The Siege on Lebanon Continues

For now, Lebanon has been under siege since July 15th when the Israeli war ships formulated a siege on its shore and destroyed most of its routes. Lebanon during the war was under seige and its people were held hostages to IDF aggression. The upper class lebanese with two nationalities succeeded in escaping through the UN sponsored evacuations while the rest were left to be killed. The whole Lebanon was bombed except Beirut's heartland (although East and West Beirut were bombed few times).

During the siege, Israeli plans kept dropping leaflets telling the Lebanese that it was Hassan Nasrallah who brought this on them, and then the leftlets would confirm that Lebanon is burning and will burn more. It is important to tell sometimes the boxes which carries those "leaflets of mercy" sometimes do not open and do almost the damage of a Katyosha when falling on the ground. Israel was not aware that Lebanon this time was united economically and socially against its aggression as people from all sects welcomed the 1.1 million refugees, who are mostly from the lower class. 1.1 million refugee means more than 25% of the Lebanese population, can you imagine 25% of your own nation living on the streets, schools, and religious locations? Two churches were bombed, the Red Cross was bombed (actually plenty of times the Red Cross was bombed live when carrying Korean and or BBC journalists).

Lebanon was held a hostage in this brutal siege, while only one route remained accessible to Syria for people seeking safety. Israel kept saying that they warned the people to flee while mistaking the infrastructure of Hezbollah for the Lebanese. Actually there is no infrastructure for a party organized in a para-military form. Israel knew that, but needed the excuse to bomb out Lebanon. For example, the people of Marwaheen were killed, and mostly children. After Israel bombed the village on the borders, destroyed all gas stations, attacked refugee buses, and many more, Israel issues a one hour warning for the people of Marwaheen to flee. The poor people of that village had no means, no routes, and no where to go, so they go to neighboring UNIFIL to seek assylum, but UNIFIL does not welcome them, and Israel bombs the refugees returning to their homes (picture of the martyrs carried by a kid link )

The United States administration argued that it wants to create peace while giving Israel all the time it needed to carry out its bombing and not only that, but gave it laser guided missiles and bunker busters. They argued that this way it avoided killing civilians, which is ironical, because next week of that event, the Qana massacre took place. Qana is probably the only massacre exposed out of the over 1000 Lebanese civilian deathtoll. Rice argued that what is happening now is the creating of a New Middle East. The question is on whose expense is it? The people always pay for it. The new Middle East has to fit 100% the United States's foreign policy.

The siege on Lebanon and as resistance to Israeli invasion was gaining more and more momentum, the current US forged Arab regimes appeared to be shakey. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia were having demonstrations, and the situation was escalating as the IDF, which appeared undefeatable, were losing on the ground. The reactionary regimes focused on donating humanitarian aid to Lebanon in order to save their own regimes from chaos. The United States forgot that the people of the Middle East still express solidarity to Lebanon and Palestine. As Egypt and Jordan refuted to go against the flow of their people by kicking the Israeli ambassadors, pressure was building more and more on them. They desperately needed a UN resolution to calm the offensive on Lebanon.

As Round 1 (as the people of Lebanon are calling it since they are expecting Israel to bomb more) is over, the Israeli siege remains under of course "Israel has the right to defend itself." Lebanon is still not allowed to bring forth weaponry to defend itself, and Israel bombed plenty of Lebanese army locations as well which made it already weaker as it is. The latest fiasco is as follows: Israel would not lift the siege from Lebanon unless UNIFIL forces are on Syrian borders as well, and Syria would close its borders with Lebanon in case UNIFIL are present on those areas.


The United States stopped Israel from bombing heart of Beirut in order not to weaken the Anti-Syrian government in majority, but allowed Israel to bomb the rest of Lebanon (check the locations bombed over here: link), not to forget the Oil spill when Israel bombed the Jiyyeh region and did not allow anyone to clean at least contain the damage. The Anti-Syrian Government decided to agree today that the Syrian borders will not have UNIFIL soldiers without the consent of the Syrians. Bush wants to drive Lebanon to a civil war by formulating a UN law to disarm Hezbollah. He forgets that Hezbollah was the party that kicked out Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 after its land has been occupied since 1978. He seems to forget that it was Hezbollah that built hospitals and schools for the people of the South. I would like to make it clear, I am not pro-Hezbollah, I am for a secular resistance against the IDF or all forms of bourgoeisie. Yet, when Lebanon was under invasion, Hezbollah again proved that they are the only force to incurr loses on IDF. In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, it took them 5 hours to make it to the Damascus - Beirut route (half way to Lebanon), now it them two weeks to occupy a single village. Bush has to be aware that the arms of Hezbollah can't be taken away except through national dialogue between the leaders (well I call it the business meetings of the elites on the expense of the Proletariat).

1187 Lebanese civilians have been killed in less than a month. One third of those killed are children. Anan himself said that this is the first war where children die more than combatants (special thanks to Israeli aggression). This link displays some horrifying numbers (link), excluding the fact that Israel used prohibited weaponry such as cluster bombs and phospohric bombs. Bush made sure the UN resolution gave Israel "the right to defend itself" even inside Lebanon, Israel already on 3 seperate occassions severely violated UN 1701 while the UN officials were crippled and only said: "Israel should not have done this"

Now Lebanon is a tiny spot trapped between racist bourgeoisie known as Zionist, and over there the engineer of the "Grapes of Wrath" Mr. Natanyaho is doing a come back against Olmert, so we wonder what is the differenc between each government when it is not secular and extremely Zionist. From the other side, el-Assad is capitalizing on Hezbollah's victory for his own bargaining chips, and the hope to bring forth Lebanon back to his dominion.

In the end, the bourgeoisie play their games, and divide the Proletariat according race, gender, religion nationality, and color. The United States, through its corporations in general, and media ones in specific dominate its people while keeps promoting the Nationalism under the banner of the American Dream (link) The people pay for the prices of their rulers. In the end, I do not see any solution for the problem except a very long one which would involve the unity of the Proletariat for all sects and backgrounds and get rid of their leaders. Tony cliff thought of that over here: (Link).

What the near future holds, time will tell, but till now not so good.

MFL

PS: Details of the war (minute by minute) can be seen over here Link

On Blogging: New Team Member Added To Renegade Eye

A new team member will be joining this blog MarxistFromLebanon. He is a secular Trotskyist from Lebanon. His being on the team, will sharpen the discussion here. Marxist from Lebanon supports the relief group in Lebanon called SAMIDOUN, a diverse group of all nationalities, and sexual orientations. He is joining Maryam Namazie, an Iranian feminist, secular leader and communist as a team member.

My blog is called Renegade Eye, because the good names were all taken. Renegade is a reference to Trotsky.

I think bloggers often write too much. What can you leave in comments, if everything is said.

The comments on a blog, when an issue is discussed with passion, have more importance than we realize sometime. The dialectic works, and people change or modify positions. RENEGADE EYE

Free Detainees from Jails of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan

The PUK security forces (Asayesh), launched a campaign against activists in Kurdistan. The PUK controls half of the autonomous zone in Iraq's north.

Following mass protests against poverty, miserable conditions and corruption, arrests occured at Sulaimaniyah, Kalaar, Kifri, Darbandikhaan, Chamchamaal, Rania, and other towns and villages. The Kurd forces, are still searching door to door, often arresting people at night, according to KurdishMedia.com.

Tahir Tofiq a journalist for Shaqam Weekly, was arrested in a protest at Derbendixan, while doing his job as a journalist. He is on a hunger strike at Kani-Gome Prison, protesting for freedom of speech. Despite attempts by the Lawyers’ Association of Kurdistan to secure his release, the PUK Asayish refused to release him.

Aryan Mahmood was killed in the protest at Kalaar. In addition 13 strikers in the Tasluja cement factory in Sulaimaniyah, were injured.

The PUK chose to release Saleh Ahmed Sharif, a killer and kidnapper of women, in a deal negotiated by tribal leaders, with the PUK. Such backwards and anti-women practises, into the existing justice system, will only pave the way for more killings and kidnappings.

The Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq, call upon all workers, socialist, and humanitarian organizations and individuals, to protest the oppressive campaign of the PUK against the people, and to demand the immediate release of all detainees from the prisons of the PUK. See: Left Worker-Communist Party of Iraq.
RENEGADE EYE

Lebanon as a test run for Iran

This reprinted from an intelligent, well written blog I discovered called the human province.


Sy Hersh has a new piece on Lebanon in The New Yorker. He says that this conflict had been planned by Israel and approved by the US for several months. The idea was that Israel's attacks on Hizbollah and Lebanon's infrastructure would serve as a trial run for a future American attack on Iran.


The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel?s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground. ...

According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah -- and shared it with Bush Administration officials -- well before the July 12th kidnappings. "It's not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into," he said, "but there was a strong feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it."

The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on, "The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against Iran's nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy."

Of course this attack has not gone as smoothly as the Israelis would have liked it to. The results have so far been unclear, with both sides claiming victory. This war seems to have been sold to the US by Israel, but so far, notes Richard Armitage it has been less than convincing and should serve as a warning against attacking Iran:


"The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits," a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. "Why oppose it? We'll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran."

A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House "has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah." He added, "It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we have someone else doing it." (As this article went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the situation on the ground).

According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush's first term -- and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah "may be the A team of terrorists" -- Israel's campaign in Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. "If the most dominant military force in the region -- the Israel Defense Forces -- can't pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million," Armitage said. "The only thing that the bombing has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis."

"World Trade Center" Oliver Stone's Apolitical Movie?

This is reprinted from World Socialist Web Site, the most widely read socialist website.

World Trade Center, directed by Oliver Stone, screenplay by Andrea Berloff

Five years after the fact, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, DC, remain largely uninvestigated. The most critical questions surrounding events that supposedly “changed everything” continue to go unanswered and even unaddressed.

Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, following in the wake of United 93 (directed by Paul Greenglass), does not deign to approach any of the troubling issues surrounding September 11. On the contrary, Stone’s work is artistically crude and politically dishonest.

The film follows two Port Authority policemen, John McLoughlin (played by Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña), who are ordered on the morning of September 11 to help with the evacuation of the first World Trade Center tower to be struck and end up buried in rubble themselves. For the greater portion of the film we see McLoughlin and Jimeno, in pain and speaking to one another, stuck in the tons of wreckage of the massive skyscrapers.

At one point in Stone’s film, President George W. Bush shows up on a television screen. “The resolve of our great nation is being tested, but make no mistake,” he asserts, “we will show the world we will pass the test.” New York City’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani makes a brief appearance. Horrified television viewers around the world watch the event.

Much of the film cuts between the two trapped men and their distraught wives and families in suburban New York and New Jersey. Donna McLoughlin (Maria Bello), the wife of the 21-year veteran of the police force, has four children, one of whom accuses her of indifference because the family sits at home and waits for news. Eventually, Donna heads into Manhattan to find out her husband’s fate.

Jimeno’s wife, the younger Allison (Maggie Gyllenhaal), is five months pregnant. With her family and in-laws, she waits anxiously across the river in New Jersey. Given false information that her husband has been rescued, Allison and other family members rush to lower Manhattan, only to be told that Jimeno remains trapped in the ruins.

An ex-marine from Connecticut, Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon), changes into his old uniform and unofficially reports for duty at Ground Zero. Patrolling the site at night, he makes contact with Jimeno and McLoughlin, who are eventually brought to the surface by emergency workers risking their own lives in the process.

The real McLoughlin and Jimeno survived the ordeal, and the screenplay, by Andrea Berloff, is based on their accounts of the experience.

Stone has never been a serious artist. His “good” films (Salvador, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK) were not very good, unsubtle and bombastic, and his bad films (The Doors, Natural Born Killers, Any Given Sunday, Alexander) have simply been awful.

About Any Given Sunday, six years ago, I wrote: “In any event, the final result is at once clichéd, impersonal and hysterical. Nearly everyone acts detestably throughout.” About Alexander, in 2005: “Alexander tells us little about its central figure or the sort of society he emerged from or envisioned. Its goings-on are rather silly. It’s not at all clear what Stone is getting at, other than suggesting that conquering the world is exhausting and psychologically damaging work. He wants us to admire youth and heroism, but a sensibility that finds it difficult to distinguish between the exploits of Jim Morrison of The Doors and Alexander of Macedon may be lacking some fundamental ingredient.”

Berloff’s screenplay for World Trade Center, although based on facts, is cliché-ridden and contrived, and the direction follows suit. Even the opening banter among the Port Authority cops feels false. Certain moments are objectively moving, and the performers do their best, but the film is emotionally manipulative and maudlin. “Is Daddy coming home?” asks Allison’s daughter at one point. “They did what they had to do,” we are sternly told at another. Although no expense or theatrics have been spared, the condition of McLoughlin and Jimeno is never genuinely communicated—because the film, at its core, is deeply evasive and untruthful and this finds expression at every dramatic turning point.

Stone and his colleagues assert that World Trade Center is “not a political film.” In a variety of interviews, the director has sounded this theme. “The beauty of my original premise was to take you inside the lives of these two men,” Stone told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I wanted to narrow it down to two men and feel their fear, their strength and their courage. I thought this was a fresh way to purge our systems of this tragedy.”

In comments to the New York Times, the filmmaker went farther: “It’s not about the World Trade Center, really. It’s about any man or woman faced with the end of their lives, and how they survive.”

The notion that this is merely a tribute to the courage and strength of individuals on a tragic day is absurd, and it’s doubtful that Stone believes it. If the work is simply about individual heroics, or how men and women face the end of their lives, why spend $63 million in recreating the rubble of the World Trade Center?

The filmmaker’s own view, which comes out from time to time, seems to be that September 11 was an extraordinary opportunity for national unity, which was hijacked by a crowd of neo-conservatives in the Bush administration: “All I can say is that we had the sympathy of the world on that day. The rest of the world was with us. We had a right to pursue those murderers. We should have closed the circle. We didn’t need more and more terror, Constitutional breakdowns and more pain.” Iraq, he argues, like numerous leading Democrats, is the “wrong war.”

In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Stone had a more “left” take on the events. On October 6, 2001, at a New York Film Festival forum, he denounced the “new world order” and asserted that “the revolt of September 11th was about ‘Fuck you! Fuck your order—’” He suggested that those in the Arab world who celebrated the downing of the World Trade Center were reacting like those who had responded joyfully to the French and Russian revolutions. Stone also apparently drew a link between the attacks and the hijacking of the 2000 elections by the Bush camp, which he described as a confirmation of the demise of democracy.

To ascribe any degree of political legitimacy to the heinous attacks of September 11, in which 2,700 innocent human beings horribly lost their lives, was wrong and disoriented. Stone’s transformation into a manufacturer of patriotic myths is not an improvement. He asserts, “Don’t pigeon-hole me; I change.” We feel that a lack of principles and any sense of political responsibility, however, are constants.

In any event, Stone, with whatever degree of consciousness, has made a highly political film. Granted, this takes a peculiar form. In World Trade Center, no effort has been made to provide the slightest historical or political context for the 9/11 attacks; on the contrary, Stone’s film is devoted to the principle of explaining nothing. The viewer, it is made clear, will know only what McLoughlin and Jimeno knew that day. Why is that an advantage? What is the point of art in that case? This was the premise of United 93, and it failed in that instance, too.

If sticking to the bare empirical facts, or claiming to do so, is a poor guideline for a historian or a journalist, it is nearly always fatal for an artist. Art exists to illuminate, to expand, to magnify. It lives or dies by the degree to which its imaginative and recreative powers are exercised, even in non-fiction or documentary—in those cases, the conscious intervention of the artist to arrange his or her material is perhaps all the more essential.

It is impossible to understand the smallest incidents of September 11 apart from their broader context. The film, of course, does not take this up, but the very unpreparedness of the city for such an attack led to the high death toll among firefighters in particular. The latter were unable to communicate with each other or the police. Firefighters in the World Trade Center’s north tower, for example, 121 of whom died, were never able to hear the order to evacuate because of faulty equipment—at a time when all the civilians who could possible have been reached were already out of the building.

Meanwhile, Rudolph Giuliani treated September 11 as one extended photo opportunity. As the WSWS has noted, the mayor “did little other than appear repeatedly before the television cameras.” At the national commission hearings in May 2004, Giuliani was heckled by a number of relatives of those killed in the attack. (In a new book, as noted by the New York Times August 6, commission heads Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton admit that they failed to “ask tough questions” of Giuliani out of fear of “public anger”—i.e., the right-wing media.)

The general social and socio-psychological situation is a fundamental fact for cinema; it has to saturate a given work. Stone’s film, however, portrays an American society without sharp contradictions. The better Hollywood films about World War II never painted such a false picture. Even the titles of some of the works, They Were Expendable, the ironic The Best Years of Our Lives, acknowledged difficulties and social discontent. In World Trade Center the myth of a nationally unified, harmonious America filters into the images and falsifies critical moments, including intimate ones.

Explicitly political elements are not missing either in this “non-political” film. A Sheboygan, Wisconsin, policeman, focused upon for some reason, calls the terrorists “bastards.” The images of the ex-marine, Karnes, in his uniform, determinedly searching the smoking ruins are particularly loaded. Having come upon the trapped men, in the company of another marine, he shouts down to them, “We are marines. We’re not leaving you. You are our mission.” Later in the film, Karnes looks straight ahead and menacingly avers, “They’re gonna need some good men out there to avenge this.”

Stone’s work is thoroughly conformist and encourages various forms of backwardness. One shot stands out in particular: one of Allison’s in-laws on her knees, tearfully praying. The camera lingers on the woman, in Stone’s inimitable style, which consists of hitting the spectator over the head until he or she cries “Uncle!” We are also treated twice to a vision of Jesus Christ, which apparently came to Jimeno in his obviously desperate circumstances.

Patriotism, militarism, religion, Bush and Giuliani: this is nothing for Stone to be proud of. The extreme right, however, thinks highly of World Trade Center. Reactionary columnist Cal Thomas termed the work “one of the greatest pro-American, pro-family, pro-faith, pro-male, flag-waving, God Bless America films you will ever see.” L. Brent Bozell III, president of the right-wing Media Research Center and founder of the Parents Television Council, described World Trade Center as “a masterpiece.” These comments strike one as a clutching at straws. It’s dubious, in fact, whether such an insincere film will have a significant impact on those who see it.

Parenthetically, the effort by Paramount on behalf of World Trade Center is a further repugnant instance of the Hollywood studios’ knuckling under to the ultra-right. The Los Angeles Times reports that Paramount “was so worried about Stone’s bomb-thrower reputation that the studio hired a media firm [Creative Response Concepts] that played a prominent role in various conservative causes, notably the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group that attacked Sen. John F. Kerry’s Vietnam record during the 2004 presidential campaign, to do outreach in the conservative community. Paramount also tried to avert a backlash in Washington by having screenings of the film and its trailer for members of Congress.”

Why has Stone made this film? As he says, he “changes,” and it may very well be that his own confused, disoriented views are drifting generally to the right. The atmosphere of intimidation that followed the September 11 attacks and which has never dissipated has clearly had an impact on an entire social layer, in Hollywood in particular. How many leading film figures have denounced the Bush administration for its criminal activities?

There is another issue, however, perhaps an even more troubling one, and not only associated with Stone’s evolution (although he may be particularly susceptible): the obsession with celebrity in the US, the desire to be in the limelight, the fear of isolation and disapproval. As we noted seven years ago, at the time of informer Elia Kazan’s honoring by the Academy Awards—“In America, after all, if you are not an immense success, a star, you are nothing, a human zero.”

Stone has been wandering in the wilderness for a dozen years or more. Recent films, Alexander in particular, have not been successful in the US. Directing World Trade Center did not fall into his lap. As he admits, he campaigned for the job. Clearly, he felt, here was a chance to get back in the industry’s good graces, to return to the fold. And, by all appearances, the strategy has worked.

The filmmaker made a revealing comment in an interview with the New York Times, whose reporter noted that Paul Haggis (Crash) is directing an adaptation of former intelligence analyst Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, which took the Bush administration to task for its failings. “Asked if that weren’t the kind of film he might once have tried to tackle, Stone first scoffs: ‘I couldn’t do it. I’d be burned alive.’ Then he adds: ‘This [World Trade Center] is not a political film. That’s the mantra they handed me.’ ”

How can anything worthwhile emerge from this type of cowardice and cynicism?,

JOIN THE THIRD CAMP IN OPPOSITION TO THE TWO POLES OF TERRORISM

War, or murder, rather, has once again rendered it an urgent necessity for the humanist and freedom loving people of the world to rally around the banner of a third camp - the camp of freedom, equality, and humanity. The two poles of terrorism have shed the blood of innocent people and destroyed their lives in Iraq, Afghanistan, New York, Beslan, Madrid and London… and today in Lebanon and Palestine.

The current savage attacks of the Israeli government on the people of Lebanon, carried out with the overt support of the United States and Britain, and accompanied by the consensual silence of many Western governments, has left hundreds of people dead, thousands injured, and hundreds of thousands displaced and/or homeless. On the other side of the conflict stands Hezbollah, or political Islam at large, which, directly backed by the Islamic regime in Iran, envisages the annihilation of the State of Israel through expanding its terrorizing of the innocent citizens of Israel.

The Israeli government has officially declared that it is implementing the goals of the USA in the region. However, what we are in fact confronted with is a state that has never stopped, even for one single day, suppressing the most basic rights of the Palestinian people, and whose leaders must be brought to justice as war criminals, now posturing as the standard bearers of fighting terrorism! Today, the Israeli government is, indeed carrying out the exact same policies as the US is following in Iraq. And tomorrow it will be the Iranian people’s turn. So far the outcome of such policies has not only been the mass killing and total destruction of the lives of innocent people, but also the growth of Hamas and Hezbollah, and that of political Islam at large, the expansion of insecurity for the people of the region, increasing loss of rights for women, and increasing loss of civil rights for people in Palestine and Lebanon. Moreover, such circumstances have increasingly overshadowed the just demand for the establishment of an independent, secular Palestinian State on an equal footing with all other internationally recognized states. And, finally, such circumstances have paved the way for Hezbollah to let out increasingly louder howls in the streets of the West, to raise the posters of such murderers as Khomeini, Moqtada al-Sadr, and Hasan Nasrollah, and even to verbally assault “unveiled” women at rallies and demonstrations in the heart of Europe.

Civilized humanity must stand up and free the world from the claws of these two murderous camps of terror. The banner of the Third Camp must be raised and fly at full mast everywhere. The world is in urgent need of such a camp and its humane, radical policies against the other two. The Third Camp is the camp of hundreds of millions of people with a thirst for freedom and justice all over the globe who have no common interests with either of the other two camps of reaction and terror.

Join us, and take this initiative across the world.

We, the undersigned, demand the following:

 immediate cessation of war against the innocent people in Lebanon, Palestine, and Israel;
 conviction of the Israeli government as a war criminal;
 establishment and international recognition of an independent, equal Palestinian State;
 payment of compensation to the people of Lebanon and Palestine;
 condemnation of the governments of United States, Britain, and other state supporters of the State of Israel in the current war against innocent people;
 condemnation of the terrorist policies of Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and political Islam in its entirety.

We call on all progressive organizations, personalities, and individuals defending freedom and equality, human rights, secularism, women’s rights, and so on, to support the above-mentioned demands, and to join The Third Camp in order to oppose the other two, and to help bring about freedom and welfare for the people throughout the world.

Asqar Karimi

To sign on, go to www.thirdcamp.com.

Asqar Karimi/Maryam Namazie

Dinner Party Game 3

My first dinner party post, brought me more and varied readers, than anything I did before. The original rules were, you could invite any four people, living or dead, from any time in history. In the second game, the rule was added not to repeat yourself.

Dinner Party Three Rules

1) Again four people.
2) Only Bloggers.

This game gives you a chance to plug blogs, that may not be noticed by others.

I'll start:

1) Histologion Taros from Greece, is a
great left journalist. He doesn't visit other blogs often.

2) KiskeyAcity Just look at her smile.

3) Unrepentant Marxist I'd like to
pick his brain. Our politics are close yet far.

4) Une Femme Libérée My first blog
friend.

Some predictions: sonia-belle will be popular, and invite leftists as MikeB. celticfire will not invite any Maoists. the beetroot will invite Redwine.




RENEGADE EYE