Sleeping with the cockroaches.
One of the things I have learned about life is that most things are all a question perspective. A friend of mine first learned this lesson as a teenager at the family dinner table when she thought to monopolize the dinner time conversation whining about how horrible and depressing her day at school was.
Her father, a former Minsk woods partisan, wanted to know how many Nazis, how many bullets, and how many others were waiting around every corner to kill her just because she existed she encountered to make her day so terrible? He might not have won the ‘most warm and cuddly’ Father of the Year award but he did teach her a little about personal perspective and that every day you find yourself alive has the potential to be – a very good day indeed.
But really; is there nothing more obnoxiously adolescent than a self-aggrandizing peace activist publicly moaning over alleged horrific treatment and circumstances she finds herself in once she goes to circumvent Israeli law? Ynet News:
An Israeli citizen who was among 21 peace activists apprehended by the IDF en route to the Gaza Strip says she was held under conditions resembling a “horror movie.” Houida Araf, who was released on Wednesday, told Ynet that she and a fellow Israeli peace activist were separated from the group and taken to the Ashdod Port.
They put us in a warehouse, where we slept on a cockroach-infested cement floor, as armed soldiers were monitoring us,” she said. “They didn’t say a word to us. They confiscated all our personal belongings and phones, and they didn’t let us contact anyone. A day later they left us at the Ashdod central bus station without any money or belongings.”
“What they did to us is unforgivable, but we’re not the story here,” Araf said. “The fact they threatened us with violence because we wanted to transfer medical supplies and drawing equipment for children is simply absurd.”
How much do you want to be Gilad Shalit would give just about everything to be left at penniless and without his ‘belongings’ at the central bus station in Ashdod?
If Araf and cohorts were really well and truly concerned for the children and health of Gazans; they would have just dropped off their ‘medical supplies and children’s drawing equipment’ to either the UNRWA or Red Cross offices in Israel…but then, she and her cohorts, wouldn’t have their 15 minutes of whine. Although, I really do think it would be instructive if someone were to ask Araf to describe what she believes is the physical circumstances in which Gilad goes to sleep in every single night since July 2006.
