Mohammad writes from Vancouver:
I cried all the way in the bus to school. I cried all the way in a
lecture on Matisse by Serge Guilbaut, scholar of
modernism. I cried while I paid for my Norman Finklestein tickets (he
is coming to Vancouver for a talk next week) at the Palestinian
Solidarity table that was tucked at a cold corner outside of the
student union building at University of British Columbia. The attendants were as sad and depressed
as the people of Gaza. And I am crying now. And I'm not a sentimental
person.
I feel so sad and so lonely and so oppressed in a
university at the end of this long and painful decade. Hillel people
walk around with the Zionist flag sticking from their jeans back
pocket.
Most kids don't really care for either side, and that
itself is tragic. It is so sad to see young people go about their
everyday school life with no consciousness of what is happening. And I
feel sad for not being young and therefore valid in displaying my
passion and my humanity in the ways of the anti war movement in the
1960's used to. I wanna grab the Israeli flag from someone's back
pocket and throw it on the floor and stump on it. I wanna set it ablaze
together with the flag of USA, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan,
And the UN. But I won't.
I see these happy kids on this rare
full sunny day but how can I blame them? It's not their fault that they
have been socialized to express their humanity for the injured cats and
dogs or the chickens and the cows in the slaughterhouses and not the
civilians in Gaza.
