The Bombing at Qarantina

The Message to Bush: Remove Your Crusader Outpost!

Another Good Piece
By FRANKLIN LAMB
Qarantina, Lebanon

CounterPunch

"Qarantina was the site of yesterday's message to the Bush administration where a 33 lb bomb killed three and wounded 21.....Qarantina, forever etched in the black annals of Palestinian history is the area of east Beirut near the Port where on April 13, 1976 Phalange forces killed 26 Palestinian bus riders. A grisly crime, followed by another massacre of Palestinians months later in nearby Tal al-Zattar Refugee Camp which began on August 12, 1976 and according to scholar Helena Cobban killed 1,500 Palestinians in one day, and eventually as many as 3,000 according to other reports. Qarantina and Talal-Zattar. Some historians argue that these events ignited Lebanon's 15 year and Civil War which killed and injured 152,000 and from which Lebanon has never recovered.......

Murderous as it turned out to be for those killed and wounded, and while all terrorist acts are fundamentally designed as means of communication, the Qarantina blast, using 33 lbs. of high explosive is meant to tell the Bush administration something. Specifically that the Bush Administration is widely viewed in Lebanon and the Middle East, and increasingly in America itself, as a criminal and terrorist regime, and that it must depart Lebanon post haste.

The Qarantina blast is advising Bush and Rice to expedite US Ambassador Feltman's long delayed and overdue departure and send a helicopter if necessary to get him to Cyprus for a plane back to Washington. Don't even use Lebanon's airport.

The message is also that if Bush and/or Israel act on their plans to attack Iran or Lebanon or Syria, the Embassy should be closed sooner rather than destroyed later. Few in Lebanon doubt that if Israel or the Bush administration bomb Iran that the American University of Beirut, bombed in 1991, and other US Rumsfeldian ' legitimate targets of opportunity' will be attacked........

For many in Lebanon, the American Embassy under the Bush administration has become an Israel Embassy in the way that John Bolton became a second Israeli UN Ambassador....

Few in Lebanon, Palestine, or the wider Middle East take Bush for anything more than a dangerous zealot in the service of Israel, not America.....

The Bush administration's intense and continuing interference in Lebanon's internal affairs rendered it guiltier of doing what it claims others are doing. Many of Lebanon's political leaders have asked it to stop. It ignores these calls and sends instead a parade of Welch Club adherents on almost weekly visits with more orders, commands, and threats......"