Children of a lesser God (Sectarian and racial bigotry ?)

Children of a Lesser God

by Osamah Khalil
Last Wednesday at the Rome Summit, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad
Siniora reportedly asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "Are we
children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth more than a drop
of Lebanese blood?" If America's callous indifference to his repeated
requests for a cease-fire were not enough, Siniora received another
answer to his question on Sunday morning when an Israeli attack on the
town of Qana killed dozens of people, including at least 16 children.
For the second time in 10 years, Qana was again the site of horrendous
civilian casualties due to Israel's indiscriminate use of force. As it
did during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its repeated invasions of
the West Bank and Gaza over the past six years, Israel again claimed
that the "terrorists" were hiding behind civilians. Again the U.S.
leadership, whose own disregard for civilian lives in Iraq is evident,
rushed to defend Israel and block it from international opprobrium.
Indeed, the rhetoric emanating from the U.S. has made it clear that it
considers the Lebanese, and other Arabs and Muslims, expendable.

One need only witness the exodus of foreign citizens from Lebanon in
the first week of the war to recognize the similarity to President
Bush's Hurricane Katrina policy: those with money and the right
passport can leave; those without are left to die. Yet American
officials offer little sympathy. On July 17, U.S. Ambassador to the UN
John Bolton, stated that there was "no moral equivalence" between
civilian deaths in Lebanon due to Israeli bombings and Israeli deaths
due to Hezbollah's rocket attacks. His statement was made in response
to a question about eight Canadian citizens and their three Lebanese
relatives killed in an Israeli air strike.

Bolton's disregard for Lebanese casualties pales in comparison to the
policies advocated by Jed Babbin, former undersecretary for defense for
President George H.W. Bush. As a guest on CNN's Paula Zahn Now on July
28, he declared, "I'm willing to kill as many people as it requires to
take out Hezbollah." How did Babbin account for the increasing support
for Hezbollah in Lebanon across sectarian lines since Israel's invasion
began? He claimed the entire country was "enslaved by a sort of
Stockholm Syndrome" that could only be cured by Israeli attacks. By
labeling an entire population as pathological, Babbin revealed the
underlying racism of the Bush administration's Middle East policy. He
also demonstrated how cruelly and consistently American officials and
experts tend to blame the victim when their delusional policies prove
to be an abysmal failure.

Predictably, support for these views came from Harvard Law Professor
Alan Dershowitz. In a July 22 Los Angeles Times opinion piece, he
claimed that the term "civilian" had come to equate "the truly innocent
with guilty accessories to terrorism." Eerily echoing Ambassador
Bolton, Dershowitz declared that "every civilian death is a tragedy,
but some are more tragic than others." Like the Bush administration and
Israel, he conflates civilians with terrorists in an attempt to blur
the horrendous civilian death toll from Israel's "strategic" attacks
using "precision" weapons.

Dershowitz's goal was to offer the media a new vocabulary that would
provide "a more fair way to describe those who are killed, wounded, and
punished." Of course he does not explain how the media will determine
the apparent innocence or guilt of civilians, or what information and
evidence they should use. Nor does he explain how the dead or their
families could petition to be recategorized as an "innocent victim" if
the media originally misidentified them. He needn't have bothered,
because the press has already demonstrated that existing categories of
"civilians" and "militants" are prejudicially determined. A cursory
review of newspaper and television coverage from the Middle East will
reveal that the Arab and Muslim victims of Israeli and American attacks
rarely receive individual profiles. Instead, they are grouped together
in an overwhelming and mind-numbing body count that blares from the
daily headlines: over 60 Lebanese killed, 100 Iraqis dead, 30
Palestinians killed. The numbers are staggering but impersonal and
distant. There are no interviews with grieving relatives or friends and
no pictures to humanize those killed. They are reduced to nameless and
faceless statistics.

I have personal experience with this type of reporting, or rather, the
lack of it. Four years ago on July 28, my 18-year-old cousin, Mamon,
was killed by the Israeli Army in the West Bank village of al-Mizra'a
al-Sharkiya, near Ramallah. Mamon and his friends were unarmed, and the
village was not the origin point for any suicide bombers. However, Army
patrols within the town had increased sharply in the previous few days
in an attempt to harass the villagers. Mamon was shot in the back, and
a friend, Ahmad, was shot in the foot. The soldiers used expanding
bullets, or "dum-dums," which are banned under international law. They
did not call for an ambulance or attempt to take Mamon to the village
medical center; instead, they interrogated him as he lay bleeding. When
he lost consciousness, the soldiers attempted to dump his body on the
front porch of a nearby house. The owners of the home interceded and
demanded the soldiers call an ambulance or take Mamon to the village
clinic. Over 30 minutes passed from the time Mamon was shot to when he
was finally taken to the clinic. He died upon arrival. What was an
earth-shattering event for his family and friends only warranted a
two-sentence paragraph in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz and no
coverage in the Western media. The lack of coverage occurred in spite
of extensive outreach to media sources in an attempt to draw attention
to this tragedy (which was similar to countless others in the West Bank
and Gaza) and bring the soldiers involved to justice. A reporter for
the San Francisco Examiner interviewed me, but the story was never
published. According to the U.S. press, Mamon not only didn't die, he
never lived.

This long-standing standard of coverage in the region has enabled the
Bush administration, the Israelis, and their apologists to label entire
populations as "terrorists" deserving no mercy. Meanwhile, the children
of Qana have been buried, and the earth moans with their cries for
justice. We ignore their pleas at our own peril. If complicity in
terrorism is to be found in this "War on Terror," it is not among the
civilians caught in the Bush administration's inept, morally bankrupt
attempts to play power politics in the Middle East, but in those who
remain silent as this murderous folly unfolds before our eyes.

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