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While I was a child growing up in Colorado and Montana, I held the tenets of my American forefathers dear to my heart. Among the pine trees of the Rockies and gushing forest streams I lived the freedom that the early Americans had fought and died for. My heroes were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin as well as all the unknown courageous soldiers who died on lonely battlefields.
It was American freedom fighters and those who refused to succumb to tyranny that forged a free and independent country based on the inalienable rights of all. I could yet hear Paul Revere's cry of, "The British are coming" amongst every blade of grass and every grain of wheat that grew valiant and unrestrained. I was proud to be an American and live in the glorious country of the brave and the free.
However, I also grew up indoctrinated with the ideas that the Jews as a people were faced with extermination by Adolf Hitler and his German army. In the epic films I watched and countless novels I read, the Germans were always depicted as cruel, inhuman and bloodthirsty.
When I began to travel and live abroad, many of the myths that I had constantly been exposed to began to disintegrate. I began to study the history of the Palestinian people and I heard countless testimonies of Palestinians who had been forced out of their homes and off their lands by Jewish invaders. I learned how Palestinians still kept their titles of land stolen from them and I touched treasured keys rusted by time and tears. These keys and yellowed parchment are all that are left to the many whose homes have been occupied or destroyed by those came to take what they had no right to.
I was witness to the sorrow and despair that dug deep crevices on Palestinian faces and many a time I trekked through the dust of dirty, hot, sprawling refugee camps where tin roofs and air block structures baked the former owners of their paradise now lost. Just over the hills and through barbed wire barriers lay the rose gardens and remnants of blossoms of orange and lemon groves. So close and yet so far.
I read about the massacres that drove Palestinian survivors off their land and I spoke to eyewitnesses who miraculously lived through the horror of those black and bloody days. And I watched as the former leaders of Jewish terrorist groups became honored heroes and were elected as leaders of the counterfeit country built over the cremated bodies of the indigenous inhabitants of the land. Every Palestinian town and village stood no longer painted in soft pastel colors of daisies and olive branches but splashed instead in the colors of blood and tears and anguish. Custer's unquenchable thirst for the lives of the innocent reverberated throughout the whole of Palestine.
But it did not stop there. The Palestinians have and still are the inexpedient victims of Jewish greed and Jewish lack of respect for human life and human dignity. Zionist control of the media has manipulated and distorted the facts and covered up the massacres that have been and are yet to be. There are no self-evident truths in the Israeli protocol and in the stolen state of Israel, only Jews have the inalienable rights that all men are entitled to. In Israeli eyes, every Palestinian is dispensable and the life of every Palestinian, valueless. A newborn babe is considered a threat to Israeli security but the American made tanks, planes, helicopters and bulldozers are always depicted as tools to secure Israeli lives and not what they really are, mass weapons that bring terror and death to each and every Palestinian regardless of profession, gender and age. There is no safe haven for any Palestinian. Palestinian lives are not sanctified because they are not Jewish lives.
When word filtered through the Internet about the massacre committed by Israeli forces in Jenin, I felt a sense of shock and helplessness. History has repeated itself so many Palestinian times and when countless Palestinians die at the hands of their occupiers, it is nothing new. Rather, amidst the carnage and rivers of blood that continue to soak Palestinian hills and city streets, human rights groups have become entangled in the definition of just what a massacre is. Had a massacre really taken place in Jenin or not? Would a higher body count make the definition of a massacre more intriguing or more real? Some say as many as 500 were killed. Does this figure not constitute a massacre?
As peaceful turquoise waves lapped the shores of Istanbul, I tried to rationalize what had happened just a few plane hours away. But nothing could excuse the murders of the innocent, the victimized, the occupied. Civilians living in their homes were subjected to the greatest forms of terror. Children were bulldozed alive and buried helplessly beneath the rubble of inhumanity. The elderly, having seen too many massacres became themselves part of the body count. It was Sabra and Shatilla revisited by the Butcher whose thirst for Palestinian blood is insatiable.
But everyone knows a massacre took place in Jenin. Everyone knows that the dead were mostly civilians. Everyone knows that the occupied have every right to defend their lives and property when attacked by their occupiers. I cannot understand how my American forefathers were the brave defenders of American liberty but Palestinian freedom fighters are defined as terrorists. Every Palestinian is a freedom fighter, from newborn to the elderly. They have no choice. They fight with their bare hands when all odds are against them. They live in huge concentration camps where extermination of all that is human in them and their existence as well is a common every day practice.
How can people cry over what Hitler did to the Jews when we now see what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians? Is not one life as valuable as any other or are we supposed to believe that only Jewish lives are of worth?
In Istanbul, students demonstrated against the Israeli atrocities and the massacres. After the unspeakable incident in Jenin, Turkish people came to outdoor tables where pictures of brutalized Palestinians stretched across city squares. Many shook their heads in dismay and then signed their names to protest the brutality being waged against the Palestinian people. At one of the squares in Istanbul, I sat and watched as Turks stared at pictures and whispered to one other, shaking their heads in disbelief and then jotted down their names in small copybooks. Writing down their names perhaps gave them some sense of solidarity with the victims.
The Israeli propaganda machines have categorically denied there was a massacre. But the homeless, the children in prison, the dead yet buried beneath the rubble - all are testimony that indeed a massacre took place. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can lie until he is blue in the face but as he eats, as he writes, as he speaks, Palestinian blood drips from his hands and indelibly stains the blackness of his heart.
He has forged the Palestinian into human bombs. He has taken away from them their country and left them with nothing but bitterness and hopelessness. He has filled his prisons with thousands of Palestinians from every walk of life. Children are tortured and beaten and deprived of the most basic human rights. How many Palestinians have died as a result of torture and how many Palestinian mothers have been shot down in cold blood? How many Palestinian babies will go through life deformed because of Israeli bullets and shells? Where will it all end?
Across the Marmara Sea, in a small snip of Paradise, gypsy women with gold teeth sell flowers of every imaginable color. Life in Turkey is beautiful and free. Elegant trees grow everywhere and the air smells sweet of green grass and summer activities. Boats of every shape and color skim across the turquoise waters and there is a sense of serenity on Turkish countenances. But just over the Mediterranean past where seagulls fly, Palestinians continue to die in the Holocaust that has now become theirs. Weapons made in the USA are wielded by a people who have lost their own humanity. And Israeli lies continue to spin at an even faster pace. But one day, the boy who cried wolf will be found out to be exactly who he is. This Day of Reckoning is close at hand and it is on this day that everyone will see the nakedness of the Emperor with the new clothes.
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