The Lebanese Prime Minister had an oped in the Post today. It appears that elected politicians in Muslim countries are no more able to tell the truth regarding Israel than unelected leaders. It is a fine showing of telling facts without telling the truth, an excellent representation of this country where Hezballah won 20% of the vote and is represented in the cabinet.
The best part comes toward the end:
Only then can the root causes of this war — Israeli occupation of Lebanese territories and its perennial threat to Lebanon’s security, as well as Lebanon’s struggle to regain full sovereignty over all its territory — be addressed.
[snip]
The 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, which called for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace based on the principle of land for peace, showed the way forward. A political solution cannot, however, be implemented as long as Israel continues to occupy Arab land in Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights and as long as it wages war on innocent people in Lebanon and Palestine.
There’s something in that list of occupied lands that doesn’t seem quite right. Oh yeah, Israel didn’t occupy Lebanon or Gaza at the beginning of this war! Israel only reoccupied those lands because, once Israel ended its occupation, they were used to launch attacks on Israel. So the “root cause” of this war is something that didn’t exist until after the war started! Birth is the root cause of pregnancy, donchyaknow.
The last part of that graph is a prime example of fact without truth. It’s a fact that Lebanon doesn’t have “full sovereignty over all its territory,” but that’s because of Hezballah, which is the organization that Israel is fighting. This oped implicitly acknowledges that Israel is fighting a war in Lebanon but not against the Lebanese army. But the oped assures us that the Israelis are fighting against the Lebanese people.
So let’s recapitulate what’s happening, according to this oped: the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, which ended in 2000, led Israel to invade Southern Lebanon and begin indiscriminately killing civilians, because the Lebanese army’s not there, and who else could they be fighting? Now, all the Lebanese Prime Minister wants is for Israel to leave so that the Lebanese army can occupy this terrority (why don’t they fight Israel off?–oh, that’s the kind of question I’m not supposed to ask).
Perhaps Israel’s neighbors will one day learn to keep their mouths shut. The more they talk, the more apparent it becomes that they are liars and villains, deserving of far more wrath than the Israelis are willing to pour out on them. They should just keep quiet and let their bombs do their talking.
Posted by Apollo in Arafatistan, Politics and the English Language