NYT: Images of Lebanese Death Intensify Arab Anger

[DeepModem Mom]

Images of Lebanese Death Intensify Arab Anger
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: July 30, 2006

DAMASCUS, Syria, July 30 — The images of the dead children in southern Lebanon played across the television screens on Sunday over and over again — small and caked in dirt and as lifeless as rag dolls as rescuers hauled them from the wreckage of several residential buildings pulverized hours earlier by the Israeli Air Force.

The images were broadcast on all of the Arab-language satellite channels, but it was the most popular station, Al Jazeera, that made the starkest point. For several hours after rescuers reached Qana, Lebanon, the station took its anchors off the air and just continuously played images of the little bodies there.

“This is the new Middle East,” one report from the shattered town began, making a sarcastic reference to a phrase Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice uttered last week when visiting Beirut, Lebanon, and rejecting calls for an immediate cease-fire.

American weapons caused the deaths, the report intoned. Men from the village were shown weeping over the children as they were laid out under blankets in front of the shattered buildings.

The anger the deaths caused in Lebanon and elsewhere was palpable. Within hours, thousands of demonstrators filled the streets in downtown Beirut, smashing windows at the United Nations headquarters, one of the few foreign buildings readily accessible....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/world/middleeast/30cnd-arab.html

[enough]

1. Images of Lebanese Death Intensify HUMAN Anger (NT)

[Mandate My Ass]

2. Thank you

That that needed to be said is truly sad. :cry:

[Monkeyman]

3. Agree whole heartly

[DeepModem Mom]

7. Yes. nt

[David__77]

4. Nothing new here.

This is the story of the past fifty-off years. Arab people are rightly angry. I can only hope that they seek human freedom and not just revenge.

[tocqueville]

5. see thread here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1773749

[DeepModem Mom]

8. Thank you for this link. nt

[Barkley]

6. "images of the dead children ... over and over again ...on all of the Arab

-language satellite channel...

They make it sound like the Arab media is over-reporting these deaths

As if we don't do the same thing when a white girl goes missing in Aruba?

[rodeodance]

9. it was images of Vietnam brought into our living rooms that helped

change the tide.

[slackmaster]

10. I can't recall anything ever making Arabs LESS angry

They must be one pissed-off crowd.

[Herkdrvr]

14. HA!

In my experience, Arabs tend to be hot-tempered. I often wonder if it's the miles of flat nothingness, and the heat that makes people live in such an agitated state. Nothing to do but be angry...if they aren't angry at the US, they are angry about something else.

On the other hand...go eat at an Arabic restaurant in downtown Kuwait or Doha, and they have phenominal service...and the food is good too!

[Jamastiene]

16. Are you saying all Arabs are hot-tempered or just some?

I wonder about that because I haven't noticed any of the Arabs I know personally to be any more hot-tempered than any non-Arabs.

[saigon68]

17. They WON'T print photos like this one in the US

That's why the brown men are angry

[bleedingheart]

18. wow...stereotype much?

[adriennui]

11. they're always pissed off....

it's just a matter of degree.

[ckramer]

12. Israel != freedom, liberty, and happiness

Israel = bunch of killers

[OneBlueSky]

13. can you imagine the administration's response if these casualties . . .

were Americans? . . . if an American city was bombed, or an American community overseas, killing American women and children? . . . can't you just picture his address to the nation, and his vow to "get the perpetrators" no matter how long it took? . . .

why is it different just because the dead men, women and children are Lebanese? . . . is their value as human beings somehow less than that of Americans? . . .

apparently Bush believes so . . .

which makes me believe that he has completely lost his humanity -- if he ever had any, that is . . .

given his upbringing, I have my doubts . . . it was his mother, after all, who couldn't bother her "beautiful mind" with images of the coffins of dead American soldiers . . .

[IndianaGreen]

15. Robert Fisk: 'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'

'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'

By Robert Fisk

07/31/06 "The Independent" -- -- They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. "Mehdi Hashem, aged seven - Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 - Qana',' "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one - Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity - yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the "pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana - as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening "western civilisation" - as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.

And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana - whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine - has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.

And there was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came from the United States, and upon a fragment of it was written: "For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B". No doubt the manufacturers can call it "combat-proven" because it destroyed the entire three-storey house in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them died.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14287.htm