Liverpool FC Forum

by **puroresu** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 11:48 am

By Ted Rall

08/18/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Hours after a ceasefire halted a five-week war between Israel and Iranian-backed Islamic militias in Lebanon, reported the New York Times, "hundreds of Hezbollah members spread over dozens of villages across southern Lebanon began cleaning, organizing and surveying damage. Men on bulldozers were busy cutting lanes through giant piles of rubble. Roads blocked with the remnants of buildings are now, just a day after a ceasefire began, fully passable." Who cares if Hezbollah is a State Department-designated terrorist organization? Unlike our worthless government, it gets things done!

The citizens of New Orleans desperately need Hezbollah's can-do terrorist spirit. Outside the French Quarter tourist zone, writes Jed Horne in The New Republic, what was until 2005 our nation's most charming city and cultural center remains "a disaster zone, an area five times the size of Manhattan."

One year after the routine matter of a Gulf Coast hurricane, half the city's population remains refugees--screwed over by a government that hasn't lifted a finger to pretend that it cares. Horne describes "Vast swaths of a city emptied as if by a neutron bomb, with only the fecal brown floodline up under the eaves to suggest what went so very wrong--that, and the ghostly dried brine still coating the dead lawns and landscaping."

New Orleans is a dead city. Incredibly, the politicians don't give a damn. "Now most of the water has gone," the British Daily Mirror newspaper informed readers on the storm's anniversary, "but little else has changed. Driving through the streets, it is shocking to see how much devastation remains and how little rebuilding has taken place."

Americans watched incredulously as their government responded to the desperate pleas of sick and starving Katrina victims by herding them into internment camps, and then issued them $2000 debit cards--an insulting pittance--to compensate them for losing everything they owned. Anyone could see that the federal government had failed its obligation to protect its citizens. Not only had officials refused to shore up crumbling levies, they didn't even try to send in relief after the long-predicted flood. The United States of America, however, is led by men who see things very differently from, well, everyone else. They actually think that Hurricane Katrina victims received too much.

"If you put $2,000 in someone's hands, that's a lot of money," Federal Emergency Management Agency Director David Paulison explained during a July 23 announcement. Due to Bush Administration budget cuts, the victims of future disasters will have to make do with a mere $500.

You know the U.S. has gone Third World when bombed-out Lebanese get a better deal than we do. Remember how hurricane victims couldn't get through to FEMA's perpetually busy hotline? Promising that Hezbollah personnel "in the towns and villages will turn to those whose homes are badly damaged and help rebuild them," Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah ordered Hezbollah militants to canvass damaged neighborhoods and begin repairs at once. Hezbollah gives out "decent and suitable furniture" and a year's free rent to all Lebanese who lost their homes. Unlike the racist government officials who managed the botched response along the Gulf Coast last year, where whites were rescued while blacks were shot, the Shiite terrorist group's offer also applies to Sunnis, Christians and even Jews.

"Hezbollah's reputation as an efficient grass-roots social service network," reported the Times, "was in evidence everywhere. Young men with walkie-talkies and clipboards were in the battered Shiite neighborhoods on the southern edge of Bint Jbail, taking notes on the extent of the damage. Hezbollah men also traveled door to door checking on residents and asking them what help they needed." With terrorists like that, who needs FEMA?

A year after Katrina, officials are still pulling bodies out of the rubble. Dozens of corpses remain unidentified; the president, governor and mayor continue to pass the blame for their willful inaction. George W. Bush still refuses to accept responsibility. Just one day after the Lebanese ceasefire, however, Sheikh Nasrallah had already delivered a thorough accounting of the damage caused by Israel's bombing campaign and launched a comprehensive rebuilding program. "So far," said the Hezbollah leader, "the initial count available to us on completely demolished houses exceeds 15,000 residential units. We cannot of course wait for the government and its heavy vehicles and machinery because they could be a while."

As often occurs during emergencies in the U.S., price gouging for housing, water, gasoline and other essentials was rampant during and after Katrina. Bush did nothing. Nasrallah, by contrast, warned businesses not to exploit the situation: "No one should raise prices due to a surge in demand."

Never argue with a man who buys AK-47s by the boxcar.

"Hezbollah's strength," says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a professor at the Lebanese American University in Beirut and an expert on the organization, in large part derives from "the gross vacuum left by the state."

Sound familiar? It does to the people of Ladysmith, Wisconsin. The rural town, destroyed by a tornado in 2002, has been abandoned by the government to whom its people paid taxes all their lives.

Maybe we can commission Hezbollah to rebuild the World Trade Center.

by **puroresu** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 12:04 pm

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanese turned out by the hundreds yesterday to sign up for aid from Hezbollah, which is offering money for rent, reconstruction and even new furniture in a campaign likely to win new public support.

The leader of the Shiite Muslim group, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, went on television this week shortly after the cease-fire with Israel took hold to promise to help rebuild Lebanon.

Nasrallah did not say where the money would come from, but Iran historically has been the militant group’s primary source of finance and weapons. The Iranians were widely thought to have opened their treasury for the rebuilding program.

Hezbollah has a history of using charitable work and social welfare programs financed by Iran to win support from Lebanon’s Shiite community.

At the White House, press secretary Tony Snow said he hopes Hezbollah decides to be peaceful and disarms, but that if it doesn’t, then others will have to step up and disarm the guerrillas.

"What Hezbollah is going to try to say is, ‘OK, well, we’ve stopped being terrorists now. We’re going to be humanitarians,’ " Snow said. "It’s important for everybody to be humanitarians. It’s also important for Hezbollah to stop acting as a terrorist organization, taking orders not from the Lebanese people but from people in Tehran, and to step up and take a political path."

Tens of thousands of people have returned to their shattered villages in eastern and southern Lebanon as well as to Beirut’s southern suburbs to find their homes either damaged or destroyed in the month of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah.

Nasrallah said 15,000 housing units were hit during the war.

At one makeshift registration center set up at the Haret Hreik Public High School yesterday, hundreds of people went from room to room, telling Hezbollah agents wielding pens and notebooks about damage to their homes from Israeli bombing. The officials promised to help them rebuild.

Salim Kenaan went into one room and looked at signs on the wall. The one on the left read "damaged" while one on the right read "destroyed." He gave his name, address and telephone number to the man sitting under the sign on the right.

"We will contact you soon," the Hezbollah member told Kenaan.

"My house was destroyed. After I heard Sheik Nasrallah’s speech, I started looking for an apartment," Kenaan said.

In Tyre, Hezbollah’s commander in south Lebanon, Nabil Kaouk, said the group’s goal is to "bring south Lebanon back to its real life and to rebuild it better than it was before the war."

The cleric stood in front of a demolished building that used to house his office.

He said Hezbollah thinks it will take a year for people to rebuild their homes. In the meantime, he said, the organization would pay rent for the homeless. Hezbollah would hand out the aid itself and not funnel it through the government, Kaouk said.

The Hezbollah official in charge of the center in Haret Hreik said he does not have an exact number of how many people have registered for help. The man, who asked that his name not be used for security reasons, said about 190 buildings were destroyed and about 90 heavily damaged in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

He said people whose homes were destroyed will get money for one year’s rent as well as money for new furniture.

Those whose homes were damaged will be paid to do repairs or Hezbollah will send workers to do the job, he said.

Hundreds of workers were in the streets of the southern suburbs yesterday, clearing rubble. Some areas were closed by Hezbollah for fear of theft; residents were allowed to enter after getting special passes.

Ahmed al-Mileeji, a 67-yearold Palestinian who has lived in Haret Hreik since 1979, sought compensation for his wrecked apartment.

"They will give me money to pay rent and to buy furniture. I will also get my flat back after one year," he said.

The Hezbollah official at the high school said all destroyed buildings will be reconstructed as they once were.

"We will use the same maps," he said. "We will give their flats back, but they will be new flats."

by **metalhead** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 1:59 pm

True on the second article, Nasrallah did promise to re-build Lebanon and offer money to any family who needed it to buy medicine, food and furniture.

and the US calles them terrorists :no

by **anfieldadorer** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 3:46 pm

i know this is general chat, but please no more politics, especially when it comes to the similar issue

by **metalhead** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 8:37 pm

anfieldadorer wrote:i know this is general chat, but please no more politics, especially when it comes to the similar issue

anfieldadorer, if politics makes you uncomfortable then please don't post in this thread!

Although this thread should have been posted in the old thread.

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