He's not that vile Jew Joe Lieberman. That would be a catastrophe.

Please keep in mind that Joumblatt is the master of deceit and metamorphosis, it is to note that in the parliamentary elections of 2005 Joumblatt allied with Hezbollah to get the Shiite votes in areas where his own people were stuck. So when Hizbollah served its purposes, he threw it like a lemon. Not knowing that some lemons - regarless of their ideologies and labels - are smarter than others. Joumblatt is so called liberal, but interestingly, he is also a feudal lord for his druze community... Any oxymoron here? No, just a moron. Not an oxy.

The neocon faction of warmongers and profiteers want a Lebanon that has been driven into the arms of fanatics. Absent that fanaticism, there is no excuse for destroying Lebanon - which is a stated goal of PNAC.

The assassination of Hariri was supposed to achieve this end, but, poor Lebanese, they wanted peace!

Too bad for Lebanon - the neocons want war.

Just to set the record straight, the people who committed suicide at Masada were not "ancient Israelites" but rather, Jews. See, e.g., wikipedia's entry on Masada: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masada.

In my neighborhood, I have a friend whose mom is in Lebanon under the Israeli guns. My pal Richard used to have a window out of his apartment in Haifa, and he could see Lebanon from that window.

We would not allow a war between Massachusetts and Connecticut to continue. (Mass. = Israel in square miles and pop. Conn. = Lebanon in square miles and pop.) Please stop thinking this is an abstract conflict involving global calculations and historical considerations. It is a real bloody tragedy involving grannies and badly broken windows and foundations and hearts.

As an abstract gesture, I will get a t-shirt with the green cedar tree on it, but nobody is going to know what it means. I wish I actually could help somehow, over in Lebanon. Can you suggest something?

I had the pleasure of meeting Walid Jumblatt in Damscus in 1983-84 - very thoughtful guy - with a pack of body guards surrounding him because as leader of the Druze he is/was at risk.

Say what you will about Syria - they put down their own home-grown Islamic fundamentalists in the Muslim Brotherhood. The Allawite Shia minority government is a far cry from Iranian or Iraqi Shia fundamentalists. They grow grapes, drink wine, and are not even considered Muslims by many.

Again, say what you will about Saddam Hussein - for years he was OUR BOY in Iraq, and we didn't mind his heavy-handed secular Ba'athism or his repressing of fundamentalists when he was gassing Iranians at the behest of Donald Rumsfeld and Ronnie Reagan.

Secularists are pragmatists - and ultimately will make concessions based on rational argument (or threat). Believers on the other hand - be they Israeli, Islamic or Christian - are prepared for martyrdom - and to kill and/or die for their belief.

Beware of zealots of any stripe.

I am 100% in agreement with you. I hope you and the middle ages have a long and bloody future together. It's like when I tell my kids to tell their friends to do as many drugs as possible. It's just that much less competition for everyone else.

And in a thousand years when you're sitting round the camel dung fire watching the rest of us colonize the solar system and you're wondering where it all went so horribly wrong for you I hope you remember with fondness the abattoir you helped plunged a half billion people into. A dark cesspit of ignorance, oppression, mysogyny, hatred, violence and anarchy. But I'm sure you had a good reason for that. See the Arab world isn't so much on a genocidal bloodlust against all the Jews it can conveniently kill. It's on a war against the last 500 years of western history.

al Sanguine wrote: "Iranian sponsors routinely execute teenagers in public (usually by slowly hanging from steel cables suspended from cranes) for such crimes as homosexuality..."

Yeah that's pretty evil but at least they quote a reason however lame it may be.

The Israelis kill Palestinian and now Lebanese civilians just because.

Kate Seelye wrote "Masada, the hilltop fortress where ancient Israelites committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans, symbolizes the Israeli penchant for viewing every fight as a fight to the death." Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It is Hezbollah, not Israel, that views the conflict as a fight to the death.

That Jumblatt has maybe 4% support in Lebanon and that the radicals won a long time ago. The simple fact is that the Lebanese nominally kicked out the secular Syrians and replaced them with the Shiite Hezbollahcrats. Israel has little if anything to do with it in the 6 years since they left Lebanon. Hezbollah has become stronger and will eventually give rise to the second Islamic Revolution. Maybe Hezbollah and their supporters here will be happy with that. After all we hear few complaints that their Iranian sponsors routinely execute teenagers in public (usually by slowly hanging from steel cables suspended from cranes) for such crimes as homosexuality and other sex-crimes. I too aplaud the downtrodden Lebanese to rise up and rejoin the middle ages. After all you can worry about the Arab secular moderates but we all know that were they ever successful most of you would claim they are puppets of the evil colonialist zionist yadda yadda American warcrminal satan etc etc anyhow.