Once again, the village of Cana is the scene of a massacre.

Once again, the United States does nothing.

I wonder how many images of dead children it will take for the United States to decide that now is the right time for a cease-fire. That now is the time to reign in Israel and stop this relentless bombing. That now is the time to stop playing to the myth of hiding weaponry among civilians as an excuse to decimate the population of Lebanon.

This continued bombing of Lebanon just sickens me. Israel's policies of collective punishment repels me completely, and now after Cana has been struck again, I doubt there will be any "secret" rooting for Israel to finish off Hizbullah. They won't. They are not going to succeed in their campaign, unless killng scores of Lebanese children was the overall goal.

I'm tired of seeing pictures of scared Israelis when there are worse images to ponder: dead Lebanese men, women and children who had nothing to do with rocket attacks or are not part of Hizbullah.

But most of all, I do not understand the sluggishness of the American government. It's just inconceivable that the United States continues to wink and nod at the Israelis (and rush-ship them more weapons!) while the suffering of the Lebanese has already become an obscenity. Of course, these are Arabs that are dying, and as we've seen, Arab life is cheap.

The Europeans are no help, with their feckless stupidity exemplified by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is rather impassive in the face of the Israeli killing machine. Not to mention the United Nations.

If you want the Arab world to turn away from the West, well then: mission accomplished.

If anyone had any doubt about the support of the United States government for Israel, then the events of the past week should dismiss those immediately.

Bush has given a green light to the Israelis to go in and destroy Lebanon. Bomb, destroy, gut, rip, utterly pound the country into the earth under the guise of fighting terrorism. It's Bush's favorite ruse and excuse for everything. And it's unlikely that it took much convincing for this man to let the Israelis unleash their war machine upon the hapless country of Lebanon.

There are no shortage of Israeli apologists who want to use terrorism as pretext for the destruction of Lebanon. Am I agreeing with the actions of Hizbullah? No, I am not. Am I apologizing for them? Certainly not. They take their own actions and I have nothing to comment on. But what I whole-heartedly disagree with is Israel's totally disproportionate response: they are destroying Lebanon right in front of the entire world under the rubric of wanting to assert Lebanon's own sovereignty (!) along its southern border.

So to make its point, in its deep concern for Lebanon, Israel proceeds to obliterate just about every standing building. People are trapped in their own country, and the Israelis have been striking so deep into the country that escape almost seems impossible. The major road with Syria has been cut off. Families fleeing the destruction are themselves meeting grisly ends; sometimes generations within the same family are dying. Lebanon has turned into a giant ghetto. To get to Hizbullah, Israel will go through every last Lebanese in sight.

Bush's lackidaisical approach to the human crisis unfolding under his nose is remarkable for its cruelty. But why should I be surprised at his reaction and that of the other neocons in the White House? Three thousand Iraqi civilians killed in this month alone (!!) and it barely registers. A CNN report put the number of people killed this year alone at 14,000. My mind reels at this and how much the carnage in Iraq has taken back seat to the Israeli rampage in Lebanon (replete with the suffering of scared Israelis compared to the widescale suffering of Lebanese as if they are the same thing). More people have died in our Iraqi Expedition, it seems, than in all the wars between Israel and the Arab countries. Not that it matters much because the cycle of violence in Iraq continues unabated.

But of course, the most important story is Israel. That country's 30 civiliian deaths trumps any one else's.