An Open Letter to Bush:Curse can only be stopped by justice [Archives:2004/705/Opinion]

By Bakr Hamud Aljunaid
Bakr.Aljunaid@
sabafon.com.ye
I send this letter to You President Bush, the so-called President of peace and freedom and to the people who believe him.
Your Excellency, Mr. Bush
Regardless of the consequences of this letter to you, whether be blame, black email that includes threats, etc., I will never stop writing about the double standard policy that you are adopting.
You have succeeded these days in making people of the USA and other countries believe that what is right is wrong and the wrong is right. Or as Shakespeare said in one of his tragedies (Macbeth) “Foul is fair and fair is foul.”
You have done a good job in controlling Arab regimes, which have turned to be like toys in your hands. They have been manipulated and played with the way you wanted. Congratulations on this achievement!
The whole world continues to watch Israel's war against unarmed civilian Palestinians. You too are watching the crimes of the Israeli State against Palestinians and their leader President Yasser Arafat. You must be aware of the killings, the massacres, the mass graves, the plane attacks, the tanks ravaging Palestinian towns and cities. You know about the bullets that penetrate innocent bodies, shatter windows, and you must have heard of the cars crushed by Israel tanks, the trees that were uprooted, and much more.
You also do know that many Palestinians are living without sufficient water, food, or medicines. They have no ambulances that can bring the wounded to hospitals, and if they get one, Israeli soldiers would prevent them from hospitalizing the injured. There are times when there is no way to take the dead from the streets or from under the rubble, and you know that well!
Your government has a major hand in all of this because you support Israel in all means possible, regardless of if it is right or wrong.
The brutalization in the occupied territories is taking many forms: the images are there for all to see of children terrified, elderly shot at, and women terrorized, traumatized: There is an uneven war in Palestine, and you know that is true.
In a time Sharon is congratulating his Israeli Defense Forces for their success in crushing innocent people, and for their “courage” and intelligence in causing maximum destruction to Palestinians and then you congratulate him by calling him a “Man of Peace”?
Sharon says that the Israeli Defense Forces will continue their military operations until their mission is completed. Do you know what that mission is? It is to destroy all forms of dignity in all Palestinians, even if it would mean to build a wall around Palestinians and even if that means their genocide.
All of this is happening while the world is watching silently, because they know you and your government are behind Israel's atrocities.
But let me tell you this, Your Excellency.
The whole world is watching you too. This includes Washington clique around you. The world is observing your foreign policy, which is a policy designed to divide the world into those who are with you and those against you; good and evil; civilized and uncivilized; On the other hand, the ones you call evil or uncivilized are those you easily converted into terrorists. So that your war on 'terrorism', vague as it is, legitimizes the state terrorism of Israel in the public's eyes.
Palestine is one more diabolical scene in the Theater of the Absurd in which you are a major player. You did it recently in Afghanistan, when the world's richest and mightiest country went to war against the world's poorest country. You launched this war with the pretext of finding Osama Bin Laden and his supporters. You bombed a whole country and its people almost out of existence and persist in continuing with this bombardment.
You repeated your war on Iraq, and who knows who would be next?
Who will bear the costs of your wars? What about those thousands killed? Who will feed the seven million starving refugees? We are talking about hundreds of thousands of potential deaths and billions of dollars in collateral damage your Administration has caused.
The price will probably be paid by your children and your grandchildren, who will be asked by our own grandchildren one day “why did you do it?”
Will history still be written by the privileged and the powerful? Or will the voices of Ramallah be heard? Will the stories of Bethlehem be told? Will the dead of Jenin speak? Will all of your crimes ever end?
Will we ever find those who have disappeared? Will Palestine still remain a distant dream? It will if you do not stop playing God, e.i., a self-proclaimed god who speaks from both sides of his mouth. You continue to call for stopping the 'violence on both sides' Both sides, Mr. President? One side that has the tanks and the gunships and the latest high-tech US heavy weapons and the other side, which is constituted of children with stones just for the sake of self-defense. If you are talking about suicide bombers, I would like to remind you of what was once wisely said about them, “Suicide bombers are not born, they are made.” Perhaps the time has come to ask why they were made. You should also accompany that question with others such as “Why do so many people around the world burn the American flag? Why is there so much anger, even bitterness about the policies of the USA?”
When coming to the September 11 attacks, why was revenge and retaliation your only response? Revenge is destructive, it corrodes; for violence is a cycle that must return to destroy and it is only a matter of time before it happens.
Sharon will not be Prime Minister forever. He will be judged in the World Court of the People for war crimes and for crimes against humanity. Sabra and Shatila will haunt him: Jenin will indict him. Only history will tell if his friends will be judged too. You too will not be President for all time. But you will continue to be a father, perhaps a grandfather. As you gather your grandchildren around you, what stories will you tell them? Will you tell them that once upon not-so-long-ago… hundreds of Palestinians were being massacred… you looked away, you spoke your double standard speeches, you did your political somersaults… extermination was your script… you had the main actor's role in the Absurd Theater.
Will you tell them that you had no answer except violent ones? What will you tell your grandchildren? Perhaps you should listen to other stories, i.e., stories that come from the corners of the Arab streets, stories that come from the people of the South, stories that come from people of conscience all over the world and there are many in your part of the world too. You should hear the stories of courage, dignity, of harmony and hope: stories that come from the children, who were tortured, terrorized, traumatized in wars made or encouraged by you. They are stories from both so-called civilized or uncivilized children of the rain, of the sun… children of the stars…that speak of justice.
As a final word Mr. President, I want to stress to you that justice, and only justice can stop the curse of greed and violence and war.
Only Justice, Mr. President, can stop the curse!
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[archive-e:705-v:13-y:2004-d:2004-01-22-p:opinion]