Muktakhir ini kecoh dengan surat terbuka itu ini yang meresahkan dunia politik tanahair, ada yang menganggapnya satu langkah keperwiraan dan ada juga yang mencebik tindakan tersebut sebagai pengkhianatan terhadap keharmonian negara.
Saya tidak mahu membincangkan isu itu di sini. Saya ingin menyiarkan lampiran surat terbuka yang ditulis tahun lalu oleh Brian Eno, perintis atau bapa muzik ambient yang pernah saya tulis dalam blog ini tidak berapa lama dahulu. < baca sini > Sesungguhnya pemuzik sejati mempunyai jiwa luhur yang qalbunya digilap oleh Tuhan.
Dear All of You:
I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more.
Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic
carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's
word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new
weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of
small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off
humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.
I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my
kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a
long time.
Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war
crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that.
America won't sign up to it.
What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how
slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other
side of this story. But - for Christ's sake! - it's not that hard to
find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided
exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY? I just don't get it. I really hate to
think its just the power of AIPAC… for if that's the case, then your
government really is fundamentally corrupt. No, I don't think that's the
reason… but I have no idea what it could be.
The America I know and like is compassionate, broadminded, creative,
eclectic, tolerant and generous. You, my close American friends,
symbolise those things for me. But which America is backing this
horrible one-sided colonialist war? I can't work it out: I know you're
not the only people like you, so how come all those voices aren't heard
or registered?
How come it isn't your spirit that most of the world now
thinks of when it hears the word 'America'? How bad does it look when
the one country which more than any other grounds its identity in
notions of Liberty and Democracy then goes and puts its money exactly
where its mouth isn't and supports a ragingly racist theocracy?
I was in Israel last year with Mary. Her sister works for UNWRA in
Jerusalem. Showing us round were a Palestinian - Shadi, who is her
sister's husband and a professional guide - and Oren Jacobovitch, an
Israeli Jew, an ex-major from the IDF who left the service under a cloud
for refusing to beat up Palestinians. Between the two of them we got to
see some harrowing things - Palestinian houses hemmed in by wire mesh
and boards to prevent settlers throwing shit and piss and used sanitary
towels at the inhabitants; Palestinian kids on their way to school being
beaten by Israeli kids with baseball bats to parental applause and
laughter; a whole village evicted and living in caves while three
settler families moved onto their land; an Israeli settlement on top of a
hill diverting its sewage directly down onto Palestinian farmland
below; The Wall; the checkpoints… and all the endless daily
humiliations. I kept thinking, "Do Americans really condone this? Do
they really think this is OK? Or do they just not know about it?".
As for the Peace Process: Israel wants the Process but not the Peace.
While 'the process' is going on the settlers continue grabbing land and
building their settlements… and then when the Palestinians finally
erupt with their pathetic fireworks they get hammered and shredded with
state-of-the-art missiles and depleted uranium shells because Israel
'has a right to defend itself' ( whereas Palestine clearly doesn't). And
the settler militias are always happy to lend a fist or rip up
someone's olive grove while the army looks the other way.
By the way, most of them are not ethnic Israelis - they're 'right of
return' Jews from Russia and Ukraine and Moravia and South Africa and
Brooklyn who came to Israel recently with the notion that they had an
inviolable (God-given!) right to the land, and that 'Arab' equates with
'vermin' - straightforward old-school racism delivered with the same
arrogant, shameless swagger that the good ole boys of Louisiana used to
affect. That is the culture our taxes are defending. It's like sending
money to the Klan.
But beyond this, what really troubles me is the bigger picture. Like
it or not, in the eyes of most of the world, America represents 'The
West'. So it is The West that is seen as supporting this war,
despite all our high-handed talk about morality and democracy. I fear
that all the civilisational achievements of The Enlightenment and
Western Culture are being discredited - to the great glee of the mad
Mullahs - by this flagrant hypocrisy. The war has no moral justification
that I can see - but it doesn't even have any pragmatic value either.
It doesn't make Kissingerian 'Realpolitik' sense; it just makes us look bad.
I'm sorry to burden you all with this. I know you're busy and in
varying degrees allergic to politics, but this is beyond politics. It's
us squandering the civilisational capital that we've built over
generations. None of the questions in this letter are rhetorical: I
really don't get it and I wish that I did.
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