By Frank Harper, 9/7/06
Last month, while the bombing and invasion of Lebanon by Israel
was in its full fury, an ad signed by 83 Hollywood actors, directors, and
producers and a few others appeared in the L.A. Times, Variety (a show business periodical) and some Hollywood publications. The ad was initiated by Nicole
Kidman, and signed by such people as Michael Douglas, Danny DeVito, Sylvester
Stallone, Bernie Mac, Serena Williams, Pat Sajak, and Bruce Willis. The
signatories claimed to be “pained and devastated” by the civilian casualties
in Lebanon and Israel, all of
which, it said, were caused by Hamas and Hezbollah.
After the crocodile tears the ad reaches its conclusion:
“If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will
rule and innocent people will continue to die. We need to support democratic
societies and stop terrorism at all costs”.
This supposedly “even handed” condemnation of the
deaths of innocent people is a vicious deceit. The U.S.
backed Israeli assault on Lebanon
left much of that country a smoking ruin. Over 1,200 Lebanese people, the vast
majority of them civilians and many of them children, died in the high tech
Israeli onslaught. The savage massacre at Qana, in which 56 people, 34 of them
children, died, was perpetrated by bombs made in the U.S.
“Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is
connected to Hezbollah”, said Israeli Justice Minister Ramon two days
before the bombing of Qana. His statement was a justification of mass murder
past, present, and future. As British journalist Robert Fisk reported, “There
was no doubt of the missile which killed all those children yesterday. It came
from the United States,
and upon a fragment of it was written: ‘For use on MK-84 Guided Bomb BSU-37-B’.
No doubt the manufacturers
can call it ‘combat-proven’ because it destroyed the entire three-storey house
in which the Shalhoub and Hashim families lived. They had taken refuge in the
basement from an enormous Israeli bombardment, and that is where most of them
died.”
Cluster bombs are brightly colored “bomblets” designed to spread
over a wide area and continue to inflict death and dismemberment long after an
invading army has left. A BBC report indicated that “the UN recently
reported that they have ‘identified 359 cluster bomb strike locations with as
many as 100,000 unexploded bomblets’ in southern Lebanon. Amazingly, 90% of the
bombs were dropped in the final 72 hours of the war.” They also report
that it can take years to clean them up and innocent civilians are being killed
and wounded by these munitions every day.” The American made
“bomblets” now spread throughout Lebanon “are in civilian areas,
on farmland and in people’s homes. We’re finding a lot at the entrances to
houses, in balconies and roofs. Sometimes windows are broken and they get
inside the houses. Most of them are from America”, said a United
Nations spokeswoman. On September 6, the U.S. Senate, including Democrat
leaders such as Hilary Clinton, voted 70-30 to approve the continued
development of cluster bombs.
These are the bloody, murderous realities of what it means to say you want
to “stop terrorism at all costs”. This is what Bruce Willis and
Bernie Mac are signing on for.
This kind of atrocity, so similar to that perpetrated routinely in Iraq and
Afghanistan directly by the U.S. military, is emphatically not what
Kidman, DeVito, Stallone, and the rest of them mean by “terrorism”.
If they actually did want to stop the main source of inflicting terror upon
people in those countries and threatening it against many others – most notably
Iran
– they would condemn the Bush regime as its principle sponsor and source. They
would join with Ed Asner, Susan Sarandon, Ed Begley Jr., Boots Riley, and
thousands of others from throughout the country in signing the Call to Drive
Out the Bush Regime, and they would act on that commitment.
The conclusion Kidman, DeVito, and the rest reach is truly chilling:
“stop terrorism at all costs”. “At all costs” – and the bill is being paid with the lives of the
tens of thousands of people who have already died in this war that will “last
our lifetime”, with the promise of many more to come. “At all costs” – at a time when Bush
is issuing thinly veiled threats to use nuclear
weapons against Iran.
Look at the pictures of the broken bodies in Qana, or of the hooded men in Guantanamo, or of the
humiliated victims of torture in Abu Ghraib.
This is the bloody path on which the Bush Regime has embarked, and which
they are determined to pursue. If you follow the Kidman logic – and the
official policy of the Democratic Party is that the “fight against
terrorism” must be both “strong and smart”, to quote N.Y.
Senator Chuck Schumer – you end up embracing George W. Bush and being complicit
in his crimes against humanity.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The only choices we have are not between the
fascist warmongering terrorists of the Bush Regime and Islamic fundamentalist
terrorists. On October 5, 2006, on the basis of the Call, The World Can’t
Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime!, people throughout the country will be
stepping forward in a day of mass resistance. The breadth, the depth, the
impact and the power of that day depends not only on those in The World Can’t
Wait organization, and others, who are already organizing for this day — it
depends on you, on us, on all those who have been hoping and searching for a
means to do something that will really make a difference.
What message do you want to send to the rest of the world? What do you
want people in other countries to understand about how people in this country
think about the atrocities being perpetrated by our government? THE WORLD Can’t
WAIT, DRIVE OUT THE BUSH REGIME! BRING THIS TO A HALT!