Israel says world backs offensive

Is the prospect of losing it's campaign against Hizbullah driving certain Israeli's insane? Because Justice Minister Haim Ramon has started to sound like a raving loon.

He claims that the failure of the Rome Conference to call for a ceasefire means that, in actual fact, it gave "a green light" for Israel to continue and implied that the whole world backed the Israeli operation.

Speaking on Israeli army radio, Mr Ramon - a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - said "everyone understands that a victory for Hezbollah is a victory for world terror".

If the US and UK represent the entire world then he might have a point, but it still strikes me as worrying that he seems not even to hear the condemnation that should surely be ringing in his ears by now.

Nor do his future plans sound as if they are going to endear the world to Israel's tactics either. He outlined them in the same interview.

He said that in order to prevent casualties among Israeli soldiers battling Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon, villages should be flattened by the Israeli air force before ground troops moved in.

He added that Israel had given the civilians of southern Lebanon ample time to quit the area and therefore anyone still remaining there could be considered a Hezbollah supporter.

"All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah," Mr Ramon said.

This is disgraceful talk and the US and UK governments should be ashamed of themselves for ever allowing this to take place. For their hands are covered in blood as they are, despite what Mr Ramon claims, the only two countries who are not screaming for a ceasefire.

Yet Ramon seems to be revelling in the fact that they are being allowed to continue this carnage.

As the inimitable Mark Steel put it in yesterday's Independent:

Convoys of civilians, families on beaches, Red Cross trucks carrying the wounded; the Israelis must see it as a party game, where they think of the most indefensible thing to bomb - and then bomb it. Today it will probably be a care home for sick rabbits. Then a defence spokesman will glare into the camera and say, "But this is the fault of Hizbollah, for using the rabbits as shields of fur. You tell me how we are supposed to distinguish between civilian rabbits and terrorist rabbits. Let me show you evidence of terrorists being hidden in safe hutches."

Normally even America would have told Israel at least to keep the noise down a bit. But with George Bush, Israel must feel like a gangster's wife when the old man's in an especially generous mood, winking at her and saying, "Go on, treat yourself. Bomb yourself somewhere nice, doll. Get yourself down to Beirut, you kill as many as you like sweetheart, you deserve it."

And presiding over all of this carnage sits Bush in the White House, the first American President ever to not even pretend that the US is a neutral in this issue, waving his Israeli flag and calling for more death and destruction.

And after Israel's attacks on a UN observation post, which killed four UN observers - after the UN had contacted the Irsaeli's TEN TIMES to ask that they stop shelling them - Australia has withdrawn 12 UN peace-keepers, describing the prospect of sending an international force to Lebanon right now as a "suicide mission".

Bush meanwhile asks for another beer before the second half begins.

It's no wonder that Haim Ramon sounds slightly unhinged, he simply can't believe there's anyone in the White House mad enough to let this carnage continue.

It's enough to drive anyone nuts.

Tags: Olmert, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Hizbullah, capture, kidnap, Lebanon, Syria, Iran,