I don’t know why I emphasized Obama in this diary’s title, as it seems a long way from the title of the Mondoweiss article featured below. But one phrase caught my attention as it quoted Obama repeating Israeli hasbara (propaganda): “Obama tells the Lebanese president earlier this week to rein in Hezbollah because they were threatening to Israel.”
The intentional killing of children, which happened during Israel’s wars on civilians in Lebanon and Gaza in 2006 and just recently in 2008, was part of Israel’s barbaric Dahiya Doctrine. While Obama’s Cairo speech is now a faded memory, pictures of the results of Dahiya in Lebanon and Gaza remain vivid. “It could not have happened without American funding” and the latest armaments we provide Israel every year.
Seham wrote this piece for Mondoweiss: Insolence and hasbara are the soundtrack to these images in my head.
So sick and tired of the b.s. from this administration: Feltman says Hezbollah endangers Lebanese people. Hezbollah doesn’t kill Lebanese civilians, Israel does. Americans and Israelis seem to think that Arabs have very short memories when it comes to the slaughter of our people. We don’t. The 2006 war on Lebanon where Israel implemented its barbaric Dahiya Doctrine-which Dan Halutz, Israel’s chief of staff said would “turn back the clock in Lebanon 20 years”- is still painfully fresh in my mind.
It was as nauseating when Bush went to Iraq and issued a “shukran jazeera” [thank you very much] to Iraqis before leaving office and it was nauseating to hear Obama tell the Lebanese president earlier this week to rein in Hezbollah because they were threatening to Israel. I wonder if non-Arabs can for a moment grasp how sickening it is to read such statements. After all, isn’t the Dahiya Doctrine really as much of an American doctrine as it is an Israeli one? It could not have happened without American funding ($2.55 billion dollars in 2009 alone).
These are a few images that run through my head constantly-and I do hope that one day I can stop conjuring them up so easily, but when I hear insolence, hasbara and lies from the Americans and the Zionists, really, their words are just a soundtrack to the following images:
Israeli children
Lebanese children
Palestinian children
There are other images,that I will spare you from, like one of a toddler’s head sticking out from beneath the rubble-Dahiya Doctrine in Gaza. When I saw that particular image I felt déjà vu, like I had only recently seen the same image. I did some research and discovered that I had seen something very similar to it… Palestinian and Lebanese children look exactly the same when they are dead and covered with an eerie coat of cement dust.
So tell us again: Olmert, Livni, and Barak are not war criminals.
