Weep for Lebanon
The insanity continues. Although now even the British government - led by the spineless, toadying Blair - are beginning to publicly express doubt about a campaign that yesterday took it's largest number yet of civilian casualties, whilst appearing to have no effect whatsoever on Hizbullah.
Yesterday another 63 innocent men, women and children lost their lives, bringing the total number killed since Israel engaged in this act of madness to 315.
A senior British official said: “Our concern is that Israeli military action is not having the desired effect. We’re not seeing the level of impact [which Israel and its allies would want].” Hezbollah was “still highprofile in southern Beirut”, even if its claims to have lost only three fighters underplayed the damage done. “We’re not seeing any large-scale destruction of Hezbollah rockets,” the official added, “and we don’t know where they are.”It is said that Olmert wants to appear tough, following as he is on the reputation of Ariel Sharon, but Mr Olmert should appreciate that cruel and hard as the old war criminal Sharon was, he always had a military objective that he ruthlessly pursued.
Olmert doesn't have one, beyond a vague notion that he'd like to punish Hizbullah for what they've done. The Israeli army under Olmert appear cruel, vindictive and impervious to the death and destruction they are sowing across a land who's people never attacked them.
There is no precision to this act of mindless violence, no attempts to distinguish between civilians and the thugs of Hizbullah. All appear to be considered fair game.
Nayla Mouawad, Lebanese minister for social affairs, is disgusted by what she called the brutal, disproportionate and murderous activities of the Israelis - but she is also appalled that Hezbollah's decision to capture Israeli soldiers has pushed Lebanon into a war for which its people never asked."We were not aware of this operation," she says.
"We did not approve and we did not adopt this operation."
And that is surely the point. It is still possible to condemn the Hizbullah kidnap of the young Israeli soldiers whilst remaining utterly disgusted by the Israeli reaction to this crime.
For make no mistake, what we are watching Israel do is disgusting. It's nothing less than the wanton destruction of an entire country.
Beirut, the "Paris of the East" is being reduced to rubble.And for what? For what?
When all this rampant, disgraceful destruction is over, the Israelis will still have to carry out their prisoner swap if they want their soldiers returned. Hizbullah will still be standing as a political force. However, the damage done to Beirut will be nothing to the damage done to Israel's reputation. Or the damage done to the reputations of the leaders of the EU who stood silently by whilst war crimes were committed and said nothing.
Collective punishment is a war crime.
Wanton destruction is a war crime.
They have watched Israel commit these crimes and failed to find their voice for fear of upsetting their American counterparts; ironically the only people who's reputation remains unharmed, as the US under Bush and Cheney have sunk so low in most of our opinions that there is nowhere lower for our opinions to go.
In an emotional televised appeal, the Lebanese prime minister urged the international community to intervene saying that his country "has been torn to shreds".
"I call upon you all to respond immediately... and provide urgent international humanitarian assistance to our war-stricken country," Mr Siniora said.
"Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?"
The shameful, but honest, answer to Fouad Siniora's plea is yes. Yes, the international community will stand by whilst the Israelis pound you and your children and your buildings and your motorways into dust. We will silently watch as the Israelis collectively punish you for a crime that we all know that you did not commit.Why will we do this? Because our leaders are spineless, unwilling any longer to stand up for what is right. Lost in their empty rhetoric of terror and terrorism and unable to make any distinction between Hizbullah and the Lebanese people.
They pretend there is a method to this madness, just as they pretend that the cruel and vindictive little ex-drunk in the White House is a man of intellect.
They will pretend that there is a point to this, that there is something that can be achieved.
The awful horrible truth is that we are led by small men at a time when the world needs giants. We are led by men who are large on rhetoric and low on principle. By men who think fire can be fought with fire.
“Through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder.Sadly, no-one of such stature is currently on the stage, so we will do the only constructive thing that one can do faced with such barbarity.
Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't establish truth.
Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate.
Darkness cannot put out darkness.
Only light can do that…
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We will weep for Lebanon.
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6 comments:
See what I mean? You have some balls, to be able type through all this stuff. I wouldn't be able to do what you do. I would have smashed my computer by the time I reached "Yesterday another 63 innocent men, women and children lost their lives, bringing the total number killed since Israel engaged in this act of madness to 315." I wouldn't even have gotten through that sentence. Just now even, I had to cut and paste it. All I see is one big massive slow motion mushroom cloud of complete annhilation.
Lately it seems all I've been doing is crying. And what really sucks about this is that you and I and people like us have to find each other in the dark alleys of the Internet. Sure, there's the occassional conscious person in certain urban areas, but it's too rare. I just wish I could knock on my neighbor's door and talk with them, but they don't have a clue. Or they aren't interested. I want to go door to door, having conversations with people about the ongoing genocide.
Before this Lebanon stuff, one could make the twisted argument that terrorists are the bad guys. Now, it's not possible. How could a person be against the terrorists now? They have a few hundred new reasons, every day, to kill whitey. Why shouldn't they just lose their minds and start killing, and killing, and killing? It's official now. The terrorists are justified in anything they do from here on out. The United States of Britain and Israel have made sure of that.
We're the bad guys now! We're the fucking devil. If some terrorist wants to bomb me, I hope I'll get a chance to say, "Well, I can't hardly blame ya," before I get blown to pieces.
Musclemouth,
I'm very lucky that I have many friends who are very political, so I at least have people to rant to.
Strangely enough one of my best friends who I walk with every morning in the park is Jewish. She makes me sound reasoned when she talks about this. She's beside herself with Israel's behaviour.
In fact yesterday I walked with her husband. Normally he and I don't see eye to eye on the subject of Israel as, unlike his wife, he is very much a supporter of Israel and can normally be relied upon to spout whatever happens to the Israeli line du jour.
However, even he made no attempt to defend what's going on, even going as far as to say "It's disproportionate". Believe me, coming from the guy in question, that's withering.
And I did cry as I got to the end of that piece. It's a mixture of rage and impotence. It's the fact that Bush - one man and not a very bright man - gets to say that this can continue, and Chirac and Blair and all these other supposedly intelligent men allow him to get away with it. It's beneath contempt.
But thank God we've got the internet and that kindrid spirits can find each other, even if only in the bowels of cyberspace, and acknowledge what our leaders fail to acknowledge. Some things are simply wrong.
And yes, I think there is a direct link between the rage that such actions cause and the ability of Hizbullah and others to recruit. We're doing their work for them.
That's what makes Bush allowing this to be such a dumb, stupid and cruel thing. They don't have any serious plan to tackle terrorism, they are literally creating terrorists.
I am definitely grateful for this...outlet? That's the wrong word. Safety valve? That's what I fear most. What if this (blogging) is just a pressure release valve, stealing all the righteous rage from our sails? I worry about these things. On the one hand, this is a wonderful thing. We share information, as if it were some kind of underground railroad for the smuggling of ideas - IDEAS AS CONTRABAND! - across borders, across racial boundaries, across every artificial line drawn in the artificial sand of the sociopolitical landscape. Here we are framing the issues the way we see them. We The People of the United Minds of Earth.
On the other hand, are we the "liberal echo chamber", as one American politician said a few weeks ago? No, I wouldn't say that. One thing 9/11 has done is pulled together people from all spectra of political philosophy. It may seem, quite often, like we are only parroting each other, but I think that is because we are intentionally dealing with some very fundamental issues: the right to exist, the right not to suffer under the hands of tyrants, the right to breathe clean air. Why would any sane person disagree with those things? No, we are not the echo chamber. We are a support structure - a last bastion of actual thought, a final phalanx of love, symbolically standing between the daemons of chaos and Universal Zion. The real Zion, the one to which everybody belongs. It is that realm of peace and harmony, words so often maligned as naive - but we know what's right.
No, we're not the echo chamber. But are we expending our energies in the right zones? Perhaps we are drowning in information but hung out to dry when it comes to action. But what is action? On the physical plane is where action exists. The choices are pathetic: either fight for the daemons, or sit back and watch in horror. Those are the choices given to us on this level of existence.
But on the spiritual level? There it is, man. There it is. You have to turn to the real psychos of the peace movements - the David Ickes, for example - and learned to simply exude love. You have to, at some point, learn to say, "I love you George Bush, I love you Colin Powell, I love you Donald Rumsfeld, I love you Tony Blair, I love you Ariel Sharon." It's really stomach-turning to realize that. I still lack the capacity to feel love for those bastards. I hate them, I hate them.
So what is all this doing? Why aren't people running up and starting the revolution? Because we know blood will beget more blood. We know that if anyone does anything violent towards the war kings, that they will only martyr them and increase the patriotic jingoism towards greater and greater chaos. The more you feed the beast, the bigger it grows. It's all one beast. It's all one angel too though. We're one helluva schizophrenic planet. Or maybe it's just me that's schizo, since I'm the one speaking two sides of the coin at the same time.
So we're left at square one: we continue doing what we are doing, because we feel, for better or for worse, that it is the right thing. Feelings of discontent rise and fall, like breathing, and sometimes a profound sense of purpose and vision strikes. You know what I'm talking abouot. Those moments when everything fades to crisp clarity, and you could describe the shape of mountain a millenium hence. And you know everything will balance out, and be beautiful once again. There will be reason to all this, one day. Those moments are lovely.
Meanwhile, we doubt, and that is most of the time. I think one way to help assuage our doubt is to augment our Internet activism with some other kind of activism. To me, the simplest and most deeply effective form of activism is making connections with people around you in the here and now, in the physical, non-virtual plane. It's what those aforementioned daemons fear most. The daemons may not KNOW they fear it, but their DNA fears it. The enemy's very existence depends on Universal Alienation. The further we separate ourselves, the stronger and more psychotic that beast grows.
Long Live Neighbors.
Ola neighbour,
You raise many interesting points. I don't know why I started blogging, I literally joined one night and started typing unsure if I'd post it in the morning. I remember feeling quite nervous before I hit the send key.
Some six months in, I find that it's in my own life that I am somehow liberated. I don't feel the need to bore people with my politics as I have a zone in which to do that.
I suppose it's also because, during the eighties, I was always at marches and protests and felt as if I was somehow doing something. We were making a difference. Nowadays, apart from the brief spell before the Iraq war, there doesn't seem to be as many areas of protest. People are much more apathetic.
And I never forget that what we do makes a difference. The sheer scale of our numbers matter.
One of the earliest campaigns I got involved in was the quest to free Nelson Mandela who Thatcher at the time labelled a terrorist, as did Dick Cheney.
I was in Wembley the night Mandela walked on stage in front of 100,000 people. He said that night that when he used to lie on Robben Island people would sneak him reports of what was being done to free him and that the centre of that movement was in London. He said that he had vowed then, if ever he was freed to come to London to say thank you. And then he said two words. "Thank you".
I felt goosebumps over my entire body. The people can make a difference if we just shout loud enough. As Tony Benn once remarked, "The first time I met Nelson Mandela, he was a terrorist, the second time I met him he was the President of South Africa".
Never believe those who try to denigrade what you do, that's always their first attempt ot get you off the scent.
Follow your heart and stand up for what you know to be true and right. People are suckers for the truth. If you think of it, in order to free Mandela, white South Africans had to be the turkeys that voted for Christmas. For that was what giving blacks the vote meant. But because enough of us shouted and yelled and wrote letters and boycotted those turkeys did, indeed, vote for Christmas. Because it was the right thing to do.
The next thing I want to see - and ten years ago this would have been an impossible thing to imagine - is a state of Palestine living in peace, side by side, with Israel. And it will happen if enough of us keep pointing out the inherent wrongs in a system that keeps five million Palestinians living in the world's largest open prison.
Even Israel are now simply trying to achieve the result unilaterally - to cut the Palestinians out of the negotiating table - but the fact is that, by doing this, Israel has already accepted that the day is coming. And fifteen years ago they were claiming God gave them the land and were vowing never to hand it back.
But the truth will eventually prevail. If enough of us keep shouting it loud enough.
As for the "echo chamber" remark. Look at how many Senators and politicians attended Yearly Kos. Are they there because they think they are addressing an echo chamber of no consequence? You bet they're not. They are there because they recognise that the internet has rurned us all into publishers and that this is a power that they need to respect. They might hate it, and I'm sure many of them do, but they ignore it at their peril. And I consider the echo chamber to be far more prevalent on the other side. Read Malkin. That's an echo chamber. Loud, nasty, vindictive and heartless and almost none of it her own work. She simply copies and pastes as others hate much more eloquently than she can.
And how funny that our usual roles are reversed. You can love Bush and Blair and Cheney all you want - I reserve the right to loath them till the day I die. :-)
Later neighbour!
I am with you all the way there, I really do believe that there should be a rule that comments can't be longer than original posts! No seriously, I do think that the ability for us all to connect and share our ideas will lead to something. What it will lead to I'm not totally sure, but for the first time we all can publish our opinions without it being edited before publication.
Of course how we utilise this technological advancement is up to us.
Hopefully that is what we are all doing by meeting online and sharing our opinions. I wouldn't be able to play any great role in the American system though as I am a Brit. But we can certainly all make a lot of noise.
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