You Make Peace With Your Enemy - Gerald Kaufman's Speech

I keep being delayed in writing my next entry as far greater people than I keep writing far more important things.

I strongly encourage you to read the full text of Sir Gerald Bernard Kaufman, a British MP, who made a short but powerful speech in Parliament on January 15th, 2009. I grew up believing we had passed the age when we referred to people and had to say: he's a Catholic, she's a Jew, they're Communists, he's from India and a Budhist. But apparently I was raised wrong. In this day and age, it seems we need those attributes to qualify or disqualify each other. Well, in this case, Sir Kaufman is a Jew, who speaks with a loud moral voice on the Palestinian situation, specifically Gaza.

The text isn't long - there's no point in my summarizing it. Click here and read this powerful text.

I heard today from two people from Ashkelon. It is undeniable that even the threat of a random rockets--regardless of the fatality ratio--causes stress, distress and has led people to want their government to 'just do something' (and maybe forget all their government has done to cause the situation in the first place).

The insanity is that, if you wonder why (some) people in Gaza are still tempted to throw rockets rather than rebuild their country, you have to remember that...
there's no cement (Israel controls that),
there's little fuel (Israel controls that),
there's very little heavy machinery to remove the rubble (Israel controls that),
there's no legal way to bring in the money (Israel controls that),
money and equipment can only come through the tunnels (the US will spend 30 million dollars closing those) or by sea (the French have sent two war ships to help Israel control that),
and the BBC in its wisdom is keeping British NGOs from raising money through TV ads to help Gaza.

God have mercy on us fools! Jewish fools, Muslim fools, Christian fools, goys and koufars

Elrig