A tiny limp hand caked in dirt emerged from a pile of rubble. It was gently clasped by the dusty hand of a rescue worker willing its owner to survive against all odds, while the international community was condemning it to be buried alive. Another photo. Another day. Another statistic.
It is now day 29. I wonder how many trapped bodies are waiting to die abandoned by a world devoid of all justice and compassion?
In response to the capture of two soldiers by Hezbollah, Israel has declared that it wishes “no harm” to the people of Lebanon. (The term “no harm” translated from colloquial Hebrew means “we can bomb you, kill your women and children and destroy your country but please, no hard feelings; we are neighbors after all”!) The spurious irrational pretext has been that the Israelis are trying to help their Lebanese brethren! They even had the gall at the beginning of the conflict to declare that the “majority of Lebanese” were happy with their efforts to eradicate Hezbollah. (Is this not reminiscent of the Bush administration’s haughty and typically delusional claims that the Iraqi people would be showering the streets of Baghdad with roses to welcome Uncle Sam and his troops?)
Hmmm. Let’s see how the Israelis have “helped” the spread of democracy in Lebanon? I wonder whether this assistance was in the form of obliterating mostly civilian targets? Or was it through the now infamous dispatch of pretty pamphlets to terrified communities demanding that they leave their homes, while simultaneously apprising them of the fact that if they did their vehicles could (but what they omitted to say is “would”) be attacked? Or perhaps they were trying to be useful when they deliberately fired at ambulances transporting the sick and wounded? (I think that this makes sense as killing them off en route saved the occupants the journey to the hospital that the Israelis had already bombed out of existence.) Or maybe it was through its 8,700 bombing sorties that have ripped South Lebanon apart destroying 146 bridges and 72 roads? Or the strike on Jieh power station on July 13 that has caused an environmental catastrophe spilling 30,000 tons of heavy fuel oil into the sea? (Naturally there was no Hezbollah hideout within the vicinity, but hey! We know the rules. If you have been unlucky enough to have been in the area where someone from Hezbollah stood around, or caught a bus, or parked their car one sunny afternoon or were dumb enough to have watched the news and there was a broadcast about this organization beaming into your living room then you are a viable target for the Israelis. And as for the power plant, of course, the guys from Hezbollah used electricity, for crying out loud.)
In conclusion this is how Israel has “helped” the Lebanese: It has killed almost 1,000 people, the vast majority of whom are civilians; of these, over one-third were children under the age of 13. It has injured over 3,000, 45 percent of whom are children. It has displaced 1,000,000 of whom one-third are children. It has created through its invaluable help this most unnecessary wave of human suffering that could have so easily been alleviated but for the impotence of our so-called world leaders.
In addition to this, it has murdered UN workers while pretending to try to abide by the organization’s resolutions. What’s even more sickening is that it has the audacity to pick and choose which of these mandates it condescends to adhere to, the outrageous and illegal invasion of another country notwithstanding.
It has behaved with the sort of impunity that doesn’t belong to this day and age and yet is consistently allowed in our increasingly hypocritical and pseudo-principled world order.
Oh well. Boys will be boys! Especially when those Israeli boys are so shamelessly backed up by the might of their powerful benefactors, Uncle George, Auntie Condi and their little “poodle” Blair (apologies to poodle lovers who are no doubt disturbed by this insult to cute canines, but it was the British press not I who was responsible for this analogy.) I feel bitter shame, intense humiliation and inconsolable sorrow in equal measure.
And there larger than life is Dan Gillerman, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, explaining to anyone who would care to listen to such disgraceful platitudes that what his country was doing was trying to remove the cancerous tumor of Hezbollah from the otherwise healthy body of Lebanon. We should all thank God that he is not a surgeon! His tactics to prevent the tumor from spreading are it seems to kill the patient. Well, it definitely does the trick.
I stare in self-disgust at the image of the child’s hand before me in pretty much the same manner that I had looked upon the picture of a child cowering, covered in blood on Day 1. My thoughts are still the same. How can this be happening? How can we stand back and allow this to happen? How in God’s name can we allow these innocents to be tortured and murdered like this?
There is no answer to these questions. The world has turned its back on Lebanon. Had that same hand belonged to the victim of an earthquake we would have been clambering to rescue it. Had Lebanon been fortunate enough to be hit by a tsunami or a hurricane we would all have rallied to its side. Even though natural disasters are inevitable, how we love to weep and lament their passing. Yet in this illegal reprehensible wholly preventable war we join bloody hands to precipitate the destruction of an entire country and the callous and barbaric annihilation of its people.
We are all complicit in this crime against humanity.
But that’s OK I guess. After all, we have to look on the bright side. If we train our eyes a little carefully beyond those rows of dead little children, the piles of rubble that were once beautiful villages and hamlets and the old and sick trapped in bombed out buildings, we can see that this is all part of the new picture. Uncle George and Auntie Condi’s vision of the “New Improved Middle East”. And so what if the vision is not that clear because of the smattering of blood all over the lens? That can very easily be cleaned up and forgotten. The media have a good way of diverting our attention away from such trifles. After the atrocities committed in Lebanon, how many of us have spared a thought for the people suffering in Iraq or Palestine or Afghanistan?
In an effort to bring democracy our way, this week it came to light that on May 29, US troops killed six unarmed civilians in Afghanistan in Khair Kane. In Iraq US soldiers faced charges of raping and murdering a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim Al-Janabi, and then murdering her parents and five-year-old sister. It seems that this was just the appetizer as they grilled chicken wings and ate them after the assault. And who in their right minds can forget how these bringers of liberation murdered 15 civilians in cold blood in the village of Haditha just for the heck of it?
Uncle George it seems fancies himself as Dexter, the boy genius, and the Middle East is his new secret laboratory. And if the ingredients that we have to contribute to his improved formula are the corpses of a few hundred of our babies and children why should we complain? We have the aforementioned shining examples of Afghanistan and Iraq to show us what a stunningly good idea this is.
If you compare what the region was before Uncle G’s magnanimous decision to screw it up and what it has become now, I wonder which you would equate with being a more fertile ground for the proliferation of terror? If Uncle George and Auntie Condi were given a dollar for every fresh recruit their so-called war against terror brought into the very organizations they seek to destroy they could retire very comfortably very soon and, in the words of Sam Cooke, “what a wonderful world it would be.”
— Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.
