Daniel Akill-Attieh's Blog | 402: THE RIGHT TO RETURN IV – The Plights of the Palestinians; Compared to and Contrasted with the Plights of Others

Dear Readers and Fellow-Apes; 2008 was a Murky and Hapless Year! Let us hope that 2009 does not turn out to be even More Murky and Hapless!

I intentionally did not wish you a Merry Christmas, because Christmas is another story for another Posting at another time; and I do not wish you a Happy New Year, since I believe that ONLY FOOLS ARE, OR CAN BE, HAPPY ALL YEAR ROUND. I do, however, wish all of you A GOOD YEAR! With a little Good in one's life, one can be a little happy, which is all one can ask for in one's short sweet dream one calls a life-time. BY GOD AND SATAN!

A Jack of many trades and master of all; I am honest to the core and I hate lies, deceits, pretensions, hypocrisy, treachery, betrayal, and stoic compliance; and I despise – and actually pity – Human-Apes who follow-the-herd-or-pack

I expose and reveal the lies, deceits, pretensions, hypocrisy, treachery, betrayal, and blind, deaf, and stoic compliance, and Human-Apes who follow-the-herd-or-pack; I tell or write the truth; and I say what I mean and mean what I say

I fear nothing; least of all, death

If I must fear anything at all in life, then let me fear what I think and know of myself; because, in the end, one’s knowledge and opinion of oneself is what counts most. All the world may think and believe one is such and such, but one knows one is such and such. Also, I like to look in the mirror and like what I see and know about me.

I invite comments, remarks, criticisms, and even insults – so long as they are straight to the point, in order for me to correct or adjust myself accordingly. What I do not welcome and won’t accept or tolerate is HORSE-SHIT!

Dear readers and felow-Apes; with every page, every report or article, every paragraph, every sentence, every word, and every letter; I thank you for taking the trouble and the time to read My Not-So-Humble Comments.

« Previous Post Next Post »

402: THE RIGHT TO RETURN IV – The Plights of the Palestinians; Compared to and Contrasted with the Plights of Others

10 October, 2008

THE RIGHT TO RETURN IV – The Plights of the Palestinians; Compared to and Contrasted with the Plights of Others

Most of the Palestinians in Lebanon have been there for not fewer than 6 decades – if we count from when they first began to arrive on record in 1948, and their descendants – and in that period of time there could now be no fewer than three generations of Palestinians in Lebanon – alone! In any and every country on the planet, a person is qualified to apply for citizenship after residing in a particular country continuously for 5 years. After 60 – if not more – fucking years, the Palestinians still cannot become citizens – for a silly corny reason – the foolish farcical and futile right to return! They exist in Limbo-Land without IDs or passports or citizenships. One would think they were all infected with LEPROSY or some other terrible incurable disease!

There are tens of millions of Lebanese scattered all over the globe who are citizens of several countries, yet who still have the right to visit and the right to return

I strongly recommend that you visit amazon.com and buy – and read:

The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian

Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan

A small Corner of Hell by Anna Politkovskaya

The Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest

Black Dog of Fate by Peter Balakian

A Shameful Act by Taner Akcam

A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power

Survivors by Donald E. Miller

Forgotten Fire by Adam Bagdasarian

Stories from Rwanda: Tomorrow, we will all be killed……by Philip Gourevitch

Hotel Rwanda by Xolani Mali

Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide by Gerard Prunier

Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins: an Aid-worker, a Warlord, Radical Islam, and the Politics of Oil – a True Story of Love and Death in the Sudan. The following are excerpts from Chapter One: AID PROGRAMMES pretend to be practical enterprises but in Africa, it’s the romantics that do all the work…African Politics is Belly-Politics. The Power of the African Big-Man depends on his ability to feed his followers – this reminds me of Lebanon and the Lebanese Big-Men and their followers who follow them only to be fed – Stomach is the enemy of Man……Europe and North America look in the mirror to see Stomach……Hunger is an option……Africa is the mirror in which the West sees its Big Belly……Western and all AID to Africa is the intersection of the Politics of the Belly and the Politics of the Mirror. It is where the two lines cross and go their separate ways.

War and Genocide: A concise History of the Holocaust by Doris L. Bergen

The Armenian Genocide by Andrew Goldberg

The Road from Home: A true story of courage, survival, and hope by David Kherdian

The Origins of Nazi Genocide by Henry Friedlander

The above are only a selected few from several pages of readable and enjoyable books. Go to amazon.com and Browse, Buy, Read, and Enjoy! BY GOD AND SATAN!

Editorial Reviews from Publishers Weekly

Now faded from memory, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the Turkish slaughter of more than 1.5 million Armenians during 1915-1916 was a virtual template for the 20^th -Century horrors that followed, and much of what Balakian describes so powerfully is now chillingly familiar: inhuman brutality; mass deportations of helpless innocent civilians, often in overcrowded rail-road box-cars; headlines screaming of systematic race exterminations; activists and intellectuals calling for intervention; and, most devastatingly, the lack of political will in the West to intervene to stop the slaughter. Balakian exposes the roots of the genocide in the total-war atmosphere of WW I, which combusted with the pan-Turkish nationalism of the Young Turk government, inflamed Moslem rage against infidel Armenian Christians, and a long-simmering Ottoman hatred of the Armenians dating to Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his slaughters in the 1890s. Balakian, who wrote so movingly of the impact of the genocide on his own family in Black Dog of Fate, also underscores how well-known the Armenian genocide was in America through detailed reports by U.S. consuls throughout Turkey and steady newspaper reports, and how great the response was in providing humanitarian aid and assistance to refugees and survivors. In a horrifying account, city by city, region by region, Balakian quotes first-hand testimonies about the decimation of the Armenian population and their towns and culture. Yet he retains the measured tone of a historian throughout; if anything, he lets Woodrow Wilson off too easily for not declaring war on Turkey. But readers will come away sadly convinced that the Armenians' brave but doomed stand in Van should be celebrated as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the corpse-strewn Lake Gaeljak as well-known as Babi Yar: 16 pages of black & white photos and maps not seen by……
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Culminating in the organized murder of more than 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, the Armenian genocide was both a systematized continuation of violence begun in the nineteenth century and a chilling premonition of larger and more systematic European genocide to come. A detailed account of the hidden holocaust sewn together from archival research and the testimony of survivors, this selection also documents another tragedy: America's response to the crisis. In the 1890s, led by William Jennings Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt, among notable others, American Protestants felt sympathy for the plight of their fellow Christians that was both heartfelt and fashionable. It was, argues Balakian, an inaugural moment for the American defense of international human rights. Yet political concerns kept Woodrow Wilson from declaring war on Turkey, and by the late twentieth century, moral clarity had sadly eroded in the face of the cold war necessity and oil-driven foreign policies. Even today, Turkey denies that genocide ever took place. In this important book, Balakian proves adept at presenting both human horror and political tragedy

Posted by akill 15:21 | General | Comment(0) | Permalink