Dear Friends I am writing to you from Guardian Films the documentary arm of the Guardian Newspaper to bring to your attention a series of films we have produced on alleged war crimes committed by Israel during the 23-day offensive against Gaza earlier this year.
The films focus on three separate cases of alleged war crimes;
(1) The use of Palestinian children as human shields.
(2) The systematic targeting of medics and hospitals by the Israeli Army.
(3) The use of state of the art precision weapons such as UAV aircraft to fire on groups of unarmed civilians.
Three documentaries produced by Guardian Films and Clancy Chassay made during a month-long investigation add weight to calls this week for a full inquiry into the events surrounding Operation Cast Lead, which was aimed at Hamas, but which left over 1400 Palestinians dead - around 300 known to be children.
PLEASE FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW TO OUR GAZA WAR CRIMES PAGE:
We are requesting from you all where possible to please embed a link to our 'Gaza War Crimes' page on your blog and web sites. Look forward to hearing from you soon
Naomi Shihab Nye put this picture on the cover of her collection of poetry, 19 Varieties of Gazelle — Poems of the Middle East. She was called by angry "scholars" who informed her that the poem was by Mahmud Darwish. When Nye met Darwish a week later she said to him: "'Please forgive our mistake. If this book ever gets reprinted, I promise we will give the proper credit for the verse. ' He stared closely at the picture. Tears ran down his cheeks. 'Don't correct it,' he said. 'It is the goal of my life to write poems that are claimed by children.'"
I think that it is important to thank publications that recognize Palestinians in such a positive way. My letter to the editor:
Dear Editor,
It is with profound gratitude that I thank you for publishing Naomi Shihab Nye's "Remembering Mahmoud Darwish" and Linda Christensen's "Teaching Ideas: The Prison Cell." How beautiful for Nye to document Darwish's words upon learning that the refugee child had claimed his poem as her own: "'Don't correct it,' he said. 'It is the goal of my life to write poems that are claimed by children.'" I intend to incorporate Christensen's ideas for teaching "The Prison Cell" in my AP Literature classroom.
AMY GOODMAN: Alice Walker, can you tell us why you chose to go to Gaza at this time?
ALICE WALKER: Well, because I really love people, and I wanted to be here with the women who have lost so much in their lives. They’ve lost their homes. They’ve lost their children. And they just seem to be people I wanted to spend International Women’s Day with, so I made sure to call up Medea and get on the—in the group.
AMY GOODMAN: And where are you now? What are your travel plans in these days?
ALICE WALKER: I think we will be going to visit more refugee camps. We were visiting one this morning. We also went around and saw a lot of the places that had been bombed. This was, of course, very disturbing, and very disturbing to see the look in some of the children’s eyes. I saw two little boys being held by an older brother. He seemed to be about eight years old, and they were like five and four. And they were—they seemed to me to be children who had lost their parents. And I feel that there are a lot of children in that situation, and this is especially difficult to bear.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 13, Section 2 states "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
This blog advocates for the implementation of the Palestinians' inalienable right to return home and calls upon each and every blogger concerned about human rights, justice, and a durable peace in the Middle East to get behind the effort to advocate for its implementation. If you support implementation of this inalienable right, please e-mail me or leave a comment and I will link to you.
(AP Photo/Hatem Moussa)
