Friday 31 December 2010

Franklin Lamb respond to a "proud" Zionism"

Dr. Lamb,

I read your article from last month, Will Hezbollah Defeat Israel?
Very Interesting piece.
In your article I believe you've erroneously placed Jesus in Lebanon's Kfar Qana when in all probability, the 'Wedding Miracle' occurred in Kfar Kanna, a village near Nazareth and now located in Eretz Yisro el.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Yours,

Proud Zionist

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Dear Proud Zionist,

Thank you for taking the time to write.

You could be very right about which Qana. I have also considered this idea.

It’s a confusing subject which I have read up on and spoken with locals and the Lebanese ministry of tourism, such as it is.When I get a chance I will send you the info I have. Lebanon for tourism and political reasons likes to insist on "our" Qana. I tend to romanticize it also.

There is actually some compelling evidence in the scriptures to favor the north Palestine (Lebanon) location including adescription of it taking Jesus and Mary a day to trek to Qana. This would have been the time to reach Qana in Lebanon rather than less than three hours for the Qana near Nazareth.

Here, Issa, a Palestinian, sought refuge and solace
from the corrupt Jewish leadership
And here the Zionisn war criminal turned his 1st Miracle Bloody

Israeli hasbara prefer sthis location for tourism purposes, like the Lebanese, plus Israel does not like to publicize the fact that Issa, a Palestinian, sought refuge and solace from like minded reformists from the corrupt Jewish leadership Frankly

PZ, I could go either way and would happily follow where the'facts' lead but it does appear that JC and sometimes his mom and a few devotees used to trek north to escape the rejection and occasional wrath of 'your' guys and he reportedly liked to fish and swim nearthe current location of the Palestinian Refugee Camp called Rashideyeh.

Tradition has it that Jesue used sit on the beach with friends, and visit Saida as well as the Jewish village just to the south of al sultaniyah (which your guys regularly bomb) where progressive Jews who were on the outs with the Sarahidran (sp) for onereason or another had established a religious community.

Twenty centuries later, the village is still there with the same name found in the old, new and Koranic scriptures......minus all but a very few rather low laying Resistance supporting Jews.

When/if JC does in fact appear, for sure we can ask him if we are still around. I've got a bunch of questions scribbled down in my ever shrinking pea brain and you probably do also.I am sure you saw this coming but whatever remains confusing about these two Qana’s, there is no uncertainty whatsoever regarding the events at Qana that occurred in April 18 1996 and on July 22 of 2006.

I invite you to Google these two Qana events.

Best wishes and Peace for the New Year.

Franklin

ps: excuse me please but what's this "Eretz Yisroel" silliness in your note?

Whichever Jew and whomsoever wishes to remain in Palestine after thecoming event (s) will be unconditionally welcomed to live inpeace..... but please no chosen people, apartheid, extreme racism, rabid rabbi’s inciting hatred, democracy for Jews only stuff..............one person, one vote, secular, democratic, majority decides........... At least theoretically kind of like the old days when Arabs and Jews in Palestine treated each other according to John,Luke and Maimonides..and the sermon above occupied al Quds on theMount.........you will recall....."do unto others...etc....."

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Dr. Franklin Lamb is Director, Americans Concerned for Middle East Peace, Beirut-Washington DC, Board Member of The Sabra Shatila Foundation, and a volunteer with the Palestine Civil Rights Campaign, Lebanon.

He is the author of The Price We Pay: A Quarter-Century of Israel’s Use of American Weapons Against Civilians in Lebanon and is doing research in Lebanon for his next book.

He can be reached at fplamb@gmail.com

In case you missed it

Qana…Where Jesus’s 1st Miracle Turns Bloody

07/31/10

Batoul Wehbe

“We have lived through hell,” Qana resident, Fawzeya Atwi cried. “The people were chopped into pieces by the Israeli bombs. They bleed these people. You should have seen the heads.”

“Do you know what the dogs did at night after the killings? They were hungry and I saw them in the ruins eating fingers and pieces of our people,” Atwi said about the Qana massacre during the July 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon.

Head of the Red Cross in Tyre Sami Yazbak, who was helping to pull bodies from the ruins, told The Guardian that the first call about the bombing was received at 7 a.m., 6 hours after the bombing took place. He said that previous shelling on the road to Qana had delayed the arrival of Red Cross personnel.

Yazbak said that “many of the children who were sleeping inside were handicapped.”

Many journalists who arrived in Qana to cover the incident became rescuers, dugging through the rubble with the Red Cross in search for bodies.

Journalist Bahia El Ainain talks about her experiences during the 2006 Israeli massacre in Qana. “I cried several times. I couldn’t be a journalist over being a mother when I saw dead young girls. I couldn’t but think of my daughter.” She also recounts an incident when she was on a roof, along with all the foreign press and their cameras. Bahia pushed the cameras away; she admits that her patriotism outweighs the journalist’s instincts for objectivity.

WINE TURNS TO BLOOD

The southern Lebanese town of Qana is believed by some to be where Jesus performed his first miracle of turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee mentioned in the Gospel of St John.

But in modern times it is blood, not wine, that is indelibly linked with the town. The blood of Lebanese civilians killed in Israeli bombing.

In 1996, one of the deadliest single events of the whole Arab-Israeli conflict took place there - the shelling of a UN base where hundreds of local people were sheltering.
More than 100 were killed and another 100 injured, cut down by Israeli anti-personnel shells that explode in the air sending a lethal shower of shrapnel to the ground.

Ten years later, the town is again in the headlines, this time because of a massive bomb dropped by an Israeli aircraft, causing a building to collapse on top of dozens of civilians - many of them children in their pajamas- taking cover in the basement. It was an attack by the Israel Air Force on a three-story building in the small community of al-Khuraybah near the South Lebanese village of Qana on July 30, 2006. 28 civilians were killed, of which 16 were children.

Israel is back in the Lebanese quagmire.

“Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disemboweled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head." The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in their building’s shelter, believing that they were safe.
A pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of the world’s eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...” an investigative journalist who was present that day describes what she saw.

The aerial attack killed members of the Shalhoub and Hashem families.

HEZBOLLAH SINKING LEBANON INTO CRISIS

One day after Qana massacre, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she was “deeply saddened” by such losses.

“Too many families have been displaced. Too many people urgently need medical care, or are living in shelters,” she said. But she qualified her statement adding “I know what caused this. And I know that there are underlying circumstances having to do with the need to really make this a strong and democratic government that can really extend its authority, that can rebuild its army, that can shield itself from harmful foreign influences, that cannot... have its territory be used in the way that Hezbollah, without its knowledge, used its territory, really sinking then the whole area into the kind of crisis that we've got.”

The US is the main supplier of military equipment and the main political backer of Israel.

Responding to the incident, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Saniora denounced “Israeli war criminals” and canceled talks with Condoleezza Rice. In a television address to the country, he said, “There is no place on this sad morning for any discussion other than an immediate and unconditional cease-fire as well as an international investigation into the Israeli massacres.” After the announcement, Rice canceled her planned visit to Beirut.

Saniora appealed to the U.N. Security Council for an emergency session, which held consultations on July 30. In a statement, the Security Council expressed the world body's “extreme shock and distress” at the Qana bombing and offered its condolences for the deaths.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a July 30 statement on the Israeli attack on Qana: “Issuing advance warning to the civilian population of impending attacks in no way relieves a warring party of its obligations under the rules and principles of international humanitarian law.” It also called for “a distinction to be drawn at all times between civilians and civilian objects on the one hand, and military objectives on the other. All necessary precautions must be taken to spare civilian life and objects.”

Human Rights Watch also warned that the “consistent failure to distinguish combatants and civilians is a war crime.”

More than 600 Lebanese civilians have been killed by Israel in July 2006 War and close to 800,000 displaced, as a result of what Israel said were two Hezbollah-captured Israeli soldiers that Israel wanted back and refused to exchange for detainees held in Israeli prisons.
Now I’ll leave you with pictures because a picture is worth a thousand words.