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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

First Blood: Pictures From Life's Other Side


Already, Gaza has faded from the front pages of the Western press. Already it is yesterday's news, yesterday's massacre, just another in a long, long, endless line of human debauchery.
After all, the Western press, the Western establishments, indeed, Western popular opinion, have often countenanced -- even championed -- far worse atrocities.
The establishments and power structures of most Arab nations are also hastening to forget, to downplay, to bury, once again, the suffering of the Palestinians, in the interests of political gamesmanship, both domestic and diplomatic.
The reality of the actual human beings in Palestine who have been inflicted with horrific suffering matter no more than the reality of the human beings in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Kurdistan, or Chechnya, or Colombia, or Sri Lanka, or Burma, or the Congo, or anywhere else on the far-flung earth where the machines of power wring the blood and terror that is their fuel from the flesh of men and women and children.
(And this geography of suffering includes the sacred Homeland itself, of course, where, for example, more than two million citizens are now held in cages, most of them for the "crime" of temporarily deranging their senses to escape the pain of the world that power has made.)

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