Better Hail than My Foot

The coverage of the recent hailstorm in Lebanon, which detonated many of the still unexploded cluster bombs lying around throughout the Lebanese countryside, is practically the same article in both Haaretz and Al Jazeera save a few details. (although i'm not sure details is an appropriate word to reference loss of human life and the potential for more)

Al Jazeera on the number of cluster bombs:

Dalya Farran, spokeswoman for the United Nations Mine Action Co-ordination Centre in southern Lebanon (MACC), said: "We don't know exactly how many [cluster bombs] the Israeli forces dropped, but we know they dropped a few million."

Haaretz on the number of cluster bombs:

The United Nations and human rights groups have accused Israel of firing as many as 4 million cluster bombs into Lebanon during its 34-day war with the militant group Hezbollah that ended in a UN-brokered cease-fire on August 14.

Those lefty radicals! There they go accusing Israel of dropping bombs again!

Al Jazeera on people injured by cluster bombs:

Cluster bombs have killed more than 30 people since the war ended in August 2006, mostly civilians, according to MACC figures. More than 200 others have been injured, with some people losing limbs as a result.

Haaretz on people injured by cluster bombs:

Cluster bombs have killed 30 people since the war. Dozens more have been wounded.

Now you're just demeaning my math skills. More than 200 is in the cent-something-or-others. A dozen is 12. Dozens could be 24, 36, 48, uhh...

My favorite take on the storm is by this guy, commenter #23 on the Haaretz article:

Even nature is removing the reproaches for Israel!! May all those bombs prepared for the Mohammedan terrorist surrounding the State of Israel reach their target or fuse on the way if they miss the evil culprits, so that no innocent victims pay for the terrorists.

Is anyone else imagining a Paul Bunyan-sized Mohammedan terrorist getting hit by little sprays of cluster bombs? Or nature going around with a giant broom cleaning up after humanity's particularly messy wars?

Seriously though, I find it very difficult to believe that nature or the universe or fate interferes in a cluster bomb's choice of target. Believing that divine intervention will intercede is, however, one way to make yourself feel okay about carpeting Lebanon with some of the most incredibly imprecise and enduring types of explosives. Actually no, it IS precise... to kids, farmers, and livestock.

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The following quote alone has made this week's 773 pages of assigned reading good times:

What we end up having [in Palestine] is the most unusual situation. The Israelis monopolize everything. They monopolize nuclear weapons, they monopolize tanks, planes, what else ... They monopolize the land, they monopolize the water ... what else ... They even monopolize moral virtue ... you know, democracy and freedom of speech, and they monopolize the capacity to write the history of our land ... But they are not only content with this; after monopolizing all this and colonizing us to the bones, they also monopolize victimhood! To my knowledge, no colonizer has ever succeeded in monopolizing even victimhood ... just our luck! We say: "Hey, you're hurting us", and they say, "Don't you know how hurt we are? Haven't you heard of the Holocaust!" They are suffocating us, and when we try to push them away a little bit so we can breathe, they say, "We're being victimized. You don't recognize we exist." How on earth can you not recognize the existence of someone as fat as Sharon sitting on top of you suffocating you, I don't know!

Palestinian man interviewed in Sydney, from Ghassan Hage's Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003), Chapter 8 - pg 133.

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