be informed

I'm reading a book for my Journalism class by an independent journalist named John Pilger, and the information he collected about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is absolutely appalling. I knew next to nothing about this conflict before reading this book, and I assume that most people my age have the same problem- and yes, it is a problem. Here's an excerpt from the book that shows the brutality of the situation which was covered up by the international community and never known about. The book is called Freedom Next Time and was published in 2006.

"On the day I visited Fatima, I arranged to meet Salim Shawamareh in a cafe near his home in Anata, an outer suburb on Jerusalem. I had been told: 'His story alone speaks for what others cannot imagine.' Salim has an Israeli ID card. This shows that he was born in Jerusalem and theoretically means that he has some protection from the brutalities of the occupation. In 1994, he applied for planning permission to have his land classified for agriculture. For this, he was told, he would have to pay $25,000, a fee that applied only to Palestinians. Over four years, he was refused permission three times, and twice he was told that two signatures were missing on a form where neither was specified.

'On July 9,1998,' he said, 'my family and I were eating lunch when suddenly there was shouting, and the house was surrounded by soldiers. One of them said, "It's not your home now; it's our home. You have fifteen minutes to get out." When I challenged this, they arrested me, and started smashing the windows and throwing tear gas inside, where my wife and kids were. My wife passed out; my kids were in a terrible state. Jeff Halper, the wonderful Israeli anthropologist who leads the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions, arrived and threw himself in front of the bulldozers. The soldiers beat up everybody; one boy lost a kidney; and my house was flattened. Seven years of working in Saudi Arabia, where I'd gone to save for a home, were wasted.

'I moved the family into a tent in the backyard, then I watched a miracle: Palestinians and Jeff Halper's people, Arabs and Jews together, rebuilt my home in twenty-three days. Hundreds came to help from all over Israel. It was finished on August 3. The very next day, my wife and I were woken at four in the morning with machine guns pointing at our faces. We were ordered out into the street where we watched our home destroyed for the second time. They destroyed the trees we planted. They even took the tent we'd been living in.

'Once more, I went to the Civil Administration where they said the house would not have been demolished if I had had the two missing signatures. But whose signatures? For two months, a lawyer tried to find out for me, with no luck. So, yes, we rebuilt my home again. It was finished on April 3, 2001. And at eight o'clock the following morning, the soldiers came again and destroyed my home again!

'Back at the Civil Administration, they kept moving the "zone" line. Was I in the zone meant only for Jews? I was never sure, because I was never told. Yes, we rebuilt it again, and the soldiers came again, this time with a tank. I couldn't stop my ten-year-old daughter running out in front of it, and the doctors say the shock to her nervous system was such that she's now going blind, a bit more every day. All my children don't sleep without wetting their beds and crying out with nightmares. That happens every night. What does this mean for me? It means that, as a father, I can't protect them, I am powerless. Now I must give up.'"

This is actually the least graphic account of an injustice against a Palestinian resident by Israeli soldiers. One story included the officers pissing and defecating on, as well as completely destroying, a children's school and art museum, all in the name of "preventing terrorism."

I'm not telling anyone to go out and become a social activist, and I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty. What I am condoning is for everyone to be informed about what's going on outside of the damn United States. There are a lot of things that go on that the American media don't report on, or skew in a pseudo-patriotic way. There are plenty of news sites available on the Internet for free nowadays that provide a different perspective than the typical government and corporation-based American news- keep yourself informed on what's really going on.