Take a deep breath.. and dive into the Middle East.

Madness.

I don't know if this describes more accurately the current Israeli administration, or the "International Community" which, if we trust the mainstream media to be representative of , is so strongly blaming the whole situation on Hezbollah that it has become laughable.
When the BBC news arabic titles "Death of one Israeli in the North of Israel" (referring to the man who died in the city of Naharia earlier today) and when the fourth paragraph mentions that "Israel has bombed a bus full of women of children fleeing their village and heading towards the mountains to escape Israeli heavy artillery shelling", making 38 victims -- more than all the Israelis who died from the beginning of the last hostilities -- the situation because just ridiculous.

Is it so scary to blame Israel? Why has it become an act of political suicide for a politician to say 'I condemn Israel for shattering every code of conduct, every code of honour, every text they are supposed to abide by, be it earthly or heavenly, secular or sacred'?
Because this is what it does.


HE....

I once read the Rome Statute of the new International Criminal Court (which both the US and Israel voted down) -- and I recall that, of all the crimes cited as war crimes, Israel was guilty of ALL of them except ONE: 'forced abortions'.
This scares the living hell out of me.

But let me focus on Lebanon, since this is the issue at hand today. Not that the genocide of Palestinians has slowed down -- it actually usually picks up whenever attention is on something else, but in order not to bore the kind readers who have honoured my humble blog with their time, let's remain in Lebanon.





... IS SHOOTING HIM.

There are ways of waging a war. There are honourable, and dishonourable ways.
Hezbollah, name them a terrorist organisation or a resistance group, are fighting for soldier against soldier. They have kidnapped 2 Israeli soldiers by the lebanese border -- I don't think those lads were on their way to a friendly visit, now were they :) -- and have sought to use them as a negotiation device to convince the Israeli government to release the HUNDREDS of Lebanese prisoners it holds, unlawfully, in israeli prisons. Those prisoners include children and women, for that matter.

Condemnable act? Yes. I agree. Probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, seeing that the Israeli prime minister reminds me of GW Bush before september 2001: Hopelessly trying to fill the shoes of a big man. Dwarves like those two gentlemen do what they can do best: a hell of a lot of noise - and a lot of victims that the world will be quick to forget.

But let's not do as the media did and get carried away by a secondary discussion about whether Hezbollah is a terrorist movement, a resistance movement or a political party or whatever you wish to call it.
The question at hand is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. To quote Rami Sarafa, "let's think back to a few years ago when the U.S. spy plane crashed in China; imagine if the U.S. tried to
free their soldiers by invading China- this is exactly what's going down".
The question is one of a massacre of civilians and an organised destruction of the infrastructure of a sovereign state.

Lebanon was just starting to recover from what it's been through recently - the retreat of Israel from most of the Lebanese occupied territories, the pull-out of the Syrian forces, the series of political assassinations - and this summer promised great things for the small nations. Now Israel has successfully destroyed the touristic season - for a few years to come, probably - and has assassinated HUNDREDS of people.



Israel is bombing full house blocs. It is bombing buses carrying women and children running from their lives from the heavy shelling coming from the Israeli artillery, from its military aircrafts operating in civilian areas, from the Israeli boats stationed by the Lebanese coast and enforcing a blockade the effects of which are very likely to be felt soon.

Of course Hezbollah would retaliate - anything else would have been unexpected. In a war, when your enemy has decided to strike you with all its force and nothing is going to stop it (nothing is going to try to stop it, if we count on the international community) the only thing you can do is try to scratch him - maybe the casualties will convince him to leave.

But not the Israeli army, because the goal has never been to free its soldiers - commandos would have been more successful, let's all acknowledge this fact - but it's a reputation building exercice for a weak prime minister who became prime minister by accident, and a minister of defense whose military experience is as big as his sense of honour - zero.



We are facing a clear case of state terrorism. Sadly, we are unable to hope that the international jurisprudence will have anything to add. The only time Israel was dragged in a court of justice was at the ICJ (International Court of Justice) which ruled on the illegality of the apartheid Wall (a.k.a. separation barrier); no one took attention of this ruling for longer than 2 days, because the opinion of the court is "strictly advisory".

No, the international community has proven that it's either weak, or as morally corrupt as Israel.

Israel has unleashed hell. God knows how it will close, or how many lives it'll take. The ball is in the Israeli court, as it has always been. If they want peace, as well as preserve the lives of their citizens, they can; their neighbours will respond in kind.