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One country bombed two countries. Such
impunity might astound were it not business as usual. In response
to the few timid protests from the international community, Israel
said mistakes were made.
How much longer will horrors
be called mistakes?
This slaughter of civilians
began with the kidnapping of a soldier.
How much longer will the kidnapping
of an Israeli soldier be allowed to justify the kidnapping of
Palestinian sovereignty?
How much longer will the kidnapping
of two Israeli soldiers be allowed to justify the kidnapping
of the entire nation of Lebanon?
For centuries the slaughter
of Jews was the favorite sport of Europeans. Auschwitz was the
natural culmination of an ancient river of terror, which had
flowed across all of Europe.
How much longer will Palestinians
and other Arabs be made to pay for crimes they didn't commit?
Hezbollah didn't exist when
Israel razed Lebanon in earlier invasions.
How much longer will we continue
to believe the story of this attacked attacker, which practices
terrorism because it has the right to defend itself from terrorism?
Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine,
Lebanon: How much longer will Israel and the United States be
allowed to exterminate countries with impunity?
The tortures of Abu Ghraib,
which triggered a certain universal sickness, are nothing new
to us in Latin America. Our militaries learned their interrogation
techniques from the School of the Americas, which may no longer
exist in name but lives on in effect.
How much longer will we continue
to accept that torture can be legitimized?
Israel has ignored forty-six
resolutions of the General Assembly and other U.N. bodies.
How much longer will Israel
enjoy the privilege of selective deafness?
The United Nations makes recommendations
but never decisions. When it does decide, the United States makes
sure the decision is blocked. In the U.N. Security Council, <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2000.htm>the
U.S. has vetoed forty resolutions condemning actions of Israel.
How much longer will the United
Nations act as if it were just another name for the United States?
Since the Palestinians had
their homes confiscated and their land taken from them, much
blood has flowed.
How much longer will blood
flow so that force can justify what law denies?
History is repeated day after
day, year after year, and ten Arabs die for every one Israeli.
How much longer will an Israeli life be measured as worth ten
Arab lives?
In proportion to the overall
population, the 50,000 civilians killed in Iraq-the majority
of them women and children-are the equivalent of 800,000 Americans.
How much longer will we continue
to accept, as if customary, the killing of Iraqis in a blind
war that has forgotten all of its justifications?
Iran is developing nuclear
energy, but the so-called international community is not concerned
in the least by the fact that Israel already has 250 atomic bombs,
despite the fact that the country lives permanently on the verge
of a nervous breakdown.
Who calibrates the universal
dangerometer? Was Iran the country that dropped atomic bombs
on Nagasaki and Hiroshima?
In the age of globalization,
the right to express is less powerful than the right to apply
pressure. To justify the illegal occupation of Palestinian territory,
war is called peace. The Israelis are patriots, and the Palestinians
are terrorists, and terrorists sow universal alarm.
How much longer will the media
broadcast fear instead of news?
The slaughter happening today,
which is not the first and I fear will not be the last, is happening
in silence. Has the world gone deaf?
How much longer will the outcry
of the outraged be sounded on a bell of straw?
The bombing is killing children,
more than a third of the victims.
Those who dare denounce this
murder are called anti-Semites.
How much longer will the critics
of state terrorism be considered anti-Semites?
How much longer will we accept
this grotesque form of extortion?
Are the Jews who are horrified
by what is being done in their name anti-Semites? Are there not
Arab voices that defend a Palestinian homeland but condemn fundamentalist
insanity?
Terrorists resemble one another:
state terrorists, respectable members of government, and private
terrorists, madmen acting alone or in those organized in groups
hard at work since the Cold War battling communist totalitarianism.
All act in the name of various gods, whether God, Allah, or Jehovah.
How much longer will we ignore
that fact that all terrorists scorn human life and feed off of
one another?
Isn't it clear that in the
war between Israel and Hezbollah, it is the civilians, Lebanese,
Palestinian, and Israeli, who are dying?
And isn't it clear that the
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the invasion of Gaza and Lebanon
are the incubators of hatred, producing fanatic after fanatic
after fanatic?
We are the only species of
animal that specializes in mutual extermination.
We devote $2.5 billion per
day to military spending. Misery and war are children of the
same father.
How much longer will we accept
that this world so in love with death is the only world possible?
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