On Monday, the Washington Post reported on a family hit by an Israeli missile as it drove to get out of the area. Not an uncommon scenario, as many attempt to flee, their activity draws attention from the Israeli forces resulting in a scramble for safety before the lock-on-target is engaged.
"Where's my father? Where's my father?" asked Mahmoud Srour, an 8-year-old whose face was burned beyond recognition after an Israeli missile struck the family's car Sunday. His mother, Nouhad, lurched toward his hospital bed, her eyes welling with tears.
"Is he coming?" he asked her.
"Don't worry about your father," she said, her words broken by sobs.
Barely conscious, bewildered, he lay with his eyes almost swollen shut. His head lolled toward her. A whisper followed.
"Don't cry, mother," he told her.
Mahmoud's father, Mohammed, was dead. An Israeli missile had struck their green Mercedes as they fled the southern town of Mansuri, where the family had been vacationing. The boy's uncle, Darwish Mudaihli, was dead, too. The bodies were left in the burning car. Mahmoud's sister Mariam, 8 months old, lay next to him, staring at the ceiling with a Donald Duck pacifier in her mouth. Her eyes were open but lifeless, a stare that suggested having seen too much. Her hair was singed, her face slightly burned. Blisters swelled the tiny fingers on her left hand to twice their size. In other beds of Najm Hospital were their other brothers, 13-year-old Ali and 15-year-old Ahmed.
Israeli forces repeatedly struck cars on southern Lebanon's already perilous roads in attacks that victims said were indiscriminate. Seven people were killed, three of them when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a white minibus carrying 19 people fleeing the village of Tairi, which Israeli forces had ordered residents to evacuate.
There were also reports and video of phosporous weapons being used on civilians. What is the justification of such a weapon being used in response to the actions against a small number of soldiers? One of certainly many egregious acts by the Israeli military which will likely continue to persist without an authoritative response from the international community.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported six Red Cross volunteers were injured. These volunteers risk their lives to transport civilians injured by Israeli bombs to hospitals for medical care. I can already hear the likely excuse for targetting the ambulances... they are a cover for the transport of terrorists. Yeah, right.
Six Red Cross volunteers were wounded in the Sunday attack, and the injured family they were ferrying to safety suffered fresh agonies. A middle-age man lost his leg from the knee down. His mother was partially paralyzed. A little boy's head was hammered by shrapnel.
Today, CNN reports of the death of four UN observers. An apparently intentional strike since the UN personnel had been in constant contact with the Israeli military officers throughout the day informing them of their location.
The U.N. observers were killed when an Israeli bomb made a direct hit on their bunker in southern Lebanon on Tuesday. They had called an Israeli military liaison about 10 times in the six hours before they died to warn that the aerial attacks were getting close to their position, according to a U.N. officer.
"This coordinated artillery and aerial attack on a long-established and clearly marked U.N. post at Khiyam occurred despite personal assurances given to me by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that U.N. positions would be spared Israeli fire," he [U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan] said in a statement.
"Furthermore, General Alain Pelligrini, the U.N. force commander in south Lebanon, had been in repeated contact with Israeli officers throughout the day on Tuesday, stressing the need to protect that particular U.N. position from attack."
Consider this from an opinion piece in Dar Al-Hayat.
Israel has always relied on brute force to ensure its security. Since its creation in 1948, it has sought to dominate the region by military means. This doctrine rests on the belief that the Arabs will never be strong enough, or capable enough, to challenge it. This is a fundamentally racist attitude.
But beneath the bluster and the muscle-flexing lies a deep-seated paranoia and insecurity, reflected in the conviction, shared by many of Israel's citizens, that the Arabs want to kill them and that they face a permanent existential threat. The choice, they seem to believe, is between killing or being killed. This dark view of their environment - something of a self-fulfilling prophecy -- goes some way to explaining the extravagantly disproportionate nature of Israel's attacks and its blatant disregard for international legality and any semblance of morality.
Israel is able to behave in this way because it has been given extraordinary immunity by the United States. A striking aspect of the crisis is, indeed, America's total political, diplomatic and strategic support for Israel -- even to the point of rushing to give it $300 million of aviation fuel with which to continue smashing Lebanon!
America's gross bias has paralysed the Security Council, the G8 and the European Union. So great is American pressure that none of these bodies has been able to insist on an immediate end to the Israeli onslaught. Britain dutifully followed its American Big Brother in repeating the mantra that 'Israel has the right to defend itself', while even France, Lebanon's traditional protector, has tended to put the blame on Hizballah, rather than Israel, for the massive destruction and loss of life.
Terrorism is usually defined as the indiscriminate killing of civilians in pursuit of political goals. Is this not what Israel is doing in both Lebanon and Gaza? It is killing large numbers of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in pursuit of its political aim of annihilating Hizballah and Hamas. By any objective standard, Israel is guilty of state terrorism.
But killing Arabs in this wanton manner and smashing their countries must inevitably have negative consequences for Israel's own security. Israel's terrorist behaviour legitimizes the terrorism of its enemies. And America's uncritical support for Israel legitimises terrorism against the United States itself. That is what 9/11 was all about, although to this day the United States has not faced up to why it was attacked. The United States and Israel are sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind.
The evidence continues to mount, weighing heavily against Israel, that the military actions being taken by Israel are nothing short of ethnic cleansing of the area. Whether it be by use of banned weapons, the blatant targetting of civilians, or destruction of the country's infrastructure, one thing is certain, Lebanon as a country will be weaker and many Lebanese will die, if not immediately over time, as the world sits idly while Israel continues to crush anyone in her path toward domination in the Middle East.
Tagged: Current Affairs, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, News, News and Politics, Opinion, Politics, Terrorism, War.
RSS
1 comment:
My heart goes out the boy and his family.
In any war, the true tragedy are the innocent victims, that said; taking the position that Israel is somehow wrong for shooting missiles at civilian targets (whether intentional or not) is pretty pointless when that has been the position of the Lebanese and Palestinian Militias for more than a decade.
To be clear: targeting of civilians is always wrong (even if it means that your side has no chance of winning), but in this war to put one side over the other, morally, for something that the opposite side has been completely complicit in is about as useful as the deaths that result.
Post a Comment