Following is the text of speech given by student activist Yahya Ibrahim, in Winnipeg, Jan. 10, at a rally organized by Peace Alliance Winnipeg and the Winnipeg chapters of Canadian Muslims for Palestine and the Canada Palestine Support Network.
By 1942, Nazi Germany, armed with what was at the time state-of-the-art weaponry, had occupied and annexed most of mainland Europe, committing some of the most horrific crimes ever known to man. Among the atrocities committed in the second World War was that the Jewish people and other minorities were forced out of their homes, segregated, and forced into prison-like ghettos, which were literally walled off, and detained from the outside world and left to die.
Does this sound familiar? We’re here today to demonstrate against the brutal aggression and crimes committed against the innocent Palestinian people who have been stripped of their land, identity and human rights and expelled, oppressed, imprisoned, terrorized and often enough, brutally murdered by the terrorist state of Israel There is no more precise modern-day example of the ghettos in Europe than the segregation and apartheid, economic embargo and restriction of movement, and humanitarian crises as the Gaza Strip.
In World War II, the international community had a responsibility. A responsibility to repel the invasion and expel the occupation; a responsibility to feed and shelter the civilian victims of these horrid crimes; a responsibility to bring the perpetrators to justice and prevent such repulsive crimes ever take place again.
But they are.
Due to the bias in the media, people are unaware that this is an on-going crisis in Palestine, deceived into thinking this nightmare the Palestinian people are living in is 13 days old. The nightmare the Palestinians have been living in has been a reality since the establishment of the state of Israel. In the Gaza strip alone, 1.5 million people (most of whom are Palestinian refugees or descendants of refugees forced out of their land and into the strip) are living inside a cage, bombed indiscriminately and deprived of human necessities such as water, electricity, fuel, medicine and food, identical to the ghettos in Europe, as the world watches in terrifying silence.
Just as in World War II, the international community now too has a responsibility: a responsibility to condemn and speak out to the familiar faces of innocent dead children that were hit by an Israeli missile, to the familiar sight of an innocent Palestinian women standing over rubble of what used to be her home, and to the familiar sight of young men desperately defending their land with stones and fire crackers.
Living in such a great nation as Canada, we have the right to freedom of expression, and the moral obligation to exercise that right to the fullest extent to condemn the Israeli oppression, repression, occupation, murder, terror, subversion, aggression, apartheid and massacre of the Palestinian people – whose country is the only country that was literally wiped off the map – otherwise the blood of innocent Palestinian civilians is on our hands.
Just as the ghettos across Europe were dismantled, so too will the ghettos in the occupied Palestinian territories be dismantled. Just as the Berlin wall was demolished, so too will the separation barrier in the occupied Palestinian territories be demolished. Just as the apartheid system in South Africa was abolished, so too will the apartheid system in Palestine be abolished. And just as countless nation’s struggles against oppression triumphed, so too will the Palestinians’ struggle against oppression triumph.