Israellycool

Israel has called for the removal of the two UNIFIL soldiers who were photographed saluting the coffins of Hizbullah terrorists during Wednesday’s prisoner exchange.

But instead of doing the responsible thing and removing the soldiers, the UN has defended their actions!

Israel is calling for removal of two United Nations soldiers from Lebanon after photographs surfaced of the soldiers saluting the coffins of Hezbollah terrorists during a prisoner exchange Wednesday.

Associated Press photographer Mohammed Zaatari captured an image of the troops paying homage to fallen Hezbollah fighters as trucks bearing their coffins drove through the city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.

The blue-helmet U.N. troops, who operate under the auspices of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), are meant disarm Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and be an impartial buffer along the country’s border with Israel.

Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, said he was “shocked and horrified” by the photograph and that it was time for the saluting soldiers to go.

“I think they should be recalled and be sent back to whichever country they came from,” said Gillerman. “I think they’ve definitely compromised their impartiality and have in a very big way,

in a very serious way, compromised the integrity of the United Nations.”

But a UNIFIL spokeswoman said the salute was nothing out of the ordinary.

“It is customary in most armies for military personnel in uniform to salute whenever a coffin passes in a procession,” UNIFIL spokeswoman Yasmina Bouziane said. “They were merely following this customary military tradition and saluted coffins draped in Lebanese national flags at their own initiative.”

The identity of the troops wasn’t certain, but Getty Images reports they were from Italy.

The incident occurred as Israel released five living Hezbollah prisoners and the bodies of 199 Lebanese and Palestinian militants killed in recent conflicts. In exchange, Hezbollah returned the remains of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped during a cross-border raid in 2006.

The truck bearing the coffins also featured a large image of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah mastermind who was killed in February in Damascus.

Israeli officials said UNIFIL troops were saluting the symbol of the violence they are meant to oppose and defuse.

“I think this is a very tragic and sad day for the United Nations when its soldiers who were sent there because of Hezbollah terrorist activities salute the terrorists and the killers,” Gillerman said.

“They are there as peacekeepers with a very clear mandate to disarm Hezbollah — they’re not there to honor terrorists,” he said.

The United Nations rejected the suggestion that its troops favored Hezbollah and told FOXNews.com that UNIFIL troops were doing their job and remained an unbiased force.

“They are impartial with regards to the forces on the ground,” Farhan Haq, a U.N. spokesman, said. “(UNIFIL) is an impartial source — it doesn’t show a bias for either side.”

Such assurances have done little to assuage Israel’s representatives, who said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon should be “appalled” by the action and called for disciplinary action.
“I think [Secretary Ban] should remove them from wearing those helmets and from serving the United Nations,” Gillerman said.

Nothing to see here..move along.

Notice the UNIFIL spokeswoman’s mention of the “coffins draped in Lebanese national flags”, meant to imply the soldiers thought they were saluting dead of the Lebanese army and not of Hizbullah. Tellingly, she does not mention the huge picture of Hizbullah arch-terrorist Imad Mughniyeh.

I also very much doubt it is “customary in most armies for military personnel in uniform” to stop everything and salute a procession of coffins of the very people the armies are supposed to be fighting. But I’ll leave it to someone in the know to confirm whether or not this is the case.

In any event, we once again see why Israel should never have accepted UN Resolution 1701.

From tomb raider to coffin saluter:

U.N. soldiers salute as a tractor-trailer loaded with coffins of nearly 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters and bearing the picture of slain Hezbollah top leader Imad Mughniyeh, right, arrives in the southern city of Tyre, Lebanon, Thursday, July 17, 2008. Eight tractor-trailers loaded with coffins are driving from south Lebanon to Beirut a day after a prisoner swap between Israel and Lebanon.

It is one thing to be utterly incompetent. It is another to be siding with evil.

Either way, agreeing to UN Resolution 1701 was clearly yet another of Israel’s huge mistakes.

Hot on the heels of news that the Lebanese government has declared Wednesday a national holiday to celebrate the release of Samir Kuntar and the other terrorists, comes word (from more than one Lebanese blogger) that Kuntar may be running for parliament in the next elections.

Welcome to Lebanon, a country where smashing in the skull of a 4-year-old girl could actually help your election campaign.

No doubt emboldened by their latest victory against Israel - namely, the farcical prisoner swap deal approved yesterday - Hizbullah are making more demands from, and issuing more threats against, Israel.

Hezbollah considers itself free to strike Israeli soldiers and civilians unless it receives maps of minefields and areas peppered with cluster bombs during the Second Lebanon War, a Lebanese journalist believed familiar with the Shi’ite group’s thinking wrote in an article appearing Monday.

“This will be a sufficient reason for the resistance (Hezbollah) to carry out a thousand operations and to kill the enemy soldiers as it wishes, and perhaps its civilians, as long as the Israeli killing machine continues,” Ibrahim al-Amin wrote in Monday editions of Al-Akhbar.

Al-Amin added that Hezbollah’s arms build-up, which includes training of its gunmen and the development of its military infrastructure, will continue “without permission from anyone.”

Hezbollah is also planning a terrorist attack against an Israeli target as retribution for last year’s killing of arch-terror mastermind Imad Mughniyeh, al-Amin wrote.

“We may see many things that can be portrayed as punishment, but there is one big event that nothing can prevent from happening,” he said. “It will be on the scale of the crime (Mughniyeh killing).”

Al-Amin did not provide many details on Hezbollah’s expected response, but it would be reasonable to assume it would take the form of an attack outside of Lebanese soil. The writer noted that Hezbollah faces practical and technical obstacles as well as intra-Lebanese political considerations that are delaying the execution of the attack.

Al-Amin said Hezbollah does not plan to publicly claim credit for the attack. He wrote that no one in Israel or Lebanon should expect a statement of responsibility to come out of “Kharet Khareikh,” the neighborhood where most of Hezbollah’s headquarters are located. “It will be signed by Mughniyeh’s friends.”

The writer also warned that Hezbollah will retaliate against the Israel Air Force’s continuing sorties in Lebanese airspace in such a way that Israel will feel the price of its actions. He added the international community would see the flights in a different light if Hezbollah were to strike.

Further proof that we should not have been content with anything less than Hizbullah’s destruction after the Second Lebanon War, and should certainly not have agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which has functioned as nothing more than a UN-sanctioned hudna.

Mark my words. Hizbullah will be attacking us in the near future. I just hope we have real leadership by then.

Today, the Israeli cabinet approved a prisoner swap deal with Hizbullah in which Israel will receive the bodies of IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in exchange for notorious Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar.

Actually, that’s only part of it, albeit the main part. In addition, Israel will receive a report regarding Ron Arad, and the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in the Second Lebanon War but never returned, while handing over four illegal Lebanese terrorists, the remains of dozens of infiltrators and terrorists (including eight Hizbulah fighters), and information regarding four missing Iranian diplomats. Did I mention we also have to release palestinian prisoners?

You can probably tell I am not impressed with this deal. In fact, with all due respect to the Goldwasser and Regev familes - whose suffering I could not even comprehend - the deal stinks. Assuming Ehud and Eldad are dead, we are essentially gaining their corpses and giving up one of the most brutal terrorists in recent memory. An unrepentant one at that.

Not only that, but this sets a very bad precedent. The terrorists now know we will pay an alarmingly high price, even for dead bodies. Which means if they capture live Israelis in future, gone is the deterrent to keep them alive.

No, this deal stinks. Unless, for example, we have secretly injected Kuntar with an agent that will kill him, but not before he spends much time in excruciating pain.

Fancy a Hezburger to UNIFIL you up?

A fast-food restaurant in Beirut’s war-torn southern suburb has hit upon an explosive way to attract customers.

Buns and Guns is made out to look like a military post and diners eat to the sound of gunfire instead of muzak.

Owner Yousef Ibrahim presents rebranded Lebanese favourites like the “rocket-propelled grenade” (chicken on a skewer) and “terrorist bread”.

“They accuse us of terrorism, so let’s serve terrorist bread, why not?” Mr Ibrahim told Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV.

Other dishes include the Kalashnikov, Dragunov, Viper, B52, while realistic-looking weapons and ammunition decorate the counters, and camouflage netting hangs from the ceiling.

Beirut has recently passed through another round of civil strife when pro-government partisans and those of the Hezbollah-led opposition fought street battles in west Beirut.

But that does not necessarily mean that the customers think the restaurant is in bad taste.

Buns and Guns (motto: A sandwich can kill you) is located in a strongly Hezbollah-supporting area, where the group’s militia is lionised by many.

“My goal was to make people laugh before they ask me why weapons. The important thing is that they laugh,” Mr Ibrahim said.

He insists the only way his sandwiches could kill the customers is by their generous proportions.

“It attracts customers in an unconventional way. You noticed the moment I opened the restaurant, there was a lot of business,” he told the al-Manar correspondent, who later tucked into an RPG sandwich.

Hmm..they might want to rethink the name.

During the Arab League conference discussing the latest turmoil in Lebanon, the Saudi Foreign Minister could not resist dragging Israel into the discussion.

“(Hizbullah leader Hassan) Nasrallah is like (former Israeli Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon * – they both invaded Beirut,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said during a recent Arab League conference in Cairo on the sectarian violence in Lebanon.

Leaving aside the fact that Israel captured Beirut to drive out the PLO (which had been launching terrorist attacks from Lebanon) while Hizbullah’s agenda is very different, Al-Faisal’s statement once again shows the Arab fixation with Israel, even when Israel is not involved.

By the way, in case you were wondering:

The Arab League eventually decided that it would try to mediate between the rival factions in Lebanon but did not condemn Hizbullah.

* There is no similarity between Nasrallah and Sharon, although I really wish there was in one respect.

“Even the Israeli enemy never dared to do to Beirut what Hizbullah has done.”

- Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora

Yeah, who’d have thought a terrorist organization that targets civilians and uses its own people as human shields would prove to be crueler than a State that goes out of its way to limit civilian casualties, at great peril to its own soldiers and civilians?

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, on whose troops Hizbullah just opened a can of whoop ass, wants everyone to know he’s not intimidated by Hizbullah, despite the fact his government caved in to their demands.

He also wants everyone to know who the real enemy is.

Guess who.

“What Hizbullah did is a coup,” Siniora said Saturday. “Hizbullah has become the problem of all of Lebanon. We are not scared of its weapons.”

Later Saturday, an opposition statement said Hizbullah and its allies will end all armed presence in Beirut after the Lebanese army overturned government measures against the group. “”The Lebanese opposition will end all armed presence in Beirut so that the capital will be in the hands of the army,” the statement said. However, the opposition noted that “civil disobedience” will continue.

By Saturday evening, eyewitnesses reported that trucks carrying Hizbullah gunmen were leaving Beirut as Lebanese soldiers were deploying in the streets.

The reports came shortly after the Lebanese army announced that it will comply with Hizbullah’s demands, namely refraining from replacing the Beirut airport’s security chief and allowing Hizbullah to maintain his separate communication network.

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Siniora added that “we believed and we still do that the real danger to the country comes from the direction of Israel – our true enemy. However, the experience we are going through at this time shows that our democratic regime has fallen victims to our homeland brothers.”

“We did not underestimate the resistance against Israel, but what is Hizbullah doing in Lebanon?” Siniora said. “What is it doing on the roads to the airport? Is it controlling the road to Tel Aviv by controlling these roads? Syria is our sister and Israel is the enemy.”

This is the man supported by the Americans, and makes a further joke of UN Resolution 1701 which, among other things, provides that “there will be no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon.” Clearly, the government of Lebanon has until now consented to Hizbullah being in possession of its weapons against Israel. And here’s an even clearer indication:

In his first public reaction to Hezbollah’s takeover of west Beirut, Mr Siniora decried what he called a “poisonous sting” to democracy.

He said Hezbollah’s weapons could no longer be considered to be legitimately held because they had been turned on the Lebanese themselves.

In other words, they were legitimately held while being used to kill Israelis.

Lebanon has in the past been called the “Paris of the Middle East.” I would posit that it only similarity with Paris these days is its hatred of Jews Zionists.

If you were hoping I would post something on the unfolding, disturbing events in Lebanon, sorry to disappoint you but I just haven’t had the time to post something of value. What I can do is point you to some terrific blogging from my friend Charles, who is in the danger zone.