Iran takes lead in 60-year war to destroy Israel

25 July 2006

THE international clamour grows for a ceasefire in the latest Middle East hostilities; Israel seems determined to ignore it as its men and armour gather for what looks like a major incursion into Lebanon; the condemnation of Israel grows ever louder for what is now generally agreed is a “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah provocation. Pause before joining this global consensus (which does not yet include the United States and Great Britain, though both are under increasing pressure to join it). Consider two matters.


THE international clamour grows for a ceasefire in the latest Middle East hostilities; Israel seems determined to ignore it as its men and armour gather for what looks like a major incursion into Lebanon; the condemnation of Israel grows ever louder for what is now generally agreed is a “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah provocation. Pause before joining this global consensus (which does not yet include the United States and Great Britain, though both are under increasing pressure to join it). Consider two matters.

First (and less important), those who are so sure Israel’s response has been “disproportionate” (the buzz word of Israel’s critics) are least able to tell us what a “proportionate” response would have been. When a terrorist group too powerful to be destroyed by its host country (Lebanon) and bent on the destruction of another (Israel) kidnaps your soldiers, kills others in the process, then rains down hundreds of rockets indiscriminately on your towns and cities, what exactly is the “proportionate” response? It is not clear that turning the other cheek or token retaliation quite does the trick. After all, Israel has been restrained during previous Hezbollah provocations, prepared even to trade an inordinate number of terrorist prisoners for a few abducted Israeli soldiers; but that has hardly earned it brownie points with Hezbollah, as the citizens of Haifa and other parts of northern Israel on the receiving end of its rockets can no doubt testify. Those who seek your destruction do not think more kindly of you when you show compromise and compassion; they see both as signs of weakness and redouble their efforts to destroy you.

Second (and paramount), what exactly would a ceasefire achieve? In the short term, of course, it would stop the civilian death toll on both sides of the border, but especially in Lebanon, where the fatalities and grief have been greatest and where Israel (like America in Iraq) has not done enough to minimise civilian casualties (though let it not be forgotten that Hezbollah places its rockets and terrorist cells in urban areas – using the local population as human shields – precisely because it knows Israel will inevitably kill civilians when it comes to destroy them). But a ceasefire now is likely to mean far more civilian casualties on both sides of the border – and probably far beyond – later.

It is important to realise the wider significance of what is happening: in the 60-year war to destroy the state of Israel, Iran is now in the lead. Those who used to be in the vanguard of Israel’s destruction – Egypt, Jordon, Saudi Arabia, the PLO – have retired from the field with bloody noses and are even tut-tutting at Shi’ite Hezbollah’s antics, which they fear are also a threat to their Sunni regimes. Now Iran has stepped up to the plate, with Syria in supporting role. It is using Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south to fight a proxy war against Israel and it is doing so as part of a wider strategy. In leading the fight against Israel and developing its own nuclear arsenal, Iran is aspiring to become the regional superpower and bidding for the leadership of Political Islam – a leadership it will use to rid the Middle East of Western influence (which requires, among other things, the destruction of Israel) and create a new Shi’ite imperium. No wonder it is not only Israel that is nervous.

A ceasefire for the sake of it would not deflect Iran from its proxy war with Israel and the West. Tehran would regard it merely as a breathing space to equip Hezbollah with bigger and better missiles that could wreak havoc in a few years’ time in Tel Aviv or even Jerusalem; then we would witness what indiscriminate civilian casualties really look like. Iran and Syria realise that Israel cannot be defeated by mass armies on the battlefield; that way has been tried often and failed every time. Now it faces the worst threat since the nearly fatal 1973 Yom Kippur war from Iranian-backed Islamic terrorists bent on its destruction and armed not just with AK47s and explosives but the latest in rocketry – and the ability to whip up an often fickle and ignorant Western public opinion against its enemy.

Israel faces the new threat at a time when anti-Israeli sentiment in the West has never been stronger or more strident. A rampant Political Islam headed by an Iran with nuclear ambitions is as much a threat to the West as it is to Israel; but even though Israel is in the frontline against this threat the irony is that it can count on less support than ever from the West, whose political and media elites on the Left and Right are increasingly consumed by rampant hostility to Israel. Those who lead the charge against Israel, of course, come from the same debased intellectual heritage that believed you could negotiate with Hitler and that Stalin was committed to world peace. But for Israel, the soft underbelly of Western opinion is as much a threat as Hezbollah’s rockets.

Western capitals are rife with the view that, if only a ceasefire to current hostilities can be arranged, the so-called roadmap to a two-state solution can be revived and a peace settlement achieved. Underlying this approach is the belief that Israeli intransigence is the real roadblock to peace. It is a view straight from cloud-cuckoo land. There is no prospect of a peace process worth its name now that Iran and its surrogates are in the driving seat. Neither Iran nor Syria nor Hezbollah nor Hamas believe in the two-state solution; they believe in the destruction of Israel and the humiliation of the West. Those who do believe (to varying degrees) in a two-state solution – Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, PLO – are increasingly marginalised. Yet Western capitals and commentators persist in believing that the old diplomatic game can be revived. It is self-delusion on a massive scale.

In the current situation, a ceasefire will mean only a lull in hostilities as long as Hezbollah remains a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, the Beirut government remains too weak to dismantle it and Iran-Syria believe they are winning. The military destruction of Hezbollah, of course, is not easy; but the price of not trying could be incalculable: if Hezbollah is not neutered now, it will have to be very soon by whatever it takes, before it is able to commit an unimaginable atrocity with Iran’s help. A continued Israeli assault on Hezbollah is the only practical way to reduce its power and military capability and to make Iran and Syria realise that not everything is going their way in the proxy war they are currently waging; a limited ground intervention by Israel, of the sort which now looks increasingly likely, in addition to aerial bombardment, will be required to destroy underground bunkers and missiles caches. Then we can start to look at longer-term solutions, including an international presence on the Israeli-Lebanese border strong enough to deter Hezbollah from a repeat performance of the past 10 days (unlike the present pathetic UN force) and a government in Beirut strong enough disarm Hezbollah’s military wing, as it is required to do under UN resolution 1559, which was part of the last “peace” deal.

Neither of these solutions will be easily arranged; indeed the odds are against them because solutions require goodwill on both sides – and there is precious little goodwill emanating from Tehran these days, a blunt truth that ˇliberal-left commentators in the West seem determined to ignore. So consider this, a speech made last week by the Iranian Parliament Speaker, Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, which summarises the false narrative being spread across the Islamic world which portrays Israel at the heart of a Western conspiracy against Islam: “England, and then America, wished to have control over the Islamic world, to prevent Muslim unity, and to have control of the oil resources in the Middle East. Therefore, following the Second World War, they established an artificial, false and fictitious state called Israel in this region … They mobilised the racist Zionists, who are not accepted even by many Jews. They came to Palestine and, under the pretext of wrongs supposedly done to them during Second World War, they carried out terrorism, conspiracies, massacres and bloodshed in this region.” Such sentiments are widespread not just in Iran but across the Middle East, thanks to years of state-sponsored propaganda along similar lines. They are hardly mood music for a revived peace process.

Indeed, with Iran and its proxies now in the driving seat, the so-called “roadmap to peace” is dead in the water, however much Western politicians try to pump life into it. Six years ago, Israeli pulled out of southern Lebanon, handing back what had been a buffer zone; the land was immediately seized by Hezbollah and used as a launch pad for attacks. Israel’s unilateral withdrawal last year from the Gaza Strip, where the army evicted 8,000 Israeli settlers, has been repaid in similar kind (rockets and abduction) by Hamas. Instead of pocketing their gains and beginning a new peace process which would bring more, Hamas and Hezbollah have interpreted Israel’s retreats as a sign of weakness and used them as a springboard to renewed hostilities. There is no peace in this process.

Indeed there are only signs that Iran is now fighting on a broad front. Prime Minister Tony Blair said last week that the missiles supplied by Iran to Hamas and Hezbollah (via Syria) are “very similar if not identical to those used against British troops in Basra”; thus did he make explicit something the British military has known – but dared not say – for over a year now: that Iranian munitions are killing British troops in the south of Iraq. The British and Israeli armies are being struck with arms made from the same Iranian factories. Iran is fighting a proxy war not just on the border of southern Lebanon but on the borders of southern Iraq.

Largely because of the mess that is Iraq, the West is not yet of a mind to see the wider threat that events on the Israel-Lebanon border represent, much less is it prepared to respond. But, as Iran evolves into the undisputed regional superpower and its proxies wreak havoc on Israel and the West, there will have to be a belated and tough Western response. Until then, those who have neither the courage nor foresight to act now should not get in the way of those who do.
 

'Disproportionate' in What Moral Universe?
By Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post
Friday, July 28, 2006

What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?
What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?
To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world -- governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats -- has completely lost its moral bearings.
The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."
When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.
Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.
Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the Blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest air campaign and land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.
The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.
In perhaps the most blatant terror campaign from the air since the London Blitz, Hezbollah is raining rockets on Israeli cities and villages. These rockets are packed with ball bearings that can penetrate automobiles and shred human flesh. They are meant to kill and maim. And they do.
But it is a dual campaign. Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.
On Wednesday CNN cameras showed destruction in Tyre. What does Israel have against Tyre and its inhabitants? Nothing. But the long-range Hezbollah rockets that have been raining terror on Haifa are based in Tyre. What is Israel to do? Leave untouched the launch sites that are deliberately placed in built-up areas?
Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead it attacked dual-use infrastructure -- bridges, roads, airport runways -- and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.
Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.
Israel knows that these leaflets and warnings give the Hezbollah fighters time to escape and regroup. The advance notification as to where the next attack is coming has allowed Hezbollah to set up elaborate ambushes. The result? Unexpectedly high Israeli infantry casualties. Moral scrupulousness paid in blood. Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

A minority causes collateral damage to the way we live, writes Paul Sheehan.

One of the edges of the global clash between Muslims and the rest is a bottle shop in a small and ratty shopping mall in western Sydney. The owner of the bottle shop is suffering low-level but steady harassment from his neighbours, who want him gone. He's a Christian who has been told repeatedly: "This is a Muslim area," and he is selling alcohol, which is proscribed by Islam.

The one-hour parking zone outside the bottle shop is always occupied because local Muslims leave their cars there all day. The owner has written to the local council to complain, and nothing has been done. He does not want to be identified because he fears retribution. His reaction is sensible.

A friend of mine, Jenny D, used to live in Lakemba. She began receiving insults from people in the street, usually Muslim women wearing headscarves, and sometimes Muslim men. If she wore a short skirt, she could expect abuse or comment. She left Lakemba. Soon after, I moved to America, stayed away for 10 years, and thought nothing more of her story. But after I came back to Sydney I found Jenny's experience had been part of a larger pattern.

One particularly strong witness to this pattern was Judith, who managed an agency helping war widows, because she encountered "dozens" of cases where people were harassed by Muslim neighbours who wanted them gone. "It was common," she told me. "A lot of these ladies couldn't take it and moved out. It happened in Campsie, Belmore, Lakemba, Bankstown, Punchbowl ...

"It was everything ... throwing rubbish over the fence, screaming abuse, blocking the driveway, knocking fences down. One guy would throw coffee grains on the windows and bottles on the roof late at night ... I confronted some of them, and the men would call me a lot of names, mostly in Arabic."

Our Western multiracial ideals have been assaulted yet again this week, via the plan by Islamic jihadists to commit mass murder by blowing up airliners flying out of Heathrow Airport. Even in failure, the plot is producing immense collateral damage in disruption, fear and suspicion.

The collateral damage is particularly severe among the proverbial people "of Middle Eastern appearance". Apart from the majority of Muslims who are just trying to get on with the normalcy of live-and-let-live, most Australians do not appear to realise that the majority of immigrants from the Middle East are not Muslim but Christian. The harassed operator of the bottle shop, for instance, is an Arab Christian. The Maronite, Catholic and Orthodox Christians from Lebanon, the Christian Palestinians and Iraqis, and Coptics from Egypt, collectively outnumber Muslim immigrants from the Middle East in Australia.
This majority of Middle Eastern immigrants have been innocent bystanders in the cultural tensions in Sydney since the Cronulla riot and self-styled "intifada" that followed it in December. They are experiencing collateral damage just as Lebanon itself is suffering as Israel uses a sledgehammer on Hezbollah and Shiite Muslims, while causing enormous suffering to the Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims who had largely run Lebanon in partnership for many decades.

Anyone who traces the growth of problems in Sydney involving Muslims who began arriving from the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s and 1980s must encounter a two-way street, though you would never know it from most reporting. Not just the failure of government policies, high unemployment, and Australian distrust, but numerous episodes of racism or aggressive insularity that arrived as part of the cultural baggage of some refugees. The open contempt some Muslims have for non-Muslims is a common thread throughout the world where Muslims communities rub against the kafirs, or non-believers.

This is especially so in Britain, where Western liberalism, freedom and the rule of law have been used as tools to help make it an operational centre of global jihad. A report by British intelligence estimates a quarter of the 1.6 million Muslims living in Britain support jihad at least somewhere in the world.

It is a place where fanatical intolerance hides in plain sight. On February 3, between 500 and 700 men marched from the Regent's Park mosque to the Danish embassy in Knightsbridge to protest against the publication of cartoons deemed insulting to Islam. Demonstrators carried posters stating "Exterminate those who slander Islam", "Be prepared for the REAL holocaust", "Massacre those who insult Islam" and "Behead those who insult Islam".

No arrests were made. As a senior Scotland Yard officer explained after complaints by several British MPs: "We have to take the overall nature of the protesters into account. If they are overheated and emotional we don't go in. It's a risk assessment. If we went in to arrest one person with a banner the crowd would turn on us and people would get hurt."

The chairman of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, Asghar Bukhari, said this demonstration should have been stopped by police. "The protesters did not represent British Muslims," he told the BBC. "The placards and chants were disgraceful and disgusting. Muslims do not feel that way. I condemn them without reservation."

But he didn't have to confront the mob. Police in Sydney reached a similar conclusion in December, as an incident report prepared by Bankstown police made clear: "On the evening of 12/12/05 numerous vehicles were sighted congregating in the vicinity of Punchbowl Park situated on Rose Street, Punchbowl. These vehicles and the crowd that had gathered were suspected to be Middle Eastern criminals who have been involved in malicious damage and civil disobedience offences throughout the Sutherland Shire and St George areas. A direction was given to police about midnight not to enter the area and antagonise these persons."

The armed and dangerous enemies of tolerance were hiding in plain sight.

Okay what follows is the incredible truth about the perception israel deals with, and how it is purpetrated by the media and the forces that guide islam. if ya think i'm messing around, fuckin with ya, playing propaganda games, read on. this is just one example from hundreds of how israel is treated by the media, its a classic example of anti semitism, cold, calculating and based on lies.

Hezbollah’s Qana Caper: Recent Socialist Rant Places Ideology over Facts
Thu, 2006-08-03 07:47
By Dr. Richard L. Benkin

Once again the world’s gullible and its ideologues have swallowed whole another terrorist claim of an “Israeli massacre.” The world was told that 54 people, mostly women and children, were killed after an Israeli rocket hit a residential building in Qana, Lebanon. And the reactions were swift to condemn Israel. Newspapers and blogs in Europe and the Muslim world called it a massacre. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asked the Security Council to condemn Israel. But while swift, the response was uncritical, despite the fact that contradictions almost from the moment it was first screamed should have called its veracity into question. As more facts emerge, it is becoming ever clearer that Qana is merely the latest “Israeli massacre” that never was.

Typical of the gleeful reaction was a piece in Asian Tribune by Australian socialist, Mike Head. The piece was full of sloganeering, ideology, hyperbole, and unsubstantiated accusations. But what it did not have was fact. He failed to provide any verifiable facts at all about Qana, but merely attributed it—with not so much as a “trust me” for the reader to go on—as the pretext for Israel expanding its war plans. And that was odd, as well, given Head’s reliance on a view of Israel and the United States as evil hegemonists, unconcerned about “world opinion.”

Since Head refuses to cite facts, we can do so here. The first is the time discrepancy. All parties agree that the last Israeli bomb to hit the building was at 1am. Yet, the first report of any deaths from the scene came at 8am, seven hours later. An explosion strong enough to “flatten” a building (as described in the press) would be loud enough to waken the town. The fire would light up the sky. But none of that was reported. This delay is characteristic of a pattern found frequently in this war: that due to secondary explosion. Specifically, Hezbollah has made no secret that it hides its stocks rockets and explosives throughout buildings in Lebanon, including apartments and other residential locations. Group members even pose for pictures with their deadly stocks in these residential buildings. Quite often, the Israelis will attack a location based on intelligence identifying them as legitimate targets, but the initial strikes cause only little damage. The real devastation often comes hours later when fires, structural damage, or heavy vibrations from the attacks go on to ignite and set off the Hezbollah munitions. This is one likely explanation for Qana.

Senior Israeli officials on Monday produced evidence of consistent intelligence that Hezbollah rocket launchers were concealed in civilian buildings in the village and fired on Israeli civilians. Interestingly, Head and his like show no concern for the Israelis murdered by these rockets in Kiryat Shemona, Afula, Ma'alot, and other Israeli cities and towns. And in fact, Israel has also released video footage of rocket launchers being driven into and fired from Qana. Further intelligence indicated that Hezbollah operatives were inside that particular building, along with Katyusha rockets and launchers. Numerous media, and Hezbollah members themselves, have reported that the group’s fighters typically run into nearby buildings after firing rockets. A senior Israeli officer noted that the air force “has been bombing Kafr Kana for three days already... Most civilians have left already, and most of those who remain are Hizbullah rocket launching cells.”

Most damning of Hezbollah were photographs smuggled out by journalists from the Herald Sun of Head’s own Australia. The photographs are powerful and show Hezbollah terrorists using high-density residential areas as launch pads for rockets and heavy caliber weapons. The photographs show them carrying automatic assault rifles and riding on trucks mounted with canon and wearing civilian clothing so they can quickly disappear. In east Beirut’s Wadi Chahrour area, images show one group of men and youths preparing to fire an anti-aircraft gun from an apartment block with sheets hanging out on a balcony to dry. Another depicts the remnants of a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket destroyed in an Israeli air attack without destroying the residential block where it was situated. The Australian man who smuggled out the shots out confirmed that he was close to the site when it was obliterated. Head was fond of quoting the UN’s humanitarian chief in Lebanon, Jan Egeland. But he conveniently neglected to mention that Egeland has become quite outspoken against Hezbollah. He recently called them “cowards” for operating among civilians. “When I was in Lebanon, in the Hezbollah heartland, I said Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children,” he said.

But the terror group’s efforts appear at times even more insidious. Israeli General Amir Eshel reported that as recently as two days prior, military intelligence reported the building area had been used by the terrorists for storage or firing of weapons. It was a bad place to cram dozens of women and children.

Did Hezbollah purposely herd civilians into that place expecting an Israeli attack that they could use as a pretext to force a premature cease fire that would save them from devastation? CNN’s Ben Wedeman noted that the roof of the building was intact and observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike. Hezbollah has cried that the victims were killed in their sleep. Yet, since the building was not destroyed, is it likely that they would have remained there or would have slept through the alleged thunderous Israeli raid?

Once journalists were called to the scene, Hezbollah fighters kept what they could see and where they could go carefully restricted. (As CNN’s Nic Robertson noted once he was out of Lebanon, the only way journalists have access to information in Lebanon is when it is stage managed by Hezbollah.) No one was allowed to evacuate the building until the camera crews came. This also means that Hezbollah already knew that everyone inside was dead, even before investigating it. And indeed, no live or injured people were extracted. This is highly unlikely in this sort of situation, and no one would assume it to be the case as it appears Hezbollah did. Or did they know in advance what was to happen?

Wedeman also noted that there was little blood, and that journalists were not allowed near the building. Rescue workers filmed as they went, occasionally flipping up the blankets so that cameras could show the faces and bodies of the dead. Israelis and others experienced with scenes of carnage noticed that the ashen faced victims already were showing rigor mortis; effects that would not have manifested so soon after the time of the attack. Did a cynical and ghoulish Hezbollah truck in dead bodies that they were hording for just such an opportunity? This is another possible reason for the carnage in Qana.

Whichever it is, there is less and less likelihood of an Israeli massacre. This would be in keeping with manufactured massacres in Jenin in 2002, on the beach in Gaza earlier this year, and the death of young Mohammed al Dura; all of which have been proven conclusively to have been staged. And in fact the debunkers were a German socialist magazine and others not known to be overly friendly toward Israel. The French journalist responsible for the al Dura libel has been disciplined.

Finally, it must be asked who benefits from the Qana incident? Certainly, Israel does not. It has come under increasing pressure to halt its anti-terrorist operations before it can finish destroying Hezbollah. That is precisely what happened after an incident in Qana it 1996, resulting in a Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure that provoked today’s conflict. Certainly, the United States does not benefit. It, too, is coming under great pressure to change its policy supporting Israeli success in destroying Hezbollah prior to a cease fire. And certainly, the people of Lebanon do not gain from more death and destruction.

No, the only winners in this are Hezbollah and Iran. Iran gains because the growing world attention and consensus to stop its nuclear weapon ambitions has been sidetracked with the Middle East violence. Hezbollah is attempting to use the incident cynically to take the moral high ground—reprehensible since it rejoices in the deliberate targeting of Israeli citizens. (That is not entirely the case. While it cheers the deaths of Israeli Jews, Hezbollah apologized to the parents of two Israeli Arabs killed by one of its rockets in Nazareth.) It is trying to advance its designs to survive the Israeli counterattack to its unprovoked attack by manipulating the international community in pushing for a pre-mature cease fire.

Mike Head has shown his bias before. The World Socialist Web Site, of which he is part, seems never to have met a terrorist it did not like. In a current article on the fighting in Sri Lanka, it consistently reports the LTTE position, while calling the government’s “biased.” “The rapid expansion of the conflict gives the lie to government claims that it is carrying out a limited, “humanitarian” [and has] exploited the issue as the pretext for launching an offensive to seize LTTE territory, in clear breach of the 2002 ceasefire agreement.” That sounds like the same refrain he used to explain the phantom massacre in Qana.

Head himself has made clear that he comes from a position that automatically sees the side supported by the United States and Israel as wrong; he has even said that Australian Prime Minister John Howard should be put on trial for war crimes! But, like many others, Head would prefer to wallow in his delusional ideology than to face the truth of what happened in Hezbollah’s Qana caper.

- Asian Tribune -



Stage-Managed MassacreBy Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 2, 2006


“The Israeli air strike on the Lebanese village of Qana early Sunday morning did more than kill 57 civilians,” says Jefferson Morley in the Washington Post. “According to a wide range of commentary in the international media, it inflamed already boiling public opinion in the Arab world against Israel, undermined what little support the United States has among the Lebanese people, and illuminated the continuing inability of Israel and the United States to achieve their goal of decisively weakening Hezbollah.” The Hindustan Times editorialized that “with Qana, one senses that the Israelis’ definition of ‘collateral damage’ has started to bear a striking resemblance to that of the very terrorist organisation that they are keen to destroy.” At a rally outside the State Department building protesting the Qana “massacre” on Monday, Leftist protestors chanted, “Hey, Rice! What do you say? How many kids have you killed today?”; “Israel Out of Lebanon! Ceasefire, Now”; and “Shame! Shame! Shame, on you!” An Australian Muslim in Qana told Australia’s Herald Sun: “I would say a few hundred have died. This isn’t war, it’s genocide.”



Except for one little detail: it is increasingly clear that the Qana “massacre” was a stage-managed Hizballah production, designed precisely to enflame international sentiment against Israel and compel the Israelis to accept a ceasefire that would enable the jihad terrorist group to gain some time to recover from the Israeli attacks. Some of the principal evidence for this:
 
* The Israeli bombardment took place about midnight, but the house where the civilians were gathered reportedly did not collapse until 8AM. Said Brigadier General Amir Eshel of the Israeli Air Force, “It is difficult for me to believe that they waited eight hours to evacuate it.” Indeed, it strains credulity that not only did these Lebanese civilians remain in a house that had been bombed for eight hours, but peacefully went to sleep in it after the bombing – since the victims were all apparently sleeping, despite continuing Israeli air bombardment in the area, when the building collapsed. Eshel suggested that “it could be that inside the building, things that could eventually cause an explosion were being housed, things that we could not blow up in the attack, and maybe remained there” – in other words, Hizballah bombs and/or weapons.
* Photos of the rescue operation, which were transmitted all over the world and appeared on the front page of the New York Times and other major newspapers, are extremely suspicious. The blog EU Referendum has done important work scrutinizing the photos, finding numerous anomalies. Most notably, the dating of the various photos suggests that the same bodies were paraded before reporters on different occasions, each time as if they had just been pulled from the rubble. In a rebuttal to this charge, AP’s David Bauder rather lamely asserts: “web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken.” Responds Richard North of EU Referendum: “Note, however, the use of the word ‘can’. He does not say that the ‘date stamps’ are wrong.” EU Referendum has also uncovered strange anomalies in the photos themselves: some workers are wearing different gear in different photos, yet clearly carrying the same corpse. Richard North comments about one of these workers: “It stretches belief to breaking point to argue that, on his way to the ambulance, he took off his helmet, his fluorescent waistcoat and his flack jacket just in order to pose for the cameras putting the body in the wagon – especially as we have the body being placed on the ‘guerney’ – which means the scenes are totally inconsistent.”
* The very existence of these pictures raises more questions. As Israel Insider puts it: “While Hezbollah and its apologists have been claiming that civilians could not freely flee the scene due to Israeli destruction of bridges and roads, the journalists and rescue teams from nearby Tyre had no problem getting there.”
* The Christian Lebanese website LIBANOSCOPIE has charged that Hizballah staged the entire incident in order to stimulate calls for a ceasefire, thereby staving off its destruction by Israel and Lebanese plans to rid themselves of this terrorist plague: “We have it from a credible source that Hizbullah, alarmed by Siniora’s plan, has concocted an incident that would help thwart the negotiations. Knowing full well that Israel will not hesitate to bombard civilian targets, Hizbullah gunmen placed a rocket launcher on the roof in Qana and brought disabled children inside, in a bid to provoke a response by the Israeli Air Force. In this way, they were planning to take advantage of the death of innocents and curtail the negotiation initiative.”
* According to the German scholar Matthias Küntzel, “the Berlin daily the Tagesspiegel published a letter-to-the-editor from Dr. Mounir Herzallah, a Shiite from the South of Lebanon. Dr. Herzallah reports on how Hezbollah-terrorists came to his town, dug a munitions depot and then built a school and a residence directly over it. He writes: ‘Laughing, a local sheikh explained to me that the Jews lose either way: either because the rockets are fired at them or because, if they attack munitions depot, they are condemned by world public opinion on account of the dead civilians.’ Hezbollah, he says, uses the civilian population ‘as a human shield and then when they are dead as propaganda.’”

Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, declared that “War is deceit.” Specifically, he taught that lying was permissible in battle.[1] While the doctrines of religious deception (taqiyya and kitman) are most often identified with Shi’ite Islam, and ostensibly rejected by Sunnis, because they were sanctioned by the Prophet, they can still be found in traditions that Sunni Muslims consider reliable, and are practiced among Salafis. Jihadists today have spoken of the usefulness of deceptive practices.
 
Americans and Westerners are not used to dealing with carefully orchestrated and large-scale deception of this kind. It is time that it be recognized as a weapon of warfare, and an extremely potent one at that. Qana has already largely accomplished what it was supposed to. It will now take its place beside the Danish cartoons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and all the rest as a useful focal point for Muslim outrage and a magnet for jihad recruitment. The dhimmi Leftist Western press is happy, for it can again show America and Israel as guilty in the world’s site. The mujahedin are happy, for jihad and Sharia will advance still more. The only people who couldn’t possibly be happy with this are the Israelis and others on the front lines of the jihad worldwide.
 
But who cares about them?
 

hey people, anyone out there, no, you all vanished, left me here with my guitar, three chords and the truth.
its a beautiful day at mission control, weathers amazing, like a summers day, birds chirp, the traffic is thin, people smile, i wander through babylon, pick up some mail, buy supplies, have a coffee with an guy i have'nt seen for ages, we talk books and i tell him to read the lucifer principle, in fact i suggest he reads my copy asap to get some background on what's going down, some people are not ready for the truth but i reckon based upon my intellectual powers and strong intuition that this guy can. so then i mail my letter to Von Donaldson, my guitar player in Berlin, it's the second letter, short and sweet.
there's a few people commenting in the newspapers about the foiled terrorist plot, mostly its downplayed, a dude from england comments upon the fact it is not a war of civilizations, it is just a small bunch of evil extreemists that want to be listened to. right lets have a cup of tea and discuss the problem, oh it's israel, no problem we hate that place to.
the real issue as i have stated is one of time displacement, half the earth have embraced technology, sex, art and the intrests of freedom of individuals over the state and religion, the other half haven't and refuse to. call it what you want but there is no escape that this is a war of civilizations, i don't say one is better than the other but i like sexually aggressive women, i have a great intrest in technology and i like the fact i can refuse to believe in whatever i want without some one hurling rocks at me.

A response from John Birmingham to Mark Steynes article in the australian.

John Birmingham: Righteous lefties lose out on the laughs
Where, John Birmingham wants to know, is the Mark Steyn of the Left, a talented polemicist able to rake down John Howard and Abu Bakar Bashir with a single, well-aimed witticism?
August 10, 2006

WHEREIN lay the greatness of Rome? In a thousand marble palaces, long fallen to ruin? In the crackling commercial energy of the Forum? Or in the ruthless elan of an elite military with the fashion chops to match a wicked iron short sword with a really spanking pleated leather skirt and lace-up sandals?

Well, in all those things, but also in its jokes. Joseph Addison, an English poet and diplomat of the early 18th century, thought satires and invectives "were an essential part of (the) Roman triumph". An informal check on hubris, just like the slaves who rode with Rome's victorious generals, whispering in their ears: "Remember that you are mortal."

In Addison's view it was folly for an eminent person to think of escaping censure, "and a weakness to be affected by it".

Reproach being concomitant to greatness, the magnificently big-wigged poet set up his own small journal, The Spectator, to have a go at the issues and eminences of the day.

Three hundred years on, humour retains the power to subvert all manner of self-regard and frozen orthodoxies. It's possible to overstate the case, of course. The piano-playing American humorist Tom Lehrer loved to point to "the satirical Berlin cabarets of the 1930s, which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent (World War II)".

But as The Australian's opinion-page cartoonist Bill Leak discovered earlier this year, a well-turned gag can reverberate right up to the top of the political food chain.

Until recently, the modern incarnation of The Spectator was graced with the reproaches and invective of Mark Steyn, inventor of the comedy subgenre "acerbic drollery", and Canada's third most successful export, after maple syrup and dangerously fatty but delicious bacon. Self-described as a one-man global content provider, he files for magazines and newspapers, including this one, throughout the English-speaking world and is at present in Australia for a sell-out speaking tour.

Less generously named as Dangerous Idiot of the Week by Britain's New Statesman, Steyn is a very modern phenomenon, a weapons-grade conservative with a functioning sense of humour that can go from gentle mockery to violent rhetorical demolition with a quick tap of the accelerator, a sort of P.J. O'Rourke without the drugs or sports cars.

He writes beautifully about pop culture, and music in particular, but since Mohammed Atta laid claim to his 72 yummy virgins, or possibly yummy raisins, and brought down the twin towers, Steyn has been writing about jihad "24/7". As he explained to the ABC's Michael Duffy during a late-evening chat about jazz lyricists this week: "I'd much rather live in a world where I could write about Dorothy Fields and Cole Porter. But if you value the world that you live in and you see that it's under threat, then you've got to do what you can in the way you can to make a shot at saving it."

It's odd, at first, to think of someone, anyone, turning global jihad to comic effect, especially someone who cares enough to be obsessed by it. But the original Spectator's founding publisher would recognise the efficacy of Steyn's personal jihad, to poke fun at anyone who interferes with the long, grim task of seeing off fascist Islam.

The specific details might vex old Addison, but not the intent, which is to strengthen one's case via reason, rather than by appeal to superstition or by simple diktat imposed by force, the modus operandi of the Taliban, for instance when their religious enforcers cum fashion police flogged young girls for wearing white socks or nail polish.

Such medieval rigidity of thought is almost self-satirising, if your tastes run to the sort of black humour that would make the creators of Little Britain blanch. But it is the rigidities of thought within our midst that call forth Steyn's sharpest and often funniest barbs, the doublethink of the anti-war Left, which remains silent on the atrocities of mass murderers such as the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, unless it is to equate them with the atrocities of imagined mass murderers such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

For a long time there has been a dreadful predictability of thinking on the Left, a lack of originality that means a thousand monkeys hammering away at a thousand typewriters could very quickly produce a whole issue of Green Left Weekly without even stopping for an expensive banana. The reflexive anti-Americanism is probably a Vietnam War era relic, but what's new, and nearly as debilitating, is the lack of any sense of proportion or humour. It is possible to make a case in favour of prosecuting the war against al-Qa'ida and its franchises while arguing that Bush and his cohorts have comprehensively bungled the conflict from day one.

Ostensibly progressive political satirists should have a vast arsenal to draw on. But where is the Steyn of the Left, a talented polemicist able to rake down John Howard as well as Abu Bakar Bashir with a single joke?

Perhaps Howard was right when he said that political correctness has had a chilling effect on debate, but not at all in the way he thought.

At the heart of much humour lies a finely calibrated cruelty, such as Steyn's reflections on the Muslim youth riots in France last year. "What is the salient point about youths? They're youthful. Very few octogenarians want to go torching Renaults every night. It's not easy lobbing a Molotov cocktail into a police station and then hobbling back on your Zimmer frame across the street before the searing heat of the explosion melts your hip replacement."

It is open to Steyn to make such quips because he is unconstrained by PC edicts about respecting the elderly or, even more absurdly, the rioters and their grievances. A left-wing writer, bound up in the silken skeins of myriad interests he must not offend, has no such freedom. A pity, really. Because there are so many aspects of the conflict that flared into life on September 11, 2001, that are in desperate need of a good piss-taking.

yes two days to play, well firstly i'm continuing doing my responsibilities, you know paying debts and getting my car registered, it's nice when ya on top of it all, free from the banks evil clutches and high interest rates, in control of your own finaces, pursuing your dreams and ambitions.
i have been thinking a lot about the next set of photo's and i actually need a few girls to model for me, i have a few ideas for some more in my series of demons and gods but i need a girl with amazing legs and a nice pair of shoes.
(don't we all, i hear you say)

i was strolling through babylon the other day when i was asked about the sbs show they had on the tele about anti-semitism, i enjoyed chatting about it with people who were prepared to listen to the point of view of a modern secular jew who has lived in the mid east, it was a good conversation. the show itself didn't teach me anything new, it starts in new testament with the killers of christ then europe with the usual stuff, that bit has never changed, then Hitler who met with the grand mufti of Jerusalem and disseminated mien kiemf and the protocols of the elders of zion to the arabs, yeah well i won't bore you with the details but it was an excellent show, for the first time i have seen just the facts presented on tv, it didn't take sides, didn't moralize, didn't deviate from the objective history. anyway it was a surprise.

the day was kinda spent pottering around, i fixed up the four track mixer so my mic works, and i played a song through the head phones, the vox sounded better than i thought but its tricky reading lyrics without a stand to put them on, i kept having to turn my head. i guess i should learn them hey?
i enjoyed john birminghams comments in the australian, he was saying how outta whack the left is, it was really refreshing to read some one else look at the way left wing politics is so far removed from reality. not that the right is any better but at least they have a less deluded perspective.
in the evening i received a call from dad, he told me that 18 terrorists were caught in london trying to blow up planes or crash them over cities. thank god they were caught is all i can say. here is another example of a meme that must be stopped, i have little problem with individuals who want to take their own lives but i do have issues with suicide bombers who want to take as many people down with them as possible. most people on this planet have very little imput into how their govt. works or decisions that are made, the afghan farmer possibly has the same immediate concerns as you or i, money, food, shelter. as we all go about our buisness, the last thing we need to stress about is some whacked out religious pakistani who decides you have to die with him. its a lost cuase man. islam needs to put a stop to this nonsense now, it can't come from the west anymore, the stupid polititions and media people don't have the balls, its gotta come from the moderate islamic community, 'are you there, moderate arabs, hello...'
unfortuatly is the end game being played out, my bible code book is amazing, it's convinced me against all odds that there are some things known and revealled about the future, sure we can intervine and change it all, but from where i am sitting it looks unlikely, yeah jeruselum may be nuked, chemical weapons in downtown new york, london bombed by a bunch of brainwashed monkeys with nothing constructive to offer the planet but bllod and tears.
me i made my peace with my god a long time ago, when my numbers called i 'll be waiting, there are lots of cuases worth fighting for but none worth dying for.

For the first time since the beginning of the conflict i have seen some reasonable reportage and opinions in the australian daily newspaper, which i must admit i very rarely read. Here's some snippets.

Brian Wimborne: Left in perversity
For leftists, Israel is the aggressor and terrorists are the victims, argues Brian Wimborne

IN her book The New Anti-Semitism (2005), American feminist academic Phyllis Chesler writes: "The American and European Left have made a marriage in hell with their Islamic counterparts. The same Left that has still never expressed any guilt over its devotion to communist dictators who murdered millions of their own people in the service of a Great Idea has now finally, fatefully, joined the world jihadic chorus in calling for the end to racist Zionism and to the Jewish apartheid state."
This is an especially interesting comment in view of the fact that, immediately after World War II, this same political Left lent support to the Jewish people and favoured the creation of a homeland for them in Israel. Even the Soviet Union voted in the UN Security Council for the establishment of the state of Israel, albeit for its own political ends. So what went wrong?

To understand why the Left has done a U-turn on this issue, one needs to appreciate that activists such as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger and Antony Loewenstein feed on a constant diet of victims and define the progressive cause by hatred of whichever group they hold responsible for victimisation. Hatred has always been an essential characteristic of leftist ideology, providing the motivating force for its theory of dialectical materialism.

Traditionally, the Left's favoured victims were the proletariat or working class who were oppressed by the hated bourgeoisie, aristocrats, landholders, factory owners, small businessmen and managers. Only recently, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the shrinking of the working class in developed economies, have numerous other groups become the Left's favoured victims. These include indigenes, welfare dependents, homosexuals, refugees (especially if they are illegal immigrants) and displaced populations of dysfunctional states primarily in Africa and South America. Failure, in addition to class, has become a desired prerequisite for joining the Left's brotherhood of victims. Through its support of those it deems less fortunate, the Left assumes a moral high ground from which it feels self-righteously justified in attacking those it designates as oppressors.

At the conclusion of World War II, the Jewish people were added to the Left's list of stereotypical victims.

After 1500 years of religiously inspired anti-Semitism that culminated in the Nazi Holocaust, Jews were an obvious choice; they were poor, mainly working class, discriminated against, often landless and powerless. Implicit in the Left's stereotyping of Jews was that, despite incidents such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising, they were incapable of defending themselves. Their history suggested that, although individuals could be successful, Jews might not be as a group.

The image of Jews being persecuted throughout Europe and being led finally into the gas chambers of concentration camps would touch the consciences of people everywhere. As a result, although the state of Israel owes its origins to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a more potent impetus for its establishment was the Holocaust and the need to find a homeland for the remnants of European Jewry. However, the odds of the new state surviving were not sanguine.

Designated a victim-state by the Left, Israel did not live up to expectations. To begin with (and despite being under constant Arab attacks from the day of its foundation in 1948), Israel has been internally stable and politically mature. Unlike most post-war emerging states that followed decolonisation, it did not experience widespread corruption, dictatorship or military takeover. From the beginning it was the only democracy in the Middle East, and through hard work, planning and foreign aid its people built a thriving economy. Worse still, the Left's stereotype of Jews was proved wrong. Jews were prepared to fight back and defend their lives and homes.

Paradoxically, the state's success has been the reason the Left turned against Israel. Within a few years of its foundation, Israel had broken the first commandment of the Left's ideology: "Thou shalt not succeed." Success is anathema to the Left because it puts an end to victimhood; without victims the Left has no reason to exist. In the eyes of the Left's supporters, Israel's great accomplishments meant that the country no longer qualified as a victim. Israel, through being successful, effectively turned its back on the role chosen for it by the Left.

From the Left's rigidly dialectical viewpoint, the world is made up solely of victims and oppressors, and if Israel is no longer a victim it has to be an oppressor. The consequence is that the mantle of victimhood once thrust on Israel now cloaks the Palestinians; it is a cloak they may come to regret.

The deep-rooted problems of the Palestinians are not attributable to Israel but to their own corrupt leadership, culture of mendacity, lack of foresight and duplicity of their supporters (originally Egypt, Jordan and Iraq; more recently Syria and Iran).

However, Realpolitik cuts no ice with the Left, whose preference for ideology over reality means Israel is judged to be the cause of all the Middle East's problems.

For instance, in his 1983 essay Fateful Triangle, American polemicist Noam Chomsky portrayed Israel as a terrorist state similar to Nazi Germany. Chomsky's central premise is that Israel should cease to exist because it is "a state based on the principle of discrimination". That only in Israel have Palestinians enjoyed full citizenship rights for more than a half-century is something he conveniently ignores.

Closer to home, Australia's counterfactual journalist John Pilger argues that Israel's "brutal subjugation of the Palestinians is, under any interpretation of the law, an epic injustice, a crime". This is despite the historical evidence that the real subjugation of the Palestinians has occurred in Arab countries and in Gaza and the West Bank, under the tyranny of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

In short, Israel has become the aggressor; terrorists or so-called insurgents, by contrast, are the darlings of the Left.

In addition to Israel's failure to play the role of victim-state, there is another reason for the Left's about-face in respect of Israel. The Left has long been permeated with anti-Semitism. It should not be forgotten that the Nazis (an acronym for National Socialist German Workers Party) had strong left-wing antecedents. The Nazis' doppelganger, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, not only supported traditional Russian anti-Jewish movements but organised pogroms for its own political purposes.

Socialist parties in Britain, France, Australia and many other countries, despite having Jewish adherents, had a strong anti-Semitic thread running through them. It is not surprising that as the Left's support for Israel faded, a latent anti-Semitic ideology replaced it, with the result that the centre of world anti-Semitism is now firmly rooted in the Left.

If there is a lesson to be learned from this, it is that where morality is concerned, the Left is value free. It draws no distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice. Hence, in the minds of leftists, the terrorist becomes a freedom fighter and murderers are transformed into heroes. This should surprise no one. In the past century the Left gave rise to national socialism and international socialism; today it continues to function without a semblance of moral rectitude, offering support of any group it designates as victims.



Visiting columnist Mark Steyn, on ABC radio's PM on Monday, on why stability is the enemy of the Middle East
YOU have to understand that stability is the big enemy in the Middle East. We have had stability fetishists. Almost all foreign policy experts in the Western world become stability fetishists.

They don't want to update their Rolodexes more than once every couple of decades. So they stuck with the house of Saud, they stuck with Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, they've stuck with Syria's Bashar al-Assad. And they were quite content in that sense with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They believe stability is the big thing. "Stability uber alles" is basically the watchword of foreign policy establishments.

Question: But what's the choice? I mean, look at Baghdad now.

Steyn: Because there is no stability. Because you see what's happening in Lebanon, that in fact Hezbollah has better rockets that can reach deeper into Israel, that even the Israelis - who have a much better intelligence service than the US and the UK and most other countries - even the Israelis didn't know they have. So every time you bet on stability, there is no stability.

Underneath it's like a pond with a very thin layer of frozen ice in winter. Underneath the ice it's always moving. And if it's not moving in your direction, generally speaking, things are going the other way. And that's what has happened with Hezbollah, that the more you freeze the Middle East, the more you say: "We have to keep these same regimes in place", the more the technology and the demography and the general situation favours the darkest forces in that region.

Question: But seizing the day means the possibility of anarchy and appalling bloodshed.

Steyn: I think you have to look at the Middle East in zero-sum terms in a way. The US has given billions of dollars per year to Mubarak in Egypt and, in return, what did it get? It got Mohammed Atta flying through the window of the World Trade Centre at 8.30 in the morning.

Question: I'm just going to stop you there. Surely, Mohammed Atta doesn't come out of Mubarak? Mohammed Atta comes out of Mubarak actually trying to repress the Muslim Brotherhood.

Steyn: Exactly. And that's my point, that in a sense once you do what the US did for 40 years, which is bankroll and sustain in power these authoritarian and rather squalid and unlikable regimes, they in effect licence anti-Americanism as a distraction from what might otherwise be more locally focused grievances. In other words, it's in their interests to encourage their people to shout death to the "Great Satan" rather than complain about the Mubaraks, and the house of Saud, and the other local regimes ...

Whatever happens in the Middle East, it has to become something other because the post-war Middle East, if you like, put it in rough terms, the post-Suez Middle East, has been a spectacular failure.



Editorial: Facing facts about Hezbollah
August 08, 2006
Israel's destruction is the name of the militants' game

THE quest for peace in the Middle East is one of the most frustrating stories of the modern age. Unlike the Cold War, which was decided by the hard and demonstrable realities of economics, conflicts in the Middle East are conducted and judged in a far less objective arena, where values of religion and honour are very often the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong. This makes it very difficult for Western observers to take the measure of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict, despite it being a battle between competing world views – medieval theocracy versus secular, liberal democracy – that are the political matter and anti-matter of the 21st century. Understood as such, the impasse at the UN over the wording of a resolution calling for an end to hostilities in the conflict was inevitable. Certainly, no one wants to see a continued loss of life on any side. But present efforts at the UN were doomed to fail. The fact is, the UN's track record in southern Lebanon is abysmal. Its mission to southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, consumes $133 million a year and has consistently failed to enforce UN Security Council resolution 1559. That document, a binding Chapter 7 resolution, explicitly calls for the disarming of all militias including Hezbollah within Lebanese territory. In pursuing and rooting out Hezbollah, Israel is not only protecting its own citizens – who have been subject to routine and often fatal harassment actions against it since pulling out of southern Lebanon in 2000 – but it is also enforcing international law where others have been unwilling or unable to.

But the second and broader problem behind any treaty is that for Israel, a tiny, liberal democracy surrounded by fascist autocracies, there can ultimately be no peace with Hezbollah – just a securing of a buffer zone. Created in the turmoil of the Iranian revolution with the goal of spreading radical Shia influence throughout the world, Hezbollah (aka the Party of God) is devoted to the destruction not just of the state of Israel but Judaism everywhere. Hezbollah will treat any deal as little more than an excuse to rearm and hope for better luck next time. In 1994, the group committed the deadliest act of terrorism ever on Argentinian soil, blowing up the Jewish community headquarters in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people and wounding about 300 more. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah whose picture is triumphantly carried by baying mobs at rallies around the world, has said that if Jews "all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide" and that "the Jews love life, so that is what we shall take away from them. We are going to win because they love life and we love death". Despite these lunatic ravings, Hezbollah is winning the propaganda war in the West, where decades of postmodernism have atrophied the culture's moral musculature and accorded the terrorist group privileged victim status. That Hezbollah loves death can be seen in its barrage of the past weekend, which hurt Israeli Arabs most of all. But if Hezbollah does not care about people, it does care about history and its place in it. As Nasrallah himself said in a recent rant in which he called Israel a temporary country: "By God, you will not succeed in erasing our memory, our presence or eradicating our strong belief." Middle Eastern broadcasters help by connecting the conflict to a much broader sweep of Arab and Muslim history that goes back to and beyond the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and portrays victories against Israel as evidence of a supposed rising tide of Islam. As such, those in the West who believe that world peace would be achieved were Israel to retreat behind its pre-1967 borders (or disappear entirely) are mistaken. Such a move would only embolden the likes of Hezbollah and its backers in Syria and Iran. Here those who truly care about the future of the Middle East and believe in the values of secular, liberal democracy and all the freedoms that they entail should gain the confidence to speak up for them in the present conflict. For, in the long run, there is nothing less that is at stake.

In the present conflict, all Hezbollah needs to win is to not lose. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert acknowledged as much on the weekend when he said it would not be possible to completely destroy such a guerilla organisation. But that is not to say that Israel should not fight Hezbollah and respond to its provocations. For until Hezbollah and its backers in Tehran are deposed or have a change of heart, and the rest of the Middle East sees the Jewish state as a neighbour with whom to coexist rather than a cancer to eliminate, Israel has no choice but to defend itself. Any peace that does not secure Israel's borders in the short term while also communicating to its foes that attempts to destroy the Jewish state will be met with overwhelming force will be a mortgage on future lives and a peace of the dead.

it's always kinda nice to laugh with friends and i am pleased to report that my sense of humor has returned, despite all the troubles in the world, i can still laugh and it feels good.
i spent the last few days looking through some fijian supermarkets buying up all sorts of weird shit, spices, goan fish sauce and spinach and cottage cheese slime, i have topped up my herbs and my kitchen has more soul than james brown. i made myself a fantastic goan fish in a spinach sauce, and it was amazing, i also used my new yogurt making machine and whipped up some killer bacteria, home made berry bacteria, good for the guts apparently.
i love cooking, its a shame i have no one to cook for, it brings me a lot of joy, i guess i am luckey as i cook at work for the autistic people who love my food, i usually make them weird veggie food, spices and herbs abundant, tastes from another world, these people have grown up on a diet of junk food, i like to trip the light fantastic with them. i recall once using wasabi with a young man who was pestering me for a bite of my sushi, yeah he couldn't believe his luck when i let him have some, his face turned pale within seconds.
usually i am neither cruel or hardwired for such trivialities but in this case he got his just deserts.

there's a lot of talk about anti isreal comments not being anti Semitic, in the herald there was a big letter from some fucking cow saying just because i criticize you doesn't mean i am anti Semitic, well people don't really get it do they, the fashionable western middle class university educated armchair Samaritan, just don't get it.
perhaps when they realize why so many people from all over the world move to Israel they might think to question why. why would a bunch of jews from say, france, england, Hungary or Spain move to the fucking most unpopular country on the map, it ain't for the friendly neighbor's. it's because anti semitism is fucking epidemic, it always has been, its just taken a new form, instead of dumb jack booted fascists its now your ideological experts and tv personalities. will self the english writer wrote in his newspaper that he was renoucing his jewish faith over Israel's attacks on Lebanon, ha i had to laugh, will self jewish, he went on to say how he never publicly acknowledged his jewish identity, i laughed because of his shame, i mean when england invaded the falklands did he offer to give up his englsihness, the prick.
anyways anti semitism, its everywhere only its manifested as being anti israel, lets see, israel has to defend itself in proportion!!!!!
no other country does, just israel. right!
israel was formed by a collective guilt by European nations. yeah well i didn't see the collective guild manifest when the first day of its creation 5 surrounding arab armies declared war on it, out numbering it by 100- 1. those European nations didn't offer a hand, possibly immobilized by guilt.
the other major statement by the new anti semitism, is israel dispossessed the original landowners, the Palestinians, well there's two ways to look at that, one what country was not formed on that basis, should Australia now be given back to the aboriginal inhabitants. yeah point the finger at Israel.
the other is if you look in the bible, which is a history book as well as many other things, the jews were original inhabitants as well. now that may not be the strongest argument but do you have 3000 year old documentation to support your own claim to your current home land.
so yeah there's a problem, its anti semitism, its rife, its inherent in your critisms to israel, you comments about jews and the way you fuck us over. fuck you, you were happy when we were meek and marched into your death camps, now we got the means to defend ourselves, you feel a little threatened, a little intimidated. Fuck You!

just finished reading paul sheehans new book, 'girls like you.' i think this is the sort of book every person who lives in australia or the west needs to read, not to instill fear but indicate the actual limits democracy can take, based around the gang rapes of anglo girls by lebanese/ pakistani youths and leading up to the cronulla riots it shows exactly what is occurring in society, that which dares not be spoken. an amazing read, and tegan one of the many victims who was not only raped by these gangs but then raped again by the legal proceedings deserves special mention for being a very brave and resilient young girl.
so i aslo finished the 'etched city', which is beautifully written and quite remarkable in story, if you require escape into the realms of fantasy, sci fi, and quasi spiritual realms. i really enjoyed it, very provocative.

for a number of years my father has been urging me to read the book the bible code 2, i had already read the first one but written it off becuase i had read so much conflicting investigations into it's scientific probability. However the other day i managed to pick up a copy for $2 and i started to read it and i have to say, so far it's incredible. one of the reasons i didn't like the first book is it was always after the event. its easy to predict something that has already happened, but the second book actually looks at what is and will happen. its early days yet but it appears as though there is something to be said about this 'bible code.' i wouldn't write it of just yet. i'll keep yu posted on what i thik so far but it looks as if 2006 is the year a nuclear bomb is detonated by Al Queda. The authors have managed to give themselves an exit stratagy, saying that the predictions can be changed if one knows about them in advance, they seem to believe that the bible was written as a warning that could not be deciphered until computers had been invented, despite issac newtons last years devoted to the mystery of the old testament. it appears this was like a time lock device that the bibles creator factored in. very intresting stuff.

ahhh the rains back, its non stop heavy drenching through the whole of my world, i never really liked the rain, unless it was in some really hot place but sydney is freezing, in fact the coldest day in 10 years.

every now and then i have to run a diagnostic check on my operating system, it's been feeling very vunerable lately and its always prudent to re evaluate where i am at, there is a number of ways you can do this, but a really tried and tested method is old Dr Leary's 8 circuits. Tunnel-Realities and Imprints.

Let's try Dr. Leary's perspective on these mysteries.
To understand neurological space, Dr. Leary assumes that the nervous system consists of eight potential circuits, or "gears," or mini-brains. Four of these brains are in the usually active left lobe and are concerned with our terrestrial survival; four are extraterrestrial, reside in the "silent" or inactive right lobe, and are for use in our future evolution. This explains why the right lobe is usually inactive at this stage of our development, and why it becomes active when the person ingests psychedelics.

I. THE BIO-SURVIVAL CIRCUIT

This invertebrate brain was the first to evolve (2 to 3 billion years ago) and is the first activated when a human infant is born. It programs perception onto an either-or grid divided into nurturing-helpful Things (which it approaches) and noxious-dangerous Things (which it flees, or attacks). The imprinting of this circuit sets up the basic attitude of trust or suspicion which will ever after trigger approach or avoidance.


II. THE EMOTIONAL CIRCUIT

This second, more advanced bio-computer formed when vertebrates appeared and began to compete for territory (perhaps 500,000,000 B.C.). In the individual, this bigger tunnel-reality is activated when the DNA master-tape triggers the metamorphosis from crawling to walking. As every parent knows, the toddler is no longer a passive (bio-survival) infant but a mammalian politician, full of physical (and psychic) territorial demands, quick to meddle in family business and decision-making. Again the first imprint on this circuit remains constant for life (unless brainwashed) and identifies the stimuli which will automatically trigger dominant, aggressive behavior or submissive, cooperative behavior. When we say that a person is behaving emotionally, egotistically or 'like a two-year-old,' we mean that s/he is blindly following one of the tunnel-realities imprinted on this circuit.


III. THE DEXTERITY-SYMBOLISM CIRCUIT

This third brain was formed when hominid types began to differentiate from other primate stock (circa 4-5 million B.C.) and is activated for the linear left-lobe functions of the brain, determines our normal modes of artifact-manufacture and conceptual thought, i.e., third circuit 'mind.'
It is no accident, then, that our logic (and our computer-design) follows either-or, binary structure of these circuits. Nor is it an accident that our geometry, until the last century, has been Euclidean. Euclid's geometry, Aristotle's logic and Newton's physics are meta-programs synthesizing and generalizing first brain forward-back, second brain up-down and third brain right-left programs.




IV. THE SOCIAL-SEXUAL CIRCUIT

The fourth brain, dealing with the transmission of tribal or ethnic culture across generations, introduces the fourth dimension, time.
Since each of these tunnel-realities consists of biochemical imprints or matrices in the nervous system, each of them is specifically triggered by neuro-transmitters and other drugs.

NOTICE how drugs that stimulate the first four circuits, which are already activated, tend to be dangerously addictive, roughly ordered ascending from the first circuit. -deoxy

To activate the first brain take an opiate. Mother Opium and Sister Morphine bring you down to cellular intelligence, bio-survival passivity, the floating consciousness of the newborn. (This is why Freudians identify opiate addiction with the desire to return to infancy.)
To activate the second tunnel-reality, take an abundant quantity of alcohol. Vertebrate territorial patterns and mammalian emotional politics immediately appear when the booze flows, as Thomas Nashe intuitively realized when he characterized the various alcohol states by animal labels: "ass drunk," "goat drunk," "swine drunk," "bear drunk," etc.
To activate the third circuit, try coffee or tea, a high-protein diet, speed or cocaine.
The specific neurotransmitter for circuit four has not been synthesized yet, but it is generated by the glands after pubescence and flows volcanically through the bloodstreams of adolescents.

NONE OF THESE TERRESTRIAL DRUGS CHANGE BASIC BIOCHEMICAL IMPRINTS. The behaviors which they trigger are those which were wired into the nervous system during the first stages of imprint vulnerability. The circuit II drunk exhibits the emotional games or cons learned from parents in infancy. The circuit III "mind" never gets beyond the permutations and combinations of those tunnel-realities originally imprinted, or abstractions associated with the imprints through later conditioning. And so forth.
But all this Pavlovian-Skinnerian robotism changes drastically and dramatically when we turn to the right lobe, the future circuits and extraterrestrial chemicals.

The four evolving future 'brains' are:


V. THE NEUROSOMATIC CIRCUIT

When this fifth "body-brain" is activated, flat Euclidean figure-ground configurations explode multi-dimensionally. Gestalts shift, in McLuhan's terms, from linear VISUAL SPACE to all-encompassing SENSORY SPACE. A hedonic turn-on occurs, a rapturous amusement, a detachment from the previously compulsive mechanism of the first four circuits. I turned this circuit on with pot and Tantra.
This fifth brain began to appear about 4,000 years ago in the first leisure-class civilizations and has been increasing statistically in recent centuries (even before the Drug Revolution), a fact demonstrated by the hedonic art of India, China, Rome and other affluent societies. More recently, Ornstein and his school have demonstrated with electroencephalograms that this circuit represents the first jump from the linear left lobe of the brain to the analogical right lobe.

The opening and imprinting of this circuit has been the preoccupation of "technicians of the occult"--Tantric shamans and hatha yogis. While the fifth tunnel-reality can be achieved by sensory deprivation, social isolation, physiological stress or severe shock (ceremonial terror tactics, as practiced by such rascal-gurus as Don Juan Matus or Aleister Crowley), it has traditionally been reserved to the educated aristocracy of leisure societies who have solved the four terrestrial survival problems.

About 20,000 years ago, the specific fifth brain neurotransmitter was discovered by shamans in the Caspian Sea area of Asia and quickly spread to other wizards throughout Eurasia and Africa. It is, of course, cannabis. Weed. Mother Mary Jane.

It is no accident that the pot-head generally refers to his neural state as "high" or "spaced-out." The transcendence of gravitational, digital, linear, either-or, Aristotelian, Newtonian, Euclidean, planetary orientations (circuits I-IV) is, in evolutionary perspective, part of our neurological preparation for the inevitable migration off our home planet, now beginning. This is why so many pot-heads are STAR TREK freaks and science fiction adepts. (Berkeley, California, certainly the Cannabis Capital of the U.S., has a Federation Trading Post on Telegraph Avenue, where the well-heeled can easily spend $500 or more in a single day, buying STAR TREK novels, magazines, newsletters, bumper stickers, photographs, posters, tapes, etc., including even complete blueprints for the starship ENTERPRISE.)
The extraterrestrial meaning of being "high" is confirmed by astronauts themselves; 85% of those who have entered the free-fall zero gravity describe "mystic experiences" or rapture states typical of the neurosomatic circuit. "No photo can show how beautiful Earth looked," raves Captain Ed Mitchell, describing his Illumination in free-fall. He sounds like any successful yogi or pot-head. No camera can show this experience because it is inside the nervous system.

FREE-FALL, AT THE PROPER EVOLUTIONARY TIME, TRIGGERS THE NEUROSOMATIC MUTATION, Leary believes. Previously this mutation has been achieved "artificially" by yogic or shamanic training or by the fifth circuit stimulant, cannabis. Surfing, skiing, skin-diving and the new sexual culture (sensuous massage, vibrators, imported Tantric arts, etc.) have evolved at the same time as part of the hedonic conquest of gravity. The Turn-On state is always described as "floating," or, in the Zen metaphor, "one foot above the ground."



VI. THE NEUROELECTRIC CIRCUIT

The sixth brain consists of the nervous system becoming aware of itself apart from imprinted gravitational reality-maps (circuits I-IV) and even apart from body-rapture (circuit V). Count Korzybski, the semanticist, called this state "consciousness of abstracting." Dr. John Lilly calls it "metaprogramming," i.e., awareness of programming one's programming. This Einsteinian, relativistic contelligence (consciousness-intelligence) recognizes, for instance, that the Euclidean, Newtonian and Aristotelian reality-maps are just three among billions of possible programs or models for experience. I turned this circuit on with Peyote, LSD and Crowley's "magick" metaprograms.
This level of brain-functioning seems to have been reported first around 500 B.C. among various "occult" groups connected by the Silk Route (Rome-North India). It is so far beyond the terrestrial tunnel-realities that those who have achieved it can barely communicate about it to ordinary humanity (circuits I-IV) and can hardly be understood even by fifth circuit Rapture Engineers.
The characteristics of the neuroelectric circuit are high velocity, multiple choice, relativity, and the fission-fusion of all perceptions into parallel science-fiction universes of alternate possibilities.

The mammalian politics which monitor power struggles among terrestrial humanity are here transcended, i.e., seen as static, artificial, an elaborate charade. One is neither coercively manipulated into another's territorial reality nor forced to struggle against it with reciprocal emotional game-playing (the usual soap-opera dramatics). One simply elects, consciously, whether or not to share the other's reality-model.

Tactics for opening and imprinting the sixth circuit are described and rarely experienced in advanced rajah yoga, and in the hermetic (coded) manuals of the medieval-Renaissance alchemists and Illuminati.

No specific sixth circuit chemical is yet available, but strong psychedelics like mescaline (from my 1962-63 "sacred cactus," peyotl) and psilocybin (from the Mexican "magic mushroom," teonactl) open the nervous system to a mixed-media series of circuit V and circuit VI channels. This is appropriately called "tripping," as distinguished from straight-forward fifth circuit "turning on" or "getting high."

The suppression of scientific research in this area has had the unfortunate result of turning the outlaw drug culture back toward fifth circuit hedonics and pre-scientific tunnel-realities (the occult revival, solipsism, Pop Orientalism). Without scientific discipline and methodology, few can successfully decode the often-frightening (but philosophically crucial) sixth circuit metaprogramming signals. Such scientists as do continue to study this subject dare not publish their results (which are illegal) and record ever-wider tunnel-realities only in private conversations--like the scholars of the Inquisitorial era. (Voltaire announced the Age of Reason two centuries too soon. We are still in the Dark Ages.) Most underground alchemists have given up on such challenging and risky self-work and restrict their trips to fifth circuit erotic tunnels.

The evolutionary function of the sixth circuit is to enable us to communicate at Einsteinian relativities and neuro-electric accelerations, not using third circuit laryngeal-manual symbols but directly via feedback, telepathy and computer link-up. Neuro-electric signals will increasingly replace "speech" (hominid grunts) after space migration.

When humans have climbed out of the atmosphere-gravity well of planetary life, accelerated sixth circuit contelligence will make possible high-energy communication with "Higher Intelligences," i.e., ourselves-in-the-future and other post-terrestrial races.

It is charmingly simple and obvious, once we realize that the spaced-out neural experiences really are extraterrestrial, that getting high and spacing out are accurate metaphors. Circuit V neurosomatic rapture is preparation for the next step in our evolution, migration off the planet. Circuit VI is preparation for the step after that, interspecies communication with advanced entities possessing electronic (post-verbal) tunnel-realities.

Circuit VI is the "universal translator" often imagined by science-fiction writers, already built into our brains by the DNA tape. Just as the circuits of the future butterfly are already built into the caterpillar.




VII. THE NEUROGENETIC CIRCUIT

The seventh brain kicks into action when the nervous system begins to receive signals from WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL NEURON, from the DNA-RNA dialogue. The first to achieve this mutation spoke of "memories of past lives," "reincarnation," "immortality," etc. That these adepts were recording something real is indicated by the fact that many of them (especially Hindu and Sufis) gave marvelously accurately poetic vistas of evolution 1,000 or 2,000 years before Darwin, and foresaw Superhumanity before Nietzsche.
The "akashic records" of Theosophy, the "collective unconscious" of Jung, the "phylogenetic unconscious" of Grof and Ring, are three modern metaphors for this circuit. The visions of past and future evolution described by those who have had "out-of-body" experiences during close-to-death episodes also describes the trans-time circuit VII tunnel-reality.
Specific exercises to trigger circuit VII are not to be found in yogic teaching; it usually happens, if at all, after several years of the kind of advanced rajah yoga that develops circuit VI facility.
The specific circuit VII neurotransmitter is, of course LSD. (Peyote and psilocybin produce some circuit VII experiences also.)
Circuit VII is best considered, in terms of 1977 science, as the genetic archives, activated by anti-histone proteins. The DNA memory coiling back to the dawn of life. A sense of the inevitability of immortality and interspecies symbiosis comes to all circuit VII mutants; we now see that this, also, is an evolutionary forecast, since WE STAND RIGHT NOW ON THE DOOR-STEP OF EXTENDED LONGEVITY LEADING TO IMMORTALITY.
The exact role of the right-lobe circuits and the reason for their activation in the 1960s cultural revolution now becomes clear. As sociologist F.M. Esfandiary writes in UPWINGERS, "Today when we speak of immortality and of going to another world we no longer mean these in a theological or metaphysical sense. People are now traveling to other worlds. People are now striving for immortality. Transcendence is no longer a metaphysical concept. It has become reality."
The evolutionary function of the seventh circuit and its evolutionary, aeon-spanning tunnel-reality is to prepare us for conscious immortality and interspecies symbiosis.
VIII. THE NEURO-QUANTA CIRCUIT
Hold on to your hats and breathe deeply--this is the farthest-out that human intelligence has yet ventured.
Consciousness probably precedes the biological unit or DNA tape-loop. "Out-of-body experiences," "astral projection," contact with alien (extraterrestrial?) "entities" or with a galactic Overmind, etc., such as I've experienced, have all been reported for thousands of years, not merely by the ignorant, the superstitious, the gullible, but often by the finest minds among us (Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Edison, Buckminster Fuller, etc.). Such experiences are reported daily to parapsychologists and have been experienced by such scientists as Dr. John Lilly and Carlos Castaneda. Dr. Kenneth Ring has attributed these phenomena to what he calls, very appropriately, "the extraterrestrial unconscious."

Dr. Leary suggests that circuit VIII is literally neuro-quanta--infra, supra and meta-physiological--a quantum model of consciousness and/or a conscious model of quantum mechanics by the turned-on physicists discussed previously (Prof. John Archibald Wheeler, Saul-Paul Sirag, Dr. Fritjof Capra, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, etc.) indicates strongly that the "atomic consciousness" first suggested by Leary in "The Seven Tongues of God" (1962) is the explanatory link which will unite parapsychology and paraphysics into the first scientific empirical experimental theology in history.
When the nervous system is turned on to this quantum-level circuit, space-time is obliterated. Einstein's speed-of-light barrier is transcended; in Dr. Sarfatti's metaphor, we escape "electromagnetic chauvinism." The contelligence within the quantum projection booth IS the entire cosmic "brain," just as the micro-miniaturized DNA helix IS the local brain guiding planetary evolution. As Lao-tse said from his own Circuit VIII perspective, "The greatest is within the smallest."

Circuit VIII is triggered by Ketamine / DMT, a neuro-chemical researched by Dr. John Lilly, which is also (according to a wide-spread but unconfirmed rumor) given to astronauts to prepare them for space. High doses of LSD also produce some circuit VIII quantum awareness.

This neuro-atomic contelligence is four mutations beyond terrestrial domesticity. (The current ideological struggle is between circuit IV tribal moralists-or-collectivists and circuit V hedonic individualists.) When our need for higher intelligence, richer involvement in the cosmic script, further transcendence, will no longer be satisfied by physical bodies, not even by immortal bodies hopping across space-time at Warp 9, circuit VIII will open a further frontier. New universes and realities. "Beyond theology: the science and art of Godmanship," as Alan Watts once wrote.
It is therefore possible that the mysterious "entities" (angels and extraterrestrials) monotonously reported by circuit VIII visionaries are members or races already evolved to this level. But it is also possible, as Leary and Sarfatti more recently suggest, that They are ourselves-in-the-future.

The left-lobe terrestrial circuits contain the learned lessons of our evolutionary past (and present). The right-lobe extraterrestrial circuits are the evolutionary script for out future.

Thus far, there have been two alternative explanations of why the Drug Revolution happened. The first is presented in a sophisticated way by anthropologist Weston LaBarre, and in an ignorant, moralistic way by most anti-drug propaganda in the schools and mass media. This explanation says, in essence, that millions have turned away from the legal DOWN drugs to illegal HIGH drugs because we are living in troubled times and many are seeking escape into fantasy.
This theory, at its best, only partially explains the ugliest and most publicized aspect of the revolution--the reckless drug abuse characteristic of the immature. It says nothing about the millions of respectable doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc., who have turned away from second circuit intoxication with booze to fifth circuit rapture with weed.

Nor does it account at all for the thoughtful, philosophical sixth circuit investigations of persons of high intelligence and deep sensibility, such as Aldous Huxley, Dr. Stanley Grof, Masters-Houston, Alan W. Watts, Carlos Castaneda, Dr. John Lilly and thousands of scientific and lay researchers on consciousness.

A more plausible theory, devised by psychiatrist Norman Zinberg out of the work of Marshall McLuhan, holds that modern electronic media have so shifted the nervous system's parameters that young people no longer enjoy "linear" drugs like alcohol and find meaning only in "non-linear" weed and psychedelics.

This is certainly part of the truth, but it is too narrow and overstresses TV and computers without sufficiently stressing the general technological picture--the ongoing Science-Fiction Revolution of which the most significant aspects are Space Migration, Increased Intelligence and Life Extension, which Leary has condensed into his SMI²LE formula.

Space Migration plus Increased Intelligence plus Life Extension means expansion of humanity into all space-time. SM + I² + LE = infinity.

Without totally endorsing Charles Fort's technological mysticism ("It steam-engines when it comes steam-engine time"), it is obvious that the DNA metaprogram for planetary evolution is far wiser than any of our individual nervous systems--which are, in a sense, giant robots or sensors for DNA. Early science-fiction of brilliant writers like Stapledon, Clarke, Heinlein; Kubrick's 2001--all were increasingly clear DNA signals transmitted through the intuitive right lobe of sensitive artists, preparing us for the extraterrestrial mutation.

It is scarcely coincidental that mainstream "literary" intellectuals--the heir of the Platonic-aristocratic tradition that a gentleman never uses his hands, monkeys with tools or learns a manual craft--despise both science-fiction and the dope culture. Nor is it coincidental that the WHOLE EARTH CATALOGS - created by Stewart Brand, a graduate of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters--are the New Testament of the rural drop-out culture, each issue bulging with tons of eco-technological information about all the manual, dextrous, gadgety know-how that Plato and his heirs consider fit only for slaves. Not surprisingly, Brand's latest publication, CO-EVOLUTION QUATERLY, has been devoted to publicizing Prof. Gerard O'Neill's space-habitat, L5.

Nor is it an accident that dopers seem to prefer science-fiction to any other reading, even including the extraterrestrial-flavored Hindu scriptures and occult-shamanic circuit VI-VIII trip-poets like Crowley and Hesse.

The circuit VI drugs may have contributed much to the metaprogramming consciousness that has led to sudden awareness of "male chauvinism" (women's liberationists), "species chauvinism" (ecology, Lilly's dolphin studies), "type-G star chauvinism" (Carl Sagan), even "oxygen chauvinism" (the CETI conference), etc. The imprinted tunnel-realities which identify one as "white-male-American-earthian" etc. or "black-female-Cuban" etc. are no longer big enough to enclose our exploding contelligence.

As TIME magazine said on November 26, 1973, "Within ten years, according to pharmacologists, they will have perfected pills and cranial electrodes of providing life-long bliss for everyone on Earth." The 1960s hysteria about weed and acid was just the overture to this fifth circuit break-through. Nathan S. Kline, M.D., predicts real aphrodisiacs, drugs to speed up learning, drugs to foster or terminate any behavior. ... Those who were jailed or beaten by cops in the 1960s were forerunners of the Revolution of Inner Technology.
In short, the various levels of consciousness and circuits we have been discussing, and illustrating, are all biochemical imprints in the evolution of the nervous system. Each imprint creates a bigger tunnel-reality. In the Sufi metaphor, the donkey on the which we ride becomes a different donkey after each imprint. The metaprogrammer continually learns more and is increasingly able to be aware of itself operating. We are thus evolving to intelligence-studying-intelligence (the nervous system studying the nervous system) and are more and more capable of accelerating our own evolution.

Leary now symbolizes intelligence-studying-intelligence by the mark, I². On the lower levels, you see with one "I", so to speak. On the higher levels, you see with many "I"s, and space-time shifts from three Euclidean dimensions to non-Euclidean multi-dimensionality.

T H E E I G H T F O L D M O D E L O F H U M A N C O N S C I O U S N E S S
Robert Anton Wilson

The Eight Basic Scripts

1. The biosurvival
Winner

"I will live forever or die trying."

Loser

"I don't know how to defend myself."

2. The emotional-territorial
Winner

"I am free; you are free; we can have our
separate trips or we can have the same trip."

Loser

"They all intimidate me."

3. The semantic
Winner

"I am learning more about everything,
including how to learn more."

Loser

"I can't solve my problems."

4. The sociosexual
Winner

"Love, and do what thou wilt." (Anon. of Ibid)

Loser

"Everything I like is illegal, immoral, or fattening."

5. The neurosomatic
Winner

"How I feel depends on my neurological knowhow."

Loser

"I can't help the way I feel."

6. The metaprogramming
Winner

"I make my own coincidences, synchronicities,
luck, and Destiny."

Loser

"Why do I have such lousy luck?"

7. The neurogenetic
Winner

"Future evolution depends on my decisions now."

Loser

"Evolution is blind and impersonal."

8. The neuroatomic
Winner

"In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true,
or becomes true within certain limits to be learned by
experience and experiment." (Dr.John Lilly)

Loser

"I am not psychic, and I doubt anyone is."

here we are hovering over the crystal city, the spires and turrets pierce the skies, the movement of people below, the crisp energy over the green areas, the vacant patches where industry works, wisps of stratus as we zoom in upon the garden in an anonymous suburb where a girl sits blowing bubbles towards a purple lizard.
'See Frakula,' the girl says, 'it's perfect, a perfect sphere.'
'Yeah,' says the lizard in a french accent, it's almost perfect.'
'No it is perfect.'
'Ahhh Emma i hate to tell you this but it is not a perfect sphere, see how gravity works, it pulls downwards stretching the fabric of the bubble downwards. Emma nothing is perfect in this world.'
Emma blows another bubble, it shoots upwards, 'I disagree. You are thinking in absolutes, nothing is perfect in this world but the imperfection to me is perfect.'
'Well i don't wanna argue with you on semantics. Can you light me a smoke?'
Emma leans over and passes Frakula a packet of cigarettes. 'You know these are very bad for your health.'
'Yeah well that's what they say but i don't get much pleasure these days and i'm cutting down to a pack a day.'
'Have you tried patches?'
'Yeah but it's not the same.'
Emma blows a series of bubbles within bubbles, 'Oh look Fracula look.'
'Pretty cool Emma, pretty cool. Jesus i wish they made these self lighting, its very hard to ignite the ends.'
'Here let me help,' Emma leans over to offer a light, 'Hey Frakla, i've got some weed if you wanna skin up.'

Over the last few weeks I have read a number of people from all around the world mention a new way to look at the middle east situation, its kind weird because it's so obvious, yet its a perspective i find quite accurate. It's not about religion or land but a difference in time. one society still feudal, dominated by an ancient meme that has no adaptive process, it fears sex, females, technology and has a desire to control by the sword. israel embraces technology, sex, women, it's secular and adaptive. i guess having lived there i see it clearly, not through the eyes of the media. i mean where else do nuclear physicists have jobs picking up garbage, and where else do you see the ex violinist of the Hungarian philharmonic busking outside a busy tel aviv street. i recall these things, a taxi driver that was a pure mathematician in russia, these things are so common, there are doctors everywhere and the streets are filled with art. actually its an amazing place.
now i certainly am not saying its enemies are not equally amazing but they are living in the dark age. perhaps the solution to the middle east is banning all religous teaching and indoctrination, taking away the brainwashing machine and replacing it with a scientific form of education anhilating the idea of memes and belief.

the day started with me asleep in the midst of a dream where a voice as clear as anything said, 'david attenbourough is dead.'
i awoke, ran to the tv, nothing, ran down the cafe with pan, scanned the paper, nothing, mmm, curious. had a few meetings at work which seemed to go quite well, lots of ground covered, productive, a good feeling.

i'm halfway through the incredible book, 'girls like us' i think if you live in australia you need to read this book, its quite disturbing, quite compulsive. written by the very brave paul sheehan, i see he gets a lot of flack from ye SMH readers but not me, i think he's one of the bravest writers around, don't tow the PC line, and is able to present the story without being tied to an ideology or agenda. the book follows a series of rapes in sydney and while the story is focused upon the terrible perpetrators it also looks at the plight of the victims in the legal process. the cases are well known but the details are incredible, the justifications and the brutality of these perps will really surprise a few people, and the larger implications about multi culturism will certainly make people think. wake up people this is where democracy is failing.

what a day, i finished a series of four night shifts, bit sleepy but feeling some what positive and in mission mode, i took pan for a long walk and we drove to neutral bay to catch up with a friend, then i zipped into the city for a book buying spree, picked up some crackers but i am beginning to feel like i have a serious book buying habit, an addiction, i may have to cold turkey for a week or so, just so i can catch up on the unread books i have.
i made some music for eagle, and contemplated my navel.
there's many things i feel i have yet to do, publish my stories, sell my art, record my songs and generally complete all my projects, dreams and desires, finding my soul mate is another.
i was chatting about my parents relationship with some one this morning, how my dad is absolutly in deep love with my mum, i don't know if its a good thing or not, but he seems happy about it, they both do. i think they set the template for me, that such a thing is possible, however i think it would be a remarkable woman that i commit to. what is remarkable, well creative is possibly the most important element but also humble and relaxed with me, trust i guess, the kind that you take to the grave, absolute trust. mmm, i used to think french but these days i realise how silly that kinda pre-requisite is, so i guess i'll replace that with soft, yeah a soft girl.
great name for a song....

towards the end of a perfect day. bright sun, blue sky, perfect surf, lots of people strolling around eating ice creams and oblivious to me and my strange feelings of alienation and detachment, i walk with my true friend pan, we attach a tennis ball onto a super stretchy piece of elastic and tie the other end onto a tree branch. everytime i throw the ball pan goes to get it only to have it whizz passed him straight to me, its so funny, pansy's face, the look of bewilderment as he looks at me, and i am laughing, for the first time in many days, i laugh and laugh and there's a slight feeling of freedom that washes over me, just for a short while, i am happy. what is happiness, a girl on a swing a boy and his dog.
i speak to my parents in the london, my mother tells me about the huge rise in anti semitic violence, the tv, the protesters, everyone blames isreal, mum says she wants to go back there, dad tries to sound positive but he isn't, he sounds sad. i tell them about their beautiful grandson.
later in the evening i hear that mel gibbon, an actor i never really rated was charged with drunk driving and then on arrest yelling out about how the jews are behind all warfare and they control the money. apparently the police tried to cover it up but some paperwork got leaked. Gibbon blames the alcohol for his behaviour.
so far most people who come to talk to me are in agreement with him, its amazing i think, i wonder what they would say if i told them i am a jew, i'm broke, i didn't start any wars and as far as i know none of my family did. the jews are nazis, people say. mmm, i usually make an excuse and leave, but i am getting to the point where i will actually develop a stratagy based upon my usual ability to make people laugh at themselves without even knowing it, 'yes those jewish nazis giving back lands in wars they never started, for a peace that never came, jeez, dumb nazis marching themselves into concentration camps like sheep, yeah stupid jewish nazis, spreading their evil message via bob dylan, robert downey juniour, sarah bernhardt, harvey keitel, daniel day lewis, woody allen and winonna ryder, iggy, the bangles, beck, jack black, t rex, mick jones (the clash) perry farrell, richard hell, lou reed, the coen bros, leonardo da vinci, j d salinger, stan lee, jack kirby, fritz freeling, matt goring, frida kahlo, the marx bros, lenny bruce, mike leigh, fritx lang, the red hot chilli peppers, paul auster, issac singer, slash, etc all signed up members of the nazi party.
phone rings its my cousin in isreal eagle, i am momentarily stunned, and somewhat speechless, what can i say. we chat about the situation, he seems relaxed, i don't know what to say, he tells me he drove through the city of hiafa, its deserted, everyone moved south. we talk about girls for a while. he says the noise is unbelievable, sirens and missiles, he tells me Katushias come in all the time, later i tell him i'm going to send him some music, turn the stereo up loud eagle, blast the church, echo and the bunneymen, some weird dub cuts out through the walls, rock and roll can stop the war.