Adonis Diaries

Israeli proposal to flatten Beirut in 2016: Done this August 4, 2020

At 6 pm, two conflagrations shook Beirut and demolished all of the port installations, neighboring streets 2 miles away, all buildings…

Half of public institutions located in the area, the central Electricity building, the Foreign minister., the hospitals around, about 5 of them., the sturdy wheat silos crumbled., newspaper dailies (Al Nahar), all the newly expensive and luxury high rises on this sea front..

So far, over 170 deaths and increasing and more than 6,000 injured and patients dispatched outside of Beirut for overflowing and for the poisonous environment due to the burning of 2, 750 tons of nitrate ammonium and other kinds of chemicals stored in the port hangard #12.

The latest news are that these highly flammable and detonating chemicals were stacked in the port since 2014 after requisitioning a Turkish ship that was transferring these chemicals from Georgia and was meant to stop in Beirut port and be discharged.

Why Beirut instead of Mozambique as the manifest declared?

Mind you that it was the US that built this nitrate of ammonium plant in Georgia.

Mind you that Hillary Clinton admitted that the US was highly involved in creating ISIS (Daesh) to occupy Mosul in Iraq. And all these Syrian insurgent factions since 2011 needed plenty of explosives.

A tsunami-kind of conflagration, red colored (color of depleted uranium/miniature atomic bomb detonation), that mushroomed in the sky like a small atomic bomb and advanced instantaneously inland and toward the sea at the speed of 750 m a second.

The hole that this conflagration left was 65 m deep. And generated a 4.3 earthquake scale.

A wide area of total devastation that remind people of picture of Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki…

People vacating Beirut to higher and far regions in order Not to be affected by the dangerous chemical inhalation.

How Israel would have reacted if the port of Haifa experienced the same devastation? I bet more than half the injured Israelis would have died for lack of individual zeal to come to the rescue.

In Lebanon, minutes after the conflagration people were busy transferring the injured to the hospitals. 5 of the hospitals close to the seafront were totally devastated and the injured had to be transferred and hundreds were welcomed in Damascus.

Israel refuse to admit that it attacked the port with depleted uranium missiles, though Israel knew very well of these stored chemicals: Netanyahu mentioned two years ago that hangard #12 contained Hezbollah missiles, in preparation for this attack

Trump declared that Beirut was attacked, but was not precise. (Just the message that he doesn’t give a damn of Beirut and the Lebanese pseudo-citizens)

So far, most countries are proposing “humanitarian” and clinical aids to Lebanon and movable hospitals.

The question is: And what afterward?

The government resigned because more than 7 ministers sided with their sectarian militia leaders.

As usual, Lebanon is bound Not to have a working government.

What kinds of help and aid to this totally bankrupt pseudo State that treated the Lebanese as pseudo-citizens since “independence” in 1943?

Currently, the Lebanese high security command ordered the army to take full control of Beirut for 2 weeks.

I have seen a video of 10 bodies flying in the air after the second conflagration: they were the first fire fighters who arrived to the scene.

And this clean-handed government could Not confront the militia/mafia clan and had to resign.

Amitai Etzioni, supposedly a prominent American professor, and who teaches at renowned universities, says Israel may have no choice but to destroy Lebanon — again and flatten Beirut

Ben Norton Friday, Feb 19, 2016

A prominent American scholar who teaches international relations at George Washington University has publicly proposed that Israel “flatten Beirut” — a city with around 1 million people — in order to destroy the missiles of Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah.

Professor Amitai Etzioni — who has taught at a variety of prestigious U.S. universities, including Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley, and who served as a senior advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration — made this proposal in an op-ed in Haaretz, the leading English-language Israeli newspaper, known as “The New York Times of Israel.” Haaretz represents the liberal wing of Israel’s increasingly far-right politics.

Etzioni’s op-ed was first published on Feb. 15 with the headline “Can Israel Obliterate Hezbollah’s Growing Missile Threat Without Massive Civilian Casualties?” (the answer he suggests in response to this question is “likely no”).

Topics: News, Politics News

“Should Israel Flatten Beirut to Destroy Hezbollah’s Missiles?” was the next, much more blunt title, chosen sometime on or before Feb. 16.

As of Feb. 18, the headline is “Should Israel Consider Using Devastating Weapons Against Hezbollah Missiles?”

Etzioni served in the Haganah — the terrorist army that formed Israel after violently expelling three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population — from 1946 to 1948, and then served in the Israeli military from 1948 to 1950. He mentions his military service in both the article and his bio.

(If a Palestinian or any “Arab” was discovered to have joined any military group, would he be teaching in the USA?)

In the piece, Etzioni cites an anonymous Israeli official who estimates that Hezbollah has 100,000 missiles in Lebanon.

In January, the U.S. government put that figure at 80,000 rockets. The anonymous official also says the Israeli government considers these weapons to be its second greatest security threat — after Iran.

Etzioni furthermore cites Israel’s chief of staff, who claims that most of Hezbollah’s missiles are in private homes. Whether this allegation is true is questionable. Israel frequently accuses militant groups of hiding weapons in civilian areas in order to justify its attacks.

On numerous occasions, it has been proven that there were no weapons in the civilian areas Israel bombed in Gaza. But that was beside the point for Israel.

Assuming it is true, the American scholar argues, if Israeli soldiers were to try to take the missiles out of these homes one at a time, it “would very likely result in many Israeli casualties.”

In order to avoid Israeli casualties, Etzioni writes: “I asked two American military officers what other options Israel has. They both pointed to Fuel-Air Explosives (FAE).

These are bombs that disperse an aerosol cloud of fuel which is ignited by a detonator, producing massive explosions.

The resulting rapidly expanding wave flattens all buildings within a considerable range.”

“Such weapons obviously would be used only after the population was given a chance to evacuate the area. Still, as we saw in Gaza, there are going to be civilian casualties,” Etzioni adds.

“The time to raise this issue is long before Israel may be forced to use FAEs.” (As people in Gaza were given 5 minutes to vacate an area and succumb to the shrapnel?)

Etzioni concludes his piece implying Israel has no other option but to bomb the city of Beirut. “In this way, one hopes, that there be a greater understanding, if not outright acceptance, of the use of these powerful weapons, given that nothing else will do,” he writes. (How about desist from the preemptive wars strategies and abide by UN resolutions?)

Lebanese journalists and activists have expressed outrage at the article.

Kareem Chehayeb, a Lebanese journalist and founder and editor of the website Beirut Syndrome, said in response to the piece “Should Israel kill me, my family, and over a million other people to destroy Hezbollah’s missiles? How about that for a headline?”

Chehayeb told Salon Etzioni’s argument is “absolutely absurd” and reeks of hypocrisy. “If some writer said the only way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just to bomb Israel,” he said, “people would go up in arms about it.”

He called it “ludicrous” that a prominent American professor “can just calmly say the solution is to flatten this entire city of 1 million people.”

“I’m just speechless. It sounds ISIS-like, just eradicating an entire community of people,” Chehayeb added.

Salon called Etzioni’s office at George Washington University’s Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies several times with a request for comment, but no one answered.

After this article was published, Etzioni emailed Salon a statement. “I agree with you that any suggestion to bomb or ‘flatten’ Beirut (or any other city) would be beyond horrible and outrageous,” he said. He said Haaretz had changed and then later corrected his headline.

“Ethics aside — Beirut is not where the missiles are housed,” Etzioni added. “The issue though stands how is a nation to respond if another nation or non-state actor rains thousands of missiles on its civilian population?”

Salon also reached out to the university. Jason Shevrin, a spokesperson, told Salon “the George Washington University is committed to academic freedom and encourages efforts to foster an environment welcoming to many different viewpoints. Dr. Etzioni is a faculty member who is expressing his personal views.” The spokesperson did not comment any further.

Etzioni is by no means an unknown scholar. He notes on his George Washington University faculty page that, in 2001, he was among the 100 most-cited American intellectuals. He has also served as the president of the American Sociological Association.

Israel has already flattened Beirut before

Writer Belén Fernández, an author and contributing editor at Jacobin magazine, published a piece in TeleSur responding to Etzioni op-ed, titled “No, Israel Should Not Flatten Beirut.”

Fernández points out “that Israel has already flattened large sections of Lebanon, in Beirut and beyond.”

She recalls visiting a young man in a south Lebanon village near the Israeli border who “described the pain in 2006 of encountering detached heads and other body parts belonging to former neighbors, blasted apart by bombs or crushed in collapsed homes.”

Note 1: Hezbollah General Secretary, Hassan Nasrallah, replied: All we need is to launch a couple of missiles on the Ammonium plant in Haifa. The conflagration is as powerful as an atomic bomb.

Israel executed this idea and stored an amount of ammonium nitrate in the port of Beirut and let it be forgotten.

Apparently most of these tons of nitrate of ammonium were sold, transferred and whisked away to Syrian insurgent factions. Possibly, from the extent of the conflagration, only about 300 tons remained in the port

Note 2: Who still believes that this calamity is a simple matter of laziness of every responsible during the last 6 years?

Who is still unable to believe that Israel is Not able to prepare for a long-term catastrophe and that hangar #12 was being prepared and targeted for a timely decision to flatten Beirut?

The next article will try to answer the why and how Israel/US wanted Beirut flattened.