27 July 2006

Enablers

“Israeli officials said they regarded the failure of an international conference to reach agreement on a cease-fire plan as clearing the way for further assaults.”

That’s the subhead on the story at the upper left of the New York Times Online webpage at 7:22 a.m., California time. The headline reads: “Israel Debates Strategy Shift After Truce Talks Fail.”

Um, excuse me?

The first thing I thought upon reading that subhead was, “they’re like little boys who, while Mom and Dad fight over whether or not it was a good idea for Dad to give them that Bowie knife, go out and start practicing their magic knife-throwing act with the neighbor kid as the target.”

My second thought was, “is there some reason they can’t just, you know, stop firing bombs into Lebanon? And vice versa? So they won’t keep killing and maiming and displacing and destroying hundreds of innocent bystanders? People who aren’t part of the fight at all?”

This is distinctly female thinking, I know (Condi Rice excepted, obviously) but as a mother of some experience, I want to take bad boy Israel and the bad boy Hezbollah and stand them in separate corners.

And cheerleader Condi should be sent to bed without her supper.

Once they’ve figured out the kind of serious trouble they’re in, they ought to be forced to clean up the mess they made by a very stern and angry world. And pay for it out of their allowances.

“Later, she [Rice] defended the United States’ refusal to call for an immediate cease-fire, saying: “It doesn’t do anyone any good to raise false hopes about something that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. I did say to the group, ‘When will we learn?’ The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken cease-fires.”

"The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken cease-fires."


A true statement, unfortunately. Yet surely, trying in good faith for an immediate cease-fire, with negotiations for a sustainable cease-fire following, is far better than the continued, wholesale slaughter of innocents.

This is a shameful fight. It will not solve Israel’s problems in the Middle East; indeed, it is only making them far, far worse. Of course, people like Codpiece and Condi are cheerleading Israel’s bloody-mindedness for reasons of their own. In their cracked minds, they see fanning the hungry flames of this conflict as bringing the world ever closer to that magical moment when Rapture comes.

Cretins. These violent, bloody, terrible deaths – the deaths of innocent children, of innocent men and women, young and old, who have no part in the fight – are on their hands.

And, sadly, on ours. We’ve enabled them.

In the meantime, the hell we’ve made of Iraq continues burning merrily, unchecked.

3 comments:

simply...lilli! said...

Blue Wren, it's so good to see there are others, all over the world, who still care. I know we lack the power to change anything and have to leave it to the politicians ( ... I can't help but worry from what I hear on the latest news though), yet it feels good to know one isn't alone. It seemed to me like nobody around gave a damn about what is going on in the Middle East right now. Trying to talk to my friends about it, I encountered nothing but questioning looks, some even asked "what do you care?" when I tried to talk about how idiotic all this is, and how dangerous not to act. So all I really want to say is "thank you for sharing your thoughts!". Take care, lille

Kevin Wolf said...

Count me in too.

Whatever the politics and the high feelings on both sides, the US's failure to try like hell to stop the missles is reprehensible.

Anonymous said...

Actually, the basic Arab-Israeli problem is that the Arabs, on the whole (and the majority of Palestinians in particular), want the Jews to die or leave.

Why is it that some people can't recognize malevolent hatred when they see it?