About that silence

A little procrastination too easily becomes weeks of non-posting. Sorry about that.

I've been wrapped up in getting the local Democratic headquarters off the ground. Also, the global news is bleak enough that focusing on the short-term things I can affect feels like the sanity-preserving path.

So look for more frequent but probably shorter posts, and more about the Jim Webb v. George Allen campaign than about Israel v. Lebanon. But, before I leave the latter topic for a while: those bastards!

Ceasefire. . . but not for another 32 hours at best

Apparently Hezbollah and the government of Lebanon have agreed to the terms of the ceasefire proposal, and a senior Israeli official implies that his/her government will also during a cabinet meeting tomorrow -- but won't stop attacks until midnight Sunday (EDT; 7 am Monday in Israel). Hezbollah won't commit not to return fire until Israel moves back across the border, and that won't happen until the peacekeeping forces arrive, in a week or so. Lovely. No point in searching out a dove image to decorate this post, then.

Tom Scudder has a very helpful analysis of UN resolution 1701 at Aqoul, especially for those of us unskilled at plowing through diplomatese. Jonathan Edelstein's gift for seeing the hopeful aspects of bleak situations is put to good use, but until the IDF stops bombing and shelling, his take asks too much for me in the way of looking past the massive human carnage and material destruction Israel has wrought. Zvi Bar'el's account in Ha'aretz of the Lebanese prime minister's skill in achieving the resolution is interesting [via Jonathan], but again, may be better appreciated if/when the explosions stop.

Qana denial cont'd

This is the banner mentioned in the previous post. It was displayed as part of Sunday's demonstration in Beirut; its scale and professional quality led the sleuths at Powerline to conclude that it, and the Qana massacre, were planned and staged. There could conceivably be something to that if the words on the banner referred specifically to Qana. Which I very much doubt.

Readers of Arabic: Your translation help is welcomed.

Update: 4:50 pm 1 Aug - At least some of the victim-blaming from the highest levels is being exposed for what it is:

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.

Not enough to keep Shimon Peres in New York this morning from placing all the blame for Qana on Hezbollah. Certainly not enough to hush Rush Limbaugh or denialist right-wing bloggers, but enough to keep them on the margins where they belong.

The Ha'aretz update also reports, thankfully, a somewhat reduced death count from the house in Qana compared with the first reports: There were 60 people in the building when it was struck, but so far 28 bodies have been recovered, 19 of them children. More are still missing, and recovery work is ongoing.

However, there appear to be many smaller Qanas:

Elsewhere in southern Lebanon, 49 bodies were removed Monday from the ruins of buildings in ten villages. Medical sources in Lebanon say dozens more are buried in the rubble.

Update 2: 12:30 pm 2 Aug - Many thanks to the commenters here and on other blogs where I asked for translation help. The banner reads: The massacre of children in Qana 2: Condi's gift! Smart bombs... stupid. Rice had been scheduled to visit Beirut that day, demonstrations were already being organized, and the banner's visuals had no doubt been prepared ahead for the event. The banner's message was applied after the morning news from Qana, which also caused Prime Minister Siniora to cancel Rice's visit.

Update 3: 5:30 pm 12 Aug - Apparently, victim-blaming goes right on at some high levels, facts be damned. At a time when the IDF had already retracted its claim that rockets were fired from anywhere near the house they bombed in Qana, Michael Ignatieff, the "human rights advocate" who's running for the Liberal Party leadership in Canada, defended his failure to call for a ceasefire until long after his rivals had. A Toronto Star reporter asked if the Qana massacre played a role in his decision to join in supporting a ceasefire:

"It wasn't Qana," replied Ignatieff, formerly head of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University. "Qana was, frankly, inevitable, in a situation in which you have rocket-launchers within 100 yards of a civilian population. This is the nature of the war that's going on. This is the kind of dirty war you're in when you have to do this and I'm not losing sleep about that."

What an inspiring advocate for human rights across the board, eh?

Qana

Taken Sunday morning July 30, the picture shows the house where Israeli air strikes killed sixty people, including somewhere between 27 and 37 children. The BBC reporter on scene described it as having been "crushed sideways into an enormous crater" by the strike, which took place in the dead of night (midnight or one o'clock).

An Israeli Air Force general claims that the house didn't collapse until eight in the morning, and hints that explosives stored inside, rather than IAF bombs, collapsed the building. He provides no evidence whatsoever to support this claim, and none has come from press, rescue workers, survivors, or any other source. But that hasn't stopped the atrocity deniers, who are being quoted in comment sections of respectable blogs and linked prominently from less respectable ones. Max Sawicky calls them out, bless his heart. In comments to that post, I provide links to another of the deniers (which I won't do here) and to the reporting that refutes them: Ha'aretz, Lebanon Daily Star, BBC.

Update: 8:15 pm 31 July - Okay, most of the denialism is disgusting, but some of the attempts to make the case for a staged massacre are almost funny. One of the bright lights at Powerline saw the picture below of the demonstrations in Beirut on Sunday, and decided that there hadn't been enough time to produce it in the hours that passed between the news of the massacre and the demonstration. Ergo, the "massacre" had to have been planned, and the banner prepared ahead of time.

Well, neither the grasping-at-straws blogger nor I read Arabic, but I'm betting that the words on the banner don't refer specifically to Qana. My guess is that they refer to Secretary Rice's "birth pangs" comments, which may have inspired the design and production of the banner as soon as they hit the news ten days ago. I'd be pleased for anyone who reads Arabic to translate the banner. No, this is not a caption contest.

Blogger not posting the photo, grrrr.

Update 2: 3:45 pm 1 Aug - Image now up in new post.

We stand on guard for thee

I hope both these men are alive today. [See Updates below.] The man on the right is Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener, a Canadian serving at the UNIFIL UN Truce Supervision Organization post in south Lebanon that was destroyed by Israeli bombing yesterday. Four UN observers were killed, one of them Canadian.

A week ago, Major Hess-von Kruedener emailed CTV, a Canadian network, an on-the-ground report. It gives some context to yesterday's events.

As does this:

The U.N. observers killed when an Israeli bomb hit their bunker in Lebanon Tuesday called an Israeli military liaison about 10 times in the six hours before they died to warn that aerial attacks were getting close to their position, a U.N. officer said.

After each call, the Israeli officer promised to have the bombing stopped, an officer at the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) base in Noqoura said.

Finally, an Israeli bomb exploded directly on the U.N. post near Khiyam, killing four U.N. observers from Austria, Finland, Canada and China, the U.N. officer said.

Update: 6:45 pm 26 July - The Canadian killed is now thought to be Maj. Hess-von Kruedener, I'm sorry to say.

Update 2: 6:30 pm 27 July - Bruce R., a Canadian military blogger who earned my enduring respect in the darkest moments of winter 2001-2, provides a corrective rundown of the UN deployments in Lebanon. Maj. H-vK was with the UN Truce Supervision Organization, UNTSO. I hope Canadians are as steamed as I am at Prime Minister Harper's effort to blame the victims rather than the military that killed them:

[Harper] questioned why the observation was manned, given the Israeli offensive that had started in southern Lebanon two weeks earlier.

"We want to find out why this United Nations post was attacked and also why it remained manned during what is now, more or less, a war during obvious danger to these individuals," said Harper.

He also did not condemn Israel's show of force.

Bruce, replying to right-wing commenters at Kevin Drum's site who, like the PM, sought to blame the UN for the Israeli Air Force's bombing, answered that "question" clearly and concisely:

...50 military observers from UNTSO's Observer Group-Lebanon, four of whom were just killed. Their job was to observe the hostilities and report back on what was going on to New York. They could hardly give the UN their independent eyes on the ground if they weren't actually close enough to observe the situation. That's what military observers do.

Update 3: 11:55 am 30 July - More from Bruce R.:

when national leaders who have lost personnel on UN service react by saying they don't understand why those personnel were there in the first place, what they're really saying is they place no value in old-style peacekeeping, or the deterrent effects it can produce, in the current situation or anywhere else.