Thought for the Day

[bcholmes]

Part of the Syria Accountability Act, and I don't have time to go into it, is the claim that Syria is... uh... is allowing offices of Hamas and Hezbollah... Lebanese Hezbollah... to stay there. Where did Hezbollah and Hamas come from? They come from Israel. Israel created both of them. In the case of Hamas, it did it consciously. I mean, in the occupied territories, Israel was supporting religious extremists in order to undermine the secular PLO... the political Islam... it wasn't even Islam very much. It was a political secular movement seeking independence for the Palestinians. Well, that was the real threat. Israel preferred ... religious extremists. One of the only, I think maybe the only university in the West Bank that Israel sort of allowed to be funded was the Islamic University. At one point to they were busing students from the Islamic University to Birzeit... the secular university... to break up strikes... y'know, protests.

Where did Hezbollah come from? Ever hear of them before he Israeli invasion of Lebanon? They're the result of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Backed by the U.S., otherwise they can't do it. It was a viscious invasion, killed about 20,000 people, destroyed a large part of southern Lebanon, lead to resistence, and the resistence ended up being Hezbollah which drove them out of Lebanon. And is now becoming a kind of political organization in Lebanon. Uh... well... those are the... uh... the purpose of the invasion of Lebanon, it was pretty open. It was expressed by the highest political military eschelons. The purposes of the invasion of Lebanon was to eliminate PLO efforts at negotiation and political accommodation which were just becoming embarassing. It was very hard to fend them off. So they wanted to drive them out of Lebanon so they could forget about it.

-- Noam Chomsky, Imperial Grand Strategy