Canada Breaking Diplomatic Ties With Iran

[puckluck2]

Originally Posted by Azure

Have you explained how or why your family was detained by Israeli authorities? Pretty sure you've been called out on that one a couple times.

This was 30+ years ago. There was no reason other than Israel going around Lebanon and ransacking homes while detaining everyone in the town in a town hall while abusing them. There was no reason. None at all. They immigrated to Canada weeks after that incident.

I know you'd all love to believe they did something wrong but that's not the case. Ask any Lebanese person you know who was there during the 80's war and I guarantee you they'll have a similar story.

Israel isn't this peaceful country you all love to believe.

[Azure]

Again, you still haven't explained how your parents were abused by Israeli soldiers. You obviously have some pretty serious hatred for them and it would provide a little more background if you could actually explain what happened.

[puckluck2]

They were beat by sticks, whipped and had their house used as mini hotels for a week. Does that answer your question?

[Rerun]

Originally Posted by Iginla

This was 30+ years ago. There was no reason other than Israel going around Lebanon and ransacking homes while detaining everyone in the town in a town hall while abusing them. There was no reason. None at all. They immigrated to Canada weeks after that incident.

I know you'd all love to believe they did something wrong but that's not the case. Ask any Lebanese person you know who was there during the 80's war and I guarantee you they'll have a similar story.

Israel isn't this peaceful country you all love to believe.

I take it you are talking about this?

The 1978 South Lebanon conflict (code-named Operation Litani by Israel) was an invasion of Lebanon up to the Litani River, carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in 1978 in response to the Coastal Road Massacre. The conflict resulted in the deaths of 1,100–2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians, 20 Israelis, the internal displacement of 100,000 to 250,000 people in Lebanon, and the PLO forces retreating north of the Litani River. It led to the creation of the UNIFIL peacekeeping force and an almost complete Israeli withdrawal.

Though it took the form of an Israeli military incursion into Southern Lebanon, Operation Litani was grounded in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From 1968 on, the PLO, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other Palestinian groups established a quasi-state in southern Lebanon, using it as a base for raids on civilian targets in northern Israel, as well as worldwide terror attacks on Israeli and other targets. This was exacerbated by an influx of 3,000 PLO militants fleeing a defeat in the Jordanian civil war and regrouping in southern Lebanon. Israel responded with damaging attacks against PLO bases.
During Israeli raids from 1968 to 1977, some of the Palestinian towns and camps in the area were totally leveled. According to estimations, by October 1977 about 300,000 refugees, mainly Shiiite Muslims, fled South Lebanon.[citation needed] The PLO-Israeli conflict increased political tensions between Maronite Christians and Druze on the one hand and Muslims on the other, adding to the factors behind the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War.[5]
In November 1977, Israeli initiated an exchange of fire that led to the death of several people from both sides of the border and finally Israeli bombing of the targets in South Lebanon during which 70 people, mainly Lebanese, were killed.[citation needed]

On March 11, 1978, 11 Fatah members led by the 18-year old female Dalal Mughrabi travelled from Lebanon and killed an American tourist on the beach. They then hijacked a bus on the coastal road near Haifa, and en route to Tel Aviv commandeered a second bus. After a lengthy chase and shootout, 37 Israelis were killed and 76 wounded.[6] Thus, the Coastal Road Massacre was the proximate cause of the Israeli invasion three days later

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_So...banon_conflict

[puckluck2]

Why would you think it was that?

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Rerun

I take it you are talking about this?



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_So...banon_conflict

or this:

The 1982 Lebanon War (Hebrew: מלחמת לבנון הראשונה‎, Milhemet Levanon Harishona, "the first Lebanon war"), (Arabic: الاجتياح‎, Al-ijtiyāḥ, "the invasion"), called Operation Peace for Galilee (Hebrew: מבצע שלום הגליל, or מבצע של"ג‎ Mivtsa Shlom HaGalil or Mivtsa Sheleg) by Israel, and later known in Israel as the Lebanon War and First Lebanon War, began on 6 June 1982, when the Israel Defense Forces invaded southern Lebanon. The Government of Israel launched the military operation after the Abu Nidal Organization's assassination attempt against Israel's ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov.[6][7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War

So many wars to pick from

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by SeeBass

This topic of who did what first and who is right is fustrating.

Just trying to find a really good book to break it all down without a preceived bias is very difficult.

The Fateful Triangle is the pre-eminent book on the history and nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

There will be responses about the biased nature of this book in this thread, I'm sure.

You'll be deafened by the cacophony of silence when one of those posters is pressed for an example of scholarly inconsistency.

The book was first published in the mid 80s, but has since been published again in the late 90s with updated and new chapters.

[polak]

It would be great if the west could just cut off ALL ties to that part of the world.

It is clear that these issues will never be resolved and the Wests tampering just incites hate and puts civilians into harms way.

[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

or this:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War

So many wars to pick from

or this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War

[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

or this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War

don't fit his timeline........but yeah there are lots on the list...

[Rerun]

Originally Posted by Iginla

Why would you think it was that?

Ummmm... because it happened 30+ years ago?

[Azure]

Originally Posted by Iginla

Why would you think it was that?

Well it was either that or the '82 war. You're being extremely vague here when people ask you for details.

[puckluck2]

Originally Posted by Azure

Well it was either that or the '82 war. You're being extremely vague here when people ask you for details.

What the hell are you talking about? I've answered every single question. Seems like you got another agenda here.

It was in 1982.

[Azure]

Well if I remember correctly you said your parents were stopped from entering Israel, and then abused by Israeli authorities, and now you're saying they were misplaced from their home and beaten with sticks. And it took asking you numerous times to get any kind of answer.

[puckluck2]

Originally Posted by Rerun

Ummmm... because it happened 30+ years ago?

Because that was an isolated incident not a war. Thought you were insinuating something.

[puckluck2]

Originally Posted by Azure

Well if I remember correctly you said your parents were stopped from entering Israel, and then abused by Israeli authorities, and now you're saying they were misplaced from their home and beaten with sticks. And it took asking you numerous times to get any kind of answer.

I never said that.

[Rerun]

Originally Posted by Iginla

What the hell are you talking about? I've answered every single question. Seems like you got another agenda here.

It was in 1982.

So I assume you have equal hate towards Syria and the PLO? They were there too.

[puckluck2]

Originally Posted by Rerun

So I assume you have equal hate towards Syria and the PLO? They were there too.

Lol of course I do. Most Lebanese people hate Syria.

[blankall]

Originally Posted by Flash Walken

The Fateful Triangle is the pre-eminent book on the history and nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

There will be responses about the biased nature of this book in this thread, I'm sure.

You'll be deafened by the cacophony of silence when one of those posters is pressed for an example of scholarly inconsistency.

The book was first published in the mid 80s, but has since been published again in the late 90s with updated and new chapters.

Translation: I'm going to post a source I know is notorious for been biased. But I'm right because this book is full of facts.

You honestly think with a conflict like the middle east, one side is 100% right? The truth lies somewhere in between those with extremist views. Chomsky is notorious for leaving out facts that do not fit in with his arguments.

The following book review gives examples of just a few of things Chomsky leaves out:

Despite Chomsky's claim, Israel was not a "client state" in 1948, 1956 or even 1967. In fact, only Harry Truman's insistence tipped the U.S. to support the United Nation's 1948 partition plan -- and Israel's founding. The U.S. remained neutral and often hostile to Israel through the Six Day War.

Chomsky also argues unconvincingly that "Israel has been the primary "aggressor" in this conflict. He forgets the highly aggressive Jerusalem Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the 1948 Arab promise of a "war of annihilation," which cost nascent Israel a catastrophic near 1% of her population, including 600 Israeli civilians captured and mutilated beyond recognition. As Werner Cohn notes in Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (available online), Chomsky devotes only parts of two pages, taking events entirely out-of-context.

Chomsky devotes only two paragraphs to the pivotal 1929 Arab riots, which on the basis of one eyewitness (whom many others contradict), he blames entirely on the Jews. He admits that in August 1929, Arabs massacred 133 Jews, including 70 Jews killed in a "most ghastly incident" in Hebron. He also quotes Christopher Sykes' Cross Roads to Israel--but excises Sykes' key point, that Hajj Amin el-Husseini instigated the riots when Arabs murdered a Jewish boy for innocently kicking a ball into an Arab garden, that he considered his enemy "the Jewish people," and that his henchmen carried clubs through Jerusalem to threaten them.

Chomsky skips the inconvenient 1973 Yom Kippur attack on Israel, and focuses on events beginning in 1982, with the false notion that Israel consistently rejected "any political settlement" with Arabs. He speciously cites a "flood" of letters to the U.S. media in "strikingly similar format," falsely inferring that the U.S. media and government supported "establishment of a Greater Israel." To prove this, he notes among other things profiles of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, whose "state worshipping" he terms worthy of the "annals of Stalinism." Good grief.

Chomsky unfortunately avoids noting that Israel's 1982 incursion into Lebanon came only after decades of cross-border terrorist raids and bombardments that had taken thousands of civilian lives. His time line also conveniently a major proof that Israel is far from intransigent: the 1979 return of the Sinai to Egypt (including Israeli-developed oil wells and resorts), only 12 years after Nasser's (renewed) 1967 vow to erase Israel from the map.

Meanwhile, Chomsky hardly touches on considerable Arab hostilities to Israel over 55 years. Thus, Chomsky sidesteps the critical fourth, fifth and sixth corners that make the complex Middle East "triangle" hexagonal--Arab incarceration of Arab refugees, Arab expulsion of 900,000 Jews from Arab lands and Arab oppression of other non-Muslim peoples, including Sudanese Christians and animists, Iraqi and Turkish Kurds, Egyptian Copts and Moroccan Berbers.

The simple truth of the matter is when you have a conflict ongoing for 100 years, it's pretty easy to focus on just what one side is doing and blame the entire thing on them.

Also interesting that a man who is trained as a linguist and philospher, and not a historian, is the ultimate source on the middle east history.

[Rerun]

Originally Posted by Iginla

Lol of course I do. Most Lebanese people hate Syria.

What about the PLO?

I usually don't post such a large quote as this but this is important background information on the 1982 conflict in Lebanon.

1981 events and cease-fire

On 10 July 1981, violence erupted in South Lebanon and Northern Israel with the rocketing of Northern Israel by thousands of PLO forces, who had come to occupy Southern Lebanon. Israel renewed its air strikes in an attempt to trigger a war that would allow it to drive out the PLO and restore peace to the region.[14] On 17 July, the Israel Air Force launched a massive attack on PLO buildings in downtown Beirut. "Perhaps as many as three hundred died, and eight hundred were wounded, the great majority of them civilians."[15] The Israeli army also heavily targeted PLO positions in south Lebanon without success in suppressing Palestinian rocket launchers and guns. As a result, thousands of Israeli citizens who resided near the Lebanese border headed south. On 24 July 1981, United States envoy Philip Habib brokered a ceasefire badly needed by both parties. Between July 1981 and June 1982, the Lebanese-Israeli border "enjoyed a state of calm unprecedented since 1968."[2]

US Secretary of State, Alexander Haig filed a report with US President Ronald Reagan on Saturday 30 January 1982 that revealed Secretary Haig's fear that Israel might, at the slightest provocation, start a war against Lebanon.[16] On 21 April 1982, after a landmine killed an Israeli officer while he was visiting a South Lebanese Army gun emplacement in Taibe, Lebanon, the Israeli Air Force attacked the Palestinian-controlled coastal town of Damour, killing 23 people.[17] On 9 May, Israeli aircraft again attacked targets in Lebanon. Later that same day, UNIFIL observed the firing of rockets from Palestinian positions in the Tyre region into northern Israel, but none of the projectiles hit an Israeli settlement[18]--the gunners had been ordered to miss.[15] Major-General Erskine (Ghana), Chief of Staff of UNTSO reported to the Secretary-General and the Security Council (S/14789, S/15194) that from August 1981 to May 1982, inclusive, there were 2096 violations of Lebanese airspace and 652 violations of Lebanese territorial waters.[19][20] There were more than 240 PLO attacks against Israeli targets, and Israel considered them violations of the ceasefire.[21] The freedom of movement of UNIFIL personnel and UNTSO observers within the enclave remained restricted due to the actions of Amal and the South Lebanon Army under Major Saad Haddad's leadership with the backing of Israeli military forces.[20]

Prior to establishing ceasefire in July 1981, U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim noted: "After several weeks of relative quiet in the area, a new cycle of violence has begun and has, in the past week, steadily intensified." He further stated: "There have been heavy civilian casualties in Lebanon; there have been civilian casualties in Israel as well. I deeply deplore the extensive human suffering caused by these developments." The President of the U.N. Security Council, Ide Oumarou of Niger, expressed "deep concern at the extent of the loss of life and the scale of the destruction caused by the deplorable events that have been taking place for several days in Lebanon".[22][23]

Since the ceasefire, established in July 1981, until the start of the war, Israel recorded 240 “terrorist actions” committed by the PLO against Israeli targets including the assassination of an Israeli diplomat in Paris and encounters with PLO units attempting to cross from Jordan.[24]

According to George Ball, the PLO had observed the ceasefire.[citation needed] Israel, he said, continued looking for the "internationally recognized provocation" that Secretary of State Alexander Haig said would be necessary to obtain American support for an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.[25] Secretary Haig's critics have accused him of "greenlighting" the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon in June 1982.[26] Haig denies this and says he urged restraint.[27]

The American reaction was that they would not apply any undue pressure on Israel to quit Lebanon as the Israeli presence in Lebanon may prove to be a catalyst for the disparate groups of Lebanon to make common cause against both Syrian and Israeli forces. Haig's analysis, which Ronald Reagan agreed with, was that this uniting of Lebanese groups would allow President Elias Sarkis to reform the Lebanese central Government and give the Palestinian refugees Lebanese citizenship.[28]

According to Avi Shlaim, the real driving force behind the Israeli invasion to Lebanon was the defense minister Ariel Sharon. One of his aims was the destruction of PLO military infrastructure in Lebanon and undermining it as a political organization, in order to facilitate the absorption of the West Bank by Israel.[citation needed] The second aim was the establishment of the Maronite government in Lebanon, headed by Bashir Gemayel and signing the peace treaty between two countries, the third aim was the expelling of Syrian army from Lebanon.[citation needed] Also, according to Shlaim, with the completion of Israeli withdrawals from Sinai in March 1982, under the terms of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, the Likud-led government of Israel hardened its attitude to the Arab world and became more aggressive.[29]


According to Zeev Maoz in Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s National Security and Foreign Policy the goals of the war were primarily developed by then Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon and were fourfold:

1. "Destroy the PLO infrastructure in Lebanon, including the PLO headquarters in Beirut."
2. "Drive Syrian forces out of Lebanon."
3. "Install a Christian-dominated government in Lebanon, with Bashir Gemayel as President."
4. "Sign a peace treaty with the Lebanese government that would solidify the informal Israeli-Christian alliance and convert it into a binding agreement.[30]

The military plan with the code name "Big Pines", prepared by IDF, envisaged invasion to Lebanon up to the highway Damascus-Beirut and linking with Maronite forces. It was first presented to Israeli cabinet on 20 December 1981 by Begin, but rejected by the majority of ministers. According to Avi Shlaim, Sharon and chief of staff Rafael Eitan, realizing that there was no chance in persuading the cabinet to approve a large-scale operation in Lebanon, adopted a different tactic and intended to implement "Operation Big Pines" in stages by manipulating enemy provocations and Israeli responses.[31]


On 3 June 1982 Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Shlomo Argov was shot and seriously wounded in London by terrorists belonging to the Iraqi-backed Abu Nidal terrorist organization. The organization was the longtime rival of PLO and its head was condemned to death by the PLO court, the British police reported that PLO leaders were on the "hit list" of the attackers.[32][better source needed] In his memoirs, Sharon stated that the attack was "merely the spark that lit the fuse".[33]

The PLO denied complicity in the attack, but Israel retaliated with punishing air and artillery strikes against Palestinian targets in Lebanon, including the PLO camps. Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were bombed for four hours and the local "Gaza" hospital was hit there. About 200 people were killed during these attacks.[34][better source needed] The PLO hit back firing rockets at northern Israel causing considerable damage and some loss of life.[citation needed] According to another source, twenty villages were targeted in Galilee and 3 Israelis were wounded.[35]

According to Shlaim, Yasser Arafat, at that time being in Saudi Arabia, told the Americans through the Saudis that he was willing to suspend cross-border shelling. But that message was disregarded by the Israeli government. President Reagan also sent a message to Begin urging him not to widen the attack.[35]
On 4 June the Israeli cabinet authorized a large scale invasion.[

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Lebanon_War