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02/15/2006:

"Palestinian Ballots vs. Israeli Bullets"

Every year in February, Americans celebrate the eradication of unjust laws that had imprisoned African-Americans behind a wall of segregation for more than 90 years and the centuries of effort that brought them out of slavery -- stateless, penniless, oppressed -- to a state of equality and justice with their fellow citizens. Yet even now, fifty years after this remarkable transformation of our society, the reality laid bare by Katrina demonstrates that equality remains elusive and racism alive. This truth about America burst from the television screen as Katrina lashed New Orleans. Had the TV crews not presented this scene to Americans, the truth of America’s poverty stricken hordes would have remained hidden behind the glitz of Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street. “Oppressed people,” Martin Luther King reminded us, “cannot remain oppressed forever.” But they can be forgotten, nameless, and voiceless, the detritus of our touted democracy. So while we celebrate this most recent accomplishment in creating a real democracy in America, almost 300 years after its proclamation to the world, we might ask why we allow our touted mid-east allay, the only bastion of American-type democracy in the mid-east, Israel, to create an apartheid state that incorporates the imprisonment of a people behind illegal walls condemned as such by the International Court of Justice, illegal theft of land contrary to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and actions that break the United Nations’ Convention against Genocide?
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