I've been thinking about this for some time. Today I came across a fox news article that alleges that government officials from Iraq have confirmed annonymously that Hezbollah has been actively training the so called Shiite special groups loyal to Al-Sadr in Iraq. If this is indeed true, then we are engaged in a proxy war not just against Iran, but against militant Shiite ideology in the Middle East. We are also at war with militant Sunni ideology but have some Sunni allies. I don't think the same can be said of the Shiites. So essentially what we are seeing and have all but set the stage for with our disastrous invasion of Iraq is a 3 way war between the U.S. and our Sunni government allies vs the Sunni insurgency vs Iran and the Shiite Insurgency. We have a huge mess on our hands and there is no end in sight. Sorry to say.

BAGHDAD —  Hezbollah instructors trained Shiite militiamen at remote camps in southern Iraq until three months ago when they slipped across the border to Iran — presumably to continue instruction on Iranian soil, according to two Shiite lawmakers and a top army officer.

Fox News Story - Iraqi Officials: Hezbollah, Iran Training Shiites in Art of Terrorism

JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants fired three homemade rockets into southern Israel on Tuesday, threatening to unravel a cease-fire days after it began, and Israel responded by closing vital border crossings into Gaza.

Despite what it called a "gross violation" of the truce, Israel refrained from military action and said it would send an envoy soon to Egypt to work on the next stage of a broader cease-fire agreement: a prisoner swap that would bring home an Israeli soldier held by Hamas for more than two years.

The midafternoon barrage, which slightly wounded two people, capped a day of violence that presented the truce with its first serious test. Just before midnight, Palestinian militants fired a mortar shell into an empty area in southern Israel. And in a pre-dawn raid, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians, one of them an Islamic Jihad area commander, in the West Bank city of Nablus.

Islamic Jihad, a militant group backed by Syria and Iran, claimed responsibility for the rocket fire from Gaza. Although the West Bank is not included in the truce agreement, the group said the rockets were retaliation for the Nablus raid.

For the past several weeks, the Israeli government has been heavily engaged in indirect negotiations with its two arch enemies in contradiction to the policy of its greatest benefactor, the U.S., and its champion of champions, President George W. Bush.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah are on the U.S. State Department's list of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs).

The only Arab democracy in the world could not last even three years.

When the Iranian-trained terrorist group Hezbollah invaded Lebanon and used it as a staging ground to attack Israel, the world solemnly promised Israel and Lebanon that Hezbollah would be stopped. The United Nations Security Council voted to disarm Hezbollah and sent in tens of thousands of troops to Lebanon in order to convince Israel to give up its right of self defense under international law.

Israel accepted the word of the world. Boy was that a mistake. Israel knows better than to trust the United Nations or the world. But the Bush Administration forced it to do so.

The real victims: the Lebanese. This week, in a stunning coup d'etat, Hezbollah killed just enough Lebanese to take over the Government and ensure the end of democracy in Lebanon forever. And those tens of thousands of UN troops stood by blankly. I guess they were too busy playing in their bunks than fulfilling their UN mandate.

Presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) addressed a crowd estimated at 700 at the B'nai Torah Synagogue in Boca Raton, Florida today.  

According to the Washington Post blog The Trail:

BOCA RATON, Fla. -- Sen. Barack Obama was greeted warmly at the B'nai Torah synagogue here, although his so-called "Jewish problem" did flare up once.

Oliver Willis caught this the other day: rightwing whackjob Debbie Schlussel is once again inserting extra hatred in to the Presidential campaign, by attacking Barack Obama for meeting with Shiite religious leader Imam Hussien Al-Qazwini, the leader of the largest mosque in America.  

Obama met with Qazwini before his town hall last week in Warren, Michigan.  They chatted for a few minutes, and Qazwini gave Obama a copy of his new book.  Predictably, the wingers have gone crazy.  

It makes sense that Obama would meet with the Imam.  Qazwini came to the United States in 1992.  He was first in California, but eventually ended up in Dearborn Michigan, home of the largest population of Middle Eastern Arabs outside the Middle East.  The Arab-American population in Detroit—between a quarter and a half million—is diverse, but the largest group is Lebanese Shiite Muslims.  Beginning in the 1990's, the Shiite Lebanese were joined by Iraqi Shiites.  

Like these new immigrants, Qazwini is from Iraq.  His Grandfather was an Ayatollah in Karbala who Saddam arrested, and he died in prison.  The family fled Iraq, Hussein Al-Qazwini came to the US, and unlike most of the Arab-American community, was a strong advocate for overthrowing Saddam.  Eventually, however, even many of the Arab-Americans who supported the invasion of Iraq—always a small group--became disillusioned with the US occupation of Iraq and turned on Bush and the GOP.  

Which brings us to the fun part about the wingers going crazy over Obama's meeting with Qazwini.  How many of the wingers were going crazy in 2003 when Qazwini gave an opening prayer before Congress?  Who complained that Qazwini met with staffers of the Bush administration's National Security Council to talk about the overthrow of Saddam?  Where were the complaints about the four or five invitations to visit Bush at the White House extended to Qazwini?  Did the wingers flip out when Qazwini participated in the roll-out of Bush's Faith Based Initiative, an event that took place at the White House?

And what about those events Bush attended in Dearborn, the ones with these great photos found by Oliver:

Most of the wingers are just hypocrites, or incapable of using Google as a way to avoid embarrassing themselves.  They're just pushing this garbage because they're authoritarian Republicans.  If it was McCain meeting with Qazwini, they probably wouldn't utter a peep.  

But Schlussel is another story.  That woman truly is obsessed with all things Muslim.  She's not only obsessed with the Obama was once a Muslim, so he's always a Muslim insanity, she doesn't want any politician to have anything to do with any Muslim or Arab leader (and for her "Arab" and "Muslim" are often used as synonyms).  She's already succeeded in getting the McCain campaign to buckle under from her pressure to distance themselves from an Arab-American in Michigan who's raised money for Bush and plenty of other politicians, both Democratic and Republican.  

The McCain campaign has shown that they will disrespect Arabs and Muslims rather than say no to haters like Schlussel, the bigots in the wingnuttosphere, and the nativists who make up a sizable chunk of the GOP base.  So the question is, will McCain do as almost every other major politician does, and meet with Imam Qazwini?  Or will he show that it's the same old Republican party, the one that will offer lip service about tolerance but which in the end refuses to denounce bigotry and hatred?  

The warring parties in Lebanon agreed to a deal brokered by Arab diplomats, and incoming flights to Beirut's International airport have resumed ending a week of bloody, political crisis.

As I was sipping my Messiah Bold Ale, the official beer of drunks for Hizballah, when I came across David Brooks latest article in the esteemed NYT about Obama and Hizballah.

In typical snide Brooks fashion, he lashes out at Obama for his policy while providing no history. No solution other than the failed status quo.

You see, in NYT-land, wearing a suit, talking about 'democracy' and 'human rights' in front of a camera or in print are all that matter. That is why he hates Chomskyland.

I will explain below, but there are graphic images.

Today’s New York Times features a column by David Brooks wherein Brooks claims that Obama’s statements about the current violence in Lebanon, "has the whiff of what President Bush described yesterday as appeasement."  The statement which Brooks feels has that whiff is:

It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.

Leaving aside the question as to whether or not that would actually appease Hezbollah in some way (I would contend that Hezbollah is plenty enthusiastic about corrupt patronage systems and unfair distribution of goods and services, merely wishing that they be in charge of the corruption and unfair distribution), let’s focus for a moment on what is actually happening in Lebanon, and what Obama is saying should be done about it by the United States.

We have seen Presiden't Bush's despicable smear calling Obama an appeaser because of his desire to talk with Iran.

Although commentators from both the left and right are already calling Bush out on his hypocricy because of his policy of talking to Syria and North Korea (for example, see the video of both Pat Buchanan and Harold Ford talking about this here: <iframe height="339" width="425" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/24647139#24647139" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>,

no one is paying attention to the fact that if Obama was President in 2003, Hezbollah would never have been able to get the weapons it used to bludgeon Israel in the 2005 war.

Without Bush's invasion of Iraq, this weapons supply route is just not possible:

Two years ago, Hezbollah directly challenged the sovereignty of Lebanon by attacking Israel from Lebanon.  They fired rockets at Israeli civiilian populations and then used the cover of fire to cross into Israel attacking and kidnapping Israeli soldiers.   They did this without provocation and without known reason.  Hezbollah never ceased firing at civilian populations throughout the entire conflict.    International pressure demanded Israel end the war without Hezbollah disarming; I believed then that this was a mistake  and I believe that events this week have shown my analysis to be correct.

Like many groups in the Middle East, Hezbollah combines political participation with arms.  Allowing an extrajudicial army within your country is never a good idea but to allow opposition parties to have their own army... that is suicide.

Domestically, we lament the death of political discourse and lose our bearings over sound bites.  It could be worse.  Instead of going to war over a lie, we could go to war over a phone system.

A private telephone network built by the Shiite Hezbollah organisation is at the centre of a political storm that has brought Lebanon perilously close to a new civil war.

I'm not making this up.  I'm not that creative.  Remember that Israeli assault on Lebanon a couple years ago?  You know, the one that Israel basically lost.  You know why they lost?  You're not going to believe this...

From Jake Tapper:

The campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., removed a man from his Michigan Finance Committee today.

It started after conservative writer Debbie Schussel called Michigan businessman Ali Jawad not only a supporter of Hezbollah -- a group the US State Department labels a "terrorist organization" -- but also claimed he was a "key agent of the terrorist group in the Detroit area."

After Schussel started asking questions the McCain campaign removed him from the finance committee for a May fundraiser.

"Apparently he is a well known member of the Arab-American community in Dearborn," a McCain staffer tells ABC News. "He is also a known Republican donor and former Bush finance committee member. When these rumors surfaced he notified the campaign and we removed him from the finance committee. The guy never raised a dime for us and he isn’t even a contributor."

Tapper directed people to Schussel's site—if you want to look for yourself you can get there via the link to Tapper—and then wondered if this wasn't some preemptive move by McCain to deny Obama a shot at McCain for being weak on terrorism.

It's both more complicated and simpler.  The Arab community, its place in Michigan, and its ties to the Middle East are complicated.  However, what's simple is that Debbie Schussel hates Arabs.  The McCain campaign is afraid to offend the far right.  So they ditched Ali Jawad rather than deal with Debbie Schussel.

A disclosure.  I haven't seen him in about 5 years or so, but I once knew Ali Jawad.  That may sound extraordinary, but it's nothing special for someone who's run campaigns in Michigan, especially for one who's worked with the Detroit Area's huge Arab community.  I've brought candidates to meet with him and his political circle, and I've worked with him to elect Democrats, just as my Republican counterparts have worked with him to elect Republicans.

To fully understand what's happening here, one must understand the Detroit area and its Arab community.  There are several million Arabs across the country, most of whom are Christian, with many tracing their families back to Christian Lebanese and Syrians who immigrated to the US in the early 20th Century.  What's different about the Arab population in the Detroit area is the size, diversity and power of the Arab community.  

Lebanese Shiites have lived in the Detroit area since the early 20th century.  In the shadows of the Ford Rouge Complex—one of the biggest factories in the world, which once employed 80,000 men—is the "South End" of Dearborn.  This neighborhood was a mix of Shiite Lebanese, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Maltese, Greeks and Armenians.  In the 1970's, as the other ethnic groups moved away from the neighborhood, the Lebanese Civil War exploded.  Soon the neighborhoods of southern and eastern Dearborn—which borders Detroit—became home to many thousands of Arabs.  These immigrants were mostly Shiite Lebanese, but eventually Dearborn also became home to large numbers of immigrants from Yemen.  Around the same time many Chaldeans—Roman Catholics from Iraq whose traditional language is Aramaic, the language that dominated the region at the time of Jesus—moved in large numbers to other neighborhoods in the Detroit area.  

Today, the Arab population of the Detroit area is somewhere between a quarter and a half million.  The largest groups are the Lebanese Shiites and the Chaldeans, although there are also large numbers of Yemeni, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and, since the end of the first Gulf War, Iraqi Shiite Arabs.  Many Detroit area Arabs are Christian, but immigrants in the last 20 years are more likely to be Muslim.

Like almost every immigrant group, Arabs have moved beyond their original neighborhoods and can be found throughout the area.  And everyone in Detroit has a lot of contact with Arab-Americans.  In secular Baathist Iraq, Chaldeans were a semi-protected group that were permitted to sell liquor.  When they began moving to Detroit, they took up the same business.  Today, Chaldeans own almost all the convenience and liquor stores in the area; everyone in the Detroit area interacts with Chaldeans because almost all the corner stores are family run.  And when you stop for gas, you'll be dealing with a Lebanese Shiite, because they own and/or operate almost all the gas stations in the area.  

Arab-Americans lean Democratic but are a key bloc of ticket-splitters.  Because of their rapidly increasing wealth, they have also become an important source of campaign contributions, especially in the $250 to $1,000 range.    This is where Ali Jawad comes in.  He is the head guy in the gas stations owners association.  He also runs the Lebanese Heritage Club, which hosts just about every candidate forum for Arab-Americans, and which regularly attracts every major politician in the area.  He's a major collector of checks, and he's one of the leaders of his community.  

As Tapper points out, Jawad has said things about Hezbollah that make it sound less sinister than one would think a group would be to make the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.  Well, he's not the only person in the area to not condemn Hezbollah; the range of attitudes of Lebanese in Dearborn is probably centered somewhere between ambivalent to fairly supportive.  Many of the Dearborn Lebanese come from a handful of villages in Southern Lebanon, within a few miles of the Israeli border.  Thus, they come from the heartland of Hezbollah.  Their home villages were used by the PLO to stage raids in Israel during the early 1970's—there is often animosity between Lebanese Shiites and Palestinians, for many Lebanese blame Palestinians for destabilizing Lebanon—the area was occupied by Israel for many years, and it was only after years of fierce attacks by Hezbollah that Israel abandoned Southern Lebanon.  In the eyes of many Lebanese, Hezbollah liberated their home villages from Israeli occuption.  

Hezbollah is now the de facto government of Southern Lebanon, and provides social services as well fights Israel.  Many people in Dearborn have family ties to major players in Lebanese Shiite politics.  And Lebanese in Dearborn view Hezbollah with much the same mix of distrust mixed with nationalist pride and identity that Catholic residents or former residents of IRA-controlled neighborhoods in Belfast or Derry view the IRA.  Most Lebanese in Dearborn came here to escape war, but that doesn't mean they don't identify with one faction more than the others.  In Dearborn, many identify  with Hezbollah.  

But whatever their views about their home country, most Arabs in Southeast Michigan view themselves as Arab-Americans, and that's how they're viewed by most of their non-Arab neighbors.  In the Middle East, most would be viewed hostilely by the Sunni terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, because most Arabs around Detroit are Shiite or Christian.  They moved to the US to escape problems back home, and have settled in.  They often hate the foreign policy of their adopted country, but they love being Americans.  And in Michigan, they are political players.

Back in the 1980's, Democratic governor Jim Blanchard was accused of returning contributions from Arab-Americans.  When he ran for Governor in 1990, Republican John Engler—with the help of his Republican party chair Spencer Abraham—did the opposite, and enthusiastically reached out to Arab-Americans.  For each of his three elections he was rewarded for his outreach with votes and contributions from Arab-Americans.  Abraham himself even slid in to the Senate in the 1994 Republican landslide (before losing to Debbie Stabenow in 2000).  But many Arab-American voters still strongly supported Democrats, especially members of Congress David Bonior (then the second-ranking Democrat in Congress), John Dingell (who represented all of Dearborn for several decades) and John Conyers (who now splits Dearborn with Dingell).  Jawad's personal political contributions mirror these community-wide patterns.

I don't know enough about Ali Jawad's background or business practices to vouch for him, but I doubt the McCain campaign does either.  But I do know that just about everyone in Michigan politics, Republican and Democrat, has sought his support, and John McCain's campaign just dumped him because viciously anti-Arab reactionary Debbie Schlussel called him a terrorist (which for her is practically a synonym for "Arab").  

Once again we have a case where a politician has no problem with dumping on Arab-Americans because of ethnic stereotyping.  It's like accusing Italians in the 1940's of all being tied to the Mafia, or thinking that every Salvadoran that comes in to the US today is connected to a violent drug gang.  

Tapper wondered if the Obama campaign might eventually throw the Jawad association back in McCain's face.  I would hope not, because that would just be validating the claims of one of the most hateful people on right.  She's claimed Media Matters is Nazi-funded.  She claimed the shooter at Virginia Tech was a "Paki."  And she's used the same scare tactics against Obama himself, pushing the bullshit that he was once a Muslim, and that "once a Muslim, always a Muslim,"  and that his comments are heavily lifted from the film Malcolm X.  In short, this woman hates Arabs and hates Muslims.  Hell, she just hates.  And anyone or anything she hates she depicts as part of a scary conspiracy of all Arabs and all Muslims (with the occasional Nazi thrown in to give her predictable hatred a bit of retro zing).  

There are legitimate criticisms to make against McCain and the Republican party in general about being soft on terrorism.  However, in the absence of anything other than the hate-filled rantings of that lunatic Debbie Schlussel, attacking McCain for once having Ali Jawad on his finance committee would not be a legitimate criticism.  The legitimate criticism of McCain is for being soft on hatred and bigotry, and caving to Debbie Schlussel.  It would be wrong for Obama's camapign to dignify her hate.  Furthermore, it would be dumb politics, because it would needlessly alienate tens of thousands of good Americans who also happen to be of Lebanese descent and swing voters in what could be one of the most competitive states in the November election.  

Jake Tapper of ABC has a story up w/ John McCain firing one of his fundraiser people b/c of the finance person's sympathy to Hezbollah.

No, I'm not making this up.  This is extraordinary.

The ambassador's name is Dr. Hamid Al-Bayati.

He has a colorful history.

Back in 2003, he was the UK representative of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Shiite political party.

I know the above title "War with Iran Imminent" may seem a bit presumptuous at this stage of the UN game. However, I come to this prediction because of several factors that have occurred recently. First a small bit of history. Several years ago the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated by a huge car bomb in Beirut, Lebanon. Most Lebanese believe it was Syria who behind the killing. They believe this because Hariri was against the Syria government’s occupation of his country and wanted them to leave to which he spoke publically. However, he like many before him who dared to speak publicly was silenced in the same manner.  His killing created the Cedar revolution also known as the March 14 movement who is led by the secular Druze political group the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP).

I have as much concern as anybody over who will be the next president.  But I have equal concern over the world that person will inherit.  And in my morning op ed reading, I encountered two pieces that gave me pause.  The first, by James Carroll in the Boston Globe, is entitled Reviving an old insult to the Jews and is about the reestablishment of the Tridentine Mass.  The second, in the New York Time, is by an Israeli journalist named Romen Bergman, entitled Bracing for Revenge, and offers a clear warning of the possible consequences - here in the U. S. - of the recent killing of Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyah in Damascus, only yards from where Palestinian Hamas political leader Khaled Mashal was meeting with Syrian intelligence personnel.

Both events represent a mindset that I fear will have serious consequences which we ignore at our peril.   And in the latter case, the eventual consequences in the United States are horrendous to contemplate.  

Stop perpetuating "Palestinian" Islamists' orchestrated self made fake "victimhood"!

It's not only unfair but it's even dangerous to swallow their propaganda and "agree" with their: "we are the victims" culture.