Here is the report on the UN bombing and killings from this morning's The Australian. Strangely, the final paragraph has been omitted from the online edition.
UN observers made 10 frantic telephone calls to the Israeli military, warning them aerial attacks were getting close to their post, in the hours before a direct hit on their bunker killed four peacekeepers.
A UN report released last night said the peacekeepers were told during each of the calls that the bombing would cease, but they were then hit by a precision-guided missile.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert telephoned UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to deny warplanes had deliberately bombed the UN position.
Mr Annan said last night there had been 17 bombardments of the UN camp, with 12 artillery rounds landing within 150m and four scoring direct hits. "Many calls went out" to the Israeli military and "you can imagine the anguish of the soldiers and men and women … who were down there in the name of peace", he said.
And from The Age, this entire excerpt has also been omitted from a similar news entry in the online edition :
A UN source said about 20 bombs or shells fell in or close to the post before an aerial bomb finally penetrated the bunker where observers were sheltering.
The UN Truce Supervisory Organisation and the UN Interim Forces in Lebanon (Unifil) had protested to Israel repeatedly during the bombing which preceded the fatal strike.
"This position has been there for 20 years. In the old days that was the front line. Israel knows these positions and they have had two weeks to zero in on this area and register targets and where you don't want to hit," the UN source said.
"(The UN bunkers) are big white things -- you can see them for miles and they are lit up at night … If you keep firing all afternoon into a position like that, then ultimately something will go wrong."
What is going on here? Why have these paragraphs been removed from both papers? Have I missed something? Like, yes it happened, but let's not give the mugs too much information?
As the rest of the world leaders spun their mumbled horror about the "incident" (while remaining supine at Israel's insanity), it took a woman, Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, to speak out in no uncertain terms.
"With respect to today's bombing of the Unifil (UN Interim Force in Lebanon) post in Khiam, New Zealand joins the Secretary-General of the United Nations in calling on the Government of Israel to conduct a full investigation into this very disturbing incident and demand that any further attack on UN positions and personnel must stop'," Miss Clark said.
"Just as Hizbollah is urged to stop its attacks, so must Israel cease the disproportionate violence which is striking civilians, infrastructure, and UN personnel and posts."
Her stand makes sense. She's not a member of a patriarchy whose penchant for violence has impeded human evolution from its beginnings.
Let's conclude with a letter in The Australian, which puts anti-semitism, whether against Jews or, these days, against Arabs -- they're all Semites -- squarely at the feet of those unfortunate members of the human species for whom racism is like oxygen: the bloody Right.
Mark Steyn's article ("If only they had refused to indulge Arafat", Opinion, 26/7) demonstrates that anti-semitism has not disappeared from the mindset of sections of the Right – it has simply transformed into a malignant bigotry against Muslim Arabs.
Of course, not all the features of classic anti-semitism are present in this new anti-Arab bigotry. Steyn and his ilk do not argue that Arabs control international finance, for example. However, his allegation that Palestinian terrorists drank the blood of the assassinated Jordanian prime minister in 1971 has an eerie parallel in the persistent medieval belief that Jews slaughtered Christian children and drank their blood in accordance with their own depraved rituals.
Like anti-semitism, the new bigotry makes no distinction between Arabs. Whether they be Palestinian or Lebanese, Shiite or Sunni, in essence they are all the same. They all share the same murderous and unappeasable bloodlust towards Jews. It is pointless to try to negotiate with them because they have no interest in compromise, only in total victory. Their genocidal jihadism is ineradicable and can only be countered with violence.
Like his fellow anti-Arab bigots, Steyn has no interest in the historical or political context except where it supports his position. He amply demonstrates Cardinal Newman's remark that although some people's opinions may radically change, their casts of minds remain fundamentally the same. -- Nick Laffey
-- Chet LaMerde
