Gadhafi: Crackdown on Libya revolt is like Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza
Speaking to France 24, long-time Libyan Leader says estimated figures of rebel, civilian casualties are exaggerated, adding that at most ’150 to 200 people were killed.’
By Haaretz Service Tags: Israel news Libya Hamas Gaza
Long-time Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi said Monday in an interview with TV network France 24 that his violent crackdown on opposition protesters is akin to Israel’s efforts to defend itself from extremism during its 2009 Gaza war against Hamas.
Libya has come under international scrutiny in recent weeks, in response to violent clashes between the Libyan military and anti-Gadhafi rebels, confrontations which caused what are estimated to be hundreds of deaths.
On Monday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon dispatched a team to Tripoli to assess the humanitarian situation in the wake of the Libyan crisis, criticizing the Libya military’s “disproportionate use of force.”
Speaking with France 24 later Monday, however, Gadhafi defended his military’s right to oppress rebel activity, comparing his crackdown to Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in 2009, saying that “even the Israelis in Gaza, when they moved into the Gaza strip, they moved in with tanks to fight such extremists.”
“It’s the same thing here! We have small armed groups who are fighting us. We did not use force from the outset… Armed units of the Libyan army have had to fight small armed al Qaida bands. That is what’s happened,” Gadhafi said.
Referring to the purported number of casualties in wake of fighting in Libya, the long-time leader claimed “there have been at most 150 to 200 people killed.”
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“People should come here and see how many people have been killed. They can come and check among the population, and among the police and the army,” Gadhafi said.
Gadhafi also dismissed the assessment that recent events injured the Libya’s links with the West, saying that the country had “very good relations with the United States, with the European Union and with African countries,” adding that “Libya plays a crucial role in regional and world peace.”
The interview came as earlier Sunday, a top official in Gadhafi ruling establishment made an unprecedented appeal to dialogue between the warring factions, in attempt to end the conflict.
Jadallah Azous Al-Talhi, a Libyan prime minister in the 1980s who is originally from eastern Libya, appeared on state television reading an address to elders in Benghazi, the main base of the anti-Gadhafi rebels.
He asked them to “give a chance to national dialogue to resolve this crisis, to help stop the bloodshed, and not give a chance to foreigners to come and capture our country again.”
Wow, Louis!!! Only a closeted jewish supremacist can come up with this analogy of comparing Libyans fighting against the imperialists and their stooge to the colonising Jews and anti-colonial palestinians.
Bravo, you have revealed another stripe of white left, “comrade”.
Comment by Asif — March 8, 2011 @ 11:22 pm
Asif: I think you have mis-read. It is Gadaffi saying his crackdown on the rebels is the same as Israel’s crackdown on Gaza. He is desperately trying to persuade the West that he is their friend in the hope they will stay out or even back him. Delusional.
Comment by David Ellis — March 8, 2011 @ 11:27 pm
I thought it was pretty clear that Lou was relaying Gadhafi’s sick analogy to criticize both Gadhafi and the sick analogy.
Comment by Steve — March 8, 2011 @ 11:43 pm
Ghaddafi’s essentially saying that the Zionist’s use of phospherous bombs on civilians was justified.
That’s akin to Stalin telling the Dewey Commission during the Moscow Trials that Hitler was justified in the relentless persecution of all opposition to the Nazis.
Ghaddafi’ regime’s days are therefore numbered, just like Israel’s regime will not ameliorate it’s profound contradictions indefinitely.
Dialectically, quantity changed the quality of Ghaddafi’s rule from a counterhegemonic force to one co-opted by and in the service of Imperialism. The date this happenned is academic because it was like a slow growing cancer that likely metastisized on 9/11/01.
Long live the Arab toilers’ uprising!
Comment by Karl Friedrich — March 9, 2011 @ 12:58 am
Threadjack:
tale a look at this steaming load
Comment by Brian Gallagher — March 9, 2011 @ 1:52 am
Ghaddafi’s quotes are great ammunition against leftist apologists.
Comment by Renegade Eye — March 9, 2011 @ 6:37 am
I think Gaddafi is exasperated with Western-Jewish propaganda caricatures, and deliberately parodies them.
Gaddafi is certainly correct that the Western-Jewish propaganda is deeply, deeply hypocritical. But his alternative is in many respects not attractive either.
Leftwing idiocy reaches approximately the same level in the critique of Gaddafi, as it did in the critique of Stalin.
Comment by Jurriaan Bendien — March 9, 2011 @ 2:43 pm
For people puzzled by Jurriaan’s comment, it should be understood that he is Jewish himself even though his comment is obviously incoherent.
Comment by louisproyect — March 9, 2011 @ 2:45 pm
What is Jewish propaganda anyway? It makes as much sense as Christian or Muslim propaganda. Let’s not fall into the trap of culturalization of politics.
Comment by Mazdak — March 9, 2011 @ 5:34 pm
I don’t know what Jewish propaganda is exactly but I do know precisely what Zionist propaganda is and it’s a perfidious form of racism based upon a predatory economic system that would have been driven into the sea long ago without decisive material aid from Uncle Sam whose got the morality of that degenerate Uncle that molests his nieces & nephews during holiday visits.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — March 9, 2011 @ 11:03 pm
Louis Proyect is mistaken, because in fact I am not Jewish at all. My grandfather on my father’s side was Jewish, hence my surname. I do not have any special identification with things Jewish either, and I feel no desire whatever to visit Israel. My interest in Marx is about as far as that goes.
Western-Jewish propaganda has a specific meaning. For good or for ill, everybody knows that Jews are very strongly represented in the Western media, that the Western media articulate Western values with roots in the Judaic tradition, and that almost any criticism of Israel’s barbaric, fascist practices evokes “anti-semitic” hysteria.
I think it is quite true that Mr Gaddafi is exasparated by Western propaganda caricatures, and that he deliberately caricatures them. It is just that by poking fun at his hypocritical critics in this way, he probably doesn’t really help his own cause. The West seizes on anything at all they can find to defame him in the most grotesque way as a lunatic, brutal dictator. Well, he is a dictator, there can be no doubt about that, but this tells you nothing about Libyan society, or about his political accomplishments.
In the ideological program of Trotskyist self-righteousness, I think Gaddafi performs exactly the same role as Stalin did previously.
Comment by Jurriaan Bendien — March 10, 2011 @ 6:18 pm
> In the ideological program of Trotskyist self-righteousness, I think Gaddafi performs exactly the same role as Stalin did previously.
That’s hard to imagine, if only because Libya has never occupied a status remotely like that of the Soviet Union. The USSR was born out of the first victorious revolution to formally declare itself socialist and many people had very deep hopes as to what might come out of it. In retrospect some of these hopes were clearly overinflated, considering where Russia was at in 1917 and what the likely developments were. But no one known to me has ever had similar hopes over Libya, even if Sam Marcy may have tried to pump them up a little bit. So I don’t think that the roles can be the same.
Comment by PatrickSMcNally — March 10, 2011 @ 6:43 pm
Jurriaan, How is an interest in Marx a “jewish thing”? or have you been brainwashed by the Trotskyist western-jewish media to think so..
Comment by Michael T — March 10, 2011 @ 6:57 pm
I am not going to respond to your Marxist jew-baiting, why should I. It’s got nothing to do with me.
There is a real crisis of Western ideology about Libya. Initially when the revolt broke out, the political class and their media were screaming about the violence and tyranny of Gaddafi’s rule (they had said almost nothing about the mass murder of Iraqis and devastation of their country by the US/UK coalition).
Well, there have unfortunately been quite a few deaths in Libya, yes, but the total number of deaths isn’t very large yet. Al Jazeera’s correspondent Jacky Rowland reported recently that at the hospital in Brega, 42 injured members of the opposition force were being treated, while there were confirmed deaths of at least eight. But, she added “The vast majority of those injured had been injured by their own weapons,” explaining that the rebels had little or no military training. “People with no prior military experience, telling the soldiers that they want to fight and they want to fight in the anti-Gaddafi forces.”
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/03/20113711929686158.html
Now it has become apparent that Western powers have been backing Gaddafi “the dictator” for years, with weaponry, technology, finance and all sorts of deals. He wouldn’t have had all the killing power he has now without the West. That’s difficult to deny, and it is difficult to sweep that all under the carpet. As I noted on FB 23 february 2011, most likely it isn’t possible to quickly overthrow Gaddafi. Now they are trying to find a new narrative, a new myth to describe what is happening in Libya.
Trotskyoid ideology has a catechism which divides the world into goodies and baddies, and Louis finds this emotionally satisfying stuff, but qua political analysis it isn’t convincing yet. You can’t simply transpose the political analysis of the 1930s into 21st century realities.
A much better idea is to let Libyans speak for themselves about their own insurrectionary process.
Comment by Jurriaan Bendien — March 10, 2011 @ 10:05 pm
You can’t simply transpose the political analysis of the 1930s into 21st century realities.
—
For people trying to interpret this, it is useful to understand that Jurriaan does not consider himself a Marxist although he does enjoy badgering them.
Comment by louisproyect — March 10, 2011 @ 10:09 pm
Jurriaan is mistaken about Proyect insofar as Louis has declared he is “no longer a Trotskyist” more than once, so please leave Trotsky (and for that matter Sam Marcy, whose been dead more than a decade) out of the Libyan discussion as “Revolution Betrayed” is hardly a self-righteous tract and definitely an enormous contribution into understanding what the Soviet Union was, that is, the class character of its state, and like all great social science, an incredible predictor of the future of the state.
Moreover, to buttress Pat McNally’s point, Ghaddaffi was no Bolshevik, nor did his revolution do a fraction of what the Bolshevik’s did, particularly when it came to things like atheist education, affirmative action for historically oppressed races, a constitution that mandated workers pay no more than 5% of their wages per month in housing, the impossibility of bureaucrats amassing personal fortunes, etc.
Of course the commercial press has slandered the progressive significance of the Libyan Revolution and its leader Ghaddafi (we’re not naive) but the last of that significance had the rivets popped out of its hull below the waterline a decade ago, the final straw being 911 when Ghadaffi figured if he didn’t cut some odious deals with the imperialists he’d be included in the so-called “axis of evil.”
Comment by Karl Friedrich — March 11, 2011 @ 1:20 am
Actually, I had a very specific reason for deliberately bringing up Sam Marcy in this context. A fact which I’ve noticed on many occasions is that quite a few crackpots who spend their time worrying about Trotskyists under the bed also seem to gravitate towards positions like those which Workers World was long associated with. Except, when they feel the need to justify their claim that the antiwar movement has been taken over by a sinister Trotskyist hidden hand, such people don’t seem to hesitate about quoting THE NATION or some such for attacks against the predominant role which Workers World has sometimes played in some antiwar activities. But then, when it’s time to go back to regularly scheduled programming, the same people lapse back into rehashing positions which make them sound like a warmed-over version of Sam Marcy. It’s not that I really want to demand standards of logical consistency from these individuals, since I realize that is beyond their grasp, but I can’t help taking note of it.
Comment by PatrickSMcNally — March 11, 2011 @ 10:16 pm
Yea, Patrick. For whatever their faults, bottom line of history is that — and Marxism after all is mostly the real story of the oppressed cleasses who cannot find a voice or publisher — no socialist party in the US since the SWP in 60′s has been able to build the equivalent coalitions that translate into “thousands of bodies in the street” peaceful & well marshalled demos over issues ranging from the Carribrean to Africa & the Mideast, particularly regarding the criminal invasion of Iraq and the need to resist it, quite like the WWP over the last 40 years (Sane-Freeze and some stale, stiff & passionless AFL-CIO/UAW events over those years notwithstanding).
Comment by Karl Friedrich — March 12, 2011 @ 1:09 am
I agree, Louis can be friendly, and he is mostly pretty harmless. But it’s best not to wallow in stupidity and endlessly go on about how stupid you were in the past.
Comment by Jurriaan Bendien — March 13, 2011 @ 9:13 am
“what is jewish propaganda anyways?”
Earth to Mazdak Hello?
It’s called AIPAC. Hiding behind the claim that Israel is ever besieged by “terrorists” to justify their brutal imperialist occupation on behalf of the US. I’m not sure if this is even a leftist blog site anynmore
Comment by hassines — August 9, 2011 @ 9:52 pm
@20
Hassines, don’t be a stupid mother-fucker. I am a Jew and I have been blasting Zionism since 1967. Get your shit straight.
Comment by louisproyect — August 9, 2011 @ 10:38 pm