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We must open our eyes to Mideast wrongs

The Israelis have opened a new chapter in their war on civilians. It is one that we should pay attention to because it might cost us dearly some day.

The Israelis infiltrated the supply chain of pagers Hezbollah was using to communicate. They put explosives in them. When it looked like they were discovered they detonated them all at once. People heard a ping from the pager and when they picked it up to see what the message was the pager exploded in their hands, causing more than 2,700 injuries — mostly to hands and faces.

The Israelis could have put enough explosives in the devices to kill a lot more people. Instead their aim was to cause life long injuries. The aim was to weaken Hezbollah and they didn’t care who else got hurt. People were driving when they went off. They were shopping and taking care of their children. It was an attack on the entire civilian population of Lebanon.

The next day the Israelis blew up walkie-talkies.Those explosions caused more than 70 fires. There were rumors the Israelis had sabotaged microwaves and washing machines. There was widespread panic. If this is not a terrorist act of one country against another, what is?

Gaza and Lebanon are far from Western New York. It’s not like England or Poland where we might know people from there, or have some connection to there. Israel seems very far away.

For us to say what the Israelis are doing is wrong. We have to look at our own history and admit what we did to the First Nations living here was wrong. The land was not empty when the Settlers got here. It was full of people with their own languages and traditions.

In North America the First Nations successfully held off Europeans from 1492 until Jamestown in 1607. A hundred years of failed settlements at a time when the First Nations People lost 90% of their population to disease.

From the time of the failed Viking settlement in Nova Scotia around 1100 North and South America were isolated from the wet market in China, the teaming cities of Europe and India. All the diseases are bred by lack of clean water and mixing live animals in markets.

It’s interesting they had no diseases to give in return. I think a fundamental difference between the First Nations culture and Europe was clean water was a human right that everybody had. The Spanish found cities of 20,000 people with nothing like cholera or dysentery.

We found First Nation’s culture to be such a threat that not only did we try to kill them outright Starting in 1860 we rounded the children up and put them in residential schools where they were mistreated horribly. They were punished for speaking their language or being “Indian” in any way. The words over the gate to these “Schools” were “Kill the Indian, Save the Man”. Now that people are looking at these places they are finding unmarked graves of children who died there. The last of these schools in the US was closed in 1976.

Personally I feel like we owe them an apology and reparations. We should at least honor our treaties. The Haudenosaunee made a deal with George Washington in 1795. That treaty took a lot of land.

Here in Chautauqua County most of the deeds to our houses go back to the Holland Land Co. Surveys in the 1820s.

In 1838, the Holland Land Co. used forged documents to cheat the Seneca of almost all of their land in western New York, but a Quaker missionary, Asher Wright, launched lawsuits that led to one of the Seneca reservations being returned in 1842 and another in 1857. The rest were lost and 10,000 acres were taken in 1960 for Kinzua Dam.

We don’t want to look at Israel and see ourselves but we must because they are using our weapons to bomb and destroy the Palestinian people. We are providing the means for genocide. People in the Arab world see us giving Israel these weapons.

They see us blocking United Nations Resolutions sanctioning Israel. They see us making excuses for Israel. How long before they decide to strike us here? If we say it’s OK for Israel to put explosives in ordinary things like pagers or phones why would it not be ok for other terrorists to do the same to us?

This conflict has not really come home to us. In fact we hardly pay attention to it. For almost a year Israel has been starving Gaza. They are only allowing 100 trucks of supplies into Gaza a day. Pre war it was 500 a day.

Punishing an entire population for the actions of a few is a war crime, a crime against humanity, and we are complicit.

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com

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