Saturday, December 28, 2013

For Hala

"A three-year-old Gazan girl has been killed by Israel. BBC says it was retaliation but doesn't say what she did." Charles Edward Frith, tweet, 27/12/13

The Gazan girl was Hala Abu-Sbaikha.

I dedicate this poem, Arguments, by Lisa Suhair Majaj, to her memory:

consider the infinite fragility of an infant's skull
how the bones lie soft and open
only time knitting them shut

consider a delicate porcelain bowl
how it crushes under a single blow -
in one moment whole years disappear

consider: beneath the din of explosions
no voice can be heard
no cry

consider your own sky on fire
your name erased
your children's lives 'a price worth paying'

consider the faces you do not see
the eyes you refuse to meet
'collateral damage'

how in these words
the world
cracks open

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Charles Edward Frith asks a good question, indeed the "retaliation" word has been used by Zionist propaganda merchants for over one hundred years to excuse their aggression.

Sadly "our" media spew it out at every opportunity.

Another old favorite is the "reprisal" word.

Following numerous Israeli attacks, including the massacre at Qibya, in 1953, and repeated censure by the U.N.M.A.C.[ Mixed Armistice Commission for continuing and repeated attacks in the lead up to the 1956 Suez War, one British journalist wrote,

"From the start of the presidential-election year all leading American newspapers, and many British ones, reported these Israeli attacks as "reprisals" and "retaliations", so that the victims were by propaganda-machine converted into the aggressors in each case."
"The Controversy of Zion" by Douglas Reed, p. 532

Interestingly, I knew a woman, a retired high school teacher, who studied Reed at Sydney University, but this book is now on the banned list in Canada.

As to what the three year old Gazan girl, Hala, actually "did" the answer is simple, nothing, except being a Palestinian and being on land Zionists covet.

To why she was murdered is not so simple.

The Nazi policy of SIPPENHAFT or punishing the family is at the heart of the matter.

From the Collins Deutsch-Englisch Dictionary;
Sipp'e [zipper] nf. kindred, clan, tribe.
Haft [haft] nf. custody, arrest.

A well known example of use of the Nazi policy of Sippenhaft is the son of Field Marshal von Paulus, Ernst Alexander von Paulus, a German army captain,who was arrested under the Sippenhaft decree following his fathers surrender at Stalingrad.

His Romanian mother "Elena Constance Paulus, who had always distrusted the Nazis, was told by Gestapo officers that she would be spared if she renounced his name. She is said to have turned her back on them scornfully. She was arrested and held in a camp".

"Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor 1998, p.427.

Naturally the Zionists have taken the Sippenhaft decree several steps forward,[or is that backwards?] from the Nazis.

Therefore we routinely observe house demolitions, collective punishment and murders, dressed up as "retaliation"or "reprisals", as in the case of Hala Abu-Sbaikha.

Let us call it for what it is, it is not retaliation it is Sippenhaft.