Chaotic state of world affairs

Over six years ago the world ushered in the 21st century. It was a new century embraced with a mixture of hope, fear and uncertainty.

Some held out an utopian hope that the 21st century could mean the start of a transformation of mankind into a kinder, gentler creature concerned about the famine ravaging some countries and people starving to death; about the degradation of the environment; rich countries helping the poor and all contributing to a safer world for us and the generations to come.

There were those who feared the new century would bring about wars including nuclear warfare; more widespread famines; pandemic that would wipe out millions of human beings; some of the worst natural disasters; widespread ethnic divisions and nations rising up against nations for dominion and control.

Six years into the new millennium, the world seems to have shattered into total chaos and madness and there are no signs that peace will ever rein supreme in the lifetime of many of us.

What is worrying is that the once powerful United Nations has been reduced to an ineffectual and weak organisation, being nakedly manipulated by the United States, depending on Washington’s personal agenda.

More than three weeks after Israel began inflicting its Armageddon like terror on Lebanon, murdering hundreds of Muslims and Christians and killing some UN workers in the process, the UN’s voice for a cease-fire is an ignored whisper.

Israel ignores the UN and Kofi Anan because Tel Aviv believes it has gotten tacit approval from US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to continue the war against Lebanon under the pretext that it has the right to defend itself.

Frankly, if George W wanted to bring an end to Israel’s brutality against the Lebanese people, all the swaggering Texan had to do was to get on the telephone with Israel’s new Prime Minister Ehud Olmert – who seems destined to carve his name in Lebanese and Palestinian blood – and order Tel Aviv to end this…mess.

Instead, George W and  Blair have thrown their support behind Israel as it kills hundreds of ordinary Lebanese people including babies, the elderly and the crippled, under the guise that they were destroying the so-called Hezbollah terrorists who indeed triggered the latest spate of violence when they captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid.

Maybe to George W, the murder of unarmed innocent civilians by Israel is collateral damage. To the rest of the sane and shocked world, it is a nice-sounding euphemism for state-sponsored mass murder as Tel Aviv continues pounding residential apartment buildings into rubble and pulverizing entire towns and villages.

In his own anger over the lopsided conflict, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused Israel of being guilty of a “new Holocaust” and the U.S. government – whom he described as a terrorist – of complicity.

Some commentators have ruled out any meddling by the US into Israel’s action stating that Hezbollah – formed as a resistance group to fight off an Israeli military that slaughtered nearly 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in 1982 – was their common enemy.

The position of rich, developed countries on Israel’s war on Lebanon has also left ordinary Middle Eastern very angry.

They are angry with their own governments, many of them too much of a coward to even say a word on behalf of Lebanon, fearing a US backlash; angry that the world continues to talk while death toll rises daily in Lebanon.

And their anger towards the US’ intransigent position boils even more as they witness the asymmetrical conflict by Israel which seems to be the annihilation of Lebanese lives and the destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure into Hiroshima-style rubble by Israel’s American-made fighter jets, dropping 500-pound bombs and artillery shells – definitely no match for Hezbollah’s  Katyusha rockets.

Already there is frenzied support from some quarters in the Arab world for Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah who is being regarded with almost mythical reverence particularly by the young Muslim men and women.

At the start of Israel’s war against Lebanon, one of George W’s concerns was the survival of Lebanon’s fledging democracy and what impact Israel’s aggression would have on the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouard Siniora, seen as being pro-American.

Siniora who has been pleading with the international community to call on Israel to stop murdering his people probably stunned Washington when he hailed the Hezbollah’s fighters and its leader as sacrificing their lives for the sake of Lebanon.

Siniora later asked an emergency summit in Rome, “Are we children of a lesser God? Is an Israel teardrop worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

With this injustice being played out on our television and the imperialistic attitudes of some of the world leaders, how does the world expect young Arabs to contain their rage and anger.

We’ve already witnessed the terrible consequences of the extremist suicide bombers and their warped sense of justice.

I do however fear that the situation in Lebanon may stir up further widespread feelings of radicalism with many young people ready to give up their lives for ‘the cause’.

No one as yet knows how Israel’s aggression on Lebanon will end, when it will end and how much more innocent blood must be spilled.

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Kaieteur News has paid the greatest tribute to its slain workers by running the printing press and publishing their newspaper, literally under the threat of a gun, since the cold-blooded killers have not yet been caught.

Keieteur News, its management, reporters, editors, sub-editors and others have demonstrated the spirit and essence of an unfettered media by not cowering even in the face of such unspeakable terror.

Having an independent and free media operating in Guyana is made even more crucial as the country’s hard-fought democracy seems to be under serious threat from criminals.