"Imagine, on September 12 2001, Condoleezza Rice had jetted in to town to tell New Yorkers that the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and the two thousand lives lost there represented the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”… Yet that’s exactly what she told the people of Lebanon as they dug dead children out of the rubble left by American bombs dropped from American planes flown by Israelis. When American innocents are killed, we’re told the event changed the world; when Arab innocents are killed they’re just the “collateral damage” of the turning of history’s gears.
Perhaps it was the grotesque spectacle of Rice telling the Lebanese people that calling for a cease-fire would have to wait, because as tragic as their losses were, they were the necessary price of the greater Bush administration’s efforts to create a “new” Middle East — an enterprise that has seen at least 46,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and counting — that provoked Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Siniora to dispense with diplomatic niceties. Siniora, whose leadership had previously been trumpeted by Washington as a showcase for its new Middle East, bluntly challenged the plain racism inherent in Washington’s position: “Is the value of human rights in Lebanon less than that of citizens elsewhere?” Siniora asked. “Are we children of a lesser god? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”
The writer, Tony Karon, on his blog the Rootless Cosmopolitan, here, makes a valid point and raises a critical question which will need to be addressed if some semblance of peace is to come about in the Middle East.
Perhaps it was the grotesque spectacle of Rice telling the Lebanese people that calling for a cease-fire would have to wait, because as tragic as their losses were, they were the necessary price of the greater Bush administration’s efforts to create a “new” Middle East — an enterprise that has seen at least 46,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and counting — that provoked Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fuad Siniora to dispense with diplomatic niceties. Siniora, whose leadership had previously been trumpeted by Washington as a showcase for its new Middle East, bluntly challenged the plain racism inherent in Washington’s position: “Is the value of human rights in Lebanon less than that of citizens elsewhere?” Siniora asked. “Are we children of a lesser god? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”
The writer, Tony Karon, on his blog the Rootless Cosmopolitan, here, makes a valid point and raises a critical question which will need to be addressed if some semblance of peace is to come about in the Middle East.
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