See this page for links to articles on OpEdNEws that articulate both sides on the issues in the middle east. It is the goal of OpEdNews to air opinions from both sides to stretch the envelope of discussion and communication. Hate statements are not accepted. Discussions of issues and new ideas for solutions are encouraged. .As the weekend news broke reporting the most deadly Israeli air strikes yet on Lebanon, killing some 60 people including many children, world condemnation has reached fever pitch.
International outcry has now, indisputably, rendered Israel and the United States to a state of condemnation approaching near-pariah status.
"Horror and condemnation rang out worldwide after an Israeli strike Sunday killed dozens of sleeping Lebanese civilians in the conflict's deadliest attack yet, and capitals from Berlin to Costa Rica cranked up demands for a cease-fire," reads an Associated Press report (July 31, 2006)
As an escalation of Israeli militarism in the region, these acts of collective punishment and crimes against humanity in Lebanon and the occupied territories (well described in Norman Finkelstein's - the son of Holocaust survivors - Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California Press, 2005)), have comprised a policy that can most charitably be described as indifferent to the welfare of innocent Arabs.
As the United Nations Security Council meets in emergency session to halt the Israeli air massacres (and the retaliatory rocket attacks by Hezbollah killing a fraction of those massacred by the Israeli attacks), even American corporate media commentators report on warnings of the likely failed policies of Israeli/U.S. military adventures disaffecting most of world as opinion of the U.S. and Israel hits an all-time low in the Islamic world, especially among the "Arab street," meaning the people suffering under various authoritarian Arab countries.
"'The U.S. is alienating even more world opinion, not to mention allies, for the sake of a strategy that is very likely to fail,' said Augustus Richard Norton, an expert on Lebanese Shiite politics and a former U.N. peacekeeper in Lebanon" (Washington Post, July 30, 2006).
"The US has lost a lot of its credibility as an honest broker...What we've seen is not a reversal of American policy. It's very obvious that [Rice] is still supporting the Israeli operation, and that means she will not be able to declare any cease-fire at this stage. I see it as a complete deadlock, because a cease-fire now means that Israeli military operations continued for 18 days with nothing to show except destruction and causalities...," said Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanon expert at Chatham House of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, in London (Christian Science Monitor, July 31, 2006).
And the U.S. inanities just keep on coming in response.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the killings in Lebanon as merely the "birth pangs" of a democracy in the new Middle East created by Bush's bold foreign policy.
Over in Iraq, another democracy exhibiting birth pangs, over a hundred civilians are killed daily in a bloody civil war, predictably begun after the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation, and still sustained by bald-faced, and facile administration lies.
In President Bush's weekly radio address to the world delivered over the weekend, Bush stuck to his unique combination of sound-bite diplomacy and bellicose foreign policy (war and more war) leading to one catastrophe after another.
"As we work to resolve this current crisis, we must recognized that Lebanon is the latest flash point in a broader struggle between freedom and terror that is unfolding in the region," said Bush.
As the bloodied and dead babies are recovered from the rubble of Lebanon, about the only good thing that can be said is that the world, and a majority of American citizens, no longer believe any sentence containing the words "freedom" and "terror" uttered by this president who will truly live in infamy in world history.
The U.S./Israeli obscenities continue unabated, with predictably destabilizing and radicalizing effects reverberating throughout the world that will guarantee, in response, another 9/11-type, collective-punishment attack against innocent Americans who now sit complacently at home watching the cataclysms unfold on T.V., but with increasing trepidation and bewilderment that Bush will in turn try to use to continue to wage his "war without end" around the world.
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