Despite widespread outrage in the Middle East and internationally, Israel, with the full backing of the Bush administration, is pressing ahead with its ground offensive in southern Lebanon, reducing towns and villages to rubble and driving the entire population out of the area. The aim is to establish a no-go zone across a broad swathe of Lebanese territory as part of a wider strategy of transforming the country into a vassal state of the US and Israel.

The Bush administration has backed the Israeli war plans to the hilt as a means for future provocations and wars against Syria and Iran and to achieve its strategic goal of US hegemony throughout the resource-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia. None of the major powers has challenged the US or condemned Israel for waging a war of aggression on Lebanon—the principal crime for which the Nazi leaders were tried and convicted after World War II.

The Sri Lankan government has silently condoned this criminal enterprise, calculating that it needs Washington’s backing as it escalates its aggressive war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. To obscure its own complicity, President Mahinda Rajapakse’s key ally, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), has made an empty appeal to the political gangsters of the Bush administration to urge their Israeli partners in crime to stop the war on Lebanon.

The Socialist Equality Party is conducting a march and public meeting in Colombo to call for the independent mobilisation of the working class in Sri Lanka and internationally on the basis of a socialist program against the predatory war against Lebanon. We urge workers, youth and intellectuals to participate.

Date: Tuesday, August 8.
March: Starts at Dematagoda Road, Maradana, Colombo 10 at 2.30 p.m.
Meeting: Public Library Auditorium, Colombo at 4.30 p.m.