The First Qana Massacre

qana

First, the news:

  • Indian doctors have been caught amputating healthy limbs from beggars to increase the latter’s potential income. India may be a burgeoning regional superpower, but it’s got some issues to deal with first.
  • This is weird. Amazon.com is selling one of my stand-alone short stories! I didn’t know they could do that!
  • As you all know by now, I love to watch athletic dance. Check out this Japanese b-boy video.
  • Increasingly, people are being fired for what they write in their blogs. I will have a lot more to say about this in the future.
  • If you’re like me and spend a lot of time surfing the nauseating right wing websites, you’ve likely come across several memes on the topic of, “why Muslims can’t be good Americans/Canadians/Englishmen/Whatever”. It’s a moronic topic. But, at last, here’s a good response: Can A Christian Be a Good Canadian? (Thanks to Anju G.)
  • Don’t know if I’ve mentioned this already, but my friend Andrew Johnston from DC has a new book out. Check it out here. Yeah, I’m in the credits, which is why I’m plugging it! 😉
  • Last night I randomly caught a televised performance of some hiphop/thrash/bboy dude named Kazzer. I am now a huge fan.

Back on June 18, I blogged about my disgust with Ezra Levant’s Western Standard, and in particular about the outrageous things being said on the magazine’s blog, many of which would typically qualify as hate speech. (For the record, I am opposed to hate speech laws –that’s for another discussion.) At the time, I made my view clear: that it is incumbent upon Ezra (and indeed the Conservative party, which has close ties to the Standard) to disassociate himself from such comments lest the world assume (rightly? wrongly?) that he shares them.

It seems I’m not the only one to have this concern. Witness the following comment by Michael Watkins on another blog:

“Question for media lawyers: there does not appear to be any serious attempt by the Western Standard to distance itself from such comments; regardless of any current or future disclaimers, they appear to be willing partners in publishing such vile stuff, and if so, are they a likely target for hate crime investigation?”

Well, any lawyers up for the take?

In the comments of the last post, the question was brought up: what would Israel possibly have to gain by deliberately bombing UN outposts? I pondered this for a while. One suggestion made to me was that the targeted outpost happened to be the sole office containing recently collected witness depositions which described Israeli war crimes in the “security zone” of South Lebanon.

As outrageous as this sounds, it reminds me of something called “Operation Grapes of Wrath“, which occurred in April of 1996. This event spawned the so-called “Qana Massacre“, in which 106 Lebanese civilians were killed while taking refuge in a United Nations compound run by Fijians. (It is more than ironic that 10 years later, a larger Qana massacre is taking place.) Amnesty International issued a document describing the unlawful attacking of civilians in the ’96 exchange.

To be clear, both the IDF and Hezbollah are guilty of war crimes for targetting civilians, both in 1996 and today. Do keep in mind that the Hezbollah rockets did little more than psychological damage, while the Israeli munitions flattened whole villages. So who really has the moral highground here?

What concerns me in this blog post is the targetting of a UN compound. It happened in 1996 and it happened again this time around. All quite fishy.

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