ON Sunday October 20, as usual, I dug out the Seven Days supplement of my Sunday National, as I always read it first. However, it was just bloody awful! Totally excruciating!
On the front page was a picture of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Li’an Talai al-Hammadin. The look of his eyes boring right through the page to mine, almost into my soul, made me feel extremely guilty. It was almost as if he was saying to me personally, “Why can’t you do anything to help me, my family, my friends and my people?”
As anyone that read this edition of the Sunday National will know, this was a stark picture of poor Li’an Talai’s badly burned face covered in some sort of cream and bandaged arms, yet another innocent victim of Israeli attacks.
READ MORE: Mike Small: As the West continues to support Israel... what can we do?
This devastating picture accompanied an excellent piece, as usual, by Mike Small. It was titled “Truth, humanity and genocide” and covered various topics. He mentioned a young man burning to death in a fire caused by Israeli bombing of tents in Gaza. He mentioned what many respected journalists and commentators consider to be Israel’s deliberate policy of starving those in Gaza.
He mentioned that since October 7 2023 the editor-in-chief of The Guardian’s (aye, the supposedly left-leaning Guardian, no less!) has maintained a vice-like grip over the paper’s output on Israel and Palestine. Clearly, the inference being that some inconvenient truths gleaned by Guardian journalists from Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza were censored by said editor-in-chief.
Mike went on to mention how we have all been brainwashed by the media to consider that climate catastrophe is well into the future, affecting our grandbairns, whereas of course climate Armageddon has already started!
READ MORE: Foreign Office warns against travelling to 18 countries following Israeli strikes
Then there is the new world order where honesty, truth and genuine sincerity are just so passé, man! Mike stated: “We live in a world where few of the truths we were brought up to believe really exist anymore”. In this respect, think of Trump, Putin, Boris Johnson, Farage, Truss and increasingly many, many more such individuals. I’m now 64 and I can honestly state there has never been a time in my life until recently and now where so many folk have been persuaded by the dastardly ones to believe that, effectively, the moon is made of cheese! There was much more in Mike’s piece but I can’t cover it all in my letter.
The way I see it – and I would hope that Mike would concur – is that the good, decent folk throughout our world need to see through all this shit, push back against it, keep pushing back against it and never succumb to the despair so many, understandably, feel right now. Surely we all owe it to poor Li’an Talai, if nobody else!
Ivor Telfer
Dalgety Bay, Fife
THERE is one goal behind the genocide perpetrated by the rogue state that is Israel. The systematic destruction of everything that offers surviving children a chance at life, leaving them traumatised forever. Israel’s actions are dismantling their past, present and future – thousands left with devastating injuries and permanent disabilities, including thousands of children orphaned, the destruction of schools, starvation during critical developmental years. There have been more children killed in the past year than in any other conflict globally over the last 18 years. So much damage has been done that it will last FOREVER. And it will NEVER heal.
There are many exceptionally brave Palestinian journalists. 39 of them have been killed since the bombing. They are heroes. So are the doctors and nurses in the hospitals. So are the UN workers, 89 of whom have been massacred by the IDF. So are the international aid workers.
READ MORE: Israel trying to 'silence' media with 'terrorist' claims, says Palestinian journalist
Reporters from all over the world are going to the border crossing at Rafah, but the IDF refuse to allow them into Gaza, because they do not want the outside world to see exactly what holocaust they are unleashing on INNOCENT CIVILIANS.
This GENOCIDE MUST STOP. Do you who have the power understand? We say CEASEFIRE NOW. Stop backing this rogue state, controlled by psychopaths. Stop using MY taxes to wipe out a whole people. I demand that you STOP.
Margaret Forbes
Blanefield
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