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Collin Powell, the liar
by Khalid
Amayreh
Like Peter
the Hermit, who played a key role in instigating medieval Europe to launch
the internecine Crusades against the Muslim East, the current American
Secretary of State Collin Powell is using every opportunity to vilify
Palestinian resistance against Israel’s sinister occupation of the
Palestinian homeland. The French monk preached the infamous lie that
Muslims were mistreating Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. The lie
eventually succeeded in getting Europe to wage the atrocious crusades,
causing incalculable death and suffering to millions of people in Europe
and the Middle East.
Powell, a
former US general whose hands are stained with the blood of hundreds of
thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, is now indulging in sinister lies
about the Palestinian –Israeli conflict. Some of these lies are uglier
than a crime.
Powell,
parroting his White House master, the equally mendacious George Bush,
recently called Ariel Sharon, the certified war criminal, a man of peace!!
Well, how can Sharon be a man of peace? Sharon ordered the extermination
of the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps near Beirut in 1982, killing up to
2000 men, women and children. He never regretted the killings, and instead
of trying him as a war criminal for his horrendous crimes, Israelis
elected him twice as Prime Minister by a landslide majority. The same
Sharon massacred Egyptian POWs in the Sinai Peninsula in 1956, crushing
many of them under the treads of Israeli tanks. The very same Sharon had
ordered his troops to shoot and kill Arab villagers at Kufer Qassem while
returning to their village in the evening.
In the past
three years, as documented by TV cameras around the world, Sharon presided
over the wanton killing and maiming of tens of thousands of defenseless
Palestinian civilians, including hundreds of children. He ordered the
destruction of thousands of Palestinian homes, farms and orchards. The
pornographic destruction of the Jenin refugee camp last year testifies to
Sharon’s Nazi-like brutality.
Furthermore,
the effective reduction of Palestinian towns and villages to large
detention camps puts the former Zionist general on equal footing with the
likes of Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Sharon’s criminal credentials
are too stark and too conspicuous to not to be recognized by any human
being with a shred of good will and moral honesty.
Obviously,
Powell has not even a shred of good will and moral honesty. He is a war
criminal much like Sharon. Similar birds flock together. Similar criminals
think in similar manner.
Now, Powell
is disseminating another plethora of lies about the Palestinian resistance
groups, claiming that they are “enemies of peace” and “impeding peace”
between Israel and the Palestinians. Well, this is another horrendous lie
by Powell. The real reason for the absence of peace in Palestine is the
absence of justice in that land. It is Israel’s continuing occupation of
the Palestinians’ homeland and adamant refusal to end to this nefarious
collective rape of the Palestinian people and their ancestral homeland.
Far from intending to end the decades-old occupation, the Israeli state,
with American tax-payers’ money and unrelenting political backing, has
built hundreds of Jewish-only settlements throughout the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, suffocating Palestinian population centers and effectively
making the purported goal of creating a viable Palestinian state on the
West Bank utterly unrealistic by any shred of imagination.
Furthermore,
Israel is building a fortified apartheid wall well inside the West Bank
for the purpose of ghettoizing Palestinian towns and villages and
arrogating still more land belonging to helpless Palestinian farmers and
peasants.
Interestingly, Powell uttered not a word in criticism of this diabolical
wall, which amounts to a tacit approval of Israel’s genocidal designs
against the Palestinian people.
Still more,
the Israeli state is continuing to vow to not allow Palestinian refugees
to return to their former hometowns and villages from which they were
expelled at gunpoint when Israeli was created in 1948.
In short,
Israel, not Hamas, not Fatah, not the Islamic Jihad, is the real villain
and blocker of peace in the Middle East. Yes, these groups carry out
occasional attacks on Israeli civilians, often as a retaliation for
attacks by the Israeli army and paramilitary Jewish settlers on
Palestinian civilians. Such attacks should be condemned outright. However,
all we constantly hear from Powell and other mouthpieces of the American
empire is only condemnation of Palestinian terror…and sympathetic and
acquiescent understanding of Jewish terror against Palestinian civilians,
as if Jewish lives are worth more than Palestinian lives.!! Has Powell
ever.
Has Powell
forgotten that Israel still refuses to carry out UN resolutions,
including 242 and 338. Israel not only refuses to dismantle the
settlements but actually continues to build new settlements on seized Arab
land. Israel also refuses to end its apartheid structure in the West Bank
which transcends every aspect of Palestinian individual and collective
life from travel movement to water distribution.
Needless to
say, Israel, under America’s watchful eyes, is waging a slow-motion
genocidal war on the Palestinians’ very existence, rendering their daily
life an enduring hell.
The truth of
the matter, which Powell refuses to see, is that the Palestinian people,
mostly civilians, are being systematically bombed, killed, maimed,
buried, surrounded, bulldozed, dynamited, targeted, rocketed, imprisoned,
deported, impoverished, and gradually exterminated by an insolent and
fascist Israel that flies in the face of human, moral and international
norms and laws. And in the meanwhile, Mr. Powell, Mr. Bush and the other
hyper-hypocrites of our time stand mutely, accusing Palestinians of
“terror” and “obstructing peace.”
What are the
Palestinians supposed to do in the face of this Nazi-like evil? Should
they willingly succumb to the unmitigated Israeli holocaust just to obtain
a favorable public relations image and receive a certificate of good
conduct from the parroting spokesman of the White House and State
Department?
Should
Palestinians accept perpetual enslavement and oppression just to appease
Sharon and please the neo-conservative gang in Washington D.C.?
Should they
willingly agree to convert their towns into modern-day Auschwitzes and
Bergen- Belsens?
I suspect that Powell wouldn’t even bother to respond to
these very realistic questions. Didn’t he say, when asked about the tens
of thousands of Iraqis he killed in the First Gulf War “ I don’t think I
am awfully concerned about how many of them died”?
Evil can exceed all limits of imagination.
Source:
by courtesy & © 2003 Al-Ahram Weekly & Khalid Amayreh
by the same author:
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