Monday, September 11, 2006
By Kurt Nimmo
"It wasn’t a good day for the embattled Tony Blair. During a press conference in Beirut with Lebanese PM Fouad Siniora—former central banker for Group Méditerranée and Citibank employee—an “angry protester accus[ed] Tony Blair of complicity in the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon,” according to ABC News.
And then Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri “left town in an apparent snub” and “the country’s most senior Shiite Muslim cleric said he held Blair responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Lebanese civilians during the 34-day war because Britain supported the United States in refusing to demand a quick cease-fire.” Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah characterized Blair as a “killer of children, women and the elderly.” Blair responded blithely by saying “he understood the anger in Lebanon” and “pledged Britain would help Lebanon rebuild. Both he and Saniora said a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was crucial to securing stability in the entire region.”
Of course, for Blair and his neocon co-conspirators in Washington, the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”—in other words, Israel killing thousands of Palestinians and stealing their land—will be resolved when Palestinians surrender and finally consent to their assigned colonial role as hewers of wood and drawers of water. Caoimhe Butterly, a well-known Irish peace activist, mentioned above, understands this and that is why she unfurled a banner declaring “Boycott Israeli apartheid” in front of live TV cameras. “It’s all right. We are in a democracy…. We respect all sorts of expression,” Saniora commented as security thugs dragged Butterly out of the press conference. In democratic Lebanon, as in democratic America, protesters were “kept about a half-mile from the government headquarters,” thus making sure they did not embarrass Blair, as Caoimhe Butterly had managed to do."