Kamangir (Archer)

Kids: Israeli or Iranian

Kamangir | July 21, 2006 | Category Iran

Read Lisa’s respond to the famous Israeli girls’ picture (see). She writes,

…Sometimes people do silly things when they are under emotional stress. … Especially when they fail to understand how their childish, empty gesture might be interpreted. … I wonder why so many people seem to take satisfaction in believing that little Israeli girls with felt markers in their hands - not weapons, but felt markers - are evil, or spawned by an evil society…

I completely agree but there is a tiny problem here; at the time of war what people are looking for are dramatic scenes which can describe what is happening. When you see people so angry and so determined to kill others the first question is why. And this picture is a “good”/”convincing” answer. I think Lisa is very lucky because she is from a country where people do these silly things once a while. Then she can show the other side of the coin and calm everyone down. This morning, I was looking at the Iranian news sources and as always I was finding tons of protests in different cities. As always, there were lots of kids involved. A girl was carrying a sign which read “Death to America, Death to Israel”. A boy had a headband with “Ready for Martyrdom” written on it. Couple of others were thoughtfully walking on the American flag. Starred at the camera a girl was holding Nasrollah’s picture with her other hand showing V. I do not think those Israeli girls are evil. They are doing a funny/silly game which then becomes serious and adultly when it is sent all over the world. My question is are we ready and willing to look at the world, The entire world, and start to think like Lisa? Take the extreme example of an adult shouting “Death to Israel” in Tehran. Is he really aware of what he is doing? Isn’t he doing that only because the national television has bombarded him with pictures of corpses, the type that you can only find in rotten.com? Then, is he responsible for what he is doing? What’s the morally acceptable reaction there? To send a rocket, force sanctions, and deny giving student Visas?

Frankly, I like Lisa’s argument and I understand it, because I have lived through it. Unlike her I am not surprised. This is the way Iranians have been judged for a long time. Probably because we have too many girls like those and our adults still have an important part of the minds not really grown up.

The Other Side of the Coin

Kamangir | July 21, 2006 | Category Iran

It’s the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle. A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.

…

This description, you’ll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The “soldier” was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew “someone” who had done “something.”

We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as “Scream Hill” (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows. No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive. When the Palestinians do this, we call it “terror.” When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.

…

The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn’t clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive. Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses, as Palestinian society has done, we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories. Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.

See the complete article here (see). A Persian translation can be found here (see). The links are from Ali’s blog (see).