Another Massacre at Qana

[katty]

cont'd: http://www.empirenotes.org/

Empire Notes
"We don't seek empires. We're not imperialistic. We never have been. I can't imagine why you'd even ask the question." Donald Rumsfeld, questioned by an al-Jazeera correspondent, April 29, 2003.

"No one can now doubt the word of America," George W. Bush, State of the Union, January 20, 2004.
A Blog by Rahul Mahajan

July 31, 2006

Weekly Commentary -- Another Massacre at Qana

It seems that Israel has an inexplicable hatred of Qana, the small Lebanese town whose inhabitants claim that here President Bush’s favorite political philosopher once turned water into wine.

Ten years ago, the liberal Labor government of Shimon Peres (with the generous Ehud Barak as Defense Minister) shelled a U.N. compound in Qana where several hundred of the half a million Lebanese refugees created by Peres’ “Grapes of Wrath” bombing campaign were sheltering, killing 106. The Israeli government claimed it was an accident; an Amnesty International investigation concluded that the bombing was deliberate, as did a Dutch general investigating for the U.N.

This time, it was an apartment building, shielding some 60 of the roughly 1 million refugees created by Operation “Change of Direction;” 56 people, 34 of them children, were killed, bringing the official Lebanese death toll to around 700. Israel once again claims that it was an accident, and that they were aiming at a Hezbollah rocket-launcher nearby.

This claim may give pause to any of you who have been asleep for the last three weeks and also during every previous Israeli bombing campaign in Lebanon. In this connection, one need simply note the circumstances of Israel’s shelling of a U.N. post near Khiyam on July 25, killing four U.N. observers.