US – Features

By Jonathan Cook

(source: Ma’an News Agency)

What is misleadingly being called in Israel the "Anat Kamm espionage affair" is quickly revealing the dark underbelly of a nation that has worshipped for decades at the altar of a security state.

Next week 23-year-old Kamm is due to stand trial for her life — or rather the state’s demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is charged with spying.

Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel’s security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too.

Read More »Dark underbelly of Isaraels security state

By Andrew Lee Butters

(source: Time.com)

The rocky red hills and dense oak forests of southern Lebanon near the Israeli border make perfect terrain for guerrilla warfare, as the Israeli army has repeatedly discovered to its chagrin. Whether or not the once and future war zone is an ideal location for a multi-million dollar tourist attraction is another matter. But that hasn’t stopped Hizballah, the anti-Israeli militant group and Shi’ite Muslim political party, from opening a war memorial this summer here in the southern hill town of Mleeta.

With a reported cost of about $20 million and a cryptic slogan ("Earth Speaks to Heaven"), Mleeta is the first stage of what Hizballah hopes will be a kind of family theme park of the Islamic Resistance that will eventually include spa hotels, a paint-ball gun battlefield, and a cable-car ride with a scenic view of northern Israel, or as the tour guides call it, "Occupied Palestine."

Mleeta is a full-frontal display of the Party of God’s legendary attention to detail, its willingness to sacrifice, and its glorification of combat. Visitors walk down "The Path" — a winding trail interspersed with mannequin-filled dioramas of combat scenes, including a field hospital and a camouflaged rocket launch site meant to convey the experience of being a mujaheddin. They duck their heads and enter "The Cave" — a once-secret bunker used as barracks for as many as 7,000 militants that engineers carved out of the hillside over a period of several years, scattering its debris for miles to avoid drawing the attention of Israeli reconnaissance planes. And they can gawk at "The Abyss," a pit filled with captured Israeli machine guns, rockets and tanks.

Read More »Lebanons hizballah museum a theme park for martyrdom