Blog For Palestine

So Tuesday we have this big meeting with a bunch of people from the Arab-American community.  I’d rather not share my opinion about most of the people that were there since that will turn this post into an angry venom filled rant.  So let me tell you what happened, I put together a very reasonable document outlining a common community objective and some strategies and immediate actions that we can take in different activism arenas.  The idea was to discuss this on a small scale on Tuesday and then on a large scale on Saturday in the context of a community wide townhall style meeting.

I send the document out to the guy organizing the meeting and the first thing I hear back from him is that the document is too ambitious, the community will reject because they don’t believe we can do this, blah, blah, blah.  These people, more than anything want to play community leaders but they fail even the most basic of tests.  Usually leaders help the community rise to the occasion, this group insists on claiming that the community are a bunch of weaklings and then they go and use that as an excuse to hide behind.  This was the reasoning given for the cancellation of the protest on Saturday and we see it rearing its ugly head again.

The meeting was a bit contentious if you haven’t gotten that idea yet.  It was comedy and tragedy both rolled into one.  Still it was an important meeting to have and I found it extremely informative.  The community thinks in one of two ways.  There are those looking for immediate gratification and the opportunity to do any feel good activities.  There are then those who want to think long term and they are willing to forgo the instant gratification in return for something more substantion in the future.

This is where we left off in the meeting.  A few people managed to come over to my side and we are moving forward.  The other will organize fundraisers and banquets for a little bit and then go home to wait for the next tragedy leveled by the Israeli against the Arabs and facilitated by our government, tax dollars and our silence.

The good news is that I am more motivated than ever.  The website is coming along very nicely.  The plan is to add a lot of meet by the end of this weekend and then send out an email to the community asking them to check it out and to participate.  Then we will hold a series of meetings next week to organize and begin acting.  All of this seems to be a very delayed reaction to the events that have been taking place over many weeks now.  Still it’s better late than never.

-Tineen

Seattle Arab-Americans are weak, disorganized and incapable of doing anything. This is about to change. Working with a couple of people we have drafted a plan to pull together and act on several fronts. The document will be presented tomorrow at an organizing meeting ahead of an open community meeting to be held this saturday.

Ahead of the meeting I’ve put together a website to be ready by saturday, check it out - www.seattlearabamericans.net. I know that the name is a little bit lame, but it’s the best thing I could think of…

Another big ticket item is a humanitarian aid project. There’s going to be another meeting this week to talk about this, I’ll update…

-Tineen

A protest that was planned today to take place in a suburb of Seattle to demand a cease fire has been canceled.  This is in light of some events that happened late last night where a Pakistani man went into a Jewish center and shot 6 people killing one.  The organizers of the protest felt that because of these events there might be a hostile response to the peaceful protest.

This response is very silly.  If anything these events should have made us more determined to protest.  To say that all violence is unacceptable.  To show that the logic of violence against civilians is tragic and to emphasize that Israel’s actions are no different.  Unfortunately the Seattlites decided to run and hide.  I actually don’t think it had anything to do with worrying about any conflicts at the protest.  I think the real rationale that remains unspoken is that a lot of these “organizers” are more worried about being lumped in the public eye with the shooter.

Let’s be honest, this is going to happen no matter what.  The accusation of anti-semitism are going to come to anyone that demands that Israel act in a legal and humanitarian way.  There will be racist accusations that all Arabs are violent and bloodthirsty.  There are classic tools of the pro-Zionist camp and we cannot succumb to these methods.  We need to find ways to combat them.

Anyways I’m off to slap some people on the back of the head for canceling this protest.

-Tineen

I seriously believe that Condasleeza Rice should officially change her name so that she recieves the honors she properly deserves.  From this point on everybody should refer to her as “Condasleeza Rice El Sharmouta” God knows that’s the only way I’ve managed to refer to her in the past couple of weeks.

-Tineen

As hundreds of innocent Lebanese and Palestinians civilians continue to be murdered, the San Francisco Gate took a little time today to mourn the death of an occupation soldier. I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to laugh or cry when I read something like this. The SF Gate took everything that is vile and evil about the conflict and asked us to sympathize with it.

The article relays the story of a young immigrant coming from the Ukraine five years ago to lead a better life in Israel (Oh Israel how generous you are by opening your arms to every person of the right religious identity while the indigenous people of the land languish in Refugee camps). About how he joined the army and volunteered to join units on the front lines (poor guy had a thirst, and the only thing that can quensh it was some Arab blood. About how he bravely fought and got killed while in the Lebanese village of Maroun El-Ras helping and injured comrade who was shot by the evil arabs. (I’m not sure why these violent arabs would do such a thing to lovely young soldiers especially after almost two weeks of the Israelis killing hundreds of innocent civilians and totally annihialating the Lebanon. You would think that the Israeli army would get better treatment when they invade)

Is the SF Gate actually serious. They actually dedicated an article to mourn a bloodthirsty, violent, racist, colonial soldier who was killed while in the midst of invading another country and while the rest of his army is on a murderous rampage.

-Tineen

Ali speaking about the conflict on KPFK.  Ali speaks with the moral outrage and the passion that is needed.  I am very disappointed by other arab-americans who are not capable of critisizing Israel’s barbarism fearing that they step out of line with the mainstream media.

Israeli attacks against Palestine and Lebanon continue unabated.  The actions of Israelis are by all measures barbaric.  The IDF, with the full backing of the Israeli government and the vast majority of Israeli society, have launched a murderous war aimed squarely at the civilian population of Palestine and Lebanon.

Many people are asking the question why is Israel doing this.  They answer is simple and it is something that the Israelis have no problem stating publicly.  The IDF is trying to restore it’s so-called deterence power, something that has been harmed by the success of the Lebanese resistance against the occupation in the south and by the Palestinian intifada which perserveres despite the most oppressive of Israeli measures.  What isn’t discussed is that the Israeli plan for projecting its deterence power is through the dual policy of eliminating all direct or indirect challenges to its power which it is doing directly against the Palestinian and Lebanese and which it is cooperating with the US  when it comes to Iraq, Iran and Syria.  Another critical portion of Israel’s deterrence forumlation that is revealed in the current attack against Lebanon is that Israel is building its “mad dog” image, that it will act without restraint and in the most barbaric ways against anything that threatens its supremacy.

The distinction that needs to be made is that Israeli society’s obsession with military superiority isn’t rooted in security as some might think but rather in an obsession with ethnic supremacy.  Israel is a country and society that was built on a racist ideology and as such any threats to its right to total belligerence is a threat to its nazi like superiority fantasies.  This is the reason why Israelis almost unanimously support the most vicious of attacks and the killing of massive numbers of innocent civilians since they believe this asserts Israeli racial superiority.

-Tineen

I have avoided posting for the past couple of weeks. The primary reason is that I don’t like what I’ve been writing. Recently the blog inched past the 1000 total visitors mark and that prompted me to take a look back at my previous posts. What I read did not at all impress me.

First off I am a bad writer. I’m not being hard on myself here; it’s not like I aspire to be Norman Mailer and I just realized that I haven’t reached my goal. My ambitions are limited to having the writing competence of a high school graduate that didn’t spend his four years smoking massive amounts of pot; which is I think where I am today. For example I really don’t know what the hell the semicolon is for and I just use it whereever I think it might look cute. Proper word usage and sentence construction are black magic as far as I’m concerned and writing is therefore reduced to throwing words together and hoping that I don’t break too many rules of grammar along the way. I’m a grammatical and spelling disaster and this is no way for a grown man to be. The last thing I want to do is to look like an incompetent buffoon while supposedly advocating for the Palestinian cause. I hate incompetence; especially when I’m the incompetent one. So I’ve crafted a little plan to allow me to become a writing ninja. I’ve gotten some books - On Writing Well, Grammatically Correct, and The Elements of Style. I’m going to read and apply their wisdom in the hopes that the garbage that I’m spew out into the world is going to stink a little less.

The second problem is focus, or the complete lack of it. I still, after more than two months of doing this have no idea what I’m trying to accomplish and who I’m trying to reach. One of the biggest problems that stopped me from starting the blog was trying to figure out what the goal was. Then I decided to start writing and maybe the blog will reveal its purpose to me. Well it didn’t. But maybe there is no real objective beyond just being out here on the web, consuming bandwidth and mindshare that might otherwise be occupied by voices that support the racist and cruel policies of Israel. Moving forward I’m just going to drop all the pretentious crap about doing something spectacular and simplify the mission to this - give Tineen some space to express his thoughts about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I will leave you now with the promise that my coming posts will become incrementally better.  So prepare yourselves for Tineen the next generation.

-Tineen

Jonathan Cook looks at the murder of Palestinian civilians in a bus in Israel by an Israeli soldier and the fallout. He does a great job exposing the hypocrisy of Israeli society and government as well as the racism that lies at the root of the hypocrisy. Here is a snippet of the article talking about how Zada the Israeli purportrator of the attacks was ignored by the authorities despite his extremist views.

There was no investigation of why Zada, well-known for his extremist
views, had been allowed to go AWOL for weeks from his unit without
attempts to trace him. Or how his family’s repeated warnings that he
had threatened to do something “terrible” to stop the disengagement had
been ignored by the authorities. No one questioned why, a few days
before his attack, the police had sent Zada away after he tried to hand
in his gun.
Even more disturbing, no one discussed why Zada, who openly belonged to
a racist and outlawed movement, Kach, which demands the expulsion, if
not eradication, of Arabs from the Holy Land, had been allowed to serve
in the army. How had he and thousands of other Kach supporters been
left in peace to promote their obscene ideas? Why were these Kach
activists, mostly young Israelis, demonstrating openly against the Gaza
disengagement, assaulting policemen and soldiers, when the group was
supposedly underground?

I’m not exactly sure how contorted the Israeli psyche needs to be for them to believe that all this racism, hatred, and injustice is normal and acceptable. I’m looking at a book right now which I think I’m going to pick up that discusses the Israeli psyche, it should be an interesting read.

-Tineen

A good article by Nigel Parry discussing the latest Israeli atrocities as it compares with the IDF’s Modus Operandi.  He reiterates my long standing belief that the Israeli army has a clear and systematic policy of killing Palestinian civilians.