Robert Fisk: 'Opening the gates of hell' and 40 years of other Middle East cliches - Comment, Opinion. Updated 04 December 2012 08:48 PM Hezbollah announced several times that Israel had "opened the gates of hell" for attacking Lebanon.
Yasser Arafat too waffled on about the "gates of hell". And we journos are repeating all the cliches we've used for the past 40 years. The killing of Mr Jabari was a "targeted attack" – like the Israeli "surgical air strikes", which killed almost 17,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982, the 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, in 2006, and the 11 civilians killed in one Gaza house yesterday. At least Hamas, with their Godzilla rockets, don't claim anything "surgical" about them. As, in truth, are the Israeli attacks on Gaza. The new exchange rate in Gaza for Palestinian and Israeli deaths has reached 16:1.
Washington supports Israel's "right to defend itself", then claims a spurious neutrality – as if Israel's bombs didn't come from the US as assuredly as the Fajr-5 rockets come from Iran. But there is no such evidence. Irish Independent Read More. Slide Show: Afghan Faces, by Mikhail Galustov. “In Afghanistan, everyone has war-related stories to tell,” the photographer Mikhail Galustov told me.
“Every family has been hurt by the war in one way or another, and I wanted to find a language of photography that would be different from what I had done before.” In this portrait series, which Galustov began in 2009, he tells the story of war through Afghan faces. Since he moved from his longtime base in Moscow to Kabul three years ago, Galustov’s work has focussed on NATO’s military intervention in Afghanistan, and on what might happen to the country as the international coalition draws down. He isn’t surprised by recent reports that the U.S. has effectively abandoned what was once the cornerstone of American military strategy in Afghanistan—brokering a peace deal with the Taliban. “Afghans are very pessimistic about 2014,” he said. Which leaves many Afghans desperate to flee before the foreign troops leave. All photographs by Mikhail Galustov/Redux.
Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre - Robert Fisk - Commentators. This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha.
It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province. "Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro).
Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. We've all had our little massacres.