City In the Cedar Trees

And so it has come to this. Israel, in its arrogance, has blindly cast a punitive net so wide, so inhumanely indiscriminate, as to murder a family of visiting Canadians who could not possibly have had the slightest connection to the struggle with Palestinian guerrillas. This is not to forget the attack on thousands and thousands of ordinary people in Lebanon who, whether there may or may not be love lost between them and Israel, have never themselves lifted a finger to do it harm. And yet, Israel takes a page from history, reads it backwards, and creates of Beirut its own Lidice and Ležáky, effectively elevating their own captured soldiers to the role of spiritual heirs of Nazi overlord Reinhard Heydrich, for whose death those two Czech villages were slaughtered. But isn’t this the sort of vicious, callous, arbitrary murder which reputedly characterizes “the terrorists” and marks them as “different” from “civilized” nations (24 Canadians died on 9/11, after all...)? If so, then why are seven innocent Canadian tourists (not to mention hundreds of Lebanese civilians) dead at the hands of a supposedly civilized nation, which they never did harm, and who had no control whatsoever over those who did?

Congratulations, Israel. Your transformation is complete. You have become what you beheld, and you are despicable.