AAARGH
Nobody is allowed to enter or leave the Gaza strip. It is surrounded
by barbed wire, its gates are locked, and even with the proper
documents, one cannot visit the largest high security prison on
earth, home to over one million Palestinians. The Israeli army,
once a fabled fighting force, have become mere prison guards.
The IDFs tactics were formulated back in 1930s, "you do not
have to kill a million, kill the best, and the rest will be cowed".
This method was first applied by the British with the help of
their Jewish allies during the Palestinian uprising of 1936. Since
then, thousands of the best sons and daughters of this land, the
potential elite of the Palestinians, have been exterminated. Once
again, the Israeli army is being used to implement the same master
plan, to "cool the restive natives" by routinely shooting
potential rebels.
Their job is easy: the strongest and biggest army in the Middle
East, a major nuclear power, has all the weapons in the world,
while the jailed Palestinians have only light guns. Recently,
Israelis intercepted a boatload of weapons on the way to Gaza.
The Army boasted of a major victory, but expressed "concern".
They have a reason for concern. Since 1973, the Israeli army has
rarely had to worry about return fire. The Jewish soldiers got
used to soft jobs. They prefer to shoot unarmed kids.
Gaza is a sci-fi reality, reminiscent of some Prison Planet B-movie.
Its barbed wire fence guards a secret: the unbroken will of its
people. It is a B-movie set, but its men and women are first grade.
This secret message came out of Palestine embodied in a 13-years
boy, Farris Ode. He was the youthful Palestinian David we saw
confronting the Jewish Goliath on the outskirts of Gaza in the
immortal photo by AP photographer Laurent Rebours. Farris the
Fearless threw his stones on the armoured monster with the grace
of St George, the beloved saint of Palestine. He confronted the
enemy with the nonchalance of a village boy chasing away a ferocious
dog. The picture was taken on the 29th of October, and a few days
later, on 8th of November, a Jewish sniper murdered him in cold
blood.
He leaves behind a picture of a hero, a poster to be placed next
to Che Guevara's, a name to be spoken in the same breath with
the name of Gavroche, the brave rebel kid from the barricades
of Paris in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, a symbol
of the unvanquished irreducible human spirit. He emerged from
a different time, the time when heroism was not a dirty word,
when men went to war ready to fight and die for a noble cause.
This spirit is totally foreign to the cheap commercial hedonism,
the main ideology of our days, abundantly supplied by American
pop-culture. Farris legacy is a sign of the failure of Israel's
master plan. This young rebel was born under Israeli military
occupation and he died defying the soldiers of the IDF.
This message of hope was not immediately understood by friends
of Palestine, as we have become accustomed to the idea of Palestinian
suffering and martyrdom. In our writing, we unconsciously copycat
the somewhat effeminate approach of presenting "our side"
as unfortunate victims deserving of compassion and pity. The last
thing we should feel towards the Palestinians is pity. Admiration,
love, solidarity, hero-worship, even envy, but no pity. If you
pity them, you might as well pity the 300 warriors of King Leonidas,
who fell defending Thermopilae, or the Russian soldiers who stopped
Guderian's tanks with their bodies, or even Gary Cooper in High
Noon. Heroes should not be pitied, they are an uplifting example
for us.
At first, we failed to correctly place the image of Farris. The
narrative of suffering called for the picture of a crouching Muhammad
Dorra, dying in front of our eyes, a child companion to the little
naked Vietnamese girl running out of the fiery hell of napalm.
The image of Farris Ode belongs to a different set of icons: that
of a hero. Its place is next to that of the Marines on Iwo Jima,
or in a church next to his countryman, St George. After all, the
warrior saint was martyred and buried in the Palestinian soil,
not far from Farris, in the crypt of the old Byzantine church
in Lydda.
The adversaries of the Palestinians understood this reality better
than their pals in New York. The American Jewish-dominated press
spared no effort to erase the memory of Farris, as they were unable
to find a hero of their own to compete with the Gaza boy. The
networks ran a silly contest for the most important Picture of
the Year, with a choice between Dorrah the Martyr and a flower.
The really important picture, the icon of Faris, was not offered
to the public.
But that was not enough, and the Washington Post sent its correspondent
in Palestine, Lee Hockstader, to debunk the fallen kid's memory.
This AIPAC-run rag could depend on Hockstader. His reports should
be studied in schools of journalism, in the course on disinformation.
When the Israeli army tanks and gun ships blasted defenseless
Bethlehem, Hockstader wrote: "In the Biblical (he would not
mention Nativity, would he?) town of Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers
and Palestinians fought with tanks, missiles, helicopters, machineguns
and stones[i]". I suspect that Hockstader's history of WWII,
would narrate a tale where the US and Japan fought with nuclear
bombs, or Jews and Germans killed each other with concentration
camp gas canisters.
Hockstader duly justified Israeli raids on civilian population,
writing: "Israeli army spokesmen say that the raids are limited
and essentially defensive. But the Israeli government takes a
broader view, noting that the raids give local military commanders
flexibility against an elusive enemy". If he takes "a
broader view" of Israeli actions, the Palestinians in his
reports are just mad terrorists: "The Palestinians have been
threatening to exact a price for what they regard as a war of
aggression. A representative of the Islamic Resistance Movement
known as Hamas, called for further suicide bombings and mortar
fire against Israel."
A fellow Hockstader-watcher, Francois Smith, wrote on the Web:
"I am offended that this guy thinks I'm dumb enough to believe
him. Watch out for Lee Hockstader. I think he has an agenda".
Well, he certainly has; the agenda of enforcing Jewish supremacy
and smearing Palestinians. Debunking Farris fits this agenda perfectly.
Hockstader went to Gaza, and reported, that Farris was a bad boy
who did not obey his mommy and daddy, that he played truant at
school, he was an "adolescent daredevil", who actually
wanted to be killed, and a merciful Jewish sniper just fulfilled
his wish. Hockstader missed nothing: the kid was shot while lifting
a stone, and therefore had to be killed; his posthumous fame was
"the hullabaloo over his death"; and anyway, his mother
received "a $10,000 check from President Saddam Hussein of
Iraq".
Hockstader played safe. If he had dared to infer that the settler
parents of the killed infant in Hebron wished their child dead,
if he would refer to the Israeli reaction as "hullabaloo",
or just mention a fat check her parents received from the hands
of the butcher of Sabra and Shatila - Hockstader would not have
made it out of Israel alive, and Katherine Graham, the Washington
Postís owner, would be repenting it to her last day.
Jews have succeeded in cowering their enemies, and not only by
the magic of words. Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy of Palestine,
dozens of British soldiers and officers and hundreds of Palestinian
leaders were assassinated by Jews in their drive for supremacy
in the Holy Land in 1940s, until the terrorized Brits sailed away
from Haifa Bay on May 15, 1948. Even today, two peace activists
and men of the cloth in San Francisco, a Catholic priest Labib
Kobti and a Jewish Rabbi Michael Lerner, receive death threats
from Jewish terrorist groups and take them very seriously.
The Palestinians are rather peaceful peasants and city folk. They
know how to tend olives and vine, how to make a zir, a jar that
keeps water cool even in the hottest hamsin. Their beautiful stone
masonry adorns every corner of Palestine. They write poetry and
venerate their holy tombs. They are no warriors, certainly no
killers. With astonishment and disbelief they stare in the mirror
of a Jewish dominated press and see themselves dressed in the
mask of a bloody terrorist. But these peasants are still able
give us all a lesson about heroism, whenever an enemy tries to
snatch their land. Palestinians proved it many centuries ago,
in the legendary days of Judges, when their ancestors battled
with overseas invader.
In 1930s, a fervent Russian Jewish nationalist and founder of
Sharon's political party, Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky wrote (in his
native Russian) a historical novel, Samson, elaborating on the
Bible story of the suicide bomber who killed three thousand men
and women (Judges, 18:27) and died with the enemies. A few years
ago, this novel was published in Israel in a modern Hebrew translation,
and a Davar newspaper reviewer noted an interesting aberration.
For Jabotinsky, the Brits were the modern Philistines, while the
Israelites became the Jews. But for a modern Israeli reader, the
novel reads as a glorification of the Palestinian fight against
Israeli rule. The highly civilized Philistines with their superior
military technology, invaders from overseas, hedonistic dwellers
of the Coastal Plain and belligerent intruders in the Highlands
reminded the reviewer of modern Israeli Jews. While Samson's people,
Banu Israel, the natives of the Highlands, certain of their deep
roots, confident of the inevitable victory of their attachment
to the soil over the military might of the invader, reminded him
of modern Palestinian Highlanders.
It makes sense, as the Palestinians are the true descendants of
Biblical Israel, of the indigenous people who embraced the faith
of Christ and Muhammad, and remained in the Holy Land forever.
The Israelis know it. In the genetic labs of Tel Aviv, the scholars
of the "Jewish DNA" proudly produce every result, tenuously
confirming the blood relation of Jews and Palestinians. They know
that our Jewish claim to the proud name of Israel is at least
dubious. Like Richard III, we seized the title and crown, and,
like Richard III, we feel insecure while the legitimate heirs
are still alive. That is the psychological explanation of our
inexplicably cruel treatment of the native Palestinians.
The Israelis want to be Palestinians. We adopted their cuisine,
and serve their falafel and hummus as our own ethnic food. We
adopted the native cactus, sabra, growing at the site of their
villages, as the name of our local-born sons and daughters. Our
revived Hebrew language, came back to life with hundreds of Palestinian
words. We just need to ask their forgiveness, embrace them as
long lost brothers and learn from them. That is the one ray of
hope coming out of the present darkness.
As modern Israeli archaeology studies have made clear, three thousand
years ago the Highland tribes (Banu Israel of Bible) eventually
achieved a modus vivendi with the Coastal "people of the
sea", and together, these sons of Samson and Delilah, became
progenitors of the Bible composers, of Christ's apostles and of
modern Palestinians. The advanced Philistine technology and the
Highlanders' love of our parched land combined to achieve the
spiritual miracle of ancient Palestine. It is not impossible,
and it is highly desirous, that history will repeat itself, and
the glorious image of young Farris, fighting the tank, will blend
with images of king David and St George in the minds and schoolbooks
of our Palestinian children.
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Nous nous plaçons sous
la protection de l'article 19 de la Déclaration des Droits
de l'homme, qui stipule:
ARTICLE 19
<Tout individu a droit à la liberté d'opinion
et d'expression, ce qui implique le droit de ne pas être
inquiété pour ses opinions et celui de chercher,
de recevoir et de répandre, sans considération de
frontière, les informations et les idées par quelque
moyen d'expression que ce soit>
Déclaration internationale des droits de l'homme,
adoptée par l'Assemblée générale de
l'ONU à Paris, le 10 décembre 1948.