It Scares Me (John Pilger Archive)

Member Name: miriamb

Product:	John Pilger Archive
Date:	30/09/02 (361 review reads)
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My name is Miriam. A good, Jewish name, my namesake was the sister of Moses, who sent him to safety through the bulrushes. Spelt slightly differently, it's also a good Muslim name, Maryam, virgin mother of Isa. The mother of an important prophet. A variant of Maryam is Mary, the Christian equivalent, from whom Jesus, son of god was born.

Just for the record, I'm not Jewish, or Muslim, or even Christian, but each of the religions could lay claim to my name, and believers of each have done so, at various times through my life. Sorry, but I'm none of the above.

I wanted to mention this first off to dispel any suggestion that my opinion is coloured by religious considerations. It's not. I speak as I find, not out of loyalty to God, or Allah, or Yahweh. I've visited Auschwitz and cried as I walked through the gas chambers, studied the Lebanon at university, read a fair amount about religious conflicts throughout the ages, I followed the East Timorese situation, and I watch the news and listen to Radio 4. But I was totally unprepared for Australian journalist John Pilger's recent television programme, entitled Palestine Is Still The Issue.

The Israel-Palestine situation is terrifying. In honesty, I was only really aware of the Palestinian suicide bombers and the murders they had committed. I genuinely believed it was purely a case of fanatical Arab resentment towards the creation of the Israeli state, and my heart went out to the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers who had lost innocent loved ones in the bombings. And it is dreadful, and my heart still goes out to them.

But that's only half of the story. The other half involves massacres, state-led terror and mass occupation. A new version of apartheid, in which Israeli settlements dominate over Palestine villages, and checkpoints and curfews dictate Palestinian lives. On Palestinian land. Children that have died shortly after

birth, whose mothers were unable to get to a hospital because of these checkpoints, which are armed by Israeli troops, who have no right to enforce the Israeli will on Palestinian territory anyway. Israeli bulldozers and tanks that rattle through Palestinian villages with the sole aim of maintaining fear and power. Israeli snipers who take out old women, who are clearly no threat, and the Palestinians who try to defend their homes and lives by slinging rocks in catapults at the Israeli war vehicles.

Israel, has, with US and UK support, become the 4th largest military power in the WORLD. Not in the region, but in the world. Israel has nuclear capacity. Israel also has over 450 UN conditions placed on it and 2 resolutions regarding its behaviour in, and 35 year occupation of, Palestine. When you start to think about it, maybe the suicide bombers aren't fanatical maniacs. Maybe the conditions under which they've been living for all this time has made them so desperate that they are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to at least try to make a point. And yet, with each suicide bomb, Israel tightens controls further on Palestinian land, could they be maybe, possibly exacerbating the problem? Hmmm what do you think?

And all the while, Britain continues granting export licences to Israel. And America keeps providing blank cheques. One argument in favour of war against Iraq is that the West has a moral obligation to remove the monster that it created, Saddam Hussein, during the Iraq-Iran war. The US now intends to deal with terror pre-emptively. Even if you gloss over what Israel is, right now, doing to Palestine, who's to say that in 10, 15 years, Israel may not be the world's biggest threat? Already they far surpass any potential threat posed by Iraq in terms of capability.

Of course, you can dismiss the Israel/Iraq analogy. But we have a problem, see, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli premier, was personall
y (al
though indirectly) responsible for over 800
deaths in a 1980s massacre. Most of which, but not all, were Palestine. Are those the actions of a reasonable or rational man? I wonder. Israel has a history of invading its neighbours, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine. No UN, or indeed anyone's, troops were ever deployed, nor was it even considered. Where is the ethical arms policy as promised by Robin Cook when New Labour gained power in 1997? Why are we directing so much vitriol against Iraq, when Israel is, as I type and as you read, occupying foreign territory in contravention of UN resolutions and international law? How can we ignore this???

As an Archive item, this op probably won't be paid. It can't get crowned. Probably only a handful of people will read it anyway, and therefore I'm sorry if it's a bit short of content about the actual programme in terms of presentation, length, scope, whatever. But I didn't know where else to put it, and the more I find out about the situation in Palestine, the more important it was to me that I post something. Rate as you wish, but if your eyes aren't already opened to this appalling situation, please think about it. What's been going on, and continues every day, is WRONG, and the UK and US are directly culpable.


http://pilger.carlton.com/palestine
http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,681511, 00.html
http://ceppal.tripod.com/CEPPal/alternatives/c homsky_invasion.html
http://web.amnesty.org/802568F7005C4453/0/3F67 16656A3DD0D680256BC200447186?Ope n&Highlight=2,palestine
http://web.amnesty.org/802568F7005C4453/0/32C1 070883CB9E0D80256B8F0050C45F?Ope n&Highlight=2,palestine
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt. jhtml?itemNo=140684&contrassID=2 &subContrassID=3&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y&itemN o=140684
http://www.palestine-un.org/info/frindex.html
http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm

and many, many more...

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