Saturday, December 2, 2023

Speech at Gov. Mike Dewine's visit to Islamic Center of Greater Toledo

December 1, 2023 
15,000 Palestinians killed. Over 5000 children dead and the world let it happen. How did the descendants of Holocaust victims become war criminals? 

Hitler’s information minister Joseph Goebbels had a philosophy, that if you repeat a lie often enough, people believe it to be the truth and after a while you yourself believe it to be the truth. And this is the power of propaganda. 

In 2012, Randy Linn was continually listening to Fox News and one day, overcome, intoxicated, and armed he entered the Islamic Center and set fire to the prayer area. Ten minutes before he entered, three ladies had just left the Center. He said in court that he had never known a Muslim and was angry with what he had heard on Fox News. 

Political scientist and son of Holocaust survivors, Prof. Norman Finkelstein was asked about what happened on October 7th and he said it was a slave revolt. When you steal the land of a people and imprison them in the largest open-air prison in the world for 75 years, you get a slave revolt. 
 
What is happening in the war on Gaza, is savage power hunger using the two methods of supremacy and dehumanization. 
I’m sure you’ve heard of the missing White woman syndrome, in which disappearances of young attractive, White women gets a lot of attention, but the disappearance of Brown or Black women does not. This is White supremacy in action. 
 
This supremacy premise was in full action when President Biden said about hostage Abigail Edan that “what she had endured was unthinkable”. 
 
I want to ask President Biden why Palestinian children half-alive under the rubble of Israeli savagery, funded by the American taxpayer, don’t classify as enduring the unthinkable. 
 
I don’t have to ask because I know. Zionists, and the self-professed Christian Zionist that Biden is, believe that an Israeli life is more precious than a Palestinian one. They want to wallow in the Chosen People premise, when the major world religions, and even secular democracies recognize that all people are created equal. 
 
The world was in an uproar at the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the loss of civilian life. But more women and children have been killed in Gaza in 50 days than were killed in Ukraine in two years. But the supremacy premise preaches that White Ukrainian life is more precious than brown Palestinian life. 
 
The image of a hand waving under the rubble in Gaza is etched in my mind and stops me from sleeping at night. So how do you unleash the barbarity of killing 15,000 innocents? By dehumanizing them, calling them vermin, calling them human animals. 

Israel, with the United States in faithful tow, does not get to making the rules. The world must not let the maniacal political ambition of Netanyahu continue the genocide in Gaza. 

Chapter 4, verse 135 in the Quran is my favorite: Stand firmly for justice and testify to the truth, even if it goes against yourselves, your parents, or your relatives. The great monotheistic faiths are embedded in justice. My request: don’t side with the oppressor and injustice. Be faithful to your faith.

Editorial ignored Israeli atrocities

 Your editorial "Release the hostages," Nov. 7 has some significant inaccuracies.

We wish President Biden wanted a cease-fire.

Mr. Biden only wants humanitarian pauses, which is a different concept from a cease-fire and is an oxymoron, for a pause in the bombing of civilians cannot be labeled humanitarian.

You label the 250 Israelis “defenseless hostages” and make no mention of the 11,000 unarmed Palestinian civilians that Israel has killed.

Pirates take hostages you say, in reference to Hamas. What do you label a people who occupy Palestinian land, dehumanize them so it is easier to kill them, and indiscriminately bomb hospitals, shelters, and schools?

War criminals?

You call for an unconditional release of hostages, but even Israeli families of the hostages demonstrating in front of Israeli war headquarters recognize the injustice and nonviability of that demand.

“All for all” are their chants and placards — 250 hostages for 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t budge.

Mr. Netanyahu invoking Amalek from the Hebrew Bible raises this to a holy war, justifying the killing of women and suckling children.

The U.N. Charter, secular democracies, and journalistic ethics recognize that all human beings are created equal.

Israel needs to shed the Chosen People supremacy premise, and the consequent impunity with which it is killing Palestinians, so that peace can prevail.

MAHJABEEN ISLAM

Monclova Township

The writer is vice president Islamic Center of Greater Toledo

https://www.toledoblade.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/2023/11/19/to-the-editor-we-must-do-and-be-better-than-this/stories/20231119033?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=opinionbrief&pnespid=7bM7EHQdLKAIyPOctjm9GpKBuguhDoNvNeyj3bNorEJmjJ60USsIAZwHpdjP0vSgbS48iXRH