Although Israel’s terror is the most brutal and the longest in history, other nations who oppose today’s Fascism are enduring similar violence. Iraq and Lebanon have been defenceless targets for years, with horrendous magnitude of destruction and civilian deaths.

Iraq has been systematically destroyed and its people humiliated in the same way many European nations were destroyed by Fascism. After more than a decade of genocidal economic sanctions, Iraq was illegally invaded and occupied. Baghdad and many other Iraqi cities – from Fallujah and Ramadi to al-Qaim and Haditha – were indiscriminately and deliberately bombed and destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed and many more have been wounded. The entire country was taken hostage and the civilian population are subjected to daily grisly massacres, arbitrary arrests and imprisonment, sadistic torture and rape by occupying U.S. forces and mercenaries. Large U.S. corporations are looting Iraq’s wealth and national resources while the living conditions for Iraqis continue to deteriorate.

Like Iraq, Lebanon has been systematically and indiscriminately destroyed. Over many years, Israel routinely bombed and invaded Lebanon. Israeli Mossad agents and assassins carried out countless acts of terrorism on Lebanon territory assassinating, and kidnapping Lebanese and Palestinian citizens. In 1978-1982 Israeli forces invaded Lebanon and occupied the country for two decades. At least 20,000 Lebanese civilians have been murdered by Israeli forces. Another 2000 Palestinian women and children refugees in Sabre and Chatila refugee camps were massacred by the criminal Ariel Sharon and his proxy thugs. Lebanon was completely destroyed before the Israelis were defeated and forced to leave by the heroic Lebanese Resistance.

Today Israel is avenging its defeat and using its war crimes in Lebanon to coerce the Lebanese people against their popular Resistance, blackmail other nations and use the crimes as a rehearsal for an Israeli-U.S. wider war in the region. The Israeli-U.S. violence failed to achieve its goal as much as the Nazis failed to coerce the Russian people during Fascism attacks on Russia.

Since the Israeli premeditated aggression against Lebanon and the indiscriminate and systematic destruction of the country, more than 1200 innocent civilians have been killed in a cowardly and Nazi-like fashion, a third of the dead were children under the age of 12-years old. At least 5000 civilians have been wounded, and more than a million Lebanese are homeless, displaced from their towns and villages. It is estimated that some 100,000 Lebanese – out of an original population of 913,000 – are still in southern villages – no one knows their fate –, cut off from the rest of the country and subjected to daily Israeli artillery shelling and aerial bombing. Israel is intended to ethnically cleanse the population from the area south of the Litani River and annexed their land, crimes used during the Nazis’ occupation of Europe.

With the blessing of the UN, the U.S. and its allies, Israel is not only allowed to drop tonnage of banned cluster bombs and white phosphorous bombs – conducted with U.S. weapons and paid for by billions of American taxpayers – on densely populated areas killing hundreds of innocent civilians and destroying their homes but also Israel is allowed to get away with horrendous war crimes. Furthermore, Israel is using the already biased and anti-Muslim corporate media to distort reality and plays victim.

As in Iraq, Lebanon entire civilian infrastructure is deliberately destroyed; a flagrant violation of international law and war crimes by any standard. Knowing that the U.S. is on his side, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said openly that; “We are destroying Lebanon and forcing the civilian population to turn against Hizbullah”. With deafening silence to mass atrocities, the persistence of Fascism seemed to have been accepted by most Western citizens.

Rejected the world’s call for an immediate cease-fire to halt the massacres of innocent Lebanese civilians by Israeli forces, the U.S. showed its full complicity in the violence. Just few days into the mass atrocity, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said: “They’ve [Lebanese] been through a very difficult war”. The aim was to give Israel more time to destroy Lebanon and kill more innocent civilians. Note also the moral bankruptcy and the “difficult war” that Israel and the U.S. have orchestrated and perpetuated for more than three decades against virtually a defenceless nation. Since the 1970s, Israel-U.S. policy has been to coerce Lebanon and the civilian population to surrender to Israeli-U.S. dictate.

It is important not to forget that in April 2002 during the Israeli aggression on the West Bank city of Jenin, the U.S. refused to call for an immediate cease-fire and encouraged the massacre of innocent Palestinian civilians. Israeli forces indiscriminately attacked the Jenin Refugee Camp, with bulldozers levelling Palestinian homes and U.S.-supplied Apache and Cobra helicopter gunships and tanks bombed the 15,000 besieged civilian population (For more see the Jenin Inquiry Report). The U.S.-based Human Right Watch (HRW) reported that Israeli occupation forces on the ground used Palestinians as human shields to conduct their terror. The entire community was destroyed in a Nazi-like fashion. At the time the UN produced a seriously flawed report to shield Israel from war crimes responsibility.

Sadly, with deafening silence of Western citizens, the persistence of Fascism continues today. The differences today are in the desire of today’s Fascism to conduct war of aggression against defenceless populations, and in the deliberate destruction of the social and economic structure to sustain and to provide the majority of the civilian population with their means of livelihood.

The systematic and random mass bombing of civilian population in the cities of Iraq, Lebanon Palestine and Afghanistan, indiscriminately killing and wounding innocent civilians and destroying homes, cultural heritages, health care services and educational system, including libraries, universities, schools and archives will not coerce the people to surrender.

Finally, the premeditated and illegal wars of aggression against Muslim nations are what the Nuremberg Tribunal called ‘Supreme International Crime’. The Tribunal tried Nazi leaders and most of them were found guilty and were hanged for their crimes. Thus, in a “civilised” world and under the same Nuremberg Charter, Western and Israeli leaders, and their accomplices have committed war crimes.

From time immemorial, wars of aggression and occupation nurture legitimate resistance. Therefore, the only way to defeat Fascism, old and new, is persistence mass resistance to its repression, wars of aggression, and occupation.

Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia

Aug 17, 2006

Posted by Bulatlat

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