1 million Lebanese refugees

Last night on BBC radio, an artist in Beirut spoke about the conflict.  There are over 1 million "displaced" persons (love that euphemism, as if people are merely shifting to another place while their homes and places of work are carpet bombed) now living in schools and parking lots and 1,000 dead Lebanese civilians, untold wounded. There is not enough fuel for hospital generators, and people who need dialysis or who are supposed to be undergoing chemotherapy are having their treatments delayed or the places they were being treated are simply closing. Similar suffering is occurring in Israel, though on a smaller scale.  People of all backgrounds are burying their dead.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/...

There is a demonstration in front of the White House on Saturday at noon.  

ANSWER is one of the organizers.  I know, I know.  But at this stage of the game, the fact that we are shipping mega-ton bombs to Israel and in no particular hurry about a ceasefire makes the US complicit in this two-way crime against humanity.  

John Lee Anderson has a great article in the New Yorker about Lebanon.  In it he quotes a Hizbollah member who says they hadn't expected the massive retaliation because the two sides have negotiated prisoner exchanges serveral times over the past 2 decades, but that when it came they were ready for it.  I picture us and the two towers.  We didn't see that one coming (except for some FBI agents who couldn't get heard), but boy when that one came we were ready for it.  

WHEEEEE! GREAT excuse for mayhem and free-floating rage on both sides.  Human beings are not rational creatures, but beings who rationalize, as someone else once said.

We must keep the suffering of civilians first and foremost in our minds, and do what we can to keep their suffering in the public consciousness and pressure all involved for a ceasefire. Please come and demonstrate in DC or keep writing letters to the editor.