Yes, I'm back. Thank you, Jesus.
God brought me home with all your prayers. Knowing that I had prayer-power behind me got me through everything. I can't thank you all enough.
I actually took notes during the whole adventure home and will get to writing it up later. But since I can't sleep, I, like some kind of sick addict, found my way to the computer and started reading.
I like the last comment to the "Paranoid" entry. I am using this as a "political forum," I guess. This person thinks I'm "trying to organize actions against Israel." Hmm. I'm not trying to organize violence against or destruction of anyone, including Israel. And that nice, imagine you were born in 1976 (like me) scenario was really what I had done many days ago when I of course offended all this people by saying Israelis are experiences psychosis with psychotic features. I had to edit that to say Israeli foreign policy. But it seems to me you reiterated (even though you did it much clearer and better than me) a point that I had already made.
So if you mean advocating a cease-fire is organizing "actions against Israel". Then yes, I'm advocating for an immediate cease-fire. Because again, I'm not talking about Israel or the Israeli people in general. You know by now, I'm a humanitarian who holds every human life equally. But if you mean Israel, as the policy of its government, then yes I'm against it and organizing actions against, which is calling for an immediate ceasefire. Not this, next week when Condoleeza Rice feels like getting there, let's see how much destruction Israel can to do while we kind of talk about real negotiation BS.
NOW.
What Israel is doing is bad. Even though their official line is that they are trying to stop Hizbollah by going after the major transportation lines, etc, this is not true.
Here are some excerpts from a press release from Caritas Internationalis, that describes itself as a "confederation of 162 Catholic relief, development and social service organisations".
http://www.caritas.org/jumpNews.asp?idLang=ENG&idChannel=35&idUser=0&idNews=4264
Vatican City, 20 July 2006 – Caritas Lebanon says it is providing aid and every possible kind of assistance to more than 25,000 people throughout the country, which has been coming under wholesale and indiscriminate attack from Israel, even in remote areas thought of as safe from the military onslaught.
“Practically every one of the Lebanese regions is being bombarded,” Caritas said in a press statement. “Even the regions that were considered sheltered from aggression have become targets.”
“The Israeli Army is making the situation even worse for Lebanese civilians by targeting warehouses and factories,” said Caritas. “In fact, food storage houses in particular have become the target of Israeli reprisals. A big milk factory in the Bekaa region called “Liban Lait” was completely burned and destroyed by direct attacks from the Israeli Air Force. A food storehouse called “TransMed” in Choueifate, in Beirut’s southern suburbs, was totally destroyed.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But of course, what Hizbollah is doing, is disgusting as well. Now, I don't know why the American media isn't all over this. But many, and I want to say a majority, of the people who live in northern Israel are Palestinians.
That popped into my head when they said the northern Galilee region and I remembered a friend of mine who's Palestinian whose family is from there. That made me think, but I didn't do any investigation about this. (I was kind of busy and focusing on other things.)
But on the Lufthansa flight, they showed the Europe News, which I get in Lebanon. They claim to be completely independent. I was actually fine with their coverage. It didn't make me want to barf like the USA Today I saw, or the Time and Newsweek I glanced at, or the cnn.com that I had been checking.
The Europe News showed all the Palestinian people who were suffereing from Hizbollah raids. Of course, these people have their own reasons to criticize their (Israeli) government. The governemnt hasn't provided them bomb shelters or issued those loud sirens to warn people, like the they've done for their non-Israeli population.
And how can it not make me sick that as a "terrorist militia" they do hide in with the civilians? Israel does have to get civilians to get Hizbullah. But a milk factory, a food warehouse, and trucks carrying humanitarian aid??
I don't know. Should I trust that Israel honestly thinks these things are a threat to their security?
Or should I think they had bad intelligence and didn't realize what they really were? No. Israel knows everything. I'm assuming that Israeli intelligence is VERY good. They knew they were bombing a milk factory. And considering that they know there's a humanitarian crisis, it doesn't seem like they can justify that.
It's war. All sides are fighting. They are all to blame.
There needs to be a cease-fire now. And my country is to blame for every single moment they put this off.
And watch how long they keep pushing this off.
MLK, Jr., in a "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" very eloquently talks about how justice delayed is no justice. He talks about "Why we can't wait." I don't have my books here. I would love for someone to pull out those great quotes about how the Negro has been told to Wait, to Wait. And how Someday means Never.
Every moment the U.S. government sits on its ass and keeps talking BS and does nothing is their participating in and supporting a humanitarian disaster.
It was this being told to wait some more that made me abandon the American plan to evacuate me. When I showed up at the predetermined time and place on Friday and was told it was postponed til tomorrow (the third time), I snapped and said screw it, I'm not gong to wait here like a sitting duck and wait for these people to get their shit together. That's why I just snuck out of the dorm, and didn't tell any of them what I was doing.
1 comment:
Jane:
Glad to hear that you've arrived home safely. I hope you've gotten some sleep, and some Tex-Mex, not necessarily in that order. :)
I'm also glad you liked the "Paranoia" comment. And that you edited the "psychotic and paranoid" bit; it's probably obvious from the style, but I was the poster who respondend to that, as well.
Finally, I'm glad we seem capable of having a reasoned back-and-forth. I don't think we knew each other in college, but this kind of exchange is one of the things I remember fondly about Harvard.
Some comments on your latest:
A ceasefire is one thing; UN sanctions are another. When you advocated UN sanctions against Israel, before, what kind of sanctions were you hoping for? Would they not be "actions against Israel"?
Now, keep in mind, I'm not an apologist for the Israeli government; military actions against power plants (in Lebanon or Gaza) or food stores, as you write about here, are simply immoral. On the other hand, I think people need to think hard about the relative merits of bringing sanctions against Israel. What would it accomplish? What messages would it send, and to whom?
I'm not advocating "waiting"; I'm advocating a reasoned response. Here are some sincere questions for you:
When calling for an immediate ceasefire, have you thought about who benefits?
Obviously, Lebanese civilians. And that's a good thing.
But who else? Do you think, if Israel stopped its attacks tomorrow, that Hizbollah would stop firing rockets? Would it let the two soldiers it captured go? Would the Lebanese government disarm them, and send its military to patrol the south? What does "justice" look like, in the end scenario?
Who would enforce the ceasefire? Lebanon? The UN? The US? They've certainly shown no inclination to do so thus far, other than ambiguous comments about "international forces."
What it comes down to, for me, in the end, is that it's simply too easy to call Israel, or what it's doing, "bad," and leave it at that. There are reasons for this. They are complex. They do not reduce well to good versus evil.
I continue to be baffled by how you seem to clearly understand this when writing about Hizbollah and its supporters in Lebanon, but not when you write about Israel.
Do you truly feel the Israeli government is evil? Or psychotic? Or paranoid? Do you feel this is true personally for Olmert? Peres? Perez?
Do you realize that the hypothetical people born in 1976 that I described might not be civilians, but, by now, relatively high-ranking officers in the Israeli army? (They would've lived through the Persian Gulf War and entered the army a few years later.)
Or that if you pushed the clock back some years, so that they were born in 1966, or 1956, they could be members of the Israeli foreign policy team? (In the latter case, they would have entered the army in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War; something else to consider.)
Maybe the best question is this: What would you have suggested Israel do after Hizbollah attacked?
Again, these are honest questions. I'm not trying to play "gotcha" here.
Post a Comment