So I’ve just been really getting into using Twitter and I am continuously surprised at how fast and consistently I get tweets, bits of information and newsflashes from sources that I otherwise would have had to do some deep sea internet searching for – like @Asia2Gaza who gives by the minute updates on the aid flotilla caravan going from… Asia 2 Gaza [who by the way, made it through the egyptian security forces (who requested a 10,000 toll to get through to gaza) just four hours ago!] or the Egyptian protesters, Muslim, Christian, and secular, who have been demanding governmental accountability from the Ministry of Interior and have been under unrelenting attack by the closest arm to the people of the Egyptian authoritarian military state, the police, and many many others. I am grateful to be connected in this way and to be receiving real-time messages about what’s happening in places plane rides away or just a few blocks down the street. But in the online pursuit of truth and justice, you rarely get happy messages.
Last night, after reading article after article, tweet after tweet, and watching video after video (hell, I even got to vids w/Vietnam War tags), I felt really defeated and really hopeless. This isn’t a feeling I’ve had in a while, nor is it a feeling I like to publicize, but it was very raw and very true. The big military powers, the US and Israel, have crushed the livelihoods of millions of people combined. But we still have hope for the Palestinians. Even though Israel killed 24 nonviolent activists protesting alongside the apartheid wall in the last year, massacred 1500 Palestinians in Gaza during their war crime campaign known as Operation Cast Lead and strangling the livelihoods of the entire Palestinian population of Gaza by perpetuating an illegal siege and occupation of the Gaza Strip, and physically and psychologically terrorizing the entire population of the West Bank while giving a blind eye/green light to the racist surpremacist land-grab of the colonial Jewish settlers who continue to torture and bully and commit homicidal acts against the Palestinians in the name of G-d, IN ADDITION TO perpetuating a system of internally legalized apartheid akin to that of the former state of Apartheid South Africa (except y’all have a better lobby). Amidst allll of that (and of course more), we still have hope. We have hope that Palestine will be sovereign (in whatever shape it may take), that we will one day be rid of the currently existing two political evils that shamefully represent the Palestinian people (one a pandering group of Uncle Toms and the other a smolderer-of-culture Islamic resistance group [different, better than other Islamic resistance groups but come on can’t we just get SOME/ANY secular folks reppin us??!!]), that justice will prevail.
But you know who has really won? And we don’t call for their boycott, we don’t burn their flags, we don’t hold them accountable for any of the war crimes that they have committed? America. They have killed over One Million Iraqis. They have used illegal chemical weaponry to attack a civilian population. White phosphorus in Fallujah. 600 civilians murdered in Fallujah. Mark 77 [similar to Napalm] in Fallujah. Causing epidemics of babies deformed in Fallujah. But where is the accountability? Not in Congress. Not in the White House. Not in the DoD. Who is protesting? Some folks around the country. Who still has hope? Not me. Not many. Iraqi friends who go back to the homeland to see family say that the Americans protect them from the insurgents, from other Iraqis. Not only has America murdered a million human beings since 2003 in just one country of just over 31 million, they have succeeded in killing hope along with it. And they’ve convinced us that boycotting them is virtually impossible. War isn’t simple, no one said it was. But upon knowing the truth, pointing out the criminal is easy as pie.
kamelya omayma 
