Posted by Farid Parhad from customer-148-233-78-77.uninet.net.mx (148.233.78.77) on Wednesday, May 14, 2003 at 9:55PM :
...with my own government hesitant to protect my familyīs good name, even after I placed them at great risk to serve my country in what I assumed was an important matter...important enough to have my car rammed at the start of a high speed chase just yesterday...with my children in the car...with this entire town gripped with stories of an Iraqi terrorist loose among us, armed no less...even now I will say it again...to be a loyal and patriotic American is to express your ideas freely...not grovel like a slave in fear of being labelled "disloyal" because you will not cut your conscience to suit the times...a quote from Lillian Hellman from her book, "Pentimento" about what the US government did to her lover and friend Dasheill Hammet, author of "The Maltese Falcon" during that other completely fabricated "National Emergency", the infamous "Red Scare".
This gaggle of businessmen who have seized power in the United States, who keep themselves there by making us all fearfull and small minded, cringeing and slinking around ideas as well as corners does not represent what is best about America, not by a long shot. I will still say...call it "peace" if you want to...but it is a howling wilderness both intellectually and morally.
These kinds of people always fail in time...they always go down. But they take the rest of us with them as we get the disease of conformity and fear rammed down out throats. I will die anyway...I want to live free till then. Nothing in the Patriot Act is intended to protect me or my childrenīs future...it is all meant to enrich people who are mad with lust for money and power.
I am being left out to twist in the wind...with my family, because I am an Iraqi-American...and it doesnīt "look" good right now to have one such as me risking his neck to bring a dangerous felon to justice.
I will never again say I am an Assyrian. I cannot prove it...and besides, I am not worthy of that name...not the way in which people who use it freely in their attempt to place some polish on their otherwise unremarkable selves. I am an Iraqi by birth, plain and simple and I am an American citizen by CHOICE.
I believe that the people of Iraq today are the descendants of all of the glorious cultures who gave civilization to the world...I believe there is no more hallowed or consecrated piece of land on earth than that which can be found between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, certainly not the sheepshit covered hills of Jerusalem...and I think it is ironic and fitting in an ugly way, that pure, crass American business greed, the same force that has driven children in America out to sleep in the streets, has come finally, like a barbarian, to the land that gave us all our humanity and desecrated it...for profit. Of COURSE they will say it is for "liberty" and "freedom" for the Iraqi people. Whom do they think they are fooling...not this Iraqi-American.
And I want to add, to my Muslim brothers and sisters in Iraq and elsewhere...we are one people...do not let them divide us over petty ass distinctions over which we are killing each otherīs children. Your child is no less precious than mine. I do not belive for one minute in terrorists. I believe in people so ground down and oppressed that they have tragically decided, filled with grief and pain, that life under the intolerable conditions imposed upon them by "Christians" for the most part, is not life at all...but a slow lingering humiliation played out before the shamed gaze of their sons and daughters.
If I havenīt shown a sense of duty and belief in my American governmentīs dearest ideals...a sense of justice and of upholding the right that was first so brilliantly articulated by Hammurabi, even at great risk and trouble...I still say, I am an American all the way....and will never allow myself to be defined differently by the son of a bitch of the other son of a bitch ,related to other sons of bitches who have wreaked more human misery on innocent and impoverished people, including their own fellow-citizens, than this sorry excuse for an "administration" we now have has done.
Will Rogers Jr. said it best and I am proud to agree, that being American MEANS nothing less than being able to walk up to the President of the United States, and perhaps especially him and look him in the eye, if he will meet your gaze, and call him a son of a bitch to his face...then walk away with the calm reassurance that you have just exercised your one basic, fundamental and inallienable right as an American.
George Bush Jr and your father...you are both sons of bitches...and I am a proud and loyal American or Iraqi birth.
Next time...as much as I would like to say, "do your own fucking dirty work, I would still risk what I did to serve our country...donīt ever presume to label me disloyal and the rest of that claptrap you people excell in.
-- Farid Parhad
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