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Once places of worship and places of
learning were pulpits and podiums from which men and women of honour and
integrity taught and guided the rest of us. Where are those voices today
when we need them most?
Where are the voices of moral righteousness that the world has always
depended upon to rein in the evil forces of conquering warlords? The
teachers and professors--why are they silent? The virtuous--the clergy
and elders of church and mosque and synagogue--who covered their mouths
with duct tape and broke their pens and keyboards?
In an earlier time those voices rang out louder than anthems for the
dead. They brought the public who look for their guidance and counsel
into the streets. The places of worship and the places of learning
provided pulpits and podiums from which men and women of honour and
integrity taught and guided the rest of us.
Where are those voices today when we need them most? Where have they
been in the years since the self-appointed warlords took the reins of
government and turned us all into accessories to the last half-century's
most heinous crimes against humanity?
The constant crimes against the Palestinians alone have been raging for
more than fifty years. For five decades, much of the rest of the world
has tacitly accepted the occupying warlords' self-justification for
murder, dispossession, theft, destruction, assassinations and torture of
Palestinians.
Why the tacit acceptance of these crimes when the justification is that
an Israeli life is worth two hundred Talmudic times the life of a
Palestinian? Where have the voices of the righteous been while these
atrocities have been committed in the guise of defence?
Forty-four innocent children have been massacred in Gaza after two or
three Israeli military were killed by Hamas. All of this hatred was
visited upon the innocent while Lebanon burned and the world's presses
rang out with condemnation of Hezbollah.
Here are just a few of the reported casualties of tribal murder in Gaza:
Bara Nasser Habib, age 3 (hit by shrapnel to the head and body, Gaza
City, 26 July)
Shahed Saleh Al-Sheikh Eid, 3 days old (bled to death after airstrike,
Al-Shouka, 4 August)
Rajaa Salam Abu Shaban, 3 (died of fractured skull in air raid, Gaza
City, 9 August)
Khaled Nidal Wahba, 15 months (died of wounds from an airstrike, 10
July)
Rawan Farid Hajjaj, 6 (killed with his mother and sister in an airstrike,
Gaza City, 8 July)
These are only a few of a multitude of babies slaughtered by
indiscriminate tribal hatred of Israelis for Palestinians. Are these
children less human or less deserving of life than their Semitic
counterparts?
Ordinary apathetic Americans don't know and don't care what happens to
these "ferners." As with the massacred in Darfur, foreign children are
not children, but numbers. They're mere data that the news reports play
with to convince the masses that the media is concerned about what
happens in the world. They're not!
The media doesn't show pictures of these slaughtered babies because
revelations of that kind of truth might, according to the devils in the
administration, fuel terrorism.
When someone like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stands at the podium
in the UN and calls G W Bush a devil, New York Times columnist Maureen
Dowd labels Chavez "a world-class nutbar." She can, and does, call Bush
names herself, but the Venezuelan president isn't allowed to speak such
truths.
What made Chavez "a world-class nutbar," Maureen? Was it his statement
that "The immoral veto of the United States allowed the Israelis, with
impunity, to destroy Lebanon. Right in front of all of us as we stood
there watching, a resolution in the council was prevented"? She didn't
say. She simply labeled Chavez a nutbar.
Perhaps Dowd faulted Chavez because he recommended Noam Chomsky's book
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance. Chomsky's is
one voice in the wilderness trying to rein in the evil forces of
conquering warlords. Where are the rest?
Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have made, and are still
making, a great effort to speak out against the Israeli lobbyists who
have so much influence on the US Congress and the media through their
organized Israeli-first campaigns. But where are the rest?
The Internet allows a few, mostly unheard, voices to broadcast truths to
small, select audiences of little consequence. But where are the
hundreds--nay thousands--of voices of the intellectuals of America who
should know better and who should speak out?
Professors, ministers, attorneys, medical professionals, judges: I'm
ashamed of you! Have you lost all sense of civic responsibility? Or do
you simply sleep or play while the business profiteers and the lords of
war murder and maim and massacre innocents in your names?
________________________________________
Dr. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance
writer who has lived in the Middle East for over 35 years. For more
information, see writerfreelance.com and pballes.com. © 2006 Paul J.
Balles.
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