I still feel a shudder of deja-vu at the irony with which I wrote last week about the ‘generosity’ of the US government’s gift of 2,000 rolls of plastic sheeting to the Lebanese as it rushed precision guided missiles to its henchmen in Israel. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that my macabre analogy would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But there it was right before my eyes. A picture of a series of tiny bodies wrapped in plastic sheets so magnanimously donated by Uncle George and Aunti Condi, callously murdered by the very weapons they had so eagerly equipped the Israelis with. The names of little Mehdi aged seven and Abbas aged one were scrawled in black ink on labels identifying the victims of the US-sponsored Israeli genocide of innocent Lebanese civilians. (I wonder if the felt tip pens and labels were included in the humanitarian aid packages as a gesture of thoughtfulness? What a touching detail!)
The obscene slaughter in Qana (and yes, for the hundreds of detractors who accused me of being ‘bias’, ‘obscene slaughter’ is a pathetically gross understatement for this wholesale annihilation that defies definition) of 62 people, 34 of whom were children, made my blood boil with anger. I read in absolute horror how the Israelis had, with ‘surgical precision’, bombed the house where these terrified souls had been hiding in the basement. Some of the children were awake playing when their lives were so cruelly cut short. Children. Babies. Murdered in cold blood.
But according to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert they had time to make a quick getaway. It was one o’clock in the morning for God’s sake! Who would have warned them and where would they have gone considering his air force had already bombed the roads and gas stations in the vicinity? In whose footsteps were they expected to follow? All those others who had foolishly heeded Israeli warnings to evacuate and then were deliberately murdered as they fled? Perhaps they should have been more considerate and departed in an ambulance so that the big red cross on top would have made it easier for the Israeli fighter pilots to spot and hit?
And how absolutely awful that Fuad Siniora, the spoilsport prime minister of Lebanon, ordered Aunti Condi to call off her peace-making trip even though she had just been to the hairdresser’s and ordered a new black suit especially for the occasion. And to add insult to injury he even insisted that she call a cease-fire! What on earth could he have been thinking? But that is of course yesterday’s news. It seems that no massacre of civilians in Lebanon is worthy enough to secure a lull in the vicious and illegal Israeli onslaught that continues unabated with the full blessings of its American and British consorts. (Uncle George and Aunti Condi were enjoying a quiet dinner together as Tony Blair schmoozed with the rich and the beautiful in California and embarked on the more pressing campaign of sympathizing with Chelsea football players on the ‘pressures of taking penalties’.) Even Israel’s promise to halt the bombing for 48 hours after the Qana tragedy was yet another lie.
Within a few days the repeated cycle of shellings, killings and destruction will bore the already-jaded TV viewers and this tragedy will all too quickly be forgotten like its Iraqi, Palestinian and Afghani predecessors.
But we will never forget. Even though the so-called ‘civilized world’ may have its selective bouts of amnesia we will remember the people of Qana, like we remember the 106 refugees who were killed there by the Israelis as they sheltered in a UN base a decade ago. And what’s more is we will recall with clarity what started this all in the first place.
The media circus would like us all to believe that this crisis has proliferated solely because of Hezbollah’s irresponsible capture of Israeli soldiers. There is some truth to this. But I wonder how it is that statements by the Israeli government about threatening to take Lebanon back 20 years and putting the whole population of Gaza ‘on a diet’ are mysteriously seen as pacifist, uninflammatory and unprovocative? Does it not strike the intelligent reader as a bit strange that the kidnapping is considered such a heinous crime and an outrage whereas the illegal occupation of the Shebaa Farms and Tela Kafr Shooba in the South of Lebanon as well as the entire West Bank and the continuous build-up of illegal Israeli settlements is not?
But who talks of the Israeli abduction of a Palestinian doctor and his brother from Gaza that led to the eventual capture of these soldiers? Who even bothers to mention the fact that 10,000 Palestinian prisoners languish in Israeli jails? What about the Israeli bombing of a power station that condemns the already wretched Palestinians to a life without water or sewage? Or the wall of apartheid that has been constructed to strangle the Palestinians of their basic human rights?
Does anyone remember the failed illegal assassination attempt by Israel that not only missed its target, but left three Palestinian children dead and 15 civilians wounded on June 20? Or how about on June 13 when in a similar feat, the Israelis missed again (pinpoint accuracy, remember?) and killed nine? Or June 9 (perhaps that’s pushing history a bit too far) when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing eight and injuring several others?
Oops! Silly me! I forgot that the dead I mentioned are Palestinians, the new millennium equivalent of the World War I term ‘cannon fodder’. Am I mistaken or was it not the same Uncle George who warmly welcomed Prime Minister Siniora in the White House three months ago (now we’re getting into pre-historic times!) praising the ‘hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets to express their desire to be free’? And now Uncle George leaves them ‘free’ to hang by allowing the Israelis a little bit more rope?
And, pardon me for asking, but if there was just such a huge threat to Israeli security by the crude missiles and rockets fired into it by Hezbollah why is it that the massive evacuation of foreigners that was so urgently carried out from Lebanon has not been deemed necessary from Israel?
The world is a sick place afflicted with a malaise of hypocrisy, deceit and treachery that has made it rotten to its core. The United Nations, perhaps one of the only bastions of remaining hope, was left neutered by the Israeli attack on its observation post leaving four of its personnel dead. How utterly bizarre that there was no expression of remorse or regret from either the US or British governments? A confirmation perhaps of the UN’s increasing impotence on the global stage and yet another superfluous green light that Israel hardly needed to continue to run amok. It comes as no surprise that Aunti Condi is flogging the dead UN horse to pretend to seek a new resolution and international force to stall for time so that the carnage can continue giving Israel the all-clear to inflict more civilian casualties and obliterate the infrastructure of an entire country.
And if the EU was our last realistic hope for a diplomatic push, then here too we have been bitterly disappointed. Britain’s and Germany’s block of a call for an immediate cease-fire has taught us in the uncivilized world that the only lesson that is valuable to note is that justice is dead. At least if you’re born an Arab.
If Bush, Blair and Olmert truly believe that their war crimes in Lebanon are going to crush the influence of Hezbollah they not only suffer from all of the aforementioned ailments but are, in addition to those, utterly delusional. The terrorists of tomorrow are being created by the failed politicians of today. And for those of you who are about to fill up my inbox with justification for these atrocities, just remember: you wouldn’t try so hard to convince me if you didn’t think I was right.
(Lubna Hussain is a Saudi writer. She is based in Riyadh.)
