What if he was your boy, 'murkn?
How would you feel then?
Now the post...
"In recent months I’ve had the privilege of exchanging e-mails with a vibrant U.K. “senior citizen” whose older brother is just such a dedicated and courageous surgeon. Some of the e-mails he wrote to his sister and friends read like war dispatches—and, indeed, they are.
Here, then, are some dispatches from an eye-witness (“Daniel”) to the recent incursions into Gaza that left more than 120 dead and hundreds more wounded—mostly civilians, many women and children—during another sad week in March. In these exchanges between Daniel and his friends and family, we read the plight of suffering, exploited humanity everywhere. (I have respected Daniel’s and his sister’s request to change names to protect the innocent—and to ensure that their group may make such journeys again unharassed by the occupying power.)
We used to get this sort of war-reporting in America—Hemingway in the First World War, Ernie Pyle and Hemingway again in the Second; and a host of television reporters reporting live from Vietnam. Nothing like that now, though, as we enter the 6th year of the War against Iraq, and more than 40 years of the Occupation of Palestine. Just men and women in suits now, reading the teleprompter, delivering the corporate news.
Which of our presidential candidates address the real issues of Palestine? Which do not hide behind the simplistic formulations of the interminable “Peace Process” or the “War on Terror”? McCain speaks glibly of a 100-years war. Democrats and Republicans alike talk of “redeployments” and genuflect before the American-Zionist AIPAC lobby. We refuse to recognize HAMAS—the party Palestinians elected to represent them in an election undoubtedly fairer than the U.S. elections of 2000, 2004, and—as should be clear by now—2008!
The religious traditions enjoin us to bear witness, “to do justice and love mercy,” in the words of Micah; to be good Samaritans, according to Christ; and to aid our fellow travelers–in the words of Muhammad: “showing men the road, in the land in which they lose it, is charity.” What follows, then, is an act of witness, an act of charity. —GC"
