[Peace-discuss] Fw: [socialistdiscussion] This is so horrific I would like us all to forward it far and wide.

[C. G. Estabrook]

And yet many of our good liberal friends on Tuesday will be celebrating the man 
most responsible for these horrors.  He was responsible in the sense that he 
could have stopped them -- more than anyone else, including the outgoing 
president, could have stopped them -- and chose not to.  --CGE


unionyes wrote:
>  
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* LOUGHFINN at AOL.COM <mailto:LOUGHFINN at AOL.COM>
> *To:* socialistdiscussion at yahoogroups.com 
> <mailto:socialistdiscussion at yahoogroups.com>
> *Sent:* Sunday, January 18, 2009 5:17 PM
> *Subject:* [socialistdiscussion] This is so horrific I would like us all 
> to forward it far and wide.
> 
> 
> Published on Saturday, January 17, 2009 by the Guardian/UK
> The Palestinians Say: 'This Is a War of Extermination'
> 
> by Ahdaf Soueif
> 
> Everyone says something new is going on here; something different. The 
> residents of Egyptian Rafah are used to the sounds of rockets and shells 
> exploding on the other side of their border, but they've never heard the 
> sounds they've been hearing over the last 20 days. Twenty-five miles 
> further into Egypt the general hospital at el-Arish is used t o 
> receiving the Palestinian wounded. The staff have never seen injuries 
> like these before. The hospital forecourt is swarming with ambulances, 
> paramedics, press. The wounded are raced into casualty.
> 
> The Palestinians are mostly silent; each man working out where he finds 
> himself and what he's going to do. Fearing for their wounded and fearing 
> for those they've left behind, they are silent but unfailingly courteous.
> 
> They try to answer questions. They must be exhausted? "The people of 
> Gaza," they say (not "we"; they're too proud for that), "the people of 
> Gaza just wish for an hour's sleep." The case you're accompanying? "I'm 
> here with my nephew. He's 19. Shrapnel in his head. He was sitting with 
> his friends. He's a student. Architecture. The helicopter dropped a bomb 
> and seven of the group were killed and six were injured. They found a 
> boy's hand on a 3rd floor balcony."
> 
> Later, I see a boy sitting up in bed with a bandage round his head. He 
> has wide brown eyes flecked with green and he frowns a little, as though 
> he was trying to remember something important. In the next bed a 
> 12-year-old also with a bandaged head is not quite conscious yet. He is 
> flushed and fretful.
> =0 A
> 
> The Palestinians say: "This is a war of extermination." They describe 
> bombs which break into 16 parts, each part splintering into 116 
> fragments, the white phosphorus which water cannot put out; which seems 
> to die and then flares up again.
> 
> No one I spoke to has any doubt that the Israelis are committing war 
> crimes. According to the medics here, to reports from doctors inside the 
> Gaza Strip and to Palestinian eye-witnesses, more than 95% of the dead 
> and injured are civilians. Many more will probably be found when the 
> siege is lifted and the rubble is cleared. The doctors speak of a 
> disproportionate number of head injuries - specifically of shrapnel 
> lodged in the brain.
> 
> They also speak of the extensive burns of white phosphorus. These 
> injuries are, as they put it, 'incompatible with life'. They are also 
> receiving large numbers of amputees. This is because the damage done to 
> the bone by explosive bullets is so extensive that the only way the 
> doctors in Gaza can save lives is by amputating.
> 
> One of the nurses said to me that the nurses a nd paramedics were 
> horrified by what they were seeing. "We deal with cases all the time," 
> she said. "But what we're seeing these days we've never seen before or 
> imagined."
> 
> Upstairs a professor of economics, accompanying his brother, sees me 
> staring at my notes and says: "Exaggerate. Whatever you write will not 
> be as bad as the truth."
> 
> In the silence that followed someone put a mobile in my hand.
> 
> "Look!" On a rubble-strewn street lay the body of a roasted and charred 
> child. Two bones were sticking out where her thighs had been. "The dogs 
> ate her legs," he explains. For a moment I put a hand over my eyes. The 
> phone goes round the table, each man gravely contemplating the burned 
> child on the screen. Then someone asks: "What will it take to make the 
> Israelis stop?"
> guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
> Ahdaf Soueif is a writer whose novel The Map of Love was shortlisted for 
> the 1999 Booker prize.
> 
> "Just because you don't take an interest in politics doesn't mean 
> politics won't take an interest in you."  Pericles, 430 BC
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