Last Sunday, relying extensively on the BBC, your nearly frozen scribe reported on Israel's claim that its "Defense" Forces had finally left Lebanon, after more than a month of open warfare and several weeks of an uneasy truce, periodically punctuated by blatant Israeli violations.
In Sunday's piece, I disputed key details of the BBC account, including the assertion that Israel's attack on Lebanon was prompted by a kidnapping, and pointed out that even without Israeli soldiers in the country, the Lebanese people are still in grave danger from the cluster bombs the Israelis left behind.
But it never dawned on me that the main point of the BBC article, "Israeli soldiers 'out of Lebanon'", might be false. Wrong again!
According to a recent and well-documented post from Kurt Nimmo, Israeli soldiers are still occupying Lebanese territory. Nimmo also presents evidence indicating that Israel is stealing both water and land from its neighbor.
How are they stealing the water? By building pipelines to draw it from Lebanon's Wazzani Spring and pump it to Israel.
And how are they stealing the land? By moving the so-called Blue Line, so that "hundreds of square meters of Lebanese territory" have been "‘added’ to the Israeli side". Additional reports indicate that the Israelis have been digging up Lebanese soil and transporting it across the border.
We have been told many times that Israel has done wonders, turning large areas of desert into productive farmland, but somehow the media reports always forget to mention that the water used to irrigate that land was stolen from Israel's neighbors.
This Google map shows Israel's borders with Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, superimposed over a satellite photo of the region. As you can plainly see, in every case the grass is greener on the Israeli side.
And now you know why.
You also know why Israel's neighbors hate her, and why they hate the USA for supporting Israel uncritically, to the hilt, in every possible way.
By now, I should know better than to trust the BBC. And we should all know better than to trust the Israelis.
There is no line they will not cross; no lie they will not tell; no crime they will not commit. And when anyone dares to call Israel what it clearly is, a terrorist state, thriving at the expense of its neighbors, he quickly finds himself accused of anti-Semitism.
Thus it has become politically dangerous to question why an alleged shipment of primitive missiles from Iran to Lebanon via Syria justifies a full-bore attack against Lebanese civilians, while Israel openly receives $3 billion a year in aid from the USA and spends at least three-quarters of it on arms and ammunition from American manufacturers.
Similarly, it is dangerous to question why the forces attempting to defend Lebanon are always referred to as "terrorists" in the western press, while the Israelis who have invaded, occupied and destroyed large parts of Lebanon are referred to as Israeli "Defense" Forces.
Clearly, one reason why such questions are never asked is because they cast Israel in a bad light, even as they remain unanswered.
And of course one reason why they are never answered is because honest answers to these questions would make Israel look even worse.
It is indeed ironic that the USA is currently engaged in one war against Iraq and planning feverishly for another against Iran, neither of which have attacked any neighboring countries recently, but at the same time the USA openly -- proudly -- supports Israel, which makes a habit of attacking its neighbors early and often, and usually on the flimsiest of pretexts.
If we (that is to say, the war criminals running the American Department of "Defense") really wanted to see peace in the Middle East, we would be attacking the one rogue state in the region, the true source of "terrorism with a global reach".
Oops! I wasn't supposed to say that, was I?
Oh well. It's not as if it wasn't obvious.