"Look what you made me do"

It's always someone else's fault isn't it.



'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'
Robert Fisk
Published: 31 July 2006

They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. " Mehdi Hashem, aged seven ­ Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 ­ Qana", "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one ­ Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity ­ yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the " pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana ­ as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening " western civilisation" ­ as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.*


It used to be the domain of small boys - throw a stone at your brother, he ducks, the stone goes through a window...

"Now look what you've made me do."

"His fault mum, he ducked."

That culture has crept into adult public life, so now we have our politicians routinely refusing to take responsibility for their actions.

This is just another example.

*Read the full dispatch from Robert Fisk in The Independent here


Please also read Babykaos' beautifully written item 'Baby's Black Balloon'.