I tend to believe blazer_ben more on this assessment, but it'd be interesting to see how creepy responds to it.
Legality only means one is recognized If Hezbollah was recognized and Isreal was not then Hezbollad would be LEGEL and Isreal would not Legality is a political thing Morality is somewhat more broad and universal Rocket River
River, I was talking about the legality of the Hezbollah as a "terrorist organization" based on the assertions laid out by the rabbi and the Palm Beach Daily News staff writer that since both Al Qaeda and Hezbollah attacked the U.S. targets at some points, they are the same. There was no attempt on my part to compare Israel with Hezbollah in this context. Swing and miss, brah.
Hezbollah is nothing like Al-Qaeda, it's very silly to make such a claim...but understandable coming from the Rabbi, he's not exactly 'well-versed' in such topics.
Clear evidence of comparison... http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Terror Alliance Has U.S. Worried Hezbollah, Al Qaeda Seen Joining Forces By Dana Priest and Douglas Farah Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, June 30, 2002; Page A01 The Lebanon-based Hezbollah organization, one of the world's most formidable terrorist groups, is increasingly teaming up with al Qaeda on logistics and training for terrorist operations, according to U.S. and European intelligence officials and terrorism experts. The new cooperation, which is ad hoc and tactical and involves mid- and low-level operatives, mutes years of rivalry between Hezbollah, which draws its support primarily from Shiite Muslims, and al Qaeda, which is predominantly Sunni. It includes coordination on explosives and tactics training, money laundering, weapons smuggling and acquiring forged documents, according to knowledgeable sources. This new alliance, even if informal, has greatly concerned U.S. officials in Washington and intelligence operatives abroad who believe the assets and organization of Hezbollah's formidable militant wing will enable a hobbled al Qaeda network to increase its ability to launch attacks against American targets. (...and Iran wants nuclear weapons...YIKES ) Hezbollah, which was founded by Lebanese clerics in 1982, has two wings. One is political and social, and its vibrant political party holds nine seats in the Lebanese parliament. The other wing is a guerrilla military force. The United States put Hezbollah on its terrorist list in 1997. Unlike al Qaeda, Hezbollah has never targeted Americans on U.S. soil. But its operatives have killed nearly 300 Americans overseas in the last 20 years, including 241 service members in a Marine barracks in Beirut....(wow) The concerns over the new partnership have reached the Senate and House intelligence committees' chairmen and vice chairmen, who, under special rules, are regularly briefed by CIA Director George J. Tenet and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III on highly classified information and operations not revealed to other committee members. "Hezbollah is the A-team of terrorism," said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the chairman of the Senate panel, who has been briefed on the subject. (wow...he might have "balls"...) The new collaboration illustrates what analysts say is an evolving pattern of decentralized alliances between terrorist groups and cells that share enough of the same goals to find common ground: crippling the United States, and forcing the U.S. military out of the Middle East and Israel out of Palestinian territory. "There's a convergence of objectives," said Steven Simon, a former National Security Council terrorism expert. "There's something in the zeitgeist that is pretty well established now." Although cooperation between al Qaeda and Hezbollah may have been going on at some level for years, the U.S. war against al Qaeda has hastened and deepened the relationship. U.S. officials believe that after al Qaeda was driven from Afghanistan, leader Osama bin Laden sanctioned his operatives to ally themselves with helpful Islamic-based groups, said a senior administration official with access to daily intelligence reports. Bin Laden or his top associates have used the Internet to convey this message, the official added. There is "no doubt at all" that Hezbollah and al Qaeda have communicated on logistical matters, the official said. Loose partnerships are being facilitated by members' ability to communicate using Internet chat rooms accessible with constantly changing passwords. The connections, intelligence officials believe, are made case by case, depending on the needs of a particular local group. "When someone's traveling and needs assistance in passing through, whomever happens to have that capacity will be turned to," said Paul R. Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA counterterrorism center and author of "Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy." The chat rooms are set up to avoid detection. New recruits can enter only rooms where "holy war" against America or other general topics are discussed. Only trusted and vetted operatives can access chat rooms where specific deals are discussed. Hezbollah's original goal was to create an Islamic state in Lebanon. For 18 years, with financial and intelligence support from Iran and Syria, the group fought to end Israel's military occupation of a buffer zone in southern Lebanon. It attacked American targets in a bid to drive the United States from the country. Hezbollah first devised suicide bombings as a terrorist tactic, and its successes inspired a generation of terrorists in the Middle East. In 1983, a Hezbollah suicide bomber attacked the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans and six of the CIA's best Middle East experts. Six months later, two suicide bombers drove trucks into western military barracks in Lebanon, killing 58 French paratroopers in one and 241 American service members in the other -- the largest peacetime loss ever for the U.S. military. It prompted President Ronald Reagan to withdraw American troops from the country. In the mid-1980s, at Iran's behest, Hezbollah and its factions were responsible for kidnapping 18 Americans in Lebanon. They killed three, including William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. Over the next decade, the United States alleged that Iranian intelligence officials, posing as diplomats, were involved in anti-U.S. and anti-Israel violence around the world. Hezbollah's intelligence officer, Imad Mughniyah, was implicated in the 1996 attack on Khobar Towers, the U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 U.S. servicemen were killed. After Israel pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000, the political wing of Hezbollah wanted to focus exclusively on political activities and charitable work. Some intelligence officials believe Iran and Syria have dampened their support for Hezbollah's militant wing. Iran, in particular, a senior U.S. intelligence official said, has tried to restrict Hezbollah's contacts with al Qaeda for fear of being targeted in the U.S. war on terrorism. There is little dispute that al Qaeda and Hezbollah operatives work together, but some analysts reject the notion that the two groups have buried their differences, which have long been sharp because they derive their support from the two competing branches of Islam. "I just don't see it," said Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East specialist at the Congressional Research Service. "There's not a lot of commonality there." Although all of Hezbollah's attacks have taken place overseas, the FBI is investigating close to a dozen Hezbollah groups in the United States. Their overt purpose is to raise money for Lebanese charities. In the United States, Hezbollah's "objective is to facilitate illegal funding . . . sometimes through sophisticated cyber-crimes," Graham said. "Today they aren't here plotting to blow up anything, they are in a support role." But a recent criminal court case in Charlotte -- in which eight defendants pleaded guilty and two were later found guilty by a jury -- showed how what prosecutors alleged was one Hezbollah cell involved in cigarette smuggling conspired to aid the organization as a whole. One of the men, Mohamad Hammoud, was caught on wiretaps speaking on the phone with Hezbollah's military commander in Lebanon, Sheik Abbas Harake. Court documents in the United States and Canada say Hezbollah members in both countries have tried to procure military equipment, including laser-range finders, aircraft-analysis software, global positioning gear, night-vision goggles, blasting equipment and mine detection machinery for fighters in Lebanon. U.S. law enforcement officials and terrorism experts fear the infrastructure and personal relationships established to facilitate illicit arms and document purchases could easily be used to launch attacks on U.S. soil. "It gives you an infrastructure you can potentially build on," Pillar said. That is what analysts believe happened in Argentina in 1996, when Hezbollah, which had longtime financial and logistics networks in Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, bombed the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. In the last 18 months, Hezbollah has reactivated some of its overseas assets in South America, Europe and Central Asia, Simon said. "They appear to be cocking their guns again." The more recent relationship between Hezbollah and al Qaeda first surfaced publicly in testimony in October 2000 by Ali Mohamed, a former U.S. Green Beret who pleaded guilty to conspiring with bin Laden to bomb U.S. embassies in Africa. He testified to having provided security for a meeting in Sudan "between al Qaeda . . . and Iran and Hezbollah . . . between Mughniyah, Hezbollah's chief, and bin Laden." Hezbollah, he testified, provided explosives training to al Qaeda while Iran "used Hezbollah to supply explosives that were disguised to look like rocks." Last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld accused Iran of sheltering al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan. "Iran has served as a haven for some terrorists leaving Afghanistan," he said. Among the more important al Qaeda operatives believed to be in Iran is Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused of helping plot a bombing at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman during the millennium celebrations. Administration and intelligence officials also say they have multiple confirmations of a meeting in March in Lebanon between al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah figures. The new alliances challenge the traditional analysis of militant Islamic-based groups, which were seen as competing and noncooperative, divided by their personalities and each group's particular brand of Islamic militarism. Understanding the workings of a more diffuse network of terrorists may determine whether the CIA and FBI can adapt quickly enough to the post-Sept. 11 world to prevent more attacks, said terrorism experts and operatives far from Washington. European and U.S. intelligence operatives on the ground in Africa and Asia said they have been trying to convince headquarters of the new alliances but have been rebuffed. "We have been screaming at them for more than a year now, and more since September 11th, that these guys all work together," an overseas operative said. "What we keep hearing back is that it can't be because al Qaeda doesn't work that way. That is [expletive]. Here, on the ground, these guys all work together as long as they are Muslims. There is no other division that matters." © 2002 The Washington Post Company
Roxran could you please link to the story next time. Your article is from 2002, and a link to the current front page of the Washington Post doesn't really help.
The article 'speculates' a lot, and in some instances passes 'speculations' or 'accusations' of Hezbollah's involvement in some terrorist attacks overseas as 'facts', when there isn't clear evidence to prove it. Anyways, my contention was that Hezbollah's goals and Al-Qaeda's goals are entirely different, although they certainly could begin to cooperate more in the near future due to a short-term convergence of interests. Hezbollah and Hamas would be a more sound comparison: two entities which came about to resist Israeli occupation of their countries and attempt to counterbalance Israel's hegemony in the region; those are clearly defined objectives carried out in a limited 'theater'. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, seeks to incite a global 'insurgency' against the West, topple every single government of a Muslim-majority nation in existence (starting with the Arab world, but certainly not limited to it), and re-establish a Muslim empire ranging from the Atlantic Ocean to SE Asia; Al-Qaeda is more of a radical organization with a global agenda that reflects a radical Utopian ideal.
A NEW HOLY WAR AGAINST EVIL? A Buddhist Response David R. Loy Like most other Americans, I have been struggling to digest the events of the last week. It has taken a while to realize how psychically numbed many of us are. In the space of a few hours, our world changed. We do not yet know what those changes will mean, but the most important long-term ones may well be psychological. Americans have always understood the United States to be a special and uniquely privileged place. The Puritans viewed New England as the Promised Land. According to Melville, "We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people." In many parts of the globe the twentieth century has been particularly horrible, but the continental United States has been so insulated from these tragedies that we have come to think of ourselves as immune to them \ although we have often contributed to them. That confidence has been abruptly shattered. We have discovered that the borderless world of globalization allows us no refuge from the hatred and violence that predominate in many parts of the world. Every death reminds us of our own, and sudden, unexpected death on such a large scale makes it harder to repress awareness of our own mortality. Our obsessions with such things as money, consumerism, and professional sports have been revealed for what they are: unworthy of all the attention we devote to them. There is something valuable to learn here, but this reality nonetheless makes us quite uncomfortable. We do not like to think about death. We usually prefer to be distracted. Talk of vengeance and "bomb them back to the stone age" makes many of us uneasy, but naturally we want to strike back. On Friday September 14 President Bush declared that the United States has been called to a new worldwide mission "to rid the world of evil," and on the following Sunday he said that the government is determined to "rid the world of evil-doers." Our land of freedom now has a responsibility to extirpate the world of its evil. We may no longer have an "evil empire" to defeat, but we have found a more sinister evil that will require a long-term, all-out war to destroy. If anything is evil, those terrorist attacks were evil. I share that sentiment. It must be emphasized. At the same time, however, I think we need to take a close look at the vocabulary. When Bush says he wants to rid the world of evil, alarm bells go off in my mind, because that is what Hitler and Stalin also wanted to do. I'm not defending either of those evil-doers, just explaining what they were trying to do. What was the problem with Jews that required a "final solution"? The earth could be made pure for the Aryan race only by exterminating the Jews, the impure vermin who contaminate it. Stalin needed to exterminate well-to-do Russian peasants to establish his ideal society of collective farmers. Both were trying to perfect this world by eliminating its impurities. The world can be made good only by destroying its evil elements. Paradoxically, then, one of the main causes of evil in this world has been human attempts to eradicate evil. Friday's Washington Post quoted Joshua Teitelbaum, a scholar who has studied a more contemporary evil-doer: "Osama bin Laden looks at the world in very stark, black-and-white terms. For him, the U.S. represents the forces of evil that are bringing corruption and domination into the Islamic world". What is the difference between bin Laden's view and Bush's? They are mirror opposites. What bin Laden sees as good \ an Islamic jihad against an impious and materialistic imperialism \ Bush sees as evil. What Bush sees as good \ America the defender of freedom \ bin Laden sees as evil. They are two different versions of the same holy-war-between-good-and-evil. Do not misunderstand me here. I am not equating them morally, nor in any way trying to excuse the horrific events of last Tuesday. From a Buddhist perspective, however, there is something dangerously delusive about the mirror-image views of both sides. We must understand how this black-and-white way of thinking deludes not only Islamic terrorists but also us, and therefore brings more suffering into the world. This dualism of good-versus-evil is attractive because it is a simple way of looking at the world. And most of us are quite familiar with it. Although it is not unique to the Abrahamic religions \ Judaism, Christianity, and Islam \ it is especially important for them. It is one of the reasons why the conflicts among them have been so difficult to resolve peacefully: adherents tend to identify their own religion as good and demonize the other as evil. It is difficult to turn the other cheek when we view the world through these spectacles, because this rationalizes the opposite principle: an eye for an eye. If the world is a battleground of good and evil forces, the evil that is in the world must be fought by any means necessary. The secularization of the modern West did not eliminate this tendency. In some ways it has intensified it, because we can no longer rely on a supernatural resolution. We have to depend upon ourselves to bring about the final victory of good over evil \ as Hitler and Stalin tried to do. It is unclear how much help bin Laden and Bush expect from God. Why do I emphasize this dualism? The basic problem with this way of understanding conflict is that it tends to preclude thought, because it is so simplistic. It keeps us from looking deeper, from trying to discover causes. Once something has been identified as evil, there is no more need to explain it; it is time to focus on fighting against it. This is where Buddhism has something important to contribute. Buddhism emphasizes the three roots of evil, also known as the three poisons: greed, ill will and delusion. The Abrahamic religions emphasize the struggle between good and evil because for them the basic issue depends on our will: which side are we on? In contrast, Buddhism emphasizes ignorance and enlightenment because the basic issue depends on our self-knowledge: do we really understand what motivates us? According to Buddhism, every effect has its web of causes and conditions. This is the law of karma. One way to summarize the essential Buddhist teaching is that we suffer, and cause others to suffer, because of greed, ill will and delusion. Karma implies that when our actions are motivated by these roots of evil, their negative consequences tend to rebound back upon us. The Buddhist solution to suffering involves transforming our greed into generosity, our ill will into loving-kindness, and our delusions into wisdom. What do these Buddhist teachings imply about the situation we now find ourselves in? The following is from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship statement: "Nations deny causality by ascribing blame to others' terrorists, rogue nations, and so on. Singling out an enemy, we short-circuit the introspection necessary to see our own karmic responsibility for the terrible acts that have befallen us. . . . Until we own causes we bear responsibility for, in this case in the Middle East, last week's violence will make no more sense than an earthquake or cyclone, except that in its human origin it turns us toward rage and revenge." We cannot focus only on the second root of evil, the hatred and violence that have just been directed against the United States. The three roots are intertwined. Ill will cannot be separated from greed and delusion. This requires us to ask: why do so many people in the Middle East, in particular, hate us so much? What have we done to encourage that hatred? Americans think of America as defending freedom and justice, but obviously that is not the way they perceive us. Are they just misinformed, then, or is it we who are misinformed? "Does anybody think that we can send the USS New Jersey to lob Volkswagen-sized shells into Lebanese villages -- Reagan, 1983 -- or loose 'smart bombs' on civilians seeking shelter in a Baghdad bunker -- Bush, 1991 -- or fire cruise missiles on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory -- Clinton, 1999 -- and not receive, someday, our share in kind?" (Micah Sifry) In particular, how much of our foreign policy in the Middle East has been motivated by our love of freedom and democracy, and how much has been motivated by our need \ our greed \ for its oil? If our main priority has been securing oil supplies, does it mean that our petroleum-based economy is one of the causes of last week's attack? Finally, Buddhist teachings suggest that we look at the role of delusion in creating this situation. Delusion has a special meaning in Buddhism. The fundamental delusion is our sense of separation from the world we are "in," including other people. Insofar as we feel separate from others, we are more inclined to manipulate them to get what we want. This naturally breeds resentment \ both from others, who do not like to be used, and within ourselves, when we do not get what we want. . . . Is this also true collectively? Delusion becomes wisdom when we realize that "no one is an island." We are interdependent because we are all part of each other, different facets of the same jewel we call the earth. This world is a not a collection of objects but a community of subjects. That interdependence means we cannot avoid responsibility for each other. This is true not only for the residents of lower Manhattan, now uniting in response to this catastrophe, but for all the people in the world, however deluded they may be. Yes, including the terrorists who did these heinous acts and those who support them. Do not misunderstand me here. Those responsible for the attacks must be caught and brought to justice. That is our responsibility to all those who have suffered, and that is also our responsibility to the deluded and hate-full terrorists, who must be stopped. If, however, we want to stop this cycle of hatred and violence, we must realize that our responsibility is much broader than that. Realizing our interdependence and mutual responsibility for each other implies something more. When we try to live this interdependence, it is called love. Love is more than a feeling, it is a mode of being in the world. In Buddhism we talk mostly about compassion, generosity, and loving-kindness, but they all reflect this mode of being. Such love is sometimes mocked as weak and ineffectual, yet it can be very powerful, as Gandhi showed. And it embodies a deep wisdom about how the cycle of hatred and violence works and about how that cycle can be ended. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, but there is an alternative. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha said: "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me" -- for those who harbour such thoughts hatred will never cease. "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me" -- for those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease. In this world hatred is never appeased by hatred; hatred is always appeased by love. This is an ancient law. (Dhammapada, 3-5) Of course, this transformative insight is not unique to Buddhism. After all, it was not the Buddha who gave us the image of turning the other cheek. In all the Abrahamic religions the tradition of a holy war between good and evil coexists with this "ancient law" about the power of love. That does not mean all the world's religions have emphasized this law to the same extent. In fact, I wonder if this is one way to measure the maturity of a religion, or at least its continuing relevance for us today: how much the liberative truth of this law is acknowledged and encouraged. I do not know enough about Islam to compare, but in the cases of Buddhism and Christianity, for example, it is the times when this truth has not been emphasized that these two religions have been most subverted by secular rulers and nationalistic fervor. So where does that leave us today? We find ourselves at a turning point. A lust for vengeance and violent retaliation is rising, fanned by a leader caught up in his own rhetoric of a holy war to purify the world of evil. Please consider: does the previous sentence describe bin Laden, or President Bush? If we pursue the path of large-scale violence, bin Laden's holy war and Bush's holy war will become two sides of the same war. No one can foresee all the consequences of such a war. They are likely to spin out of control and take on a life of their own. However, one sobering effect is clearly implied by the "ancient law": massive retaliation by the United States in the Middle East will spawn a new generation of suicidal terrorists, eager to do their part in this holy war. But widespread violence is not the only possibility. If this time of crisis encourages us to see through the rhetoric of a war to exterminate evil, and if we begin to understand the intertwined roots of this evil, including our own responsibility, then perhaps something good may yet come out of this catastrophic tragedy. 18 September 2001 David Loy Faculty of International Studies Bunkyo University JAPAN E-mail: loy@shonan.bunkyo.ac.jp
Hezbollah is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans. They kidnap and terrorize to achieve their goals. They and all other groups like them need to be eradicated from the face of the earth. If Cuba was lobbing missiles into Miami what do you think we would do? Cuba would be decimated and whoever told us our use of force was "disproportionate" would be openly laughed at by the US. Im all for what Israel is doing, and i wish they would stop holding back. I really hope Iran officially joins the fight so they can be taken care of as well.
I actually miss him in a strange sort of way .. when he was civil, he was rather an intelligent and nice guy to communicate with.
That's akin to a beauty pageant saying, "I want world peace"...sounds nice in theory, but will never happen, not as long as certain circumstances exist to drive people toward violence. Not as long as there are grievances, not as long as there is selfishness. In other words: not as long as there are human beings.
Okay but remember that Hezbollah is lobbing rockers in retaliation after Israel went on a all-out campaign to bomb Lebanese civilian infrastructure and towns over a raid which captured two soliders, not before. If Cuba kidnapped two soldiers from Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. decided to go all out and launch an all-out bombing campaign against the U.S. you can be pretty sure that most people including many Americans would consider it disproportionate.
I meant to say: If Cuba kidnapped two soldiers from Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. decided to go all out and launch an all-out bombing campaign against Cuba you can be pretty sure that most people including many Americans would consider it disproportionate.
Is it possible to think that iran is using hezbollah to see the capability of the isrealie army. not to mention it might be testing weapons (missiles fajir) against the isrealie army?. hezbollah allready has sunk a isrealie gunboat by using an iran built guided missile. it might sound far fetched, but who knows. politics dosent have parents. it's really dirty business.
