Category: 2014

A mother looks out from her kitchen window and catches her eighteen-year old daughter smoking behind the garden shed.

A father opens the door to his eighteen-year old son’s room to find him jerking off while watching nude women on his computer screen.

Shameful? No. Embarrassing? Probably.

Shameful is when we ship those same eighteen-year olds to fight wars based on deceit and lies.

Shameful is when they come back shattered and tattered and the Department of Veterans Affairs disregards them.

Shameful is when those same politicians, political leaders and mainstream media lapdogs are now voicing indignation at this scandal. Where were they all these years while this was happening?

Something is terribly wrong here!

Things have been going really, really awry in these United States and in our world! It’s as if everything is unraveling! All our efforts at civilization are becoming undone! Our democracies are being exposed as facades. Our religious institutions are beset with vice. In a pathetic effort to enhance education our systems are failing. Our abuse is causing Earth to suffer. Our financial institutions are corrupt. Our supposedly free press has become beholden to the dishonest corporations that finance them and the politicians who grant them access to gossip and drivel.  It all seems to be so totally unraveling!!

One day though, all this nonsense will go away.

Assad (and his ilk) will go and he will neither take Syria or anything else with him. After all, Nero burned Rome. Where is he, I ask you? And is there still a beautiful city called Rome?

Putin will go, too, not only without a shirt but with nothing else on.

And Obama will one day try to convince St. Peter that he didn’t let the whole world down and Steve Jobs, standing at St. Peter’s side (who hired him as his App guru), will tell his boss: there’s no App that can do this!

Tolerance and Compassion sometimes seem as if they have fled Earth, or maybe they never really existed but in the minds of prophets and idealists??!! In the babble of radicalism, ideologies and partisanship simple common sense that can unite all of us across the board has disappeared.

However, the things that won’t go away are the small etchings that are occurring in our DNA and that are altering it, because, nothing will ever change unless we human beings drastically redo our whole behaviors and mindsets. In fact, if we don’t, despotism all over the world will continue and increase as it is going to for the foreseeable future.

Yes, we can invent superhighways and computers, acquire more wealth, more things and build fancier homes. It is, though, our brains that have to change.

In my generation, with me and my friends, attitudes have gradually begun changing regarding ethnicities, feminism, honor killings, religion, transparency, hypocrisy, privacy issues, war, rape, homosexuality, political malfeasance and all those other scourges that have been distressing us for thousands of years. In my children’s generations there is even more awareness about all these issues. And in my grandchildren’s generations these afflictions are slowly becoming relics of dying generations. Hooray for that!

Certainly these changes are not universal yet. That simply will not happen during one generation, or two, or three!

As long as most of earth’s populations remain within their Comfort Zones and insist on being Willfully Blind to the atrocities being committed in our names nothing will change overnight.

As long as we are too busy to engage with the world that is on our doorstep wherever in the world that we live then nothing will change for a long while yet.

As long as we allow our political leaders all over this planet to continue with their lies and negligence while we cheer and re-elect them then their tyranny will simply increase.

As long as that raped woman is not our mother, sister or daughter and we do not bother to speak out or get outraged things will take ages to change.

As long as that nine-year old little girl or boy is not our child we will not think twice that they are being sold to the sex trade.

As long as wars are fought “somewhere else” we will not be sleepless about any of their consequences.

As long as we are too pre-occupied to care equally about Every Man and Woman, Every Child, Every Atrocious Incident and Every Act of Injustice nothing will change in the foreseeable future.

It is damn shameful!

However, and as I have always believed, at some point this will change. It will change because there are, despite it all, honest human beings all across the world who will risk their lives and reputations in order to see that Justice is served and that Truth be told. Their numbers are increasing daily. Their outlets are increasing hourly. Their voices are rising by the minute. They cannot and will not be silenced, chilled or intimidated.  Yes and so will Truth, Justice, Equality, Democracy and Freedom. They too, cannot be muzzled forever and the power of their crescendo will one day outdo the power of any governmental despotism whoever that government is and wherever it may be. At some boiling point, the younger generations of heroes and heroines now flooding the internet highways with their indignation at all things unjust will gush into city highways and demand real and radical change. It has to happen.

So we should not despair! However we do need to go out there and make our voices heard, voice our indignation, talk to neighbors, friends, relatives, anyone who will listen! We have to leave our Comfort Zones, for if we are comfortable now and today with all these issues churning in our world, we will not be comfortable for long. If we don’t address the miseries and injustices of our planet, they will come back to find, to haunt and to hurt us. They will locate us, our children and our grandchildren. They will! It’s true!

There are many feelings and sensations that have become foreign to me at this age. Emotions that I once felt very acutely have now mercifully relegated themselves into my history. Extremes of all kinds and sorts, at this fantastic age and from this vantage point, look to me now as infantile, immature, plain stupid and quite nonsensical. Ah, how the years mellow us so elegantly sometimes!

Denial of Anything is one of those sensations that I have not felt in a long, long time.

However, come one morning and while I am checking out my emails, alternative press sites and social media sites I read how two champion teenage Palestinian soccer players were deliberately – deliberately – shot in the legs by Israeli soldiers so they may never play soccer again! I have, for all those past decades since the Nakba in 1948, read, experienced and heard atrocious stories about what Israeli governments have perpetuated on the Palestinian people. I have at times been angry and at others enraged. I have sometimes experienced utter disgust and loathing regarding everything Jewish – which is wrong, and at other instances, and even when reading about carnage, I have differentiated between Jews, Israelis and Israeli Governments – which is the right thing to do.

However, reading about the shot soccer players was so revolting, so nauseating, so incredibly outrageous and immoral that I went into utter denial fearing that the right thing to do would be overwhelmed by such an atrocious event and that I might revert back to the extreme emotions of my past!

I usually print out things that interest me, or that I think I will write about at some point. I skipped this one! I just wanted it to go away! I wanted to act as if I had never read it! I wanted to pretend that it never happened! That it simply couldn’t have! That it was beyond the pale for any entity, any people, and any nation to do! I went into denial . . .

. . . until recently . . . with stories of the incarcerations of young Palestinians occurring more often – much, much more! – than they ever have; with more children being horrendously abused and shot for no reason; with inflammatory deeds being committed by Israeli soldiers and settlers every single day! So I had to call on a friend to send me the links to that shooting of the soccer players just to recall the heinous act before I blogged this!

I mean, we are all familiar with the rubbish and feces being dumped on Palestinian orchards by gleeful and radical settlers, we all know of the water shortages for Palestinians being diverted to settlement swimming pools, we know of the burning of olive trees, we know of the sport stadium that Israel destroyed twice and that FIFA rebuilt twice, we know of the incarcerations for no reason, numerous political assassinations across the years, daily abuses and humiliations, spitting, cursing, expropriating, road blocks, bulldozing, mass punishments, asymmetrical retaliations and demolishing. We know all that!

What is going on recently, though, and at this accelerated pace? Some are saying that Israel has lost its moral compass, that it doesn’t know how to behave any more.

I beg to differ with this lame excuse as all these incidents lead me to only one conclusion, and paranoid it is not! My experience, and the experiences of millions, is that the Israeli Government does not act irrationally. More than half a century of first-hand knowledge proves to me that it doesn’t. Does it seem, therefore, that there is a deliberate effort aimed at riling up the Palestinian people and getting them to react violently? And is that in order to launch that Third Palestinian Intifada – rumors of which have been circulating for some years now (many of them disseminated by Israeli minions and their counterparts amongst the Palestinian and Arab people)? There is even some Twitter-ing going on about this.

The world is busy, after all – always an opportune moment for mischief!

The United States will, of course, endorse anything that Israel does. We point our fingers at Assad, Putin and . . . and . . . but we’ll cut that same finger off before we point it at Israel no matter how blatant and egregious its trespasses!

Putin is busy with the mess and image problems he has on his hands!

Then there’s Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Nigeria et al: all busy!

Pope Francis will say a prayer.

Ban Ki-Moon will Tsk! Tsk! about it, as will the European nations.

My Arab brethren will wait until it all blows over – as usual, I must say! – and then voice their too late anger.

It all seems like perfect timing for another Israeli excursion! History, definitely, has taught us a lesson, or two regarding that!

As for those Israelis and Jews who are in the peace camp, and for the two-state solution and . . yadda . . . yadda . . . yadda . . . they will probably clam up immediately and as soon as the first bullet resounds. They are very good at playing “good cop” to Israel’s “bad cop” but very few of them would cross the line when Bibi starts howling “existential threat” again! No, most just won’t! Why not? Really, why?

What can the Palestinians do with this criminal behavior, these blood-curdling provocations, this on-going terrorism? We have seen it happen before, time and time again: the stoking of the fires will continue, intensify and become more criminal until retaliation takes place and then: let the games begin! Let the Israeli war machine get to work once again!

. . . And, if/should that be the satanic plot (and if it’s not, then to what wicked end is Israel sacrificing these kids?), then my heart will crunch up, my intestines will get inflamed, my whole system will wrench with pain again! And because I so support that elusive peace, that chimera of coexistence, that mirage of the two-state solution, that belief in the fundamental decency of people, I might go into denial that this could happen yet again!

Move on, they will tell me!

Give in! Give up! Let it go!

How do I do that, pray?

How many more times?

How many more times will we replay that same old sordid scenario and twist and mangle it so that the Palestinians come out to be the terrorists and Israel merely defending itself? How many more countries like Iraq will we, the US, invade and occupy under the pretext of liberating them from a thug and when they resist our occupation we will call them ungrateful backward bastards?

Or, are the US and Israel intent on invading, occupying, killing, droning and arousing more hatred and creating more violence in our world in order for their military machine to justify its squalid existence and its war on terror? To choreograph the events in which “Muslims” are seen to be against us, “Christians;” to divide and to rule? Is that what it is? If it is, then it is quite criminal and so déjà-vu and even more blood-curdling!

To destroy a nation, they say, you have to destroy the spirit of its people. For sixty belligerent and blood-thirsty years Israeli governments have not managed to do that.

They will keep on trying!

Meanwhile: Do try “Jewish Values” on me one more time if that happens! Do try the American mantra “This Is Who We Are” when we raise not one voice in condemnation! Try them on me as more Palestinian children are being butchered, humiliated and imprisoned while doing fucking Nothing!

For the moment . . . the Israeli radicals and government will keep on trying to break the Palestinian spirit in any way, and denial cannot work for me anymore! It shouldn’t work for any decent human being, Jews especially! It simply shouldn’t! Enough!

References that I read in writing this post came from: The Nation/Dave Zirin (on-line); The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; the Electronic Intifada and Haaretz.