---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ambros <waterbuf@...>
Date: Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 10:41 AM
Subject: The people of Israel can do no wrong !!!
To:


Pretty grim, the

LETTER FROM ISRAELI PRISONER NUMBER 88794 !!!

I am sending it on to some 50 people on my mailing  list.  Here is the
intro I send along with it:

No, the people of Israel can do no wrong because they are God's chosen
people, even though most of them aren't even semitic Jews but
descendants of the Khazars, from the Genghis Khan's steppes of Central
Asia.
  What you find below is a black former US congress woman in jail in
Israel because she tried get humanitarian aid into scorched-earth
Gaza.

Just read what she has to say.  And don't forget that what Israel is
doing to the Palestinians / Gazans has f...k all to do with Israel's
right to self-defense.   The virtually defenseless Paletinians aren't
-- can't be -- a threat to the one and only military superpower of the
Middle East.  Israel just wants to "steal" more of the Palestinians'
land, of what little they have left.


======================================================
4. LETTER FROM ISRAELI PRISONER NUMBER 88794
[By Cynthia McKinney and the Free Gaza Team -- Saturday July 4, 2009]
======================================================

This is Cynthia McKinney and I'm speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock
in Ramle. [I am one of] the "Free Gaza 21," a group of human rights
activists currently imprisoned for trying to take needed supplies to Gaza -
medicines, building materials, even  a suitcase full of crayons for
children.

On our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did
not turn around. They stopped us and we were arrested because we wanted to
give crayons to children in Gaza.

We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we
have been treated, for the "crime" of delivering humanitarian assistance to
the people of Gaza. In December 2008, I boarded a Free Gaza boat and tried
-- as the U.S. representative in a multi-national delegation -- to deliver
3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16's rained hellfire
on a trapped people and ethnic cleansing became full scale genocide. U.S.-
supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, and
cluster bombs were among the new weapons designed to inflict injuries on
Gazans that Jordanian and Norwegian doctors had never treated before. I was
later told by doctors who were there that Gaza had become Israel's
veritable weapons testing laboratory - helpless people used to test and
improve the kill ratio of modern weapons.

The world saw Israel's despicable violence thanks to al- Jazeera’s Arabic
and English satellite television broadcasts. I saw those broadcasts around
the clock from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended
because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international
waters. It's a miracle that I'm even here to write about my second
encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted
by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess to committing a
crime ... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794, incarcerated for
wanting to give crayons to kids.

Zionism has surely exhausted its last legitimacy if this is what it does to
people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their
own lives on the line for someone else's children. If Israel fears for its
security because Gaza's children have crayons, one cannot help but declare
it a failed state.

So I am facing deportation from the Zionist state that brought me here at
gunpoint after commandeering our boat. My "crime" was the dream that Gaza's
children could colour and paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and
that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

But I've also observed something else by being in this prison. First of
all, it's incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a
dream. They are all are in their twenties and they thought they were coming
to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better here.
Once proud, never colonized Ethiopia (now in the back pocket of the United
States) has become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free of superpower
politics. They also committed no crime except to have a dream. They thought
Israel held promise for them, and so they made an arduous journey through
Sudan and Egypt. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission
for Refugees; they got their yellow identification papers; they got their
certificates for police protection. But once they’d arrived here, Israel
told them "there is no UN in Israel."

Instead, Israeli police can pick them up on any pretence and abandon them
to this country’s farcical justice system. These beautiful, industrious and
proud people represent the hopes of entire families and were betrayed by
false propaganda. In a widely publicized slick marketing campaign, Israel
represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world's first
Jews and Christians. I too believed that at first.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the young women
I met in prison, as well as to their families in Ethiopia. One of my
cellmates had been incarcerated for six months and wept in despair. But
crying with her was not enough.

At home in the U.S., people watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion
dollars to America’s financial elite. It ought now to be clear that hope,
change, and "yes we can" are powerful images of dignity and self-
fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere
can truly believe in.

We must cast an informed vote and have better candidates seeking to
represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter
from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever
imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers
in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they've done to
others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am
in prison, for the sake of other people's children. But I'm lucky; I will
leave this place. For my cellmates, Israel has become the place where
dreams die.

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men being
processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. Ask yourself: what are
you willing to do?

Let's change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings:
Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who
have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of
the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State's
Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified
refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I
appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special
envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of
the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle for a free Palestine, and to
the women I've met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also
known as prisoner 88794.

(Retrieved from:
http://freegaza.org/en/home/56-news/986-letter-from-an-israeli-jail-by-cynthia-m\
ckinney
Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green
Party presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights
and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state
of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives,
from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted
to Israel while attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies
to Gaza on June 30th. For more information, please see
http://www.FreeGaza.org  This article was slightly abridged and edited for
the CIC Friday Magazine.)