9 May 2008
The recent events in Lebanon point to the continued failure of this administration and its policies in the Middle East. The trend continues in favor of non-negotiation with the different factions in the region under the guise, We do not negotiate with terrorists. Such an approach in international politics marginalizes the other nations or groups involved and can only have one outcome: physical or violent intervention to push through a policy or sanction without input from all parties concerned. That constitutes bullying behavior and encourages further violence in retaliation.
The refusal of the United States to negotiate with Iran, Syria, or Hezbollah, labeling them all as terrorists, is a continuation of this bullying policy. Ultimatums are given in place of direct meetings, and forced interventions replace negotiation and compromise. The intent is on destroying people and groups versus working with them. Such drastic approaches have contributed to the current fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah, Amal, and their supporters in the Opposition movement (opposed to the current ruling system) and supporters of the government (headed by the Future movement of Sa’d Hariri, the son of the Lebanese-Saudi ex-prime minister who was assassinated in 2005 in Lebanon).
Average Lebanese are openly expressing concern about what they see as U.S. efforts to implement in Lebanon what it is doing in Iraq to promote sectarian tension. In Lebanon, this is accomplished using the guise of security firms to train Sunni militias to counteract the Shi’ite tide with its most obvious prototype, Hezbollah. Arab monarchies (all Sunni), with the help of the United States, are scrambling to put a halt to the rise in Shi’ite political, social, and military awareness.
Historical Facts
- - The July 2006 War that was initiated by Israel against Hezbollah after a cross-border raid by Hezbollah to capture Israeli soldiers killed many civilians (Lebanese death toll: close to 1400, mostly civilian. Israeli death toll, about 142 mostly military) and destroyed a large portion of Lebanon. The rationale for the large-scale bombardment and military activity: the return of two abducted Israeli soldiers and the destruction of Hezbollah.
- - Two years later, Hezbollah is at least as strong as before. The two soldiers have not been returned, but many other people continue to die due to cluster bombs and land mines. The political crisis has deepened. The birth pangs of the new Middle East that this administration was counting on turned out to be no more than wishful thinking.
- - The United States, Saudi Arabia, and Israel have encouraged sectarian conflict in an effort to eradicate Hezbollah and their Iranian support. Both remain a high target on the list of this axis.
- - The United States has openly intervened in internal Lebanese politics to prevent any compromise among the parties in conflict, to the indignation and open criticism of many Lebanese politicians.
- - For at least the past year, the United States has openly financed and helped train Sunni militias in an attempt to ready the situation for a confrontation with Hezbollah amidst calls for Hezbollah to disarm under foreign pressure.
- - Hezbollah continues to refuse disarmament, claiming that they are the only group capable at this time of preventing any threat from Israel. They claim that it is up to the Lebanese themselves to determine the time of such disarmament. They also cite the fact that other groups have been arming themselves and training in secret within and outside Lebanon.
- - Multiple assassinations and sectarian tensions in Lebanon are blamed on Syria by the United States and its allies. Others in Lebanon believe that Samir Ja'ja', a high profile war criminal and leader of the Lebanese Forces militia who was imprisoned for life for his war crimes during the Lebanese Civil War and who achieved early release, is behind some of the assassinations in Lebanon, including those of political figures. He is openly supported by the United States and Israel and continues to hold secret and open meetings with both inside Lebanon.
- - Syria and Iran also continue to intervene in Lebanese politics through their support of the Opposition and Hezbollah. The open international hostilities between the two blocks (the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia/Iran and Syria) is playing itself out inside Lebanon with Hezbollah the prize, especially for Israel. It is a well-accepted belief in the minds of most Lebanese and Arabs that Hezbollah is the only group in the Middle East that can prevent Israeli military transgressions inside Lebanon. The group is also very much respected by the citizens for its level of dedication and expertise, and its ability and willingness to accomplish what no other regular Arab army was able to do.
- - Since the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon in 2006 without accomplishing its stated objectives, that state has been intent on destroying Hezbollah by any other means—thusly, the creation of an internal situation in an attempt to erase popular support and force the group to disarm and disband.
On a more recent note, the following took place (Excerpts from the Times, May 12, 2008; the Telegraph, May 11, 2008; the Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2008; and As-Safir Newspaper, May 19, 2008):
- - According to Lebanese officials, for a year the main Lebanese political faction backed by the United States built a Sunni Muslim militia under the guise of private security companies.
- - The fighters, aligned with Sa’d Hariri’s Future movement, were trained and armed to counter the heavily armed Shi’ite Muslim militant group Hezbollah and protect their turf in a potential military confrontation.
- - Lebanon’s US-backed government and the Iranian-backed opposition led by Hezbollah have been mired in a political stalemate for more than a year. The country has been without a president since November.
- - Amid the political crisis that has sharpened differences among various religious communities, Lebanon’s army and Internal Security Forces had played a peacekeeping role, preventing clashes without confronting any of the different armed groups. They feared any robust intervention would break the unity of the armed forces and plunge the country into civil war.
- - The crisis has created a power vacuum. Hariri’s deputies have denied his movement was building a militia, though ranking military officials, independent analysts and employees of the security firm called Secure Plus say it was doing just that. Private security firms are the latest arrivals in Lebanon to a hodgepodge of armed groups that include Islamic militants inspired by Al Qaeda, Palestinian militias based in the country’s dozen refugee camps and Hezbollah.
- - For months, Lebanese security officials in the army and the Internal Security Forces warily watched the growth of the Future-Secure Plus fighting force. Officials close to and inside Hezbollah said they were monitoring the growth of the potential threat.
- - Over the last year, Secure Plus went from a small security company to an organization with 3,000 employees and unofficial associates on the payroll, mostly poor Sunnis from the country’s north. Some were armed with pistols and assault rifles.
We have… thousands of young people in plainclothes working with us all over the country,
a company official said before the clashes started. - - Even those who feared the development hoped the Future movement’s growing military capacity would create a balance of terror with the more heavily armed Shi’ite fighters, government officials and members of the group say.
On the one side, Hezbollah has trained military groups allied with it,
said a high-ranking official with the Internal Security Forces, which has received $60 million in training and equipment from the U.S.On the other side, the Future movement has created security firms to protect itself.
- - Things came to a head when, among other measures, the Lebanese government ordered the army to shut down the private telecommunications network of Hezbollah and remove the brigadier responsible for airport security. The army refused the order.
- - The plan provoked Hezbollah into sending fighters into the streets of Beirut, sparking 3 days of fighting with Sunni militias.
- - Fearing an outright civil war, the government reinstated the brigadier and announced it would be looking at the telecommunications network of Hezbollah.
- - Hezbollah defeated the US-backed and armed militias within a few hours and handed most of its captured positions to the Lebanese Army. More than 80 people were killed in 3 days of fighting.
- - President Bush, during his visit to Israel and Sharam Esheikh in Egypt, called on Arabs to isolate Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
- - Bush also stated that supporting the Lebanese people in their struggle to build a democracy was dependent upon confronting whom he called Hezbollah terrorists.
- - Bush described Hezbollah as the
enemy of a free Lebanon.
24 May 2008
Information Press
One day after this article was written, on 25 May 2008, a new president was elected inside Lebanon, Commander of Lebanese Army Forces, Michel Sleiman.
2 comments:
It is widely reported that women suffer depression at twice the rate of men. Apparently, more women are clinically depressed than ever before. On the assumption that these assessments are true, the question anyone interested in the subject -- which means anyone who cares about any woman -- asks is, why?
In a recent column I offered one explanation -- the impossibly high expectations for happiness that feminism created for many women.
There are other possible explanations.
One is the way in which many girls have been raised.
As every wise person and wise culture in history has known, it is impossible to attain any happiness without conquering one's nature. This is, of course, equally true for boys and girls, men and women. However, along with feminism arose a belief in the superiority of female nature. One result of this has been the suppressing of many male instincts -- both negative and positive -- along with little or no suppression of negative female instincts.
Societies and parents always knew that it was imperative to teach boys to control two aspects of their male nature -- their sexual desires and their predilection for violence. So all of us decent men were taught from a young age to touch a woman sexually only with her permission and to channel our physical aggression into sports or into helping to fight evil by joining a police force, or the military, or by being prepared to physically defend innocents. Men who did not learn to control these aspects of male nature not only became bad men, they became unhappy men. Happiness is attainable only when we control our nature and not when our nature controls us.
Societies and parents also always knew that it was imperative to teach girls to control their natures -- in particular their predilection to be ruled by their emotions. Women who allowed their emotions to rule them not only became destructive (to members of their families first and foremost), they became unhappy women.
However, with the advent of contemporary feminism and other social trends that coincided with the rise of feminism -- among them the elevation of compassion over standards, the great emphasis placed on feelings, the rejection of patriarchy and the devaluation of traditional masculine virtues (like subdued emotional expression) -- female nature came to be seen as far less in need of discipline than male nature.
So, while society continued to teach boys to control themselves, it stopped teaching girls to do so. Girls' emotions and feelings were inherently valuable. And denying this was attacked as sexist, if not misogynistic.
Consequently, the women many of these girls grew into lacked the ability to control their natures, to control their emotions, or their moods, and therefore lacked the facility to engage in the self-control necessary for happiness and the avoidance of depression.
Another aspect of feminism that has probably contributed to many women's unhappiness was the rejection of femininity. Feminism was more often the celebration of masculine virtues (for women only, alas) than the celebration of feminine virtues. The latter were usually dismissed as weak, passive, underachieving or even oppressive. There are scores of examples. One is the rejection of feminine dress -- a girl who attends class at almost any high school or college wearing a skirt or dress is an anomaly. Another is coarse speech. A generation ago, men refrained from using curse words in front of women. Today many young women curse as readily as men (I have probably seen more women than men drivers make an obscene gesture at other drivers). Such behaviors were inconceivable when women were expected to act feminine. And, of course, the "liberated" female's celebration of casual sex, throughout history associated with male nature, is the antithesis of femininity.
This loss of femininity may well have contributed to many women's depression. Though in our foolish age femininity is often identified with weakness, it was in fact empowering for many women, giving them a distinct power and identity that was unavailable to men. Women are not generally happy being largely indistinguishable from men.
Which brings us to yet another cause of unhappiness among women -- the effects of all the above on men. Women are generally happier when they have a good man in their lives. And by "good man," I mean not only devoted and kind, but masculine as well. Yet the prevailing egalitarian doctrines have conspired not only to undermine femininity in women but masculinity in many men. Just as women were supposed to forge feminine virtues, men were supposed to relinquish masculine virtues, which have been derided as sexist, oppressive, patriarchal and, therefore, anachronistic.
However, once again, things did not work out for many women as feminism had led them to expect they would. The dearth of masculine men has not brought most women happiness, but unhappiness. Those who do not believe this should simply ask single adult women looking for a husband what their greatest problem is with the men they meet. "They are not men," is the single greatest lament. Not "they are not egalitarian enough" or "not sensitive enough."
And women without men are not, as the old feminist saying went, fish without bicycles. They are women without men.
The 1960s ushered in The Age of Hubris, a time of almost unprecedented levels of conceit that one knew better than all previous generations how to order life, that almost everything inherited from the past was just plain wrong and outdated. For this hubris we have paid, and will continue to pay, a steep price. And many women, untrained in subduing darker aspects of their natures, deprived of the female joy of femininity and increasingly deprived of men (as opposed to boys), are feeling the brunt of these losses. They call it depression.
To: because i care
I have decided to let your post through despite the fact that it is off topic.
Men AND women suffer from depression. This depression may have some basis in what you said, however it is not the whole picture. Male and female children, teenagers, and the elderly also suffer from depression. That depression has nothing to do with gender roles or with men trying to be more like women and women trying to be like men.
Fact: It is harder for men to admit or seek help for their depression. Instead, they tend to bury their sorrows in alcoholism, sex addiction, drug addiction, and workaholism. Many end up committing suicide.
Fact: The highest rate of depression in the United States is among teenagers and very young adults. That has nothing to do with being raised male or female. It has to do with the kinds of parents such teenagers are raised by as well as with their perception of their value as human beings in an impersonal society. There are many parents who are unfit to raise children. Sexual, emotional, and physical abuse and neglect are the leading causes of depression among children.
Fact: there are both genetic and social components to depression. Depressed parents tend to raise depressed children. We can inherit as well as absorb our parents' outlook on life. After all, they are our first and usually main role models in how we look at life, how we form our self-concept, and how we deal with difficulties as well as how we relate to others. Tyrannical and abusive fathers with submissive mothers may end up raising abusive male children with submissive female children.
Fact: According to the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the number of suicides among men and women is on the rise in the United States. At the same time the number of successful suicides is 4 times higher among men than it is among women and suicide is the 8th leading cause of death among men. Eighty percent of all suicide victims are men.
The following are the most common risk factors for suicide among men:
1- Using drugs and/or alcohol to help cope with emotions, relationships, pressure of work etc.
2- Social isolation, living alone.
3- Not being able to form or sustain meaningful relationships.
4- Divorce or relationship breakdowns.
5- A history of physical and sexual abuse.
6- Imprisonment.
7- Being bullied at school/college/work.
8- Unemployment.
9- Loss of a loved one through trauma or disease.
10- mental illness, particularly where this is related to depression, painful and/or debilitating illnesses or conditions.
The problem with Western feminism is that, in some of its aspects, the focus, as you said, is on trying to be more like men. Not all feminists subscribe to that notion. Both are equal but different and complementary. That means one does not rule over or is above the other. They share certain things in common, but are also unique. Such uniqueness in no way translates to one being in charge of the other.
I disagree with the statement that in order to attain any happiness, one has to conquer one's nature. If one is a psychopath or a narcissist, that holds true, but statistics have shown that such people are not usually successful at "conquering" their natures because they are unable to "see" or "feel" their nature and, I emphasize the word "feel." Feelings are important because they enable us to empathize with others and allow us to understand their condition. That is what makes relationships between people functional. If we treated each other as kings and subjects or predator and food, where would we be?
Then there is emotional intelligence: the ability to relate to people as human beings and not as objects, and the ability to understand and communicate at deep levels. Emotional intelligence is not about exhibiting destructive emotions or crying and yelling. It is about relating to others on a deep level. There are parents who are incapable of relating to their children on that level. They use them as extensions of themselves, as objects for their own benefit. Abusive parents do the same. In fact, abuse in early childhood is one of the main contributors to depression. In adulthood, the causes of that depression are transferred from the parent (the cause of the abuse) to the person of the opposite sex (the wife or significant other, or any other female), thus the gender control issues that are exhibited by many men and some women.
Women still have a long way to go to achieve what men have had for a long time, mainly the ability to have a say in what affects their lives at the existential level, in things like politics, war, health, and human rights. Women's rights extend beyond the kind of attire they wear or what kind of job they hold. They extend to their ability to have their say as any other human being has the right to express in a human way.
I do not buy into the notion that women, once again, are causing the demise of men and society. We need to move away from the biblical and patriarchal traditions that have oppressed both men and women. I think when the world as a whole is sold on the idea that women are human beings who should not be subjugated or exploited, they will be much happier.
Expressing feelings and emotions is a personal choice and a skill we learn or suppress as we are growing up. It has to do with our role models at home. People who are raised by healthy parents tend to be healthy in most cases.
I have never encountered the belief that women's natures are superior. I certainly was not raised with such a belief and none of the women I know believe that. There, again, is the perception of the men who lack the emotional intelligence I talked about earlier and who confuse assertive behavior with being superior.
People who hold power over others do not give it up easily. This is true of men's relationships with their women as well. Therein lies the difficulty.
Instead of conquering one's nature (personality), maybe a better approach would be to try and understand it, its causes, and ways to use the good in it for one's and other's benefit. Conquering oneself can only lead to one thing: annihilation and the necessity of creating a false self, one that thinks it is superior to everything and one that looks at women with misplaced contempt. Conquering oneself erases that self, but something else has to take its place, otherwise, the only other alternative is the final solution to depression.
The answers to our depression usually lie within. Scapegoating feminism and accusing it of conceit is the narcissist's way of dealing with his inadequacies (by the way, most narcissists are men). One should not judge the women of the world based on the actions of their mothers.
Being sensitive is a trait that most children possess and that is bred out of most men and some women as they get older. Sensitivity is NOT weakness. It is a sign of intelligence and strength. It is what makes us human. It is what allows us to interpret emotional signals properly and respond accordingly. It is what gives us great art and music. It is what gives humans the reason to choose to live despite all the difficulty. Sensitivity is not strictly a female trait. It is exhibited by females and suppressed in males. Suppression of feelings is never healthy because it is part of our nature to want to express who we are. That is why there are so many neurotics in the world. Too much suppression to prove masculinity against one's nature is contrived and only leads to other neurotic behaviors to compensate.
You also neglected to define feminine virtues, masculine qualities, and "a good man." What feminine virtues are we to admire and what kind of masculine man should a woman look for? How do good men behave towards other people, male and female?
Respect between men and women is earned. One cannot expect a woman to respect a man (and I think that is what your comment asks for, respect, not compassion, friendship, and moral choices), who is not willing to respect her.
Check this website on men and depression.
Post a Comment