By Vijay Prashad
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

On Oct. 1, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee issued a statement urging US President Joe Biden to “place maximum pressure on Iran and its proxies, rather than pressure Israel for a ceasefire. We need to expedite arms transfers to Israel that this administration has delayed for months, including 2,000-pound bombs, to ensure Israel has all the tools to deter these threats.”

McCaul’s belligerent call came days after Israel used over 80 U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs and other munitions on Sept. 27, to strike a residential neighbourhood in Beirut and kill – amongst hundreds of civilians – Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (1960–2024), the leader of Hezbollah. In this one bombing raid, Israel dropped more of these “bunker buster” bombs than the United States military used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq.

A former U.S. aviator, Commander Graham Scarbro of the U.S. Navy, reviewed the evidence of the Israeli strikes for the U.S. Naval Institute. In a very revealing article, Scarbro notes that Israel “seems to have taken a notably different approach to collateral damage than U.S. forces over the past few decades.” 

While the U.S. has never demonstrated any significant concern for civilian casualties or “collateral damage,” it is worth noting that even senior U.S. military officials have raised their eyebrows at the degree of Israel’s disregard for human life. Israel’s military, Scarbro writes, “seems to have a higher threshold for collateral damage… meaning they strike even when chances are higher for civilian casualties.”

Despite Washington’s knowledge that the Israelis have been bombing Gaza, and now Lebanon, with complete abandon — and even after the International Court of Justice ruled that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza — the United States has continued to arm the Israelis with deadly weaponry. 

On Oct. 10, 2023, Biden said, “We’re surging additional military assistance,” which has amounted to a record-level of at least $17.9 billion during the past year of genocide. In March, The Washington Postreported that the U.S. had “quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel that amounted to ‘thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid.” 

These “small” sales fell below the minimum threshold under U.S. law which requires the president to approach Congress for approval (which anyway would not have been denied). These sales amounted to the transfer of at least 14,000 of the 2,000 pound MK-84 bombs and 6,500 500-pound bombs that Israel has used in both Gaza and Lebanon.

In Gaza, the Israelis have routinely used the 2,000-pound bombs to strike areas populated by civilians — who had been told to take refuge at these locations by the Israeli authorities themselves. 

“In the first two weeks of the war,” The New York Times reported, “roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs of 1,000 or 2,000 pounds.” 

In March, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted, 

“The US cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks. This is obscene.” 

A 2016 report by Action on Armed Violence offered the following assessment of these weapons of mass destruction:

“These are extremely powerful bombs, with a large destructive capacity when used in populated areas. They can blow apart buildings and kill and injure people hundreds of metres from the point of detonation. The fragmentation pattern and range of a 2,000lb MK 84 bomb are difficult to predict, but it is generally said that this weapon has a ‘lethal radius’ (i.e. the distance in which it is likely to kill people in the vicinity) of up to 360m. 

The blast waves of such a weapon can create a great concussive effect; a 2,000lb bomb can be expected to cause severe injury and damage as far as 800 metres from the point of impact.”

I have several times walked around the Beirut neighbourhood of Haret Hreik in Dahiyeh, which was struck by Israeli bombs in the attack on the Hezbollah leadership. This is a highly congested area, with barely a few metres between high-rise residential buildings. To strike a complex of these buildings with over 80 of these powerful bombs cannot be called “precise.” 

Israel’s bombing of Beirut mirrors its harsh attacks on Gaza and symbolises the disdain for human life that characterises both Israeli and U.S. warfare. On Sept. 23, Israel bombarded Lebanon at a rate of more than one airstrike per minute. In days, Israel’s “intense airstrikes” displaced over a million people, a fifth of the entire population of Lebanon.

The first bomb to ever fall from an aircraft was a Haasen hand grenade (Denmark) dropped by Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti of the Italian Air Force on Nov. 1, 1911, onto the town of Tagiura, near Tripoli, Libya. A hundred years later, in a grotesque commemoration of sorts, French and U.S. aircraft bombed Libya once more as part of their war to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi. 

The ferocity of aerial bombing was understood from the very outset, as Sven Lindqvist documented in his book, A History of Bombing (2003). In March 1924, U.K. Squadron Leader Arthur “Bomber” Harris authored a report (later expunged) about his bombings in Iraq and the “real” meaning of aerial bombardment:

“Where the Arab and Kurd had just begun to realise that if they could stand a little noise, they could stand bombing … they now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they now know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village … can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.”

A hundred years later, these words of “Bomber” Harris aptly describe the kind of ruthlessness inflicted on both Palestine and Lebanon.

You might ask: what about the rockets fired on Israel by Hezbollah and Iran? Are they not part of the brutality of war? Certainly, these are part of the ugliness of warfare, but an easy parallel cannot be drawn.

Iran’s ballistic missiles followed Israel’s attack on an Iranian diplomatic facility in Syria in April, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran following the inauguration of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in July, the assassination of Nasrallah in Beirut in September, and the killing of several Iranian military officials.

Significantly, whereas Israel has launched countless strikes targeting civilians, medical personnel, journalists, and aid workers, Iran’s missiles exclusively targeted Israeli military and intelligence facilities and not civilian areas. Hezbollah, meanwhile, targeted Israel’s Ramat David Airbase, east of Haifa, in September.

Neither Iran nor Hezbollah have fired their munitions into congested neighbourhoods of Israeli cities. Since Oct. 8, 2023, Israeli airstrikes against Lebanon have far outnumbered Hezbollah’s strikes against Israel.

Before the current wave of hostilities, by Sept. 10, Israel had killed 137 Lebanese civilians and displaced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese from their homes; meanwhile, Hezbollah rockets had by then killed 14 Israeli civilians, with their rockets leading to the evacuation of 63,000 Israeli civilians.

There has been not only a quantitative difference in the number of strikes and death toll, but a qualitative difference in the use of violence. Violence that is directed largely at military targets, is permissible in certain conditions under international law; violence that is indiscriminate, such as when massive bombs are used against civilians, violates the laws of war.

Etel Adnan (1925–2021), a Lebanese poet and artist, grew up in Beirut after her parents fled the collapsing Ottoman Empire that became modern day Turkey. She dug deep into the soil of conflict and pain, the ingredients for her poetry. Her voice resonated from the balcony of her apartment in Ashrafieh, the “little mountain,” from where she could see the ships come in and out of the port. 

When Etel Adnan died, the novelist Elias Khoury (1948–2024), who himself died just before Beirut was again bombarded, wrote that he mourned a woman who would not die, but he feared for his city which was suffering alone. Here are a few extracts from Etel’s poem, “Beirut, 1982,” to remind us that we are as angry as a storm.

I never believed
that vengeance
would be a tree
growing in my garden

*

   Trees grow in all directions
So do Palestinians:

uprooted
and unlike butterflies
wingless,
earthbound,
heavy with love
for their borders and their
misery,

no people can go forever behind
bars
or under the rain.

…

We shall never cry with tears
but with blood.

…

It is not on cemeteries that we shall
plant grain
nor in the palm of my hand
We are as angry as a storm.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations.  His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky,  The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article is from People’s Dispatch and was produced by Globetrotter.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/10/11/vijay-prashad-they-know-what-real-bombing-means/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

    by Michael West

What’s the scam with the appalling bias of the Australian mainstream media covering Israel’s war on Palestinians, and now Lebanese? We put questions to the regulator ACMA (Australian Communications & Media Authority).

The scam is ACMA ducked for cover and advised us to contact the Australian Press Council. Yes, ACMA has run up the yellow flag (definitely not the Hezbollah one) on the most vital issue for global media. 

While Australia’s media still refuses to resile from Israel’s discredited claims of ‘babies beheaded’ – which lent Netanyahu’s extremist regime a media licence for atrocities in Gaza, now they are running the Israel line on the invasion of Lebanon.

ACMA Chair Nerida O’Loughlin was unavailable for comment, which was disappointing since the agency – now with the e-Safety Commissioner wrapped in – spent $133m last year and should be able to cope. 

A spokesperson however suggested (text below) that we should pose the question to the Press Council, which is funded by its large corporate media stakeholders, so unlikely to bite the hand that feeds.

The questions to ACMA:

In December 2022, ACMA announced the results of its inquiry into the ABC’s Four Corners claiming breaches of impartiality standards for broadcasting its “Fox and the Big Lie” investigation into Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.

Has ACMA investigated the false claims and breaches of impartiality regarding the Australian media’s coverage of events in Gaza since October 7 last year? In particular, the claims of the News Corp and Nine Entertainment press which have mimicked the discredited claims of the government of Israel.

Major media outlets have failed to correct claims of babies beheaded, babies in ovens, mass rapes and other claimed atrocities which lent licence for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and the mass killing of civilians. 

As you would be aware, these claims have been discredited both by the UN and other independent authorities and by subsequent foreign media investigations.

Questions for the Chair Nerida O’Loughlin and the Authority of ACMA. What has ACMA done to investigate Australia’s mainstream media for broadcasting these false claims which have given licence to allegations of genocide?

 If ACMA has taken no action, why not?

 Is ACMA in breach of its own duties as a media regulator?

ACMA response:

The ACMA’s statutory remit concerns the compliance of TV and radio broadcasters with licence conditions of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (BSA) and rules in broadcasting industry codes of practice.

Concerns about press coverage should be raised with the Australian Press Council, which has responsibility for responding to complaints about published material other than advertisements in Australian newspapers, magazines and digital sites.

Under the broadcasting co-regulatory system, complainants are directed to the broadcaster in the first instance. If a complainant does not receive a response from the broadcaster within 60 days or is not satisfied with the response they do receive, they may refer their complaint to the ACMA for consideration.

The ACMA has received complaints relating to broadcasts about the Israel/Gaza conflict where the complainant was not satisfied with the broadcaster’s response. The complaints were assessed against the relevant rules in the industry codes of practice, and in relation to complaints considered to date no further action has been taken.

MWM will revert when the Press Council responds.

https://michaelwest.com.au/media-authority-acma-flicks-israel-to-press-council/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.