They Need Clean Water

Is this how you would want your children to grow up?

The people of Gaza, a full half of them children under the age of 15, are without adequate clean water, food, electricity, homes, medicine and well, everything. Children, people. Write me all the polemics you wish about terrorists, but children are not terrorists. The babies dying in Gaza because there is no sewage treatment and the aquifer is being poisoned are not terrorists. They are babies. And the same people that shout and cry when a collection of cells is aborted think this is just fine. Seriously, fuck you all. And stop calling yourselves prolife until you can bring youself to care about Palestine's children.





Today, 1,400 activists from from over 42 countries will march on the wall in Gaza to protest the inhumane, cruel treatment of the Gazans. I felt nauseated when I read this. I fear for them. I really don't think all 1,400 of them are walking out of there.





And I wish I could be there. I wish I could do something for all those people- and that's what they are, people- suffering under conditions I cannot imagine. You take away my coffee and I'm a wreck, I can't imagine drinking sewage water. I wish I could make everyone listen when I say that we cannot treat children this way and expect anything good in the future.





All I can do is write this post and hope that you will think on it. Think on the fact that each American taxpayer gives about $400 a year to Israel, so if you live in the US, you helped build that wall. You and I helped create this horrendous situation.





I am paying to ensure that children drink sewage.





So are you.

Pretty Darn Accurate

Heart of Jenin

ahmed khatib, jenin, israel, palestine, palestinian, heart,

A Palestinian boy is killed by Israeli soldiers.

I bet you think you know the whole story now, don't you? So did I.

The story doesn't end the way you think it would. It doesn't end in violence and reprisals, it ends in love and sacrifice and new beginnings when the boy's family decides to donate his organs. Two years later, the boy's father journeys to visit the children whose lives were saved by his son's death: a Druze girl, a Bedouin boy and an Orthodox Jewish girl.

Heart of Jenin is an amazing documentary. You will cry, but there is hope in Ahmed Khatib’s story, and that hope is for all of us.

Children Shouldn't Pay

palestine, palestinian, israel, conflict, children,

As a general rule, I don't weigh in on the Palestine/Israel situation. It's complicated, it represents decades, if not centuries, of festering hatred, it involves religious and racist elements, passions run high on both sides . . . I'd rather debate abortion with Bill O'Reilly on national tv, naked.

However, no matter how you feel about the issue, I think you, and anyone else in the world, can agree that children shouldn't pay the price of this conflict. And they are. It's horrible.

More than 300 children were among the 1,400 Palestinians killed and many more were wounded during the 22-day Israeli offensive that ended on January 18, according to Palestinian figures.

And experts say a vast majority of the children who make up more than half of Gaza's 1.5 million population, will bear the psychological scars for years to come.

"Children here have lost joy in life. They can laugh but there is no joy. They are unable to maintain hope," says psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj, who heads the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.

Seven-year-old Ahmed Salah al-Samuni smiles timidly as he is tossed a green plastic ball but quickly loses interest, instead digging his nails into a couch in a brightly coloured room used for psycho-social counselling sessions.

"I remember that Israelis came and ordered us out. Shells were fired," he says when asked what he remembers of the war.

"Grandmother and grandfather are dead," he says, going on to list about 10 others who died when his house was bombed. In all, 29 were killed in the attack, 18 of them from his direct family.

"I love Azza and want her back," he says of his two-and-a-half year-old sister who was among the dead.

After the attack, he lay in a pool of blood. It's only when he cried out for his mother that she realised he was still alive.

A large scar runs across his face, another along his hip. His nose is still deformed from the shrapnel wounds.

Just a few months ago he had regular fits of rage, when he'd beat his brothers and break whatever was in his path.

"He'd scream out at night: 'The Jews are coming to kill me'," his father says.

I have no answers, no comfort for a little boy who misses his dead sister, no words of wisdom to end decades of hatred and conflict. I can only say that I wish hugs could fix the world.