Images of Lebanese Death Intensify Arab Anger

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: July 30, 2006

DAMASCUS, Syria, July 30 — The images of the dead children in southern Lebanon played across the television screens on Sunday over and over again — small and caked in dirt and as lifeless as rag dolls as rescuers hauled them from the wreckage of several residential buildings pulverized hours earlier by the Israeli Air Force.

The images were broadcast on all of the Arab-language satellite channels, but it was the most popular station, Al Jazeera, that made the starkest point. For several hours after rescuers reached Qana, Lebanon, the station took its anchors off the air and just continuously played images of the little bodies there.

“This is the new Middle East,” one report from the shattered town began, making a sarcastic reference to a phrase Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice uttered last week when visiting Beirut, Lebanon, and rejecting calls for an immediate cease-fire.

American weapons caused the deaths, the report intoned. Men from the village were shown weeping over the children as they were laid out under blankets in front of the shattered buildings.

The anger the deaths caused in Lebanon and elsewhere was palpable. Within hours, thousands of demonstrators filled the streets in downtown Beirut, smashing windows at the United Nations headquarters, one of the few foreign buildings readily accessible...http://tinyurl.com/qleyf
*