I cannot endorse the Israeli position of using disproportionate force which punishes the innocents.
If Hezbollah and Hamas are carrying out a proxy war on behalf of Syria and Iran, so are the Israeli's carrying on a proxy war on behalf of the USA.
I appreciate the author's article to put some balance in the debate. The fault does not solely reside with the Lebanese or Palestinians.

Greg Barnes opened this article with
“Israel is fast becoming a failed state.
The Lebanese people have done nothing to deserve the wrath of the Israeli political and military establishment. They are innocent bystanders, in the same way millions of Poles were in World War II when, sandwiched between the Soviet Union and Germany, they suffered immeasurably.”
How Ironic he chooses a comparison to Poland, where so many Jews fell at the hands of the Nazi, I wonder where he stands on the matter of the Warsaw Ghetto (some of the millions of Poles who were also Jews)?

I would observe “the Lebanese people have allowed Hezbollah to infiltrate the government and social institutions. Hezbollah could not exist without support of some portion of the “Lebanese” people, so whilst his statement might be partially true. Thus, it is a truism and clearly, inapplicable to those Lebanese who both support and are complicit in the actions of the terrorist organisation of Hezbollah.

It shows that the “failed state” is really Lebanon, where its own government, military and civil services cannot control the terrorist organisation within its midst.

Having read that part of the putrefying drivel, there is little incentive and no merit in reading on what amounts to just more deluded slop from that incongruous place known as “Barnies World”.

Have you all looked in the mirror today? What did you see? Did you see the face of a Hezbollah, Lebanese or Palestinian fed up with being tormented and tortured by the Israelis? Or did you see the face of an Aryan pretending to be a christian while condoning the massacres of Lebanese people who had nothing to do with the holocaust?

Get a grip. The question of the need for a Jewish state are a nonsense when only 39% of the world's Jews want to live there and are spread all over the world. We have 100,000 Jewish people here and 300,000 muslims from all over the world.

Why are the Jewish more important to us and why do we take sides. We must remain neutral and then recognise that Greg and Antony and other Israel critics are correct. Go back and read the stories of women dying in child birth because they cannot get through the blockades or their babies dying because they cannot get a pass to the hospital.

It would take Palestine 17,000 years to accomplish what we did in the holocaust yet these one sided rants by so many are achieving nothing.

Not one person anywhere has the right to murder another - we put murderers in prison for life remember?

Do we wait for the reports like those from Haditha, My Lai, Stephen Green and his raping, murderous rampage, the utter catastrophe that is Iraq and Afghanistan?

Read back on the rhetoric of the west before the invasion of Iraq - then read the bull coming from the Israelis - a large number of whom have US accents by the way.

This is not and will never be right - blowing up ambulances, using cluster bombs in civilian areas, displacing nearly 1 million people - for what? 2 soldiers taken to force the release of some of the 9,000 political prisoners held by Israel?

Don't think so. This is way to co-ordinated and the US looked way too unsurprised to me. This is a proxy to drag in Iran and you all know it.

Marilyn,

The Christian fundamentalists on this forum will view your empathy for Lebanese civilians as a sign of weakness, and will prefer not to think about the suffering that has occurred, the ends (the destruction of hizbollah, which will not be achievd) justifies the means according to them. Pretty easy stance to take from 15,000 kms away.

I belive the current death toll of civilians is 10 Lebanese for every 1 Israeli, another fact they will ignore. And with the Western Propaganda apparatus in full swing, they will continue to beleive this whole thing started with the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, and will ignore the fact that a Gaza beach was shelled killing a family of 8, and that this was the point where things started to go downhill.

The Christian extremists on this forum who condone the Israeli actions are no better than the Hezbollah extremists who do the same.

Palestinian talk.

The speaker is Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, Member of the Palestinian
Authority-appointed "Fatwa Council" and former acting Rector of
the Islamic University in Gaza.

On killing Jews and Americans:

"O brother believers, the criminals, the terrorists - are the
Jews, who have butchered our children, orphaned them, widowed our
women and desecrated our holy places and sacred sites. They are
the terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and
killed, as Allah the Almighty said: 'Fight them: Allah will
torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them and will help
you to overcome them, and will relieve the minds of the
believers..."

"Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any
country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them,
kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans
who are like them - and those who stand by them - they are all in
one trench, against the Arabs and the Muslims because they
established Israel here, in the beating heart of the Arab world,
in Palestine. ... .”

On making peace with Israel:

"Even if an agreement of Gaza is signed - we shall not forget
Haifa, and Acre, and the Galilee, and Jaffa, and the Triangle and
the Negev, and the rest of our cities and villages. It is only a
matter of time. The weak will not remain forever weak, and the
strong will not remain forever strong... If we are weak today...
and we are not able to regain our rights, then at least we have
to pass on the banner - waving high - to our children and
grandchildren..."

"...We will not give up a single grain of soil of Palestine,
..."

continued

Israeli talk.

" [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs." Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
"The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." " Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
"When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to." Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.
"There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed." Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969
"The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war." Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.
Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

Us. Australian government’s silence gives tacit approval to terrorism.

Irresponsible talk worse than this can be found on the net. This propaganda must stop.

Rancitas says: This malicious propaganda is where it starts. It now ends with innocent civilian deaths and tragedy far out-weighing combatants losses. Rulers must STOP this war talk. War/terrorism itself is darkness and must STOP. The Irish people given short shift to the IRA/UDF stupidity – it is ultimately in the peoples’ best interest to stop - to distance themselves from fascistic sentiments.

It would be better for all, if rulers became leaders and worked "to foster mutual understanding and tolerance and shall accordingly abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other.” (from a Palestine/Israel agreement).