Voices

Civilian deaths in Tyre, Lebanon

Sydney Morning Herald

Parked outside the small general hospital in Tyre is a badly refrigerated lorry container in which are stacked the bodies of 91 Lebanese civilians, 55 of them children.

Since Israel began bombing and shelling south Lebanon last Wednesday, about 380 patients have passed through this 65-bed hospital, plus the 91 dead.

Not one of the victims, he says, has been a member of Hezbollah, the militia group that triggered Israel's onslaught with a border raid last week.

"The army and Hezbollah - I don't care if they kill all of them," he said. "But the civilians - it's very hard. Everyone who has come in here has been a civilian."

Robert Fisk

How soon must we use the words "war crime"? How many children must be scattered in the rubble of Israeli air attacks before we reject the obscene phrase "collateral damage" and start talking about prosecution for crimes against humanity?

The child whose dead body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking her and her family to safety is a symbol of the latest Lebanon war; she was hurled from the vehicle in which she and her family were traveling in southern Lebanon as they fled their village - on Israel's own instructions. Because her parents were apparently killed in the same Israeli air attack, her name is still unknown. Not an unknown warrior, but an unknown child.

The Israelis constantly boast of their "pin-point" or "surgical" precision in air attacks. If this is true, then there are far too many civilians being killed in the Lebanese bloodbath to make every one of them an accident. And since Israel's target list now includes obviously civilian targets - deliberately bombed to punish the civilian population - the evidence is mounting that these air raids are intended to kill the innocent as well as the Hizbollah guerrillas whom Israel claims to be fighting.

True, the Hizbollah are killing civilians in Israel, but their missiles are inaccurate and the West, which has done no more than mildly disapprove of Israel's retaliatory onslaught, must surely expect higher standards of the Israeli armed forces than of the men whom both Israel and President George Bush describe as "terrorists".

Why, for example, did the Israelis attack and destroy the headquarters of the Liban-Lait company in the Bekaa Valley, the largest milk factory in Lebanon? Why did they bomb out the factory of the main importer for Proctor and Gamble products in Lebanon, based in Bchmoun? Why did they destroy a paper box factory outside Beirut? And why did Israeli planes attack a convoy of new ambulances being brought into Lebanon from Syria yesterday, vehicles which were the gift of the medical authorities of the United Arab Emirates? The ambulances were clearly marked as a relief aid convoy, according to an Emirates official. Were all these "terrorist" targets? Was the little girl in the field at Tel Harfa a "terrorist" target?

Jefferson Morley (Washington Post)

Are Americans being given a very different view of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict than their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere?

Yes, according to commentators in Muslim and European media.

In European media, the civilian toll in Lebanon is often seen as trumping all other considerations.

Is the U.S. media just providing reports that conform to its consumers' world view? After all, Americans are the most sympathetic towards Israel of 15 nations surveyed by the Pew Global Attitude survey conducted earlier this year. That survey found that 48 percent of Americans sympathized with Israel as compared with 13 percent who sympathized with Palestinians.

Americans are also more likely than the people of any other country to regard U.S. policy in the Middle East as "fair," according to Pew pollsters. In one 2003 survey, 47 percent thought U.S. policy in the Middle East favored neither the Israelis or the Palestinians. Only five percent of Lebanese shared that view.

The disparate reaction to Lebanon's civilian casualties may simply reflect the larger beliefs of the societies in which journalists work.

Paul Craig Roberts

Many Muslims believe that Bush and Israel see them as animals to be slain. On July 17, neocon John Bolton, Bush’s unconfirmed ambassador to the UN, gave credence to this Muslim belief when he announced that Israelis killed by terrorists were more important than the Lebanese civilians killed by Israel. Bolton said that there is no "moral equivalence" between Lebanese civilians killed by Israel and Israeli civilians killed by Muslim terrorists: "It’s simply not the same thing to say that it’s the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire their deaths, to fire rockets and use explosive devices or kidnapping versus the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense."

In Bolton’s sick mind, Lebanese civilians are not experiencing terrorism when Israel deliberately targets them and drops high explosives on their apartment buildings, streets, bridges, power plants, and bombs the Beirut International Airport. This, says Bolton, is Israel acting in self-defense.

If Israel grabs Palestinian or Lebanese land and murders civilians, that is "self-defense," but if someone responds to Israeli aggression with a rocket, that is "Muslim terrorism."

Isolated in their evil, the neoconservatives are frantically and shrilly demanding that Bush join Israel in military attacks on Syria and Iran in order to “build democracy” and to clear the Middle East of any opposition to Israel’s unbridled self-interest. The crazed David Horowitz writes that "Israel is doing the work of the rest of the civilized world."

Neoconservatives believe that the US and Israel can extirpate Islam with fire and sword and that the present opportunity to escalate the current conflict into generalized war in the Middle East must not be missed.

Are Americans too inattentive and too brainwashed to prevent their moronic president and his neocon government from initiating a dangerous war?

Manuel Valenzuela

The labeling as anti-Semitic of anyone critical of the state of Israel's policies in the continued destruction of Palestinian identity, and now Lebanese society and infrastructure, and the increasing domination into American foreign policy no longer has the sting of threat or intimidation it once mastered. For too long this masquerade has been used to silence those opposing anything Israel, shouted at anyone disseminating truth and seeking justice. Like the boy who cried wolf, this charade has lost its power or hypnotic control, and today only serves to breed more anger and resentment against the apologists and smear mongers protecting the cancerous tentacles of Zionism and the crimes against humanity it spawns.

The time has come to stop bending over to the dictates of intimidation and scare tactics used by Israel's protectors, defenders and apologists. The time has come to say "Never Again" to such fictional libel and slander whose only purpose is the continued subjugation of truth and awakening. The labeling of "anti-Semite" does not bother us, nor does it stop us from writing truth to justice and reality to intimidation because we refuse to be frightened into submission and silenced into acquiescence by a mechanism we know to be false.

Our convictions, search for truth and want for justice supercedes the trash invented to protect the malfeasance ruining humanity and the crimes perpetrated against our fellow human beings. The time has come to stand up and be heard, refusing to believe the smears and the labels, instead living life in truth, devoid of veiled threats and intimidation tactics whose power over us continues to erode thanks to its incessant overuse and abuse. So smear if you must, defenders, appeasers and apologists of human wickedness, continue to blindly believe in the majesty of a fiction you know to be false, ensuring your daily complicity in the crimes against humanity being committed by those you protect and defend.

We are above your labels, above your intimidation and smear tactics, following the path of truth in the voice of our writings and in the convictions of humanity. If pursuing truth, fighting criminality and awakening justice makes us anti-Semites, then guilty we are. If seeing the dehumanization, exploitation and utter destruction of the Palestinian people makes the voices of reason anti-Semitic, then guilty we stand. To defend the humanity of other Semitic people is to defend humanity itself. To speak out against injustice and dehumanization makes us human, to defend it makes you complicit.

Tagged: Current Affairs, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, News, News and Politics, Opinion, Politics, Syria, Terrorism, War.