Got Fear?

Many of us know someone who was at or around Ground Zero on 9/11/2001. We all remember the shock of the planes hitting the Twin Towers. Fear, anger, anguish. All this from hundreds and thousands of miles away while watching images on TV.

We will never know what it feels like to be a target of bombings and I hope none of us ever has to. We who get tensed watching scary movies, sweat when we're stopped for speeding on the highway, how can we EVER know what it is like as hundreds of sorties over us are dropping "smart-bombs" and we are sitting targets? Imagine being a child whose nation's "soldiers" have embedded themselves among civilans. Imagine being a housewife who is trying to get by as buildings shake, roofs cave in, shells explode and you have to dig out your children from underneath the rubble.

Ehud Barak recently justified Israel's actions: "Obama said that if rockets were being fired at his home while his two daughters were sleeping, he would do everything he could to prevent it." Right, and I wonder what Obama would do if his daughters were in the house while his tiny neighborhood was being bombed for days on and a bomb could fall on his house any minute? Obama the Israeli would fight. I suspect, so would Obama the Palestinian.

I believe it was Gandhi who said "an eye for an eye will make the whole world go blind."

As I said, if the purpose is to make the other slide bleed and live in terror they are both succeeding. If their goal was to live in peace and to prosper, I think it's a mixed bag.

This evening, I pause for the innocent children of Palestine who have very little to comfort them. They are like the children of Israel in many respect and like children anywhere else in the world, except, as I said, they have far too little to comfort them through all this insanity. They don't have shelters they can hide in. They are not counseled by child specialists in coping with loss and traumatic experiences. They are left to the varied elements of their misfortune and random events. They are every bit like all our children except their future is dim because they were born in the wrong geography.

I suspect Ehud Barak doesn't lose sleep worrying about their lives even though their destinies are intertwined with that of the children of Israel. Hamas is far too intoxicated in humiliation to think clearly about them except as possible tools in its arsenel through miseducation and brain-washing. May the Lord comfort these children and keep them safe now and in the future.