The BBC is currently doing a rather interesting live conversation with a a panel of inhabitants of the south lebanese village of Al-Khiam (which is notorious for the torture prison the israeli supported SLA did run there from 1985 to 2000). the villagers are answering questions that can be posed to them via the BBC-news website.

While the BBC website claims that the conversation is live, at least the questions seem to be relayed to the panelists very selectively and all of them are subject to moderation before they appear on the website: at the time of writing 11 questions had been answered by while 259 had been posted by readers.

Most of the submitted questions (and for sure those recommended by other readers) seem to be intended to provoke the panelists into anti-hezbollah statements claiming that Israeli conduct during the war was somehow morally superior to the conduct of Hezbollah. This leaves the impression of being a well coordinated action by Israeli war supporters (something the Israeli foreign ministry is known to actively stimulate). However this does not keep the panelists from praising the ‘Islamic Resistance’ and the furthest they go in criticizing them is the – now familiar – ‘bad timing’ argument (that Hezbullah should not have captured israelis at the beginning of the tourist season).

These issues aside it is encouraging to see a big broadcaster to experiment in this way with the possibilities offered by mobile internet access and it actually seems to allow these villagers to directly engage with a public that has a highly filtered perception of what has happened in south Lebanon in the last couple of weeks.

An a related note: the complete recording of the live webcast we did one and a half weeks ago is now available for download in four parts. In retrospective this was a truely amazing event. make sure that you also check out this drawing by mazen kerbaj, depicting how the whole thing looked in Beirut.

I guess the recent weeks have shown that the use of the word ‘sometimes’ in the above quote by Shimon Naveh, a retired Brigadier-General who directs the Operational Theory Research Institute of the IDF is somewhat misplaced: the IDF definitely knows more about killing and destruction than about reading and building.

While the article ‘the art of war‘ by Eyal Weizman from which the above quote is taken does portray the IDF as an extremely sophisticated and almost lovable bunch, reality has again shown that the IDF does not read enough (especially when it comes to history) and even more importantly still does not get that you cannot bring peace for your own people by humiliating and killing your neighbors. this becomes really obvious when looking into the earlier Israeli incursions into Lebanon. in ‘Pity the Nation‘, in the chapter dealing with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Robert Fisk quite drastically describes how Israel’s current number one enemy – Hezbollah – is a product of the 1982 invasion that eventually drove Israel’s then number one enemy – the PLO – out of Lebanon:

None of us, i think, realized the critical importance of the events at Khalde [a place just south of the Airport where the IDF met its first serious resistance by PLO and Amal fighters during its advance on Beirut]. The Lebanese Shia were learning the principles of martyrdom and putting them into practice. Never before had we seen these men wear headbands like this; we thought it was just another militia affectation but it was not. It was the beginning of a legend which also contained a strong element of truth. The Shia were now the Lebanese resistance, nationalist no doubt but also inspired by their religion. The party of God – in arabic, the Hezbollah – were on the beaches of Khalde that night. (Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation, 1990 p.227)

Now one wonders if the IDF really had these consequences in mind when it crushed the PLO in 1982. The same PLO could not stop the IDF from reaching West Beirut in 7 days. Hezbollah managed to prevent the IDF from reaching the Litani river for more than 4 weeks… at the same time one has to also credit the IDF for ‘only’ killing about a thousand Lebanese in its latest incursion. in 1982 they managed to kill 10.000 in those 7 days.

Is a four minute or so short film produced on July 21, 2006 at the studios of Beirut DC, a film and cinema collective which runs the yearly Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya Film Festival. This video letter was produced in collaboration with Samidoun, a grassroots gathering of various organizations and individuals who were involved in relief and media efforts from the first day of the Israeli attack on Lebanon.

Click the image above to watch the movie or go to www.beirutletters.org to download it. The film is available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License, which means you are free to share or screen the movie as long as you credit the makers and do not re-edit it.

After yesterday’s extremely depressing and upsetting morning news i went running (which is always a sensible thing when you don’t know what to do and/or are angry). During that run i was thinking what to do about the whole situation and finally came up with something that seemed like a sensible idea:

In the last two weeks mazen kerbaj’s drawings have been one of the strongest most vivid expressions of the whole mess that is unfolding in lebanon that i came across (to the extend that i am dissapointed every time i wake up and there are no new ones). Now what are drawings if not posters-in-waiting that can easily been printed out and stuck against the walls of the city? Clearly one only has to print them out, copy them a couple of times, get wallpaper-glue and head out into the night (ok, first wait some 10 hours for night). So i spend some of Sunday night sticking a4 sized mini-posters all over the walls of my neighborhood (the Pijp) in Amsterdam.

More pictures taken on Monday morning before going to work on my flickr account.

Yesterday evening i did a second round (around Leidseplein in the center), and i am planning to continue for the next couple of nights. Hopefully these relatively small posters will catch some eyeballs and make more people think and start expressing their outrage.

Apart from the obvious advantage of making me feel like i am doing something about the situation, i also like this little action on a symbolic level. It feels like translating a blog (something normally contained to the internets) into something that is part of the urban fabric. I like the idea of images leaking from my screen into the streets of amsterdam and would probably be even more beautiful if people in other cities started doing the same… (in case you feel like it here are a4-sized printable versions of some of Mazen’s drawings)

update [5 august]: here are more pdf files with newer drawings, which i used yesterday night.

It is incredible how extremely stupid IDF commanders can be (I guess it makes no sense of complaining about their lack of sensibility as that is a trait of character that seems to disqualify anyone from becoming a military commander). Looks like today they managed to stage a repeat of the April 18, 1996 Qana Massacre in which IDF artillery shelling killed 106 lebanese civilians sheltering in an UN compound.

This morning – 10 years, 3 month and 12 days later – the Israeli air force targeted a 4-story apartment complex in the same city killing another 50-or-so civilians seeking shelter from the continuing Israeli air and artillery attacks on South Lebanon:

The facts will come trickling in, preceded by the excuses: the Israeli military will insist the civilians were warned, will insist Hizbullah fired from the village first; Hizbullah will deny firing from houses, will argue the Israeli drones, above the village all day, had recorded the civilians’ presence; the remaining, bereaved family members will say, again, how they had nowhere to go, no way to leave, and that the roads out have been unremittingly bombed for the past week.

But none of it will matter. Not to those who make callous, calculated decisions from their comfortable, removed safety, nor to those who sell and deliver the weapons. The innocents suffer, and only the impotent care.

The families will grieve. The children will grow up without their mothers. The memorial at Qana, already displaying the coffins of 106 civilian deaths, will swell by at least 55 more, at least 20 of them children’s sized. And the atrocities, tacitly and repeatedly permitted, will continue. [Sonya Knox on the Siege of Lebanon Blog]

It is hard to understand how the IDF hopes to ‘break support for Hezbollah‘ by these kinds of operations. when we were touring South Lebanon last june the Qana massacre was repeatedly mentioned in order to underline why Hezbollah’s resistance strategy is justified and why Hezbollah enjoys the almost complete support of the Shi’a population in the South: they are the ones who fight against those who have repeatedly taken the liberty to invade Lebanon, commit or support massacres and generally turn the life of ordinary people in South Lebanon into hell.

Of course there is no way that by committing more massacres among innocent civilians and making life more miserable for ordinary Lebanese and Palestinian people Israel will ever gain support or trust from its neighbors or even get rid of the Hezbollah. but at the same time it appears that there is no way that IDF commanders will ever learn this lesson…

After reading the morning news i got up and went running. Choose Da Arabian MC’s ‘Meen Erhabe‘ (‘Who is the Real Terrorist?’) as background track…

update: There is a interesting piece on how Hezbullah operates militarily in Lebanon up on salon.com. It questions the standard israeli justification for killing civilians, who according to the IDF are used by Hezbollah as human shields.

Just found this postcard (i think it is originally form a series of postcards) when i was emptying my paper recycling bin. makes me very sad & angry..

There is another quite brilliant posting by Sonya Knox on the Siege of Lebanon group blog. This passage really made me think of a picture i took in Beirut last june:

A shipment of hundreds of towels arrived today to the Nasra school in Achrafieh. Hundreds of hundreds, bagged-up by the dozen, creating a small multi-colored mountain in one corner of the open yard. No one is quite sure where they came from; apparently some lads arrived in the early hours of the morning, deposited them all from a small hatchback, and left without a word.

“They’re certainly not from the Memory-of-the-Martyr-Rafik-Hariri-Institution,” joked Abu Ali, “or the martyr’s face would have been sewn into each one.”

So it looks like counting dead people becomes one of the main threads woven through this blog. i have mentioned my own and other people’s efforts before and now I came across this simple yet powerful visualization of the proportionality of deaths resulting from the conflict between Israel en Hezbullah. The page is maintained by Moiz Syed using the numbers taken from BBC’s coverage on the conflict.

Looks like the current situation in Lebanon has lead to an explosion in the number of blogs from Lebanon in the last couple of days, which of course means that there is more interesting stuff out there than anyone can read without becoming a social outcast…

My absolute favorite is this blog with black and white drawings by Mazen Kerbaj. If you have not seen his drawings yet go check them out! Also worth a read are this bilingual (arabic/english) blog by people of the grass roots group sanayeh who are blogging about the relief work they are doing in central Beirut and the siege of lebanon group blog that collects various first person accounts from all over Lebanon.

Finally there is a blog that collects headline items from the Lebanese newtv television channel providing minute by minute updates of the situation. And of course wikipedia seems to do an impressive job at covering the events.

Actually i am sick of a number of things at the moment. Has a lot today with what the media reporting, but this evening i am particularly sick of how the media are reporting. Around 2000h yesterday evening the germen news-portal spiegel online had a breaking news alert on top of their frontpage:

Why is that important? Even the most stupid intern doing a sunday afternoon shift in the news room while it is summer outside must have noticed that up until now more than 150 people have been killed in Lebanon by the Israelis and at least 20 have been killed in Israel by Hezbollha. So what is the point of pointing out that 8 Canadians have been killed? I mean dead people are dead people and it does not really matter which passport they had (o.k sometimes it does matter, but that is another story and i cant find the link right now) even if the idiots who are running most media outlets and wire services seem to think otherwise.

Are we supposed to pay more attention to the death of Canadians just because they are mostly white, better educated and issue pointless statements for restraint through the same international organizations (G8/NATO/OECD/…) as ‘we’ are?

Or is it because canadians are so healthy and live in such a safe place that their live expectancy is slightly higher than that of the average Lebanese person and as a result their unexpected death weights more than that of a non-western person?

Now don’t expect an answer from spiegel online, as their breaking news alert linked to an absolute non-story. i do not even know why i still have this crap news-site as my start up page in my browser. Guess i have to change that.

This whole episode also reminds me of how pissed i was with all the western media last week for the amount of attention they paid to the Bombay train bombings. given that these attacks where almost exactly one year after the 7/7 London bombings and killed almost 4 times as many people the media attention was extremely sparse. No interactive flash graphics or interviews with distressed emergency responders when it comes to non-westerners being the victims of terrorist attacks (but then interactive flash graphics and interviews with distressed emergency responders are highly annoying things so maybe one should plead for less media attention to terrorist attacks in the west).

Update [23.jul]: Here is a little bit of background on the dead Canadians by Jim Quilty writing for the Canadian website straight.com.