[News] A Christmas Remembrance
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Tue Dec 22 10:37:37 EST 2009
A Christmas Remembrance
http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/12/21/william-a-cook-a-christmas-remembrance/
By
<http://palestinethinktank.com/author/Haitham/>Haitham
Sabbah Dec 21st, 2009 at 17:29
gaza-war-crimes
By <http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/author/william-a-cook/>William A. Cook*
"The white civilized man (is) the most ferocious
animal on the face of the earth."
(Herman Melville, 1840s)
In 1841, Melville sailed aboard the Acushnet, a
whaling vessel, on a three year trip to the South
Seas. By July of 1842, Melville and a shipmate,
Toby Greene, jumped ship revolting against the
tyrannical powers that brutalized the crew by
oppressing these men of many races. Having
witnessed American warships firing their guns at
naked islanders in the Marquesas, Tahiti, and
Hawaii and watched "rapacious hordes of
enlightened individuals" seizing the "depopulated
land" from the natives, reducing them to starving
"interlopers" in their own country, he realized
that the superior white Christian civilization
epitomized absolute savagery and that cannibals
treated others with more humanity than these
self-identified enlightened men. That
understanding of the civilized white man struck
me with its absoluteness, its certainty, its
expressive force the moment I opened my file of
little four year old Kaukab Al Dayah, whose
tender face rests on top of the rubble of her
home, an unsuspecting victim of white Zionist
brutality that delivered her family a missile as
a Christmas gift just over a year ago. (See
Salaman, "The true Jew is the European Ashkenazi
of whitish appearance," in Sand's
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1844674223?ie=UTF8&tag=sabbahsblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1844674223>The
Invention of the Jewish People). (To see the
picture of Kaukab Al Dayah, see above or google
her name. Two sites have photos: Getty Images and Laweranceofcyberia).
She, too, like the islanders in the South Seas
157 years ago, is a resident of a "depopulated
land," or perhaps is an "interloper" that failed
to flea when the merciful enlightened hordes shot
their warning shots announcing the white man's
civilized gesture to those about to be crushed,
if they hoped to survive. How considerate. How
truly enlightened. How like now in Gaza just a
year ago, when Israel, our westernized culture in
the Mid-East, the friendly democratic state of
Europeanized enlightenment, attempted to crush
the defenseless Gazans caught on their own island
surrounded by the savage might of this most
civilized state. How unfortunate since the
intended target was the school next door; an
unexplainable mistake since only precision
missiles are used, $300,000 dollar weapons to
ensure accuracy. "After all we are civilized; we
don't permit such pictures to be made public.
That's brutal, pornographic; at least blur the
face as we do lest our people be shocked, or
dismayed that the enemy seems so small, so sweet, so silent, so dead."
I look upon that serene face and see my own
daughters asleep in their beds, no more than a
yard apart when tucked in, sleeping now after the
story's end, eyelids closed, lips parted, faces
visible above the blankets as I turned out the
lights. I remember because I was restoring a 1750
colonial house at the time and their room had not
been touched yet. The heavy thick horse hair
plaster was cracked on the ceiling, parts of it
hung above the beds waiting the day I would
tackle that room. But that night it crashed to
the floor with a thunderous roar amid the
screaming voices of the girls. How fear rushed to
my throat; how relieved to find them untouched
but sitting up in fright. How comforting for me
to hold them and hug them till they fell asleep
again. Remembering this moment, I find no words
to express how a mother or a father or a
grandmother or aunt or sister or brother would
feel upon seeing the innocent face of little
Kaukab shrouded in this pall of dirt and stone.
What horror strikes the soul to see that face
encased in death, the weight of that shroud
pressing around her tiny body, the cement wall
rising beside her like the vault's side that
receives the coffin, but there is no coffin. This
is unnatural death. This is civilized death, the
death of the innocent whose life was yet to be
lived, whose eyes, shut now, will see no more the
rising sun, whose hair, all matted now, will
never flow in the warmth of the breeze, whose
voice, silenced now, will never sing again. This
is now the cold body of an unknown girl, unknown
to the pilot of the F-16 that fired the missile,
indeed, unconsidered by him lost as he is in his
indifference to those he cannot see or hear or
touch. How like Kaukab perhaps is that pilot's
daughter. Was he happy, perhaps, upon his return
home after his days work to lift his daughter's
face to his lips before sitting down to dinner?
But he need not worry after all, Rabbi Yitzhak
Shapira has already absolved him of any guilt
with the recent publication of his book, The
King's Torah, a best seller in Israel, but
un-reviewed in America, not by the enlightened
New York Times or the Washington Post or the Los
Angeles Times. The good Rabbi writes "even babies
and children can be killed if they pose a threat
to the nation" (Haaretz 12/15/09). Many other
Rabbis joined with Shapira in his call to kill
Gentiles while absolving the soldier or citizen
of Israel from guilt before the crime is
committed. During Israel's Gaza New Year
celebration last year, euphemistically dubbed
Cast Lead, Rabbi Mordechai Elyahu, one of the
leading Rabbis in Israel, "urged the army not to
refrain from killing enemy children in order to
save lives of Israel's soldiers" (EU Times,
11/11/09). After all, Christian morals are not
binding on Jews. Certainly the civilized world
can understand these perspectives since the
ultra-orthodox Rabbis have only exonerated God's
chosen from the guilt that attends Gentiles
should they be so rash as to kill a Jew. Funny
how we condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization
and justify the carnage that took the life of
little Kaukab Al Dayah. No doubt the F-16 pilot
feared for his life if he did not destroy her
before she got old enough to commit some yet to
be determined evil against the IDF forces.
I think as I look upon this young girl's face of
the mother who bore her, cherished her, dreamed
for her; I think about her father who never
thought that his daughter would find her grave in
the ruins of her room as she slept; I think about
her sisters and brothers who played with her just
the evening before never imagining that her life
would end in such suffering and pain; I think of
her as a reflection of all who died in this
wasted war that accomplished nothing but horrific
pain for the Palestinian and provided only a
junky's moment of ecstasy for Olmert, Barak, and
Livni, as they sunk needles into their arms,
feeling nothing but self-gratification, a
sickness of the mind and spirit, a high that
knows nothing of others, nothing of love or
gratitude or peace, the ecstasy of nirvana that
unites all in the human embrace.
As the year ends that opened with Israel's
invasion of a people locked behind walls with no
place to go, an invasion by the world's fourth
largest military according to Israeli estimates,
an invasion against a people that have no
military, an invasion of a small speck of land
that is home to 1.5 million people, an invasion
that capped two years of siege by this same
military that destroyed the infrastructure of
Gaza, preventing food and medicine and oil and
gas and water from entering Gaza, an invasion
that was as merciless as that of any ferocious
animal killing its prey, but here the prey is not
one but 1400 with upwards of 5000 wounded and
maimed, an invasion that can only mark the
perpetrators as ruthless killers without
compassion or conscience, a robotic mass that has
lost all sense of humane sensitivity, a people
that should be and must be isolated from the law abiding nations of the world.
Perhaps, if there is a God of mercy, He has left
this image as a token of His love for those who
died in this carnage, and a token of His
compassion for those who inflicted it that they
might learn. It is after all a mirror that both
must look into, a symbolic image of life and
death. For the Palestinian, it mirrors what life
should be for little Kaukab and all children: the
joy that should have been; the love showered upon
her, lost forever; the home filled with laughter
and hope and dreams and warmth and security,
blasted now; the neighbors and friends and
family, tightly knit in love and kinship,
shattered now as this home is shattered. An image
of what must be, for friend and foe alike, if
this life of hope has meaning and promise.
For the Israeli, it mirrors what this state has
become and what the future of the Jews might be
under the pathological sickness imposed on them
by the Zionists. What minister of God could
conceive the slaughter of children and justify it
unless he was mired in myth as recorded in
Biblical lore. There we read of the Scourge
inflicted by G-d on the first born of all who
lived in Egypt on behalf of the Jews. There we
read of Herod's slaughter of the innocents that
first Christmas lest his throne be threatened by
the Christ child. Why do such tales exist? They
exist to give license to those who would inflict
their will on those they fear; they are stories
of minds distorted by self-indulgence, arrogance
and pride; they impose what they will to ensure
their power not through rational deliberation but
through deceit, coercion and fear.
That child mirrors for the Zionist the perceived
enemy next door grown into adulthood, the fear of
what might be; the twisted steel bars rising from
the rubble reflect the prison built around those
who have been excluded from privilege; the
crushed cement strewn on the ground beneath the
grey walls reminds the Israeli of the Wall of
Fear they have built around the Palestinians, a
fear resident deep in the psyche of the Zionist,
as all embracing as the rubble that encases
little Al Dayah, a fear that those different from
them might walk their streets and shop in their
stores reminding them that the world is full of
people to fear, people that must be controlled
and isolated; and in that image they see
themselves, the consequence of the corrosive acid
that is destroying their faith that once stood
for compassion and love seen in the sorrowful
face of this innocent girl, the realization that
they have destroyed their neighbors, those
closest in blood and place to their lives, and in
the reaction from people around the world to this
unwarranted slaughter, they understand they have
built their own ghetto wall around an enclave
that exudes violence, vengeance, retaliation, and
death to those who do not capitulate to their
wants; they have in fact created what their fear
predicted, a complete isolation from the civilized world.
What more can be said? Melville saw the cannibals
as more civilized than the white Christians that
ripped apart the indigenous people of the
islands, denying that they had rights, and with
impunity destroyed their cultures. It's not only
the Christians now, the evangelical end timer
Christians; it's the white Ashkenazi of Europe
that act now with impunity, the enlightened
offspring of the Eurocentric mind that believes
in their own superiority fostered by their own
myths, supported by the Congress of the United
States, as they ravage the defenseless people of Palestine.
Let us all ask of the Child of Bethlehem that He
offer this world once again the Beatitudes:
For little Kaukab, Blessed are the poor in
spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven;
For her parents, Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they shall be called the children of God;
For the perpetrators of this havoc, Blessed are
the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.
* William A. Cook is a professor of English at
the University of La Verne in southern California
and author of
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9079778028?ie=UTF8&tag=sabbahsblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=9079778028>The
Rape Of Palestine: Hope Destroyed, Justice
Denied,
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1893302717?ie=UTF8&tag=sabbahsblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1893302717>Tracking
Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy and
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/907977801X?ie=UTF8&tag=sabbahsblog-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=907977801X>The
Chronicles Of Nefaria. He can be reached at:
<mailto:wcook at laverne.edu>wcook at laverne.edu.
www.drwilliamacook.com
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