Dear Donna Edwards: History will vindicate your vote
Photo Credit: The New Liberator.Com
Representative Donna Edwards (D-MD) was the only Maryland Congressional Representative to vote against the AIPAC-produced House Resolution (H.Res 867) which called on the “President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict” in multilateral fora.”
This vote was an extremely important one because of its connection to what happened last year with the Gaza War in the Gaza Strip. Thirteen Israelis and more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in what the Israeli Military called Operation Cast Lead. Nearly half a million Palestinians were left in the aftermath without running water (still a present day challenge), and without homes to go back to.
I write extensively about this subject because I truly believe the words of Dr. Martin King, Jr. who said that “injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to justice everywhere.” And as I type this, grave injustice hounds the Palestinian people and thwarts efforts to find peace with justice and eventually usher in reconciliation between them and their Israeli brothers and sisters.
That’s why the vote of the U.S. House of Representatives (including every Maryland Rep except Rep. Donna Edwards) to oppose the Goldstone Report is so disturbing. With their vote Congressmen Steny Hoyer, Elijah Cummings, Dutch Ruppersberger, Roscoe Bartlett, Chris Van Hollen, Frank Kratovil, and John Sarbanes voted AGAINST accountability, human rights, and a respect for international law.
Donna Edwards was the only Maryland Representative to withstand the relentless pressure of the American Israeli Political Action Committee and vote her conscious and not to protect her political hide. She should be commended for that vote as well as the 36 others who voted with her. I called Edwards’ office yesterday and left a message with the young lady who answered the phone. I asked her to tell the Congresswoman that history will vindicate her vote.
If you ask any of those above named Representatives or most in the U.S. Congress about their feelings related to the South African Apartheid, the majority of them would likely condemn the actions of the South African Government to oppress, humiliate, segregate, and murder Black South Africans with impunity. Some of them would hold up Nelson Mandela as a model citizen who was a part of the grassroots leadership to largely nonviolently overthrow the South African Government’s oppressive policies and usher in the drafting of a new constitution devoid of the unjust apartheid laws.
But we need to remember that the international movement to challenge the South African Apartheid came very late. Many of the elected officials in the U.S. and many other places chose to be silent, corporations that did business in South Africa were not hampered from making money from the exploitation of Black South Africans, and the conscious of the global community was put at ease about what was being done in their name.
It’s only with the perspective of history do we recognize the value of those courageous voices that spoke out against South African Apartheid at a time when speaking out was unpopular – politically and personally.
So let me be prophetic for a moment: There will come a day when the tide will turn, when many will consider the shame of their silence in the face of such gross inhumanity, and when it will be a worldwide conviction that the Palestinian Apartheid is ungodly, intolerable, and wholly inconsistent with the virtues expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I believe that within my lifetime the day will come and history will once again tell the story of how in the face of collective complicity and outrageous inhumanity, TRUTH crushed to the earth found a way to rise again.
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