Catching up with Informed Comment

Informed Comment, by Juan Cole, is one of the best blogs there is. No, really.

OK, for any leftist who has the sneaking suspicion that the corporate media is about 95% lies about the Middle East, and wants well-researched, sometimes heartwrenching, sometimes funny news about the area, interspersed with occasional rants about the Bush Regime, this is one of the best blogs.

I'm catching up on his stories. Like this monster, with maps and everything, which will take like, serious focus.

But here's one from a few days ago that grabbed me... this thing here. It's not Cole, but it's a great post. Which is the point. It's by Patrick McGreevy, whoever he is, and Patrick is in Beruit. Heavily excerpted:

“Justice” Comes to Qana

' The attacks of 11 September 2001 gave many ordinary Americans a palpable experience of injustice. Addressing both houses of Congress nine days later, President Bush proclaimed: "Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution. Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done." By nearly conflating justice and revenge, the President... lost an opportunity to see with new clarity, justice itself, cast into relief by the very experience of injustice...

This week “justice” came to the Lebanese Village of Qana. The United States had blocked every attempt to end the violence...

Reacting to the horrors of World War II, the bold thinking Max Horkheimer suggested that we finally make social progress from the experience of the opposite of justice... Hence, “the anonymous martyrs of the concentration camps are the symbols of the humanity that is striving to be born,” and we could expect insight from those “who have gone through the infernos of suffering and degradation in their resistance to conquest and oppression.”

Hassan Nasrallah speaks to the Arab World and the Muslim World about their common experience of injustice. Do not doubt its deep resonance. Its truth. Qana is just the latest, and one of the clearest, and most globally visible, examples. Can those who launched the endless war finally recognize the infinitely valuable “inner light” so callously snuffed out of each of those dusty child corpses?

Ask your right wing christian buddy why it's ok for the Israelis to kill on a 10:1 ratio. Are the souls of Lebanese, of little Lebanese babies less fucking important than other souls? Huh???


Grr... pisses me off...