connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by LeggNet)

On Dying In Virginia
The Black Iris of Jordan

I was kind of shocked and saddened to hear about the shooting in Virginia Tech that has dominated western media in the past 48 hours, especially the Internet. I tend to pay close attention to how such incidents unravel in the media and the public eye. The number 30 was splashed across home pages of the BBC and CNN for quite some time and it’s just one of those things where one cannot help but take a step back and realize how important those 30 lives were. I mean for instance 30 is the new 20 in Iraq; daily bombings and slaughters inspire at least that much.

One could easily cast this aside as another orientalist view of the world: that their lives are worth more than our lives. I mean I’m sure it plays a role, after all, a day after the shooting the “30 dead� headline was replaced with “South Korean gunman�, as if origin mattered; as if this was the opportunity the US was waiting for all along to invade North Korea (because their names sound suspiciously similar). But maybe there’s more to it.

In between hoping the gunman isn’t Arab, there is a common denominator to consider.

There’s something to be said about the storm that breaks the quiet; when tranquility is disturbed and replaced with chaos, which of course inspires fear, confusion and anger.

When you’re used to chaos, more if it is simply nothing new. One becomes accustomed to death. If I turned on the TV to hear that there were no new deaths in Occupied Palestine or Iraq or Darfur, then I would rush to the window to make sure the apocalypse wasn’t being ushered in with falling meteors from the sky.

You get used to certain things.

But then Virginia isn’t Palestine.

Virginia isn’t Iraq.

And yes, an American isn’t a Palestinian, isn’t an Iraqi. If anything, the media makes sure to remind us of that time and time again.

The irony of this I suppose is that if anyone on the face of the Earth right now knows what it means to have innocent life taken from them; to know what it feels to have that tranquility disturbed, if anyone right now knows that feeling, those people are in Iraq and Palestine.

The only difference is hope.

The US seems to have plenty of it. There is always that light at the end of the tunnel; the recovery, the moving on, the getting over the initial shock, the coming to terms with it, coming to grips with it.

Here in the Middle East, hope is as scarce as water these days (i.e. roughly half a century to be more accurate). There is no getting over the shock; there’s just not enough time to recover from loss before another comes along to replace it. There are no recovery stories here. No learning-how-to-move-on tales to be told. Yesterday is today; today is tomorrow.

Hope doesn’t live here anymore.

Maybe there should be a cultural exchange: we could teach Americans a thing or two about how to deal with the shock of loss and maybe they could teach us a thing or two about hope.

Being that they control the world supply of hope: maybe they would be kind enough to just lend us some.

Just for the weekend.

30 is 30, just as 30,000 is 30,000, just as insanity is insanity.

While I fully realize I live in a much more stable world than a majority of human beings on this earth — that the chances of me or my loved ones falling victim to random acts of violence are slim at best — I still feel the need to cling to my sense of hope.

Because for me, that sense of hope isn’t relegated solely to my circle of friends, family and neighbor’s well being — it’s continuously extending outwards to people who deal with depravity and destruction on a daily basis.

This week, it’s extended to my neighbors in Virginia.

Every other week, it seems to bounce between folks caught up in the system at home and folks caught up in the violence around the world, particularly in the Middle-East and Africa.

And I know I’m not alone.

Hopefully, Nas and his neighbors will one day receive a pause from the cycle of violence to breathe in and digest this reality.

Hopefully.

Remember that slippery slope?…

Some of the more insightful analysis (video uploaded to YouTube on July 18th):

[…]

The next stage was Hezbollah’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers, they say on the border. Their official reason for this is that they are aiming for prisoner release. There are a few, nobody knows how many. Officially, there are three Lebanese prisoners in Israel. There’s allegedly a couple hundred people missing. Nobody knows where they are.

But the real reason, I think it’s generally agreed by analysts, is that — I’ll read from the Financial Times, which happens to be right in front of me. “The timing and scale of the attack suggest it was partly intended to reduce the pressure on Palestinians by forcing Israel to fight on two fronts simultaneously.”

David Hurst, who knows this area well, describes it, I think this morning, as a display of solidarity with a suffering people, the clinching impulse.

It’s a very, in my view, a very irresponsible act. It subjects the Lebanese people to possible — certainly to plenty of terror and possible extreme disaster.

[…]

(originally uploaded by Fauldsb)

Informed Comment
One Ring To Rule Them
by Juan Cole

The wholesale destruction of all of Lebanon by Israel and the US Pentagon does not make any sense. Why bomb roads, bridges, ports, fuel depots in Sunni and Christian areas that have nothing to do with Shiite Hizbullah in the deep south? And, why was Hizbullah’s rocket capability so crucial that it provoked Israel to this orgy of destruction? Most of the rockets were small katyushas with limited range and were highly inaccurate. They were an annoyance in the Occupied Golan Heights, especially the Lebanese-owned Shebaa Farms area. Hizbullah had killed 6 Israeli civilians since 2000. For this you would destroy a whole country?

It doesn’t make any sense.

Moreover, the Lebanese government elected last year was pro-American! Why risk causing it to fall by hitting the whole country so hard?

And, why was Condi Rice’s reaction to the capture of two Israeli soldiers and Israel’s wholesale destruction of little Lebanon that these were the “birth pangs” of the “New Middle East”? How did she know so early on that this war would be so wideranging? And, how could a little border dispute in the Levant signal such an elephantine baby’s advent? Isn’t it because she had, like Tony Blair, been briefed about the likelihood of a war by the Israelis, or maybe collaborated with them in the plans, and also conceived of it in much larger strategic terms?

[…]

The read then goes on to get chilling…

(via OpenSource)

The Black Iris of Jordan
Moral Equivalents

[…]

Because it seems to me that morality is always on Israel’s side, the side that is morally superior and therefore has a moral obligation to kill Arabs the same way that morality is on America’s side and therefore it too has a moral right to kill Arabs because you see Arabs are morally bankrupt and their acts are morally reprehensible. It doesn’t matter who is militarily superior, what matters is who is morally superior; morality trumps artillery and whatever you do with it. And it doesn’t matter who is occupying whom or who is forced to live in what kind of morally reprehensible conditions; these arguments are fruitless, perhaps immoral themselves. What matters is that the void of morality or rather the moral bankruptcy of Arabs, most likely inherited from that crazy desert religion they practice, needs to filled. Arabs need to be taught the ways of morality so that they too can embrace the civilized world and go on to bomb and invade other nations and other people deemed less civilized, perhaps people who are darker in skin color, and teach them how to be moral and how to be civil.

[…]

CounterCurrents
Why Must The Right Wing Sound So Brutally Stupid?

[…]

Of course, Condi was keeping her eyes on the big picture, as she tends to do, the picture as viewed from high above the earth where human beings become unseen bacilli in a vast fabric of coastlines and geometric patterns, not close-up where you can distinguish blood-spattered ruins and childrens’ limbs snapped like broken bird wings.

[…]

Tom Toles sums up my perspective on the future effects of this war in a single frame: