Good for you Matt. Lead by example. Organize a direct action with a few of your friends. Put together your own affinity group. Or does your committment to step up to the plate and engage in meaningful protest extend only to your keyboard and a post on IMC? You know the old saying about talk being cheap. No doubt, any initiative you take would be appreciated and supported by other antiwar activists throughout Chicago.( The most creative direct actions I've seen to date have been taken by the courageous folks of CODEPink Chicago.)

Incidentially, news of the Chicago protest ( and SF, and NY and other cities across the US and Eurpoe) have been picked up by a number of Palestinian, Lebanese and Arab outlets. As cut off from the outside world as they are folks in Gaza and Beirut are actually buoyed by accounts of international solidarity. No matter how pathetic in scope or ineffectual they may seem to us. And that has value.

As for taking sides, as an US taxpayer, you have already been forced to take sides, albeit without your consent -- your tax dollars are being used to underwrite the F-16s, 155 mm howitzers, Apache attack helicopters and naval gunboats being used to pound both Lebanon and Gaza into submission.

Finally, IMO, any suggestion of a symmetry of violence in this conflict is simply obscene, given the horrific costs both the Palestinian and Lebanese peoples have paid at the hands of the Israeli apartheid state and the United States for decades now.

Chris Hedge sums it up well in a recent editorial on Commondreams.org - "We cannot ascribe equal amounts of moral blame to all sides. Israel is the oppressor in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon. America is the oppressor in Iraq. And there can be no hope for a peaceful resolution to these conflicts until Iraqis are freed from American occupation and Palestinians are allowed to build a viable state. It is the distorting and dehumanizing effects of occupation that made possible the proliferation of extremist groups that, albeit on a smaller scale, simply hand back to the occupier some of their own medicine. The numbers, after all, make clear that most of the victims are Palestinian, Iraqi and now Lebanese civilians, although the numbers game can also obscure the fact that the murder of any innocent by any group is indefensible."