Fisk: A terrible thought occurs to me - that there will be another 9/11

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1214522.ece

The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and outside in the street the palm trees moved.

Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians can you make homeless before you start a revolution? And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign warships came and took their citizens away, to make Beirut safe to destroy?

Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of massacres, great and small. The largest appeared to be 40 farm workers in northern Lebanon, some of them Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. An Israeli missile was reported to have exploded among them as they loaded vegetables on to a refrigerated truck near Al-Qaa, a small village east of Hermel in the far north. The wounded were taken to hospital in Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all been cratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that an air strike on a house in the village of Taibeh in the south had killed seven civilians and wounded 10 seeking shelter from attack.

In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah missiles but, as usual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the day's attacks which centred - incredibly - on the Christian heartland that has traditionally shown great sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite community whose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's closest allies in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon yet Israel's air force yesterday attacked three highway bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was the little people who died.

more...

hears about him.

And it will come by sea, most likely. But whatever, it will come. We have guaranteed it.

... Dems take back the Senate, House or Presidency.

For the same reason that bin Laden conveniently releases tapes at the most opportune times for Bush (e.g. right before the 2004 election), I expect that bin Laden has given orders that the US NOT be hit: Bush is bin Laden's wet dream.

Bush has very nearly fulfilled all of bin Laden's objectives:

- increase price of oil. Check!
- remove troops from Saudi Arabia. Check!
- invade Middle Eastern country, generating chaos and conditions that will facilitate radical Islamic takeovers throughout the ME, and will ultimately bankrupt the US. Check!

They're not fighting us here, because they want us fighting over there.

emphisis mine:

Syria and Iran will send in troops to Lebanon so the RW can attack both of those countries. This has been the PNAC Plan all along.

Mighty appropriate.

Second. Yep, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" ... going according to plan.

nt

who seek to run the world without dialogue and brute force.

K&R

And bush-cheney have spent every day of the past five years showing them why.

Its our government's policies, not our freedom or culture that causes the US to be hated around the globe. Due to this, we are unable to make changes that will make us safer because the public is unaware of the real roots of the problem, at least the roots the Ministry of Truth never mentions.

Because I gather Fisk is suggesting it might really be Arabs this time.

Still, the most important point Fisk makes here is this
<snip>
And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war.

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the region these past three decades has been the growing unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders - our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt - may be afraid. But their peoples are not.
--------------
Several military analysts have been tearing Israel's approach to shreds.

"Extraordinary precedents are being set in this Lebanon war."

and what is left for that person have left to fear?

More and more people are becoming psychologically prepared to give everything and fear nothing.

Reading your posts, Malaise, I see you have the experience or empathy to have learned this already.

If we must die. In 1919 there was a wave of race riots consisting mainly of white assaults on black neighborhoods in a dozen American cities. Jamaican-born writer Claude McKay responded by writing this sonnet, urging his comrades to fight back. It had a powerful impact, then and later.

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

As a child I learned not to value life for life's sake,
but to value it for what living lets you achieve and enjoy.

So I've many times risked my life to protect others, as living without concern for safety
has meant I have been there when other people have been unsafe, and I would prefer to die
than to live with another person's death on my conscience.

And it seems that when we no longer have concern for our own selves,
a force we cannot understand steps in and and takes care of us.
Sometimes this force will help our success.
Sometimes it will comfort us when we are left bruised in the gutter,
And finally it will be a guide opening the door for us.

Hugs, brother, and thanks for the poem. I'm saving it.

from a sister :D

But it was not really an insult;
some men are quite ok, really. ;-)

no problem :D.

:D

:shrug:

Encouraged It to Happen On Purpose. ;-)

But, with enough encouragement, the result becomes inevitable.

they want to kill them all. It is pretty clear...



A wounded civilian being carried away on a stretcher at Maameltain bridge in Lebanon.