Women's voices from around the world
Compiled by CODEPINK Staff
(1)
"France is literally bombing Raqaa's hospitals & museums in synechdocal representation of people who've already killed themselves. It's knocking out water & electricity service to a civilian population. It's killing people. Ask why it seems like the natural order of things for bombs to fall on Syria but a monstrous violation for bombs to detonate in France. Ask."
Source: Twitter
(2)
Laila Lalami:
"What happened in Paris on November 13 has happened before, in a shopping district of Beirut on November 12, in the skies over Egypt on October 31, at a cultural center in Turkey on July 20, a beach resort in Tunisia on June 26—and nearly every day in Syria for the last four years."
Source: The Nation
(3)
Malak Mattar
“I love Paris because it symbolizes happiness to me. I feel sorry about what's going on there now, so I painted this.”
Malak Mattar is a Palestinian from Gaza and just 15 years old, but she is old beyond her years, having lived through three major attacks on her home. And her latest painting is a gesture of sympathy with those suffering in Paris after the terrorist rampage there.
Source: We Are Not Numbers
(4)
Nabila Ramdani:
"French Algerians are still encouraged to stay out of tourist Paris. Curfews are regularly imposed on the estates, with armoured vehicles filled with paramilitaries moving in during disturbances. When particularly heavy rioting broke out in 2005, the then interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, imposed a state of emergency."
Source: The Guardian
(5)
June Jordan:
Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?
Source: Poetry Foundation
(6)
Phyllis Bennis:
"A few days after the 9/11 attacks, we at the Institute for Policy Studies and some of our allies organized a public statement whose lead signatories included Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Gloria Steinem, Rosa Parks, and many more. The statement reflected the deeply-rooted fear we all shared, that however horrific the attacks of September 11, it was George W. Bush’s statement in response to those attacks that threatened the world. That was the moment he announced that the response to this enormous crime against humanity would be a war—that he would lead the world to war “against terror.”
Source: The Nation
(7)
Susan Abulhawa, author of Mornings In Jenin and 'The Blue Between Sky and Water', founder of Playgrounds for Palestine
What if
In the silence that lives deep in despair
Where it’s unclear how life can go on
There, in that moment
That space
Parisians turn their gaze eastward
To Beirut and Baghdad
Libya and Palestine
And Yemen
Somalia and Egypt
What if they looked now
With a knowing they didn’t know last week?
With a connecting thing
With the humble impulse of grief
That reaches for itself
What if they stayed a while longer in that silence
To find what they know little about
But which was done in their name
By ambitious politicians
By pitiless men who
Call for “pitiless” wars
Merciless thugs
Declaring “merciless” (profitable) wars
Maybe walk Haiti’s streets
Potholed and cracked
To pay a “debt” owed by the enslaved
To pave a French terrace
To visit the remnants
Of a former colony’s blast
In Beirut one day before.
See the same tears
Of the same anguish
Then remember, together
Adel Termos and Valentin Ribet
To discover how utterly splendid
How glorious was Iraq
How precious was Baghdad,
Even under a tyrant.
Then see what they did to her
Really, really see.
Be horrified
Aghast at such profound,
Irreparable harm to
An ancient people
And fabled land.
Then dig into the words of rules
Like Rule #81
To see how we are all being duped
And robbed and broken
By the same monsters
Who create proxy monsters like IS
You know,
Syria did not ask for this
They had already splendor
A subversive sophistication and beauty
That minisculed senior and junior tyrants
Palestine did not deserve this fate either.
Our Jerusalem was your Paris.
Romance, religions, books and song.
What if Parisians would see?
What if U.S. Americans saw after Nine Eleven?
Shunned their cowboy and sinister senators?
Read and investigated, instead?
Tried the guilty and damned
The reorderers of world order?
If so, for Americans then
Maybe there’d be no need to ask
What if
For Parisians now.
Source: The New Inquiry