Letters to my sons.

Dear Son,

Today would have been Grandma Caudle’s 69th Birthday. So we went out to lunch today to celebrate.

On coming home I find out the news that at least 54 people have been killed in an Israeli air strike on Lebanon. 34 of the dead were children.

When television and Internet news talks of Hezbollah they call them “Muslim Extremists”, but the Israeli government is never called a group of “Jewish Extremists”. But this is actually what they are. The difference between the actions of Hezbollah, al-qaeda, the Government of the United States and the Government of Israel are none, they are exactly the same.

The Jewish Extremists blame Hezbollah for the deaths because, according to the BBC:

Israel said the Shia militant group was responsible for the Qana strike, because it used the town to launch rockets.

I have written here how Muslim Extremists blamed the people of the UK for the bombings on the 7th July 2005 because they re-elected Tony Blair. I said at that the time that this was rubbish and why it was rubbish. The same arguments apply here; the Jewish Extremists refuse to accept that they are nothing more than common murders and attempt to justify their killings. They claim that they had told people to leave the area or face being bombed. al-qaeda has warned many times what certain governments around the world need to do to avoid being bombed. When these edicts are announced world leaders queue up to pontificate about “not bowing to terrorism”. But when the Jewish Extremists set out their demands so that people can avoid being bombed, they are treated as statesmen and armed by the USA government.

Although we do get some weasel words from Condoleezza Rice:

We are also pushing for an urgent end to the current hostilities, but the views of the parties on how to achieve this are different.

The government of the USA thinks arming the Jewish Extremists is the way forward as they sell Israel the arms necessary to kill the 54 people in the first place.

In 1984 Orwell gives us the word blackwhite:

Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

To understand the minds of the assembled Extremists in light of the World Trade Centre, Milan and London bombings and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraqi we have to have to identify and understand blackwhite when we see it. And this episode is a case study.