Israel Bombed Lebanon with Uranium

Once again, we are told those crazy Iranians have “stepped up” their enrichment program, and Israel has taken the opportunity to compare Iran to Nazi Germany.

War criminal Ehud Olmert, guilty of bombing Lebanese children while they slept in apartment buildings, used Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, to warn of Iranian “echoes of those very voices that started to spread across the world in the 1930s,” a reference to German fascism. Of course, Iranian nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism is hardly analogous to fascism, never mind the idiots on Fox News incessantly jabbering about “Islamofascism,” but this fact is lost on the ill-informed hordes tuned in to the corporate media Borg Hive.

Meanwhile, as the corporate media attempts to scare us into believing Iran will have nukes by the time I finish typing this sentence, the possibility Israel used uranium in Lebanon receives next to no coverage.

The Independent is reporting “that scientists were studying samples of Lebanese soil after Israeli bombing during the July-August war showed high radiation levels, suggesting that uranium-based munitions had been used. Samples taken from two Israeli bomb craters in the Lebanese villages of Khiam and aL-Tiri have been sent to the Harwell laboratory in Oxfordshire, southern England, for further analysis.”

According to the International Middle East Media Center, the “damage caused by such weapons inflict vicious wounds, which will burst into flames when exposed to air, even after the initial infliction. The threat does not end there as the particles of uranium released from the weapon remain in the land and air causing cancer for years to come.” In addition, notes IMEMC, there is “suspicion that Israel is also using illegal weapons in Gaza, during its ‘Summer Rains Operation’; the injuries that are being sustained by the weapons being used, according to the Rafah hospitals’ Director, are injuries that must be inflicted by a new weapon as he has not seen injuries like this before. They leave the victims torn apart and covered in burns, he stated.” A recent Italian “television report aired last week made a similar claim, raising the possibility that Israel had used a weapon in the Gaza Strip in recent months, causing especially serious physical injuries, such as amputated limbs and severe burns,” reports WAFA, the Palestinian News Agency.

Of course, this is scantly mentioned in the corporate media. A Google News search returns exactly a dozen results on the news story, ranging from the Khaleej Times in the United Arab Emirates to the Jerusalem Post in Israel, but as usual the American media, beyond the alternative media, is completely ignoring the story, a natural occurrence as such brutal revelations would inspire people to ask their government why it is sending billions of dollars a year to a country that nukes its neighbor (and using uranium-based munitions is indeed nuclear war, even if the signature mushroom cloud is absent).

Even Yedioth Ahronoth, a major Hebrew language tabloid newspaper published in Israel, reported the accusation, while its American counterparts remained silent. “We know that they drenched southern Lebanon with cluster bombs in the last 72 hours of the war, leaving tens of thousands of bomblets which are still killing Lebanese civilians every week,” YNet, the internet version of Yedioth Ahronoth, reports, quoting the Independent. “And we now know—after it first categorically denied using such munitions—that the Israeli army also used phosphorous bombs, weapons which are supposed to be restricted under the third protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which neither Israel nor the United States have signed.”

“Israel has a poor reputation for telling the truth about its use of weapons in Lebanon. In 1982, it denied using phosphorous munitions on civilian areas - until journalists discovered dying and dead civilians whose wounds caught fire when exposed to air,” writes Robert Fisk. “I saw two dead babies who, when taken from a mortuary drawer in West Beirut during the Israeli siege of the city, suddenly burst back into flames. Israel officially denied using phosphorous again in Lebanon during the summer—except for “marking” targets—even after civilians were photographed in Lebanese hospitals with burn wounds consistent with phosphorous munitions.”

Fisk then relates the fact Israel has admitted using internationally banned weapons. “Then on Sunday, Israel suddenly admitted that it had not been telling the truth. Jacob Edery, the Israeli minister in charge of government-parliament relations, confirmed that phosphorous shells were used in direct attacks against Hizbollah, adding that ‘according to international law, the use of phosphorous munitions is authorized and the (Israeli) army keeps to the rules of international norms.’”

Next, Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, told the Independent, “Israel does not use any weaponry which is not authorized by international law or international conventions,” a response that prompted Fisk to write, “This, however, begs more questions than it answers. Much international law does not cover modern uranium weapons because they were not invented when humanitarian rules such as the Geneva Conventions were drawn up and because Western governments still refuse to believe that their use can cause long-term damage to the health of thousands of civilians living in the area of the explosions.”

As Fisk notes, the “American and British forces used hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) shells in Iraq in 199—their hardened penetrator warheads manufactured from the waste products of the nuclear industry—and five years later, a plague of cancers emerged across the south of Iraq.” In addition, the United States and NATO used DU in the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, resulting in “new forms of cancer.”

Thanks to this continued and persistent psychopathic insanity, according to Dr. James Howenstine, in “the year 2005 there were 175,000 new cases of lung cancer in the United States,” an increase that cannot be attributed to cigarette smoking or second-hand smoke. “Following exposure to radioactive iodine particulate debris in the air from shells and bombs, between 2 to 5 years of time is needed to lead to the appearance of malignancies. Our bombing of Afghanistan began in October 2001 (four and a half years ago) and the new bombing in Iraq began in March 2003 (exactly three years ago). Aerial bombs are more effective than artillery shells in increasing airborne radioiodine because they release more dust into the atmosphere.”

Howenstine believes this unprecedented release of uranium into the atmosphere is deliberate. “A frightening aspect of depleted uranium warfare is that there is no way to protect oneself from this hazard. Clothing and gas masks are easily penetrated. The key persons running the New World Order are brilliant planners. They would not want themselves to die from lung cancer along with the rest of humanity. My guess is they have discovered methods to protect themselves from developing lung cancer. Certainly one has to be impressed with how effectively David Rockefeller, Zignev Brezinski and Henry Kissinger appear to have managed to avoid the infirmities of aging at least to outward appearances.”

Regardless, Israel’s use of a possible new uranium bomb in Lebanon, and its use of mysterious weapons in the Occupied Territories, indicate the small outlaw state will go to new and frightening lengths to kill its enemies, who are mostly women, children, and non-combatant men.