November 10, 2006
Dear Jennifer,
People are hard to understand. I have been trying to do something about the long series of crimes that were committed against me by a doctor. Five years ago, I discovered what he had been doing. Nobody wants to know about it. Some people no longer talk to me. My own mother doesn't support me on this. "John was always such a polite little boy," she says. You would think he was the aggrieved party. I have evidence. I have made a case. I have published a CD. I am writing a book. But he is a doctor. Nobody wants to know about it. Here in Saskatchewan, mistreatment of Indian children at residential schools finally received a hearing, after 80 years. Abuse of children (mostly boys) by Roman Catholic priests was ignored for decades; maybe it was ignored for centuries. Whatever one might think of Texas, they get some things right, sometimes. A jury hammered Merck with a $253,000,000 judgement awarded to the widow of a man who was taking VIOXX. My Anglican priest says don't ask why God lets terrible things happen. What matters is how you respond to them. That's why terrible things happen. I won't be putting a bomb in the doctor's car. I'll write my book. I'll publish it myself. I won't get $253,000,000 and if I do, I'll give it away.
You wrote a very
moving piece. I sent it to every Member of Parliament. I see this morning
that most of them are reading it. Maybe something good will happen. Say
a prayer and write some more. Bless you and do be careful over there.
- Morley
Jennifer Loewenstein wrote:
> Thanks for writing this. And sending it around. I wish, I only wish,
it would wake people up.
>
> Jennifer
>
> "Action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost
nothing." -Gerrard Winstanley
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Morley Evans
> To: morleyevans@morleyevans.com
> Sent: 11/10/2006 2:22:51 AM
> Subject: Nightmares: How Gaza Offends Us All by Jennifer Loewenstein
>
> On November 11th we honour those who
fought and sometimes died in our defence. Did they fight and die so this
could continue? Do we bring shame on them — and on ourselves —
by letting this continue? Shame. Shame! - Morley Evans
>
www.counterpunch.org
>
>
> November 9, 2006
> Nightmare:
> How
Gaza Offends Us All
>
> By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
>
> An opened jaw with yellowed teeth gaped out of its bloodied shroud.
The rest of the head parts were wrapped in a plastic bag placed atop the
jaw and nostrils, as if to be close to the place to which it once belonged.
The bag was red from the pieces that were stuffed inside it. Below the
jaw was a human neck slit open midway down: a fleshy, wet wound smiling
pink and oozing out from the browned skin around it, the neck that was
still linked to the body below it. Above him, in the upper freezer of
the morgue lay a dead woman, her red hennaed hair visible for the first
time to strange men around her. More red plastic wrapped around an otherwise
absent chin. She was dead for demonstrating outside a mosque in Beit Hanoun,
northern Gaza where more than 60 men sheltered during the artillery onslaught
by Israeli tanks and cannons.
>
> Most of the others still had their faces intact. They lay on their
silver morgue trays stiffly as unthawed frozen food. One man had a green
Hamas band tied around his head; he looked like a gentle shepherd from
some forgotten, pastoral age. Another's white eyes were partially opened,
his face looking out in horror as if he'd died seeing it coming. Then
a muddy, grizzled blob on the bottom left tray, black curls tangled and
damped into its rounded head and blessedly shut eyes. A closer look revealed
a child, a boy of 4: Majed, out playing his important childhood games
when death came in like thunder and rolled him up in a million speckles
of black mud. The other dead had already been taken away.
>
> Muslim burials take place quickly, a god-send to the doctors, nurses
and undertakers who, at the hospitals and morgues, desperately need the
space for next batch of casualties who would sleep on the same sheets,
same steel-framed beds, in the same humid heat, in the same close, crowded,
grief-stricken rooms, often on the floors, with the same tired, unpaid
attendants doing their rounds without the proper supplies to help them
if they were still alive. And some would die on the operating table like
the young man gone now to the Kamal Adwan hospital morgue when his wounds
became too much for his body to bear. Two young girls preceded him earlier
the same day. Blessed are they who leave this human wasteland washed and
shrouded for a quiet, earthy grave.
>
> Today the hospitals will be filled beyond capacity again when the
18 civilian dead from a pre-dawn attack on Beit Hanoun -- women, men and
children blasted out of their sleep into human chunks -- roll out of the
ambulances and into the freezers of Shifa or Kamal Adwan hospitals in
the northern Gaza Strip. How dare they sleep in their houses at night
when the tanks are barking out commands.
>
> Do you believe this was an accident? that an international investigation
will ever take place? Like after Jenin? Like after Dan Halutz and his
2000 pound bomb which was dropped on an apartment building in Gaza City
killing 15 people, 9 of them women and children? Like after the siege
of Jabalya in the fall of 2004? Like after Operation Rainbow in Rafah?
Like after Huda Ghalia's family was blasted into nothingness during an
outing on a Gaza beach? Will US eyes, glued to their glaucousy TV screens
to find out which marketed candidate won the corporate-managed midterm
elections, ever know that that another massacre of Palestinians took place?
>
> At Shifa hospital, Gaza's central hospital, where Dr. Juma' Saqa
and his staff cope with the daily shortages of supplies from kidney dialysis
machines to fans and clean linens; where cancer medications are unavailable
to the increasing rate of cancer patients and elective surgeries, such
as for hernias or tonsils, are a thing of the past. This is where doctors
and nurses witness how the water that Gazans drink causes innumerable
ailments, rotting teeth, anemia in children and kidney dysfunction because
of its brackish, poisonous quality. This is where children lie half naked
in their beds, white tape across their noses holding tubes to their faces
so that they may eat or breathe-- like Ahmad aged 3, also from Beit Hanoun,
who took a bullet in the right side of his belly that exited on the left.
His mother stands over him passively, grateful. Ahmad, at least, is going
to live. But for what?
>
> Each night in Gaza City that first week in November, explosions sounded
in the northeastern corner of Gaza: a succession of bullets, booms, bombs,
canon fire. On the first night of the onslaught we could still see lights
from Beit Hanoun 10 miles from us blinking and twinkling as if nothing
were really happening; it was all a dreamófireworks, a distant
celebration perhaps. But then, by the second night only a swath of blacked
out space lay in the place of Beit Hanoun, electricity-less and water-less
as the booms continued unabated for an hour or more and the hum of the
pilot-less drones circled round again and again above us, above Beit Hanoun,
above Gaza, automated people-monitors taking stock of the activity below.
Nobody from Beit Hanoun could leave by day to get to work without announcing
to the tanks and the drones that he was prepared to sacrifice his life
for a semblance of normalcy. All men between the ages of 16-35 were rounded
up onto trucks and hauled away for "questioning". What will
happen to them and their families? Will anyone follow up? Will they add
to the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, left to rot while
their wives and children, sisters, brothers, parents go on struggling
to survive?
>
> There lies Gaza stretched 28 miles long in a tumbledown graying,
decaying heap, yawning, tired, wretched, full of garbage. Tape gauze over
your nose to avoid the smell of sewage and burning trash. Try not to notice
the metal-shuttered shop fronts, the empty stores, the proliferation of
horse- and donkey-carts clopping along the streets for lack of fuel, the
ribs of the tired beasts jutting out from their bellies as boys whip them
along to keep going. The joke is the cerulean blue sky illuminating the
rubbish tip, the palm trees and purple flowers beaming in the November
sun ñ natural non-sequiturs, like the box of fresh chocolates offered
to the journalists filming the woman's wounded son as she yells out her
frustrations and horror at the Americans and the Israelis who are killing
her family. Why? She asks. Why, why, why?
>
> Ask Mark Regev, Israel's eager, hideously sincere government spokesperson.
On CNN's international news he tells us in earnest that this is Israeli
self-defense. The Qassam fire into Sderot and Ashkelon must stop. Israelis
have the right to defend themselves. The "operation" in Beit
Hanoun will not stop until the Qassams stop. Each word drivels out of
his mouth into a bubble of obscenity for everyone watching from the vantage
point of Gaza. Verbal pornography, sado-masochistic jargon from the prince
of Hasbara leaks onto the dust like poisonous bile bought, paid for and
sought after by the lords of power and their occupying machinery.
>
> The shoddy, home-made Qassams hiss like cornered alley cats when
they are fired into the skies. Stupid and bestial, they zing across the
border like crazed beasts not knowing where they are going. They'll dash
forever like this until the occupation of Palestine ends. The Gazans know
this, Hamas knows it, Fatah knows it, the PFLP knows it; In Israel, Labor
and Likkud know it, Meretz knows it, Yisrael Beiteinu knows it, Shas knows
it; Peretz, Olmert and Lieberman know it, Sharon knew it, the Israeli
people know it, official America know this, so 40 years after 1967 and
58 years after 1948, why is the occupation not yet over?
>
> Because Israel does not want it to end. Because Israel wants the
land and the resources without the people. Because you have to eviscerate
a culture in order to maintain total control over it. Because the United
States says that's just fine with us, you serve our purpose well. You
help make the war on terror convenient. You help fit Iraq into the scheme.
You'll help us with Iran as well. Who the hell cares about a million and
a half poverty-stricken Gazans and their dust, their sand, their stinking,
crumbling heap of a disaster area homeland?
>
> What a terrible shame it is that Gazans have not yet attained the
status of Human in the eyes of the Western powers, for the resistance
there will continue to be an enigma until this changes. For now, however,
the slaughter will continue unabated.
>
> Leaving Gaza 6:30am Saturday morning, November 4th 2006, I hear a
loud explosion. My cab driver picks me up and we drive down the main street
in Gaza City toward Erez. Suddenly, unexpectedly, there is a smoldering
mass of wreckage in front of me, a car surrounded by boys picking at its
still-hot exterior. Inside are four blackened, seared human shapes, crispy
at the touch, faceless from the burns, charcoal, shreds of steaming cloth,
a smell of barbecued human flesh, sirens in the distance. Burnt and vaporized
metal looks like what you see in a science fiction movie. Burnt humans
look like singed paper mache monsters whose pieces fall off at the hint
of a breeze.
>
> Gaza is sorry for these indiscretions, this poor taste, this unseemly
topic of conversation. You are right to express your indignation. How
Dare Gaza Speak of These Things!? But it can no longer contain its secrets
even with the blockade of visitors to its vile shores; its voice is shrill
even when sublimated through the layers of media deceit. The smoke rises
higher in the skies each time. The prison is imploding and the resistance
will never end.
>
> Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's
Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza City, Beirut
and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East,
where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a human rights activist.
She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net
>
>
>
>
> "Action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost
nothing." - Gerrard Winstanley
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>Visit me on the Web
>http://www.morleyevans.com
>Accurate Solutions to Complex Problems
>
--
Visit me on the Web
http://www.morleyevans.com
Accurate Solutions to Complex Problems