Day to Day, 20 July: NPR correspondent Jackie Northam joined dozens of writers, photographers, sound engineers and interpreters on a Hizbollah-led tour of the horrific destruction of southern Beirut. She says, “Nabolsi may have led the propaganda parade through the neighbourhood, but the sheer extent of the damage spoke louder than anything he had to say,” yet listeners are barely allowed to hear from Nabolsi himself.
At one point when Nabolsi is heard, Northam introduces his words by saying he “wastes no opportunity to slam the Israelis for levelling the neighbourhood” but is “defensive” when asked about Israeli casualties and the incident that “seems to have ignited this round” of violence, the capture of two Israeli soldiers. This instructs the listeners that Israel’s actions, even if they are a response to the capture of two soldiers, are reasonable, and that Hizbollah must endure Israeli attacks without launching a “defensive” of any kind, verbal or military. The tour ends when Northam hears approaching planes and Nabolsi shouts, “Jet fighters in the sky,” and the group frantically scrambles for transportation out of the area.
A grieving family sits next to the
coffins of several dead children.
All Things Considered, 21 July: NPR correspondent Ivan Watson reports that scores of Lebanese are being dug out from beneath the rubble of Tyre. Carpenters and volunteers construct makeshift coffins for the dead whilst bulldozers dig long trenches in a field, since the area is too dangerous for proper burials, mass graves must do for now.
Watson reports:
“Nearby, two trucks stood parked. For days, their motors have been running around the clock. They are refrigerator trucks, and since the hospital mortuary overflowed at the start of the Israeli bombing campaign, these trucks have stored a growing cargo of corpses.
The director of the hospital, Dr. Salman Zeynadin, says the trucks are normally used to store meat.”
U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis
By DAVID S. CLOUD and HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON, July 21 — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.
The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.
That last sentence would be hilarious if the situation weren’t so dire. If Iran were able to equip Hizbollah with a defence comparable to Israel’s this outrageous destruction of Lebanon would not be taking place.
This shipment means that the U.S. is fully complicit in Israel’s crimes, and judging from the onslaught of propaganda being streamed non-stop from D.C. myth makers, a remarkably well coordinated reaction to allegedly unexpected events, they will continue brutalising the Lebanese, hoping to elicit a reaction from Syria and Iran, just as they’ve done everything within their obscene military powers to elicit a reaction from the Palestinians since their electing of Hamas to power. A sneeze in the wrong direction will suffice, and a good number of Americans who would not tolerate for a day what the Palestinians have been made to endure for decades, will simply change the channel or channel the official narrative when reality interrupts their good times.
The United States, Israel, and their Arab associates despise democracy. Refrigerator truck manufacturers rejoice. The mightiest have pronounced that millions are expendable.