Dear Editor,
I have just flown back to my safe and sunny home in Portugal, leaving behind the cold winter streets of cosmopolitan London, where I attended a ‘Stop the War – Ceasefire in Gaza’ event in support of the Palestinian children and civilians caught in the crossfire of religious and state terrorism.
Why should we who live in the most peaceful country on the planet be concerned about one of the most atrocious wars we have ever witnessed in a far-off foreign land brought graphically home to us on screen in real time?
My personal history of growing up in a religious, boarding-schooled military family travelling the British empire of old has made me a global citizen fully aware of the militarised base of the nation state system. However, born in Singapore of Anglo-Eurasian descent, a mixed-marriage heritage has allowed me the joy of celebrating cultural diversity and tolerance across race, class and religion, enabling a birthright vision of justice, peace and prosperity for all – and I am sure many other thoughtful Algarve residents in our international community share or sympathise with these formative feelings and would also uphold the need for a moral compassionate society above a life of privatised material consumerism. Aware of all of our unconscious prejudice of inbred nationalism, I see a world where country has been placed before humanity, with clever media propagandists distorting our inbuilt humane morality.
As a genocide again takes place before my eyes, witnessing the unspeakable carnage of currently 25,000 dead and mutilated innocent children, there can be no inner peace for any person of conscience who does not, in this dark moment, now speak up on behalf of these voiceless victims of a brutal illegal occupation of a holy land that has been stolen instead of shared.
So, I ask all of you whose governments are complicit in these inexcusable war crimes – Israelis, Americans, Britons, Germans, French and others – to ask your governments and the equally complicit European Union to follow the lead of the Belgians and Irish politicians who have rightly named and shamed the self-interested politicians perpetrating this state-sponsored terror on children, acting so callously in our names with our tax money, but not with our consent.
Let us take our inspiration from another Algarve resident – a musician friend, Peyotl – please listen to his haunting and informative lyrical song that gives these souls of our souls a voice so we can all rise up and be the guardians of the Palestinian children in their greatest hour of need. Don’t let global apartheid and genocide drive us all towards the war-torn abyss of human misery of those oppressed and dispossessed in Gaza at this very moment, whilst you read this.
Please take whatever action you can do – in your field, with your business, with your government, with your money, no action is too small or too big – to end this slaughter of the innocents that will not cease until the call for true equality and justice expose the centuries-old international war machine making blood money for the few in the name of nation state security cloaked in all its Orwellian double speak rationality.
Gordon Sillence
