The nueva cancion group Sabia had a song title "Who Are the Terrorists"--anyone ever heard it?

It seems that the Israeli call for blood is driving Sharon and the military Zionists into the same terrible place they found themselves in in 1982, when Israeli Defense Forces invaded Lebanon, and remained as an occupying force for 18 years. Including the years of some of the worst violence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Israeli massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla (sp?) refugee camps. Sharon was Defense Minister at the time, as some may recall (and others will likely prefer to overlook or forget).

I am struck by two things today: limiting the number of terms leaders may serve is likely a very good thing in a democracy (ie if Israel and Palestine had someone besides Arafat and Sharon in power, they would likely be in vastly different circumstances right now). There is a profound need to get to a point where a younger leadership born after the 1940s wars and struggles for statehood, and not so stuck in the past, to emerge in the Middle East.

The other thing which strikes me is how raw and simplistic the right wing militarists in both the US and Israel are. There is much talk in the US mainstream media today of Bush losing "moral clarity" on the war on terrorism by his failure to declare Arafat a terrorist, and give our full support to Sharon's bloody vengeful military "retaliation" in the occupied territories.

What is needed here are leaders who aren't so reactionary, leaders who will allow time to pass after a major atrocity is committed, as was done in the wake of the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland, the worst atrocity in the history of the Troubles.

And finally, I wish someone would listen to George Mitchell, and the Palestinian's negotiator, whose name escapes me right now, rather than the military hawks looking for bloody vengeance, which is what is driving this crisis to the final breaking point.

Just where do people think it will go, with Israel now holding two groups of Palestinians hostage? The democratically elected president of the Palestinian people in one location, and a group of Palestinian Authority police, militants, and civilians in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, being given sanctuary by the Catholic Church in the other?

The pictures in Ramallah are damning this occupation in ways no words will ever be able to do as powerfully, no matter how loudly the US and Israeli right wing militarists scream "Terrorist!" Those pictures speak for themselves. Scorched earth, dead bodies piling up and being buried in the car park to make room for more bodies, Israeli snipers murdering civilians on the streets. The US government might have the stomach to rally round this slaughter, but I have a lot more confidence in the American people to judge for themselves that this crisis, like the 9/11 attack, isn't about terrorism. It is about the brutality of our arrogant indifference to the rest of the world's suffering.