[Peace-discuss] A mother's reflections…

[Morton K. Brussel]

These words, relevant to our community's incident of a military man  
in uniform appearing before our elementary school children, were  
written by an Israeli mother and teacher, Nuri Peled-Elhanan, who  
lost her son some time ago. It is part of an insightful and  
passionate speech she gave, to be found at:

http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan

Mazim Qumseyeh, who came through our town some time ago, relayed this  
on his list serve. (He would have been an ideal Palestinian spokesman  
to have on our forthcoming Israel-Palestine panel.) --mkb

  …Israeli, American, English, Italian mothers raise their children  
with all the love and care in order to sacrifice them to the god of  
death, as if their uterus is a national or rather an international  
asset. and fathers urge their children to commit themselves to armies  
those interests have nothing to do with defense. And when these  
children die for the profits of somebody else their parents bear it  
with dignity and pride, as they were taught, put their dead  
children's photographs on the mantelpiece and sigh: He was so  
handsome in uniform. It is time to tell these parents that no-one is   
handsome in the uniform of brutality. It is time to tell them  
uniforms and ranks and medals have become ugly. Tell them their  
dignity and pride are misplaced. It is time to tell Jewish people  
that the only way to discourage anti-Semitism is by condemning the  
only government in the world who deliberately sends young Jewish boys  
and girls to their certain death and who persecutes to the point of  
genocide a whole Semitic nation, explain to them that it is the  
Jewish government and the actions of its army, not some primordial  
hatred for the Jewish race, which are the reasons for the invention  
of the new sign we often see in pro-Palestinian demonstration, where  
the Star of David is equated with the swastika.

It is a terribly hard task for people who were educated in Israel or  
in the USA or in any other 'western' 'democratic' country, to admit  
we were raised on false racist values. On heterophobia. The only  
thing that can enhance such a change of spirit is the constant image  
of the mutilated small bodies of the victims of these values .…
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