Cranius wrote:

Lemuel Gulliver wrote:I'd guess some of the jew haters on this thread wouldn't come to my point of view...

AlBStern wrote:Article about the Israeli bombing of the UN post.

Andrew L. wrote: Fuck's sake. You want to talk to me about "objectivity," AlBStern? There's no need to apologize for atrocities just b/c one allies w/ Israel.

Andrew L. wrote:AIBStern, do you think the Israeli military response in this "conflict" has been warranted or "measured," whether on strategic or moral grounds?

steve wrote:Calling someone opposed to Israel's tactics a "jew hater" is ridiculous. It is a way of avoiding the content of the discussion and makes you look like an asshole. You shouldn't do it.

If there is an actual jew hater reading this thread, he is not anyone we know. I'm pretty confidant of that.

Andrew L. wrote: It's not b/c Iran and Syria finance it, it's because it fulfills a need. This need (food, medicine, education, community, pride) is not the result of some natural deficit in the Shiite population waiting to be exploited. It's the result of the dispossession of a people. Refugees.

"So, I guess what I'm saying is I don't fully understand how Israel's colonial roots come into play with the last few weeks' fighting, because they're their now and have been for 60 years. I see no imperialistic ambition on Israel's part. How do these roots come into play?"

July 31, 2006
The Scene
A Night of Death and Terror for Lebanese Villagers

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
QANA, Lebanon, July 30 — The dead lay in strange shapes. Several had open mouths filled with dirt. Faces were puffy. A man’s arm was extended straight out from his body, his fingers spread. Two tiny children, a girl and boy, lay feet to head in the back of an ambulance, their skin like wax.

In the all-day scramble to retrieve the bodies from the remains of this one house — backhoes dug for hours at the site after an early-morning airstrike — tallies of the dead varied, from as many as 60 to 27, many of them children.

This was the single most lethal episode in the course of this sudden war. The survivors will remember it as the day their children died. For the village, it is a fresh pain in a wound cut more than 10 years ago, when an Israeli attack here killed more than 100 civilians. Many of them were children, too.

The Israeli government apologized for that airstrike, as it did for the one here on Sunday. It said that residents had been warned to leave and should have already been gone.

But leaving southern Lebanon now is dangerous. The two extended families staying in the house that the Israeli missile struck — the Shalhoubs and the Hashims — had discussed leaving several times over the past two weeks. But they were poor — most worked in tobacco or construction — and the families were big and many of their members weak, with a 95-year-old, two relatives in wheelchairs and dozens of children. A taxi north, around $1,000, was unaffordable.

And then there was the risk of the road itself.

Dozens, including 21 refugees in the back of a pickup truck on July 15, have been killed by Israeli strikes while trying to evacuate. Missiles hit two Red Cross ambulances last weekend, wounding six people and punching a circle in the center of the cross on one’s roof. A rocket hit the ambulance convoy that responded in Qana on Sunday.

“We heard on the news they were bombing the Red Cross,” said Zaineb Shalhoub, a 22-year-old who survived the bombing. She was lying quietly in a hospital bed in Tyre.

“What can we do with all of our kids?” she asked. “There was just no way to go.”

They had moved to the house on the edge of a high ridge, which was dug into the earth. They thought it would be safer. The position helped muffle the sound of the bombs.

But its most valuable asset was water. The town, mostly abandoned, had not had power or running water in many days. A neighbor rigged a pumping system, and the Shalhoubs and Hashims ran a pipe from that house to theirs.

Life had taken on a strange, stunted quality. In a crawl-space basement area near the crushed house, five mattresses were on the floor. A Koran was open to a prayer. A school notebook was on a pillow. Each morning, the women made breakfast for the children. Ms. Shalhoub gave lessons. And they all hoped for rescue.

The first missile struck around 1 a.m., throwing Mohamed Shalhoub, one of the relatives who uses a wheelchair, into an open doorway. His five children, ages 12 to 2, were still inside the house, as was his wife, his mother and a 10-year-old nephew. He tried to get to them, but minutes later another missile hit. By morning, when the rescue workers arrived, all eight of his relatives were dead.

“I felt like I was turning around, and the earth was going up and I was going into the earth,” said Mr. Shalhoub, 38, staring blankly ahead in a hospital bed in Tyre.

Israeli military officials said the building did not collapse until the early morning, and that “munitions” stored in the house might have brought it down. But the house appeared to have been hit from above, and residents said the walls and ceiling came down around them immediately after the first bomb.

“My mouth was full of sand,” Ms. Shalhoub said. She said doctors had told her family that those who died had been suffocated and crushed to death.

“They died because of the sand and the bricks, that’s what they told us,” she said.

At least eight people in the house survived, and told of a long, terrifying night. Some remained buried until morning. Others crawled free. Ms. Shalhoub sat under a tree with Mohamed Shalhoub, without his wheelchair, and three others, listening to the planes flying overhead in the dark.

“You couldn’t see your finger in front of your face,” said Ghazi Aidibi, a neighbor.

Ms. Shalhoub said she tried to help a woman who was sobbing from under the wreckage, asking for her baby, but she could not find the child. A neighbor, Haidar Tafleh, said he heard screaming when he approached the debris, but that bombing kept him away.

“We tried to take them out, but the bombs wouldn’t let us,” Mr. Tafleh said.

The area took several more hits. A house very close to the Shalhoubs’ was crushed. A giant crater was gouged next to it. Residents said as many as eight buildings had been destroyed over two weeks.

Collapsed buildings have been a serious problem in southern Lebanon. Dozens of bodies are still stuck under the rubble. The mayor of Tyre, Abed al-Husseini, estimated that about 75 bodies were still buried under rubble in Slifa, a village on the border.

A grocer, Hassan Faraj, stood outside his shop, near a monument to those killed in the 1996 attack. He said that Hezbollah fighters had not come to Qana, but that residents supported them strongly. There was little evidence of fighters on Sunday, but Hezbollah flags and posters of Shiite leaders trimmed the streets. “They like the resistance here,” he said.

He cautioned people not to stand in the street in front of his shop, because that was where the ambulance convoy was hit in the morning.

At the Hakoumi Hospital in Tyre, Mr. Shalhoub sat in bed. His face was slack, stunned. His relatives poured him spicy coffee, and the room filled with its scent. The survivors spoke of their faith as a salve. The children, Mr. Shalhoub said, were in paradise now.

But 24-year-old Hala Shalhoub, whose two daughters, ages 1 and 5, were killed, was moaning and rocking slightly in her hospital bed.

“I want to see them,” she said slowly. “I want to hold them.”

A relative said, “Let her cry.”

Zaineb Shalhoub, in the next bed, rested quietly.

“There’s nobody left in our village,” she said. “Not a human or a stone.”


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

ari berman in the nation dot com wrote:On July 18, the Senate unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution "condemning Hamas and Hezbollah and their state sponsors and supporting Israel's exercise of its right to self-defense." After House majority leader John Boehner removed language from the bill urging "all sides to protect innocent civilian life and infrastructure," the House version passed by a landslide, 410 to 8.

AIPAC not only lobbied for the resolution; it had written it. "They [Congress] were given a resolution by AIPAC," said former Carter Administration National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who addressed the House Democratic Caucus on July 19. "They didn't prepare one."