Comment:
This action alert was just posted by a coalition that involves hundreds of peace and justice groups in the US. The tragic events of the last few weeks, where palestinian and Israeli civilians have been killed, make it necessary than ever to call for an end to the violence, an end to the suffering. Sadly, some posts have ended with calls of violent retribution, and even more shelling of Palestinian civilians. The purpose here is to provide a counterweight to what many of us see as madness of the spiral of violence.
We must take action to make sure that we know the history of the killing of civilians, that this did not start with suicide bombings in the 1990's but has a long history. The use of terror has also long been used by the State of Israel. We must recognize that Israel is not the only state to use terror to advance its objectives, the United states uses terror to advance its effort to quell resistance to its occupation to Iraq. Even for the US, using terror does not work, though it is quite effective in a)killing civilians b) recruiting... for the resistance.
We must remember the bombing of a UN shelter, where men, women and children were massacred. The headlines only seem to remember Israeli dead. They hardly mention Palestinian dead. Are they "children of a lesser god"?
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http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1201April 18, 2006 will mark the 10-year anniversary of the Qana massacre when Israeli Armed Forced killed 106 civilians in the United Nations Interim Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Compound. Follow the link to get involved.
Israel has consistently committed gross human rights violations in the Arab world in the name of self-defense in the “war on terror.” In doing so, it has been able to act with impunity in the region in part due to the active support or passive acquiescence of the US Government, and partly because it is the strongest military power in the Middle East.i On April 18th, demand Israeli accountability to human rights and international law,by commemorating the 10th year since the Qana Massacre.
On the 10th Anniversary of the shelling of the U.N. compound in Qana, commemorate the lives of those who survived as well as those who died in the massacre and demand that Israel be held accountable for the devastation it wrought.
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For more info on the Qana massacre, see here:
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles18.htmQana, southern Lebanon - It was a massacre. Not since Sabra and Chatila had I seen the innocent slaughtered like this. The Lebanese refugee women and children and men lay in heaps, their hands or arms or legs missing, beheaded or disembowelled. There were well over a hundred of them. A baby lay without a head. The Israeli shells had scythed through them as they lay in the United Nations shelter, believing that they were safe under the world's protection. Like the Muslims of Srebrenica, the Muslims of Qana were wrong.
In front of a burning building of the UN's Fijian battalion headquarters, a girl held a corpse in her arms, the body of a grey- haired man whose eyes were staring at her, and she rocked the corpse back and forth in her arms, keening and weeping and crying the same words over and over: "My father, my father." A Fijian UN soldier stood amid a sea of bodies and, without saying a word, held aloft the body of a headless child.
"The Israelis have just told us they'll stop shelling the area," a UN soldier said, shaking with anger. "Are we supposed to thank them?" In the remains of a burning building - the conference room of the Fijian UN headquarters - a pile of corpses was burning. The roof had crashed in flames onto their bodies, cremating them in front of my eyes. When I walked towards them, I slipped on a human hand...
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