Why
Do They Hate Us?
Listen To Qana (again)
By Jonathan Cook
31 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
The crowds in Beirut last year
demanding a Cedar Revolution, “the first shoots of democracy”
supposedly planted by the United States, are a distant memory. Yesterday
we saw in their place the fury of Lebanon directed against the capital’s
United Nations building -- an early “birth pang” in Condoleeza
Rice’s new Middle East.
If Israel wanted to widen its war, it could not have chosen a better
way to achieve it than by sending its war planes back to the mixed Muslim
and Christian village of Qana in south Lebanon to massacre civilians
there, as if marking a morbid anniversary. A decade ago, Israeli shelling
on the village killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians sheltering in
a local UN post.
To the Lebanese, and most in the Arab world, the United Nations now
symbolises everything that is corrupt about the international community
and its “conscience”. The world body, it has become clearer
by the day, is a mere plaything of the United States and, by default,
of Israel too. It is nothing more than a talking shop, one so enfeebled
that it lacks the moral backbone even to denouce unequivocally the murder
of four of its unarmed observers by the Israeli army last week. How
can Lebanon expect protection for its civilians from an international
body as emasculated as this?
The rage we saw directed against the United Nations building in Beirut,
as if we needed reminding, will be converted in time into more violence
against the West, to more 9/11s and to more London and Madrid bombings.
Will these attacks wake up the slumbering Western publics to stop their
leaders engineering a global war, or will more of us simply be persuaded
that the Arab world is fundamentally irrational and savage?
Why do they hate us? Qana provides the answers but it appears few in
the West are really listening.
All morning when Arab channels were showing the crushed building in
Qana, and the Red Crescent workers extracting from under it more than
60 bodies, mostly children, embalmed in blood and dust, Israel was showing
family movies on its main television networks.
Foreign channels were hardly better. It is in the first responses of
the Western broadcasters -- before they have had time to hone and polish
their scripts and cover all the bases -- that their partisan agenda
is at its most transparent. So all morning their attention was directed
less at the new Qana massacre than at the destruction of the UN building
in Beirut, as though it was our last rampart against the rampaging hordes
of Islam. In this framing of the world, our provocative acts appear
so much less significant than the mystifying response, the Other’s
delusional anger.
Noticeably, our news anchors were careful to avoid referring to the
massacre of Lebanese children at Qana as “an escalation”
by Israel. That word, intoned so solemnly when eight Israeli railway
workers were killed by a Hizbullah rocket in Haifa a fortnight ago,
was not uttered on this occasion. According to our media, when we suffer,
it is an escalation demanding retaliation; when they suffer, maybe it
is time to begin talks about talks about a ceasefire.
BBC World’s presenter in Beirut, Lyse Doucet, personifies this
moral blindness. She chided Lebanese speaker after speaker for the crowds
attacking the UN building. “Why are they doing this when the UN
is trying to broker a ceasefire?” she demanded in bafflement of
each. The headlines at 11am GMT even began with her quoting an expression
of regret she had extracted from a Hizbullah MP for the attack on the
Beirut building, as though amid all that morning’s carnage the
destruction of UN property was the real issue.
This presumably is what our media mean when they talk about “balance”.
Jim Muir, the BBC’s fine reporter in Tyre, observed in the same
broadcast that it was non-combatants who were paying the price in this
war, and that the majority of the dead on both sides were civilian.
Where did he get that idea? In Israel, the great majority of dead are
soldiers, but you would hardly know it listening to our media. In the
same spirit, Jonathan Charles in Haifa observed that it had been “a
difficult day” for both countries, adding -- in case we could
not fathom what he meant -- that Israel had faced a hard day on the
diplomatic front. What lengths our broadcasters must go to to remain
even-handed when we massacre innocence.
Israel, as usual, can be relied on to defend the indefensible. A government
spokeswoman told the BBC in another easy-ride interview that the army
would never target an area if it knew Lebanese civilians were there.
Then she performed a somersault of logic several times by arguing in
her country’s defence that the army knows Hizbullah hides behind
civilians. If she is right, then even as the pilot fired on the Hizbullah
fighters he assumed were inside the building he knew civilians would
pay the price too. But, of course, Hizbullah fighters were not in the
building.
This endless sophistry is designed to lull us into acquiescence. Only
vigilance keeps us asking the right questions. How, for example, after
its reconnaissance planes and spy drones have been hovering over south
Lebanon for the best part of three weeks, was Israel not aware that
hundreds of civilians were still in Qana? But no one raised that question.
Cut through the apology, both from Israel and our media, and the aerial
strike on Qana looks, at the very best interpretation, recklessly ambivalent
about the likely civilian death toll. A cynic might go further. Was
the attack meant as a warning to other civilians still in south Lebanon
to get out -- and fast? After its clear failure to win a conventional
war, does the Israeli army want a freer hand to begin the job of incinerating
Hizbullah, using its cluster and incendiary bombs, the Middle East’s
napalm? Was the answer to be found in the statement of Israel’s
Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, yesterday that, generously, he was giving
civilians 24 hours safe passage to get out of the south.
Or was the massacre crafted as punishment for Qana’s villagers,
for those living among Hizbullah, for those who are related to Hizbullah,
for those who believe that Hizbullah is their best hope of preventing
another Israeli occupation? Did Israel’s Justice Minister Haim
Ramon not make precisely this point last week when he announced in a
cabinet meeting: “Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist
and is connected to Hizbollah.”?
Moshe Marzouk, a former senior Israeli army officer who has turned his
hand to being a “counter-terrorism expert” in one of the
country’s leading academic institutions, told the American Jewish
weekly The Forward that one of Israel’s goal in this war is to
teach Lebanon’s Shiite community that it will pay a tremendous
price for Hizbullah’s actions. Maybe Qana was part of the price
he was talking about.
Israel offers a second excuse for the massacre: it says it dropped leaflets
on Qana warning civilians to leave the area. Again, our cynic could
point out that those leaflets were dropped 10 days ago, as they were
across most of south Lebanon. Qana had no reason to expect worse than
anywhere else -- and possibly it expected better, assuming that Israel
would not dare to stage a war crime here for a second time after it
troops massacred more than 100 civilians in 1996.
Our cynic could also note that Israel has bombed the escape roads from
the south and is shooting at anything that moves on what is left of
them. And he could point out that many of Qana’s families have
no cars to leave in, that they can find no petrol to fill the cars that
remain after Israel bombed all the petrol stations, and that in any
case they have nowhere else to go.
Though these things are all true, they distract us from the real issue:
that Israel has no right to empty south Lebanon of its population, to
make a million people homeless, just because its leaflets say they must
leave. Jim Muir let us and himself down when he observed that south
Lebanon is “not an area which can become depopulated overnight”.
No it isn’t, but the deeper question is why should it be depopulated?
At what point did the international broadcasters fall unnoticed behind
an agenda that demands south Lebanon be ethnically cleansed to satisfy
Israel?
Our media are oblivious to the double standards. Did Hizbullah’s
leader Hassan Nasrallah not publicly warn that he would attack Haifa
days before he did so, if Israel continued its aggression and refused
to negotiate over a prisoner swap? Were Israelis not warned to leave
too? And would we allow Hizbulllah to use that as a justification for
its rocket fire on Israel?
On Friday Hizbullah fired its first khaibar missile, packed with 100kg
of explosives, close by Nazareth -- we could feel the earth tremble
from the impact. The Shiite militia waited more than two weeks before
launching a warhead of that size, after it made repeated threats to
do so if Israel continued its onslaught. Who will point out that had
Hizbullah wanted to, if Israel’s destruction was the real aim,
it could have fired those khaibar rockets from day one?
And on Saturday Nasrallah promised to strike “beyond Haifa”
with even more lethal rockets if Israel refused to countenance a ceasefire.
Who on the BBC, or CNN or any of our other channels will quote that
warning as justification if Hizbullah extends its fire to Hadera, Netanya
or Tel Aviv in the coming days?
This is not a war of two narratives, nor even of two worldviews. It
is a war in which we, the West, speak for both sides. Where we define
the meaning of suffering and death, and of victory and peace. Where
our humanity alone counts because we feel only our own pain as the birth
pangs take hold.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth,
Israel. His book, “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish
and Democratic State”, is published by Pluto Press. His website
is www.jkcook.net