Hi. Yesterday Israel launched a major ground invasion almost to the Litani River, promising to continue until the treaty begins on Monday and to 'retaliate to any infraction.' This can only be looked at as a land-grab 'fact on the ground' which will surely not be ceded without 'infractions,' real or manufactured and a renewed war. The West Bank and Gaza immediately come to mind. The first two articles maintain. Gabriel Garcia Marquez' great style and incisiveness is matched only by his subject. Have a great Sunday. Ed
ACT NOW - Help Protect CODEPINK Women Traveling With Humanitarian Aid Convoy to Lebanon! August 12, 2006 Dear all, CODEPINK women Medea Benjamin, Gael Murphy and Diane Wilson are risking their lives to bring aid to Southern Lebanon and to expose the atrocities, please help protect them in their passage. Contact the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC and the Israeli Consulate in New York today to let them know that there is international attention on the Humanitarian Aid Convoy composed of Lebanese and U.S. citizens as well as other Internationals that plans to bring much needed aid to the thousands of civilians that are dying in Southern Lebanon from thirst, hunger and disease brought about by the bombing. Let them know that we expect safe passage for this convoy - they must know the whole world is watching! In Solidarity, Allison, Anedra, Dana, Erin, Farida, Gael, Jodie, Katie, Laura, Medea, Meredith, Nancy, Rae, Samantha and Tiffany CALL TODAY! Amir Maimon - Minister-Counselor and Head of Department Eynat Shlein-Michael - Counselor for Middle Eastern Affairs Reuven Azar - Counselor for Political Affairs Israel Embassy Washington DC Political Department Tel: (202) 364-5581/2 Fax: (202) 364-5490 New York Israel Consulate General Tel: (212) 499-5000 Click here for latest blogs and photos from the Middle East! http://www.troopshomefast.org/article.php?id=1068 In Solidarity, Allison, Anedra, Dana, Erin, Farida, Gael, Jodie, Katie, Laura, Medea, Meredith, Nancy, Rae, Samantha and Tiffany Don't forget to forward this message to friends! *** http://signs-of-the-times.org/signs/editorials/signs20060811_Daysofdarkness. php Days Of Darkness by Gideon Levy voltairenet.org August 4, 2006 In war as in war: Israel is sinking into a strident, nationalistic atmosphere and darkness is beginning to cover everything. The brakes we still had are eroding, the insensitivity and blindness that characterized Israeli society in recent years is intensifying. The home front is cut in half: the north suffers and the center is serene. But both have been taken over by tones of jingoism, ruthlessness and vengeance, and the voices of extremism that previously characterized the camp's margins are now expressing its heart. The left has once again lost its way, wrapped in silence or "admitting mistakes." Israel is exposing a unified, nationalistic face. The devastation we are sowing in Lebanon doesn't touch anyone here and most of it is not even shown to Israelis. Those who want to know what Tyre looks like now have to turn to foreign channels - the BBC reporter brings chilling images from there, the likes of which won't be seen here. How can one not be shocked by the suffering of the other, at our hands, even when our north suffers? The death we are sowing at the same time, right now in Gaza, with close to 120 dead since the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, 27 last Wednesday alone, touches us even less. The hospitals in Gaza are full of burned children, but who cares? The darkness of the war in the north covers them, too. Since we've grown accustomed to thinking collective punishment a legitimate weapon, it is no wonder no debate has sparked here over the cruel punishment of Lebanon for Hezbollah's actions. If it was okay in Nablus, why not Beirut? The only criticism being heard about this war is over tactics. Everyone is a general now and they are mostly pushing the IDF to deepen its activities. Commentators, ex-generals and politicians compete at raising the stakes with extreme proposals. Haim Ramon "doesn't understand" why there is still electricity in Baalbek; Eli Yishai proposes turning south Lebanon into a "sandbox"; Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military correspondent, proposes an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses and the next day to conduct a parade of prisoners in their underwear, "to strengthen the home front's morale." It's not difficult to guess what we would think about an Arab TV station whose commentators would say something like that, but another few casualties or failures by the IDF, and Limor's proposal will be implemented. Is there a better sign of how we have lost our senses and our humanity? Chauvinism and an appetite for vengeance are raising their heads. If two weeks ago only lunatics such as Safed Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu spoke about "wiping out every village where a Katyusha is fired," now a senior officer in the IDF speaks that way in Yedioth Aharonoth's main headlines. Lebanese villages may not have been wiped out yet, but we have long since wiped out our own red lines. A bereaved father, Haim Avraham, whose son was kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in October 2000, fires an artillery shell into Lebanon for the reporters. It's vengeance for his son. His image, embracing the decorated artillery shell is one of the most disgraceful images of this war. And it's only the first. A group of young girls also have their picture taken decorating IDF shells with slogans. Maariv, which has turned into the Fox News of Israel, fills its pages with chauvinist slogans reminiscent of particularly inferior propaganda machines, such as "Israel is strong" - which is indicative of weakness, actually - while a TV commentator calls for the bombing of a TV station. Lebanon, which has never fought Israel and has 40 daily newspapers, 42 colleges and universities and hundreds of different banks, is being destroyed by our planes and cannon and nobody is taking into account the amount of hatred we are sowing. In international public opinion, Israel has been turned into a monster, and that still hasn't been calculated into the debit column of this war. Israel is badly stained, a moral stain that can't be easily and quickly removed. And only we don't want to see it. The people want victory, and nobody knows what that is and what its price will be. The Zionist left has also been made irrelevant. As in every difficult test in the past - the two intifadas for example - this time too the left has failed just when its voice was so necessary as a counterweight to the stridency of the beating tom-toms of war. Why have a left if at every real test it joins the national chorus? Peace Now stands silently, so does Meretz, except for brave Zehava Gal-On. A few days of a war of choice and already Yehoshua Sobol is admitting he was wrong all along. Peace Now is suddenly an "infantile slogan" for him. His colleagues are silent and their silence is no less resounding. Only the extreme left makes its voice heard, but it is a voice nobody listens to. Long before this war is decided, it can already be stated that its spiraling cost will include the moral blackout that is surrounding and covering us all, threatening our existence and image no less than Hezbollah's Katyushas. --Gideon Levy is a journalist of the Israeli left wing newspaper Ha'aretz. Strong critic of the Israeli occupation, he writes for such newspaper a weekly report on violations against Palestinians under the title of "Twilight Zone". He has become a symbol of the "pro Palestinian left wing" for the Israeli right wing and an alibi for the rest. "How could we not be a democracy? We let Gideon Levy write!", says the Minister of Defense Shaul Moffaz. *** http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1842879,00.html Guardian (UK) August 12, 2006 The Fidel I think I know He's a man of ironclad discipline, inexhaustible patience, colossal ideas and insatiable illusions By Gabriel Garcia Marquez His devotion is to the word. His power is of seduction. He goes to seek out problems where they are. The impetus of inspiration is very much part of his style. Books reflect the breadth of his tastes very well. He stopped smoking to have the moral authority to combat tobacco addiction. He likes to prepare food recipes with a kind of scientific fervour. He keeps himself in excellent physical condition with various hours of gymnastics daily and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Ironclad discipline. The force of his imagination stretches him to the unforeseen. Jose Marti is his foremost author and he has had the talent to incorporate Marti's thinking into the sanguine torrent of a Marxist revolution. The essence of his own thinking could lie in the certainty that in undertaking mass work it is fundamental to be concerned about individuals. That could explain his absolute confidence in direct contact. He has a language for each occasion and a distinct means of persuasion according to his interlocutors. He knows how to put himself at the level of each one, and possesses a vast and varied knowledge that allows him to move with facility in any media. One thing is definite: he is where he is, how he is and with whom he is. Fidel Castro is there to win. His attitude in the face of defeat, even in the most minimal actions of everyday life, would seem to obey a private logic: he does not even admit it, and does not have a minute's peace until he succeeds in inverting the terms and converting it into victory. His supreme aide is his memory and he uses it, to the point of abuse, to sustain speeches or private conversations with overwhelming reasoning and arithmetical operations of an incredible rapidity. He requires incessant information, well masticated and digested. He breakfasts with no less than 200 pages of news. Responses have to be exact, given that he is capable of discovering the most minimal contradiction in a casual phrase. He is a voracious reader. He is prepared to read any paper that comes into his hands at any hour. He does not lose any occasion to inform himself. During the Angola war he described a battle in such detail at an official reception that it was hard work to convince a European diplomat that Fidel Castro had not participated in it. His vision of Latin America in the future is the same as that of Bolivar and Marti, an integrated and autonomous community, capable of moving the destiny of the world. The country about which he knows the most after Cuba is the United States: of the nature of its people, their power structures, the secondary intentions of its governments. And this has helped him to handle the incessant torment of the blockade. He has never refused to answer any question, however provocative it might be, nor has he ever lost his patience. In terms of those who are economical with the truth, in order not to give him any more concerns than those that he already has: he knows it. He said to one official who did so: "You are hiding truths from me, in order not to worry me, but when I finally discover them I will die from the impact of having to confront so many truths I have not been told." But gravest are the truths concealed to cover up deficiencies, because alongside the enormous achievements that sustain the revolution - the political, scientific, sporting, cultural achievements - there is a colossal bureaucratic incompetence, affecting daily life, and particularly domestic happiness. When he talks with people in the street, his conversation regains the expressiveness and crude frankness of genuine affection. They call him: Fidel. They address him informally, they argue with him, they claim him. It is then that one discovers the unusual human being that the reflection of his own image does not let us see. This is the Fidel Castro that I believe I know. A man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education of cautious words and subdued tones, and incapable of conceiving any idea that is not colossal. I have heard him evoking things that he could have done in another way to gain time in life. On seeing him very overburdened with the weight of so many distant destinies, I asked him what it was that he most wished to do in this world, and he immediately answered me: "Stand on a corner." Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Nobel prize-winning novelist. This is an edited extract of an article from the Cuban newspaper Granma. Fidel Castro is 80 today ____________________________________________ portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. 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