Monday, July 31, 2006
But "We" Are at War
Robert writes below:
Well, first, "we," i.e., the United States of America isn't at war with the Hezbollah -- Israel is.
President Bush on September 11, 2001:
We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.
It is an open ended statement which is not just intended for Al-Qaeda.
This is with good reason. On April 18, 1983 Front Line reminds us of the following event taking place:
A suicide bomber in a pickup truck loaded with explosives rammed into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Sixty-three people were killed, including 17 Americans, eight of whom were employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, including chief Middle East analyst Robert C. Ames and station chief Kenneth Haas.
Reagan administration officials said that the attack was carried out by Hezbollah operatives...
And then on October 23, 1983:
A suicide bomber detonated a truck full of explosives at a U.S. Marine barracks located at Beirut International Airport; 241 U.S. Marines were killed and more than 100 others wounded. They were part of a contingent of 1,800 Marines that had been sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational force to help separate the warring Lebanese factions...
Further acts of war from Hezbollah on June 14, 1985:
TWA Flight 847 was hijacked en route from Athens to Rome and forced to land in Beirut, Lebanon, where the hijackers held the plane for 17 days. They demanded the release of the Kuwait 17 as well as the release of 700 fellow Shiite Muslim prisoners held in Israeli prisons and in prisons in southern Lebanon run by the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army. When these demands weren't met, hostage Robert Dean Stethem, a U.S. Navy diver, was shot and his body dumped on the airport tarmac. U.S. sources implicated Hezbollah.
September 11, 2001 was not an isolated act of terrorism from an isolated terrorist organization.
It was a part of a bigger picture...a global war of terrorism which the terrorist are fully aware exists.
No amount of "listening" will change the minds of Hezbollah, which is the total destruction of not just Israel but of the United States.
Menahem Milson writes on September 15, 2004:
In sum, from the Islamist perspective, Muslims are in a no-holds-barred war ofjihad. We have seen how Islam's traumatic encounter with Western culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries led to the emergence of Salafism and, subsequently, to the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood movement and other similar groups. We have also seen how two Islamic movements which emerged two centuries apart – the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots, on the one hand, and Wahhabism, on the other – share a spiritual father in Ibn Taymiyya and have united in a common holy war, intended to change the face of the world.
