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Check
Your Beliefs
By Charley Reese
03/17/06 -- -- Let's play a
fantasy game to check on
our belief in human rights. Let's suppose that
in a
mythical state, a governor announced a campaign to
punish
African-Americans for alleged violence.
Step one is to confiscate the
land owned by
African-Americans, evict them from it and use the
land
to build massive new subdivisions. Only white
Protestant
Christians may live in these subdivisions.
Step two is to connect
these all-white Protestant
Christian settlements to each other by a
highway on
which African-Americans are forbidden to drive.
To
facilitate control, the automobile tags for
African-Americans will
be a different color from the
tags issued to white motorists. Checkpoints
would be
set up all around the state capitol to search and
harass
African-Americans trying to enter.
Would you support such a plan?
Would you hail that
mythical governor as a man of peace? Would you go
to
your church congregation and ask the members to send
money to the
occupants of these white settlements?
Would you lobby the federal
government to subsidize
this new apartheid state in our midst?
I
don't think so. I think most Americans would
consider such acts an
abomination, un-American and a
mockery of everything both Christianity
and the United
States stand for.
Well, if you would condemn such
acts here directed
against African-Americans, why won't you
condemn
identical acts committed against the Palestinians by
the state
of Israel?
Those settlements you hear about are built
on
Palestinian land, and they are for Jews only. New
roads that
Palestinians are forbidden to use connect
them. The entire West Bank is
riddled with Israeli
checkpoints, where innocent Palestinians are
daily
humiliated and harassed. A trip to a nearby village
can mean
waiting in line at checkpoints for hours.
Palestinians have died in these
lines.
After all of these humiliations, abuses, the
houses
destroyed, the children killed, the olive trees
uprooted, how
do you think Palestinians feel about
Americans who support the Israelis
no matter what they
do to the Palestinians? Don't take my word about
these
abuses. Check out the Israeli human-rights
organization at
www.btselem.org/English.
If
you cannot condemn the flagrant abuses of
Palestinians by the Israeli
government, then you are
undoubtedly a bigot, the worst kind of racist
pig who
believes that Palestinians are some kind of subspecies
of the
human race. If you do condemn in your heart
these terrible abuses, but
are afraid to speak out
about them, then you are a damned
coward.
I listened in disgust to a congressional committee
hearing
on the Palestinian elections. It was all about
what the Palestinians have
to do. It was as if the
cops, interviewing a child who had been raped by
an
adult, lectured the child on dressing provocatively
and of being in
places she should not have been in.
The Palestinians are the victims
here. It is their
land that is occupied. They have no army. They are
at
the mercy of the Israeli government. They don't have a
superpower
protecting them from international
sanctions and supplying them with
billions of dollars.
The United States should be telling Israel to get
out
of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, to dismantle its
settlements
and checkpoints, and to allow Palestinian
refugees to return to or be
compensated for the land
the Israelis stole.
You want to know why
we have a problem with terrorism?
It's not Islamic fundamentalists or
hatred of freedom.
It's our support of Israel's unspeakable abuse
of
Palestinians. Don't blame Osama bin Laden. Blame the
president,
Congress, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee and all the
cowardly Americans who
practice hypocrisy by claiming to be moral
while
supporting gross immorality committed against their
fellow human
beings in Palestine.
© 2006 by King Features Syndicate,
Inc.
"Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut, that
held its ground."
- Anonymous