The Hindu Business Line : Massacre of the innocents

The world's anger should be directed not at any single party involved in the continuing West Asia problem but at all those who are playing a part in fuelling it.

One remembers Adolf Hitler's attempt to wipe Jews off the face of the earth with the help of gas chambers in his concentration camps, an act of inhumanity the impact of which was made even more graphic by the photographs of the piles of emaciated bodies found by the advancing Allied forces. Such pictures, among others, had the immediate impact of letting the world know first-hand of the immensity of the crime committed against humanity by the Nazi regime in the 1940s.

In the late 1960s and the 1970s came the Vietnam misadventure of Washington in the course of which napalm wrought its destruction on human beings, like the Nazi concentration camps making no distinction among the old, the middle-aged and the young. Almost contemporaneous was the systematic elimination of opponents by the Cambodian strongman Pol Pot, the enormity of his crime being highlighted by photographs of the hundreds of skulls belonging in life to his opponents.

Destruction of WTC

Nearer to our times is the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York, an event which took the lives of thousands of innocent people who had no inkling whatever that that September day would be their last because of the diabolical intent of the al-Quaeda.

In our own country, we have had a string of terrorist action — in Mumbai, New Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and other places — which has taken a heavy toll of life cutting across all sections of the population, not to speak of the innocent lives snuffed out in the course of retaliatory action taken legitimately by the Indian security forces against the perpetrators of violence and destruction from across the border who have, as a matter of policy, targeted the innocent in their calculated quest to spread terror and chaos.

The Qana strike

It is against this disturbing background that one has to see the Qana strike by the Israelis which led to the loss of more than 50 innocent lives, more than half of them of children. Let it be said at the outset that such action is unpardonable and has to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

The Israelis have launched an inquiry, and the world hopes that those responsible for the heinous deed will be punished according to existing laws. After all, the deaths were caused not by an anonymous terrorist group but by one of the most accomplished military forces.

But the vilification of the Israelis, as far as the Qana event is concerned, should end here. It is of little relevance to link the tragic loss of innocent lives to the larger causes being pursued by the Israelis and their opponents. That debate, which essentially began in the early years of the 20th Century, will continue unabated for at least another century — till perhaps such time the demographic factors begin to call the final shots. More appropriately, the world's anger should be directed not at any single party involved in the continuing West Asia problem but at all those who are playing a part in fuelling it — to a level where Qana-type events are occurring.

This, briefly, should be the central message of the photographs of the dead children of Qana, which the media has been publishing and projecting with alacrity during the past week.