Promiscuous war

One week in the life and death of Beirut:

The local Beirut papers are filled with photographs that would never be seen in the pages of a British paper: of decapitated babies and women with no legs or arms or of old men in bits. Israel’s air raids are promiscuous and – when you see the results as we now do with our own eyes – obscene. No doubt Hizbollah’s equally innocent civilian victims in Israel look like this but the slaughter in Lebanon is on an infinitely more terrible scale. The Lebanese look at these pictures and see them on television – as does the rest of the Arab world – and I wonder how many of them are provoked to think of another 9/11 or 7/7 or whatever the next date will be. [The Independent – original article | full text]

Robert Fisk is a journalist who covers the middle east for London’s The Independent and has lived in Beirut for years.