Big brotheR
01-30-2007, 02:27 AM
An Israeli Mother Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13, who was killed by a Palestinian bombing attack in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is summary of Dr. Nurit's address to the European Parliament (EU) in 2005.
When I asked the people who invited me here why wouldn't they invite a Palestinian woman the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized. I don't know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.
It is true unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli Army, has expanded around the globe. In fact state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened Western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.
This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: "I gave him birth, I breast-fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land."
This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian (Bush), one is Anglican (Blair) and one is a non-devout Jew (Sharon).
When I asked the people who invited me here why wouldn't they invite a Palestinian woman the answer was that it would make the discussion too localized. I don't know what is non-localized violence. Racism and discrimination may be theoretical concepts and universal phenomena but their impact is always local, and real. Pain is local, humiliation, sexual abuse, torture and death, are all very local, and so are the scars.
It is true unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli Army, has expanded around the globe. In fact state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened Western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.
This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Muslim womb.
We are all the victims of mental, psychological and cultural violence that turn us to one homogenic group of bereaved or potentially bereaved mothers. Western mothers are taught to believe their uterus is a national asset just like they are taught to believe that the Muslim uterus is an international threat. They are educated not to cry out: "I gave him birth, I breast-fed him, he is mine, and I will not let him be the one whose life is cheaper than oil, whose future is less worth than a piece of land."
This in spite of the fact that the people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian (Bush), one is Anglican (Blair) and one is a non-devout Jew (Sharon).