Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "The contorted arm was in a deformed pose with an extremely flexed wrist, seen commonly on children with cereberal palsy."
Making these sorts of arguments isn't going to buy you anything. Everyone knows that Israel has a heck of a lot more weaponry than they have targets. That's why there's been so much stuff dropped on infrastructure and general neighborhoods.
Is the photograph faked? I don't know and I'm really not inclined to make an internet search for what happens to the limbs of people bombed to death. But let me remind you that the last time you went on and on about how a photograph was faked evidence of an Israeli war crime you had to eat your words.
The topic was the photograph of Israeli soldiers posing next to a dead Palestinian. You said that the photo was obviously a fake. I told you that this sort of photograph taking was very commonplace in war even though it is technically a violation of the Geneva convention. The Israeli newspapers then reported the names of the soldiers who got punished for the violation.
Since then, we've had the Iraq war to again give demonstrations of the truth of my comments -- US soldiers take these sorts of photographs all the time and have stuck hundreds of them up on the web. I doubt that you would make that mistake again, now that is has been repeated so much.
But the real lesson from the Qana photographs is that Israel just isn't getting good press any more. Since this total war (well, "slap fight" is a better description than "war" of such a small conflict) with Lebanon began, Israel has simply been unable to catch a fair call with even the US media.
When rockets drop on Israel, the media goes on about how this is a new record for how far Hezbollah has fired them, or about how Israel's government said that they had the problem solved two weeks ago.
One of the things that you should contemplate is that there were 25,000 US citizens in Lebanon who left the country in the face of Israeli bombing. I'd love to see comparable figures from around the time of the 1967 war or the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
You know very well that Europe is being converted to Islam by a combination of demographics and immigration. Thus Europe slowly grows away from Israel and towards the Arabs. The same process is happening in the US but it is far slower. US connections to Israel's enemies are growing faster than US connections to Israel.
The bad press, the Mel Gibson drunken blather, the Lieberman campaign in Connecticut, all these things are related. The slap fight with Lebanon illustrates well the problems that Israel faces. You guys are slowly walking into a situation where you will have to face the problem of dealing with a far more numerous enemy that is far more powerful than you without the support of your last supporter, the US.
I don't mean to make you feel down by pointing these things out. I want the situation to devolve to peace in the same manner that the situation in South Africa devolved. But to do this, the Israelis need to be educated as to their true situation. By writing this commentary I am making my own small contribution to an end to the conflict.
The primary barrier to peace in the ME is Israel's irrational confidence in their power. It is only when people understand the nature of power that there is no need to kill in order to determine who has power. War, particularly "optional" war, is caused primarily not by conflicting desires between nations (which are unavoidable), but instead by conflicting expectations (which are the result of ignorance) about the results of war.
Conflicting desires between nations is eternal, war is not. the human race is just a bit too advanced to be starting wars based on ignorance and blindness.
-- Carl |
