Interesting article from a Christian Arab journalist:
An open letter to the Palestinian people
general.reliantenergy.com
Fri Aug 17 11:56:57
c 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
I regularly get emails from Arab readers and well-meaning Westerners who watch too much CNN "coverage" taking me to task for my position regarding Israel and the Palestinians. For the most part, the letters reflect a general viewpoint that I don't care about Arabs, or Palestinians, or their plight. As one Palestinian reader
asked me, "What about the victims of Israeli policy?"
I'd like to take this opportunity to send an open letter to the Palestinian "man on the street":
Dear Child of Abraham,
It is an ironclad certainty that I grieve for the
situation you currently find yourselves in. I grieve when
I read of homes being bulldozed by the Israeli Defense
Forces in retaliation for this attack or that against
Israeli targets. I grieve for those innocents who suffer
the consequences of the actions of Hamas, Hezbollah,
Fatah and other perpetrators of terror.
I grieve for those among you who saw the bright promise
of peace that shone so brilliantly on that warm September
afternoon in the Rose Garden in 1993. I grieve for those
who saw the hope that was manifested in the simple act of
a handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, only
to see that promise squandered.
I grieve for those who watched as the hope of peace
faded, and as the dogs of war began to nip at your heels.
Today, those dogs are at your throat and I grieve for the
hopelessness of your situation.
I grieve for your dead, and for the families that remain
behind to mourn their loss. I grieve for the hatred that
has replaced the burgeoning friendships that began
following the signing of Oslo and the beginning of what
appeared to be a process of peace.
But my grief is not for the "victims of Israeli
aggression," since it would be misplaced. The victims of
the intifada are victims of a Palestinian leadership that
has perverted the truth. Your leadership has had almost a
decade in which to indoctrinate your children in hatred
and violence and they have used it to their best
advantage.
The victims of the intifada are the children who are
being bussed to indoctrination camps to be taught how to
kill without regard for their victims. A counselor at one
such camp called "Paradise Camp" bragged in the July 20
Jerusalem Post, "We are teaching the children that
suicide bombs make [the] Israeli people frightened and we
are allowed to do it. ... We teach them that after a
person becomes a suicide bomber he reaches the highest
level of paradise."
The victims of the intifada are the children, some as
young as 12, bussed to rally points and deliberately
placed in the front ranks of the stone throwers, with
Palestinian snipers shooting from behind them. Your
leadership "purchases" the lives of these children as
martyrs, paying the families of those killed a paltry
$2,000 per life. Wounded children are worth much less,
with the value of their injuries assessed by your
leadership as being worth only $300.
I grieve for Mohammed al-Dura, the 12 year-old boy
murdered by your own forces during a shoot-out with the
IDF. His death made excellent propaganda for Yasser
Arafat, but the price of that propaganda was far too
high, despite Arafat's eagerness to pay that price.
I grieve for the families of suicide bombers who have
given up their sons as a consequence of a leadership who
places no value on the lives of its constituency, placing
instead a premium on their deaths relative only to the
number of innocent civilians that die with them.
The victims of your leadership are legion, but the most
heart-rending stories of suffering at the hands of Yasser
Arafat and his band of thugs come from within your own
ranks.
I grieve for the five young men sentenced to death by
firing squad after a ten-minute trial for
"collaborating" with Israel. If collaboration
with Israel is a crime worthy of death, then your
leadership represents the apex of hypocrisy. Or else
Arafat would long ago have put on his own blindfold and
smoked his last cigarette. For making a peace he never
intended to honor at the expense of his own people is
collaboration defined.
My heart breaks for your suffering. But none of that
grief changes reality. Your current suffering is the
result of your allowing yourself to be deceived by an
opportunistic cynic who knew back in 1993 that genuine
peace with Israel would mean the end of his power.
Without the conflict to define him, Yasser Arafat's
political existence would self-destruct. Peace is his
mortal enemy.
Within six months of signing the Oslo agreement for
peace, the first Egged bus exploded into flames on a Tel
Aviv street. Dozens of young Palestinian lives have since
dissolved into a similar pink mist of impotent rage,
created and fanned by the need of Yasser Arafat and Fatah
to justify their continued political existence.
The responsibility for the suffering of your people
rightly belongs in the hands of the man who once took the
hand of Yitzhak Rabin in an empty gesture of a peace that
would never come. By design, Arafat raised the hopes of
both sons of Abraham that, finally, reconciliation of a
4,000-year-old conflict might be at hand, knowing full
well he intended to bring about the current conflict.
Your leadership always intended to implement the "Phased
Plan for the Destruction of Israel" that Arafat promised
to renounce as a condition of peace. As recently as May
2000, Abd El Aziz Shanhian, a member of Arafat's cabinet
revealed that truth in one of your own newspapers, Al
Ayaam. As he said then, "The Palestinian people accepted
the Oslo Agreement as a first step and not as a permanent
arrangement, based on the premise that the war and the
struggle on the ground is more efficient than a struggle
from a distant land."
I grieve for you, because Arafat bartered your future to
preserve his present. He is a liar. That isn't a value
judgment, but rather an observation of fact. He signed an
agreement to renounce violence, knowing full well in
advance that was never his intention, and that if there
were consequences of his perfidy to be paid, they would
be paid by his own people.
Even now, as you suffer, he continues to lie to you,
telling you your suffering is the result of Israeli
"aggression." "Retaliation" can never be aggression. It
is, by definition, a response to aggression.
An aggression begun by your own leadership, under the
cover of false promises and outright lies, with the full
knowledge in advance of the price that aggression would
exact from you, while he looted your treasury and
installed his Tunisian thugs to help him carry away the
booty. While you suffer in poverty and deprivation, he
and his Tunisians live in luxury villas, drive Mercedes
and wear Armani suits.
Your leadership has refused to meet the Israelis halfway,
preferring instead to use deception and violence to prop
up their own regime. When Israel, recognizing that the
halfway mark for Arafat was nowhere near the middle,
moved so far toward your side as to offer Arafat 95
percent of what he claimed he wanted back in 1993, Arafat
rejected it out of hand and began the current uprising.
Arafat knew the price of rejecting the offer would be
high, but you would be the ones who had to pay it.
Because the price of peace was too high for Arafat to
even consider ponying up himself. He likes the trappings
of power too much.
I grieve for you. But I don't buy for a second that your
pain is a consequence of Israeli "aggression." You could
hold in your own hands the keys to peace. But to claim
that key, you will first have to drop the rocks, bottles
and guns. I pray that you do, for your own sake, and for
the sake of the peace co-existence with the other son of
Abraham you once claimed as your objective. |
