Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
Empathy Is A Wave
Children's art from Gaza - aimed at helping heal Palestinian kids traumatized by Operation Cast Lead, but censored at the last minute by the Museum of Children's Art in Oakland, Ca. after pressure from Jewish groups - is now available in a searing book, "A Child's View from Gaza." Born largely of the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA)'s “Let the Children Play and Heal,” project, the book features drawings from kids who survived the Israeli assault that killed 1,400 people, but still see its planes and guns and bodies wherever they look. With a moving, truth-telling forward from Alice Walker. Buy this book, help these kids.
From Alice Walker's forward:
I realize it's hard for grownups to accept that we've had a hand in making a small child armless, legless, eyeless. We want to keep thinking Americans are generous, fun-loving, baseball-crazed folks who draw the line, collectively, at child abuse. At child murder. That image was never true, and it certainly isn't now....Each child who sees the art should be given some background about war. Any war. For it is war that humanity must outgrow, wherever it arises...We can encourage ourselves, and our children, never to be afraid to feel. No one dies from compassion, is a mantra they might like. Empathy is a wave that need never be stopped. If our children catch this wave, from the ocean of tears shed by Palestinian children, they might have a future in a more stable and saner world.
29 Comments so far
Show AllThank you for posting this and for promoting the book. What we did to Gaza was horrific,much of it criminal according to our own laws. But when it is our government that does the crimes, then how can the criminals be prosecuted and our attacks on powerless people be stopped? I one time visited the Hiroshima museum, and they had a theatre showing continuously different films about the nuclear bombing. The most moving of these was a film about amateur art done by survivors, asked to make a painting of what they saw that day. Art is emotionally more real and more informative than photographs. It seems that Congress and the US media decided that Palestinians are not humans, not deserving of rights or empathy or security. This book might help Congress understand that Palestinians are humans. We should all buy extra copies to mail to our Congressional representatives and our Senators.
WP:
Unfortunately, "what we did to Gaza" is incorrect. Along with our Israeli partners/allies/bosses we continue to heap death, misery and destruction on the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan and elsewhere.
The crimes are too numerous to detail, but they are ongoing and horrendous.
I will just mention one: the blockade which prevents food, medicine, building materials, etc. -- the basic stuff of life -- from entering Gaza. Normal human commerce and communication have been suspended.
Turning a nation into a concentration camp ranks pretty high on the crimes against humanity list.
Save the children. Free, Free Palestine!
What they did to Lebanon was horrendous, and inexcusable. We tend to forget about Lebanon, because they followed up so quickly with "cast lead" on Gaza. They appear to think they have a "god" given right to oppress.
I fully agree. Again, none of this is past tense.
Good for Alice Walker.
So the people who keep screaming Holocaust, Holocaust don't want the world to know about their own little genocide.
Well siad, Alice Walker. We need the empathy to see everyone as human and not allow the elites to disapper the humanity of people who are in the way of their politics.
USA citizens' greatest deficit, lack of empathy, Thanks Alice.CD
Any one who has been witness in this country to the death of children and there pets in a house fire sees the empathy in all the faces around them.
What we suffer from is a media that fails to show what we're accomplices to abroad.
Even the presence of this book is too threatening for the people in Oakland.
Children suffer the most in all wars. Beginning during the Soviet war against Afghanistan, children making rugs (yes, kids make those beautiful rugs) often incorporated helicopters, tanks, and airplanes into the rugs. I have not only seen them but I bought one many years ago as a gift to a friend. Like the children's art from Palestine, it is both beautiful and horrifying, as in horrific beauty.
http://www.warrug.com/
American leadership has done an excellent job in keeping images of war out of the media. We need more and more visual displays of the horrors of war.
The US media is easily the most important player by far in the Israel Lobby. We are bombarded with endless numbers of reports of white Israeli Jews under attack by non-white Palestinians. Spare us the "liberal media" nonsense.
Yeah when you consider the last Israeli "over"reaction resulted in 1400 deaths of Palestinians compared to the 14 Israelis that died it's hard to deny who the greater threat is.
But then the Israelis found Rachel Corrie such a threat they had to run her over with a bulldozer.
The "Buy" function does not work. Is it being interfered with by the feds, using the same techniques that they screwed up Wikileaks contributions? Or maybe the Israelis?
Why do we do this? Why do we support Israel, no matter what it does? Why won't we let Palestine in the UN? Why?
Dispensationalist Lobby. The Biblical "prophecy" of Armageddon. The Rapture. Final battle in the Middle East. Enough Americans believe the Biblical "New Jerusalem" prophecies for the war profiteers to make an obscene amount of money from those beliefs.
Christ was supposedly born in the Church of the Nativity in Jerusalem, in Palestine. So if Palestine ever becomes a recognized country, a part of the UN, the Christians will, in effect, have lost the Crusades. And the Biblical prophecy of Armageddon won't be realized. Peace and a free Palestine = no Armageddon = the Bible isn't true = no obscene profits for the weapons manufacturers.
Warfare State.
The "BUY" link in the article goes to a dead-end PayPal screen.
Unfreaking believable isn't it.
I'm buying it as soon as the link works. As far as I am concerned this book should be handed out to every school child in America. But that is wishful thinking,as doing so would land one in a dungeon under charges of supporting Hezbollah. Every time an Apache gunship or M-16 kills and maims those poor people,yes we do have blood on our hands. And the Media??? What Media??? All we are left with are ball games,reality TV and a massive propaganda machine ala1984. Even MSNBC, which passes for a semblance of Media,is a subsidiary of a weapons manufacturer. I feel the American people clearly know what is going on,but have gone into a mass denial,and are just beyond caring about children,war crimes,massacres and so forth. We are now being prepped for a war in Iran,of course on behalf of Israel. And you've all probably already noticed a clear slant in our so called Media,printed or otherwise,pushing for war as soon as possible.
Officially children do not exist in Palestine. According to Israel and the US they are simply terrorists in training or collateral damage. If they are not Jewish or Christian they are seemingly not children no matter their age. I am betting Israel doesn't even acknowledge Christians either.
"If our children catch this wave, from the ocean of tears shed by Palestinian children, they might have a future in a more stable and saner world."
They might if they were ever exposed to it. But they won't be. US media will always portray the Palestinian children as "terrorists" in training. US media is controlled by five or six multinational corporations that value no life over another unless it can promise them a profit. And a more stable and saner world is not in their interests either.
To Alice Walker:
I love you ....
I don't believe Jeremy Rifkin's book "The Empathetic Civilization" is correct. We really can't empathize with hurt people, even if they're our own relatives lying in bed, hooked up to life-support. Empathy is only a small part of survival. Denial also has a hand. Denial that we are not superior or demi-Gods, denial of the possibility that there is no god or of how much suffering is possible in this world. Like Nancy Reagan, we don't get behind causes until our "Ronnie" gets Alzheimer's disease. Otherwise, we stay in our bubbles.
No sane, benevolent 'god' would allow the events occurring in this world. If there is a 'god' it is one evil son of a bitch.
Now for the final word! "God is evil." Yeah, "that's right." God doesn't make us do the right thing on these or any other issues. Or if you prefer neither does Mother Nature. Does that mean that God and or Mother Nature are evil? Where is the responsiblity of us "human beings" who reject our own humanity? How about that? God doesn't make it do that which is right. If God did that then we would simply be robots, and surely would deserve no credit whatsoever for doing what's right. Do read up on existentialism. Life is full of choices. Sometimes terrible! Sometime absolutely terrifying! What about the rank and file US Army troops at My Lai who did the right thing by turning the guns of their helicopter gun ship on their fellow GIs? How about that for a tough choice? How about the White Rose in Germany? Willy Brandt even a guerrilla fighter against the Nazis and called a traitor by other Germans at the time! Later to be chancellor! Much later-- 1969. This against all odds, with the German society having been so completely brainwashed by the Nazi "doctrine of darkness." It was so much easier and popular to be a Hitler Youth or the women's version of same. The Nazi Werewolf movement agaisnt the us didn't just come from out of nowhere. It took all that hate being pumped into people to do the job on them. How about US troops who defected to the other side in the Phillipines to fight on the side of the rebets against the US Goverment imperialists and military?
They behave just like the Nazis....Hitler burned books...The Israelis are doing the same thing by banning them....
I'm buying it as soon as the link works. As far as I am concerned this book should be handed out to every school child in America. But that is wishful thinking,as doing so would land one in a dungeon under charges of supporting Hezbollah. Every time an Apache gunship or M-16 kills and maims those poor people,yes we do have blood on our hands. And the Media??? What Media??? All we are left with are ball games,reality TV and a massive propaganda machine ala1984. Even MSNBC, which passes for a semblance of Media,is a subsidiary of a weapons manufacturer. I feel the American people clearly know what is going on,but have gone into a mass denial,and are just beyond caring about children,war crimes,massacres and so forth. We are now being prepped for a war in Iran,of course on behalf of Israel. And you've all probably already noticed a clear slant in our so called Media,printed or otherwise,pushing for war as soon as possible.
FYI, those interested in purchasing this book can use this (working) link:
http://www.mecaforpeace.org/projects/childs-view-gaza-palestinian-childrens-art-and-fight-against-censorship-book
you beat me to it.
(the page can be accessed via the "book" link in Abby's text.)
From Alice Walker's forward:
"I realize it's hard for grownups to accept…"
further down:
"…it is war that humanity must outgrow…"
those finding it "hard to accept" have never really "grown up".
Warmongers fail to understand that war solves absolutely nothing and only creates yet more enemies. There is no excuse for starting yet one more war. If one is attacked one must protect oneself, but to attack is wrong, always, always wrong. Thousands of innocent people in Iran are going to die because some mythical "god" gave its "chosen people" some land, a "god" simply made up out of thin air and written about by some psychopaths in their fevered hallucinations. The "desert religions" have caused so much pain and suffering for over 2000 years now. Isn't it time to end the atrocities?
Someone write to this thread to tell us when the link works. I would like to buy the book.