Mad World

My husband's 90 year old Grandfather was over last week. He survived the horrors of the Holocaust. He tells us stories; we sit in silence trying our best to believe such events actually happened.

"Grandpa, tell us the story of the end of the war when you got your hands on a gun." my husband asks him, as if we haven't heard the story 20 times already.

There is silence for a moment as he takes himself back to a different world.

"It was after the war, I was in Theresienstadt, there were a lot of trees, places to hide." he says with a thick accent.

"You were able to get your hands on a gun?" my husband asks again as if the story were brand new to us.

"Yeah. I saw a German soldier. I was hiding, he couldn't see me. I pointed my gun at him. I had him right in my view."

"And you couldn't do it?" asks my husband innocently?

"No." he answers quickly as if coming back to this world and away from those memories.

No matter what you believe about what is happening in the Middle East, or any part of the world for that matter, no one can justify killing innocent people to make a statement.

Grandpa always talks about how many Germans were innocent and even helped him. They weren't all evil. There were those who made bad decisions that drove them to even inhumane actions and there were those who helped save lives.

If you believe that the Palestinians are occupied and oppressed, do you justify their violence by calling it resistance? Is resistance killing a 3 month old sleeping baby? Do we celebrate the resistance by giving out candies in the streets?

Would you give Grandpa advice to have killed that German soldier? If he did it, do you think he would feel good about it? Good enough to have danced in the street and celebrated with candy?

And most of you "End the occupation" activists are Americans. Where were your voices after 9/11? Why were you not defending these 'freedom fighters' with the justification that 9/11 is resistance of a people who feel oppressed by Western and Israeli values.

None of you seem to be at all bothered with your own occupation of a land that was taken over from a people who claimed to have been there for centuries prior; Canadian company included.

Yes, the truth is that the entire world is occupied.

Today we are occupied with a different standard of madness.

End that occupation.