{Comments on letter attached below sent to Today newspaper}
I refer to letter titled 'A Distortion of Reality' published in your paper on Aug 25.
The writer was 'surpised' to read what was reported in your paper the day before and went on to challenge your reporter to 'find one starving Palestinian or even one close to starving' and claimed that the article was a distortion of actual events.
He proceeded to paint a wholely positive picture of the Israelis and did the opposite with the Palestinians whom he claimed have a 'traditional habit of blaming Israel for all difficulties', and challenged them to 'take fate in their own hands'.
What a neat ‘good guy versus terrible guy’ picture of reality indeed, political or historical context notwithstanding.
As we cannot resolve which of these are distortions of reality without the benefit of history, I can only suggest that your readers do their own check of reality starting with the history of the making of Israel from around the time of the Balfour Declaration, and see how 'fate was taken into the hands' of certain people (some may claim perhaps 'under-handedly').
100 years of history may not be ideal but I personally found it quite sufficient to understand this particular 'reality'.
A Distortion of Reality
Stop blaming Israel for all Palestinian problems, says ambassador-designate
Letter from ilan ben-dovAmbassador-designate
Embassy of Israel, Singapore
I was surprised to read the report in your newspaper, "Palestinians starve as Israelis get cash" (Aug 24).
To begin with, I would like to suggest that if the writer, Mr Sanjay Suri, is to find one "starving Palestinian" or even a person who is close to starving, I would be very much interested to know about him.
The presentation of the Jewish settlers as ones who get "comfortable compensations" is also a misrepresentation of reality.
Nothing is comfortable for people who are being forced to leave their homes after 30 years. And this, without respect to the political context.
The whole attempt in this article to describe reality as if Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip creates a problem for the Palestinians is again a distortion of the actual events.
I would like, with your permission, to mention the following:
The disengagement plan is an initiative of the Israeli government whose aim is to stop the political stalemate in the region and to reduce violence and friction between the Israelis and Palestinians.
But beyond this, Israel has initiated the disengagement plan because it does not wish to rule over the Palestinians.
Until the end of this year, there will be no Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip.
It is now time for the Palestinians to take their own fate in their hands and to assume responsibility for the future of their children.
The traditional habit of blaming Israel for all difficulties, as was done by Mr Suri, instead of challenging them, will lead us nowhere.
Therefore, to describe current reality with words like those in your headline, "Palestinians starve as Israelis get cash", is, unfortunately, far away from describing current events in the region.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
Friday, August 19, 2005
A Comparison of Madness
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4164534.stm
This is just one of the various reports of killings of Palestinians arising from the Isreali pullout from the Gaza strip. In one of the incidents reported here, the Jewish man that killed 2 Palestinians who used to 'share food together' with him was described as a mad man. It is interesting to put this in context.
- The Jews arrogantly claimed for centuries that they are 'special children of god'. Assuming that that is true, one can make only a few conclusions:
1. for those that don't believe that the gods are mad enough to play games, the Jews' belief must then be crap. Which gods would make their 'special children' mad?
2. for those that do believe in gods playing games, then the Jews' belief could well be a big lie by the gods.
Either way, those Jews are just a bunch of millenia-old idiots (any one of you have the same belief as them?)
- if removing these people from others' land that they had occupied for the last half century can make them mad enough to shoot people they used to associate with for years, imagine what madness will come of people who had their land forcibly taken from them (based on some crap notions like above), and who had to withstand daily humiliations for almost an entire century.
For histo-ignoramuses, the closest analogy I can give is ask them to imagine a kid growing up in the scenario below.
In his early days when he was barely aware of what's happening around him, a kid saw his family being evicted by a bully from his home at gun point and banished to a backyard shack. After that, he realized that his family could not do anything without the prior permission of the bully. In fact, they could not even see each other nor could he go to school without going through the insulting checkpoints setup by the bully inside the shack. On top of that, his parents were not allowed to work outside or do business with any of their neighbours, and had to rely on the bully’s generosity for odd-jobs around the backyard. The income was barely enough for the family to survive. The net result of all this is the kid was growing up uneducated and with little hope for a decent future. It was a life not much worse than the other animals in the backyard.
While all that was happening, the bully with his backer was telling their neighbours that they had the right to stay in the kid's granddad's house because the bully's great-great-great granddad left him a book that said that the house was theirs. The neighbours were either stupid enough to believe that story or were too weak to do anything about the bully and his backer who is actually the neighbourhood sheriff.
The kid's family of course had a different book and that book says that the book that the bully and sheriff shares is crap. So how can the family accept the bully's claim that their house was actually his?
But the only thing his family could do was to stage protests and to plead for help from the other neighbours. But that was to no avail – the neighbours were either too weak or were idiots that believed in the bully's story. So the kid saw that once a while his brother would throw stones at the bully. But when that happened, the bully would come over and give his brother a few tight slaps. As good measure, the bully would wreck a few furniture and give his dad and grandpa a few slaps too as some sort of a 'lesson'. In one of these incidents, the bully simply put a bullet into the kid’s brother and claimed that he had to do that because it was ‘war’.
As the above went on for years and years, the shack that the kid lives in began to deteriorate due to lack of maintenance, and his family's standard of living went from bad to worse. Yet, the kid was expected to accept what he and his family has got and just keep quiet - because the bully and sheriff were holding the guns and were still slapping his dad and grandpa whenever they liked.
For those of us that believe not in blind faith but in causes and effects, it will not be difficult to see why the kid would not grow up with the pent-up desire to blow the brains out of the bully if he gets the chance. Which was what the kid did one day.
After that, we still see some idiots living in their comfortable house next door calling the kid a terrorist and preaching to the kid's family about the virtues of not taking the lives of others.
That could well be the story of the live of many a Palestinian child - written by a Chinaman thousands of miles away just trying to understand why the kid in this story did what he did.
A Palestinian child is after all one of gods' creation. Perhaps, the gods are really mad. Or it is just some among us but which one?
This is just one of the various reports of killings of Palestinians arising from the Isreali pullout from the Gaza strip. In one of the incidents reported here, the Jewish man that killed 2 Palestinians who used to 'share food together' with him was described as a mad man. It is interesting to put this in context.
- The Jews arrogantly claimed for centuries that they are 'special children of god'. Assuming that that is true, one can make only a few conclusions:
1. for those that don't believe that the gods are mad enough to play games, the Jews' belief must then be crap. Which gods would make their 'special children' mad?
2. for those that do believe in gods playing games, then the Jews' belief could well be a big lie by the gods.
Either way, those Jews are just a bunch of millenia-old idiots (any one of you have the same belief as them?)
- if removing these people from others' land that they had occupied for the last half century can make them mad enough to shoot people they used to associate with for years, imagine what madness will come of people who had their land forcibly taken from them (based on some crap notions like above), and who had to withstand daily humiliations for almost an entire century.
For histo-ignoramuses, the closest analogy I can give is ask them to imagine a kid growing up in the scenario below.
In his early days when he was barely aware of what's happening around him, a kid saw his family being evicted by a bully from his home at gun point and banished to a backyard shack. After that, he realized that his family could not do anything without the prior permission of the bully. In fact, they could not even see each other nor could he go to school without going through the insulting checkpoints setup by the bully inside the shack. On top of that, his parents were not allowed to work outside or do business with any of their neighbours, and had to rely on the bully’s generosity for odd-jobs around the backyard. The income was barely enough for the family to survive. The net result of all this is the kid was growing up uneducated and with little hope for a decent future. It was a life not much worse than the other animals in the backyard.
While all that was happening, the bully with his backer was telling their neighbours that they had the right to stay in the kid's granddad's house because the bully's great-great-great granddad left him a book that said that the house was theirs. The neighbours were either stupid enough to believe that story or were too weak to do anything about the bully and his backer who is actually the neighbourhood sheriff.
The kid's family of course had a different book and that book says that the book that the bully and sheriff shares is crap. So how can the family accept the bully's claim that their house was actually his?
But the only thing his family could do was to stage protests and to plead for help from the other neighbours. But that was to no avail – the neighbours were either too weak or were idiots that believed in the bully's story. So the kid saw that once a while his brother would throw stones at the bully. But when that happened, the bully would come over and give his brother a few tight slaps. As good measure, the bully would wreck a few furniture and give his dad and grandpa a few slaps too as some sort of a 'lesson'. In one of these incidents, the bully simply put a bullet into the kid’s brother and claimed that he had to do that because it was ‘war’.
As the above went on for years and years, the shack that the kid lives in began to deteriorate due to lack of maintenance, and his family's standard of living went from bad to worse. Yet, the kid was expected to accept what he and his family has got and just keep quiet - because the bully and sheriff were holding the guns and were still slapping his dad and grandpa whenever they liked.
For those of us that believe not in blind faith but in causes and effects, it will not be difficult to see why the kid would not grow up with the pent-up desire to blow the brains out of the bully if he gets the chance. Which was what the kid did one day.
After that, we still see some idiots living in their comfortable house next door calling the kid a terrorist and preaching to the kid's family about the virtues of not taking the lives of others.
That could well be the story of the live of many a Palestinian child - written by a Chinaman thousands of miles away just trying to understand why the kid in this story did what he did.
A Palestinian child is after all one of gods' creation. Perhaps, the gods are really mad. Or it is just some among us but which one?
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