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Yom Kippur is devoted to atonement and forgiveness--or "conscience consciousness-raising," as I once heard a rabbi still recovering from the '70s phrase it. In itself, the purpose of the holiday needn't really affect day-to-day life, except that observance takes the form of a 25-hour fast and the total abstention from physical labor and the use of technology. Jews in the Diaspora spend most of Yom Kippur at home or in synagogue, where the absence of electricity hardly affects the greater gentile grids. But in Israel, which effectively shuts down for Yom Kippur, the contradiction between ancient religious tradition and modernity is brought into stark relief once a year, creating either a brief trance of neo-Luddite serenity or a sliver of Dark Age privation.

Decades ago, when Israel was still locked in an agrarian economy, this contradiction was inconspicuous. Today, the country's largest, fastest-growing industries are tech-related. Although children on bicycles and video-store patronage have long been staple examples of Yom Kippur apostasy, the advent of global media has forever altered the possibilities for transgression.

During the Days of Awe, the 10-day period between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, stores in Israel close early and radios broadcast liturgical music--all in rehearsal for the big blackout that occurs when God is said to seal the fate of each individual Jew for the coming year in the Book of Life. On the Day of Atonement, all Israeli radio and national television broadcasts are taken off the air, factories are closed, roads and highways are cleared of traffic, public transportation is halted, and all aircraft are grounded. Anwar Sadat made historic use of this short-term stasis in an otherwise dynamic society by choosing Oct. 6, 1973, as the date for Egypt and Syria's joint attack on Israel in what was soon branded the Yom Kippur War. (Some historians now argue that the timing was actually beneficial to Israel's ultimately victorious counter-response, as all roads were empty when Israel Defense Forces reservists were mobilized.) On the whole, religious and nonreligious Israelis alike observe the holiday in some fashion. According to a survey conducted in 2008 by the Panals Institute, 63 percent of Israeli Jews said that they'd fast on Yom Kippur even though the bulk of the population skirts the Sabbath the rest of the year. "One day totally free of car horns, telephone calls, email and polluted air," Joel Leyden of the Israel News Agency noted in 2006, capturing an ecumenical sentiment.

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One can measure the failures of the film American Beauty in so many ways, but perhaps the best is to realize that the screenwriter was so unsure of his audience's ability to spot a creep that he had to make Kevin Spacey's next-door neighbor not just a sadist and a closet case but also a collector of Nazi memorabilia. I bring this up because a fetish for the baubles of fascism is generally thought to be a good way of alienating civilized company. The auction house Christie's refuses to sell the stuff. And whatever the interpretative fallacies of the late Susan Sontag, she was surely onto something when she spotted the correlation between this form of "collecting" and pornography.

So when Human Rights Watch first learned that Marc Garlasco, its senior military analyst and a former Pentagon official, moonlights on the internet as "Flak 88," an obsessive buyer and chronicler of Nazi war paraphernalia, it might have understood right away that it had a public relations crisis on its hands. Instead, the NGO did what it always does when confronted with embarrassing questions about its personnel: it blamed supporters of Israel.

Charging that critics of HRW have accused Garlasco of being a Nazi or an anti-Semite, though failing to cite any of these critics by name, the statement HRW put out read: "This accusation is demonstrably false and fits into a campaign to deflect attention from Human Rights Watch's rigorous and detailed reporting on violations of international human rights and humanitarian law by the Israeli government. Garlasco has co-authored several of our reports on violations of the laws of war, including in Afghanistan, Georgia, and Iraq, as well as by Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah." Furthermore, HRW insisted, Garlasco "is the author of a monograph on the history of German Air Force and Army anti-aircraft medals and a contributor to websites that promote serious historical research into the Second World War (and which forbid hate speech)."

HRW's push-back was followed by Garlasco's own attempt at self-defense in the Huffington Post to depict himself as a serious military historian, an avocation he attributes to having had two relatives serve on either side during the war. Garlasco wrote as if he had no idea his behavior could bemuse or offend anybody, going so far as to suggest that his after-hours hobby bolsters his work as a professional military investigator and analyst. For that reason, he said, he has never hidden his side gig from anyone "because there's nothing shameful in it, however weird it might seem to those who aren't fascinated by military history."

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The name Joseph Wilson was already associated in the minds of political obsessives with unscrupulousness and flamboyance, albeit at the ambassadorial and central intelligence levels, but I doubt if the Congressman who is not Valerie Plame's husband could have anticipated the instant notoriety he's attained simply by calling the president of the United States a liar. A politician who accuses another politician of dishonesty is being heroic and hypocritical at the same time. I think I.F. Stone or Yogi Bear said that.

In Rep. Wilson's case, given his neo-Confederate affiliation, he's surely guilty of something else, too, but it's an outburst--barely audible on television though apparently loud enough make Nancy Pelosi look as if someone just took a sip of non--fair-trade coffee--that's said to be distracting us now from an important national "conversation" about healthcare. That such a conversation has seemed more a bipartisan séance of stupidity, led by mediums Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck, is beside the point.. The real health we should be worried about, says The Hill, is that of Rep. Wilson:

Wilson took caffeine pills in 2007

By Jordan Fabian - 09/10/09 06:21 PM ET

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), who shouted "you lie!" at President Obama during his Wednesday night address to Congress, admitted to regularly consuming caffeine pills in 2007.

It is unclear if Wilson still takes NoDoz, a brand of pill that contains 200 milligrams of caffeine a pop. By comparison, a seven ounce cup of drip coffee contains 115 to 175 milligrams of caffeine.

A source told The Hill in 2007 that the congressman ingested the tablets "like candy," but Wilson insisted he was not addicted despite the fact that he had been taking them since high school.

"I love coffee, but I don't have time to drink it and I don't have access to it," Wilson said at the time.

The fifth-term Republican said he shared his NoDoz use with his doctor, who Wilson said assured him that the over-the-counter pills are not dangerous unless you get addicted.

Wilson interrupted the president yesterday night after he said that his health reform plan will not insure illegal immigrants. He quickly apologized for his outburst last night but maintained that Obama was lying in a radio interview today.

So that explains it. The over-the-counter amphetamine of choice for delinquent thesis-writers is to blame for the kind of incivility that greeted Obama in his prime time explainer session on public options and death panels. What right-wing boor heckles a president during his own speech, anyway? Meanwhile, as Reason's Matt Welch helpfully points out, the American left seems to have forgotten that the man in charge is not above suspicion himself:

The lies last night began in Obama's opening paragraph. "When I spoke here last winter," he began, "credit was frozen. And our financial system was on the verge of collapse." In fact, Obama spoke on Feb. 24, at least six weeks after credit markets began to thaw, and one week after he proclaimed that the passage of his $787 billion stimulus marked "the beginning of the end, the beginning of what we need to do to create jobs for Americans." Obama's speech that day wasn't about staving off a collapse, it was about cleaning up the mess and tackling long-ignored issues. Such as health care.

It's never encouraging when a politician who desperately needs to convince skeptical Americans of his fiscal sobriety starts off by slurring his words. As you might then infer, Obama was just warming up. "Insurance companies," the president announced, "will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies," in part because such prevention "saves money." Looks like someone forgot to tell the Congressional Budget Office, or other non-White House sources that have analyzed the cost-benefit of prevention.

Again and again last night, the president's numbers didn't add up. "There may be those--particularly the young and healthy--who still want to take the risk and go without coverage," he warned, in a passage defending compulsory insurance. "The problem is, such irresponsible behavior costs all the rest of us money. If there are affordable options and people still don't sign up for health insurance, it means we pay for those people's expensive emergency room visits." No, it means that, on balance, the healthy young don't pay for the unhealthy old. The whole point of forcing vigorous youth to buy insurance is using their cash and good actuarials to bring down the costs of covering the less fortunate.

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Irving Howe observes in his memoir, Margin of Hope, that as a working-class first-generation Jewish immigrant to the Bronx, his imagination first caught fire when he discovered the works of Marx and Shelley. A sensible pairing, particularly for the founding father of Dissent magazine as well as one of the few New York intellectuals to begin an anti-Stalinist socialist and culminate an anti-Stalinist socialist.

Quite apart from their shared radicalism, Marx and Shelly also shared a fondness for the Promethean as well for employing other classical references to enliven modern plights. Both were moved to physical pains--in Marx's case, carbuncles, in Shelley's, the blows of Eton bullies-- for their art, for which they both have also suffered the enormous condescension of posterity. (Paul Johnson wrote a book about radical hypocrisy: chief on his list of hypocrises for Marx was raging against bourgeois philandering while helping himself to the help. And an old college professor of mine, breaking the strictures of classroom decorum, once did an impersonation of what the maudlin author of "Ode to the West Wind" must have sounded like in bed.) But most of all, they were both poets, after a fashion. Francis Wheen in his excellent "biography" of Das Kapital calls Marx the "poet of commodities," an assessment somewhat prefigured by Edmund Wilson who thought that the Gothic themes depicted in Marx's netherworld of capitalist accumulation were worthy of Dickens or Zola. The greybeard of the British Museum aimed at scientific "laws" to govern history and what he hit was literary paydirt instead. Dark Satanic mills had come before, but it took a rebellious Young Hegelian to peek inside them and canvas the millers about their daily bread.

One needn't be on the left to appreciate this curious hybridizing of roles. Today, the notion of the poet-politician, or the poet-revolutionary, is confined to Brooklyn food co-ops and the V-neck-and-Verlaine quadrants of MFA programs. If the masses prefer their politicians as anything other than lawyers, they prefer them as middling comedians like Al Franken, whose method of delivering a punch line is to kick you in the shin with one. Benjamin Disraeli, with his satirical social novels, may have been the closest we've come to seeing a man of letters earn a sizable reputation as a man of public policy, though when he attempted verse the campaign was usually a failure. And it pays notice that Disraeli took as both his boyhood and adulthood hero a scribbling predecessor in parliament fluent in his own species of Hebrew melodies--Lord Byron.

Harold Bloom has a nice review of Edna O'Brien's Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, in which he notes that the great poet's crest of celebrity began with his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812, denouncing the Tory government's Framework Bill. It demanded the gallows for the Luddite weavers of Nottingham who, as Bloom aptly phrases it, "had destroyed the machines replacing them." He continues:

"I have just read what appears to be the speech which lacks rhetorical confidence, but it made a considerable impression upon both Whigs and Tories. Like Shelley, Byron was a poet of the left, and revolution kindled his enthusiasm, but his concern for the people is suspect. He grimly exploited the angry workers in the Lancashire coal pits he owned, and expressed no guilt, since his rage for expense invariably exceeded his high revenues. Karl Marx, whose daughter translated Shelley, looked back at the self-destructive careers of both Promethean rebels and shrewdly concluded that Shelley the aristocrat always would have stood with the revolutionary left but that Byron, had he been able to bear survival into middle age (he proclaimed the best of life to be over at twenty-three), would have sided with his hereditary nobility against the lower orders."

That is a shrewd insight indeed, although Shelley, contra his conservative critics who uncover the germ of 20th-century totalitarianism in his woozy visions of utopia, would have been the first victim of any successful revolution to which he leant his bodily fervor (fortunately, there were none). It's impossible, for instance, to imagine Shelley as a functionary of some Committee on Public Safety, much less a purveyor of quest poems in a state where internal passports were necessary. He head never rolled because his heart, desiccated and pyre-scorched, had to be pressed into a book.

But Byron was the bard of ambivalence and confusion: a world-historical teenager. He was an erotic Calvinist, a subversive formalist, and an aspiring revolutionary happy with the luxuries and privileges afforded him by the ancien regime. This made him more a flaky fellow traveler than a committed radical, which was just as well because his genius lay in encompassing multitudes of emotion while not lending the outward impression that he was in any way contradicting himself. This is why Goethe remarked that when Byron thought, he became a child.

Though a very clever one, it must be admitted. He rather neatly fitted what Cyril Connolly once termed the mold of "permanent adolescence," a category Connolly had originally applied to the poets and writers of the 1930's who were just as engage--and sexually conflicted--as Byron. And as with Auden, Isherwood and Spender, there were small but unmistakable hints in Byron of a future reconciliation with the established order. He once wrote from Cambridge to Augusta Leigh, the half-sister with whom an incestuous affair would later be the cause of his exile from England, that he felt "as independent as a German Prince who coins his own Cash, or a Cherokee Chief who coins no Cash at all, but enjoys what is more precious, Liberty." This is the same way of saying that the master-slave dynamic was encoded in his DNA. And while reckless youth may have heightened these inner tensions, given Byron's sense of humor (dark and reactionary, like all good senses of humor), his zero tolerance for mawkishness or Gawd-'elp-us rusticity, and the fact that his first major poem was about the diminishing returns of depravity, it was only a matter of time before the master won out. Marx's daughter spotted Byron's incipient conservatism before Byron did.

Yet unlike Disraeli, the Tory who forestalled a revolution in England by passing legislation more progressive than what any Whig could contrive, Byron deplored the Ottoman Empire and gave his life to the cause of liberating Christian Greece from Islamic dominion. (If he wrote Orientalist poems like The Giaour, Disraeli embodied Orientalist myths about the nobility of the Semitic peoples, myths which led him to some black conclusions such as denying the Turkish slaughter of 12,000 Bulgarians in 1876 for fear of de-stabilizing Ottoman rule.) But even in his final act of self-sacrifice, occasioned as much by a desire for immortality as it was for Hellenic self-determination, Byron cut a figure more silly than heroic. O'Brien seems to imagine Gen. Petraeus fused with Dorian Grey when she notes that his war effort in Missolonghi

signaled escape from the demands and tedium of everyday life and was a metamorphosing from poet to soldier... He ordered scarlet uniforms with buttons, epaulettes and sashes and fearsome helmets with waving plumes, for his corps of three, Count Gamba, Edward Trelawny and himself. The helmets were modeled on those in Book IV of the Iliad.

Anticlimax stalks this passage as it did the life that inspired it. There are no immutable laws of history except the following: If Paris Hilton survives to 40, she'll look and sound like Lynne Cheney. Had malaria and malpractice not claimed the brightest star in the Romantic firmament at 32, he'd like have pitched farther to the right than his nemesis Wordsworth. And his legend would be only half as interesting.

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"I accept that this may seem an odd thing to wish for," writes Nick Cohen in the latest issue of Standpoint, somewhat inverting his own lede, "but what the world needs now is an uncompromisingly militant feminist movement." The feminism Cohen has in mind calls for a single law to which all citizens, whatever their religious or ethnic grouping, must adhere. It roundly forbids murdering a woman for being raped or lashing her for being seen in the company of a married man. This would have been an elementary component of any "wave" of feminism in decades past, but today, alas, it's a radical proposition.

The occasion for Cohen's vigorously argued polemic is the nasty reaction Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom's new book, Does God Hate Women?, received in the liberal British press. Though Cohen doesn't explicitly say so, his point is clear: had the authors confined themselves to thundering against the male-oriented perfidies of the Judeo-Christian tradition, they'd have likely been left alone, or praised for their contribution to the conventional wisdom. Any schoolboy can mouth a few platitudes about patriarchy, glass ceilings and the contemporary uses of the word "bitch." Should the root of this ancient problem be discovered in either Testament, well, that schoolboy will have probably discovered it without ever reading the relevant texts. Such is the nature of opinions in the age of open-mindedness.

But how dare two white-skinned Western atheists presume to condemn the Prophet Muhammed for keeping a 9 year-old bride and a slave-girl concubine, and how dare they insist that the God of Islam is a "God of playground bullies, a God of rapists, of gangs, of pimps"? Don't they know, reply their critics, no doubt looking over their shoulders for incinerated embassies and imminent loudmouthed "rage boys," that investigating the history of the fastest-growing monotheism can get you killed? Don't they know that it can get us all killed? Here's Cohen:

The response of the Sunday Times to Does God Hate Women? was truly sinister. "An academic book about religious attitudes to women is to be published this week," the paper reported, "despite concerns it could cause a backlash among Muslims because it criticises the prophet Muhammad for taking a nine-year-old girl as his third wife. Such assertions could invoke the ire of some Muslims."

No irate Muslim had contacted the reporter to warn of a "backlash". She had not seen threats against Benson and Stangroom in online chatrooms. The Sunday Times invented a scandal where none existed and was unconcerned that it might provoke attacks on the authors. In a dismal sign of our nervous times, their panicked publisher responded by calling in an "ecumenical adviser", to assess whether the book's launch should go ahead.

This is the first capitulation to theocracy on secular shores. Cowardice gets dressed up as cultural sensitivity; an eagerness to please semi-literate reactionaries becomes a form of willing internal exile, whereby independence of one's own mind is held in suspicion, if not thought to be lethal in itself. The author of that Sunday Times squib likely doesn't think it's wrong or immoral to point out certain unpleasant facts about a religion; but her children might because the predominant ethos--from Yale University Press to the newsstands of Borders--has made it all but impossible for such facts to see the light of day.

Spinoza's signet ring read Caute--"Cautiously"--and, with rare exception, he never took to provoking a medieval mob for provocation's sake. Still, such self-restraint didn't prohibit the marrano genius of Amsterdam from publishing what he really thought about God, nature and democracy. Imagine a world without The Ethics and you have what every catchpenny bien-pensant hack nowadays would call I'm-okay-you're-okay bliss.

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When Colonel Muamar Qaddafi announced his plan to spend the better part of this month's forthcoming U.N. General Assembly meeting at an estate owned by his regime in Englewood, New Jersey, anyone familiar with that tony enclave might have predicted what followed. That the "mad dog" of the Middle East, who, upon seizing power in Libya in a 1969 military coup, confiscated all Jewish property (or what remained of it after decades of Italian fascism), canceled all Jewish debts, and outlawed all Jewish emigration would seek to literally pitch a tent in a U.S. suburb with a high Orthodox population-well, that's just too easy for area newspapers. But that Qaddafi should have sought to install his Bedouin bower between a yeshiva and the private residence of Rabbi Shmuely Boteach, Oprah's favorite pop Talmudist and host of the radio program "Shalom in the Home," seems a challenge that might bedevil the inspired headline-writers at the New York Post. (Boteach, who's greatest fear is failing to have an opinion about something tangentially Jewish, at first consenting to his temporary next door neighbor, before a chorus of indignation was raised by Sen. Frank Lautenberg and other New Jersey officials.)

Indeed, a strong odor of absurdity--the East-meets-West Point wardrobe, the Gene Simmons haircut, the harem of nubile bodyguards--has always surrounded Qaddafi even as he's engaged in acts of dictatorial malice. The latest of these was his warm reception of Abdel Baset al Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of carrying out the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people after it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. A "hero's welcome," as most journalists have perfunctorily described Megrahi's homecoming, this event could never have been because Qaddafi himself has more or less confessed to Megrahi's villainy. In 2003, Libya submitted a letter--still on file at the United National headquarters in New York--accepting responsibility for its officials in relation to the Lockerbie mass murder and vowing not to support or "acquiesce" to further acts of international terrorism. Qaddafi even agreed to pay the victims' families $2.7 billion, or up to $10 million each, in reparations money. His goal was to end UN sanctions against Libya, though even cynicism cannot be overshadowed by what Richard Marquise, a 31-year FBI veteran who headed the US task force assigned to investigate Lockerbie, recently told the Jerusalem Post: "I have to think [Qaddafi] knew something was going to happen, something that the US would be pissed about, and he said OK."

Megrahi had been incarcerated in Scotland since his conviction in 2003, and he was to stay there to complete the remainder of his 27-year sentence until Kenny MacAskill, the tender-headed Scottish justice secretary, pleaded compassion for a man afflicted with terminal prostate cancer. As reported by Scotland's daily newspaper The Herald, Qaddafi's own son and heir, Saif, indicated that the timing was more than fortuitous: Libya had been negotiating a trade and energy deal with Britain at the same time the two countries began conferencing about a "prisoner transfer program," which might otherwise be described as "blood for oil" were that phrase so out of vogue. Though the younger Qaddafi claims no direct quid pro quo arrangement in Megrahi's release, the reader is invited to consider the chronology and logic of the following:

"For the last seven to eight years we have been trying very hard to transfer Mr Megrahi to Libya to serve his sentence here, and we have tried many times in the past to sign the PTA (prisoner transfer agreement) without mentioning Mr Megrahi, but it was obvious we were targeting Mr Megrahi and the PTA was on the table all the time.

"It was part of the bargaining deal with the UK. When Tony Blair came here we signed the agreement. It is not a secret. But I want to be very clear to your readers that we didn't mention Mr Megrahi. People should not get angry because we were talking about commerce or oil. We signed an oil deal at the same time. The commerce and politics and deals were all with the PTA."

If that doesn't give you some indication as to Saif's troubled role as spokesman for his government, then consider that this bumbling scion also told Megrahi on his flight home, in front of media cameras, that his release was "on the table" whenever oil and gas deals were discussed. These are plausible claims that have so embarrassed the already anemic administration of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown that he has tried shunt all responsibility for this scandal onto Scotland, a country that is still part of the United Kingdom and exercises limited self-government. (It taxes the imagination of most Britons to think that had London exerted even the slightest pressure on Edinburgh to stop the transfer of such a high-profile criminal it would have failed to do so.)

Brown's case is looking increasingly weak. On September 1 there emerged a letter that was written in 2008 by Britain's own Justice Secretary Jack Straw to Alex Salmond, Scotland's first minister, and read in part, "Developing a strong relationship with Libya, and helping it reintegrate into the international community, is good for the U.K." Straw also argued that it was in the U.K.'s "overwhelming interest" to include Megrahi in any prisoner transfer agreement. Exports from Britain to Libya are up 50% this year, and Whitehall would not disclose the name of the state official it sent to the weeklong Libyan saturnalia celebrating Qaddafi's 40th year in power--the longest reign of any African strongman. In attendance will be Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for his orchestration of genocide in Darfur. The only EU official to RSVP is Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, who has found time away from his mistresses to break ground on an Italian-Libyan mega-highway.

Meanwhile, as Bernard Henry Levi has written, for Qaddafi to praise his "friend" Gordon Brown and categorize this abortion of justice as recompense for the Crusades is to summon the feeling that a thug and buffoon who has overstayed his welcome as an enemy of the West is "spitting on Winston Churchill and the heroes of the Battle of Britain."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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Despite losing last June in Lebanon's parliamentary election, Hezbollah, the Shiite Islamist political party and paramilitary organization controlled by Iran and Syria, is once more in a position of political and military power greater than the one it occupied in 2006 when it provoked the Second Lebanon War with Israel. In July, a Hezbollah weapons depot exploded 10 miles north of the Lebanon-Israel border, causing the U.N. Security Council to accuse Hezbollah of violating the terms of the 2006 cease-fire. Two weeks ago, Israeli President Shimon Peres told a Kuwaiti newspaper that Hezbollah possessed 80,000 rockets for future use against Israel. For its part, Hezbollah has been especially voluble about retaliating for Israel's 2008 killing of its military mastermind Imad Moughniyeh, and Hezbollah spokesman, Sayyed Hashim Safieddin, told Reuters recently that his group would make the Second Lebanon War seem like a "joke" if a third were initiated. The war of words has escalated to upper echelons of the Lebanese government, with Foreign Minister Fawzi Sallouk, widely seen to be allied with Hezbollah, telling Beiruit's Daily Star that there will be "neither direct nor indirect negotiations with Israel." Even the newly elected Prime Minister Saad Hariri, whose March 14 Alliance roundly defeated Hezbollah in June's election, informed guests at his Beirut home few weeks ago that Hezbollah will for sure be welcomed into the new government whether the "enemy" Israel likes it or not.

According to Eyal Zisser, a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, any possible sequel to 2006's Israel-Lebanon War would be "ten times worse." This is due, he and other experts agree, to three factors: Hezbollah's re-amped military capability, its top-down infiltration of Lebanon's political system, and Israel's adoption, since the end of the last war, of the so-called Dahiya Doctrine, which stipulates that Israel now makes no distinction between terrorist or paramilitary groups and state government in the event that the former is in any way represented in the latter. "What Israel is doing now," said Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Center for the Defense of Democracies, "is trying to remind everybody, 'If you start a war, this time we'll destroy the place.'" Indeed, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "If Hezbollah joins the Lebanese government as an official entity, let it be clear that the Lebanese government, as far as we are concerned, is responsible for any attack--any attack--from its area on the state of Israel. It cannot hide and say: 'It's Hezbollah, we don't control them.'"

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