Baghdad Burning April 18th

[bemildred]

Riverbend has some new stuff up ...

Bad news first: Brave, young Marla Ruzicka was killed in Baghdad while travelling along the Baghdad Airport road. Read more about her work and the lives she touched here: CIVIC Worldwide. Read more about her personally on Justin Alexander's site and Raed's "Raed in the Middle".

The good news: Another shipment of emergency aid for Iraqi civilians has been sent out. Raed's family started and are organizing the whole thing. He has listed all the people who donated money and has taken endless pictures and scanned receipts- it's well documented on his blog. See it on his site.

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We know a lot of our new officials and spokespeople are blatantly lying and it's fine to lie about security, reconstruction and democracy- we've gotten used to it. In fact, we tell jokes about it and laugh about it at family gatherings or over the telephone. To lie about something as serious as Sunni-Shia hostage taking is another story altogether. It's unacceptable and while Sunnis and Shia were hardly going to take up arms against each other over this latest debacle, but it was still extremely worrisome and for people who wish to fuel sectarian violence, it was a perfect opportunity.

We have an Iraqi government that bans news channels and newspapers because they *insist* on reporting about such routine things as civilian casualties and raids, yet the Puppets barely flinch over media sources spreading a rumor as dangerous and provocative as this one.

Baghdad Burning

[stellanoir]

1. gotta love her

she's so-o-o sincere. Wish we could help her plight.

[stillcool]

2. Thanks for the heads up !....

i always get worried in between posts.

[DELUSIONAL]

3. her idea of a reality TV show

from 9 April:

I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…

I’d not only watch *that* reality show, I’d tape every episode.

[chlamor]

4. A real

profound sense of the horrors in Iraq are felt through her writings.

The destruction of an entire culture. This is genocide by any definition.