Friday, January 09, 2009
Vote No on Resolution 34
letter sent to my congressman via
Dear Representative McCarthy:
I am urging you to vote no on Resolution 34 in support of Israel's slaughter of innocent Palestinian children, women, and other civilians. I am a Palestinian-American, a graduate of Cal State, Bakersfield like yourself, and I know that with the inception of a state which privileges one religious group in what was once a multi-cultural area, all matter of horrors have been inflicted on my friends and relatives, including the destruction and depopulation in 1948 of over four hundred villages in what is Israel today. Israel also refuses Palestinians their universal right to return to their ancestral homes; it may surprise you to know that Sderot is built upon a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed and depopulated in 1948. Israel continues its genocide in Gaza today, with its murder of entire family clans; the ICRC reports that a family of upwards of 80 people was murdered in a house in which they sought refgue, and a UN school to which people fled for their lives was also the scene of an Israeli massacre. Massacres are nothing new for Palestinans. I urge you, sir, to educate yourself; in the age of the internet, news flows freely; in years to come, you will not want to have been complicit in what are most definitely crimes against humanity in contravention of the Geneva Convention.
I am urging you to vote no on Resolution 34 in support of Israel's slaughter of innocent Palestinian children, women, and other civilians. I am a Palestinian-American, a graduate of Cal State, Bakersfield like yourself, and I know that with the inception of a state which privileges one religious group in what was once a multi-cultural area, all matter of horrors have been inflicted on my friends and relatives, including the destruction and depopulation in 1948 of over four hundred villages in what is Israel today. Israel also refuses Palestinians their universal right to return to their ancestral homes; it may surprise you to know that Sderot is built upon a Palestinian village that was ethnically cleansed and depopulated in 1948. Israel continues its genocide in Gaza today, with its murder of entire family clans; the ICRC reports that a family of upwards of 80 people was murdered in a house in which they sought refgue, and a UN school to which people fled for their lives was also the scene of an Israeli massacre. Massacres are nothing new for Palestinans. I urge you, sir, to educate yourself; in the age of the internet, news flows freely; in years to come, you will not want to have been complicit in what are most definitely crimes against humanity in contravention of the Geneva Convention.
Sincerely,
Nancy Harb Almendras
photo Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images in The Guardian
The body of a girl who was found in the rubble of her destroyed house following an Israeli air strike on a house in Zeitoun
