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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Why Followers of Jesus should forgo travel to Israel Why Followers of Jesus should forgo travel to Israel Charles E. Carlson Feb 06, 2006 Recent disclosures of the Israeli practice of sonic bombing of the 1.3 million fenced in and captive people in the Gaza Strip may take the award for the meanest trick yet. Israel’s pilots fly made in the USA F-16 Fighters low and fast, deliberately breaking the sound barrier over sleeping people. The shock waves can and do blow out the windows and break the eardrums. Anyone who ever heard a sonic boom, even from six miles overhead, can imagine the terror that children feel when the sonic boom is created right over their homes. Gaza is an island of children, four or five per family. Why terror? Because most people in Gaza have seen or felt death by explosive bombing. America’s churches could end sonic bombing and other deliberate practices of starving and torturing the Palestinians overnight. To do so religious leaders need only to cancel their tourist junkets to Israel, and tell the world they are doing so. Religious junkets to Israel are probably Israel’s biggest and most profitable tourist industry. Gifts of foreign aid from our government to theirs pay for the F-16s and Apache helicopters. While it is unlikely to end foreign aid quickly, it is possible to end tourist aid in a moment. Ending religious tourism in Israel is logical. God would seem to forbid supporting those who torture children, some of whom are Christians. Evangelicals should stop talking about their obligations to Israel long enough to listen to Jesus. What would Jesus say about terrorizing the little children? He left not a word behind that would allow his professed followers to kill children or to terrify them, or to support anyone who does. Yet evangelical leaders openly support Israel with pricey religious junkets. The diabolical meanness of the bully-boy, sonic bombers defies comprehension. The children of Gaza are used to being bombed with real bombs that blow off limbs and crush families under the debris. Most children in Gaza know shooting and bombing victims, so the sonic bombings play on the physiology and fear that is already present in anyone. We refer you to an outstanding detailed story in the Arab press Aljazeera with interviews that clearly show that sonic bombing is an ongoing plan, not an accident. It is a mass tactic little different than those used in Guantanamo, but in Gaza it is practiced in masse on half a million or more children! In my brief and never to be forgotten few days in Gaza city, I saw and heard the sounds of real nighttime assassinations, the bombing launched from right overhead, from USA gifts of Apache helicopters. This 3 AM raid was enough to frighten me, even though I could rationalize that I was not at risk. I was under the rocket launchers, while others, a mile away, were on the receiving end of the missiles. The sound of death came back to me at the speed of sound, dull thuds with faint flashes that lit a bit of sky where the Hellfire missiles exploded. The terror is felt by those who are on the receiving end, who don’t even know where the attackers have parked their helicopters. No Philistine child can ever be sure he is not a target when he hears the sounds of war. A Gaza father (he is a Baptist) showed me the irreparable school where his sons had attended classes side by side with many Muslim boys only the week before, now destroyed by an F-16 with two 500 pound guided bombs. He told me his children were then without a school and did not want to go back to school for fear of the Israelis. That is Terrorism! Another Gazan showed me the City Prison, also destroyed by American planes, flown by Israeli pilots. This writer is often accused of being partial to the Palestinians. I am without apology because they are the underdog and no one should apologize for standing up for the little guy. I will not apologize for favoring them any more than I would feel guilty for favoring a frail little kid in a fight against a school bully twice his age and size who first steals his sandwich and then taunts the victim into a can’t-win fight. This does not mean I hate Israelis, it just so happens they are citizens of the top dog which is mauling its frail and virtually unarmed opponent. They have state-of-the-war arts F-16s; and the Gazans have a few handguns and home made rockets that rarely hit anything, and oh yes, home-made hand carried bombs. It is a universal practice of the bully to accuse the little kid of just what the bully is guilty of. So it is with the Israelis and the Philistines. We have come to call the Palestinians, “Philistines,” to denote the idea that they are a homeless people, denied a land they own, living where some of their ancestors probably lived on the beach of the Mediterranean, called Gaza. Dr. Eyad Sarraj, Palestinian psychiatrist in Gaza City, chain smoked as he spoke to me in March, 2002 about the Gazans. He spoke of the traumatizing of the children. Almost daily attacks and often deaths of friends take its toll. He spoke with obvious pain about the many children who can not sleep alone, who habitually wet their beds in fear of the impending bombings. Dr. Sarraj has for years run a modest mental health clinic in Gaza City. To him the children were the unseen victims, many scarred for life. Sarraj stated categorically that every known case of a human sacrifice bombing (“suicide bomb”) came from a family where the father had been abused by the IDF in the presence of the children. Last week Dr. Sarraj, speaking of sonic bombing, told author Laila El-Haddad, "Although it is not lethal, it can lead to death indirectly, of unborn children, it can lead to highly traumatizing effects on children particularly, and adults too" Say no more, I can believe him. Who would not be terrorized by the incredible pressure of a sonic bomb at ground level over the heads of a sleeping city? Israel usually bombs at night when the children are asleep, elevating the terror with the darkness that surrounds them. In September Israel removed the 21 settlements housing a scant 6000 Israelis in Gaza, which made Sonic bombing possible. Israel would never terrify its own citizen’s children with sonic bombs. But once the squatters were gone, 1.3 million residents of Gaza were no longer protected by the presence of the Israelis scattered about Gaza. Can an evangelical pastor imagine himself, stripped and beaten by soldiers in front of the wife and children? This is a common form of community punishment in Gaza. How can a pastor lead a flock of lavish spending “Christians” on a five star posh tour of Israel when sonic bombing torture is going on? Answer: No one has suggested they stop! No one has challenged them, picketed them, confronted them, and scalded their collective conscience. But We Hold These Truths does. Please do it! Join Project Strait Gate; make copies of this plea and distribute them in every church in your neighborhood, not just to the pastor’s mailbox, but also to the congregation.
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#6. To: Red Jones (#0)
This only a small part of whats going on. Israel has walled off Gaza into an open air prison. Stole 10`s of 1,000 of extra acres of land to build this thing. Its going to be a big "Shanty Town'. The IDF goes in on "missions" to provoke and stir up some trouble. In the meantime, Israel has turned around and bulldozed and stared taking land in the West BAnk area. Mark
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