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Check Your Beliefs
By Charley Reese
03/17/06 -- -- Let's play a fantasy game to check on our belief in
human rights. Let's suppose that in a mythical state, a governor
announced a campaign to punish African-Americans for alleged
violence.
Step one is to confiscate the land owned by African-Americans, evict
them from it and use the land to build massive new subdivisions.
Only white Protestant Christians may live in these subdivisions.
Step two is to connect these all-white Protestant Christian
settlements to each other by a highway on which African-Americans
are forbidden to drive. To facilitate control, the automobile tags
for African-Americans will be a different color from the tags issued
to white motorists. Checkpoints would be set up all around the state
capitol to search and harass African-Americans trying to enter.
Would you support such a plan? Would you hail that mythical governor
as a man of peace? Would you go to your church congregation and ask
the members to send money to the occupants of these white
settlements? Would you lobby the federal government to subsidize
this new apartheid state in our midst?
I don't think so. I think most Americans would consider such acts an
abomination, un-American and a mockery of everything both
Christianity and the United States stand for.
Well, if you would condemn such acts here directed against
African-Americans, why won't you condemn identical acts committed
against the Palestinians by the state of Israel?
Those settlements you hear about are built on Palestinian land, and
they are for Jews only. New roads that Palestinians are forbidden to
use connect them. The entire West Bank is riddled with Israeli
checkpoints, where innocent Palestinians are daily humiliated and
harassed. A trip to a nearby village can mean waiting in line at
checkpoints for hours. Palestinians have died in these lines.
After all of these humiliations, abuses, the houses destroyed, the
children killed, the olive trees uprooted, how do you think
Palestinians feel about Americans who support the Israelis no matter
what they do to the Palestinians? Don't take my word about these
abuses. Check out the Israeli human-rights organization at
www.btselem.org/English.
If you cannot condemn the flagrant abuses of Palestinians by the
Israeli government, then you are undoubtedly a bigot, the worst kind
of racist pig who believes that Palestinians are some kind of
subspecies of the human race. If you do condemn in your heart these
terrible abuses, but are afraid to speak out about them, then you
are a damned coward.
I listened in disgust to a congressional committee hearing on the
Palestinian elections. It was all about what the Palestinians have
to do. It was as if the cops, interviewing a child who had been
raped by an adult, lectured the child on dressing provocatively and
of being in places she should not have been in.
The Palestinians are the victims here. It is their land that is
occupied. They have no army. They are at the mercy of the Israeli
government. They don't have a superpower protecting them from
international sanctions and supplying them with billions of dollars.
The United States should be telling Israel to get out of the West
Bank and East Jerusalem, to dismantle its settlements and
checkpoints, and to allow Palestinian refugees to return to or be
compensated for the land the Israelis stole.
You want to know why we have a problem with terrorism? It's not
Islamic fundamentalists or hatred of freedom. It's our support of
Israel's unspeakable abuse of Palestinians. Don't blame Osama bin
Laden. Blame the president, Congress, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee and all the cowardly Americans who practice
hypocrisy by claiming to be moral while supporting gross immorality
committed against their fellow human beings in Palestine.
© 2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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