Petition to Barack Obama on the issue of Palestine
Written by Haitham Sabbah on 30. March 2008, 1709hrs // Part of Haitham Sabbah's adventure in Action, Palestine, USA // Other posts by Haitham Sabbah
Dear fellow Americans: Please take 2 minutes to kindly sign this petition (http://tinyurl.com/ytefbp) to Barack Obama on the issue of Palestine.
Obama, Call for Peace & Justice for Palestine
Dear Senator Obama:
As Americans who will be voting in this year’s presidential elections, we have welcomed your focus on the need for new thinking about America’s role in the world and your insistence that peace and security depend on respect for international law and for the rights, dignity, and common humanity of all peoples.
Surely one of the areas where it is most critical to apply these values is Israel/Palestine, where the policies the United States has pursued for 40 years have brought about neither peace nor justice. We have hoped you would articulate a new approach to this issue, one built on respect for the rights of the Palestinians as well as the Israelis.
Unfortunately, all we have heard from you so far on this issue is an increasingly fervent repetition of the same bankrupt policies pursued by George W. Bush and his predecessors. In particular, we were shocked to read your letter of January 23, 2008, to Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (see bellow attached image copy), about a proposed Security Council resolution on the situation in Gaza.
In it you focused on condemning Palestinian rocket attacks against Israel, but made no mention of the ongoing Israeli bombardments and raids that have killed hundreds of innocent residents of Gaza, as well as the calculated Israeli policy of denying the necessities of life - food, clean drinking water, medicines, medical care, school supplies, and the energy needed to power sewage treatment plants and hospital operating rooms - to all 1.5 million residents of the area, of whom more than half are children. When you say that “Israel is forced to do this,” we hope that you are not condoning or encouraging Israeli human rights violations. You denounce Hamas as a terrorist organization, but ignore its repeated offers of a long-term truce with Israel - offers the Israeli government has summarily rejected, even though polls show that more 60 percent of Israel’s own population favor negotiations with Hamas.
The brutal and disproportionate nature of Israel’s recent actions in Gaza has been condemned around the world, including by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and by the European Union. Yet you, like Hillary Clinton and John McCain, have offered not a word of criticism of Israel, nor of sympathy for the people of Gaza.
This is not “change we can believe in.”
We understand that you are under intense political pressure by those who consider themselves pro-Israel. But as your campaign leaflets say, “What this country needs is a President who won’t just do what’s right when the politics are easy, but will stand up when the politics are hard.”
This is a time to show you mean that. We call on you to condemn the Israeli assault on Gaza and to outline a new policy on Israel/Palestine based on respect for international law and the rights and dignity of the Palestinian as well as the Israeli people.
Kindly sign this petition here: http://tinyurl.com/ytefbp
(Click image to enlarge)
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March 30th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Petition to Barack Obama on the issue of Palestine | Sabbah’s Blog…
Dear fellow Americans: Please take 2 minutes to kindly sign this petition (http://tinyurl.com/ytefbp) to Barack Obama on the issue of Palestine….
April 1st, 2008 at 12:37 am
Alice Walker, Afro-American author (The Color Purple) and feminist, who was married (divorced) to Jewish civil rights attorney, Mel Levanthal, and close friend to Howard Zinn, has written an open letter to her “sisters” in support of Obama
http://www.theroot.com/id/45469
She too states there are things she disagrees with with Obama:
“True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth’s people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don’t understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, “enemy” or “friend,” and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?
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“He who allows oppression shares the crime.” Erasmus.
Hear us Senator Obama, and let your good conscience be your guide. “Si se puede” is for ALL people.