2005 International Women's Day Address to the European Parliament

[Tom Joad]

Dear Friends,

Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan is the mother of Smadar Elhanan, 13 years old when killed by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem in September 1997. Below is Nurit's speech made on International Women's Day 2005 in Strasbourg.

Please listen to the words of a bereaved mother, whose daughter fell victim to a vicious, indiscriminating terrorist attack. I wish her words will enter the hearts of all peace seekers in our troubled and divided world.

For better days, Professor Avraham Oz
Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature
University of Haifa

WOMEN

by Nurit Peled-Elhanan

Thank you for inviting me to this today. It is always an honour and a pleasure to be here, among you (at the European Parliament).

However, I must admit I believe you should have invited a Palestinian woman at my stead, because the women who suffer most from violence in my county are the Palestinian women. And I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam Raban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family's strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.
<snip>
I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour. I don't know the kind of violence that turns a woman's life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken in at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished, who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life. This is not part of my personal ordeal. But I am a victim of violence against women insofar as violence against children is actually violence against mothers. Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan women are my sisters because we are all at the grip of the same unscrupulous criminals who call themselves leaders of the free enlightened world and in the name of this freedom and enlightenment rob us of our children. Furthermore, Israeli, American, Italian and British mothers have been for the most part violently blinded and brainwashed to such a degree that they cannot realize their only sisters, their only allies in the world are the Muslim Palestinian, Iraqi or Afghani mothers, whose children are killed by our children or who blow themselves to pieces with our sons and daughters. They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses, though they may have various illustrious names such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland, are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful.
.... more
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Please read the whole thing.
http://mostlywater.org/node/4219
or
http://www.countercurrents.org/pa-elhanan300306.htm
(the latter is a better page, but the first has Dr. Nurit Peled-Elhanan background information.

[Violet_Crumble]

1. She's an amazing woman...

I hope everyone here reads her address and finds it as moving as I did...

Violet...

[Phx_Dem]

2. I think it's very disturbing

"They are all mind-infected by the same viruses engendered by politicians. And the viruses, though they may have various illustrious names such as Democracy, Patriotism, God, Homeland, are all the same. They are all part of false and fake ideologies that are meant to enrich the rich and to empower the powerful."

What a bunch of nonsense.

[cali]

3. How is it that some people are

able to resist the virus of hate, and others aren't? It's a moving speech, though not one I can completely agree with. I presume that when she asserts that God, democracy etc. are false and fake ideologies she means that they are fronts for more pernicious ideologies. She doesn't make that clear. Even people who have suffered great losses don't automatically have a franchise on some transcendent truth.