Robert Fisk: 'Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask'
The Independent 7 January 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-do-they-hate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html

Brilliant article by Robert Fisk published on Wednesday in The Independent. Fisk articulates the outrage many of us feel about the current situation in the Gaza Strip and reminds us that Israel is making its own 'contribution' to the war on terror that reinforces the binary West/East christianity/Islam. This article was written after the Israelis bombarded a UN school. Still today, Israel refuses to back out while over 700 Palestinians are already dead. As Rosi Braidotti argues in Nomadic Subjects 'transformations or change are not possible, unless the vicious circle of dialectical violence is completely broken'.

Here are some extracts from Fisk's article

'Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?'

'What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre.'

'What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.'