Wars are love stories, easy to begin, hard to end, yet warmongers are never short of pretexts to stir trouble, fuel conflicts, wage wars, then sit back and relax in posh offices, or appear on numerous TV programs to cheer the death, the devastation and the suffering inflicted on innocent civilian caught in the line of a fire.
The way to the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims is blocked by anger, not hatred.
The rockets that planes rain down on terrified Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, the brutal killing of Lebanese and Palestinian people, the smashing of Lebanese and Palestinian infrastructure, the disturbing images of death and destruction emerging from “the axis of victimization” (Gaza, Iraq and Lebanon), the pictures of Israeli soldiers displaying cedar-flags of Lebanon as war trophies, infuriate Arabs and Muslims around the globe.
Many Muslims and many Arabs believe that the attempt to force the release of three captured soldiers was a pretext to inflict collective punishment on the Palestinian people for choosing democracy and an excuse to wage an all-out war on a small, beautiful, democratic Arab country, which has just been rebuilt after years of civil war.
Many are of the opinion that the pretext was used to seize members of a democratically elected government, to destroy the Palestinian Interior Ministry and the prime minister’s offices, to create divisions and havoc in the Palestinian society, to drop “smart” and “dumb” bombs on innocent Arabs and Muslims, to shower Lebanese and Palestinians with threatening leaflets, to scare Palestinian and Lebanese men, women and children out of their wits and force them to vacate their homes and leave their towns, to explode night “sound bombs” to deprive everyone in Gaza of sleep, to fire missiles into residential areas and kill children, women and men, young and old, to demolish roads, bridges and destroy the power stations that generate electricity and running water.
Decades of injustice inflicted on Palestinians, decades of illegal occupation of Arab lands, decades of biased mediation and fruitless negotiations, the detention, imprisonment, torture and slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, the suffering inflicted on Palestinians, Iraqis and Lebanese, the rape and killing of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and the murder of her family, the arrest and beating of Palestinian officials, the heart rendering screams of little Hoda, who lost her entire family in an Israeli raid on the beach where she was spending her first day out of school, the endless futile attempts to uproot the great, deeply embedded Arab culture and replace it with Western values, the ferocious attacks on Islamic teachings, the unending endeavors to erase the Muslim and Arab identities, the destruction of Arab homes, the assassination of Palestinian leaders, the mayhem in Iraq and the failure to restore order, security and stability by peaceful means, the sanctions and the looming sanctions against Muslim countries, the destruction of ancient Arab cities and Arab cultural heritage and the looting of Arab wealth, are but few examples of numerous factors that anger Arabs and Muslims and conjure in their minds images of the infamous Roman Emperor Nero, while Roma burned and promote anger in their hears.
The use of offending epithets, such as “reactionary” and “fascist”, to describe Islam is oil to a burning fire, an attack on one of the world’s greatest religions and an insult to every Muslim. Such words fuels a prevailing suspicion that the war on terror is in reality a war on Islam and its followers. They reinforce a belief that the vicious attack on Lebanon is part of a wide ethnic-cleansing plot.
Yes indeed, the mounting death toll and horrific destruction in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza are “birth pangs”. They have given birth to many conspiracy theories, most of which are highly credible.
When a well-placed official warned that Lebanon would be attacked and brought twenty years back and when his words were quickly followed by the bombardment of the designated country, many around the globe suspected that the war was pre-planned.
Many Arabs and Muslims came to believe that the operation was the brainchild of a spin machine, which does not leave a stone unturned to divert attention from the chaos in Iraq and the suffering of the Palestinian people.
Many feared that the war was an attempt to liquidate the Israeli-Palestinian problem and deprive Palestinians of their promised viable state.
The longer the war on Lebanon continues, the more resentment and anger it will promote, the higher the fence of mistrust between Arabs and Israelis will be, the less secure Israel will be, the less credibility American mediation and American policy will enjoy, the more the flame of Anti-Americanism will rise and the greater will be the probability of trouble spilling over and reaching regions far from the war zone.
Do we not live in a global village? Is not globalization a fact on the ground?
When the curtain eventually falls on a war that could and should have been avoided, we will all will be left with scars that time may fail to heal.
