Dear Brother and friend AbdelBari Atwan,
Editor of Al-Quds
London


It has been said that you, Sir, are the "last Arab". We both know that is not true, there are still
others, but millions of us know why it was said of you.

You are a Knight of the Arabs that's for sure. Born in a Gazan refugee camp, you are a Prince
among men. I have known you for thirty years; back then you still had some of the dust of the
camp about you. Now you are an ever-present commentator in the media, publish the Arab
world's only independent newspaper, and are highly respected by all who know you.

Together we have fought in the land of Balfour and Sykes, of Anthony Eden and Anthony Blair,
many great political battles. Many tears and much blood has flown over those years, and
before, and its not going to stop now.

I am moved to write having seen yet another of your heart-piercing interviews on television. You
leave the interrogator speechless when you tell them that you were born there, and in the very
camp we are all watching being destroyed by fire and red-hot steel. How could you, this man of
letters, this sophisticated commentator, have come from...that?

Of course we know that it was....that...which made you, and that you will never lose your
burning sense of indignation, your cry, no, roar on behalf of those you left behind.

But it was not your voice which moved me most tonight  its 5 in the morning and I am still
fitfully flicking across the channels not so much looking FOR but away refugee the unrelenting,
hypocritical, downright mendacity of most of them.

It was the voice of Amal, a young mother who appeared late last night in a package on
Al-Jazeera English, interviewed in a school in the southern Gaza Strip.

This young woman, a girl really, was with her baby one of 61 members of the same family of
refugees hiding out in this school in the hope that it would not be attacked by the Israeli
invaders. Her baby had not been changed in three days, she was feeding her the last bottle of
milk and in a dirty bottle, there was no electricity and very little running water. What there was,
was being drunk and cooked with, washed in and washed with. And the people in this school
were the lucky ones.

Elsewhere in the Strip at that very moment, children like Amal's were being carried, stiff and
dead, from the hospitals by their fathers.

Women wailed, bled, died in Jabalia, the Beach Camp, Rafah, Gaza City. Young boys recited
the Shahada as they were carried into intensive care units operating in near darkness, running
out of medicines, even bandages, and being staffed by doctors and nurses close to madness
through despair.

International journalists - banned by the invaders from seeing for themselves - nonetheless
continue to accept the terms of reference imposed by those who have banned them. Every
bulletin incants the same falsehood: that Israel is attacking "Hamas militant...targets" (by the
way why are Palestinian fighters always described as "militants"?

But how can a baby be Hamas? A Mosque? A school? An Ambulance? A family? A whole
apartment block? Or, as I heard you explain, the parliament building.

Oh what an irony is that destruction of the parliament building, housing that rarity in the Arab
world, a freely elected assembly. In a way I suppose its a variant on Bertolt Brecht, when he
wrote of the old East Germany that the Communist Party, if disappointed in the people, could
always abolish them and elect a new one.

I was never a supporter of Hamas myself. I spent the best years of my life as a partisan of Abu
Amar, how we miss the late president now more than ever. And to his memory I remain loyal.

But Hamas are the freely elected government of the Palestinian people living under occupation.
Neither jailing or killing its MPs and supporters, nor besieging the voters to punish them for
their free choice, nor destroying the parliament in which they can no longer sit will change that.

"The terrorist group Hamas" is the usual mantra in the western media discourse. These
commentators clearly can't remember back as far as the last Palestinian elections. Which
means of course they cannot possibly know that Israel itself came into being on a wave of
terror.

From the assassination of the United Nations' Special Envoy through the hanging by wire of
British soldiers, the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killing almost a hundred
people, including British civil servants, to the massacre of whole villages of Palestinians like
Deir Yasin.

The first and last of these crimes of course were carried out by two subsequent prime
ministers of Israel.

And, of course, as Israel came into being your own country of Palestine necessarily
disappeared. They were after all mutually exclusive. Palestine was wiped off the map. Its
people scattered to the four winds as refugees and, generation after generation, of squalor,
pogrom, a people lost in the wilderness. As your book has it, citizens of a country of words.

And of course, returning to the western coverage, there is no "targtting" in any case. How
could there be? If you bomb a seven story apartment building to kill one man (and his four
wives and several of his children) in what sense is that "targeted"? You have in fact targeted
every single person in that block and given the density of Gaza, adjacent blocks too. That's
hundreds of people you have "targeted", in which case you have not targeted at all.

Neither are the weapons capable of "targeting". When tanks and artillery pieces fire shells into
refugee camps, as is happening right now in Jabalia, they are not targeting anyone specifically,
how could they?

A gun barrel barks and a heavy piece of metal and explosives hurtles forth in a general
direction. Anyone with the misfortune to be in its firing line will end up limbless, eyeless in
Gaza; or just plain dead.

How can a warship off the coast be said to be "targeting" anyone when their cannons boom
and their death and destruction are delivered onto the beach and beyond? The F16's and the
Apache helicopters show the gullible their "video-footage" of targets. Over and over the same
video-nasty is played. But the vast majority of their bombing raids are never filmed, or at least
film is never released. How could it be?

The bombing of civilians began when the Italians attempted to suppress a revolt in Libya in
1911. Its full horror came to Europe at Guernica in 1937, when the Nazis backing Franco
helped drown the elected Spanish republic in blood. Picasso immortalised the moment and his
painting now adorns the United Nations building in New York. That's the building inhabited by
empty suits and raincoats where George W Bush can paralyse the entire "international
community" with his threat of veto, supported by Gordon Brown.

But the reason the Al-Jazeera package which contained the interview with Amal broke my
heart is nothing to do with diplomacy or international politics. Really it was just a simple
question she repeatedly asked, in a torrent of heartfelt words, spoken through the tears running
down her face and onto the baby she held.
"Where is everybody?" she kept asking.
"Where is the great Arab world they taught us about at school?"
"Why have they left us alone?"
"What have we done wrong to deserve to be left to face this alone. We have nothing."

After the interview, my own children turned to me and asked what were the answers to Amal's
questions. I had no answer to their questions.

I could not explain why 300 million Arabs cannot affect this suffering; cannot even land a box of
tissues to dry Amal's tears, a clean bottle for her baby to drink from, a clean nappy.

I couldn't say why the Arab armies, so huge and bristling with weapons, could not even
threaten to fire a single shot in defence of a Palestine being murdered before their eyes.

I couldn't explain to my own children, never mind Amal's, why the oil and the gas which turns
the wheels of the countries arming, financing, and protecting the murderers was still flowing.

Or why the casinos and the bordellos were full of the potentates of Arabia while the
Palestinians eat from the garbage heaps.

Why some Arabs are buying second rate English football clubs for hundreds of millions while
Amal's baby drinks from a dirty bottle, while hiding from the bombs and praying just to see
tomorrow.

I don't know the answer to these questions.

Why Rafah for example, a border with an Arab country, where the flag of the great Egypt flies,
is sealed shut for almost two years trapping a million and a half Palestinian Arabs at the mercy
of those who wish to murder them, quietly if they can but in a blaze of publicity if they must.

As I say, despite more than 30 years with the Arabs, I cannot answer these questions.

The cheap and easy line is that the puppet presidents and the corrupt kings are to blame. But
that's too easy isn't it.

The world has seen many tyrants. But when their tyranny becomes simply intolerable, when
their incompetence has become so tragically apparent that even the blind can see it, when
their systems have become so bankrupt that their leaders cannot even risk meeting with each
other  well, then normally their people pour onto the streets, out of the factories, mills, fields
and barracks, and tear down their oppressor.

Or at least a patriotic officer steps forward and removes the national embarrassment from the
scene.

The peacock shah, Mobuto, Suharto, the Ceausescus are no more.

When will this happen for the Arabs, dear Abdelbari? You are one of the very "last Arabs"; do
you know the answer to Amal's essential question. "Where is the great Arab world they taught
us about in school...why have they left us all alone?"

I remain, of course,
your comrade


George Galloway MP
House of Commons
London


From www.SpideredNews.com

http://www.georgegalloway.com


Original published at:
http://worldpressnetwork.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=677