Letter from Beirut

Heartbreaking letter from Beirut, via Juan Cole …

The AUB hospital sent out an urgent call for blood donations. Others were organizing aid to refugee families housed in schools and other make-shift shelters. A protest against the Israeli bombing has been scheduled for Thursday at 11 am in the city center. Will anyone be listening and watching? Lebanon has only words and pictures with which to fight. As Khalil Gibran wrote, “your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” By now, Lebanon must be the wisest of nations. Not everyone finds it easy to transmute pain into wisdom like Gibran’s Prophet. “Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.” I fear that, for most, pain creates a reservoir of revenge: a pool of hatred in which to baptize another generation of killers. Does terror ever really work? And what becomes of the bombardier’s soul? In the film Fog of War, former US Secretary of Defense McNamara admits that, had the Japanese won World War II, he would have been convicted of war crimes for his involvement in the firebombing of Japanese cities in World War II. But who gave him, or anyone else with the power to win and write history, the license to kill?

Are the weak and the losers reduced to a mere muffled cry? Plenty of wisdom: plenty of blood. Is Lebanon’s cry audible?

Audible, but falling on deaf ears.