Druze leader Walid Jumblatt opens the Parliamentary debate

Franklin Lamb
Shatila Camp, Beirut

hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who few in Lebanon deny live
in near unimaginable squalor

Months before his mysterious death on 11 November 2004, PLO founder and Chairman, Yassir Arafat arranged a secret telephone conference call with his shrinking cache of political allies, who remained in Lebanon following the 1982 catastrophes and the 1985-88 “camp wars”.

Reflecting the new political reality that beset his people following the August 1982 departure of Palestinian forces, which departure left the unprotected refugee camps to a predictable fate, Arafat’s colleagues assembled in the Parliamentary office of Speaker Nabih Berri who himself has had a checkered history with Arafat and the Palestinians in Lebanon. Their problems stem from a number of factors including PLO abuses in the Shia South and Berri’s Haraket Amal Movement ( Amal Movement) militia’s role in the above misnomered “camp wars.” They were not of course ‘wars’ but rather slaughters and attempted starvations of the Palestinian camps populations designed to weaken Arafat and prevent his return.

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Joel S. Hirschhorn

For some years a number of groups have mounted an anti-incumbency campaign aimed at ridding Congress of the huge majority that keep getting reelected despite miserable performance. This year’s midterm elections provide the ultimate test for all the anti-incumbency sentiment that has bubbled up over many years. This year more than all others there is a huge amount of public discontent with Congress which is solidly supported by the cowardly, partisan actions or inactions that explain why so many Americans are fed up with the two-party controlled political system. Rightfully, many, many Americans see the country on the wrong track.

An economy without any real energy for ordinary Americans, unemployment that is more like 20 percent rather than the official 10 percent figure, two enormously costly and useless wars and a regulatory system that has allowed corporations to decimate our natural environment and financial system. All these and much more justify voting out nearly all incumbents.

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by Stephen Lendman

First the good.

On June 22, the International Middle East Media Center reported that the UN Human Rights Council (that established the Goldstone Commission) approved "forming an international committee to probe the deadly Israeli" Flotilla attack, massacring and injuring dozens of nonviolent activists on board. Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak urged Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to shelve it, saying:

"We expressed our view that for the time being, as long as....new flotillas are in the preparation, it's probably better to leave (an investigation) on the shelf for a certain time" - in other words, postpone it long enough to forget, letting Israel's self-examination whitewash top officials' culpability, a vain hope given world outrage, mushrooming toward universally branding Israel a pariah rogue state.

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William C. Carlotti

The corporate media has us seeing the trees for the forest when reporting on the activities of the Zionist led Israeli government. The heavy focus, the furious debate, the reporting about singular events serves to remove the context in which the events take place.

In the United States, alternative sources are providing the testimony of the victims of the nighttime assault on the flotilla of vessels in international waters that were delivering humanitarian aid to the Palestinians trapped in the Israeli siege of the Gaza sector of Palestine. The corporate media, on the other hand, are largely reporting, commenting and detailing Zionist led Israel’s rationale for this latest slaughter of innocents.

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