Words From the Heart

It is sadly rare in this world that one can raise their head from their own suffering and feel for another. I. G. Has know her own sorrows, yet can still feel for those who are so close and so forgotten.

Blue Ibis

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The Problems Of Palestine -The Problems Of Cyprus

I. G.
Signs of the Times
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:04 EDT

©Signs of the Times

Today I read the article Overcoming the conspiracy against Palestine, and I began thinking about the "Cyprus problem" and the "Palestinian problem", the sad stories behind them and the conditions that currently prevail in each country.

You see, when an army invades a country, confiscates the land and kills and imprisons the people, suddenly the whole sum of these people that have been killed, imprisoned and kicked out of their homeland become a "problem". The psychopathic leaders that caused the suffering have the gall to claim that the oppressed and beleaguered people of an invaded nation are the "problem". These psychopaths fume at the idea that their victims would dare to demand their rights, dare to talk of freedom and raise up their voices and arms towards their oppressors. Apparently those that survived the onslaught of the psychopaths in power should be grateful that their lives were spared.

Ah, this anger I feel today! You see today at 5:30 am, the sirens woke me up in Cyprus where I live. 33 years ago to this day, at this time, the Turkish army was illegally invading the island of Cyprus. They started by bombing via sea and air, the area of Kyrenia (Northern Cyprus, close to Turkey), and I swear, after all those years, I haven't got used to that sound. The average Cypriot old enough to remember might even get up and run to the window to check the skies with their heart beating like crazy, only if briefly, until they realize the date, until they realize that that was years ago.

But not in Palestine.

There, the sirens mean the prospect of death for all who hear them. In Palestine, the first thing that a child recognizes is this sound. The sirens are a daily occurrence for them, weekly at best. But it doesn't stop there: they know that another sound is sure to follow: the sound of bombing. And the little Palestinian children put their little hands over their small ears and curl up in the corner. Will they be the target this time? Will this latest missile destroy their house, kill their mother, father, sisters, brothers, friends? What is known is that every time - because the IDF and the Israeli government are committing genocide against all Palestinians - someone does die, houses are destroyed, and often, whole families are murdered. Can any of us even imagine living in such a hell every day? I can't imagine even that anyone could ever get used to the sound of the sirens and the sound of the bombs falling heartlessly to destroy their lives.

Try to picture your entire life to date in your mind, everything that comprises the life that you know... and then... Boom! It's gone.

Palestine is so close to Cyprus, but sometimes so far away...

For 33 years now, every 20th of July, Cypriots wake up to the sound of the sirens, but we never truly wake up on this island. Why is there no resistance in Cyprus like there is in Palestine? The answer is so simple: it is by design that there IS resistance in Palestine, and there IS NOT in Cyprus. In Palestine, Israel's plan is to kill all Palestinians. So they need the Palestinians to resist, to give the IDF the excuse and the "right" to kill them, in a massively one-sided war or rather "turkey shoot". Soon after the Turkish invasion and occupation of Cyprus, the Cypriot government received international aid and lots of money. The message was clear: "here's some money, now keep quiet! Ok?"

A year later, the refugees from the Northern cities of Cyprus had houses built for them. The Palestinians, 60 years later, still live in tents. Not long afterwards, Cyprus began to prosper economically. On this one, the Cypriots will say with pride: "It's because we are not afraid to work hard!" and I won't take it from them because it is true. But ... it is much easier to work and prosper when your primary needs of adequate food and shelter are already met by way of millions in International aid is it not? When you have no money, no roof over your head, no food, no medical aid, no water, no jobs - nothing! - how do you work? How do you prosper?

Yet the devil is lurking in there again. This financial "prosperity" in Cyprus, has brought about a strong materialism, blindness and self-centrism: the large majority of people in Cyprus now only care about what they own, how they look and how much of a "good time" they can afford. The recent history of Cyprus - the "Turko-Cypriot question" - is just another worn out story on the evening news for most. Not even the locals care about the history of their own small island sanctuary. And despite their ignorance of the FACTS of history, especially recent history, Cypriots have the audacity to lay claim to having "educated opinions" and "nationalistic sentiments", even while they exhibit their racist dumbed down beliefs, these "cosmopolitan" people with their Prada, their PhDs and their new Mercedes.

And there's still Palestine, where children die malnourished... geographically so close to us here, but yet so far away from our reality...

And in our ignorance, how can we recognize the enemy from our friend? We can't of course! Just as Abba's Fatah party has collaborated with the Zionist enemy against their own people, so too did EOKA B in Cyprus, with inspiration and support from the Athens junta and International forces, in a coup to overthrow Makarios, the democratically elected first president of the Cyprus republic, which was the event that gave Turkey the "excuse" to invade.

On the 15th of July some of us woke up by sirens again to commemorate that sad day of betrayal of the Cypriot people by a minority of deviants and the deluded. But who remembers anymore? Just as in Palestine where the collaborators now hold power, sotoo in Cyprus, the descendants of the traitors are in positions of power, enjoying the privileges of high office when they should be in jail. Those who truly care for Cyprus and the Cypriot people are defamed locally and Internationally, like Hamas is in Palestine. Palestinians know it though; Cypriots don't, they are sound asleep, and in their sleep they can't recognise friend from foe.

On August 15th, the sirens might disrupt some of our sleep again. We might even get irritated: "not again, let us sleep!" we will say, as we forget again that it was on August 15th in 1974 that Famagusta was taken, and the Cypriot troops who tried hard to fight the Turkish troops (a sad uneven battle lost from the start, considering the size of Turkish army, that of Cyprus, and the fact that the invasion was financed and applauded by the US and the British) were forced to withdraw.

My grandmother locked the door and took the key, upon leaving her house in Famagusta. "We'll return", she assured her 8 children, and kept assuring them during the months that they lived in the tents. A few years later my grandma died. My family have never returned. Cypriots have yet to acknowledge the wounds from that summer of 1974, wounds that still scar their hearts, wounds that they unwittingly pass on to their children .

And the distance becomes so small sometimes: here is Palestine, here is Cyprus, just a little piece of the blue Mediterranean between us. The same "act" being re-played, as it has been for centuries: psychopathic individuals, to meet their goals, find those among a nation with matching personality or characteristics, and together they to destroy a nation. And then the task is to silence the majority of people of the nation, by putting them to sleep with "gifts" or by exterminating them, little by little, so that they lose the will or energy to resist. And so it goes.

Seferis - a greek poet and diplomat who loved Cyprus - in his poem 'Eleni' - one from a collection dedicated to that island - using characters of the Trojan war to illustrate the act that replays again and again through the centuries, wrote:

[...] some other Teucrus* years later, or an Ajax*, or a Priam*, or a Hecuba*,
Or someone else unknown, anonymous,
Who however has seen a Scamander* full of dead corpses,
Has it in his fate to hear heralds who come to say
That so much pain
So many lives
Were lost in abyss
For an empty shirt, for one Eleni.

This is what the pathocrats sell, and the masses eagerly buy the lie that all suffering happens for a "grand cause", for "an ideal", for the beauty of Eleni, when in truth, it is because some "empty shirts" (psychopaths) got together and made a plan long ago on how to bring the whole world under their control. And the Cypriots still don't resist because they are infatuated with their slavery; and the Palestinians do resist, but they won't achieve anything until many more of us join them and all of us together decide, once and for all, to resist the rule of the psychopath.

Meanwhile, the sirens will keep sounding, and the bombs will keep falling, bodies and hearts will continue to be blown to pieces, lives will continue to be shattered, nations exterminated, the earth destroyed... and all FOR NOTHING!

*Teucrus: Ajax brother who did not return home to Salamis in Greece after Ajax was killed in Troy, and created Salamis in Cyprus
*Priam: King of Troy, father of Paris and Hector
*Hecuba: Wife of Priam
*Scamander: river of troy where the biggest battles took play

Comment: Why is she so rare? The book Political Ponerology explains exactly the process by which we becom spellbound by the material comforts. This leads us to selectively edit out perceptions that make us uncomfortable in our softness.

The Video Israel Doesn't Want You to See

Notice the family is considered by one soldier to be "dirty" , sub-human. Isn't that the same thing Jews suffered in Germany? And this was 2002. Things have only gotten worse.

Blue Ibis.
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Israeli army embarrassed by video broadcast

CBC News, 19 March 2002

The Israeli army has expressed a note of contrition after a television station aired a videotape showing an army assault on a Palestinian home in which a mother of five children died. When CBC News spoke with Ismail Hawarjeh at Bethlehem's hospital earlier this month, there was no way to verify the story he told about how his wife had died, until Israel's Channel 2 broacast the tape last weekend.

The Palestinian school administrator said his wife Huda had been killed in their home by an Israeli tank shell during the army's March 8 assault on the Aida refugee camp. The army wouldn't comment and foreign journalists weren't allowed inside the camp.

But Israeli media were allowed to ride along with the soldiers, and they went right into the Hawarjeh home. An Israeli camera recorded the army blowing off the door, and found Huda Hawarjeh bleeding on the floor.

The pictures conformed to Ismail Hawarjeh's story about his wife being hit by shrapnel in the front hallway of the house, and about the Israeli soldiers doing little to help her for an hour while she bled to death in front of her five children.

Finally, the soldiers allowed an ambulance to come to a nearby street, and soldiers helped Hawarjeh carry his wife to it. Doctors tried to revive her at the hospital but couldn't.

Huda Hawarjeh was one of seven people to die in the Bethlehem area that day.

The Israeli army allows the media such close access on the understanding it can embargo anything it doesn't want broadcast.

The tapes of the assault on the Hawarjeh home fell into that category. But Channel 2 broke the embargo anyway.

The army, government and many Israeli citizens didn't like what they saw.

Channel 2 showed Hawarjeh begging soldiers to allow an ambulance through. The camera captured the terror of the woman's daughter, and her brother's attempt to stop her from showing the soldiers her fear.

After the woman was finally taken out, one of the soldiers looked into the camera and said: "I don't know what we're doing here. Purification, maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here, so far from his home."

The soldiers tore the home apart, evidently looking for weapons.

Another daughter begged them not to demolish the home's wall. Soldiers commonly smash walls to move into adjacent houses.

Israeli spokesman Ranaan Gissin said the government was disappointed by the decision to air the tapes. "I would have expected a little bit more self-censorship on the part of the Israeli media," he said.

Ma'ariv, Israel's second-biggest newspaper, ran the story on its front page on Monday, under a banner headline that read "Gaffe!"

[That's all the Zionists think this is. A procedural faux pas instead of what it is, yet another violation of human rights. Oh wait. I forgot. Palestinians aren't human.]

The army, after trying to suppress distribution of the pictures, admitted the soldiers' actions pushed the boundaries of public acceptance.

"Our action is so difficult to be done that it is to the extremities of acceptance," said Olivier Rafowicz, an Israeli Defence Force spokesman.

He called what happened in the Hawarjeh home "a mistake."

Comment:

At one point in the video an Israeli soldier says. "I don't know what we're doing here. Purification maybe. It's dirty here. I don't know why a good Hebrew boy should be here so far from his home."

These are people he is talking about!

That Israel is able to kill innocent Palestinians while saying what amounts to how hard it is to do the killing without being condemned is sickening.

Israel Forty Years On: What Has Been Wrought

Short and powerful, SOTT editor Henry See, exposes the shallow hypocrisy of the average well-heeled Israeli illegal immigrant to the land of the Palestinians

Blue Ibis
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Squatters Without Conscience

Henry See
SOTT
Sat, 09 Jun 2007 11:08 EDT

©Mike DuBose, UMCom

A Palestinian child swings over the rubble of the family home,demolished by Israeli bulldozers in a valley east of Hebron.

The Forward, which bills itself as "the Jewish daily", had an article this week on American Jews who choose to become illegal settlers on occupied Palestinian land. The "difficulties" they face are illustrated by the following comment:

"'Before we found Neve Daniel, my husband told me, 'I love you and I want to live in Israel, but I'm very materialistic and if I don't have a nice house, we're not moving,' said Lara Kwalbrun, a peppy mother of six, as she gave a tour of her luxurious new home while toting a baby in her arms."

As long as moving into an illegal settlement meant life in a mobile home, a large number of American Jews weren't interested. They left it up to their more pioneering and violent brethren to go out and "colonize" the area, to actually confront the owners of the land with clubs and guns and chain saws and bulldozers. Now that the out and out outlaws have "claimed" the land, so to speak, and the base can move into a gated community fed by water siphoned away from the Palestinians and policed by troops paid for by American taxpayers, these new settlers can move in and never have to come into contact with the people they have displaced. You know, the ones walled up in the concentration - uh, refugee - camps out of sight and out of mind.

Another choice quote:

"Jerusalem has evolved to be like Manhattan in terms of prices and having to live in an apartment," said Michael Chernofsky, an orthopedic surgeon from Pennsylvania who recently moved with his family to Efrat, a Gush Etzion settlement. "If you want to live in a house, you need to move out to the suburbs."

Language is a powerful means of creating an illusory world. We make up words to replace other words, antiseptic words to replace bothersome and ugly words, neutral or comfortable words that point away from injustice and suffering. The Palestinians are being ejected out of Jerusalem by force and by a series of laws that mandate that if they are essentially imprisoned on the West Bank and unable to return to their homes in East Jerusalem, after a certain amount of time, the state can confiscate their property.

"Suburbs" brings to mind the manicured lawns of the New Jersey many of these settlers have left. "Suburbs" has associations of being the epitome of American life. The word "Suburbs" is a telling example of how language is used to create an illusory world that we take for reality.

Settlements on Palestinian land are illegal according to international law. The settlers are criminals. Not only that, they are actively aiding and abetting the genocide of the original inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians who have been walled off into compounds on their own land.

If such actions don't make your blood boil, then you probably don't have a conscience. When I say "conscience," I'm not talking about a set of rules you live by that allows you to believe you are a 'good person', the kind of things you can apply mechanically as a series of if-then statements that allow you to see how much you can get away with in any given situation. We all go through that stage as kids, and some people do actually outgrow it, though from the state of the world, it is clear that it is a small percentage. There are unfortunately large numbers of people for whom this stage represents the pinnacle of their moral development.

Illegal settlers are certainly counted among their number. They are, moreover, buttressed in their selfishness by the ideology that justifies killing off the Palestinians in the name of their psychopathic god, so their crimes, crimes to anyone of conscience; holy acts according to the ideology of Judaism as well as to their Christian supporters. American intervention in Iraq is based upon pretty much the same thought process where the religion descends from the Almighty Dollar and "Democracy" rather than the bloodthirsty Yahweh.

There is no excuse for the seizure of this land and the justifications of "Chosen People" or "God-given right". None. Those are fairy tales told to cover up theft and murder. And anyone with a functioning conscience knows this, feels this deep in his or her gut. Any attempt to justify or explain away the theft of land and genocide of the people of Palestine is a clear marker that the individual has no conscience or that it is so totally anaesthetized that it may as well not exist.

Note: If you wish to take a voyage into the very pit of soullessness, some black and clammy void that would not be out of place in the works of H.P. Lovecraft, then go to Wikipedia and do a search on "Gush Etzion" and start following the links.