Washington Post: Muslim morons in Lebanon sent rockets to Israel but they "failed to even enter Israeli territory". The stupid, it burns.

                      A Gaza building erupts in flames after an Israeli airstrike Tuesday. 
 

Rocket fire from Lebanon joins ongoing Israel, Hamas battles

The projectiles failed to even enter Israeli territory, and Israeli artillery immediately responded, but it raises the specter of a new front opening in the conflict.

By Michael E. Miller ●  Read more »

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This is from The Times of Israel.

Six rockets were fired from Lebanon toward Israel late Monday, but they apparently fell short of the border fence. The military said it responded with artillery fire.

The rockets triggered warning sirens in some communities near the border. The army later ordered communities within four kilometers (2.5 miles) of the northern border to open bomb shelters.

There were no injuries reported.

A Lebanese military source confirmed to AFP that several Grad-type rockets had been fired from the Shebaa Farms area in southern Lebanon toward Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces believed that a small Palestinian faction — not the Hezbollah terror group — was responsible for the attack, military spokesperson Hidai Zilberman said on Tuesday morning.

More problems in Beirut, Lebanon. Nobody cares.

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World Alert Sept. 10, 7:42 a.m. EDT Fire breaks out at Beirut port, stoking panic across traumatized capital The source of the fire at a warehouse storing oil and tires was not yet known. Read more

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New York Times

BREAKING NEWS

A large fire erupted in Beirut’s port. It was near the site of an explosion last month that devastated entire neighborhoods in the Lebanese capital.

Thursday, September 10, 2020 7:41 AM EST

Videos taken at the scene showed flames engulfing an already damaged warehouse in the port and a thick plume of smoke rising from the area. The extent and cause of the fire were not immediately clear, but the Lebanese Army said in a statement that it began at a warehouse where oil and tires were stored.

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Something going on in Lebanon.

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World Alert Aug. 4, 11:51 a.m. EDT At least one major explosion shakes central Beirut, badly damaging buildings and knocking pedestrians to the ground Television footage showed thick smoke billowing over the city. The cause was not immediately clear. Read more

Morons love their dead Magic Jeebus Man. The stupid, it burns.

THE MAGIC JEEBUS MAN

Bsharri, a mountain hamlet in Lebanon, is known for its beauty.

The coronavirus pandemic has put the town on lockdown, after 24 cases were reported in 24 hours. With about 70 cases, Bsharri virus patients make up around 10 percent of the country's total cases.

The Washington Post

Sickness amid the cedars

The Lebanese were watching for the virus. But the outbreak in this secluded and stunningly beautiful place was not what they’d expected.

By Sarah Dadouch

APRIL 27, 2020

BSHARRI, Lebanon — When Lebanon reported its first coronavirus infection in February, the case was a woman who had come from the Muslim holy city of Qom in Iran, which was rapidly becoming the epicenter of the epidemic in the Middle East.

Iran has long been a factor in Lebanon’s highly sectarian politics, and many Lebanese were quick to cast blame on Iran and local Shiite Muslims for Lebanon’s widening outbreak. Avoid Shiite villages and areas, some urged.

So when, weeks later, it emerged that the largest cluster of coronavirus cases in the country was actually in the insular Christian hamlet of Bsharri in the mountains above Beirut, the irony was not lost on many in Lebanon. Bsharri is known for its devout Maronite Christian inhabitants and as a bastion of right-wing Christian militiamen during the country’s long civil war.

Bsharri is also famous for being beautiful. It is widely celebrated for its cedar trees, some of the oldest in the world — called the “Cedars of God” — and the national emblem of Lebanon. Below the town’s newly inaugurated government hospital perched atop a hill extends a lush valley. Streams, waterfalls and water springs abound, filling the silence with a permanent gurgling. Mountains, both green and snow-capped, encircle the town, giving an impression of nature-mandated isolation.

Today, however, the isolation is government imposed. Bsharri is the only town in Lebanon to have been placed under complete quarantine, after 24 cases of the coronavirus were recorded in a 24-hour period early this month. About 70 of the town’s 5,500 residents have now contracted the virus, around 10 percent of all the cases in the country.

[Stirrings of unrest around the world could portend turmoil as economies collapse]

The government has closed off the surrounding Bsharri district, which includes 22 towns and villages, allowing only supplies and police and other official personnel in and out. The emptied streets in the picturesque town look like an abandoned Hollywood set.

Residents are not permitted out of their homes except individually to go shopping. A rotation has been set for restaurants so one is open each day to feed hospital staff and policemen. Policemen are stationed outside markets to limit crowding. “You either wear the mask or quit,” one growled at a grocer.

A sectarian struggle

Lebanon continues to struggle with the religious differences that have long divided it, at times violently, and religious affiliations that define so much of the country’s politics.

The mountains extending north of the capital Beirut are mainly populated by Christians, while the northernmost part of the country is majority Sunni Muslim. Shiites dominate in the south and the northeast of the country and are the base of support for the militant Hezbollah group, backed by Iran.

Top political posts are assigned based on religion, and sectarianism plays a role in the access to public goods and services and availability of jobs, which are becoming ever scarcer as the country struggles with its worst economic crisis in a generation.

Though some Lebanese protested that the coronavirus has no sect, it was perhaps no surprise that the outbreak would also be widely viewed through a sectarian lens, especially given the size of the epidemic in Iran.

“It is as if what Iran already bestows upon Lebanon and the Lebanese isn’t enough,” a newscaster sarcastically began his news segment after Lebanon reported its first case of the virus. “So now it has sent us corona to finish its good deeds. Thank you, Iran.”

Hezbollah’s television channel responded, calling the sectarian attacks “an amoral pandemic that is also difficult to cure.”

When the Hezbollah-aligned health minister recommended isolating two predominantly Christian areas, a member of parliament from one of the areas angrily tweeted, asking the minister to explain rumors about a hospital in a Shiite part of Beirut instead of “deeming our area infested.”

Hezbollah’s response to the uproar was swift, dispatching trucks to spray its areas with disinfectant and enlisting volunteers to stand outside villages, taking temperatures. “The battle against the corona pandemic is a human battle, and does not have a religious, political, or racial affiliation,” said Hezbollah’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, in a speech.

These steps contained the spread of the epidemic in Shiite areas, while public health measures elsewhere in the country were less aggressive.

[As men wage bloody battle for Syrian province, women sew face masks to fight the next threat]

“The direct political pressure was ugly, because they only shed the spotlight on those coming from Iran,” said a senior doctor at one of the country’s leading hospitals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “But in other communities, because those coming from Italy and Egypt and the United Kingdom were not treated with the same scientific approach … what happened, happened.”

The result is reflected in a map issued by the health ministry depicting the spread of the virus across the country. The majority-Christian areas north of Beirut are colored in various shades of blues indicating higher case numbers.

Life under quarantine

The first two confirmed cases in Bsharri were doctors in the town’s hospital, according to Mayor Freddy Kairouz, but no one’s saying where they caught the virus.

Antoine Geagea, the hospital’s chief executive, says health authorities have a pretty good idea who imported it into Bsharri but wouldn’t disclose the individual’s identity, saying it could expose that person to retribution or ridicule.

As news of the Bsharri outbreak spread, the government announced the new containment measures. Food parcels were sent to those in need. Bsharri natives residing elsewhere donated money for virus tests, and district officials began conducting rapid random testing.

“We took the decision to attack the virus,” Kairouz said. “We decided to shut down the area and do mass tests.” He added that more than 11 percent of residents have been tested so far and this wide net may help explain why so many cases have been detected locally.

The decision to shut the town during Easter was not an easy one.

“It’s annoying, and it’s boring,” said Amal Geagea, a sprightly resident. She still sees her son, who lives down the street, but not her daughter, who lives elsewhere in the district. Her only excursion out is to the grocery store.

“I haven’t left the house in two, three weeks; I came out today to get some bread,” said Therese al-Khoury, 76, while shopping for her canned tuna dinner. “I only leave when it’s necessary.”

Police have been posted at checkpoints outside the district’s population centers to curtail travel.

During a recent visit by Washington Post journalists, a police officer forced one driver to retreat. “He wanted to go on a joyride with his friend. Can you imagine the audacity?” the officer said, shaking his head.

[Lebanon is in a big mess. But on coronavirus, it’s doing something right.]

A little earlier, the town’s silence had been broken as an ambulance raced through the streets, pulling up at a hospital directly across from the childhood home of Lebanese writer Gibran Khalil Gibran. An old man was taken in on a stretcher, one of two new cases that day.

Father Charbel Makhlouf has been live-streaming sermons to his parish via Facebook. “It’s a spiritual meeting: You are doing a new strong test [to your faith].” His voice echoed in his large, beautiful church, completely empty. Outside, a recently printed sign: “Please keep a meter and a half between the believers.”

Makhlouf has found strength in a bible passage he sends every morning to his bible study group via messaging app WhatsApp. “Whenever I hold back the rain or send locusts to eat up the crops or send an epidemic on my people,” he read from a worn piece of paper, “if they pray to me and repent and turn away from the evil they have been doing, then I will hear them in heaven, forgive their sins, and make their land prosperous again.”

Others in town are also turning to their faith.

“We’re at the edge of the world, and God is protecting us,” said a local butcher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he also works as a police officer. But when he thought about the economic crisis that could follow the epidemic, he turned glum.

“After corona, we’ll have famine,” he said.

The Middle East has always been totally fucked up and the problems are getting worse. It's all thanks to religion. Religion is bullshit and it destroys everything. This New York Times article is interesting whether or not you agree with it.

Opinion

One Thing Trump Gets Right

Israel’s settlements are not the principal obstacle to peace with the Palestinians.

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist

November 21, 2019

In this week’s Mideast news, the Iranian regime has reportedly killed more than 100 of its own people as it attempts to suppress another wave of nationwide demonstrations. The Islamic State is taking advantage of Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria to regroup. Governments in Lebanon and Iraq remain paralyzed by popular discontent. And Israel has struck dozens of targets near Damascus after intercepting Iranian rockets fired from Syria.

Into this thicket of trouble, Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that the State Department would reverse a 41-year-old legal opinion claiming that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were inconsistent with international law. The decision has garnered outsized attention, as if it’s another gratuitous Trumpian obstacle on the road to peace.

It’s not. To paraphrase Ariana Grande, we have one less problem without it.

I rarely have anything positive to say about Donald Trump’s foreign policy, and his overall approach to the Middle East is damaging and potentially disastrous for the United States and Israel alike. America cannot turn its back on the region, as Trump would like to do, and imagine the Middle East will return the favor. And Israel will not be safe in an America First world in which allies like the Kurds are cavalierly betrayed and enemies like Iran are only haphazardly confronted.

But let me give the administration some credit: When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least it isn’t stuck in a time warp, hanging on to hoary shibboleths.

Among those shibboleths: That the conflict can be solved by returning to the status quo ante 1967, or at least an approximation of it. That peace between Israel and the Arab states hinges on delivering a Palestinian state. And that settlement construction is the principal obstacle to peace.

This is all nonsense. The pan-Arab campaign to “liberate” Palestine began two decades before Israel controlled an inch of Gaza or the West Bank. Resolving the territorial dispute arising from the 1967 war does nothing to solve the existential issues arising from Israel’s creation in 1948. Relations with much of the Arab world have flourished in recent years, not on account of any progress on the Palestinian front, but because Arab states see Israel as a capable ally against an imperialist Iran.

As for settlements, Israel withdrew all of its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. The result was more war, not less. What began as a moment of hope rapidly descended into a Palestinian civil war. That was followed by a Hamas victory, three major wars, and innumerable bloody skirmishes. Now we have an endless limbo in which Israelis live under constant threat, Gazans chafe under a remorseless tyranny, and groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad somehow have the means to acquire and fire hundreds of rockets at Israeli civilian targets.

Whatever else one might say about the administration, at least it understands that it would be worse than useless to demand that Israelis repeat the experiment on a much larger scale. Reversing a legally shaky opinion that does little more than drive American policy down a familiar cul-de-sac advances nobody’s interests, including those of the Palestinians.

I say “legally shaky” because it was never clear just whose territory Israel supposedly occupied when it wrested the West Bank from Jordanian control in a defensive war: Jordan’s claims to the area weren’t internationally recognized, either.

The more important point is that no progress can be made by repeatedly exhuming an increasingly distant past. As a matter of principle, Israel needs a two-state solution because it should not indefinitely rule (even indirectly) people who do not wish to be ruled by Israel. As a matter of survival, Israel also requires that a Palestinian state have neither the ambition nor the means to devote itself to Israel’s ultimate destruction.

The core problem with the past half-century of failed peacemaking efforts has been the facile assumption that meeting the need for two states would ultimately fulfill the requirement for security. The lesson of experience has been the opposite. The failure of Palestinians and their international enablers to satisfy that requirement — or even feign concern for it — has only made the need seem like little more than a remote abstraction to most Israelis.

This presents its own dangers. Having a right to build settlements is one thing. Having the right and exercising it wisely are separate things. A wise Israel needs to understand that it will have to compromise with the Palestinians at some point, in conditions that make compromise possible.

Opposition leader Benny Gantz, who on Wednesday failed to assemble a ruling coalition, gets this. Benjamin Netanyahu, who lately has promised to annex parts of the West Bank, does not. We’re a long way from knowing which of them will become prime minister.

In the meantime, the administration’s ruling on settlements cleans out some of the cobwebs under which thinking about the conflict has moldered. Good. Peace, if it comes, will not be the result of a diplomatic solution, much less as part of a legal argument over the Geneva Convention. It will happen as a cultural evolution, in which a new generation of Palestinian leaders dedicate themselves to building up the institutions of a decent state rather than attacking those of their neighbor; and in which Israelis have the wisdom to wait for those leaders, if necessary for decades.

Bret L. Stephens has been an Opinion columnist with The Times since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at The Wall Street Journal in 2013 and was previously editor in chief of The Jerusalem Post. Facebook

Muslim morons are stupid fucking assholes.

Wall Street Journal

On Saturday, Mr. Trump suspended talks between the U.S. and the Taliban in Qatar and said a previously undisclosed peace summit at Camp David was canceled, a move welcomed by Afghan officials.

Mr. Trump cited a car-bomb attack in the east of the Afghan capital Thursday that killed 12 people, including a Romanian and a U.S. soldier, and wounded dozens, for which the Taliban claimed responsibility. This year, 15 other U.S. service members have been killed in Afghanistan.

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Today is September 9, 2019. Two days from now it will be September 11, 2019, exactly 18 years since cowardly Muslim assholes murdered 3,000 Americans in one day (September 11, 2001).

The fucktards came here from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, and Egypt, but they all worked for fucktard Osama bin Laden who was from Saudi Arabia but lived in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan so we went there to kill people, especially the Taliban. We found Osama and we killed him. After that did we leave? Of course not. We are still there after 18 years of wasting a few thousand American lives and about one trillion dollars.

Trump wanted to put an end to this bullshit so we have been talking to the Taliban about getting out of there. Unfortunately, during the talks, the Taliban kept blowing themselves up to kill women and children. It's what they do. Like most Muslims, the Taliban like to blow themselves up.

So now it looks like we will never get out of there. And if we do leave then the Taliban will kill the government and make all the women wear black tents.

I suggest, who cares. Fuck Afganistan. It's a shithole country, not worth dying for.

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Wikipedia

The hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men affiliated with al-Qaeda. 15 of the 19 were citizens of Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one was from Egypt.[1] The hijackers were organized into four teams, each led by a pilot-trained hijacker with three or four "muscle hijackers," who were trained to help subdue the pilots, passengers, and crew.

The first hijackers to arrive in the United States were Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who settled in San Diego County, California, in January 2000. They were followed by three hijacker-pilots, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah in mid-2000 to undertake flight training in South Florida. The fourth hijacker-pilot, Hani Hanjour, arrived in San Diego in December 2000. The rest of the "muscle hijackers" arrived in early- and mid-2001.

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This thing is easy to fix. Just don't let any more Muslim assholes enter this country. No exceptions. If you're a Muslim fucktard then you can't get in. If you're an ex-Muslim you are welcome to come here.

This was Trump's idea and it's one of the reasons he got the president job despite his breathtaking stupidity. Most Americans, unless they are liberal fucktards, do not want any Muslims in this country. Muslims are scum. If they had any sense of decency they would have thrown out Islam a long time ago.

Since the 9/11 genocide, Muslims have been blowing themselves up every fucking day. Enough is enough. If you're a Muslim moron, get out of my country.