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Fergal Keane Reports From Qana

Why did the pilot target this particular house [in Qana]? I don’t know. What can be said is that the overall level of civilian casualties indicates that the air campaign is being fought with nothing like the precision and carefulness that Israel has claimed [italics added]. Certainly the civilians I have spoken to who have […]

Why did the pilot target this particular house [in Qana]? I don’t know. What can be said is that the overall level of civilian casualties indicates that the air campaign is being fought with nothing like the precision and carefulness that Israel has claimed [italics added]. Certainly the civilians I have spoken to who have been attacked in their vehicle convoys — and there have been many [italics added] — would find it impossible to accept such an assertion.

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We are good people. What have we done to them?’ one Maronite woman asked as we both cowered under Israeli shelling in the largely Christian village of Rmeich. A few minutes earlier I had descended into the basement of the church of St George to find several hundred terrified and hungry refugees. Many Christians do not like or trust Hezbollah but they are furious at being driven from their homes and at the huge cost in civilian lives. When you are being shelled in your village and then again as you try to flee, you are not inclined to go back along the chain of responsibility and blame Sheikh Nasrallah for ordering the original attack.

The bad news for Mr Bush and Mr Blair is that the people of the ruined villages rail against them too. There was bitter ironic laughter when the American ambassador appeared on television donating humanitar-ian aid for the refugees. It did not escape the notice of the Lebanese that at the very same time the Americans were sending, via Britain, fresh supplies of bombs to be dropped on them by Israel.

No phrase in recent memory has caused so much offence in Lebanon as Condi Rice’s ‘new Middle East’. I have had it thrown in my face by elderly refugees trudging around the massive craters in the roads that lead from the town of Bint Jebiel, a place bombed into the stone age during fighting between the Israelis and Hezbollah. ~Fergal Keane, The Spectator

Mr. Keane’s article has done a good service in firmly rejecting the attempts of apologists to change the story of what happened at Qana. 

It is only natural that Condi’s appalling phrase should cause outrage, as all sane people will be disgusted at having death and destruction likened to birth in the terms of the language of revolutionary fanaticism.  As a matter of rhetoric, it is not much better to say that these are the “birth pangs of the new Middle East” than it is to say about the violent deaths of human beings “you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.”  Goodness knows what that makes the suffering people of Lebanon in Condi’s mind.

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