You are currently browsing the monthly archive for August 2006.
Letters to the Editor
Demasduit’s Museum
by Barbara Barker & Tyler McCreary
Grade Two students petition to honour the Beothuk in their own language
Hung Out to Dry?
by Angela Regnier
Academic research “partnerships” and the Wiarton water experiment
By Eric Margolis
The Toronto Sun
July 30, 2006
The spreading war in Lebanon has bared the bizarre contradictions and self-destructive nature of U.S. Mideast policy.
With one hand, the U.S. sends $30 million of food and blankets to Lebanon for the 20% of its population made refugees by Israel’s bombing.
With the other, it rushes planeloads of precision bombs to Israel, one of which may have destroyed a UN border observer post, killing four, including a Canadian major.
In Rome, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week blocked international efforts by Europe and Washington’s Arab allies to halt the war. Not since Colin Powell’s grotesque lies to the UN about Iraq has American diplomacy so debased itself. Small wonder hatred for America is surging across the Muslim world.
Rice also proclaimed the U.S. was going to midwife the birth of a “new Middle East” by means of the Lebanon war. This latest absurdity comes from the same fools and right-wing ideologues that fathered the Iraq debacle.
However, Canadian PM “Steve” Harper has no doubts. Read the rest of this entry »
By Robert Fisk
Counterpunch
August 1, 2006
Every foreign army–including the Israelis–comes to grief in Lebanon.
So, how come George Bush and Blair, after their inevitable disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, believe that a Nato-led force is going to survive on the south Lebanese border? The Israelis would obviously enjoy watching its deployment–it will be time for the West to take the casualties–but Hizbollah is likely to view its arrival as a proxy Israeli army. It is, after all, supposed to be a “buffer” force to protect Israel–not, as the Lebanese have quickly noted, to protect Lebanon–and the last NATO army that came to this country was literally blasted out of its mission by suicide bombers.
“All across southern Lebanon now, you find scenes like this, not so grotesque in scale, perhaps, but just as terrible, for the people of these villages are terrified to leave and terrified to stay. The Israelis had dropped leaflets over Qana, ordering its people to leave their homes. Yet twice now since Israel’s onslaught began, the Israelis have ordered villagers to leave their houses and then attacked them with aircraft as they obeyed the Israeli instructions and fled. There are at least 3,000 Shia Muslims trapped in villages between Qlaya and Aiteroun close to the scene of Israel’s last military incursion at Bint Jbeil and yet none of them can leave without fear of dying on the roads.”
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
July 31 2006
They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. ” Mehdi Hashem, aged seven Qana,” was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy’s body lay. “Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 Qana”, “Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one Qana.” And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas’s little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father’s shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.
You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday.
