Day: 1-Aug-2006

…..Why do they hate us? Qana provides the answers, but it appears few in the West are really listening.

All morning when Arab channels were showing the crushed building in Qana, and the Red Crescent workers extracting from under it more than 60 bodies, mostly children, embalmed in blood and dust, Israel was showing family movies on its main television networks.

Foreign channels were hardly better. It is in the first responses of the Western broadcasters – before they have had time to hone and polish their scripts and cover all the bases – that their partisan agenda is at its most transparent. So all morning their attention was directed less at the new Qana massacre than at the destruction of the UN building in Beirut, as though it was our last rampart against the rampaging hordes of Islam. In this framing of the world, our provocative acts appear so much less significant than the mystifying response, the Other’s delusional anger….. Continue Reading →

Since its withdrawal of occupation forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has violated the United Nations-monitored “blue line” on an almost daily basis, according to UN reports. Hizbullah’s military doctrine, articulated in the early 1990s, states that it will fire Katyusha rockets into Israel only in response to Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians or Hizbullah’s leadership; this indeed has been the pattern….. Continue Reading →