Friday, July 21, 2006

21-Jul-06: Silent testimony to what Nasrallah wants to achieve

For most of us, the word explosive means 'bang'. It's a reality that until you confront an explosion from up close, the overwhelming power is impossible to imagine. In reality, it's not just 'bang'.

Palestinian terrorists have long understood that they can magnify the deadliness of their explosives by adding nails and ball bearings to the device. These fly off in every direction and kill exactly the way bullets do. When our daughter's bag was handed back to us by the Jerusalem police a week after her murder in August 2001, the tough ballistic nylon case inside of which she had kept her cell phone was shredded to pieces. As we picked the remains of the phone out of the case, nails fell onto the table. They had embedded themselves inside the case, inside the phone and inside the bodies of the victims at the Sbarro restaurant massacre. There's a picture of the phone and one of the nails here and here. (The hand-writing on the bottom of the shattered Nokia phone is our daughter's. Malki had written a reminder to herself in Hebrew: "Never speak ill of other people.")

The other pictures come from Lenny Maschkowski who lives in Haifa (thanks, Lenny). He's captured some important images. One shows a car that was wrecked in one of the many missiles to have fallen in Haifa the past few days. Note the tiny holes that have punctured the metal in a million places. The other two show the ball bearings that caused those tiny little holes and that are intended to puncture people's bodies. These ball bearings, stuffed inside the Katyusha rockets, are Nasrallah's calling cards. It's not explosions he wants to cause. It's the greatest possible havoc, and the greatest possible number of injuries and death that he can wreak.

What's a proportionate response to that?

(If the pictures don't appear in this blog entry, it's because of a temporary technical glitch which we're trying to fix. The links to the pictures however should work fine.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi ,

can you change the credit on the photo to: Lenny Maschkowski

Thank you ,

Lenny.

Oz_in_Zion said...

Done. Thanks very much Lenny. Those images are terribly important, particularly with most of the news coverage focusing on devastation and destruction on the Lebanese side. I don't know how we let people outside this immediate area know that we have hundreds of thousands people here, innocent civilians, living in constant fear of their lives, and the lives of their loved ones. Images like these are part of what has to be done.

pacific_waters said...

May I suggest that Lenny or you send his photos to boortz.com or, as much and the O'reilly show. I realize that this may be anathema to some but they do have a broad readership. If Lenny would oblige maybe he could share a PPT presentation by link and even by e-mail on request. I would be most happy to send them on my e-mail list of, especially those who think Israel is the aggressor.

PS: This is the first time I have read your blog and I can only extend my most heartfelt sympathies you.