Circle of reason

Today morning, reading Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation - The Abduction of Lebanon, one particular paragraph knocked the breath out of me. the book about the events of 1982, when Fisk was a journalist based in Lebanon for a British newspaper, covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and seige of Beirut. The 1982 invasion was in response to mischief by PLO militants (like by the Hizbullah in 2006) and led to large-scale victimization of Lebanese as well as Palestinian civilians.

Reflecting on the savagery of the Israeli air bombings of 1982 and the devastation they wrought, Fisk writes (abridged):

What would be the result of all this? What would happen in a year or in five years' time to a people who were subjected to this unprecedented military onslaught, bombed and shelled by outsiders with munitions made in America, France, Britain and eastern Europe? Anderson and I talked then about this, about whether Lebanon might not hold some frightful revenge for these powers, the invaders.

The book was written in 1990.

Now listen to what Osama bin Laden's said (quoted from outside the book) in his tape-recorded statement of 2004, talking about his memories of Beirut in 1982:

As I looked at those destroyed towers in Lebanon it occurred to me to punish the opressors in kind by destroying towers in America, so that it would have a taste of its own medicine.

Unnerving.