Well, well, well. The last few days, in spite of my busy schedule (what schedule?), things have improved a little bit for me, emotionally speaking. I’m finally starting to "unfall" in love with my best friend… hope things keep this way, so we can finally become the best friends of the world, without those "strange" feelings from me towards her…

On the other side, my gorgeous Canadian friend (the "saved by the cold" one) became twenty-something-years-old on Wednesday…  she has been through a lot of things, but she also had a great time on her special day… and, in spite of some depressive thoughts -which assail everyone once in a while-, she realized how happy she is for having such good friends. And that makes me really happy too…

On Friday there was this ceremony of a local internet awards we had been nominated to. We didn’t win, but we had a good time, chatted a while, had some wine and talked a lot of stuff about the future of our project. We’re going "big", but I can’t tell anything yet, hehe…  Definitively, friendship is on the air these days… ah, and the best of all is that today I found some pictures of my graduation last year… (ラッキー!!)

Este artículo esta disponible en español

"There’s always trouble lurking in the shadows", people use to say. Even animals cannot be saved from the horrors of the war nor the cruelty and the paranoia held by the arrogant human being.

In March, a Chinese blogger crusade allowed to know the whereabouts of a woman who appeared in an internet video killing a cat with her shoes’ heels. Nevertheless, the next superpower -for some people- seems not to want to do a thing to improve her animal protection zero history. The kitten killer gave herself up to the authorities, but there are no laws to protect animals from cruelty in China. Two weeks ago, a Southern China county ordered the sacrifice of more than 50,000 dogs because a rabies outbreak which had left as a result three people so far. Not even the vaccined dogs were saved, because in China forging animal vaccines is a common practice. Using the most brutal methods in some cases, government officers, by hitting, electrocuting and kicking them, murdered a lot of pets. In the middle of the night, in order to avoid the pet owners who were hiding them to got their way, officers made noise so the dogs had to bark and, this way, be found and executed. The worst of all this issue is that another Chinese town is considering to commit the same massacre. This is the face of the nation which is intended to "own" the 21st century.

On the other side, hundreds of volunteers from everywhere are arriving to Lebanon,  where the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah is taking place, in order to rescue the animals which are abandoned, sometimes involuntarily, by their masters, who run away escaping from the war or are simply massacred by the bombs dropped by both sides. Into the rubble of the buildings destroyed by the pilots and the terrorists, thousands of pets, hungry, thirsty, or, at worst, dead, come into the light. Luckily, fellows from environmental organizations (sometimes controversial) as PETA help those helpless who maybe will never understand why humans like to kill each other. Children and animals are the greatest forgotten of the war, even though with the former, press of the worst kind can be published.

Amidst sorrow and horror, impotence and desperation, human race reacts of different ways. Some "sacrifice" in the name of public health and man’s well-being, thinking that the massacre of some innocents solves the problem inmediately. Others "sacrifice themselves" in spite of the countless risks for their own lives in places with no hope for no one, without a single penny in their pockets and armed only with a huge affection, a deep conviction and an iron will. These are the contradictions of the human tragicomedy.

The original Spanish-version of this article was published in equinoXio

On a quite balanced -in my opinion- column (well, balanced for the American regular columnist standards), named In Lebanon, Echoes of Iraq?, Nicholas D. Kristof says:

Israelis are brimming with moral clarity, as we Americans were after 9/11. And they’re right: the Hezbollah attacks on Israel were particularly contemptible because they followed Israeli withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza. Israel should have been rewarded for those withdrawals, not subjected to rocket attacks and cross-border incursions.

These and other are the reasons because some Israelis (and pro-Jewish) justify such dreadful crimes as this Sunday’s massacre in Qana, where 34 children and 10 women died under the bombs sent by Ehud Olmert’s government, who’s earning enough merits to exceed Ariel Sharon’s bloody legacy. Had Israel the right to self-defence? Of course it had, and I agree with Kristof in that it deserved to be rewarded for the Gaza and South Lebanon withdrawals as an action for peace. Nevertheless, one should ask if the kidnappings of several soldiers by the Hamas and Hezbollah murderers and terrorists justify the deaths of hundreds of civilians in Lebanon, including a lot of foreigners? Wasn’t it an overreaction? Here Kristof strikes again when he states that "the first rule in foreign policy, as in medicine, should be “Do no harm.”" Such a wise quote. Even Americans, Israel allies, feel in a terribly uncomfortable position. The same applies for some people who self proclaim "leftist" and, because of a simple coincidence in their hate for US, condemn Israel but doesn’t do the same with Hamas and Hezbollah killers. The angry reactions of Spanish right-wing and, of course, from Israeli ambassador in Madrid are justified.

For centuries, specially during the last 58 years, after the founding of the State of Israel, Arabs and Israelis have promoted the hate for each other. This feeling, based in the fact that both people seem to "not to fit" in the same territory, the resentment of some Israelis after the Nazi Holocaust, and the Palestinian claims, have unleashed several conflicts within that time, whose results generate deep-seated grudges between these people with ancestral roots in this fertile region (once with vegetation, today with oil). Those feelings get worse because of the Israel-US alliance and the rising and consolidation of the Islamist extremist armed groups, which put hate and religion together in order to kill, justify themselves and gain popularity, as well as the support that certain goverments (as Ahmadinejad’s) provide to these organizations. A spiral of death that will unleash a bigger magnitude conflict for sure.

Everything we’ve seen in the Middle East for the last several years have been blood, death and destruction, result of  such awful emotions as hate, grudge and the wish of revenge. The Israelis and Palestinians’ rights to have their respective states seem not to be able to coexist in the same space and in the same time. It is a phenomenon so complex that its solution seems more distant everyday. Even children are urged to perpetuate these bad feelings and even music cannot escape this arrogant confrontation. Things this way, as long as Arabs (including Palestinians) and Israelis keep promoting the visceral hate for each other, there will be never peace in the Middle East.

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