Friday, January 26, 2007
26th January marks Holocaust Memorial Day in the U.K., established by Prime Minister Blair in 2001.The message of the Holocaust was ; ' never again', so, at this time, have you noticed that there are no Iraqis anymore?
No children: no Alis, Jassims, Omars, Sabahs, Husseins; no Nairas, Ranins, Yasmins, Esthers, Fetuahs. No Parents; no Umm (mother of) Jassim, Ranin, Sabah, or Abus' (father of) Yasmin, Ali, Omar ... there are no Am or Khal (uncles) or Ama and Khala (aunts) no Jeda (grandmothers) or Jedu (grandfathers.)
No familes, friends, taleb (students) yufadh (teachers) mentors, coaches, shop keepers, friends to children on a special household errand. No fish, date, fruit, falafal, pistachio sellers ... In Iraq, humanity has been erased.
Instead there are 'terrorists', 'insurgents', 'Ba'athistremanants','militants', 'Saddamists', 'Sunnis', 'Shia's', 'foreign fighters', 'Al Qaeda'.
There are 'rag heads', 'camel jockeys' and the all become 'collateral damage' as they are sliced in pieces, beheaded, tortured, slaughtered, by the occupiers or their militia goons as they sleep, drive, walk, play, dying in numbers 'not productive to count', as so succinctly putby General Kimmitt, a man who would seemingly be unphased running a concentration camp.
Car bombs, for which the occupiers are responsible, since they are legally responsible for all under their watch, do not kill Iraqis, with names, loves, plans, hopes. They result in 'body parts', which are pronounced 'Sunni' or 'Shia' (though how they can tell from a bit of foot, flesh, finger or brain, is one of life's chilling, dark miracles.) As under Nazi occuption and in the death camps, bodies pile up or are left to rot in streets, fear preventing collection.
Villages and towns, are now non-communities, where non-people live, they are: 'restive', 'hotbeds', to be 'cleansed' - reminiscent of the WW11 antics of Kommandant Amon Goeth in the Krakow ghetto, who, as in Abu Ghraib, set dogs on the naked and stood on his balcony, a sharpshooter, picking off the terrorified, hounded Jews* .
Iraqis are 'flushed out', 'pacified' (read mass murder) slaughtered along with their non-cattle, goats, sheep, chickens and pets. Ancient, evocotive homes, in their haven of citrus groves, regal date palms, fig trees, the all razed.
'Mission accomplished', it's back to base, with perhaps the odd rape en route, or squashing a few non-kids and the toddlers holding their hands, along the way - since reportedly, America's valiant occupiers, have been told to drive on, if they are in the road, as they might be decoys, to slow them, to enable Umm, Abu, Am or Jedu to lob an RPG their way.
Gives a whole new meaning to would-be President Hilary Clinton's : 'No child left behind', initiative - brought into a sqatted U.S., base, stuck in bits to the tank tracks, or Humvee tyres. Road meat.
In strategic moves of which Kommandant Goeth would be proud, U.S.,service personnel, in their new 'clampdown', are reported as hauling hospital patients out of bed, expelling doctors from their institutions (currently in 'restive' western Anbar province) and taking over the buildings, in which, even liberated of all needed to sustain life since the invasion, Iraq's remaining inventitve, dedicated doctors might have saved some in dangerous or critical conditions.
Water purification plants (where they exist) are destroyed, water and electricity cut off (all in strict violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions) streets blocked and barricaded, homes raided.
The dead, as ever, simply written off as 'terrorists', insurgents - no questions, no trial,,just the summary execution of those brave enough to go about their daily business. The culling of Iraq.
On 11th September 2001; after the Bali bombings, the 7th July 2005 London bombings, the Madrid atrocities, the world sent condolences, candlelight vigils were held, there are emotional annual memorials. Where are the condolences for the silent holocaust of the perhaps one point seven million people who died quietly in Iraq of 'embago related causes'? (U.N.)
Where are the condolences, the international rescue teams, the flood of medical aid for the 9/11 every month in Baghdad?Where is the same for the Madrid, July 7th, Bali, daily, weekly across Iraq?Where is the shame, the outrage, the horror,of the international community as represented by their governments?
Where is the succour for the average one hundred thousand a month fleeing for their lives, who is opening their borders to Iraq's Palestinians, generations who found safety there, since expelled from their heritage after the formation of the Jewish state, now threatened with a very 'final solution' under the liberators watch?
Attacks on U.S., and British troops? A legal and legitimate resistance to an illegal invasion and the genocide of a further ( probably underestimated) nearly three quarter of a million Iraqis (to September 2006.) Bush and Blair never miss an opportunity to reminisce over the courage of the resistance in World War 11, after another illegal invasion plunged Europe in to war.Spot the difference.
The response from Washington's Draft Dodger in Chief, is that Iraqis owe the mass murderering invaders: 'a debt of gratitude' - and for their also dying at the hands of mercenaries brought in with the invasion and countless other factions who have invaded since, detonating, beheading. Washington's patience is running out with the dismembered, distraught and daily near-demented in grief, we are told.
As for Britain's spineless, shameful, 'truthfully economic', Prime Minister: two days before Holocaust Memorial Day, Parliament finally secured a debate on the current Iraq one, for the first time since the invasion and lasting for six and a half hours.
Blair was too busy to attend, addressing instead, the Confederation of British Industry ,which surely included executives from the oil companies, which, he assured the late former Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook (according to Cook's memoirs) were going to contribute to paying for and even turn a profit from the invasion.
He was prevented attending even the winding up of the debate, by a meeting to discuss the rights of same sex couples to adopt. Doubt he thought passingly of Iraq's orphans, evicted from the safety of their orphanages, by the invading forces, in March 2003, and abandoned again, in bewilderment ands trauma, to wander the streets, fend for themselves, or worse, in the mahem, as the bombs fell and since.
The Leader of the opposition Conservative Party, David Cameron was also notably absent. Constantly trying to (unconvinceingly) cash in on the 'green' card, he might have had something pithy to say about the four and a half billion year pollution of Iraq by the radioactive and toxic depleted uranium weapons used by the US and UK. It was not to be.
A member of one of the Committees, involved in the establishment of Holocaust Memorial Day, pointed out, that given history's numerous holocausts, such a day would seem as if: “western lives have more value than non-western lives”. A perception which needed to be changed. “One way of doing that is if the government were to sponsor a national Genocide Memorial Day.“The message of the Holocaust was ‘never again’, and for that message to have practical effect on the world community it has to be inclusive.
We can never have double standards in terms of human life." Further: " Muslims feel hurt and excluded that their lives are not equally valuable to those lives lost in the Holocaust time.”Ibrahim Hewitt, chairman of the charity Interpal, said: “There are 500 Palestinian towns and villages that have been wiped out over the years.
That’s pretty genocidal to me.” ** As is Afghanistan, now and when the US backed the Taliban against the Russians; American decimations echo from the Phillippines to VIetnam, from Haiti to Central America. Britain and other Europeans have been at it since the crusades, as most of the world.Genocide Day, once a year,would have been a minute step to acknowledgement that no one, unique, precious life has more value than another.
An acknowledgement of our common humanity. A tiny atonement and tinier acknowledgement of some supreme western wickednesses. And, as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen Belsen, of the piles of empty shoes, childrens' beyond counting, which litter the planet: testimony to mans' enduring psychosis: ramapant greed and inhumanity to mankind.
* Thomas Kenneally : Schindler's List.
** Sunday Times, 11th September 2005.
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