May 12, 1996

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Last night, I watched the "60 Minutes" segment about the artificial famine in the country called Iraq. The more things change, the more things stay the same, to use a trite expression.

I remember my mother telling me when she was still a young, unmarried student in Odessa during the early 30s when the Ukraine was sealed off from the rest of the world to force the people living there into a New World Order system-only it wasn't called that then. It was called "collectivization" and stood for genocide.

While every day the corpse cart came and went and picked up people lying the gutter, she said that American reporters would stand there, next to corpses, pencils poised, and ask each other: "Famine? Do you see famine? I don't see famine anywhere." To this day, most people in the West have no idea what happened in those years in the Ukraine, and who had manufactured it.

I have a letter here to the United Church Observer, written by Ian MacDonald of Canada, a former career diplomat. I understand it was not published because it did not pass the "politically correct" smilometer. I want to bring it here in full:

"You devoted 8 pages and the cover of the May, 1996 issue of the Observer to food shortages, but I found not one word about the desperate plight of the children of Iraq. These unfortunates, with their elders, have suffered for over five years from the effects of international sanctions that have deprived their country of the necessary foreign exchange earnings to pay for adequate supplies of food and medicine, to say nothing of the other prerequisites to well-being. As a result, many hundreds of thousands of young children have died needlessly (560,000 up to October, 1995, according to FAO) and hundreds of thousands more have been permanently disabled by inadequate diet.

The cruel irony of the Iraq tragedy is that Canada, a normally compassionate Christian country, is a party to these brutal sanctions. At the same time, Canada praises and even subsidizes the worst offender in the Middle East (responsible indirectly for Iraq's suffering) namely the State of Israel.

In contrast to Iraq, Israel mercilessly suppresses Christianity in her conquered territories, destroys Christian Holy Places (including the Biblical village of Emmaeus) and even takes Christian lives (including that of the kindly Dr. Mattar, Keeper of the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem who was killed in cold blood by the first Israeli soldiers to visit the Tomb after the seizure of the Christian Quarter).

Under the circumstances, it is a shocking commentary on the (lack of) sensitivity of the United Church Observer that it would accept advertising from El-Al, the official Israeli airline. The Government of Israel should be condemned and penalized, not rewarded, for its crimes against humanity, especially after the latest massacre in South Lebanon.

A former editor, Dr. Al Forrest, spoke out fearlessly against injustice and intolerance in the Middle East. Is it too much to expect that his successors should match his courage and insight?

I would be grateful if this letter could be published intact!"

I remember the start of the Gulf War very well because that was the first time that I noticed General Colen Powell. I will never forget the look on his face when he said of the Iraqi: "We will surround them. And we will kill them."

Do those two sentences qualify as the Final Solution for the people of Iraq? Unlike what might or might not have been said at the Conference at Wannsee, there is a record of General Powell's statement. Will the day come when he'll be hanged for that at Nuremberg?

Ingrid

Thought for the Day:

"We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs-we have no place to go."

(Golda Meir)

Back to Table of Contents of the May 1996 ZGrams