Interview taped Tuesday July 18, 2006.
Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment. I’m Dori Smith.
Journalist Dahr Jamail joins us this time from Damascus, Syria, to talk about the climate there as Israeli F-16s bomb Lebanon and make their way along the Beirut to Damascus Highway towards Syria. Dahr Jamail covered the Iraq war during 8 months reporting on the early stages of war and occupation, covering two sieges of Fallujah in 2004 through the 2005 elections. You will find his work in the Nation Magazine, Inter Press News Service, and many other publications. His web site is dahrjamailiraq.com
Dori Smith: Dahr let’s talk about the climate in Syria right now. I understand there have been some big demonstrations there.
Dahr Jamail: Yesterday there was a massive demonstration here at Damascus. I don’t know exactly how many people but I think it would be safe to say it was well over 100,000. It’s really not a surprise because the government of Syria and most of the people of Syria very much support Hezbollah’s right to existence. Over here in the Arab and Muslim world they are not viewed as a terrorist organization. They are viewed as a legitimate political albeit militant group now. They do have a seat in the cabinet in the Lebanese government. They have many seats in the Lebanese Parliament. Their party has been fully engaged in formation in 1985 of social welfare programs, hospital, education, this sort of thing. So they sort of fill the gap left by the inability of the Lebanese government to help impoverished Shiite in Southern Lebanon and so therefore in that area as well as Syria, Iran, and so much of the countries in this region, they do have very much support. And that is the news here in Damascus.
I just walked back from dinner and there’s Hezbollah flags flying in front of shops. Cars driving down the street with Hezbollah flags flying on the antennae and the demonstration yesterday showed that. And not only was there a demonstration here in Damascus but also up in Latkia, a larger city up north on the coast and in several other cities around Damascus as well.
Dori Smith: Major U.S. TV networks, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, and others are passing on Israel’s remarks that the bombing of Lebanon is a kind of service of freeing the people from Hezbollah.
Dahr Jamail: This is simply propaganda. And it’s really not a surprise that propaganda outlets like CNN and especially FOX really tow the Israeli line as far as acting as good mouthpieces to get the information out to people in the west. This is really the stated goal of this Israeli program of collectively punishing the entire country of Lebanon because of Hezbollah. It’s their goal that they want to do this to put pressure on the Lebanese government to try to help kick Hezbollah out of Southern Lebanon. And in fact that’s one of the pre sets they say that has to happen before they stop this attack, which basically guarantees that it won’t stop because the Lebanese government really can’t do much of anything. It’s much like the Iraqi government. It’s very sectarian, very factionalized and no one group has much power. So getting them to agree on anything let alone such a critical issue as Hezbollah is just not going to happen.
So as these media outlets continue to propagandize this Israeli plan its certainly not the case on the ground in Lebanon. Let’s be clear. Hezbollah has the majority of support of most people in Lebanon. Over 60% of the country is Shiite Muslim and that is the base of Hezbollah. And they are even respected by much of the Christian community and much of the Druze community there as well. So saying that they are trying to split the country–sort of divide Lebanon into submission to “free” the people–Dori you and I have talked from Baghdad about this same type of policy that the United States has instituted in Iraq where it’s basically bomb the country into oblivion. Bomb them to freedom. Destroy the village to save it. It’s the same type of rhetoric we’ve been seeing since Vietnam and its complete lunacy. The bottom line is dropping bombs on a country does not split it up, it does not cause the people to start fighting amongst each other so much as it does cause them to meld together to oppose the enemy. And even the Prime Minister Rafik Harirri’s son who is now the majority leader of parliament said two days ago from Kuwait that Israel is the enemy, that the enemy is not Hezbollah, the enemy is not from within, it’s not a particular faction or sectarian group in Lebanon. Rather, the enemy is Israel, and that’s what we are seeing that as the bombs now continue to fall in Lebanon and “bomb them to the stone age” now most of their critical infrastructure is gone. So many civilians being killed and wounded every single day–the outrage is aimed at Israel the people dropping the bombs rather than Hezbollah.
Dori Smith: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Israel has said he will continue attacking until Israeli soldiers are freed and until Israelis are free from rocket attacks from Lebanon and Hezbollah at the border.
Dahr Jamail: It’s simply violence against more violence and if we look at the cause of events we see that there were no Hezbollah rockets landing in the train stations of Haifa and killing Israeli civilians until the Israeli military began to collectively punish the entire country of Lebanon, knocking out critical infrastructure, killing over 200 civilians. There’s been right now a maximum of 14 Lebanese soldiers killed; all of the rest now of over 220 people now killed are civilians. This is what is causing Hezbollah to respond in kind. And another thing I should point out is that the Israeli military, if you do the math and look at the number of Lebanese civilians killed compared with the number of Lebanese in the army that have been killed its a 16% ratio of how many military people who are being killed out of all that are being killed. Consequently if we look at Hezbollah and the rockets they’ve fired into Israel, which has been over 400 now, and there have been 24 Israelis die, 12 of those are military and twelve of those are civilians. So not to justify it or not to approve of it but that’s a 50% ratio as opposed to Ehud Olmert’s position of collectively punishing an entire country and in the process only 16% of the targets being military targets. Their use of this rhetoric of we’re going to go to the end. We’re not ruling out the possibility of a ground invasion. Certainly only guarantees that more of the same is going to happen where more of Lebanon’s critical infrastructure will be destroyed, more civilians will be killed, and in response Hezbollah will launch of course many many more rockets into Israel therefore guaranteeing that more Israeli civilians will die and guaranteeing this crazy policy that Israel is engaged in is only going to continue. It’s once again that insane cycle of violence where as more people die the rhetoric gets cranked up even more and unfortunately this is only going to continue for the coming weeks if not months if not longer.
Dori Smith: President Bashr al-Asad, of Syria, was on Democracy Now Tuesday July 18, 2006 and he said that he had contacted U.S. leaders to offer his help after 9/11 and that Syria in fact provided intelligence on Al Qaeda which helped protect the U.S. from further attacks. We had also heard Ron Suskind on Democracy Now confirming that Syria offered sensitive intelligence to America on Al Qieda. So why didn’t Syria become America’s ally in the war on terror after 9/11 after these kinds of overtures were made?
Dahr Jamail: Even if we look back to the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq, Bush Senior’s war against Iraq, we had Syria on board in that coalition, which is why the U.S. green lighted Syria to go ahead and occupy Lebanon which they did until just a little bit over a year ago. And they only occupied Lebanon because the U.S. gave them the green light to do so. And then we flash forward up to the very important events that you mentioned that al-Asad has said in the past as well that they did give the U.S. very valuable information about Al Qaeda groups planning terrorist attacks. They have even allowed the U.S., the CIA, to use extraordinary rendition to fly people here to be tortured. So they’ve been quite complicit with the U.S. in the so-called war on terror. But things changed during the invasion of Iraq when this time Syria refused to join the coalition of the so-called willing–therefore became sort of a sub country of the axis of evil. So they certainly are part of that now simply because of that now because of the fact that they would not aid and abet the United States in invading and occupying Iraq. So now they are paying the price despite the fact that their country has done what it can to help the U.S. prevent terrorist attacks. I think its really as simple as that.
Dori Smith: I understand that you have been talking with a man who says he saw a hospital bombed in Lebanon. Just talk about what these refugees are telling you.
Dahr Jamail: Collective punishment means basically everything has become a target now. The Geneva Conventions are out the window. And when I was at the northern border I interviewed a 25-year-old American citizen, his name is Abdul Rahman. He’s a social studies teacher. He was vacationing in Beirut with his family. And they were all living in an apartment near the UN building in downtown Beirut.
He told me that were so many bombs falling on the city, and they were all bombing civilians, and he said if Israel wants to attack Hezbollah fine, let them attack Hezbollah, but not the civilians because all they are doing is attacking the civilians in Lebanon. He was outraged. He was practically yelling responses as I asked him questions. And he said we lived in sheer terror. We hadn’t slept for three nights. Every bomb that fell we wondered if it was going to collapse our building. We wondered when the next one was going to come and if it would hit us. This is terrorism. We are terrorized. He said that very clearly. When you bomb a country into oblivion, bomb Beirut into oblivion, that is blatant terrorism of the civilian population, and that is another violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Al Jazeera reported that a convoy of ambulances was hit with missiles from either war planes or helicopters. Other people, so many people have told me that they have seen hospitals bombed. I’ve been to the western border of Syria, the eastern border of Lebanon, about 5 days ago, and then just two days ago I was on the northern border of Syria and Lebanon. And in both places people were coming out, and this was at different times, this was about three days apart, and both times I ran into several people at each border coming out and they were all saying the same things. That they were seeing ambulances bombed, they were seeing hospitals attacked, most of the damage being done was against the civilian population while certainly the al-Manar Hezbollah television station has been hit and some of the Hezbollah infrastructure again, if you simply look at the images on TV and listen to what the people are saying coming out of Lebanon most of the damage being done is against hospitals, its against ambulances, and the civilian population.
I think its important to be very clear about this. The Geneva Conventions were designed, they were born, in order to protect the civilian population during a time of war. So these tactics of collective punishment that we saw in Fallujah and now that we are seeing in Lebanon, are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. Targetting civilians, doing indescriminate bombing, targetting hospitals and ambulances, these are very grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. These are war crimes.
People like Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and those who support him, of course all of his military, but the U.S. Government which provides over $2 billion dollars a year in aid to Israel, much of that in military hardware; Israel has the largest fleet of F-16s outside of the United States of America because the U.S. affords it so much. So that basically means the U.S. Government has been aiding and abetting Israel in these war crimes and of course that’s underscored by the fact that recently George Bush has said Israel has the right to so-called defend itself; a cease-fire resolution was put forward in the UN which was vetoed by the United States. Basically 7 of 8 of the last vetoes to occur in the UN have been by the U.S. when it has stood up to defend Israel’s policies which tend to take the shape of war crimes whether it be now in Lebanon or right now in the Gaza strip or in the past in other areas of the occupied Palestinian territories.
So it’s an atrocity that we are witnessing right now. We are watching an entire country collectively punished. It’s on all of the mainstream media and the world is standing by and watching it and letting it happen and the UN is completely impotent because of this fatal design of giving countries like the United States veto power. What kind of a democratic institution is that? Over 150 countries belong to it and there are three or four I believe, if I recall correctly, who have veto power. That’s absurd and that’s why these atrocities are going to continue to take place and why right now there’s nothing that anybody can do to stop it.
Dori Smith: Talk about the issue of Israel’s claims that the rockets and weapons that Hezbollah has were provided by Iran and or Syria.
Dahr Jamail: There were even claims that there were Iranian Republican Guards in Southern Lebanon which is absolutely untrue but without a doubt Hezbollah has either bought or been provided with weaponry from Iran. But we can say the same thing of the U.S. providing arms to Israel. So then therefore that would make the U.S. a legitimate target by Hezbollah or anyone else who might chose to support them now wouldn’t it? If we applied this same logic that Israel is using against Hezbollah and now saber rattling towards Syria and Iran?
Why don’t we turn that around? And we could say well anyone that is supporting Israel then is also a legitimate target and they are supporting a terrorist organization because what Israel is doing is terrorism. This rhetoric that a state can’t engage in terrorism by the air by using F-16s to target civilian populations, drop 500 pound bombs in the middle of a city center, bomb hospitals, rocket ambulances, killing women and children; this is what’s seen across TV screens over here in the Middle East every single day, every single hour of every single day. And yet when Hezbollah fights back using rockets, of course firing them into civilian populations is also a war crime, but when they fight back generating not nearly the number of casualties, that’s terrorism.
It’s quite the double standard and people in the west have to understand that over here in the Arab world, in the Muslim world, it’s seen as the hypocritical thing that it really is. Because Hezbollah certainly has a right to defend itself. Lebanon especially as a country as a sovereign country that is being bombed—and Israeli ground troops yesterday pushed into Southern Lebanon for a bit and then backed back out—as a sovereign country certainly has a right to defend itself.
So by Israeli slash US logic is the Lebanese army a terrorist organization simply because they are fighting to defend their own country? It’s really absurd rhetoric and its one of these things that back in the west when a terror strike happens people like on 9/11 during that time people said, “why do they hate us?†Well this is why they hate us. Because there’s this blatant hypocrisy, this unbridled support of Israel as they occupy Palestinian territories, as they kill civilians daily, and now as they collectively punish an entire country.
Dori Smith: A few leaders in various countries responded to all of this in either militant tones to match Israel and the U.S. or some are criticizing Hezbollah. Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, Jordan’s King Abdullah, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. But then the people of many of these countries appear to feel differently. Maybe there are differences within the government. Would you say that you are seeing the political power base separate from some leaders? Are there divisions forming? Is it the case that the policies may seem unstoppable right now because the decisions were made behind closed doors and away from the people?
Dahr Jamail: Well you make a very good point because the fact is there is a huge disconnect between the rulers of these Arab countries like Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emerites, and so on down the line; Iraq, where the bottom line is these rulers are certainly not representing what the people want them to do. I really can’t underscore hard enough how much outrage there is around the Arab world now that Israel is attacking Lebanon.
Israel is viewed as a Zionist country which is occupying Arab land and shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That’s how it is viewed in the Arab world. So now that they are launching an act of aggression against Lebanon an Arab country there is widespread outrage across the Arab world.
It seems when you contrast that you get Arab leaders like Hosni Mubarak and others of his ilk and especially King Abdullah of Jordan who is one of the finest American pawns out there. They absolutely won’t fully condemn what’s happening and won’t certainly do anything like consider sanctions against Israel or something a little bit more tangible that might actually have an impact instead of doing some reflecting and maybe clicking their tongues on the tops of their mouth and saying well this is just too bad, and certainly Israel should use restraint, and basically mirroring the rhetoric that we see coming out of the G8–that ridiculous G8 conference that’s going on right now. And that disconnect is another very worrisome thing because there are massive demonstrations. They are getting bigger as time goes on. The governments are doing nothing about it.
Contrast it with Israel. It does seem that while there are protestors in Israel, while there are certainly hundreds of thousands of people opposed to what their government is doing just like they are opposed to their government carrying out military operations in the Palestinian territories, let alone occupying it–still when a country goes to war, at least at the beginning of it like we’ve seen in our own country, people do tend to rally around the President, kind of wave the flag, make the eagle scream, you know patriotism, nationalism–and that’s what we are seeing in Israel right now where they are afraid there are air raid sirens going off daily around cities in Israel and many people are now living in bomb shelters. Not a fun existence. So of course people are hoping someone will protect them and support them in using this overkill military style that they are using in Lebanon.
But that’s really the one country where I would say that the government is doing what the majority of people want it to do contrasted with the Arab countries where there is a massive disconnect and the Arab leaders are condemned and scoffed at by most people in the populations of their countries. In fact when I went to the western border of Lebanon about five days ago I interviewed one man who had been in there vacationing from Kuwait who was also very upset at the leader of his country and he said I’m leaving Lebanon because this is never going to stop until the Arab leaders move their asses. –None of them are moving their asses and nothing‘s going to be changed until they do something that has real consequence against the Israeli government. And that is the outrage that is common place here now in the Middle East.
Dori Smith: Many of us are just searching for news on the internet and through various sites. What if anything are Lebanese and Syrians and others seeing and hearing on Arab TV networks that comes from perhaps Hezbollah itself? Or from those in Hamas who are also dealing with Israel in the Palestine occupied territories?
Dahr Jamail: Yes. The al-Manar television station that I mentioned earlier, it was bombed by the Israelis but they failed to knock out the bunkers that al-Manar has underneath their building so that their TV station is still broadcasting. And that is quite a popular station. It’s very common here in Damascus or other cities in Syria and I’ve been to to walk into a hotel and see that the person in the lobby sitting there is watching al-Manar. I went out to eat at a restaurant tonight and lo and behold there’s al-Manar on the television in that restaurant. So that is a very common channel here in Syria and also in other places around the Middle East. They are showing the reality on the ground. They are showing the dead men, women, and children.
Of course, a lot of al-Manar is simply Hezbollah propaganda and its simply not worth watching but more importantly than al-Manar though is Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera has a very strong presence in Lebanon. They have scores of reporters there. They are broadcasting from Beirut. They are doing a very fine job of covering it. They are interviewing Israeli military officials as well and also are covering the situation in Israel. But in Lebanon they are doing a fine job of getting people out to the scene of where these bombs are happening.
So that translates to what people here in the Middle East are seeing. –The result of this collective punishment of Lebanon by the Israelis, they are seeing the dead women and children. They are seeing the blown up ambulances, the completely destroyed hospitals. They are seeing grain silos that have been rocketed by Israeli war planes. They are seeing the new light house that had recently been built on the Lebanese coast in Beirut that was rocketed by American made Apache helicopters a couple of days ago. They are seeing all of these atrocities. They are seeing the billowing smoke plums coming out of different areas around Beirut 24/7. This is the footage coming out.
When nightfall happens they are seeing these giant flashing bombs exploding around Beirut. That’s what people are seeing because that’s the reality on the ground. There are massive bombing campaigns going off there every single day carried out by the Israelis and that is the reality on the ground. That’s why there is so much outrage and that’s why there is a huge disconnect between people in the West because of the corporate media who basically run the rhetoric that you mentioned earlier that we see from CNN and FOX. We don’t see the civilian casualties in Lebanon. We don’t see the dead bodies, the babies with their heads sheered off. The bombs, phosphorus weapons have used by the Israelis in Southern Lebanon. The people in the west don’t see this so then they don’t understand why there is so much rage over here in the Middle East.
Dori Smith: Dahr let’s talk about the impression U.S. soldiers are making on the Arab world through operations in Iraq which to some extent are also joint operations with Israel as I understand it. Are some of the recent cases of U.S. soldiers getting arrested for atrocities impacting the views of Hamas or Hezbollah leaders as they take actions where Israel is concerned?
Dahr Jamail: This is another very important point and in fact I did write a piece several months ago for Truthout.org called, “An Alliance of Violence,†and in it I discussed the fact that when the Israeli military carries out operations in the occupied territories there is almost immediate blowback in Iraq let alone around the rest of the Arab world but particularly in Iraq.
The example I cite is when the Israeli military assassinated Sheik Yassin, the leader of Hamas down in Gaza on March 22, 2004, nine days later the four Blackwater Security contractors were murdered in Fallujah and that was a reprisal attack for Sheik Yassin. There were pamphlets distributed at the scene that said very clearly this is a revenge attack for Sheik Yassin, “down with Israel, death to Israel,†this kind of thing going on at the scene of that attack. And of course we all know what happened to the bodies of those contractors. And now we are seeing the same thing in Iraq. Just two days ago Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has already had two intifadas against the U.S. Military there said, basically hinted very strongly, that they will support Hezbollah and there probably will be some fighting now coming out of the Mehdi army, his militia, against the U.S. and the British. And consequently, there is just so much going on excuse me if I get my days mixed up, but it was either yesterday or today a British soldier was killed just North of Basra and another one was wounded. Well that’s Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi army so without a doubt there is blowback happening in Iraq and, of course, also because of these atrocities you mentioned.
There are also Israeli mercenaries working in the prisons doing interrogations, doing some of the torturing. Also there are Israeli special forces in Iraq, they have been there from the beginning, and they also have a very strong presence in the northern region of Kurdistan.
So what’s happening in Lebanon, let alone everything that I just mentioned in Iraq, is just pouring more fuel onto the fire. Really it’s important that people understand that Israel is not loved in the Arab world and in the Middle East and its certain that if there just were policies of peaceful coexistence and there were some fairness happening in the occupied territories, occupied by Israel that is, there wouldn’t be this –but people here are all too aware that there is massive oppression going on in Palestine by the Israeli military and the U.S. invasion of Iraq has heightened that awareness and U.S. policy in Iraq coupled with Israeli policy in the Gaza strip for example and now in Lebanon; its really just underscoring for everyone here, how it’s perceived, is that the Israelis and the Americans will launch wars of aggression any time they choose, they will use heavy handed tactics to punish people, they will use collective punishment, they will violate the Geneva Conventions. There is nothing you can do about it. And that is the policy here that the people are seeing now today clearer today than ever before and that’s why there is so much outrage.
Dori Smith: Dahr Jamail, thank you for joining us on Talk Nation Radio.
Dahr Jamail: Thanks Dori.
Dori Smith: Journalist Dahr Jamail joined us from Damascus, Syria. He’s been interviewing refugees from Lebanon and watching political developments there as Israeli F-16s bomb Lebanese cities and find sites along the Beirut to Damascus Highway in the direction of Syria.
You can read Dahr Jamail’s latest stories “Fleeing Lebanese Speak of Indiscriminate Bombing,†and Hezbollah, an Emerging Political Force in Lebanon You can read his other work in Inter Press News Service and in Truthout.org or on his web page dahrjamailiraq.com
For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. Talk Nation Radio is produced in the studios of WHUS radio at the University of Connecticut, in Storrs, Connecticut. WHUS.org to listen live every Wednesdays at 5 PM. talknation.org and talknationradio.org for transcripts and discussions at the New Café. Our music is by Fritz Heede
[...] During his travels Dahr Jamail has reported for Pacifica’s Democracy Now and Flashpoints In addition to reporting from Iraq he has also reported from Syria Lebanon during the Israeli/Lebanon War and Jordan. [...]