So Lebanon.

Talk about a big fucking mess.

No doubt that as soon as something stabilizes there, somebody will invade it... just to make sure that the "right" man is in power.

Am I right?

Mean time, I'm not sure the Lebanese knew what hit them. You can just hear a parody of SNL going "Good Morning, Beirut... I love the AK-47 you're sporting!"

But they were not.
Which is a shame, because they are so pitiful they don't need to be parodied.

#1 Will the stupidity know no end! Were there a GD who actually smacked His/Her/Its followers upside the head. The whole region from Southern Lebanon to Southern Israel has been experiencing tectonic shifting - earthquakes that is - there was quite a big one on Friday where Mummy and I ran under a door way, it wasn't that hard, but still left my knees a bit wobbly.
Those people who are somewhat detached from reality* are trying to find metaphysical reasons why this is happening in the Holy Land.
Obviously, the gays are causing the earthquakes.
Yup, there's the sounds, rational reasoning I like to find in my leadership (well, obviously not mine-mine, I'm not considered a whole human, being a woman and a queer one to boot).

#2 Ahmadinejad is continuing his paranoid anti-Israel rhetoric. Israel is a germ spreading the vileness of the West in the Middle East. Oh, that's nice, real mature Mahmoud, way to show a fraction of sanity one would imagine a statesman should posses.
Then again he was always rabid. I wonder if he's aware of the fact that by bombing Israel with the A-Bomb, he'd end up murdering a huge amount of his Palestinian brethren... those dictators never do think of that little glitch do they.

Yes, these are serious News articles.
No, I'm not laughing because I'm too busy mocking!

*Not all religious people are detached from reality... only those in government.

Even the BBC mentioned it.

Are we gearing up again?
I'm sure the world will be glued to their screens once more.

Where even in times of no (across the border warfare, only internal guerrilla fighting) actual war, we can be sure to find rockets fired in a Northern town.

Links: Hebrew, English.

Thankfully, no one was hurt.
Security forces have confirmed that the Katyuasha's were fired overnight.
What does this mean?
*shrug*
My own interpretation skills about what the IDF and the Ministry of Defense can and want to do with this little provocation is out of whack.
I expect the worst.
But then again, that could just be hyperbole.

Anybody who served (or followed the News) in Lebanon War II knows that Cluster bombs were employed by the IDF over Lebanon.
Those who know what Cluster bombs are all about (if you don't Google it, like everything else to do with weapons there's a lot of info online about it) should be aware that undetonated "bomblets" are either dudds or sleepers that act like land-mines, no need to explain what a land-mine is.

I thought the investigation about the use of Cluster bombs was redundant, because unlike the use of land-mines, which are illegal, Cluster bombs are not illegal under international law.
Just immoral.
And as we all know, morality touches very little on legality when it comes to International law, which is generally about whatever you do inside your own borders is fine, just don't bother us about it.
Seeing as the bombs were dropped outside Israel... well, you know the rest.

Ynet News is defensive about the use of Cluster bombs. And as usual BBC News has no problems with being morally "superior".

I remember when my officer first spoke to me during my service about the weapons in our arsenal and I studied Cluster Bombs I asked her "Isn't this like dropping land-mines on people" - in my 18 year old innocence.
And she said "That's exactly what it is".
"And this is allowed?"
"It's not illegal"
"That's horrible"
"Yes it is"
And we moved on.

Morals and Ethics have very little place in any army. They should.
But they don't.
But so long as no War Time Laws are broken, what difference does it make what the aftermath is.

13:31 - Edited to Add: This what Israel.Indymedia has to say about the Cluster Bomb findings.

13:41 - Edited to Add: Someone else with an opinion - it's in Hebrew over at Friends of George.

Today my nephew, Amos, turned six.
Six years.
More than half way to ten.
I was sixteen when he was born (a baby myself) and he's the first grandchild in my family.
He's the oldest of the youngest generation in my family. ( More about him here )


I'm a paper, television and radio news addict. I like to hear, see and feel what is going on in the world. The Internet news sites are all very nice and informative but they seem so detached from it all. I usually check them in order to confirm a roomer I heard or to read a link someone else found and then I'll skim over the other bulletins that are on that particular website. ( To read why I'm talking about this, click the cut )

That's how the inside of my head looked today.
Was yours equally grey?

In addition, the genocide in Darfur must be stopped.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Fuck.

With Hamas Country in the South and this shit happening in the North... nothing is going right.

Looks like there's going to be a rehash of last summer.

Fuck.

In addition, the genocide in Darfur must be stopped.

Midnight News report:

Heavy exchange of fire between the Lebanese Army and the Israeli Defense Force.

Shit.

I'm getting really awful flashbacks.

Being back in the army has strengthen my personal ideologies in such a way, that I believe we are need of a radical reform in almost every aspect of life; how and when that will come about I don't know, I'm still thinking about that and discussing it with people who don't really agree with me, so that I can learn the flaws and strengths in my arguments (the one benefit of serving again is meeting and working with men, religious among them, who take what you say seriously and are very engaging conversationalists).

More than ever am I a Feminist - I can see again why the Army is important and how integral it is to our national identity, and also how it imbues everyone with Nationalism, making it "us vs. them" which a more destructive ideology cannot be found. The Army also shows, in an extreme way, exactly how our country is constructed and how everyone is still arbitrarily categorized through gender and race, just as an example, where I am currently serving there is approx. the same amount of women as there are non-Ashkenazi men. Yeah, "White is right" my peachy, Ashkenazi ass!

More than ever am I a Humanist - the Israeli Defence Force... not really; in times of war we can't afford to be, we tell civilians about the bombings coming in, but they are held hostage by Hezbollah, who holds all of Lebanon hostage for Iranian influence. Not to mention that Syria is still aching to get their hands back in Lebanon, which they see as another piece of the Middle-Eastern Pie as far as they are concerned.
And through Hezbollah, we also get Hamas, which is sending it's citizens into Israel to kill themselves in order to murder Israelis.

These are not good people in the upper crust of those governments.

More than ever my government is one of the worst; where are our Representatives going on public broadcast telling the civilians that the war effort is going well? Where is our Prime Minister telling us that the army is doing the best job it can defending the home land? Where are the bittersweet lies people want to hear that their children on the front line are doing what is needed?
Where is the sympathy towards the 500,000 Lebanese refugees in southern Lebanon? Where is the UN to help the Lebanese government regain sovereignty over it's entire land? Where is the impartial media to tell both sides of what the fuck is going on?
This is the real world, and those things are lacking, much like an news about what's going on in Gaza and the West Bank, where Israel is still killing Palestinians and Gilad Shalit is still captured?

This war has also put on hold every other social issues in this country - just because we are at war does not mean we are not still living our lives, hundreds of senior citizens are being displaces, far too many children do not have the support Social Services is supposed to provide for them, still women are smuggled (even more easily now, since no one cares about anything other than bombing Lebanon and watching the news to see if their house was bombed) into Israel in the "white slavery" market economy.
Where police should be investigating rapes and murders they are guarding against "enemy incursions".
We have a Defense Minister for the war, a Foreign Minister for dealing with all the other people outside of Israel talking to us and a UN Ambassador who is actually doing some hard talking for Israel. I don't know what his politics are, but I have a feeling that once his tenure as Ambassador is over he'll be coming back and running for a pretty high government office, and since in Israel one very rarely votes for a party, but for the person heading the party their politics are not that important (sad, but true).

And so, not only is Israel condemned by the media, it is condemning itself into social disaster, It has to start;
#1 giving people information that actually helps and doesn't bombard them (bad pun, sorry) with how many missiles have injured, killed and destroyed in their neighborhood.
#2 Going on with life, yes there's war, but not everyone is fighting and Israel has to continue to be a government to the back lines who are still trying to live the semblance of a normal life.
#3 Treating humans beings as human beings; we are not only harming Hezbollah outposts and offices, we are hurting innocent people, those people are not "fucking Arabs"! They are humans trying to survive with guerrilla extremists using them as cannon fodder and a government too weak to actually help them.
I will not be dehumanized, by dehumanizing the Hezbollah, or by dehumanizing the innocent Lebanese men, women and children who have to live in those conditions.

Do I even want to get into what this war is doing to the Animals living in the North and is Southern Lebanon?
*sigh*

Once agian, a few lines from a song;
Woodstock by Joni Mitchell
By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everytime there was a song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotguns in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation
We are stardust
We are golden
And we have to get ourselves
Back to the garden