Sir, - Seventeen years ago I found myself in the basement of a building in a modern, multicultural city. For many hours, artillery shells rained down. The night was filled with the smells and sounds of burning buildings and cars, screams and sudden silences. We waited, terrified, and wondered whether the building would become our tomb. After the bombardment ended, the toll of dead and seriously injured ran into several hundred.
The city was west Beirut, or "mainly Muslim" west Beirut, as the newspapers liked to call it. Almost all of those killed and injured were civilians - just as civilian, and as innocent, as most of those who died last week.
All of the ordnance which hit them was American-made. The sectarian faction of the Lebanese Army which fired the weapons was trained by American advisers. The pro-Israeli government which gave the orders was entirely beholden to the US. There was no condemnation from the "West". Few of the victims were given faces and names in subsequent reports, or spoke English, or looked like us. We didn't learn about their husbands, wives and children, their last messages of love. They were not a part of the media's version of our shared humanity.
There are a number of points which strike me now, in the light of last week's atrocity in the US.
1. There can be no ifs and buts: this was a crime against humanity. The people who ordered it, or provided facilities of any kind, should be brought to book.
2. I can understand the depth of hatred which exists in the minds of many in the Middle East for the US and what it represents, even though the vast majority would never descend to the cruelty we saw last week.
3.The world is not a duopoly: them (evil) and us (good). All sides, including "the West", and including many states, have practiced terrorism and killed civilians.
4. We had a day of mourning for the US, but not for Omagh, or Sabra and Chatila, or the refugees who die or are murdered while Europe, or the millions who die of AIDS in Africa and Asia, or the victims of famines and floods or globalist exploitation, or the many victims of state terrorism - the Cambodians carpet-bombed by the US, and the Chechens slaughtered by Russia, for instance.
Isn't there a danger of moral relativism - of finding some deaths more important than others?
5. How does this happen? Isn't it because in various ways, implicitly and explicitly, we dehumanise certain people - or at any rate make them less human, less real, less sensitive, less fully "civilised" than we are?
An Israeli general once referred to Palestinians as "cockroaches". There are still some Arab anti-Semites who say Hitler didn't finish the job. Once people lose their individuality in our eyes, the first step in the hardening of our moral arteries has taken place.
6. There is no war on and it is wrong to use the term. It could be used to legitimate the concept that (however regrettably, of course) it may now be necessary to take action against entire countries. And even though we know their citizens are not war criminals or belligerents (in fact we know and concede in advance that many will be innocent civilians), the use of the term "war" places any harm done to them in the regrettable but "inevitable" category of "collateral damage" - and that's what happens in war, isn't it?
7. Let's go after the killers, by all means. But why, for instance, should they not be brought, like Milsoevic, to an international tribunal in the Hague? Are the European Muslims he killed less valuable than the people who died in New York? Why should the response be different? Does America have the right, uniquely, to take the law into its own hands?
8. We need to understand that although millions of Muslims neither support the murder of civilians nor would themselves countenance suicide bombings and suchlike, they understand and sympathise with the political dilemmas which have led to these measures (yes, there is an Irish parallel).
9. Islam in itself is no more or less extreme than Christianity or Judaism.
10. The modern Middle East is a creation of "the West" - from its borders to Osama Ben Laden. The West has frequently prevented the development of democracy there and has armed and supported the most despotic and antidemocratic forces, as long as it could continue to extract oil for its own benefit.
We should resist all attempts to reduce this situation to a view that says that those who are not with the Americans are necessarily against them. Solidarity with the American people is right and understandable, especially for Irish people, with all of the strong connections between the two countries.
This does not mean we should agree with all of the objectives of the American administration - objectives which have sometimes been anti-democratic, and even murderous, in the field of foreign policy.
The US needs and deserves support in its response to last week - but it should be critical, inclusive and informed, not blind and lemming-like. - Yours, etc.,
Piaras Mac Einri, Model Farm Road, Cork.