Dear Friends, Yesterday evening, my blog reached its 1,000,000th viewer. Ive been waiting for quite some time now. Its been around 2.5 years since I started HummusForThought with my childhood friend Sari Hawa (who has since started his own blog.) HummusForThought was just supposed to be a platform for our rants. We had too many, you see, and we figured that we needed a blog to host them. This is a great achievement and Id like to see it as a sign that what I have to say resonates with quite a lot of people. And yet I couldnt celebrate. I genuinely appreciate the warm comments and nothing gives me greater joy than a random person stopping me on the streets of Beirut to tell that he/she loves my blog. I cant. It feels poignantly real to say that the dead children of Gaza allowed me to reach my 1,000,000th viewer. Ive been following the horrors unfolding in front of my eyes. Friends in Gaza send me pictures and videos on a daily basis, images that feel too terrifying to be true. Children, men, women, yelling Ya Allah (Oh Lord) in shrieking desperation, their voices haunt me. Too many dead. Too many children dead. From Syria and Iraq to Libya, from the most ignored corners of Africa to those of Burma. Too many. I dont have a reason for focusing on Gaza. No child is more important than another child. Its just that I can barely keep up with those dying just some kilometers to my south. Were it not for the terrorist state of Israel, Id have driven there. Itd have just taken me some hours to go and hug those children. And yes, I could say the same thing regarding Bashar Al Assad or ISIS. Gazas situation has the advantage of being crystal clear to those of us who have been studying the region for some time. The oppressors are vocal about their oppressing, the oppressed vocal about their oppression. Slaughter, mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing. Ive used all these terms to describe the current onslaught. And theyre all accurate. Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe used the term incremental genocide. Other Jewish activists have used the terms ethnic cleansing and massacre. We may argue about the specific term to use, but the situation on the ground couldnt be any clearer. This is not a Jew vs Arab situation, and I refuse to treat it as such. Its a military power vs a defenseless population situation. And yet, after 23 days, after nearly 1,400 Palestinians have died, the vast majority of whom are civilians, 315 of whom are children - a not-so-surprising percentage given Gazas nature as the largest open-air prison with its citizens tightly packed in barely tolerable conditions - the United States of America have increased their military support to the terrorist state. American tax payers money is financing the slaughter of children, literally. I will be preparing a longer, better prepared post on why I support the Palestinians struggle. For now, its enough. At least 32 Palestinians were killed today alone. Do not allow Israel to make you forget who they are. Here are their names: hummusforthought/2014/07/12/names-of-the-victims-in-gaza-continuously-updated/
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 19:01:07 +0000
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