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Do not keep silent in the face of US and Israeli crimes
By Paul J. Balles*
27 January 2008
Paul J. Balles reminds those who keep silent in the face of crimes, whether by Israel, the USA or some other, that eventually their silence may rebound on them with a vengeance.
In a poem by Maurice Ogden, a hangman comes to town and builds a scaffold in front of the courthouse. The poem's narrator says:
And we wondered whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal? What the crime?
Till one cried, "Hangman, who is he,
for whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in his buckshot eye
and he gave a riddle instead of reply.
"He who serves me best," said he
Shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down and laid his hand
on a man who came from another land.
So we gave him way and no one spoke
out of respect for his hangman’s cloak.
After hanging the "alien", the hangman stayed in the village and told the people
that he was there for more than the alien.
"Do you think I've gone to all this fuss,
to hang one man? That's the thing I do."
One voice said "Shame" and the hangman hung him. After that no one spoke out of fear. Next he hung a "usurer", a Jew, and then a black, and then another and another until everyone in the village was gone except the hangman and the narrator.
Just before hanging the narrator, the hangman says:
"First the alien ... then the Jew.
I did no more than you let me do."
At one time or another, the hangman's prey in America have been native Indians, Mexicans, Jews, blacks, southerners, British, Germans, Italians, Irish, Japanese, Communists, North Vietnamese, North Koreans, anti-war protesters, Serbians, Russians, civil rights protesters, and now, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims.
As one commentator has said, "The poem can be seen as an indictment of those who stand idly by while others commit grave evil or injustice, such as The Holocaust or McCarthyism."
That being the case, many should be indicted for standing idly by while:
- Palestinians in Gaza are the victims of devastating treatment by the Israeli hangman
- Hamas is labelled a terrorist organization but not Israel
- The theft of Palestinian governance from a duly elected Hamas
- Fingering Hezbollah as a terrorist organization when it has committed no terrorist acts
- The support of Israel by the US, UK and now France no matter what crimes against humanity they commit
- The destruction of Iraq by America while failing to capture the bearded old man hiding securely in caves in Afghanistan and Pakistan
- Israel continues as an apartheid state
- Lobbyists control the US government and media
- Israel's possession of over 200 nuclear warheads while objecting to Iran's development of nuclear power
- The terrorism and crime of Guantanamo
- America's violations of human rights while pretending to be the icon of freedom
- The erosion of the US constitution and its intended protection of personal freedom and liberty
- America's support of dictators like Musharraf – the latest in a series of exemplars
- America and Israel threatens to bomb Iran
- Designating Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization
- Zionists label any criticism of Israel anti-Semitic
- US protects American corporate interests destroying the environment
- America gives free rein to mercenary cowboys in Iraq to murder and maim without control or punishment for their crimes
“DO NOT KEEP SILENT when your own ideas and values are being attacked. .If a dictatorship ever comes to this country, it will be by the default of those who keep silent. We are still free enough to speak. Do we have time? No one can tell." – Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It.
Paul Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for 38 years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.
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