The Empire Has No Heart

The empire has no heart. The America of George W. Bush, which held the world hostage with the victory of the neo-conservatives and their “creative chaos,” has no heart. The country of iron and fire has no heart. Israel, the monstrous country rising from the stuff of legend, spreading destruction and ruin and snatching away our lives, the lives of our children, and the lives of our children’s children, has no heart.

The huge, disgusting cockroaches running around our streets and destroyed roadways, and the embers of fire raining down on the buildings of Maroun al-Ras and Bint Jubayl and Ayta al-Sha’b, have no hearts. Neither do the metal birds built in the heart of the empire and given by the American people to the new Nazis, the metal birds that soar high above, far, far away from the fires of resistance fighters in steadfast southern Lebanon. For their vengeance poured forth onto the bodies of the gentle, sleeping children who were seeking safety in the House for the Disabled in Qana, who escaped from the hell of guns to the hell of airplanes, rising to the sky in nightclothes because Olmert and Amir Peretz and Dan Halotz, and others from the League of Evil and Murder, didn’t give them time to change their clothes and put on something more formal.

Bush has no heart; Ehud Olmert has no heart; Condoleezza Rice has no heart. The United Nations has no heart; the Security Council has no heart; the European Union has no heart; The countries of the first, second and third worlds: heartless. Globalization, which strives to make us all alike through consumption, has no heart.

We are all heartless, while the Israeli war machine levels beautiful Lebanon, pulverizing the bodies of children and crushing the bones of women and the cantankerous elderly while we watch and listen, and seizing every vein that pulses in southern, central, and northern Lebanon. The first Qana and the second Qana, and before and after that: Dair Yassin, Tantura, al-Duwaima, Qibya, Nahalin, Kafr Qasim … massacre after massacre, while the monstrous country responsible just grows and grows, feeding on the blood and meat of tender children.

The whole world listens and watches, and ignores all of this in order to flatter the legend of iron and fire. Qana 1996 and Qana 2006. How much water has flowed under the bridge between those two incidents … after Israel tore down bridges and buildings and brought down houses right on top of their owners’ heads? Ten whole years have passed, and nothing has quenched the fire of this mythical being growing in the heart of the Arab lands. It’s as though it is taking vengeance for its gutless, cowardly flight from southern Lebanon in 2000. It’s as if its current and former leaders feed on hatred and spite, on the myth upon which the State of Israel is built.

They demolish houses right on top of their occupants. They burn the bodies of children in Lebanon and Palestine. They bring buildings to the ground with tens of tons of bombs brought from the distant, bloodthirsty lands of Columbus, snatching the souls of millions of humans in this land, which Bush, or Dick Cheney, or Condoleezza, with her black skin and white mask (in the words of Frantz Fanon ), do not care about.

I have no heart. My hands were not paralyzed as I watched this blood fill the screen, as I watched all of these small bodies, with their distorted features and in nylon bags, fill airplanes.