Lebanon - Forgotten?

No, I haven't forgotten Lebanon. For me, personally, it was not one more disaster for children, it was the epitome of disasters (though I realize that the death toll for children in the Iraq boondoggle is very much higher, one estimate 1-1/2 years ago estimated civilian casualties at 100,000, mostly women and children, "Air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most of the deaths.")

It also showed me that children have an enemy in our midst, those supporters of Israel who condoned the destruction of Lebanon. Before anyone rolls out that old canard about anti-Semitism, let me once again remind you that the Lebanese are Semites, I would dare say many in the Bekha valley have a greater claim on being so that those who migrated to Israel from Europe, Russia and the U.S., and, more importantly, it doesn't mean a damn thing. If anything, what happened to Jews in Nazi Germany (and numerically more Poles, Russians, Gypsies, dissidents, etc. etc. etc.) should direct our sympathies towards Lebanese children, who certainly didn't chose to be killed by civilian directed bombing or malicious cluster bombs.

As Billmon points out, even religious leaders in the West have ganged up on these children:

Following a solidarity mission to Israel last week, leaders of the Rabbinical Council of America issued a statement prodding the Israeli military to review its policy of taking pains to spare the lives of innocent civilians, in light of HezbollahÂ’s tactic of hiding its fighters and weaponry among Lebanese civilians. Because Hezbollah "puts Israeli men and women at extraordinary risk of life and limb through unconscionably using their own civilians, hospitals, ambulances, mosques… as human shields, cannon fodder, and weapons of asymmetric warfare" the rabbinical council said in a statement, "we believe that Judaism would neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians."

Do you know disingenuous, Mr. Rabbi's?

Civilian Israeli:
39 dead (of which 18 were Israeli Arabs.
+ 4 died of heart attacks during rocket bombardments.

On the other hand:

Civilian Lebanese:
1,600 dead
3,600 wounded.
1 million displaced

Oh, and one IDF soldier was an American Citizen!

So, both in Iraq and Lebanon, I, as an American citizen, am complicit in the murder of thousands upon thousands of children. And, I have sat here wringing my hands and not doing anything about it.

Sheepishly we remember that condemnation of the German people that was so common in the 50's and 60's for "not doing something" about the Nazi concentration camps. We are all responsible for this slaughter and will live to regret it.

Of all the pictures, this one haunts me the most: