Following the capture of Israeli soldiers by Palestinian and Lebanese militants, Israel has launched a full scale assault on civilian infrastructure in both Gaza and Lebanon.

Good Morning Beirut by Bilal El-Amine

My country was being bombed. My people were being bombed. Other than being afraid of what could happen to me, my loved ones, people I knew, people I saw on the streets, people who smiled at me at a corner, the stupid taxi driver that I cursed the other day; I was afraid for the people I never knew, the people I never met, never saw and people who in the small villages of the south, in the streets of the southern suburbs of Beirut who were agonizing, dying under the rubble of their own houses. My country has had many wars. The civil war that lasted from 1975 until 1991 was cruel and meaningless. I didn’t witness it as I was too young, and we used to escape to the back-then-safe south, to my grandmother's house.

Hi everyone. First of all, I am fine as are family and friends. We're scattered in different places, some still in the south, some in Tyre, the rest in Beirut and its surroundings. Those who live in the southern suburbs where Hizbullah is based managed to leave before the latest strikes and are safe with relatives.

Racism against Arabs and Muslims long preceded the 9-11 terrorist attacks and has much of its roots in Western imperialism in the Middle East, especially Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Yet, the escalation that we witness today can be traced to the war on terror launched after 9-11 by Bush and his neoconservative ideologues with the backing of the Democrats. Anti-Arab/anti-Muslim racism has helped sell the detentions, wars, gulags, and occupations of US imperialism’s latest and boldest venture into the Middle East and South Asia. In turn, this imperial venture has further inflamed racist views of Arabs and Muslims.