by AlicetheCurious » Thu Jul 27, 2006 7:04 pm
Greencrow0, I've had a bad week. My internet access broke down a few days ago...very frustrating.<br><br>But I more than made up for it by watching lots and lots and lots of tv. I was switching between al-Jazeera (Qatar), al-Arabia (Saudi), Future TV (Lebanon), CNN, BBC and, most interesting of all, al-Manar TV, the official Hizbullah tv station.<br><br>That's where I was able to watch Sayed Hassan Nasrallah his very own self, speaking and explaining his perspective on what has been going on. I had to stay up until 1:30 am to see his latest speech, but although my husband thought I was nuts, it was worth it. The excerpts aired the next day on the other networks always seem to be of the least interesting parts of his speech. <br><br>Actually, I've noticed that that's the case in general. If you miss the live broadcast of the press conferences, you pretty much miss the significant parts. An excellent example is the press conference with Rice and Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese Prime Minister after the Rome meeting. Woah! Siniora was uncharacteristically blunt, and Rice looked like she was having heart palpitations. She seemed breathless and nervous, and when she smiled, it looked even more like a grimace than usual... <br><br>Anyway, back to our point. Greencrow0, you're mixing up two very different things: (1) the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, in Gaza, by Palestinian militants. You're right, that sounds very fishy, for the simple reason that Israel has complete and total control over Gaza, including all access points, its communications and every other aspect of its infrastructure. Gaza has been described as a concentration camp, and that's what it is. Gaza holds no secrets for the Israelis.<br><br>The second event (2), was the capture by Hizbullah (the Lebanese resistance) of two Israeli soldiers, near the Lebanese-Israeli "border" (whether it was on the Lebanese side or on the self-declared "Israeli side" is still debatable, since conflicting reports have been made).<br><br>South Lebanon is a very different story from Gaza. The Hizbullah resistance is extremely well-organized, well-equipped and alert, and very difficult for Israel to penetrate. Despite a massive US and Israeli-led campaign to demonize them and brand them as terrorists, they enjoy huge prestige in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East as heroes, mostly because they successfully fought and ended the Israeli occupation, but also because of their smart, well-informed and politically-astute leadership. South Lebanon is Hizbullah territory, and the people there are passionately loyal to them.<br><br>Sayed Hassan Nasrallah heads Hizbullah, and Hizbullah's official tv station is al-Manar, so watching him speak is as close as one can get to the horse's mouth, as it were.<br><br>The video was very clear, his familiar face was filmed up close, and his voice was not distorted in any way. By the way, Nasrallah has a specific speech defect that would make it very difficult for anyone to imitate. His manner was relaxed and he spoke thoughtfully and compellingly.<br><br>What a contrast to those grainy, weird, 'al-Qaeda' video and audio tapes...<br><br>So, in his latest televised speech 3 nights ago, Nasrallah advised his audience that Hizbullah had learned of a plot by the Israelis, hatched a year ago, to make a surprise air attack on Hizbullah, effectively destroying the resistance, that would be followed by a re-invasion of Southern Lebanon. He said that the Israelis were expecting to implement their plan at the end of September or the beginning of October.<br><br>By taking the two soldiers prisoner, according to Nasrallah, Hizbullah had provoked the Israeli government into rashly implementing their plan before the preparations had been completed.<br><br>Thus, the Israelis had tried to substitute overkill for sufficient intelligence, leading to a devastating loss of life and essentially the destruction of an entire country, but leaving the resistance mostly intact. As proof, he cited the continuing rocket attacks that were continuing to strike Israel.<br><br>According to Nasrallah, if the Israelis had been able to implement their plan according to its schedule, the resistance might have been destroyed, and there would be little or no hope of rebuilding it. In other words, Israel would be able to permanently re-occupy Lebanese territory up to the Litani River, and there wouldn't be anything anybody could do about it. <br><br>As evidence that the Israelis were planning this for a long time, he told people to ask themselves whether the massive, coordinated attack on Lebanon really could have been decided in the few hours between the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, and the commencement of bombing from the air and sea. <br><br>Then he asked them to think about how the Americans were aggressively 'on message' immediately after the Israeli attack was launched, including Rice's assertion that they were the "birth pangs of a New Middle East". (By the way, the words 'New Middle East' are very frightening words in this part of the world, where Israel and Iraq are shining lights of democracy, and the puppet regimes controlling their captive populations are "allies in the War on Terra")<br><br>Finally, he said that Hizbullah was not a 'classic' army, that can be defeated by gradually taking territory away from it. It's a guerilla resistance movement, that retreats and then attacks and then disappears again. Its ranks are constantly replenished, because the more brutal the occupation, the more volunteers rush to join. The goal of the resistance is simply to keep attacking the occupier and maximizing his losses as much as possible, until he can no longer sustain the occupation.<br><br>This is what Sayed Hassan Nasrallah said in person, three nights ago, on the official al-Manar satellite tv station. I saw and heard him myself, and there is no question at all that Hizbullah captured the two soldiers. I tried to find a link for his speech on the al-Manar website, but the site appears to have been hacked.<br><br>As for the capture in Gaza by Hamas, that's a different story. In any case, Hamas is a very, very different organization from Hizbullah. Thanks for giving me some intriguing food for thought.<br><br>This Lebanese blogger saw the same speech I did, on Monday July 24; our summaries and comments aren't identical, but at least he corroborates the part about Nasrallah affirming the reasons why Hizbullah took the Israeli soldiers prisoner:<br><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>From the entry for Tuesday, July 25, 2006, The Angry Arab blog:</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://angryarab.blogspot.com/">angryarab.blogspot.com/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>Hasan Nasrallah's new TV message. This was a new TV message by Hasan Nasrallah released through Al-Manar TV to all Arab media. It was carried by all of them, except the sleaze-and-dance channels funded by House of Saud--who on the side also fund Bin Ladenites, chief among them is the Mufti of Saud Arabia. <br><br>...<br><br>He was sitting on a chair, with the flags of Lebanon and Hizbullah behind him. He spoke from an outline of a talk--he does not read texts of speeches. His main point was to respond to the charges that Hizbullah erred by capturing the occupation soldiers. To that he said: that there is evidence that Israeli troops have been conducting maneuvers and exercises for a large-scale attack on Lebanon to begin in September or October of this year. He did not cite sources for the information. He said that this on-going large-scale attack could not logically be a spontaneous response to the capture of the occupation soldiers. He said that the plan--if the timing was giving to Israel to execute in September or October--aims at destroying the command and leadership of the party, to cause paralysis in its rank. He said that the capture of the soldiers gave Hizbullah a tactical advantage--my words. That if the timing was left to Israel to determine, the Party would have been caught by surprise...<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i></i>
