Word out of Gaza is that things are worse than ever. A friend who just returned says that the people are even more desperate. Then this from Reuters on the Gaza zoo:
I love my people! because even under a brutal siege they will do anything and everything to make sure their children have as normal a life possible. And all the while Zionists and Americans lie and say that there is no peace because we don’t love our children.
I Instantly burst into tears. this is the result of Zionisim. This is why I am opposed to it. Zionisim may have been a positive force in many respects for the Jews, but in every way, it has wrecked havoc on Palestinians.
Zionism is not universal, it is too restricted, egotistical and inward looking.
As sad as the story is, I am so delighted that the soul of the Palestinians maybe occupied, too, to borrow Phil’s recent headline, but the spirit of the Palestinians is very much alive.
Always, in solidarity, Palestine. Always.
That is funny, I wonder how zoos or zebras there were in Gaza when it was occupied by the Eygptians, or from their previous occupiers, the British, or the occupiers previous to that, the Ottomans.
Maybe instead of using the tunnels for weapons, drugs, and militants, they could smuggle zebras for their beloved zoo.
If Gazans were truly free people, they wouldn’t have to smuggle anything.
Yonira, I’m sure that animals were far better off under the British, Egyptians and Ottomans. At least those three entities never bombed zoo animals:
link to gulfnews.com
Yonira. There’s nothing funny about it. Nothing whatsoever.
Yonira it has already been said but deserves repeating. The Israelis also murdered the animals in the Gaza zoo last winter. Killing Palestinians is one thing, but have do have any idea how many animal rights activists in this country would be really shocked if Israeli crimes against the zoo animals was ever fully publicized? I don’t think the Zionist want to open this issue.
please excuse the disgusting antisemites here, yonira; you’re quite right: people should reorder their priorities.
Consider how well-prioritized these Israelis were in 1979, as Israel’s Iranian cookie jar was suddenly snapped shut by Ayatollah Khomeini:
“On Jan 1, 1979, Erwin Muller,… [a zoo director in Iran] sat beside the gates of two magnificent animal cages, now open and empty, and wept. Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, the Israeli military attache in Tehran, stood next to him and tried to find words to console him….Khomeini’s mobs were taking control in Iran. The royal family was on the run–and not all of their royal pets could survive.
“Four years earlier, the director of Israel’s National Parks Authority, General Avraham Yaffeh, had had the idea of recreating herds of the animals that had roamed the country in biblical times, among them the fallow deer. Such animals, he discovered, could be found in Iran.”
The narrative describes how Yaffeh made a deal with the brother of Shah Reza Pahlavi: in exchange for a pair of fallow deer, Abdul Reza would be permitted to hunt an ibex in the Negev desert [sidenote: of course, Bedouin live in and on Negev, so what difference was it to an Israeli if animals important to the Bedouin ecosystem were traded for a fantasy?]
Abdul Reza bagged his ibex in 1974, but “For budgetary reasons,” Israel never collected its fallow deer.
“On November 28, 1978, as rioting in Iran approached a crescendo, … the [Israeli] Parks Authority sent a crew to Tehran. With vehicles and security provided by Segev, they travelled to a nature preserve on the shore of the Caspian Sea, picked up two pairs of fallow deer…and returned to Tehran, where they hoped to lodge the animals in the local zoo until a flight to Israel could be arranged.”
Muller at first refused to permit the deer to leave Tehran, but later relented, or rather, negotiated, allowing the release of the deer if the Shah’s “royal tiger and lion were included in the shipment.” Zoo director Muller was fearful that the angry mobs might harm these symbols of monarchy, and had arranged to send them to safety in Holland.
After applying a great deal of “pressure on El Al Airline managers in Tehran and a flood of phone calls from Israel, space was allocated on the next flight out for the four deer and the lion and tiger, at the expense of some Jewish passengers and the cargo of carpets they wanted to ship out.”
Alas, the space was acquired too late to save the Iranian cats, but the fallow deer did, indeed, board the El Al flight to Israel and were “eventually turned loos in a nature preserve near Haifa.”
(The Secret War with Iran, Ronen Bergman, pp 23-24)
So please excuse the insensitivity of the brutes on this forum who have no appreciation for the reality that at least Israelis prioritize acquiring animals, even if they ship them on magic-carpet El Al flights rather than through tunnels.
You don’t think they’d need to smuggle goods under Sharia Law imposed by Hamas? You are kidding yourself.
As a side note, while Gazans are painting donkeys and making rockets, another Israeli wins the Nobel Prize:
link to jpost.com
germany won lots of nobel prizes prior to ww II yet that no more prevented it from turning to fascism as israel’s nobel prizes have deterred it from becoming an apartheid entity.
Psychopathic god, aside from announcing your deep fanatacism which i assume it directly connected to your zionism, it was nice of you to hearken back to the mid 70′s… looking at what that shitty little state of israel is wrecking on it’s neighbor in the present is no where near as pleasant to consider… brute is a good word to define you…
…
sigh
Foxman invented ADL just for me, but you call me a “fanatic…zionist…brute.”
I consider zionism the scourge of the century; my epistle to yonira was intended as sarcasm. Yonira’s comment was among the most hateful things I have read.
Chris Berel is back: he now calls himself Yonira.
Unfortunately some American arch-Zionists residing in the cesspit/open sewers of the ‘conservative’ ‘blogosphere’ will have a field day with this: talk of ‘pseudo-zebras’ for ‘pseudostinians’ will probably spread like wildfire.
That’s if they’re not too busy lighting their own farts, that is…
NOT SO FUNNY!
yonira,
#1 the tunnels in Gaza are used for “importing” food, medicine, clothing, household goods, business and school supplies, books, you name it!….tunnels are the only source for just about everything the people of Gaza NEED to survive….and yes, at times weapons and those infamous rockets come through …that’s a minor function of the tunnels.
Where were you when they did bring in animals for the zoo???
Children in Gaza play in rubble, suffer from depression and trauma, attend schools with out supplies, are malnourished, live in tents, the list of hardships is never ending.
Careful yonira, you seem to be making an ass of yourself over 2 donkeys masquerading as zebras; bringing a bit of fun to children who can use smiles and laughter.
“Children in Gaza play in rubble, suffer from depression and trauma..” Just to put an emphasis on this point, go about 6:30 into this video and you will get a view of how deep the depression is, children lose the will to live. Does anyone think this is funny?
SEVERITY OF CHILD DEPRESSION IN GAZA
v… thank you! The video is compelling…..it’s from 2007! It’s now 2009 Gaza has experienced 22 days of bombardment and invasion; the closure of their borders through siege and boycott.
In May 2009 I witnessed conditions in Gaza. I can’t begin to adequately describe the conditions. How anyone maintains the will to live in Gaza is amazing…..and that’s exactly the condition Israel has intentionally created.
yes, the gazan’s will to live is amazing. reminds me of the haitians will to survive. having been in haiti circa a half century ago during the regime of papa doc duvalier, from the look of things back then, what with people in the streets looking so impoverished, starved and beaten down, it sure seemed like haiti would be the last place where the people would have the strength to rise up against their oppressors, yet 25 years later that’s exactly what happened. remember, too, that haitians have been waging a liberation struggle for more than two centuries now, so it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever give up. same goes for the palestinians.
I remember all the reports on traumatized Israeli children during the last war on Lebanon, and can only imagine what kind of coverage painting donkeys for traumatized Israeli kids would have garnered!
I don’t think Israeli kids would be stupid enough to find this interesting. Whose idea was this? Those people must be the most literal minded people on earth.
Israel kids are definitely too smart for that. Yeah, they are smarter than the rest of the world’s children. Keep believing that one…
In poor taste Ohio, but I guess it fits in with you and you ilk. A sense of happiness at others misfortune. But you’re a victim inevitably, so those children must be part of the evil that wants to destroy your people.
Those people must be the most literal minded people on earth.
Or perhaps only some of the most deprived of any joy in their lives.
You managed to be spectacularly mean-spirited and racist about children. I think Phil ought to ban you–no one as small-minded (if you have any mind at all, that is) could possibly have anything interesting to say.
link to youtube.com
that’s a video of Hamas bobbytrapping the Gaza zoo in hopes that some Israeli would feel sorry for the zebras the Palestinians were starving there.
Nice bunch of friends you got there, Phil!
You must have missed the reports. The IDF soldiers (the only “Israelis” there) shot at the animals instead of feeding them, killing some of them and terrorizing the rest. They also trashed the offices, defaced the walls, ripped out the computer hard drives and ripped a toilet off the wall. It doesn’t look like the IDF soldiers felt any sorrier for the starving zoo animals than they did for the starving Palestinians of Gaza. Nice set of values you’ve got there, OJ.
OhioJoes,
You put a link up of Hamas allegedly booby trapping a school not a zoo. Are you saying that Palestinian children are animals? Also, you should know that the UN already investigated and said Hamas did no such thing. This is called “hasbara” I am sure you are familiar with the word. It goes like this: Israel bombs a school or a zoo or a hospital and then Israel sends its little web ambassadors (people like you and Witty) to make up lies and claim that it was Hamas that did those things. You people usually rely on the abundant ignorance of Americans who fall for Israeli hasbara all the time, successfully. The crowd here, for the most part, is a bit more astute than that.
I’ll bet OhioJoe laughs at the woman with wine stains all over her clothes and says it must have been her fault for trying to live on a street where Jews might want to walk.
So a group of fresh new Zionist faces are on Mondoweiss. They didn’t come here, apparently, to extol the virtues of Israel as a Jewish and/or “democratic” nation. They didn’t come here to whitewash or outright deny the Nakba and the crimes that followed. Nor did they come here to highlight the faults and failures of the Palestinian government, such as the Israelis and Americans allow it to function under total siege. They certainly didn’t come here with the sophisticated academic prestidigitation we’ve come to know and love from our friend Witty.
No. They only came here so that they could mock Palestinian children.
Rather speaks to the character of Zionism, doesn’t it?
chaos4700 – i think the mondoweiss site is freaking them out! they are disturbed at the thought of a contrary view to their own… zionism has thrived by keeping an alternate view from getting out… mondoweiss is an outlet for an alternate view and it disturbs these same intolerant folks mightily..
I love my people! because even under a brutal siege they will do anything and everything to make sure their children have as normal a life possible.
Here is another example of who the people in Gaza are working very hard to help the children have the best life possible. They had hoped to hold this event last weekend, but they came up short about $250, so they have had to postpone. Contributions are still welcome. They’re hoping to get enough money to be able to hold it some time in the next week. Donations can be made by Paypal:
http://www.artistsagainstapartheid.org/?p=761
The Quest For Smile
An Afterschool program of Music and Performance for the children of Al-Maghazi refugee camp. Featuring Culture and Heritage Show, Children’s Songs, Puppet Show, Dabkah Performance, and more…
Thanks for the link. Just being aware of that web site brightened my day.
Sorry about the typo.
One of the people who is working hard to make that event happen, Ayman Quader, is doing important work with children in Gaza. He also works with them through an organization called, Gaza Art Gallery, by the Children of Gaza.
The childrens’ art
This is his blog
I think he’s an amazing young man.
slightly off topic –
about two years ago a Children’s Museum nearby had an exhibit of Zany Umbrella Circus’s link to zanyumbrellacircus.com
recent tour among the children of Afghanistan.
One is not supposed to cry while visiting a Children’s Museum, but the combination of the generosity and courage of the Zany clowns, and the humanness of the Afghani children who dream, like all children, of living their lives in their own families and villages, in peace and love, against the hatefulness of war that Americans and neocons are forcing in Afghanistan, simply had to provoke a larger response than a plastic smile and vague, touristy head-nod of assent. One wanted to reach out to hug and shelter the Afghani children who drew the primary-color pictures of the beauty they see in their own homes and villages.
Hopefully there will be a new traveling exhibit of children’s art from Gaza in the spring . There are others out there currently but I’m not sure where.
If you want to view the drawings of what they witnesses during Israel’s bombardment and invasion, google: Palestine seeing for myself and go to “Qarran Center: children paint to heal wounds. It shows a small sampling of drawings from their art therapy program.
Witnessing war is traumatic….especially for children. They carry the trauma, in varying degrees, throughout their lives.
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Sarah thanks for the link….your effort to post it has led to a donation on my part. I also sent it to a friend who donated, and that friend planned on sending it to a few others. Hopefully they can have it asap!
Thanks! Every little it helps.
Correction: Every little bit helps.
I re-signed up here just to comment on this story, which touched and broke my heart (and brought back the memories of the terrible pictures of what happened to the animals at the zoo). I too contributed a tiny amount Sarah, which was all I could afford. Big cheers to that lovely donkey too. He is an animal hero.