Bush's Speech - An Interim Insult

Eleanor Roosevelt once said “Justice cannot be for one side alone. It must be for both sides.” Surrounded by the roses of his garden, President Bush’s speech made it quite evident and predictably clear that in the context of the Holy Land, justice would not grace its elusive countenance on the beleaguered women and children of Palestine today. On a day where many Israeli groups went into raptures over the President’s “superb” and “visionary” address, the Palestinians and those who support their plight, felt further marginalized by an administration that seems to assign more value to an Israeli life than that of a Palestinian.

“Terrorism” is to President Bush as “Communism” was to Senator McCarthy. Since that fateful day in September, the word “terrorism” has become this bloody maxim which strikes a painful reminder of the North and South Towers crumbling into oblivion in New York. What fails to reconcile itself to me is why the word “terrorism” is only used for the Palestinians, but not for the Israelis. Prior to President Bush’s address, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak continuously used the word “terror” to refer to the Palestinians. The President followed suit a few minutes later by using the word “terror” ten times in his address. Of those ten instances, how many times was he referring to the Israelis? Not once.

According to Amnesty International, in the first 408 days of the current Intifada, 570 Palestinians were killed compared to 150 Israelis who died. Out of those figures, 150 Palestinian children were killed to Israel’s 30. Amnesty continues to report that “Israeli forces have killed Palestinians unlawfully by shooting them during demonstrations and at checkpoints although lives were not in danger. They have shelled residential areas and committed extrajudicial executions… All Palestinians in the Occupied Territories — more than three million people — have been collectively punished. Almost every Palestinian town and village has been cut off by Israeli army checkpoints or physical barriers. Curfews on Palestinian areas have trapped residents in their homes for days, weeks or even months. In the name of security, hundreds of Palestinian homes have been demolished.” Just going by Amnesty’s casualty count, if President Bush used the word “terror” for Palestinians ten times in his address, the number of associations between Israelis and “terror” should have numbered around fifty.