how can they think otherwise?

A couple of nights ago I heard a telling statistic - in the violence between Israel and Hezbollah up to Saturday night 35 Israelis have been killed of whom 20 were military personnel, with 350 Lebanese killed, the vast majority of whom were women and children, and almost none of whom were Hezbollah militants. In its "war on terror" and in an effort to secure the release of 2 hostages the might of the Israeli army, funded and equipped by the US, have destroyed all roads out of Beirut, the airport, the port, countless blocks of apartments, business buildings and many other "Hezbollah strongholds". The US have refused to sanction Israel and Condoleeza Rice has gone on record saying that Israel should have more time to complete its operations against Hezbollah before a ceasefire should be called for.

So my question is - how can the Arab world believe anything else except that an Arab life is worth less than non-Arabs?? How can we be suprised by anti-western sentiment among Muslim communities? Why are we standing by letting these heinous crimes against innocent people go unstopped and practically uncriticised??

And today Israel says it has no choice but to occupy part of Lebanon until an international force is deployed - that's right, they are occupying a sovereign country because its in the interest of national security.

Lets draw a parellel here - in June 1996 a huge explosion ripped apart the centre of the city of Manchester and over 200 people were injured by the IRA-planted bomb. This was the seventh attack by the IRA since Feb of that year. If we had behaved as Israel are behaving today we would have order air strikes to take out the airport and port in Dublin, bombed the hell out of the bridges and roads out of the city as well as residential areas then sent ground troops to occupy the land between Dublin and Belfast.

But we didn't do that, because the IRA are not representative of the whole Irish people and they have a democratically elected government. (And beside the US would have stepped in to sanction us pretty damn quick, but that's another rant for another time...)

Oh, and another thing, have you heard the term collective punishment? In a nutshell it means punishing a group of people for the crimes of one or a few of them - and Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention specifically forbids collective punishment. An example might be, oh I don't know, maybe destroying power stations that supply domestic power to a country for example or bombing bridges and roads and apartment blocks. So where are the criticisms of the Israelis for behaving like this??? I guess the only country with any influence over Israel isn't prepared to go there - maybe cos they're not so pure themselves...

Tags: middle east crisis, israel, palestine, colective punishment