Monday, July 31, 2006

Qana

This weekend, the Israeli Defense Force bombed a compound in Qana where two large extended Lebanese families had taken shelter from Israel's reign of death and destruction. The dead are in the dozens, mostly children.

Will Martin Peretz allow me to note that those who murder innocent people are not innocent? Will Alan Dershowitz permit me to point out that the man whose five children, aged two to fifteen, perished, is indeed a victim undeserving of the horror brought on him, even though on NPR I heard him swear allegiance to Hizbullah and Nasrallah? Will Leon Wieseltier, Peter Beinart, and Marshall Wittman sanction my right to speak about the Israeli Brigadier General who attempted to justify the so-called 48-hour hiatus in bombing when even the IDF admits it is no such thing? The general simply could not answer the question about how the "hiatus" differs from the status quo. Are Al From and his friends Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman going to call me anti-Semitic for labeling this IDF general, and by extension, the Israeli power establishment, as the apotheosis of Orwellian?

If there's one thing to take from this episode, other than the starkly frightening voice of the Lebanese man who said on the radio "Israel will be razed. It will be cancelled from the map," it is that Joe Lieberman must be destroyed. Because Israel must suffer a defeat after this; we cannot allow it to move beyond this unscathed, and Lieberman's defeat will be a defeat for Israel, only without the death of innocents. God knows that Joe Lieberman, along with Peretz, Dershowitz, Wieseltier, Beinart, Wittman, From, Rosen, and Weissman, not to mention that Brigadier General, are not innocent.

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