Adonis Diaries

Posts Tagged ‘Lebanese Armed Forces

After Gaza: Lebanese army needs support against obscurantist terrorists

The UK has been supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces to prevent the overspill of the Syrian Civil War into Lebanon. (And It failed to condemn Israel preemptive war on Gaza)

This is from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office:
“Practical UK support for Lebanon’s stability has increased tenfold over the last two years.

In 2013, the UK government approved £12.2 million to fund the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to extend the authority of the Lebanese state into contested border areas. (while approving 600 million to Israel?)

This includes a $16 million ‘train and equip’ programme to strengthen the Land Border Regiments of the LAF.

These Regiments monitor 150km of Lebanon’s border with Syria.

12 border watchtowers are being constructed along the border with Syria with UK support, and we have delivered 164 Land Rovers, 1,500 sets of body armour, a secure radio communication network, border watchtowers, and HESCO bastion ballistic protection for LAF positions along the border.

Over 3500 troops have been trained with UK support, and in 2013, 44 LAF personnel undertook training in the UK.

Our programs are responding to the needs set out by the LAF in their 5-year Capability Development Plan.
Lebanon is a priority country for the UK’s largest ever humanitarian effort in response to the Syria conflict.

UK humanitarian and development support to Lebanon has reached £139 million since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, including in vulnerable areas around Arsal.”
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/fco-minister-condemns-attack-in-arsal-lebanon

Mr Ellwood condemns attacks, sends his condolences to the families of those…
WWW.GOV.UK
Note: The latest round in Ersal is moot in its outcome: 40 Lebanese soldiers are still held with Daesh forces

In a combat situation: Ethical Code of Conduct priorities

Joanna Choukeir Hojeily posted on FB this August 4, 2014

Yesterday, I asked my father, a retired Major General in the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), this question:

“In a combat situation, if your commanders are faced with these three factors, how would you train them to prioritise and take action:
1. Achieving a military objective;
2. Sparing soldiers’ lives;
3. Sparing enemy civilians’ lives.”

He replied: “According to the LAF Ethical Code of Conduct, the three factors are of equal priority.

We need to achieve a military objective while sparing as many soldiers’ and civilians’ lives.

The military objective is very important, however, if it risks the lives of soldiers and/or enemy civilians at a scale that exceeds the achievement of the military objective, we would need to consider a different military strategy that incurs less loss in lives. This ethical practice is common across many National armies in the World.”

And what is Israel army Ethical Code of Conduct?

IDF: “No justification for endangering lives of soldiers to avoid killing of civilians who live in vicinity of terrorists” ‪#‎GazaUnderAttack

http://www.stoptorture.org.il/files/no%20second%20thoughts_ENG_WEB.pdf

Now I quote from the Israeli Defencs Forces’ Ethical Code of Conduct:
The overriding principle guiding the commanders is achieving their military objectives. Next in priority is protecting soldiers’ lives, followed by avoiding injury to enemy civilians.”

#‎Israeli‬ officer’s briefing: “Let errors take their lives, not ours. This is the mindset. War.” ‪#‎Gazaunderattack‬ http://t.co/Wxv4qVxMNO

Questions human rights organisations are asking themselves http://www.stoptorture.org.il/files/no%20second%20thoughts_ENG_WEB.pdf

Questions human rights organisations are asking themselves http://www.stoptorture.org.il/files/no%20second%20thoughts_ENG_WEB.pdf

Therefore, it comes at no surprise that the UN and the World would be questioning the ethics of Israel’s military actions so urgently and frequently

To everyone their opinion: Pay close attention to “demonstrating opinions”

Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

To everyone their opinion.

The fact of the matter remains that tens of thousands formed an opinion today against the atrocities that Israel is committing in Gaza.

These were global, not Muslim opinions as I have witnessed today and as another commentator has stated below.

The fact of the matter remains that no matter how terrorist Hamas (or ISIS, if you want to dump them in the same category) is, this does not justify the killing of hundreds of civilian lives by the IDF.

We all followed how the Lebanese Armed Forces removed ISIS militants from town of Arsal (by the Syrian border) without sacrificing the life of any Arsal residents.

Yes battles are different, but today, many people saw no justification for the killing of innocent Gazans, and therefore they protested.

WWW.TIMESOFISRAEL.COM

Hanna Arendt:

Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away

Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt

For the new year, here are some prophetic excerpts from two essays of Hannah Arendt’s, collected in The Jewish Writings (2007).

Note her predictions of the Nakba (Palestinians killed and transferred from their homes and villages in 1948), of unending conflict, of Zionist dependence on the American Jewish community, of ultimate conflict with that American Jewish community, and the contribution of political Zionism to world anti-semitism.

Just what Howard Gutman said recently.

For which he was denounced by– Zionists.

Zionism Reconsidered, 1944:

Nationalism is bad enough when it trusts in nothing but the rude force of the nation. A nationalism that necessarily and admittedly depends upon the force of a foreign nation is certainly worse.

This is the threatened state of Jewish nationalism and of the proposed Jewish state, surrounded inevitably by Arab states and Arab people. Even a Jewish majority in Palestine–nay even a transfer of all Palestine’s Arabs, which is openly demanded by the revisionists–would not substantially change a situation in which Jews must either ask protection from an outside power against their neighbors or come to a working agreement with their neighbors…

[T]he Zionists, if they continue to ignore the Mediterranean people and watch out only for the big faraway powers, will appear only as their tools, the agents of foreign and hostile interests.

Jews who know their own history should be aware that such a state of affairs will inevitably lead to a new wave of Jew-hatred; the antisemitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of foreign big powers in that region but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences…

[T]he sole new piece of historical philosophy which the Zionists contributed out of their own new experiences [was] “A nation is a group of people…  held together by a common enemy” (Herzl)–an absurd doctrine…

To such [political] independence, it was believed, the Jewish nation could arrive under the protecting wings of any great power strong enough to shelter its growth…. the Zionists ended by making the Jewish national emancipation entirely dependent upon the material intersts of another nation.

The actual result was a return of the new movement to the traditional methods of shtadlonus [court Jews], which the Zionists once had so bitterly despised and violently denounced.

Now Zionists too knew no better place politically than the lobbies of the powerful, and no sounder basis for agreements than their good services as agents of foreign interests…

[O]nly folly could dictate a policy which trusts a distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbors. What then, one is prompted to ask, will be the future policy of Zionism with respect to big powers, and what program will Zionists have to offer for a solution of the Arab-Jewish conflict?…

If a Jewish commonwealth is obtained in the near future–with or without partition–it will be due to the political influence of American Jews….

But if the Jewish commonwealth is proclaimed against the will of the Arabs and without the support of the Mediterranean peoples, not only financial help but political support will be necessary for a long time to come.

And that may turn out to be very troublesome indeed for Jews in this country [the U.S.], who after all have no power to direct the political destinies of the Near East.

It may eventually be far more of a responsibility than today they imagine or tomorrow can make good.

To Save the Jewish Homeland, 1948 [on the occasion of war in Palestine]

And even if the Jews were to win the war, its end would find the unique possibilities and the unique achievements of Zionism in Palestine destroyed.

The land that would come into being would be something quite other than the dream of world Jewry, Zionist and non-Zionist.

The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded into ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities.

The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would center around military strategy….

And all this would be the fate of a nation that — no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries (the whole of Palestine and Transjordan is the insane Revisionist demand)–would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.

Under such circumstances… the Palestinian Jews would degenerate into one of those small warrior tribes about whose possibilities and importance history has amply informed us since the days of Sparta.

Their relations with world Jewry would become problematical, since their defense interests might clash at any moment with those of other countries where large number of Jews lived.

Palestine Jewry would eventually separate itself from the larger body of world Jewry and in its isolation develop into an entirely new people.

Thus it becomes plain that at this moment and under present circumstances a Jewish state can only be erected at the price of the Jewish homeland…

One grim addendum.

In the heyday of the special relationship between the US and Israel, American Jewry felt itself to be one with the Israeli people. We Are One! declared Melvin Urofsky’s book of 1978.

That unity is today being dissolved. The haredi-secular conflict in Israel that is getting so much attention here is one means of that dissolution.

And the aim, unconsciously, may be a desire by American Jews to distance themselves from Israeli Jews so that when the Arab Spring at last brings a democratic movement to Israel and Palestine, and bloody conflict ensues, and the Israeli gov’t is cast as the bad guys, American Jews are emotionally prepared to regard the bloodshed as inevitable and not their problem.

After writing, “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” Arendt report of the Eichmann trial in which she suggested that had not the Judenrat, the Jewish councils appointed by the Nazis in occupied Europe, collaborated with the Nazis in their round-up of Jews to be sent off to the death camps to the point of providing them with lists, collecting valuables, and policing Jews who were non-cooperative, the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis would have greatly reduced, she became a non-person in the Jewish world.

It was not until the past few years that she was resurrected to the degree that her name could even be mentioned in the Jewish press, albeit usually critically.

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.


adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

March 2023
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Blog Stats

  • 1,518,714 hits

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.adonisbouh@gmail.com

Join 764 other subscribers
%d bloggers like this: