...on the current middle east killing spree. I don't see an end. I see bad guys everywhere I look. I see two men whose hatred for one another is so deep, so long standing, and so impenetrable that an entire region--and perhaps an entire world--could be leveled because of them. I don't deny Israel has a right to self defense against a group of people that loathe its existence. The suicide bombings deserve reprisal--but how, and at whom? A culture without weapons of mass destruction has alternatively grown its own crop of home-grown weapons in the bodies and minds of young people who are rewarded in eternity for becoming human bombs.
Where will it end and what is the answer? Kill Arafat? Worse news for us all. Let him stay? Too late for that. Exile him? He won't go, and if he did, worse still.
Looking at my own country's actions of "self defense," I wonder if there is a line that, once stepped across, transforms defense to offense, almost in an nanosecond. You blink and you miss it. And the lure of crossing it is maybe just too hard to ignore. The line is blurry yet critically important. Step over it and all the answers are erased with the sand kicked aside. The line is gone. The answer is gone.
This, the latest from the war zone.
"In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a protest letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon saying Israel had an obligation to allow journalists to work freely in the West Bank. 'Attempting to prevent journalists from witnessing events on the ground is a flagrant act of censorship,' the letter said. The group also expressed alarm at 'several incidents in which Israeli troops have fired on working journalists.' "
