Never Again?
by Anna Baltzer
www.opednews.com
I am sitting in an internet cafe in Beirut trying to concentrate, but I just can’t. There are hundreds of heartbreaking emails to read through, each one worse than the last. The carnage did not stop with the so-called “ceasefire” (I use quotations because the slow massacre of starving an entire population of basic human necessities — sufficient food, water, medical supplies, heat — continues). Everyday on television we watch new bodies being dug out of the rubble. And now that a few international reporters and humanitarian workers have been allowed into Gaza, we hear more of the stories that had previously been left untold.
I do not have the resilience to even bear one more month here. I am so drained, so pained, and of course I have the luxury of being able to buy a ticket and leave whenever I want. It’s fitting that Beirut will be one of my last stops. Here a city, devastated by war after war, continues to rebuild itself, like the rest of Lebanon and like Gaza. Beirut nightlife buzzes around me as I write, and I have to believe that if the millions of Lebanese and Palestinian people repeatedly traumatized in this war-torn land have pulled themselves together to rebuild and look to a better future, then I’ll manage to as well.
What Happened to Western Morality?
Paul Craig Roberts
On the last day of the old year in CounterPunch, two Israelis, Jeff Halper who heads the Israeli peace movement ICAHD, and Neve Gordon, who is chairman of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University, asked, “Where’s the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?”
“Not one of the nearly 450 presidents of American colleges and universities who prominently denounced an effort by British academics to boycott Israeli universities in September 2007 have raised their voice in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza earlier this week,” report Halper and Gordon. They note that Columbia University president Lee C. Bollinger, who has in the past ignorantly insulted Islamic representatives, “has been silent.”
It is the goyim moralists who are silent, not the Jews. It is the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, not the goyim media, that provides reports of Israel’s abuse of Palestinians. Gideon Levy’s “The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again” was published December 29 in Haaretz, not in the goyim press. Levy’s words, “Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom.” These are not words that can appear in American print or TV media. Such words, printed in Israeli newspapers, never reach the goyim.
