Fake facades and deceptive masks are dissolving away in this war for me. People, journalists on TV whom you somehow respected, are suddenly unfamiliar. I watch them with horror as they dexterously warp and fog the meaning behind the events of the war in Lebanon and Palestine. CNN, of course, I am not talking about. It’s BBC that has unhingingly (for me) transfigured itself. Israel’s barbaric invasion is being clothed with words like ‘self-defence’ and ‘retaliation’ to somehow make it less malignant or more excusable. Its losses are magnified, over-emphasized, while those in Lebanon go maddeningly under-reported. The use of illegal cluster and white phosphorus bombs is blissfully ignored. BBC wasn’t exactly the lone champion of truth in the wilderness of misleading reportage. But you always expected better from BBC. It was supposed to be different. I have taken to visiting Electronic Intifada, Counter Currents and Daily Star (a Lebanon English Daily I recently discovered) now. Its sad, painful, upsetting and … outrageous to think of the diet of misinformation being fed to the Western public and every where else around the world these channels are watched. Perfect thought control. I just get more and more of you each day Orwell.

And I am frightened. A terror holds me each day in the normalcy of my life in Lahore. The terror of watching the world, my world spiral towards the destruction of a monstrously huge black hole. I see the corpses of dead children and homeless families, waiting their fate to be pronounced by the lords of this world. And fear that more young people are going to be led towards despair, more of them will be convinced that bombing trains, buildings and themselves is the only choice despite the futility. People in the West might not perhaps understand this despair. I can only describe it in the words of John Berger who, in the foreword to Arundhati Roy’s ‘Algebra of Infinite Justice’, describes aptly seven levels of despair …

The search every morning
to find the scraps
with which to survive another day

The knowledge on waking
that in this legal wilderness
no right exist

The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse

The humiliation of being able
to change almost nothing,
and of seizing upon the almost
which then leads to another impasse

The listening to a thousand promises
which pass inexorably
beside you and yours

The example of those who resist
being bombarded to dust

The weight of your own killed
a weight which closes
innocence for ever
because they are so many

But how much longer is this supposed to continue? How much longer non-Israeli, non-American, non-Western lives will count for nothing? Valueless. Trashed away to apparently save more “valuable” lives. Exterminated, without a thought, as in a computer good-guys, bad-guys war? When is anyone going to tell them that these are real people, this is real world, not a 3-D game? How much longer?