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Speech given at Connecticut College, New London, CT 09/27/06
http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/
I would like to dedicate these words to all the Palestinian boys and
girls, and to all the Lebanese boys and girls, and to all the Iraqi boys
and girls who have been massacred by mind-infected Israeli and American
soldier boys, and who have recently joined my own little girl in the
underground kingdom
of dead children, which is growing under our
feet as I speak. I would like to tell them not to worry: "You will be
well received there, children, and no one will hurt you just because you
wandered off on your way to school or because you wore a scarf on your
head or because you lived in a certain place. Rest in peace, everyone is
equally worthy in your new world. This is the world where Israeli
children dwell side by side with Palestinian children. There they lay,
victims and murderers, whose bloods have long been absorbed by the holy
land which has always been indifferent to blood. There they rest, all of
them, victims of deceit.
All of you dead children were deceived, because your death has achieved
nothing at all and the world goes on living as if your blood had never
been shed. Because the leaders of the world keep playing their murderous
games, using you as their dice and our grief as fuel for their killing
machines. Because children are abstract entities for generals and grief
is a political tool. Living at both sides, that of the victims and that
of the killers, I keep asking myself, what are the means by which good
Israeli children are turned into murdering monsters, what are the means
by which they are so mind-infected as to kill and torture and humiliate
other children, their parents and grandparents, and sacrifice their own
life for nothing but the folly and megalomania of their chiefs? In the
so-called Western enlightened world everyone feels very well-founded
when they blame Islam for suicide bombing and terror. But who would ever
blame Judaism for murder? And yet, Ulta Orthodox Jewish children who
have never left Brooklyn know that to kill Arabs is a 'mitzva' (holy
commandment) for they are 'vilde hayeths' (wild beasts). And Israeli
children actually commit the crimes of slaughter and torture. Neither
Judaism nor Islam nor any religion for that matter are the cause for
murder and terror. Racist education is. American imperialism is, and
Israeli ruthless regime of occupation is. The women and children who
suffer most from western violence today are Muslim women but racism has
its way and the blame for their suffering is attributed to their being
muslim.
The western world today is infected with fear of Islam and of the muslim
womb. Great France of liberte egalite and fraternite is scared of
little head-scarved girls, Jewish Israel calls in public speeches and
schoolbooks the Arab citizens of Israel a demographic nightmare and the
enemy from within. As for the Palestinians refugees living under
occupation, they are defined in Israeli History schoolbooks as a
'problem to be solved". Not long ago the Jews were a problem to be
solved.
This in spite the fact that the people who are destroying the world
today are not muslim. The people who are using the most sophisticated
disastrous weapons to kill thousand of innocent civilians are not
Muslim. They are Christian, and Jewish. Nevertheless people who belong
to the Judeo-Christian cultures, who support American-British and
Israeli crimes against humanity, and particularly against Muslims all
over the world, people who send their children to fight these ruthless
useless wars in the name of democracy and freedom which are cover names
for greed and megalomania, dare call themselves enlightened and blame it
all on some imaginary clash of civilizations.. What does this
fear-stricken world offer as a solution to Palestinian , Iraqi or Afgan
people who are harassed, abused, tortured and famished by western crimes
and exploitation? The general offer this enlightened world gives them
is: Be like us. Constitute a Democracy like ours, embrace our values
which despise you, which consider you an inferior primitive lot to be
cultivated or cleansed away.
This, ladies and gentlemen is the attitude that permit American soldiers
to rape, torture and kill muslim men women and children by the
thousands, that permits Israeli soldiers to order Palestinian women to
strip in front of their children for security reasons, jailers to keep
them in inhuman conditions, without necessary hygienic aids, without
clean water or clean mattresses and separate them from their breast-fed
babies and toddlers. To block their way to education, to confiscate
their lands, to destroy their water wells, to uproot their trees and to
prevent them from working their fields. This is what permits Israeli
pilots to drop a hundred bombs of one ton a day on the most crowded area
in the world -Gaza. This is what permits Israel to issue racist laws
that separate mothers from fathers and children.
Palestinian, Iraqi and Afgan
women are mothers like me. And when they lose a child, even if it is one
of 12, their pain is equal to mine. But in addition to losing their
children they also lose their homes and their livelihood and their
future because the world does not listen to their sufferings and does
not punish their murderers. Their honour as women and mothers is
crushed. Their identity is destroyed and their cry is not heard. their
faith and customs, their centuries-old ways of life are disregarded and
despised.
Not only American soldiers but also Israeli soldiers who actually
perform massacres of 'Arabs' - Palestinian or Lebanese - may never see
an Arab human face until they are drafted to the army, but they learn,
for 12 long years, that these people are primitive, bear children in
order to send them to the streets and throw stones at our peace-keeping
soldiers, uneducated because they don't receive our education, conniving
and dirty because they have different notions about politeness, they
dress differently and cover their heads with different pieces of cloth.
Well, from my experience there are
many more Kafiehs in the camp of peace lovers than there are kippas.
Israeli children are deprived from knowing their immediate neighbours,
their history and their culture and their merits. Israeli children are
educated to see their neighbours as an unwanted element. This is not
education, this is mind infection.
The scientist Richard Dawkins was the first to speak about viruses of
the mind. Children, because their minds are gullible and open to almost
any suggestion, are not immune to mental infections of all sorts of
propaganda and fashion. They are easily persuaded to pierce their faces
and tattoo their bottoms, to turn their hats around and bare their
bellies, to believe in angels and fairies. They are equally easy to
acquire political beliefs and to appropriate mental maps which will
later influence their decisions on the question of the future borders of
the state and on the necessity of war. All of Our children are
mind-infected from an early age. So that by the time they are old enough
to become real soldiers, theyhave already learned to be good soldiers,
which means their minds are totally infected and they are incapable of
questioning the 'truth' that has been inculcated to them. This is part
of the explanation one can give to the terrible deeds that are committed
today by good Israeli boys, who are characterized once and again as
"people of values". Therefore it is high time to ask, what values are
these? The following lines are part of a personal preface by Tal Sela,
one of my university students to his term-paper, which included the
analysis of a History textbook:
"On the 5th of September 1997 I found myself in Lebanon , on a rescuing
mission . All my friends were in the battle, 12 soldiers were killed.
The following days I was happy: " I am alive, I survived" I said to
myself. However, a year later I was in deep depression. Sad and morose.
I decided to consult a psychologist. After a few sessions I was able to
gather up my forces again, both physical and moral. I could reorganize
my thoughts. Then I understood that the mental crisis I had was in fact
a moral crisis, a crisis of consciousness. What I actually felt was
frustration, shame and anger. . How could I be so gullible and let
myself be duped? How can I explain that a man of peace, exposes himself
to such a morbid experience of his own free will? Today, like every two
weeks, I drove peace activists to the
military check-points of the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian
territories. I saw an officer put tight handcuffs on a taxi driver
because he failed to obey the soldiers' order to park here and not
there. "We told him a thousand times" the soldiers said. The man was
lying on the ground in the worst heat of the summer, thirsty, for hours
on end. His friend was luckier: He had to stand on his feet, in a cell,
without handcuffs. What pushes these young Israeli boys to play the
r�le of supreme judges until they lose all judgment? In my opinion it
is the Grand Zionist Narrative which serves as a collective conscience
to the whole Israeli society, explicitly as well as implicitly. This
grand narrative is the system of values that makes us belong to this
particular collective".
This is the system that dictates the relationships between us and
the Palestinians. How else can one explain young people who were
educated to love their neighbour as they love themselves killing their
neighbours, destroying their educational institutions, their libraries
and their hospitals, for no apparent reason other than their being
neighbours? The only explanation is that their minds are infected by
parents, teachers and leaders, who convince them that the others are not
as human as we are, and therefore killing them is not real killing; it
has other legitimating names such as "cleansing" "purifying",
"punishment", "operation", "mission", "campaign" and "war". Although I
speak about Israeli boys this is not an Israeli affair because, as you
know, the epidemic is worldwide. My nephew, Doroni, 7 years old, who
lives in the US, came home on Halloween day and said he wanted to be a
soldier, and then to go to Iraq and save America. How many American
young men, ignorant as he is of the absurdity of this statement,
actually went to Iraq and died there without knowing why, but with the
words "save America" on their lips? The question is, how were these
false values imprinted on their minds and how can they be erased?
The human psyche, says Dawkins, has two great sicknesses: the urge to
carry vendetta across generations and the tendency to fasten group
labels on people rather than see them as individuals. We all suffer
because of labels, but only those of us who died because of labels have
realized that the way to fight labels is to refuse labels. The way to
defeat false value systems is to expose them. The viruses of the mind
are only partially weakened by young people like Tal and other Israeli
refusniks such as 'Combatants for Peace'. But most of our mind infected
children would not be free of the grip of those viruses until they find
their final rest in the evergrowing, underground kingdom of dead
children . Only there will they realize that is doesn't matter whether
their head was bare or not in a synagogue or a church or a mosque,
whether they were circumcised or not, whether they pronounced forbidden
words, ate pig or cow or whether they had a hot chocolate after their
salami pizza just before they were blown up by someone who didn't.
Israeli, American, English, Italian mothers raise their children with
all the love and care in order to sacrifice them to the god of death, as
if their uterus is a national or rather an international asset and
fathers urge their children to commit themselves to armies whose
interests have nothing to do with defense. And when these children die
for the profits of somebody else their parents bear it with dignity and
pride, as they were taught, put their dead children's photographs on the
mantelpiece and sigh: He was so handsome in uniform. It is time to tell
these parents that no-one is andsome in the uniform of brutality. It is
time to tell them uniforms and ranks and medals have become ugly. Tell
them their dignity and pride are misplaced. It is time to tell Jewish
people that the only way to discourage anti-Semitism is by condemning
the only government in the world who deliberately sends young Jewish
boys and girls to their certain death and who persecutes to the point of
genocide a whole Semitic nation, explain to them that it is the Jewish
government and the actions of its army, not some primordial hatred for
the Jewish race, which are the reasons for the invention of the new sign
we often see in pro-Palestinian demonstration, where the Star of David
is equated with the swastika.
It is a terribly hard task for people who were educated in Israel or in
the USA or in any other 'western' 'democratic' country, to admit we were
raised on false racist values. On heterophobia. The only thing that can
enhance such a change of spirit is the constant image of the mutilated
small bodies of the victims of these values . Tomorrow is Yom Kippur,
the holiest day for the Jews. On this day people are required to ask
forgiveness. Not to forgive but to try and be forgiven. I would like to
quote one stanza from a poem written by the late Hanoh Levin, one of
Israel's greatest playwrights, in the 1970s:
Dear Father, when you stand on my grave
Old and tired and very lonely,
And you see how they burry me in the ground -
Ask me to forgive you my father.
We must all ask our children's forgiveness for not being more alert, for
not fighting hard enough to keep our promises for a better world, for
not refusing the evil viruses before and for letting them be the victims
of the horrible, mental infection we are all suffering from, to look at
their innocent, astonished, disillusioned small faces and ask ourselves:
why does that streak of blood rip the petal of their cheek???
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