Fwd: My Family In Iraq

here's a note from a friend of mine. you may or
may not agree with everything, but thought people
may also just be interested to hear more first
hand accounts.


>Hello all and seasons greetings.
>
>I've copied below the first in a series of
>reports I am writing on daily life in Iraq from
>interviews with my family, "Iraq: A Silenced
>Majority." It appears on the front page of
>Common Dreams this weekend,
>http://www.commondreams.org One of the most
>important things we can do to counteract the war
>is to give a human face to the people who are
>its victims. I hope you find it inspirational.
>Please feel free to send me your comments, and
>to forward this widely. I will be setting up a
>blog page for these reports in the near future
>and will send you the link with the next entry.
>
>Yours for the world to come,
>
>Stephan Said, aka Stephan Smith
>http://www.stephansmith.com
>[email protected]
>
>Iraq: A Silenced Majority
>>From Interviews With My Family
>
>Since my return from this fall's busy touring
>schedule, I have been able to reach my family in
>Iraq regularly for the first time since the
>beginning of the war. One of the most important
>things we can do for them, and for the people of
>Iraq, is to counteract the unjust dehumanization
>of their entire nation of people, by giving
>voice to the silenced majority there who want
>peace. This silenced majority rarely makes it in
>the mainstream press because they are not
>killing people, and because they neither support
>the US occupation and its puppet interim
>government, nor the minority of reactionary
>extremists in their own country, who are on our
>front pages every day. And so, I've decided to
>begin a series of reports on what "ordinary"
>life is like in Iraq through interviews with my
>family and their friends.
>
>I come from a large Sunni family originally from
>Nineveh, but now spread between Mosul and
>Baghdad, and I am grateful to report that all of
>my nephews, nieces, aunts and uncles are alive.
>
>If you listen to Democracy Now!, you may have
>heard my Uncle Ghazi's voice the last time I
>did. My uncle Ghazi was Chief Electrical
>Engineer for the entire country until he retired
>in the nineties. The last time I heard his
>voice, it was crackling through a small bedside
>radio on the day the invasion began, when Amy
>Goodman interviewed him from his home. I shall
>never forget laying there, hearing Ghazi's
>unshakeable, dignified voice, when Amy asked him
>what he and his family planned to do, "Will you
>leave town, or…?", and he responded, "What can
>we do? We are expecting our first grandchild in
>the next two monthsSwe will gather the family
>and take them into the basement until the
>bombing stops." Arundhati Roy, also on line from
>India, burst out in tears thoroughly disturbed
>that Americans could hear such a testimony and
>not do everything possible to stop the war that
>would begin a mere three hours later. Still
>composed, Ghazi went on to say that he did not
>blame all Americans for the acts of their
>administration … he understood how a people,
>any people, and in this case the Americans, can
>be systematically disinformed.
>
>When I reached my cousin Omar at home in Baghdad
>last week, he said his father had been stranded
>in Mosul since the siege on Fallujah. Ghazi had
>gone to our family home there to be with my
>aunts Zeineb and Butheina for Ramadan feast. He
>told my father that when the siege on Fallujah
>began and the "freedom fighting" (or
>"insurgency" as it is called in the American
>media) spread to Mosul, the whole town shut
>down, everyone too afraid to go out, no
>businesses open, as though the place were
>deserted. Speaking with my father from their
>family home, Ghazi reported that now conditions
>are so bad, that the vast majority wishes Saddam
>Hussein were back in power…it was better then,
>even for the majority who either endured or
>tolerated, as my family, but did not support the
>Baathist regime.
>
>Four of my aunts and uncles are doctors in the
>main Hospitals in both Baghdad and Mosul. From
>contact with them, I can only imagine what it
>does to a doctor's heart to try to heal,
>knowingly in vain, a people who now may have
>become the first victims of irreparable,
>long-term geno-contamination in human history:
>Already at the Conference on Nuclear Arms in
>Hamburg, Oct. 2003, Dr. Katsuma Yagasaki, Prof.
>of Science at the University of Ryukyus,
>Okinawa, reported the US had dropped the
>equivalent of 250,000 times the radioactive
>nuclear waste dropped on Nagasaki in Iraq.
>Different from Nagasaki, however, the
>contamination in Iraq is widespread, dispersed
>over entire regions of the country, bullets,
>strewn casings, armor, fragments, shrapnel…
>all containing radioactive waste.
>
>>From scant reports and video that leak past the
>>mainstream embargo on images from Iraq, we can
>>only assume that Fallujah has been leveled like
>>Dresden was in the 2nd World War. At an event
>>coordinated by Veterans for Peace at New York
>>City's Community Church this past Sunday at
>>which I sang, the Nation's correspondent
>>Christian Parenti described why the siege on
>>Fallujah was such a critically huge mistake: it
>>was a city with more Mosque's than any other
>>city in Iraq, beloved across the religious
>>spectrum. Now many of those Mosques are no more
>>than rubble, and the total $82 million
>>magnanimously pledged by the US to rebuild the
>>city would scarcely be enough to rebuild more
>>than a couple of these churches alone.
>
>But the truth is, Fallujah's damage is far worse
>than meets the eye. The entire city could very
>well be a permanently uninhabitable radioactive
>zone, yet we hear about the noble efforts of the
>US to move the 250-300,000 inhabitants back in
>to live in the now poisoned homes, water, earth,
>and air. I reflected on this with my friend
>Dennis Kyne at the School of the Americas
>Protests a couple weeks ago. Dennis, a Gulf War
>II vet and former Fort Benning medic, was
>trained by our government to detect radiation
>sickness from Depleted Uranium in American
>soldiers using the weapons the government itself
>had given them to use. Why are the top
>administration and military officers in the US
>knowingly allowing irreparable, widespread, and
>lethal contamination of Iraq to occur? Is it
>intentional?
>
>Men in my family have been military officers
>since the days of the Ottomans. My great uncle,
>Selahuddin Sabagh, was a leader of the Four
>Colonels Revolt against the British in 1941,
>perhaps the single most pivotal incident in the
>anti-colonial movement that spread thereafter
>throughout the middle east and North Africa as a
>call to independence. Sabagh and his four
>colleagues were publicly hung by the
>British-installed regime as a message against
>the Iraqi will for freedom.
>
>It is an understatement to say that the Iraqi
>and Mesopotamian struggle to be free of forced
>rule has a long history. The giant-sized
>presidential campaign posters of interim prime
>minister and US-backed former Saddam Hussein
>strongman Ayad Allawi, shown going up around
>Baghdad on today's cover of the New York Times,
>don't fool the citizens of a politically evolved
>society. The average Iraqi citizen is much more
>aware of the workings of power in politics and
>media than their Fox-News addicted American
>counterparts. Iraq is a land where Democracy has
>its oldest roots, where Hammurabi's code of law
>pre-existed Moses, and came 1,700 years before
>Christ, where Christianity, and subsequently
>Mohammedism, became popular as revolutions
>against economic imperialism 2,000 years ago,
>where the Ottoman Empire led the world in
>religious tolerance in the days when Europe and
>its foundling United States were in the throws
>of Inquisitions and Puritanism. This is a land
>where war, after war, after war, has been waged
>for the cause of economic imperialism since the
>beginning of time, while the majority of
>families huddled with their children in their
>basements, waiting for God to bring an end to
>greed, once and for all.
>
>My father and uncle have told me over and over
>again how in their childhood, their friends were
>Shia, Kurdish, Jewish, that they lived in the
>same neighborhoods together without incident, in
>deed even with joy. They insist, knowingly, that
>their cultural landscape has become increasingly
>violently divided by domestic and foreign
>imperialist power which needs to divide to
>conquer, and keep the nation under control for
>the interests of power.
>
>The ordinary Iraqi, the silenced majority, is
>not fighting in the Mahdi Army, or for the
>insurgents, or joining the American-installed
>governing authority and its 'police.' The
>silenced majority, like my nephews and nieces
>hiding in their basements, hoping they can just
>go outside, or get to school again, or get food,
>water, electricity regularly again, know in
>their hearts that it is economic imperialism
>itself that suppresses them, and that the US
>Government and military are pawns for corporate
>interests. They understand the cause of global
>justice all too well. They know their enemy is a
>globally endured system in which the ability for
>some to have more power and wealth than others
>creates and sustains a legacy of dominance,
>divisiveness, oppression, violence, and hatred
>to maintain power.
>
>>From this perspective, the American military,
>>the Baathists, Ariel Sharon and Likkud Israel,
>>Bin Laden, al Sadr, or Saddam Hussein, are all
>>cousins in an endless parade of foot soldiers
>>for the same problem: the system of economic
>>dominance we all live under that requires
>>oppression. When I asked my family what they
>>thought was the only way to peace in Iraq, they
>>answered, " the only way for peace in Iraq, or
>>on earth now, is through a total revolution in
>>society. One no short of the dream which
>>Christ, Mohammed, and all the prophets spoke
>>of, in which real equality brings an end to
>>this entire unjust way in which we all live
>>together."
>
>Yours in the belief that another world is in the making,
>
>Stephan Said, aka Stephan Smith
>
>Stephan Smith is an Iraqi-American artist and
>activist whose new album "Slash and Burn" is out
>on Artemis Records. His song "The Bell," or
>"Daquat al Nakous," with Pete Seeger, Dean Ween,
>and DJ Spooky has become an anthem for the
>global antiwar movement.
>http://www.stephansmith.com , you can email him
>at [email protected]
>
>"Great is truth, but still greater, from a
>practical point of view, is silence about truth."
>Aldous Huxley, "Brave New World," from the foreword to the 1946 edition.


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