Colonialism's bumpy road....
Russians lend toughness as Israel faces up to terror Immigrants bear grief of conflict, determined to persevere in new land
By Bill Glauber
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published May 12, 2002
TEL AVIV - The smokejumper from Siberia was used to leaps of faith, parachuting into remote forests to fight fierce fires. Four years ago, jobless in the former Soviet Union, he took another plunge, leaving a tattered Siberian city named Novosibirsk and taking his wife and four children to Israel.
"It was," he said, "like a miracle."
He had left a country that in every sense seemed to be in a deep freeze and arrived in another warmed by a hot desert wind.
He found a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant, working 80 hours, supporting his family, making sure his four kids got the best schooling, the best clothes. And 11 months ago, he allowed his 16-year-old daughter Mariana to go with her friends to a seaside disco in Tel Aviv.
He still remembers the night - Mariana with her short hair and long limbs, laughing and trying on clothes with her friends, dancing to a Madonna single, and then, out the door, forever.
The next time he saw her was at the morgue, her body still warm, a shrapnel wound in the back of the head. Mariana was among 21 killed in a suicide bombing that ripped through the heart of Israel's new immigrant community from the old Soviet Union.
So now, Victor Medvedenko, a sad-eyed 47-year-old with a weathered face, trim beard and rueful smile, is left to sit in his apartment at night contemplating his family's destroyed dreams.
'That day my daughter died, of course I regretted coming to Israel," Medvedenko said. "I kept thinking, 'I'm guilty and I can't change anything.' But now, I am ready to fight for this land."
[snip]
sunspot.net
Those Russkies are nuts, aren't they? "...'I'm guilty and I can't change anything.' But now, I am ready to fight for this land." Len, can you tell me why the guy wasn't "ready to fight for his MOTHER RUSSIA in the first place???? On what planet these crazy, racist, Russian rednecks think they're hanging about? Millions of wretches are slumming it in their homelands worldwide --from China to India to Africa to Argentina to.... Well, just because you pretend to be Jewish or half-Jewish or your grandma was half-Jewish, BINGO! You lucked out! You just won a oneway ticket to the Promised Land! "Sea, sex and sun" resorts freshly stolen from "Arab bums" are waiting for you and your brave Jewish family... a few blocks from the beach --courtesy of Uncle Sam-- your dream gated community for Russian underachievers only!
What would Judeofascist Russkies do if it happened to them the other way round? That is, hundreds of thousands of Muslim settlers gate-crashing Moscow and FORCEFULLY seizing the properties and real estate of White Russians??
That Russian immigrant lost his beloved daughter in the disco sacrifice-bombing --does he only know that in Western Europe most discos don't allow darkies in? What seemed so natural for his daughter --dancing all night long in a disco-- is routinely denied to Arab-looking immigrants all across the "civilized West".
Gus |
