Christmas trees don American streets and living rooms and wreaths decorate the entrances of homes and places of work. This the season to be jolly as long as you are not a Palestinian or Afghani.

Something is definitely wrong with the majority of the American people. They speak of "peace on earth, good will to men," but their foreign policy does not provide either peace on earth or good will to men. Freedom is but a dream in the hearts and minds of the oppressed.

Americans have been brainwashed into believing that whatever is presented to them in their media is true. Apparently, though many Americans have the latest technology at their fingertips, they are not deep thinkers of what is actually happening in the world around them. Their heads are filled with T.S. Eliot’s sawdust and their hearts have been turned to stone.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the professional psychopathic killer who has the blood of more than 20,000 people indelibly staining his hands, has suddenly become in the American psyche, the silk purse that could not be made out of a sow’s ear.

While Sharon’s American-made F-15 and F-16 warplanes bomb, shell and shoot to kill the innocent and the occupied, he calls for a war against terror while he wages his own terror 24 hours a day against the indigenous inhabitants of the land he squats on.

Though Palestinian President Yasser Arafat has tried to clamp down on resistance fighters who defend their country and sacrifice their lives so their people can be free, Israel labels him a terrorist. All Arafat wants is peace and for his people to have a state of their own.

Sharon has declared a war on terrorism so he therefore should declare a war on himself for he is the greatest terrorist of all. He has tried to turn the US war against Afghanistan to suit his own nefarious goals and to justify his brutal and cruel occupation of the Palestinian people by defining Arafat’s Palestine Authority as a "terror-supporting entity."

Arafat is caught between appeasing the Israelis, being a party to the peace process and not angering his own people. Whatever he does, he is damned. If he arrests Palestinian resistance fighters, he not only angers and offends members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but also might face the consequences of not just internal civil unrest, but a civil war.

If he does not arrest any freedom fighters and quell the Intifada, then Israel brands him a terrorist and puts him in the same category as Saudi dissident Osama Ben Laden who has been accused of being the master mind behind the September 11 attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.

Every day Arafat faces the threat of being extra judicially killed by the Israeli military. We should not forget the F-15 and F-16 American made warplanes that struck at PA installations and nearly killed the Palestinian president.

The idiot American President George Bush who is dumber than a chimp with a Middle Eastern policy that even a mentally impaired person would not endorse, received Sharon on both his visits to the US. Bush did not mind sitting with a master terrorist, but he would not receive Arafat even though the PA president has much more peaceful intentions than his Israeli counterpart.

But it is after all Christmas and we have seen the peace and joy that our cherished actor-president is spreading all over the world. We must close our eyes and forget that Afghanistan has been bombed to nothingness and we must forget too that Bush has given Sharon the go ahead to kill as many Palestinians as he wishes and calls this genocide of the innocent as "Israel’s right to defend itself."

It is a cold and bleak Christmas season in the Holy Land and in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Prophet Jesus. The Palestinian people are being collectively punished, are confined to their ghetto concentration camps and are deemed not human. In accordance with the Christmas spirit, Israeli forces have tightened their siege on Palestinian areas and have bulldozed homes and farmland. We do not hear American condemnation of the continued attacks on the Palestinians. Bush was not a bit concerned when Palestinian civilians were bombed by the American planes the American government supplies Israel with.

But in order for there to be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, there has to be justice on all sides. The Palestinians must be free of the occupation of their land and they are entitled to have a state of their own.

The silk purse is still a sow’s ear after all.

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