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Condemnation: The Easy Bit.
Note: since yesterday, I've rethought this emotionally violent reaction.
Permanent Solutions?
According to the New York Times, Khofi Anan is calling for the world to condemn the killings in Lebanon.
[quote begins]
Secretary General Kofi Annan called on the Security Council today to “condemn in the strongest possible terms” the killing of Lebanese civilians in the bombing of Qana, and he reiterated his call for an immediate halt in the fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah militia.
In an emergency meeting of the Security Council requested by the Lebanese government, Mr. Annan said, “We meet at a moment of extreme gravity, first and foremost for the people of the Middle East, but also for the authority of this organization, especially this council.”....“No one disputes Israel’s right to defend itself,” Mr. Annan said. “But by its manner of doing so, it has caused and is causing death and suffering on a wholly unacceptable scale.”
[quote ends (links in original)]
I am fully prepared to join with him in that. But then there's this:
[quote from NY Times Article begins]
The United States has refused to back Mr. Annan’s call for a cessation of hostilities, saying that any halt must be one that removes the threat to Israel from Hezbollah.
John R. Bolton, the American ambassador, said, “Our view for quite some time has been and remains that we need to work toward a permanent solution for the problems of the region.”
[quote from The NY Times article ends (links in original)]
Am I the only person who shivers reflexively at the words "permanent solution"? Not just because of their bad associations, but because I know and you know, though apparently Bolton doesn't know, that there will be a permanent solution to the Mideast when pigs fly. Any peace they attain is going to have to be a step-by-step one-day-at-a-time daily reaffirmation and it can't be constructed out of rubble. (Barring, of course, the event anxiously awaited by certain fellow Christians of mine. Is that the final solution we are waiting for? Because I don't think, you know, that it's a legitimate basis for diplomacy.)
I see the headlines and I think, No, go away, this is wrong; this is awful. But of course they've been coming at me all day, all week. This is another tragic mistake.
"Fresh pain; old wounds."
Earlier in The New York Times:
Airstrike brings fresh pain to town with old wounds.
[quote begins]
QANA, Lebanon, July 30 — It was pitch black when the missiles came to this small mountain village. The children were asleep. Suddenly, a roof and a second floor were punched in on top of them. Dirt was forced into mouths. Bodies were broken.
The bombing continued through the night, and it was not until this morning that neighbors and emergency workers were able to reach those buried inside. Digging under the rubble, they pulled out 28 bodies. Twenty of them were children. The youngest was 10 months....
And then there was the risk of the road. Dozens, including 21 refugees in the back of a pickup truck on July 15, have been killed on roads in Israeli strikes since the war began.
“We heard on the news they were bombing the Red Cross,” said Zaineb Shalhoub, a 22-year-old who survived the bombing and was lying quietly in a hospital bed in Tyre.
“There was just no way to go.”
[quote ends]
When are the friends of embryonic stem cells going to become equally irate over the death of Lebanese children in the current doomed and therefore pointless conflict?
From Fox.news ["Fair and Balanced"]: Bush Expresses sorrow at Lebanese Loss of Life.
It's something, I suppose.
[quote begins]
"Our hope for peace for boys and girls everywhere extends across the world, especially in the Middle East," the president said before the start of a T-ball game at the White House.
"Today's actions in the Middle East remind us that friends and allies must work together for a sustainable peace particularly for the sake of children," Bush told the teams of youngsters and visitors."
[quote ends]
It reminds me that war never works out the way people intend. You don't put an end to attacks on your own citizens by killing children. No, I'd say that killing children is practically a foolproof way to ensure that a feud will be perpetuated for at least another couple of generations.
You would think I'd be used to this, growing up as I did in the Vietnam Era and living through so much violence in the Middle East. But as I get older, I find that I'm less able to tolerate it. It's always the many who pay the price for the violent.
You think I'd be used to it, having grown up in the Vietnam era during a war when everyone was apparently presumptively guilty, including the people on our side. I have never been able to get out of my head the image of that little girl (not much older than I was) screaming her way down the street, burning from the napalm---or from photographs of melted limbs and useless, horrific suffering by very young people who had got in the way of the warring armies. I can't believe that this is ever right or excusable or a good solution.
Done listening to rationalizations.
I'm so done with the rationalizing of the Israelis and of my Jewish friends, however beloved, who support them (sorry guys...). When the oppressed become the oppressors, they are no longer entitled to the support and sympathy of people like me---in other words, the significant portion of the population who believe that other people, even those who hate you, must be treated at all times as ends and not means.
What are the Israelis telling themselves, I wonder? "Now they know how it feels"? But the they who are being punished are not the they who are responsible for the original harm.
If there were a way to wipe out hatred by killing people indiscriminately---as if discriminate killing has any sort of meaning or would be okay---their actions would be understandable if not morally justifiable, but surely the Israelis of all people know that this is not the way to wipe out hatred.
Arianna Huffington---whom I normally love for various reasons----explains all this in a lengthy blog, but of course the people who need to hear it aren't listening. And such explanations are pointless anyway because they've heard it all before and they either don't believe it or they don't care about the consequences. For this reason, I find the Sunday-school-lady tones of this posting really irksome. It's as if she and the liberals at HuffPost really believe that the problem is lack of understanding. It isn't. People bent on inflicting punishment can know that it's just going to make things worse and not care. That's a hard reality for liberals to accept, it seems. So, Arianna, they know. They know.
What are you going to say to them, knowing that? That is the question!
Hard to take the moral high ground.
Unfortunately, it's a little hard for Americans to take the moral high ground here. We set a precedent for preemptive war; and that was the wrong thing to do. Furthermore---and I remind myself of this whenever I read the outcries of the dear people at Huffpost whose blogs I so much enjoy---this war is not the Administration's War; no, it was endorsed by the people's representatives on both sides.
Nor does the "we were lied to!" excuse cut the least ice with me. A preemptive war is a preemptive war. If Congress, meaning most of Congress, had not authorized it, it would not now be taking place. If Bush got it wrong, so did the people's representatives. Until the Democrats fully own it, they will never really regain their credibility or the confidence of voters like me.
Anyway, I'm at least grateful to see this: Israel OKs Suspension of Aerial Activity, though the article itself is heart-breaking and the response (read on) infuriating.
[quote begins]
Israel has agreed to a 48-hour suspension of aerial activity in south Lebanon while it investigates an attack on a Lebanese village that killed a number of children, U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said Sunday.
The airstrike killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, when it leveled a building where they had taken shelter. The deadliest attack in nearly three weeks of warfare forced Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to cut short a Mideast mission and increased world pressure on the United States to back an end to the fighting....
The attack in the village of Qana brought Lebanon's confirmed death toll to more than 510. Throughout the day, workers pulled dirt-covered bodies of young boys and girls dressed in the shorts and T-shirts they had been sleeping in out of the rubble of the three-story building.
Two extended families, the Shalhoubs and the Hashems, had gathered for shelter from another night of Israeli bombardment in the border area when the 1 a.m. strike brought the building down.
"I was so afraid. There was dirt and rocks and I couldn't see. Everything was black," said Noor Hashem, 13, whose five siblings were killed.
Noor was pulled out of the ruins by her uncle, whose wife and five children also died.
[quote ends]
The pay-off:
[quote begins]
Israel apologized for the deaths but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas, saying they had fired rockets into northern Israel from near the building. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the campaign to crush Hezbollah would continue, telling Rice it could last another two weeks.
"We will not stop this battle, despite the difficult incidents this morning," he told his Cabinet after the strike, according to a participant. "If necessary, it will be broadened without hesitation."
[quote ends]
There are no words, except for ones I would not like my friends and my family (particularly those sympathetic to Israel) to read.
"End Times" Christians: Inducing Rapture?
In the meantime, the 'end times' Christians apparently see this as the chance to drag Jesus back into history, whether he likes it or not. While I doubt that statistically there are a large number of Christians who believe this nonsense, some of the ones who do are in Congress; and I have a problem with the thought that there are people content to let this go on because it is predestined or because Jesus wants it; or whatever. It just adds to my distress to imagine all those people sitting around their living rooms waiting for "The Rapture" and---of course--fulfillment of the further prophecy: conversion of the Jews. If innocent blood is spilled, what does it matter to them? They're certain that Jesus will redeem the blood of the innocent---after, of course, all the true believers are "taken up."
Related postings:
"Christianity” v. Christianity [Christianity v. Christianism]
Compare & Contrast: Some Remarks on Hamdan
The Faulty Reasoning Almanack: The Embryo Huggers v. PETA
Pat Buchanan Slams Bush’s Mideast Policy
Crime and Punishment 1: Children’s Edition; and Crime and Punishment 2: Children’s Edition
POSTED IN CATEGORY: VERSUS
Drawn by Tenniel; painted by Damozel!
5:11:18 PM 
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