Apartheid Israel Launches More Terrorist Attacks in Lebanon

In addition to their routine daily shootings, bombings and shellings of Palestinians, Reuters reported on Friday 9 December that the apartheid government of Israel waged a terrorist attack inside Lebanon's borders, bombing the car of Hizballah official Hussein Assaf. Another bombing, on 12 December, killed 4 more including prominant pro-Israel MP Gibran Tueni.

During a weekend in which Israeli headlines reported on the bombing and killing of 3 Palestinians at a house in Beit Lahiya, the shelling of the Abu Safiyeh and Abasan areas in and around Gaza, the battle plans to attack Iran, and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz's announcement of a military siege against Palestinians in Gaza (see also here), the biggest news dealt with Israel's latest car bomb attacks in Lebanon.

These attacks, carried out in flagrant violation of international law (ignored by the pro-apartheid Israeli Supreme Court, which has yet to decide on the 'legality' of killing innocent Palestinians) dovetails perfectly with their ongoing support for extrajudicial assassination of Palestinians. The policy has the approval of many Zionist lumanies including Mofaz, Sharon, and Israel Occupation Forces Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Dan Halutz as well as former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter and former IDF chief Moshe Ya'alon, both of whom are being sued for their role in the 23 July 2002 Gaza Strip air strike that killed 14 Palestinians, including eight children.

The attacks on Assaf and Tueni share a great deal with their hit on Rafik Hariri. Despite clear evidence implicating the Israeli government in Hariri's killing, however, Israel, the US, and France have opportunistically used the assassination for their own political ends, demanding the accelerated implementation of UN Resolution #1559, an anti-Syrian wish list benefitting only Zionists, as well as an international investigation known as the Mehlis Commission.

Dispencing with the passe notion that the verdict comes after the trial, the flagrantly biased Mehlis commission has, from its inception, existed soley to fuel anti-Syrian sentiment at the UN and create the pretext for military aggression.

After a key commission witness against Syria recanted his testimony, the findings now hinge almost exclusively on the testimony of Zuheir al-Siddiq, a criminal convicted of fraud and embezzlement (much like Ahmad Chalabi) who has contradicted himself repeatedly during the proceedings.

The weakness of the case against Syria has not dissuaded the commission from racheting up their propaganda campaign against the Syrians. Yet the farcical evidence has provided an opening for Syria to demand the Mehlis commission substantiate findings it calls "littered with errors and false witnesses."

The propaganda function of the investigation becomes even more clear when we look into the background of Mr. Mehlis. According to xymphora, Mehlis served as "prosecutor of the case of the 1982 bombing of the La Belle Discotheque in West Berlin. "As Berlin public prosecutor," Nafeez Ahmed writes

Mehlis inadvertently but consistently covered up the dubious involvement of US, Israeli and German intelligence interests in the 1986 terrorist attack; actively built a selective politically-motivated case against suspects without objective material proof; while ignoring and protecting a group of suspects with documented connections to western secret services. This background fundamentally challenges the credibility of his investigation of the Hariri assassination.

To concoct a case against Libya, Mehlis relied on "alleged National Security Agency intercepts of coded exchanges between Tripoli and the East Berlin Libyan Peoples Bureau," later revealed by a former Israeli intelligence colonel to be fakes. Ahmed continues: "German public television’s Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) broadcast on 25th August 1998 reported that several leading suspects in the Berlin disco bombing were being protected from prosecution by western intelligence services."

As in the Hariri killing, Mehlis ignored incriminating evidence pointing to those protected by the West, choosing instead to partake in a Western propaganda campaign using cooked evidence and crooked witnesses to implicate the third party they wanted to see implicated. In the 1980s, it was Libya; today it's Syria.

While the killings of Assaf and Tueni share many similarities with Israel's assassination of Hariri, they share as much with the January 2002 assassination of Lebanese Phalangist militia leader and government minister Elie Hobeika in Beirut.

According to Robert Fisk, Hobeika's killing "occurred less than two days after he agreed to give evidence against Mr Sharon." Sharon was the Israeli defense minister who invaded and occupied Beirut in 1982, in direct contravention of a signed agreement with the United States. Hobeika's testimony implicated Sharon "for the murder of up to 1,700 Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in September 1982."

Largely because Hobeika was assassinated before testifying, the case against Sharon for the massacre collapsed. Hobeika's killing hardly exonerates Sharon. But, like any mafia hit, when the witnesses get axed, so does the case.

Racist Zionist violence against Arab and Muslim people - targeted killings, terrorist car bombings, special ops, and war scheming - all fall within apartheid Israel's broader agenda of land theft and ethnic cleansing.

Dozens of car bombs have exploded in Lebanon over the last few years. After each one, Western nations - France, Israel, and the US - accused Syria without any evidence. Yet in every case, the real beneficiaries of the crime were the accusers themselves.

As the truth unfolds, Savage Justice will continue to unmask the lies and the propaganda behind this well-oiled campaign of decit and deception whose intended result is to deepen the energy war and expand it into Syria, a country posing no threat to either the US or apartheid Israel.