Israel is destroying Tyre, one of the oldest cities in the world, for no reason
On Jewish exceptionalism.
During their reign in Afghanistan through the mid 1990s and early 2000s, the Taliban embarked on a sacrilegious mission. In the Bamiyan province of central Afghanistan stood two huge sculptures of the Buddha (known as the Bamiyan Buddhas), one slightly smaller than the other. The likeness of the Buddha were carved at the opposite ends of a mountain sometime in the 6th century CE, making them a UNESCO World Heritage Site that should have been protected simply for the preservation of history even if they didn’t have any religious significance. But the fact that the statues obviously had religious significance, their protection was even more important. However, the Taliban were in no mood to let the two idols stand. They destroyed the two sculptures in 2001, inviting international condemnation.
Here a brief history of the Taliban is in order to put things in context. The Mujahidin of Afghanistan (many of whom would later form Al-Qaeda in the late 1980s and the Taliban in the early 1990s) were created, funded, aided, and abetted by the United States since the late 1970s — as part of the CIA’s most expensive and largest covert operation known as the Operation Cyclone — to weaken the leftist hold on the Afghan government and goad the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan as a way to bleed it into dissolution. The Soviets took the bait. They invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and got caught in a quagmire that they had no chance of escaping unscathed. The United States achieved its objective in 1991 as the humongous Soviet Union gave way to 15 independent states.
In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and the brains behind the creation and funding of the Afghanistan Mujahidin, spilled the beans:
According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
As the United States propped up the Afghan militants, its leaders were invited to the White House multiple times to show how much the American government stood behind their resistance against the Soviet incursion. “I expressed our nation’s continued strong support for the resistance,” Reagan declared from a lectern at a press conference in November 1987, as members of the said resistance sat to his right. “You are a nation of heroes,” concluded Reagan nodding towards the Afghan delegation.
That was by no means the first or the last time the Afghan militants were invited to the imperial capital. The Reagan Library channel on YouTube has a video from June 16, 1986, titled, “President Reagan Meeting with Freedom Fighters from Afghanistan (Mujahedin)…” There’s also the famous photo of Reagan meeting a bunch of Afghan leaders in the White house in 1983. Eqbal Ahmad (1933-99), a towering Pakistani-American academic and intellectual of his time, recollected one such meeting between the Afghans and Reagan: “President Reagan received them in the White House; after receiving them he spoke to the press, and he pointed towards them… and said these are the moral equivalents of America’s Founding Fathers. These were the Afghan Mujahidin.”
These “moral equivalents of America’s Founding Fathers” became disposable once they outlasted their usefulness for the United States. The most egregious of their sins was the shunning of American imperial interests in a pipeline deal that traversed Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and pursuing their sovereign interests with a non-American client. For the Taliban’s unforgivable sin, Afghanistan was invaded in 2001 (under the pretext of being the hideout of Osama Bin Laden). The illegal invasion would plunge an already poor country into internecine warfare for the next two decades. It brought untold suffering to the 43 million Afghans, millions of whom became refugees in neighbouring Pakistan and India. The country is still grappling with the aftermath of wholesale destruction wrought by the US and its client states.
Back to the Buddhas of Bamiyan. In 2001, as Afghanistan reeled under crushing US sanctions, Western NGOs expressed interest in renovating the two Buddhas. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the ruling Taliban, was so enraged by these offers to renovate the stone structures as his people struggled for food, that he ordered their destruction. He said in a 2004 interview:
I did not want to destroy the Bamiyan Buddha. In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamiyan Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. This shocked me. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings — the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. This was extremely deplorable. That is why I ordered its destruction. Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddha’s destruction.
Of course, his indignation doesn’t justify the destruction of a world heritage and religious site. Nevertheless, Wikipedia, another imperial propaganda tool, tells unsuspecting readers that the structures were destroyed because of the Taliban’s iconoclasm.
The world was outraged at the Taliban’s act. National governments issued condemnations. The Dalai Lama was “deeply concerned”, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church called it “barbarism”, and a G8 statement termed it a “deeply tragic decision.” According to one Taliban minister, UNESCO sent 36 letters imploring them to abstain from destroying the structures.
The Lebanese city of Tyre, known in Arabic as Sour, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with a history that dates back to thousands of years. It was one of the oldest Phoenician cities and a birthplace to many legendary figures of antiquity. Dido, the founder of Carthage, one of the most historic of ancient cities, was born in Tyre. More importantly, Europa, the consort of Zeus after whom the continent of Europe is named, was born in Tyre. It is also home to the historic Tyre Hippodrome (nearly two millennia old). Due to the cultural significance of the city, UNESCO declared Tyre a World Heritage Site, a distinction that accords it legal protection.
However, none of it matters to the Israeli barbarians.
They have been bombing it incessantly for over a month for literally no reason other than to cause wanton destruction. Videos of Tyre’s destruction have flooded social media, documenting how its historic structures have collapsed under the incendiary firepower of the American-supplied Israeli bombs.
The Israeli savages have destroyed residential areas (just like they have done in Gaza):
Decimated civilian homes (just like they have done in Gaza):
Created crater-sized holes in the historic city (just like they have done in Gaza):
Destroyed centuries-old churches (just like they have done in Gaza):
And destroyed centuries-old mosques (just like they have done in Gaza):
The fighting on the Lebanese front is concentrated on the border areas between Lebanon and Israel where the Israelis are taking casualties by the dozens every single day. However, instead of finding a way to beat the Hezbollah defences and march forward to achieve their war objectives, the Israelis have chosen to destroy historic cities and civilian infrastructure.
Tyre lies around 20 kilometres north of the Israeli border. After more than a month into their ground invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis are yet to take control of even one Lebanese village on their immediate border. In such a scenario, the bombing of Tyre signifies nothing but the Israeli lust for sheer destruction of Arab lands and lives.
The idyllic city on the Mediterranean Sea has largely been deserted with most of its 60,000 residents evacuating to safer locations, but it has made no impact on the Israelis and their North American and European backers. Many states in the supposedly cultured Europe are directly facilitating the destruction of a city that birthed the goddess after whom their continent is named. Now that it has been firmly established that the West doesn’t care an iota for Arab lives, as the quarter million dead Palestinians and nearly 3,000 dead Lebanese over the past year testify, it is also becoming increasingly clear that it will sacrifice even culturally significant landmarks to facilitate the genocidal Israeli project in the Middle East, as long as it is the Jewish state doing it.
None of the Israel-funding Western states have raised so much as an eyebrow as the Israelis have dropped thousand-pound bombs on the historic Tyre. No words of condemnation have been forthcoming from the cultural institutions of the West. UNESCO hasn’t bothered to issue even a statement denouncing the Israelis, let alone send 36 letters as it did to the Taliban.
The only way to understand the West’s, especially Europe’s, complete silence on the wanton destruction of a historic city (to say nothing of its murderous rampage) is what I have started calling Jewish exceptionalism. No rules apply to the Jewish forces. They are exempted from the laws and expected norms of behaviour that govern the rest of the world. The self-proclaimed Jewish state can kill, destroy, and desecrate whoever and whatever they want and they will never be censured. Instead of condemnation, excuses will be made in their defence, justifying their acts, as the US State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller did when he declared that “Israel has a right to try and target those civilians.” Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock similarly declared that killing civilians is kosher for the Jewish state.
This Jewish exceptionalism has already annihilated Gaza and is fast paving the way for Lebanon’s destruction. Lisa Johnson, the US ambassador to Lebanon, is still busy convincing the Lebanese political leadership to prepare for a “post-Hezbollah” phase instead of reining in the genocidal Israelis, knocking some sense into them, and asking them to treat the non-Jews in their neighbourhood (and elsewhere) as fellow human beings instead of labelling them as “Amalek” and “human animals”, who have no right to food, water, electricity, and life.
The Arabs of West Asia are on their own. No one in the supposedly civilised West and its so-called international institutions is coming to their defence. With all other avenues exhausted, it has become increasingly clear that the only way for the Arabs to get the rabid dog, which has been biting them relentlessly for nearly a century, off their backs is to put it down for good by force.
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Palestine notes: How Europe projected its unique antisemitism disease on the Middle East
Palestine notes is inspired by the Pass notes in the British imperialist propaganda rag, also known as the Guardian.
This is breaking my heart. I've walked in Tyre. I've walked in Baalbek. These are places full of magic, and they're being destroyed by people with no sense of history or culture. That goes for Biden and his team as well. In WW2, even as the Americans were burning down Japan, some general or admiral said 'not Kyoto.' So 50 years later I was able to walk in that magic. Not anymore, not in these sacred places in Lebanon.
Tyre. It was an island before Alexander the Great built a causeway out to it so his army could sack it. Ironically, it was the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon who supplied the cedars to build Solomon's Temple, and now those who would rebuild it destroy Tyre simply because they can.