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SIGNS OF THE TIMES

By Humra Quraishi. Dated: 10/21/2023 3:39:51 AM

No words can describe tragedies striking Palestinians!

A file photo of injured and their relatives following missile attack on a hospital in Gaza on October 19, 2023. (Photo: Open Source)

Every week I try to send this column by Wednesday evening but yesterday
(that is, this week’s Wednesday) couldn’t complete writing it because after I saw pics and shots of the mass killings of the Palestinians and the carnage and destruction all around the Gaza region, I sat back in agony and distress. Never before in the recent history of this so-called developed world, have hospitals been targeted with such severity that hundreds have perished! Mothers, fathers, babies, teenagers, health workers, rescuers, volunteers targeted … hundreds killed!

It’s distressing and depressing. Can’t find adequate words to describe the tragedies hitting the Palestinians. When all they want is to live in peace and dignity on their own homeland, which was robbed from them and with that they made to sit like hapless refugees on their own land. Now even that basic right to survive seems ripped off, snatched from them!

Several offshoots writ large here. In those earlier years, Indian citizens could rather too freely protest against any of the earlier unleashed atrocities on the Palestinians. I have myself witnessed several such protests and demonstrations held in New Delhi and also in Lucknow and Srinagar.… No longer. A rather disturbing and noticeable change this time. What, with students and activists and all those who believe in the democratic ways of protesting, are finding it difficult to march on the streets of New Delhi and raise their voice against what’s going on in Gaza!

It is pathetic to see the balancing acts of the rulers of the day. Mind you, several heads of State have even sided with Israel; perhaps, because of the rather too obvious political motives and expansionist plans. But in their political speeches these rulers should confine their preferences to themselves and to their governments. Why drag the masses? After all, the masses are not naïve and are mature enough to see the brutalities and killings spreading out. They are also well aware of the just and legitimate demand of the Palestinians. After all, it isn’t a cricket match that’s on, that one can have the audacity to query: which side are you with? It is a genocide taking place in Gaza, in these so-called developed times!

Can’t we hear human cries! Can’t we see arms lobbies and arms dealers thriving at the cost of human blood! Can’t we see human forms and psyches and souls getting battered because of the expansionist policies and political games of the rulers of the day!

Let us not be under the impression that the atrocities are limited only to the West Bank. Several Arab lands and neighbouring countries are in the midst of severe civil strife. Each time, I see television shots of the Middle East, of hundreds killed in car explosions, bombs strapped on the alive forms of teenagers, homes and buildings bombarded, dying children and fleeing families, entire settlements razed to the ground in the garb of ‘looking for terrorists’, I have been asking myself who is behind these mass scale killings! The ISIS seems too vague a term. Who set up the ISIS? Who funds them? Who organizes mass scale destructions with minutest precision, from one marked target to the next, from one end of the world to the next? Who is the master mind behind these deadly tactics, unsettling the very basic survival of millions in the landlocked States. Who is killing whom! Who is a terrorist!

During the course of an earlier interview with me, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s grandson, Asfandyar Wali Khan, had come up with this rather simplistic explanation to the growing turmoil in today’s world: “If you have two badmashes in a village it’s okay, because they will be busy settling scores with each other. But there will be chaos and confusion if there is only one badmash left! That’s the trouble in today’s world. There is only one badmash left! Also, where’s the leadership of calibre in today’s Muslim world. Religion was used by Americans in Afghanistan to create their base, otherwise Afghan struggles had been based on nationalism and not religion. Also, the ongoing atrocities against the Palestinians are hurting the Muslims the world over. Post 9/11, the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan are being looked at as if they are similar, which is not the case. The true essence and meaning of Islam is being overshadowed in this chaos which is unfortunate, for Islam stands for justice and peace.… it’s a known fact that way back in early 90s madrasas and other religious institutions under the various camouflages, had been set up by the CIA, along the Afghan-Pakistan borders!”
And if we were to focus on Latin American countries, its best to hear what the well-known Mexican writer and columnist Juan Miguel De Mora had to tell me during the course of an interview whilst he was visiting New Delhi in 2004. When I had queried about the US he began by quoting two former Mexican presidents: “Mexican President General Porfirio Diaz had said way back (he was president till 1910) ‘Poor Mexico so far from God and so close to the US.’ Then another Mexican President-Adolfo Lopez Mateos had said that the biggest problem faced by Mexico is ‘the US.’ Together with that Mora came up with his own comments: “But in my opinion both Mexican presidents were too diplomatic. President Bush’s democracy is like Stalin’s and I have been writing in my columns that Bush’s policies are a danger to humanity.”
And in 2001, when I had interviewed Libya’s erstwhile ruler Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Saif-EL Islam, I had asked him to comment on the ‘terror tags’ heaped by the Western Powers on his father and on his government, along the strain that they are funding terror groups. He had told me, “It all depends on your perception. Many liberation leaders were viewed as being terrorists but later they became heroes. In the sense when Nelson Mandela was in trouble we helped him out, when Mugabe was having problems we helped him too, so does that mean we helped terrorist outfits! Mind you, both these men fought liberation wars and later emerged as heroes. In fact, in my won country’s war for liberation from the Italians we had lost about three - quarters of our population, so realize the problems involved… it’s all matter of perception and image.”
And as Chomsky said – “in the Reagan years alone the US sponsored state terrorists in Central America left hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses, millions orphaned and four countries in ruins. In the same year Western backed South African depredations killed 1.5 million people. I need not speak of West Asia or much else… All of this, however, is barred from the annals of terrorism by a simple devise, the term ‘terrorism ‘like most terms of political discourse has two meanings - a literal one and a propagandistic one. Needless to add that the propagandistic version is preferred and pursued by the US - terrorism is terrorism that is directed against the US and its friends and allies.” Chomksy had also drawn parallels between US and the Nazis, “The Nazis, for example, bitterly condemned terrorism and conducted what they called counter terrorism against terrorist partisans. The US basically agreed and it organized and conducted similar counter-terrorism in the post war years.
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Ending this week’s column with this verse of the Palestinian poet - Mahmoud Darwish: ‘I COME FROM THERE
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland…

I AM THERE
I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is born, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the god sent food of birds and an olive tree beyond the kent of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there, I return the sky to its mother when for its mother
the sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home.’
--- Mahmoud Darwish
(Translated by Anton Shammas from “The Bed of the Stranger,”
Riad El-Rayyes Books, Beirut, 1999.)