{"id":1578,"date":"2006-08-21T16:38:06","date_gmt":"2006-08-21T20:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=1578"},"modified":"2008-05-29T17:08:51","modified_gmt":"2008-05-29T22:08:51","slug":"a-proportionate-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=1578","title":{"rendered":"A Proportionate Response"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kathy Kelly
\nAugust 21, 2006<\/strong><\/p>\n

Upon arrival in Beirut in early August, 2006, Michael Birmingham met Abu Mustafa. Michael is an Irish citizen who has worked with Voices campaigns for several years. Abu Mustafa is a kindly Lebanese cab driver.<\/p>\n

Having fled his home in the Dahiya neighborhood which was being heavily bombed, Abu Mustafa was living in his car. Abu Mustafa joked that he sometimes went back to his home in the already evacuated area of the Dahiya, just to take a shower or sometimes a proper nap. His family was living with relatives in a safer area. Toward the end of the war, Israeli bombs blasted buildings quite near his home. He tore out of the suburb in his cab and made that his home until we met him again on August 15th.<\/p>\n

That day, he took us to the Dahiya where we saw hundreds of people, including parents walking hand in hand with toddlers, process silently along streets lined by wreckage. Even the small children looked extremely sad and grim.<\/p>\n

Before the \u201cShock and Awe\u201d bombing of Iraq in 2003, a contingent of peace activists living in Baghdad hung huge banners at various locales stating, \u201cTo bomb this place would be a war crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Dahiya\u2019s streets, we saw the sequel, banners that said \u201cMade in the U.S.A.\u201d in Arabic and English, detailing U.S. complicity in manufacturing and shipping the weapons that demolished homes, gas stations, shopping malls, overpasses, clinics, the town square, \u2026.block after block of ruin.<\/p>\n

On the fourth floor of a five-story apartment building, a father and his daughters scooped up successive loads of broken glass and pitched them onto the sidewalk below. They called out a warning before each load came crashing down. You have to start somewhere.<\/p>\n

[MORE<\/a>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kathy Kelly August 21, 2006 Upon arrival in Beirut in early August, 2006, Michael Birmingham met Abu Mustafa. Michael is an Irish citizen who has worked with Voices campaigns for several years. Abu Mustafa is a kindly Lebanese cab … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-ps","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}