Our friend Seham, a Palestinian-American in California, declined our challenge to produce a positive forward-looking solution in Israel/Palestine. You'll see there were a ton of smart comments on her post. We asked if she wanted to add anything to her original points.
It wasn't Obama, it was the war on Gaza. Obama was busy vacationing in
Hawaii when Israel was dropping phosphorus on kids in Palestine,
besides he couldn't bring himself to condemn the indiscriminate
slaughter of Palestinian civilians because "there could only be one
President at a time." Though that didn't stop him from condemning the
attacks in Mumbai in November.
It's not just about the land theft, war crimes, illegal detentions,
routine human right violations, starvation, the collective punishment
or the extra-judicial assassinations. It's more disgusting to watch
this attempt to reduce one of the richest cultures in the Middle East
to "terrorists" in order to pull this whole thing off. We had a poet that every Palestinian could quote, he died last year and this is how we buried him. Old,
young, conservative, secular, students, senior
citizens, everyone went out in the streets and wept over his death,
followed by three days of mourning. When is the last time that
happened anywhere else in the world… for a poet? Nobody ever
objected in all these years while this vilification took place in the
media. I mean, Arabs objected, but "the white man" always needs a
non-Arab intermediary before they can listen to Arab concerns.
Moving forward would seem so much easier if an apology took place first.
