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WORLDPRESSNETWORK
Dear Brother and friend AbdelBari Atwan,
Editor of Al-Quds
London
An Open Letter on the Murder of Palestine, from George Galloway MP
It has been said that you, Sir, are the "last Arab". We both know that is not true, there are still others, but millions of us know why it was said of you.
You are a Knight of the Arabs that's for sure. Born in a Gazan refugee camp, you are a Prince among men. I have known you for thirty years; back then you still had some of the dust of the camp about you. Now you are an ever-present commentator in the media, publish the Arab world's only independent newspaper, and are highly respected by all who know you.
Together we have fought in the land of Balfour and Sykes, of Anthony Eden and Anthony Blair, many great political battles. Many tears and much blood has flown over those years, and before, and it's not going to stop now.
I am moved to write having seen yet another of your heart-piercing interviews on television. You leave the interrogator speechless when you tell them that you were born there, and in the very camp we are all watching being destroyed by fire and red-hot steel. How could you, this man of letters, this sophisticated commentator, have come from...that?
Of course we know that it was....that...which made you, and that you will never lose your burning sense of indignation, your cry, no, roar on behalf of those you left behind.
But it was not your voice which moved me most tonight - it's 5 in the morning and I am still fitfully flicking across the channels not so much looking FOR but away refugee the unrelenting, hypocritical, downright mendacity of most of them.
It was the voice of Amal, a young mother who appeared late last night in a package on Al-Jazeera English, interviewed in a school in the southern Gaza Strip.
This young woman, a girl really, was with her baby one of 61 members of the same family of refugees hiding out in this school in the hope that it would not be attacked by the Israeli invaders. Her baby had not been changed in three days, she was feeding her the last bottle of milk and in a dirty bottle, there was no electricity and very little running water. What there was, was being drunk and cooked with, washed in and washed with. And the people in this school were the lucky ones.
Elsewhere in the Strip at that very moment, children like Amal's were being carried, stiff and dead, from the hospitals by their fathers.
Women wailed, bled, died in Jabalia, the Beach Camp, Rafah, Gaza City. Young boys recited the Shahada as they were carried into intensive care units operating in near darkness, running out of medicines, even bandages, and being staffed by doctors and nurses close to madness through despair.
International journalists - banned by the invaders from seeing for themselves - nonetheless continue to accept the terms of reference imposed by those who have banned them. Every bulletin incants the same falsehood: that Israel is attacking "Hamas militant...targets" (by the way why are Palestinian fighters always described as "militants"?
But how can a baby be Hamas? A Mosque? A school? An Ambulance? A family? A whole apartment block? Or, as I heard you explain, the parliament building. Oh what an irony is that destruction of the parliament building, housing that rarity in the Arab world, a freely elected assembly. In a way I suppose it's a variant on Bertolt Brecht, when he wrote of the old East Germany that the Communist Party, if disappointed in the people, could always abolish them and elect a new one.
I was never a supporter of Hamas myself. I spent the best years of my life as a partisan of Abu Amar ....
..... Click here to read the rest of the letter
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NEWS SUMMARY
An Interview with Abdel Bari Atwan
AMW media interview: Abdul Bari Atwan, editor, Al Quds Al Arabi
Arafat and resisting by illness
