Who Are the Real Prisoners? Arabs Serving The Interests Of The Enemy
28 October 2010By Dr. Bouthaina Shaaban
When I asked in my previous article, "Until when this
conspiracy of silence?" concerning more than eleven
thousand Palestinian prisoners kidnapped from their
homes by Israeli intelligence officers, and suffering
the cruelest torture at the hands of sadist jailers in
Israeli prisons, I wanted to say that Western silence
regarding this brutality was only because the victims
are Arabs. But the responses of some Arab bloggers to
my article reminded me of a more dangerous silence,
the silence of Arab people. It is more dangerous
because it indicates a collapse of thought and
identity. When a Palestinian youth sacrifices his life
to prevent the demolition of a house in the Salwan
neighborhood in Jerusalem, and when an unarmed
Palestinian girl faces the Israeli military oppression
machine on her own, they do so because both of them
believe in their land, their nation and their duty
towards both, not only towards their families and
villages, but also towards Palestine.
The brutality, injustice and blackmail which Arab
prisoners suffer in Israeli jails are definitely more
painful than that of the 33 miners in Chile whose saga
came to a happy end on October 14, 2010. But this
tragedy would not have ended without the employment of
money, science and will to save them, and without the
determination of Chilean president, government and
people to save them and to spare no effort in the
endeavor.
Had the tragedy been met with the kind of laxity the
Arab official regime is showing, or the kind of
indifference, which I have read in responses to my
article, which called for forgetting the prisoners and
focusing on our "many problems" – as we are often
asked to do by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and
his foreign minister Lieberman – the miners' families
and country would not have enjoyed their safe return.
In addition to this Chilean achievement on the human
level, which cannot be overvalued because it stands
for the difference between life and perdition, this
achievement has indeed put Chile on the map of
respectable countries concerned about human life which
make persistent and creative efforts to protect it at
whatever cost.
On the other hand, when some Arabs ignore the
suffering of thousands of Arab prisoners, hundreds of
whom are women and children, and when serious, genuine
and persistent official and popular action to stir
world public opinion and world parliaments until they
are freed, is lacking, this does not only perpetuate
their tragedy, but deprives us of the world's respect.
Every time we raise the issue of the injustice done to
our people in Palestine with a Western intellectual or
activist, they ask about what the Arabs have done in
this regard. What have the Arabs, who possess huge
financial and political capabilities, done for their
brethren in Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Galilee,
Negev and throughout Palestine?
There is not sufficient space here to describe the
crimes committed by the West – which claims to be
concerned about the life of an individual here or
there - in Guantanamo or Abu Ghreib and their brutal
wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Of course all
these crimes do not justify for anyone to commit a
crime anywhere or against anyone. This is the position
I live, not only the position I write about. But those
who award the Nobel prize to individuals who opposed
The Cuban revolution, Iran, China or governments
disliked by the West, are the same people spending
huge amounts of money to sow division and internal
conflict in the Arab world. They are the same people
who arm Israel with lethal weapons and the same people
who besiege the Arabs, disarm them, abuse their
prophet and burn their holy book. They are the same
people who support arresting unarmed Palestinians and
forgive our enemies for all the crimes they have
committed in Iraq, Palestine, and today in Yemen, and
very soon in Sudan.
This is Hillary Clinton saying in Brussels, "for
Israel, security is paramount, they have the
experience of having left Lebanon and now having
Hezbollah and rockets on their border, having left
Gaza and now having Hamas and rockets on their
border". Mrs. Clinton does not mention that Israel
possesses hundreds of nuclear bombs and all kinds of
missiles, aircraft and submarines with the capacity to
carry nuclear weapons. Neither does she mention that
the Israeli occupation in Palestine has so far
uprooted a million olive trees from the fields of
unarmed Palestinians and that, while she was speaking
in Brussels, Israel was demolishing forty houses in
Negev and Netanyahu was approving the demolition of
twenty two Arab houses in Salwan. She did not mention
that Israeli occupation troops daily kill unarmed
Palestinians and kidnap others from their houses,
schools and farms.
Does not that anger those who defend spies? Did not
they get angry when Israel passed its new racist law,
which Jews described in Israeli papers (see Yediot
Ahronot and Haaretz, Monday, 11 October 2010) as
racist and fascist, while most Arabs remained silent
as if nothing had happened. This law is one of a
number of racist laws which aim at expelling Arabs
from the part of Palestine occupied in 1948.
Do not these Arabs see what is happening in Sudan in
terms of dividing the country and squandering the
resources of the Sudanese people? Barack Obama is
threatening the Sudanese people: either accept
division or millions of them will be killed. Has not
Hilary Clinton declared in New York that "Sudan's
division is inevitable", and that "separation will
take place after the referendum"? Has not she sent her
ambassador, Suzan Rice, to draw the borders between
"the north" and "the south"?
Despite all the Sudanese government's statements that
it will be impossible to conduct the referendum in
Abyei in January, the American administration and
those cooperating with it are going ahead with their
plans to send international forces to fragment the
country and destroy its unity. Must we wait until the
colonizers occupy, violate and divide our countries,
one after another, before we are convinced that all of
us are targeted, and that they do not distinguish
between one Arab and another except in as much as they
serve them and as long as the service lasts, then they
throw them away?
The condition of our people in Palestine, Sudan,
Yemen, Iraq and Gaza is similar to that of the miners
who were locked up in the depths of Chile's mines.
What is required is that all the intellectual, moral
and material capabilities of the Arab nation should be
used to find ways for saving them from this blockade.
Anything else only serves the interests of the enemy
and contributes to undermining Arab existence and
future.
©
EsinIslam.Com
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