Fallujah, Gaza, Tyre
My thoughts circle back to certain moments: waking before dawn in California on successive days and hearing Ivan Watson's reporting on civilian deaths in Tyre ( here and here ), the missile hole burned through the top of a Red Cross ambulance in a newspaper photo glanced at my cafe, the bitter debate and rift at that same cafe between a Polish / Israeli / Jewish-American friend of mine and a progressive Pacifica-listening / Znet-reading friend of mine... and NPR Baghdad reporter Jamie Tarabay's unforgettable and ghastly reporting last weekend about the retrieval of bodies from the Tigris in Iraq. These are potent stories and images and discussions. And before one's thoughts coalesce, before one's convictions harden impressions into conclusions, it seems to me that there's a responsibility simply to witness, on a human level, the bloodshed, the destruction, the loss of life, the disruption that has been visited in the Middle East on all sides these last weeks an