Anthony Shadid: The Middle East's Great Voice of Reason Dies - Daily Beast

“As I lay motionless on the ground, I sensed something familiar, a feeling I recalled from Ramallah where, years before, I had lain under a cemetery-gray sky, waiting to die from a bullet wound in my back. I recalled it from Qana [Lebanon] in 2006, where the people had cried, ‘Slowly, slowly!’ as Lebanese soldiers, Red Cross workers, and volunteers dug with hoes, shovels, and their bare hands, searching for pieces of lost lives. I had felt it in Baghdad in 2003, when the mother of Lava Jamal, whose mauled torso was pulled from the wreckage of an American bombing, vomited at the sight of her daughter’s severed head. I remembered it from Marjayoun [Shadid’s ancestral home in Lebanon] when I came upon a house on a hill whose grandeur had given way to insult. It was emptiness, aridity, hopelessness, the antithesis of creation and imagination.”