"It has been found in India that when a hunter pickets a goat on a plain as a bait, a tiger has whipped it off so quickly by a stroke of his paw that it was impossible to take aim. To obviate this difficulty a small pit is dug, in the bottom of which the goat is picketed, with a small stone tied in its ear to make it cry the whole night. When the suspicious tiger sees the appearance of a trap he walks round and round the pit, thus giving the hunter in ambush a fair shot." - Hunting the Lions by R.M. Ballantyne

The lie becomes truth in Orwell’s 1984 and today as Israel continues to proclaim its victim status, a falsehood supported by all but eight members of the US Congress, the US Secretary of State, the mainstream US media and the White House, with 21st century US military technology and full financial and diplomatic support Israel rains bombs down on the people and infrastructure of Lebanon.

The ruse of pointing to the iniquity of their opponents is an old, well practiced excuse for the planned invasion. Hamas and Hizbullah occupy no moral high ground. However, the notion that Israel is acting only in response to Hizbullah’s “provocation” disguises Israel’s “tethered goat” strategy. The first “tethered goat” was the bombing and murder of Palestinian civilians, one bait among many that Hamas could not resist. The Hamas reaction provided political cover for Israel to re-invade Gaza and the West Bank, kidnapping members of the Palestinian government. This bait was too tantalizing for Hizbullah, and their bite, the abduction of two Israeli soldiers and the firing of kaytusha rockets into northern Israel, brought Israel’s apocalyptic and supposedly justified “response,” indiscriminately bombing Beirut (although apparently there are no vital targets for Israel among the wealthy Saudi enclaves along Beirut’s gold coast) and south Lebanon, populated primarily by Shia Muslims.

Lebanon’s destruction is a bloody bait for Syria to the west, who knows it is next in the Israeli line of fire, and ultimately for Iran, who Israel will not broke as a competing military or political power. The US / Israel / UK axis could not obtain the censure and isolation of Iran they sought through diplomatic means, and the current series of invasions, from Gaza to Lebanon, are simply next phases in obtaining these goals through aggression and war that were not possible through negotiation. Israel proceeds with US funding and weaponry, without hindrance, behind the mask of victim hood and the all purpose accusation of terrorism.

The goals of Israel and the US include resource control, the fresh water aquifers under the Palestinian territories, the rivers north in Lebanon, and first and foremost the control of the oil resources that provide fuel for the world’s economy. However, the engine driving Israel’s expansionist policies under the Likud are the exceptionalist religious beliefs that find apex in the Jewish settlers and extremist Zionism, woven throughout Israel’s foreign and domestic policies. Many of their opponents throughout the Middle East brandish a similar set of irrational principles that are expressed politically and militarily but are maintained and popularized through religious fervor that supposes hatred to be theology and glorifies suicidal death and murder as martyrdom. The third leg of this corruption are the christian fundamentalists in the US who put Bush in office who include the rapturist creed among their many hateful beliefs of a vengeful almighty who favors the demise of the Earth and everyone on it except them.

The innocent people of Lebanon, Palestine and Israel are hostage to these regressive creeds and the barbaric violence they are spawning, most of which within the fortresses of power are for resource control, but all of which are supported by the myopic bipolar language that has become the shorthand defense for the American Israeli military hegemony and their Islamic counterparts, a world of black and white, us and them, of might makes right, of Satan lurking here, there and everywhere evil masked as good. How any of this corresponds in the slightest to the teachings of Jesus or Mohammed is beyond belief, and equally absurd that these actions have any meaningful reference to freedom and democracy, the trump cards of the junior high President and his sole remaining ally, Britain.

Stafford went on to write: “It is corrupting to deal with such reality. Those who deal with current events are damaged as human beings.” Stafford was writing this during Gulf War I, and looking over the photographs of Lebanon in the Daily Star or reading Dahr Jamail’s commentary from within the war zone, one can only feel the sickness of the soul Stafford warned imminent, but there is also a path of wholeness that speaks truth to the lie and contradicts the hypocrisy of this murderous direction.

The biggest lie of all is that we are powerless, that this stream of events is all simply the result of hundreds if not thousands of years of animosity, poor genetics, “other” people who can’t seem to reason or value life the way “we” do, and worst of all, the sacrilege of calling the ongoing murder and destruction “God’s” plan. The same sermon has been repeated for the longest time, by clergy and politician alike, leaving the reclamation / salvation business to our elected or anointed representatives. George Bush doesn’t have the moral depth or intellectual acuity to sustain a reasoned path within the current strife he in large part has ignorantly or perhaps deliberately engineered. However, human intelligence and good heartedness are in abundance, despite the bad press, and I simply don’t accept the lie that there’s nothing that can be done.

We owe our witness to the people whose voices have been lost in the chaos, and we owe it to our own inner life, to augment and further what is creative and productive in the midst of these dark times, the “spiral down” as Stafford put it. “The best way to fight evil is to make energetic progress in the good” as the ancient Chinese Oracle once intoned, and a fine example is Evo Morales taking the lead in integrity for his country and leaders throughout the world, promoting justice through voluntary simplicity.

We each have our part and place in this divine world, and as my Irish brothers and sisters learned long ago, Nill illigitimi carborundum – don’t let the bastards grind you down.

And yet though we strain

against the deadening grip

of daily necessity.

I sense there is the mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?

Is it the things themselves,

or something waiting inside them,

like an unplayed melody in a flute?

- Rilke, Book of Hours