What Next?

It’s 4:00 a.m. by the castle clock. The dark world outside my window has an exhausted sound – as well it might after two days of lashing rain and tearing wind. And Saint Patrick rules the roost today. Lucky him.

After the Healing Service, my parents waited in vain for the Homecare Person to come and help my Dad into bed. Finally my Mom managed it with only one hitch when my Dad’s exhausted legs simply gave out and he sank helplessly to the carpet. Mom summoned the neighbour again. Disaster temporarily averted.
Dad woke up at 1:15 and decided he wanted something out of his bureau drawer. Instead of calling Mom, he got out of bed and proceeded across the room with his walker. Once more, his legs gave out. At this point, he did call Mom but she couldn’t find the strength to haul him up off the floor. Neither of them could figure out what to do so Mom brought a blanket and pillow and tried to make Dad comfortable. There he lay until Homecare Person showed up at 10 the next morning.

I note the top court in Iraq has found Tareq Aziz guilty of the 1992 murders of 42 traders who were rounded up over two days, given a brief trial and executed hours later. Tareq will spend the rest of his life in jail.

This reminded me of Amna, one of my students in the UAE. Her grandfather was a leading Iraqi businessman elected by his peers to the presidency of the Chamber of Commerce, an independent body with no remuneration attached to its leadership. In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein changed tradition by turning the Chamber into a government department. Amna’s grandfather resigned and went to Mecca with 19 of his friends, partly to remove himself from the situation and partly to renew his spirit. When the group returned to Baghdad, they were arrested at the airport, taken to Kangaroo Court at high noon, and hung en masse two hours later. Amna’s family blamed Saddam personally for the deaths but I wonder if there was a middleman, a hatchet guy, who might soon appear in court.

Or is killing 19 people not enough to count as mass murder? Is there a cut-off point?

In other news, I read that Hillary Clinton has called the demolition of Palestinian homes in the West Bank “unhelpful.” How incredibly profound! What searing commentary!

I also note that certain western newspapers have started referring to “the recent Gaza conflict where it is thought 1300 Palestinians died.” It is thought? What would be the outcry if wording changed to the “recent Gaza conflict where it is thought 13 Israelis died”? The fact that four of them were killed by friendly fire seems to have been lost in the race to avoid charging the Israel with war crimes.

Or what if the papers said, “As a result of the thousands of tin-pot rockets Hamas has fired into Israel since 2001, it is thought 20 Israelis have died?”

As a matter of fact, Human Rights Watch estimates that 1,434 Palestinians, 960 of them civilians, were killed in the recent “offensive.”

Finally, my kidney infection is back – if, in fact, it was ever gone.

Ye gods and little fishes!