500 Free Voices in the Grip of Occupation

Yemenat

Mahmoud Yassin – Yemeni Writer & Novelist

Five hundred international human rights and media figures, from all six continents, now find themselves in the grip of occupation. They are the elite of the elite, their names representing the finest human conscience and the most worthy of the trust of their societies and of the institutions of law and media to which they belong.

And now, you fool, you have moved from disputing with the families of prisoners held by the resistance to entering into a confrontation, an open provocation, with the world entire. That world now stands before you as one family—five hundred prisoners under your hand. Humanity has followed every detail of your act: halting them, preventing them from fulfilling a humanitarian and legal mission sanctioned by every international charter and by the very frameworks of human rights.

You had already earned the title of the foremost violator of human rights for your crimes in Gaza. Still, there remained some broadcasters and journalists within your institutions and Western media networks who sought to dispute this definition, arguing in your defense with claims that you had not struck first, or that—though excessive—your actions were but a reaction.

But now, with your seizure of the Convoy of Steadfastness and the capture of its crews, you have furnished the world with definitive and irrefutable documentation: you are the embodiment of the very definition, beyond contest or argument, of the foremost criminal against human rights in all of human history.

Consider Milosevic: he committed crimes of ethnic cleansing, yet he did not imprison the rights activists who sought to document those crimes. And what have you done? You have practiced both faces of atrocity—genocide, and the direct violation of human rights and liberties—in live transmission, before the eyes of the entire world.

Like any cornered criminal, each day you escalate to a new level of crime, making life itself, the very existence of your own citizens, untenable anywhere in the world. With your seizure of five hundred prisoners, you have transformed the world’s outrage and hatred of you and your state from a moral and humanitarian stance into one of deeply personal grievance.

For each of them has an institution, colleagues, relatives, and a personal history worthy of respect. And now thousands of institutions are filing lawsuits, and thousands of newspapers are taking a stance—unequivocal, unambiguous, and absolute.

The white and the black, the colored, the speakers of English, French, Latin, and the ancient tongues of Asia—the Christian beside the Muslim, and even the kind-hearted Jew among them, as though what remains of your religion were nothing but its evils, its deranged interpretations, its criminal impulses, and the incitements to violence inscribed in its sacred book. Even the priests still with you are but your own reflection.

Now, within the cell, the Buddhist inquires after the health of his Muslim companion across the corner, while between them sits a Copt carrying an American passport, and an Indian whose very presence lays bare every hypocrisy between you and the Prime Minister of India.

There is a Greek woman, with tears of Venus, and an Italian of the Medici line—the family that once nurtured the Renaissance. All of civilization now stands behind your bars. Every ancient charter, every covenant of human rights, every race and every creed is now subject to interrogation on the charge of siding with humanity—in a mingling of outraged sentiment drawn from all six continents.

It is, in truth, a redistribution of your filth across every corner of the earth, a perverse form of justice: the justice of one who knows no justice except in the measured allotment of his harm and his wickedness upon all alike.