And it came to pass after these

things, that God did tempt Abraham,

and said unto him, Abraham:

and he said, Behold, here I am.

Ands he said, Take now thy son,

thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest,

and get thee into the land of Mo-ri-ah;

and offer him there for a burnt

offering upon one of the mountains

which I will tell thee of.

And Abraham rose up early in the

morning, and saddled his ass, and took

two of his young men with him, and

Isaac his son, and clave the wood for

the burnt offering, and rose up, and

went unto the place of which God had

told him.

Then on the third day Abraham

lifted up his eyes, and saw the place

afar off.

And Abraham said unto his young

men, Abide ye here with the ass; and

I and the lad will go yonder and worship,

and come again to you.

And Abraham took the wood of

the burnt offering, and laid it upon

Isaac his son; and he took the fire in

his hand, and a knife; and they went

both of them together.

And Isaac spake unto Abraham

his father, and said, My father: and he

said, Here am I, my son. And he said,

Behold the fire and the wood: but

where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

And Abraham said, My son, God

will provide himself a lamb for a burnt

offering: so they went both of them

together.

And they came to the place which

God had told him of; and Abraham

built an alter there, and laid the wood

in order, and bound Isaac his son, and

laid him on the altar upon the wood.

And Abraham stretched forth

his hand, and took the knife to slay

his son.

And the angel of the Lord called

unto him out of heaven, and said,

Abraham, Abraham: and he said,

Here am I.

And he said, Lay not thine hand

upon the lad, neither do thou any

thing unto him: for now I know that

thou fearest God, seeing thou has not

withheld thy son, thine only son from

me.

And Abraham lifted up his eyes,

and looked, l and behold behind him a

ram caught in the thicket by his horns:

and Abraham went and took the ram,

and offered him up for a burnt offering

in the stead of his son.

And Abraham called the name

of that Place Je-ho-vah-ji-reh: as it is

said to this day, In the mount of the

Lord it shall be seen.

And the angel of the Lord called

unto Abraham out of heaven the

second time,

And said, By myself have I

sworn, saith the Lord, for because

thou hast done this thing, and hast not

withheld thy son, thine only son:

That in blessing I will bless thee,

and in multiplying I will multiply thy

seed as the stars of the heaven, and as

the sand which is upon the sea shore;

and they seed shall posses the gate of

his enemies;

And in thy seed shall all the nations

of the earth be blessed; because

thou hast obeyed my voice.

And it shall be, when the Lord

they God shall have brought thee into

the land which he sware unto thy

fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and

to Jacob, to give thee great and

goodly cities, which thou buildedest

not,

And houses full of all good things,

which thou filledst not, and wells

gigged, which thou diggedst not, vineyards

and olive trees, which thou

plantedst not; when thou shalt have

eaten and be full;

Then beware lest thou forget the

Lord, which brought thee forth out of

the land of Egypt, from the house of

bondage.

Thou shalt fear the Lord thy

God, and serve him, and shalt swear

by his name.

Ye shall not go after other gods,

of the gods of the people which are

round about you;

(For the Lord they God is a jealous

God among you) lest the anger of

the Lord thy God be kindled against

thee, and destroy thee from off the

face of the earth.

When the Lord thy God shall

bring thee into the land whither

thou goest to possess it, and hath cast

out many nations before thee, the Hittites,

and the Gir-ga-shites, and the

Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the

Per-iz-zites, and the Hi-vites, and the

Jeb-u-sites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;

And when the Lord thy God shall

deliver them before thee; thou shalt

smite them, and utterly destroy them;

thou shalt make no covenant with

them, nor shew mercy unto them:

Neither shalt thou make marriages

with them;thy daughter thou

shalt not give unto his son, nor his

daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

For they will turn away thy son

from following me, that they may

serve other gods: so will the anger of

the Lord be kindled against you, and

destroy thee suddenly.

But thus shall ye deal with them;

ye shall destroy their altars, and break

down their images, and cut down their

groves, and burn their graven images

with fire.

For thou art an holy people unto

the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God

hath chosen thee to be a special people

unto himself, above all people that are

upon the face of the earth.

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful. . .

As for the unbelievers, the fire of Hell awaits them. Death shall not deliver them,

nor shall its torments be ever lightened for them. They shall the thankless be rewarded.

There they will cry out: "Lord, remove us hence! We will live a good life and will not

do as we have done." But He will answer: "Did We not make your lives long enough

for any one who would be warned to take warning? Besides, Our apostle did come to

you; taste then the torment of Hell. None shall help the wrongdoers."

Allah knows the mysteries of heaven and earth. He knows the hidden thoughts of men.

It is He who has given you the earth to inherit. He that denies Him shall bear the burden

of his unbelief. In denying Him the unbelievers earn nothing but odium in the sight of Allah;

their unbelief gets them nothing but perdition.

In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful. . .

Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal sternly with them. Hell

shall be their home, evil their fate.

Allah has set an example to the unbelievers in the wife of Noah and the wife of Lot. They

were married to two of Our righteous servants and deceived them. Their husbands could

not protect them from Allah. The angels said to them: "Enter the Fire, together with those

that shall enter it."

But to the faithful Allah has set an example in Pharaoh's wife, who said: "Lord, build be a

house with You in Paradise and deliver me from Pharaoh and his misdeeds. Deliver me from

a wicked nation."

                          PARADISE LOST

 

                         Farewell happy fields

Where joy for ever dwells: hail horrors, hail

Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell

Receive thy new possessor: one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n.

What matter where, if I be still the same,

And what I should be, all but less than he

Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least

We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition though in hell:

Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n.

But wherefore let we then our faithful friends,

Th' associates and copartners of our loss

Lie thus astonished on th' oblivious pool,

And call them not to share with us their part

In this unhappy mansion, or once more

With rallied arms to try what may be yet

Regained in heav'n, or what more lost in hell?

A.
from Edward Herman :
Subject: hebron-day-06
21 November 2006


Francis,
My apologies for the gruesomeness of this mailing, but I send along only a tiny fraction of the gruesome flowing through the web, most of it much more
painful than the item here. We are dealing with a terror state out-of-control, or rather failing to deal with it.
Ed

Swedish Human Rights Worker Viciously Attacked by Jewish Extremists in Hebron 

http://www.palsolidarity.org/2006/11/18/hebron-day-06

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/11/18/hebron-day-06/
 

_____________
B.
from Francis Feeley :
22 November 2006
The Socialist Worker

The Roots of Israel's Violence
by Tony Cliff

[THE ISRAELI state is engaged in brutal violence against the Palestinian population and has killed hundreds of Palestinians over the past few months. In 1982 revolutionary socialist Tony Cliff, who died a year ago this month, wrote this explanation of why Israel acts in this way. He was writing just after Israel had invaded Lebanon and carried out massacres of both Lebanese and refugee Palestinians.]


L OOKING BACK on my own experience in Palestine I can see how today’s horror grew from small beginnings. Zionism, Jewish separateness and the belief in a Jewish homeland, have developed into state violence. My parents were pioneering Zionists, leaving Russia for Palestine in 1902 to join a total Zionist population of a few thousand.

I grew up a Zionist, but Zionism didn’t have the ugly face we see today. However, there was always a fundamental crack between the Zionists and the Arabs. This same crack split Zionists from ordinary people in their countries of origin.

If you look to 19th century Russia it’s clear. In 1891 Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. The next year Russia’s extreme right organised a pogrom against the Jews. “Kill a Jew and save Russia,” they said. Socialists reacted by calling for unity in fighting Tsarism and the right. But there was a second reaction-Zionism. The Zionists argued, “Jews can’t rely on anyone but ourselves,” and the first of them left Russia for Palestine. Each further pogrom produced the same two reactions. Some joined the general revolutionary movement – others chose separation.

When the Zionists came to Palestine they continued to emphasiwe their separateness. Zionists took over Arab land, often evicting the occupiers. And the Zionists systematically discriminated against the thousands of Arab unemployed. Although Arabs were at least 80 percent of the population, not one came to my school.

My parents were extreme Zionists, and my father told me, “The only way to look at an Arab is through the sight of a gun.” I never shared a house with an Arab.

THE ZIONISTS organized their own trade union, the Histadrut, which raised two political funds. One was called “the defence of Hebrew Labour”, the other “the defence of Hebrew products”. These funds were used to organize pickets to prevent Arabs working in Jewish enterprises and to stop Arab produce coming into Jewish markets. They did nothing to damage Zionist businesses.

In 1944 we lived near Tel Aviv market. One morning my wife saw a young man go around talking to all the women selling produce. Some he left alone, but others had paraffin poured on the vegetables and their eggs smashed. My wife, who had just come from South Africa, couldn’t believe it. “What's going on?” she asked.

It was simple. The man checked if the produce was Hebrew or Arab, and destroyed Arab produce. Now, this behaviour was still on a small scale and some Zionists were still talking like left wingers. Zionist publishers printed Lenin and Trotsky, for example.

But the antagonism to the Arabs remained central. No Arab ever entered the kibbutz movement, the so called “socialist” collective farms. The majority of Jewish-owned land belonged to the Jewish National Fund, whose constitution forbade Arab tenants. This meant in whole areas the original Arab populations were driven out.

When I left Palestine in 1946 Tel Aviv, a city of 300,000, had absolutely no Arab residents. Imagine arriving in Nottingham, a similar sized town to Tel Aviv, and finding no English people.

There was obviously enmity between the Zionists and the Arabs. The Zionists – a minority not trusting the majority – needed support and always looked to the imperialist powers that controlled Palestine for help. This was low key at first. Zionist leaders repeatedly told German rulers it would be in their interests if Zionism flourished in Palestine.

When Britain occupied Palestine in 1917, the Zionist leaders wrote to the Tory foreign minister Balfour explaining it was in Britain’s interests to have a strong Zionist presence in Palestine. And during the Second World War, as it became clear America was the main imperialist power, particularly in the Middle East, Zionist leaders switched their focus to Washington.

The Zionists, if not for sale, were always for hire. The logic of Zionism, separatism from the Gentile population, whether in Russia, Poland or Palestine, led to this dependence on imperialism. Nazism and its rise were important. German big business didn’t support Hitler from fear of the Jews, but from fear of the German working class. Both the Jews and German workers were Hitler’s victims.

The key for revolutionary socialists should have been organizing working class struggle against the Nazis. The Zionist objected. “The Jews are Hitler’s victims,” they said, and by implication all Germans are enemies of the Jews.

When the German workers were defeated in 1933 without a mass struggle against Hitler, Zionism was immensely strengthened. Once a movement has a certain momentum it can’t be stopped unless there is a new movement on a much bigger scale. If the Jews couldn’t trust the Germans, it was natural for them to see a strong Zionist state as the only answer

Back in Palestine Zionist outrages were developing. The state of Israel, declared in 1948, was accomplished by a terror campaign which drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes. The state was born with the “limited” massacre of 240 civilians in the village of Deir Yassin.

Men, women and children were slaughtered, some thrown alive down the village well. It was a place I knew well, just a few miles from my home. The Arabs aren’t the only ones to pay since then. Israel’s constant search for allies has made it increasingly a supplier of military equipment to the world's most reactionary regimes.

Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister, spent two months in South Vietnam in 1966 advising the American puppet government. Israel supplied arms to Chile, to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, and to all the countries upon which US president Carter placed an arms embargo for human rights violations.

Israel’s security police advised the Shah of Iran, while its scientists developed nuclear weapons with South Africa. Some people argue oppression always leads to progress. The Jews were horribly oppressed but it didn’t guarantee they became progressive or revolutionary. Indeed, oppression associated with lack of power leads to reaction. When the core of Zionism meant separation from all progressive forces, from the revolutionary forces in Russia to the anti-imperialist forces in the Middle East, the rest of the tale followed naturally.

Now Israel is collaborating with the Phalangists in Lebanon, an openly fascist organization. I’m not surprised. I remember the 1930s when Begin’s (now Israel’s prime minister) organization, the Irgun, used the Hitler salute and wore the brown shirts.

In 1935 I would never have believed Zionists would murder civilians – they discriminated against the Arabs, that’s all. But in today’s harsh world any crack expands and the crack of Jewish separateness leads to the horrors we’ve seen in Lebanon. Those monstrosities are the logic of Zionism. Indeed, I fear we’ll see much worse from the Zionists in the future.


The workers have a solution
THE ARAB working class is the only power in the Middle East which can stop Zionism and smash imperialism. The existing state can’t do it. The king of Saudi Arabia collaborates completely with America because of oil interests.

The Assad regime in Syria is corrupt and unstable, depending on Saudi Arabian subsidies, while the Egyptian regime rests on millions of impoverished workers and peasants. Millions of workers live in shanty towns and millions of peasants suffer terrible diseases because they lack even basic amenities of sanitation and fresh water.

These regimes can’t fight anything – let alone Zionism and imperialism. The Palestine Liberation Organisation depends on Saudi Arabian money and Syria for physical survival. All the bravery of the PLO guerillas can only lead to an impasse. Arab workers are the key. The Egyptian working class is at least the size of Russia’s working class in 1917. These workers have the power to change the Middle East.


___________________
C.
from Fred Méni :
22 November 2006
Euro-Palestine

L’ESCALADE DE LA VIOLENCE ORGANISÉE PAR ISRAEL SE POURSUIT
SANS QUE NOS GOUVERNANTS N’INTERVIENNENT

http://www.europalestine.com/article.php3?id_article=2381

_________________
D.
from Democracy Now :
22 November 2006
The Seattle PI

Rumsfeld and a mountain of misery
by Amy Goodman

Frederick Douglass, the renowned abolitionist, began life as a slave on Maryland's Eastern Shore. When his owner had trouble with the young, unruly slave, Douglass was sent to Edward Covey, a notorious "slave breaker." Covey's plantation, where physical and psychological torture were standard, was called Mount Misery. Douglass eventually fought back, escaped to the North and went on to change the world. Today Mount Misery is owned by Donald Rumsfeld, the outgoing secretary of defense.

It is ironic that this notorious plantation run by a practiced torturer would now be owned by Rumsfeld, himself accused as the man principally responsible for the U.S. military's program of torture and detention.

Rumsfeld was recently named along with 11 other high-ranking U.S. officials in a criminal complaint filed in Germany by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. The center is requesting that the German government conduct an investigation and ultimately a criminal prosecution of Rumsfeld and company. CCR President Michael Ratner says U.S. policy authorizing "harsh interrogation techniques" is in fact a torture program that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorized himself, passed down through the chain of command and was implemented by one of the other defendants, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller.

The complaint represents victims of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, the U.S. prison at Guantanamo. Says Ratner, "I think it is important to make it very clear that CCR's suit is not just saying Rumsfeld is a war criminal because he tops the chain of command, but that he personally played a central role in one of the worst interrogations at Gitmo."

Ratner is referring to Saudi citizen Mohammed al-Qahtani. An internal military report as well as leaked interrogation logs show how the Guantanamo prisoner was systematically tortured.

His attorney, CCR's Gita Gutierrez, described his ordeal on my TV/radio news hour Democracy Now!: "He was subjected to approximately 160 days of isolation, 48 days of sleep deprivation, which was accompanied by 20 hourlong interrogations consecutively. During that period of time, he was also subjected to sexual humiliation, euphemistically called 'invasion of space by a female' at times when MPs would hold him down on the floor and female interrogators would straddle him and molest him."

Gutierrez added, "At one point in Guantanamo, his heart rate dropped so low that he was at risk of dying and was rushed to the military hospital there and revived, then sent back to interrogations the following day and was actually interrogated in the ambulance on the way back to his cell."

The complaint follows one filed in 2004, which was dismissed. The 2006 complaint differs principally with Rumsfeld's departure as secretary of defense. Without the immunity of government office shielding him, Rumsfeld now falls under the jurisdiction of the German courts. Germany is among several nations that employ the concept of universal jurisdiction, which states that crimes against humanity or war crimes can be prosecuted by a state (such as Germany) regardless of the jurisdiction where the crimes were committed or the nationality of the accused. If an indictment follows, then Rumsfeld will have to be very careful when traveling abroad, as are former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Torture is a noxious, heinous practice and should not be tolerated. Slavery was once legal and tolerated in the U.S. (it is still practiced in some parts of the world). But people fought back, organized and formed the abolition movement. Pioneering legal and human-rights organizations, such as CCR, aggressively and creatively are working to stop torture, and to hold the torturers and their superiors accountable. Ultimately, it will be the U.S. populace -- not the German courts, not the U.S. Congress -- that stops the U.S. torture program. Frederick Douglass summed it up most eloquently -- in 1849:

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

The owner of Mount Misery should take heed.

_____________
Amy Goodman hosts the radio news program "Democracy Now!" Distributed by King Features Syndicate.


______________
E
from Gabriel Kolko :
25 August 2006
Japanese Focus

The Great Equalizer. Lessons From Iraq and Lebanon
by Gabriel Kolko

The United States had a monopoly of nuclear weaponry only a few years before other nations challenged it, but from 1949 until roughly the 1990s deterrence theory worked­nations knew that if they used the awesome bomb they were likely to be devastated in the riposte. Despite such examples of brinkmanship as the Cuban missile crisis and numerous threats of nuclear annihilation against non-nuclear powers, by and large the few nations that possessed the bomb concluded that nuclear war was not worth its horrendous risks. Today, by contrast, weapons of mass destruction or precision and power are within the capacity of dozens of nations either to produce or purchase. With the multiplicity of weapons now available, deterrence theory is increasingly irrelevant and the equations of military power that existed in the period after World War Two no longer hold.

____________
Gabriel Kolko is the leading historian of modern warfare. His latest book is The Age of War. He wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted at Japan Focus on August 25, 2006; updated September 9, 2006.


________________
F.
from Robert Fisk :
22 November 2006
The Independent

Civil war In Lebanon

by Robert Fisk in Beirut

Civil war - the words on all our lips yesterday. Pierre Gemayel's murder - in broad daylight, in a Christian suburb of Beirut, his car blocked mafia-style by another vehicle while his killer fired through the driver's window into the head of Lebanon's minister of industry - was a message for all of us who live in this tragic land.

For days, we had been debating whether it was time for another political murder to ratchet up the sectarian tensions now that the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora was about to fall. For days now, the political language of Lebanon had been incendiary, the threats and bullying of the political leaders ever more fearsome. Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Shia Hizbollah leader, had been calling Siniora's cabinet illegitimate. "The government of Feltman," he was calling it - Jeffrey Feltman is the US ambassador to Lebanon - while the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt was claiming Iran was trying to take over.

Yesterday's assassination of Pierre Gemayel was a warning. It might have been Jumblatt, who has told me many times that he constantly awaits his own death, or it might have been Siniora himself, the little economist and friend of the also murdered former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

But no. Gemayel, son of ex-president Amin Gemayel and nephew of the murdered president-elect, Bashir Gemayel - murder tends to run in the family in Lebanon - was no charismatic figure, just a hard-working unmarried Christian Maronite minister whose unrewarding task had been to call émigré Lebanese home to rebuild their country after Israel's bloody bombardment.

The fires burnt in the streets of Christian east Beirut last night and there were hundreds of young and occasionally armed young men in the neighbourhood of Jdeideh, where Gemayel was killed. "I want no revenge," his father Amin pleaded in front of the hospital where his body lay. But violence crackles through the air in a city where four anti-Syrian politicians and journalists have been assassinated in 21 months.

Gemayel, too, was a harsh critic of Syria, which was one reason why Hariri's son Saad - leader of the March 14th movement which controls parliament - blamed Damascus for his death.

Yet nothing happens by accident in Lebanon and political detectives - as opposed to the police kind who most assuredly will not find Gemayel's killers - have to look beyond this country's frontiers to understand why ghosts may soon climb out of the mass graves of the civil war.

Why did Gemayel die just hours after Syria announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Iraq after a quarter of a century? Why has Nasrallah threatened street demonstrations in Beirut to bring down the government when Siniora's cabinet had just accepted the UN's tribunal to try Hariri's assassins?

And why did America's UN ambassador, John Bolton, weep crocodile tears for Lebanon's democracy - which he cared so little about when Israel smashed into Lebanon this summer - without mentioning Syria?

All this, of course, takes place as thousands of Western troops pour into Lebanon to shore up the UN force in the south of the country: UN troops who are supposed to protect Israel (which they cannot do) and disarm Hizbollah (which they will not do) and who are already being threatened by al-Qa'ida.

No wonder the Europeans, whose armoured Nato forces now lie trapped in the south of the country, are so fearful. No wonder the Foreign Office has been telling Britons to stay away. No wonder Tony Blair - as discredited in the Middle East as he is in Britain - has been demanding an inquiry into Gemayel's assassination, something he will not get.

Hypocrisy isn't the word for it, though recent history provides all the clues. When Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers and killed three on 12 July, Israel bombed Lebanon for 34 days, slaughtered more than a thousand civilians and caused billions of dollars of damage. It blamed Siniora's government and Mr Bolton and his fellow American diplomats did nothing to help the hapless prime minister. President George Bush wanted Israel to destroy Hizbollah - which they totally failed to do - as a warning to his latest Middle East target, which just happens to be Hizbollah's principal supporter, Iran. So much for Lebanese democracy. Even Mr Blair, so anxious about Lebanon yesterday, saw no reason for an immediate ceasefire.

In the aftermath of the war and the failure of all Israel's war aims, Sayed Nasrallah began to boast that he had won a "divine victory" and that Siniora's government had failed. Hizbollah, of course, is also Syria's friend and no one was surprised that the anti-Syrian government came under the lash of the Shia prelate whose giant billboard posters across Lebanon suggest he is suffering the cult of personality.

Twelve days ago, all six Shia ministers left the cabinet, leaving the largest religious sect in Lebanon unrepresented in government. Last Monday, Siniora's government - Gemayel included - approved the UN's plans for a tribunal to try Hariri's killers, whom most Lebanese suspect were working for the Syrians. But without the presence of the Shia, their decision may have no legal status. Nasrallah began to call for street demonstrations.

If he is the creature of Syria and Iran - and the Lebanese are still debating this while Nasrallah denies it - there could have been no better way of striking at Lebanon's anti-Syrian government. "We can have no confidence in this government because it obeys the orders of the US administration," Nasrallah announced. "... the cabinet has received an order from the US embassy assuring them that American policy in the region has not changed. The Americans told them: 'We are with you - don't give up!'"

Nasrallah chided those who claimed he was trying to create a crisis between Shia and Sunni Muslims, although many fear that their own religious divisions reflect, in faint and phantom form, the blood-drenched sectarianism of Iraq.

And does America really support Siniora, whose cabinet may now be in its death throes? At the UN, Mr Bolton loudly supported it yesterday while desperately avoiding the use of the word Syria. That almost certainly means Washington does at last realise that it will need the help of Damascus - as well as Tehran - to pull its tanks and troops out of the slough of Iraq.

Beside America's catastrophe in Mesopotamia, the democracy of Lebanon and Siniora's government doesn't amount to the proverbial hill of beans - as Syria and Iran are well aware. And Syria, yesterday, resumed diplomatic relations with the American-supported government of Iraq.

Today, Lebanon celebrates - it would be difficult to find a more lugubrious word on such an occasion - its 63rd year of independence from France, whose troops again patrol southern Lebanon. And Siniora's government still - just - exists. With Gemayel gone, however, it would only need the loss of two more cabinet ministers to destroy the legitimacy of his Shia-less cabinet and close down Lebanese democracy.

The Lebanese may be too mature for another civil war. But ministers might be well advised to avoid driving their ministerial cars along the highways of Beirut for the next few days lest someone blocks their way and fires through the driver's window.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited