i believe the children are our future (thats why its all so hopelessly grim)

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060717/481/c8723701e8f644f0b5befd7df750e8ea


I woke this morning knowing that when I turned on the news I would hear nothing of peace in the war on Lebanon,what I didnt expect was to find the roots of the next generations wars. How can there ever be a peaceful resolution when both sides are inculcated with such hate from such a early age. We condemn as war crimes of the highest order the Lord's Resistance Army when they brainwash ten year olds and force them to kill in Uganda, yet surely this is of a similar ilk when the children of the region are encouraged to hate with such innocent venom.

So often we only hear the voices of the extremists, as though they are the only voices available or the only ones who are able to steer the narrative forward. We hear the usual bullshit about the Israeli attack upon Lebanon being yet another proxy war in the "war on terror", drawing strings out to embrace a justifcation of what is surely an unjust collective punishment of an entire nation.

How can a war of terror defeat a war on terror. Just like the war in Iraq has now been conviently morphed and carefully packaged into the Long War, these daily atrocities are now just part of the accepted rationales for any action, regardless of consequences . From robert fisk in 2000, just change the names, replace assaination with the captured Israeli corporal and he could have written it yesterday:

"Let's go back to June 1982. Southern Lebanon. A UN ceasefire is in place between Yasser Arafat's PLO guerrillas and Israel. In London, a Palestinian tries to assassinate the Israeli ambassador; his potential killer belongs to the anti-Arafat Abu Nidal faction, intent on provoking an Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Israel bombs Arafat's men in Lebanon. After several days under attack, they fire Katyusha rockets over the border into Israel. And what happens? Israel invades Lebanon because it is under "terrorist" attack and suggests – wait for it – that "Arafat cannot control his men".
Sound familiar? There's more. By the time cameras were recording the thousands of civilian casualties of the Lebanon war, the Israelis were asking why the "terrorists" were hiding behind the civilians. Why did the Palestinians use children in their war? Israel said it did not intend to kill children, even the ones I found in the Makassed hospital in Beirut, their bodies still on fire from the phosphorus shell that killed them, and blamed their deaths on the PLO."

Sadly I fear that like most conflicts, demands for a ceasefire will not grow until we have an incident which all the worlds press can define as a massacre, the deaths of a family here, a bus load of fleeing refugees there, the slow drip of collateral damage is easy to ignore and place in a plus and minus column, 312 Lebanese in one, 29 Isrealis on the other, like it were a macabre tennis game. In order for the world to finally demand action from both sides a hundred plus mutilated bodies must be piled in a sickening twisted heap from a single action. Then the inevitable murky shadows of the facts will be deliberatly blurred, but at least these things sadly provide a circuit breaker of revulsion.


do we need another Sabra and Shatila or Qana before we act.

Listening to the news as we speak, 35 dead civilians in a single incident, a village bombed, and it barely makes a dent. The IDF dropped leaflets on the village telling them to leave, "forgetting" that they had bombed the bridges, roads and were indiscriminatly firing missiles at any vehicles on the roads. 35 dead civilians still buried beneath the rubble of their homes is not a massacre, it is just part of the "calm and measured" response.

http://abc.net.au/worldtoday/podcast/20060720worldtoday.mp3
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I loved our foriegn mininster, alexander downer, informing Australian citzens in Lebanon that all they needed to do was steer clear of any Hezbollah "infrastructure" and they would be safe. He neglected to point out (or be asked) what the hell that actually means, it is clearly just more weasle words in place of a condemnation of the actions of israel. If you are an Australian in Lebanon and you die, it is your fault, you were deliberately standing next to some terrorist "infrastructure", like a milk factory or a car or a house. Fucking meaningless weasle words from a fucking weasle.


http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2006/07/19/louise-arbour-killing-of-civilians-in-lebanon-gaza-and-israel-may-be-war-crimes/

I am trying to find progressive Jewish voices, the monolith of opinion that the media portrays, who seem to get their words from the same talking points sheet, that are the current voices of the Israeli side needs to be balanced. I know that many many Jews do not support the current policies of the present adminsistration in either Lebanon or Gaza or the West Bank.

Talk of the attacks on Lebanon continuing until the "infrastructure of terror" is dismantled is just ridiculous. In 18 years of occupation of southern lebanon, the IDF could not erradicate hezbollah, on the day they invaded rockets were fired into Israel, on the day they left, rockets fired into Israel, the only change was that Hezbollah were widely acknowledged as heros who defied and defeated the might of the IDF by a majority of Lebanese, radicals gained further adherents and 20,000 Lebanese civilians lay dead in the fields of rubble.

One could say that the current polling of Israelis supporting the attacks (some 80%) is due to their relative peace being shattered by the hitherto unexpected reach of the Hezbollah rockets. It has been a long while since the conservative heartlands of Israel have felt a genuine threat to life, as the Gazans do everyday. The result of war is always the radicalisation of those who hold moderate views, it is the way Hamas and Hezbollah have grown in popularity and support. Today we are hearing from Israelis who describe themselves as normally against military action, suddenly giving one hundred support to it. Funny what a threat to your life can do to your beliefs.

http://danielscounter.blogspot.com/

http://www.rawstory.com/showarticle.php?src=http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=2927

I havent had time to go through his site, but when work slows, I will continue my search for those Jews who have an alternate view of the current crisis. Perhaps I should google "self-hating jews" as that is undoubtedly what they will be labeled, as I could easily be labeled anti-semetic, despite the fact that I fully support the right of Israel to exist in peace (within its own borders).

from more peaceful times, a snapshot of the most "moral army in the world"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16886-2004Nov27.html