Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| Eliminate unjust policies |
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| bhaloo |
| 10/09/00 at 16:09:27 |
| slm Eliminate unjust policies Charley Reese Commentary Published in The Orlando Sentinel on October 05, 2000 The Israeli Army admitted that it killed 12-year-old Mohammad Jemal al-Durah as he huddled next to his father on a street in Gaza. Thanks to a brave cameraman for French television, the boy's death was recorded and has been broadcast around the world. The boy now forever will be a symbol of Israeli brutality. The Israeli soldiers also killed an ambulance driver trying to reach the dying boy and his wounded father. They fired on six other ambulances in other areas and shot three other Palestinian medics. As of this writing , approximately 53 Palestinians have been killed, including a 10-year-old boy and an 18-month-old baby. All of them were killed in their own country -- Israel. Obviously, Israel was not firing in self-defense. It was firing in defense of its illegal military occupation of Palestinian lands. Seven of the Palestinians who were killed hold Israeli citizenship. They, too, were killed in their own country. Seven years after the Oslo accords were signed, the Israelis still control, according to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, 61 percent of the West Bank and Gaza. Here's the Palestinian point of view: When Palestinians agreed to a two-state solution to the conflict, they conceded two-thirds of their country, including West Jerusalem, to the Israelis. They are not about to concede 61 percent of the remaining one-third, and most of all they are not about to concede East Jerusalem or to abandon the refugees created by the 1948 and 1967 wars. Palestinians insist that all of these refugees have a right to return to their lands or to receive compensation for them. So far the Israelis have refused. How any decent person can argue that Jews -- 50 years after the fact -- deserve compensation for property lost to the Nazi government but that Palestinian refugees, whose property was taken by the Israeli government, have no right to compensation is beyond me. The important point for Americans to remember is that our government acting as if it were an extension of the Israeli Government is not in America's national interests. We should support international law. We should be neutral and even-handed in trying to mediate the conflict. Instead, we use our veto to block the application of international law, and our so-called mediation has consisted of pressuring the Palestinians to take the crumbs Israel has offered. That is not in our interest at all. The Israelis are playing with fire when they claim ownership of Haram Al-Sharif and the Aqsa Mosque. That is a holy site not just to Arab Muslims but to all 1.1 billion Muslims throughout the world. If the dispute becomes a religious war, which up to now it has not been, then there is no telling how far the violence will spread. It could spread to attacks on American interests if the United States persists in its one-sided support of Israel's aggression and land-grabbing. The simple solution to terrorism is to eliminate the unjust policies that cause it. The American government's deliberately blind eye to the abuse of Palestinian human rights is certainly an injustice. The late Yehoshafat Harkabi, former head of Israeli military intelligence, wrote an important book, Israel's Fateful Hour, some years ago, in which he argued that failure to allow the Palestinians to develop their own independent state would be tantamount to Israel committing suicide. I couldn't find anything to disagree with him about when I first read the book, and I don't now. The Middle East is full of ruins left by people who thought military power could sustain them. |
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