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   From: oO@oO.com   
      
   Robert Fisk: From my home, I saw what the 'war on terror' meant   
   Published: 14 July 2006   
      
   All night I heard the jets, whispering high above the Mediterranean. It   
   lasted for hours, little fireflies that were watching Beirut, waiting for   
   dawn perhaps, because it was then that they descended.   
      
   They came first to the little village of Dweir near Nabatiya in southern   
   Lebanon where an Israeli plane dropped a bomb on to the home of a Shia   
   Muslim cleric. He was killed. So was his wife. So were eight of his   
   children. One was decapitated. All they could find of a baby was its head   
   and torso which a young villager brandished in fury in front of the cameras.   
   Then the planes visited another home in Dweir and disposed of a family of   
   seven.   
      
   It was a brisk start to Day Two of Israel's latest "war on terror", a   
   conflict that uses some of the same language - and a few of the same lies -   
   as George Bush's larger "war on terror". For just as we "degraded" Iraq - in   
   1991 as well as 2003 - so yesterday it was Lebanon's turn to be "degraded".   
      
   That means not only physical death but economic death and it arrived at   
   Beirut's gleaming new £300m international airport just before 6am as   
   passengers prepared to board flights to London and Paris.   
      
   From my home, I heard the F-16 which suddenly appeared over the newest   
   runway and fired a spread of rockets into it, ripping up 20 metres of tarmac   
   and blasting tons of concrete into the air in a massive explosion before a   
   Hetz-class Israeli gunboat fired on to the other runways.   
      
   Two of Middle East Airlines' new Airbuses were left untouched but, within   
   minutes, the airport was deserted as passengers fled back to their homes and   
   hotels.   
      
   The flight indicators told the whole story: Paris no flight, London, no   
   flight, Cairo, no flight, Dubai, no flight, Baghdad - from the cauldron into   
   the fire if anyone had chosen to take it - no flight. Someone was playing   
   "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" over the public address system.   
      
   Then the Israelis went for the Hizbollah television station, Al-Manar,   
   clipping off its antenna with a missile but failing to put the station off   
   air. That might be a more understandable target - "Manar", after all,   
   broadcasts Hizbollah propaganda. But was it really designed to find or   
   recover the two Israeli soldiers captured on Wednesday? Or to take revenge   
   for the nine Israelis killed in the same incident, one of the blackest days   
   in recent Israeli Army history although not as black as it was for the 36   
   Lebanese civilians killed in the previous 24 hours.   
      
   An Israeli woman was also killed by a Hizbollah rocket fired into Israel.   
   So, in the grim exchange rate of these wretched conflicts, one Israeli death   
   equals just over three Lebanese; it's a fair bet the exchange rate will grow   
   more murderous.   
      
   And by afternoon, the threats had grown worse. Israel would not "sit idly   
   by". It ordered the entire population of the southern suburbs - home to   
   Hizbollah's headquarters - to flee their homes by 3pm.   
      
   Save for a few hundred families, they stubbornly refused to leave.   
   Everywhere in Lebanon could now be a target, the Israelis announced. If   
   Israel bombed the suburbs, the Hizbollah roared, it would fire its   
   long-range Katyushas at the Israeli city of Haifa. One of them had   
   apparently already damaged an Israeli air base at Miron, a fact concealed at   
   the time by Israeli censors.   
      
   It certainly frightened Lebanon's Gulf tourists who packed the roads from   
   Bhamdoun in their 4x4s, fleeing for the safety of Syria and flights home   
   from Damascus. Another little economic death for Lebanon.   
      
   But what did all this mean, this ranting and threatening? I sat at home in   
   the early afternoon, going through my files of Israeli statements. It turned   
   out that Israel had threatened not to "sit idly by" (or occasionally "stand   
   idly by") in Lebanon on at least six occasions in the past 26 years, most   
   famously when the late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin promised that   
   he would not "stand idly by" while Christians were threatened here in 1980 -   
   only to withdraw his soldiers and leave the Christians to their bloody fate   
   three years later.   
      
   The Lebanese are always left to their fate. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud   
   Olmert, says he holds the Lebanese government responsible for the attacks on   
   the border that breached the international frontier on Wednesday.   
      
   But Mr Olmert and everyone knows that the weak and fractious government of   
   the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora isn't capable of controlling a   
   single militiaman, let alone the Hizbollah.   
      
   Yet wasn't this the same set of Lebanese political leaders congratulated by   
   the United States last year for its democratic elections and its freedom   
   from Syria? Indeed, a man who sees Bush as a friend - perhaps "saw" is a   
   better word - is Saad Hariri, son of the ex-Lebanese prime minister Rafik   
   Hariri who built much of the infrastructure that Israel is now destroying   
   and whose murder last year - by Syrian agents? - supposedly outraged Mr   
   Bush.   
      
   Yesterday morning, Saad Hariri, the son, was flying into Beirut when   
   America's Israeli allies arrived to bomb the airport. He had to turn round   
   as his aircraft skulked off to Cyprus for refuge.   
      
   But it was the undercurrent of terror-speak that was particularly   
   frightening yesterday.   
      
   Lebanon was an "axis of terror", Israel was "fighting terror on all fronts".   
   During the morning, I had to cut across an interview with an Australian   
   radio station when an Israeli reporter stated - totally untruthfully - that   
   there were Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon and that not all Syria's   
   troops had left.   
      
   And the reason why the Israelis had attacked Beirut's infinitely secure and   
   carefully monitored airport, used by diplomats and European leaders, a   
   facility as safe as any in Europe? Because, so said the Israelis, it was "a   
   central hub for the transfer of weapons and supplies to the Hizbollah   
   terrorist organisation." If the Israelis really want to know where that hub   
   is, they should be looking at Damascus airport. But they do know that, don't   
   they?   
      
   And so it is terror, terror, terror again and Lebanon is once more to be   
   depicted as the mythic terror centre of the Middle East along, I suppose   
   with Gaza. And the West Bank. And Syria. And, of course, Iraq. And Iran. And   
   Afghanistan. And who knows where next?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)