All Life is Sacred, Not Just Some

On CNN and several other news sites today, I've noticed that prominent in coverage of the Israel-Hezbollah-Beirut conflict waging currently is news that an Israeli woman and her grandson were killed. Their deaths are terrible and made more tragic because they were so avoidable, the victims innocent civilians in the madness.

But nowhere was there such obvious coverage of the more than five dozen Lebanese civilians dead in the last two days. Certainly, no individual stories of their equally tragic deaths were noted as with the Israelis. I've seen this depicted again and again since the latest entifada began in 2000: individual Israeli deaths, always a fraction of the number of Palestinians in most conflicts, cited but not the others.

This disparity is nothing new. We hear so much of the deaths in New York, Washington, and in the field in Pennsylvania on 9-11-01, but our government makes a point of not even trying to count the number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and elsewhere the so-called War of on Terror is being waged.

In fact, the most conservative estimates of civilian deaths just around Baghdad is about 50,000 or more than a dozen times the number who died here on 9/11. But experts say that figure is ridiculously low, and likely, several hundred thousand Iraqis have died, which does not count Afghanistan, et al.

We keep hearing, "it doesn't matter what we do so long as we save even one American life."

But ALL life is sacred. An Israeli life is as valuable as an American life which is as valuable as a Lebanese life which is as valuable as a Palestinian life which is as valuable as an Iraqi and Afghani life.... and so on.

Perhaps if this were acknowledged a bit more, some of the bloodshed would stop.

But then, I do seem hopelessly naive and simple sometimes.