To see death — to touch it with still-living flesh, to smell its saliva, to feel it in your hands, around you, on every corner of the street. To witness its brutality, its vulgarity, its mercilessness. To watch as bodies are scattered about in piles in front of you, like discarded exam papers at the end of a school term. One leg here, one arm there, an eye, a severed head, fingers, hair, intestines.

We are having lunch. We have barely started, when the sound of the tanks’ mortars thunders through the house.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/opinion/atef-abu-saif-life-and-death-in-gaza-strip-jabaliya-refugee-camp.html -8/4/2014.

FTAC Introduction

Contemporary war has a surface everyone can see — and “see” it we do from mass murder by the “Islamic State” in Iraq to conventional devastation in Gaza — but for all that, the “behind the curtains” processes, whether involving Baghdaddi or Hamas, remain opaque. We don’t know how they do what they do, these “Islamists”, but all know they bring war to everyone’s doorstep wherever they are and wherever they go.

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