Talks and rants

The AFP news agency reports on the progress of talks between the opposition and government in Doha, Qatar:

Bickering Lebanese politicians postponed the thorny issue of Hezbollah's weapons on Saturday at talks in Qatar aimed at ending a feud that drove their country to the brink of a new civil war.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem bin Jabr al-Thani "offered to come up with a proposal on the Hezbollah weaponry issue and present it to the two parties," a Lebanese delegate told AFP.

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Meanwhile Melanie Phillips of The Spectator is spitting blood over the loss of her "democratic Lebanon" (not sure if she's ever been here). Reading this gibberish gives you a flavour of the kind of stuff pumped out by Hariri's Future TV...

Here's a taste:

"What coverage there has been has presented this development as yet another round in the schismatic internal politics of Lebanon and of scant concern to us. On the contrary: it is a major development in the war being waged against the free world.

"Hezbollah is the irregular army of Iran and the means by which Iran intends to turn Lebanon into its proxy, pin Israel down from multiple belligerent fronts as a prelude to its annihilation, impose its domination of the region and thus win its war against the west.

"What is surely undeniable is the imperative need to defeat Hezbollah, and that America and Britain will either help bring that about — or will help strengthen it instead through continuing to pursue their lethally misguided strategy of appeasing Syria and Iran."

Phillips then quotes lots of Zionists and their allies to warn us that what happened in Lebanon was like "Spain in 1936".

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Luckily Robert Fisk is at hand. Although Fisk had been swayed by the so-called Cedar revolution (it wasn't a revolution and there where no cedars), he still manages to keep his wits about him. He writes in The Independent:

I opened my newspaper and what did I read?

That George Bush declared in Jerusalem that "al-Qa'ida, Hizbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause".

Where does the madness end? Where do words lose their meaning? Al-Qa'ida is not being defeated. Hizbollah has just won a domestic war in Lebanon, as total as Hamas's war in Gaza. Afghanistan and Iraq and Lebanon and Gaza are hell disasters — I need no apology to quote Churchill's description of 1948 Palestine yet again — and this foolish, stupid, vicious man is lying to the world yet again.