Browsing the mini library of our little library in a place I call 'home', I found a book whose owned by an unknown owner. Certainly, I am sure I am allowed to read the book. I was 'eye-ing' the book for some time, but have not manage to have my own copy yet. THe book entitled 'From Beirut to Jerusalem' by Dr Ang Swee Chai is now a book you'll see I'm carrying all the time now. Thanks to the book, now I am at a right pace of reading and looking for more.
What is inside intrigued me. It touches straight to your heart and will never know when you will shed your tears while reading it. It was very emotional although you are reading it from stacks of papers, but Ang had done it well through her writing. I admired her courage to write such a book, of being very open in voicing the truth, proud as she is half Malaysian, and prouder to discover that she discover and fell in love with my brothers and sisters in Palestine. I wonder how much will I ever heard this from a non-Muslim, I should be embarrassed by now, so much that I can't bear of what I called myself as a muslim, but little I had done for my brothers and sisters in Palestine.
Here I quote some of the very touching part of the book.
I started to cry. For the first time I grasped the scale of what had happened. The truth hit me painfully. I had been so busy that I had no time to think. But now, I knew that while we had been trying to save a handful of people in the operating theatres of Gaza hospital, the camp folks(Sabra and Shatila) had been dying by the thousands outside. Besides being shot dead, people were tortured before being killed. They were beaten brutally, electric wires were tied around limbs, eyes were dug out, women were raped, often more than once, children were dynamited alive. Looking at all the broken bodies, I began to think that those who had died quickly were the lucky ones.
The machine-gun rattle that we had heard from the hospital was not fighting between PLO terrorists and Israelis as I had vaguely assumed, but had been the sound of whole families being shot dead in cold blood. The heavy explosive noises we had heard had been the shelling of the camp homes. The camps were completely sealed in by Israeli tanks, and not even a child could sneak put past them. When we asked the two thousand people hiding in Gaza Hospital to run away, they had nowhere to go. So indeed, many of them were murdered later that morning. People full of hope an d life were now just mutilated corpses. These were the folks who after months of bombardment had come back from the bomb shelters to live in the camps. They had ben so optimistic just a few days ago. They had believed the promises of the USA and other powerful nations that they would be left in peace, if the PLO left. They all thought they were being promised a chance of life.
I had watched them rebuilding their shattered lives and homes just a few days before. I had spoken to women sho had watched their sons,brothers, and husbands being evacuated with the PLO under the peace agreement and then had taken the guns they left behind to surrender them to the Lebanese Army or throw them away on the rubbish dump. I had eaten in their homes and had drunk Arabic coffee with them. My surgical skills had enabled me to treat a few people, to save them so that they could be sent out into the streets, unarmed, to be shot down again, this time, successfully. I hated my own ignorance which had deceived me into believing that we all had a real hope of peace in Sabra and Shatila,a real chance of a new life. Like everyone else from the West, I thought things would be all right once the PLO left. I thought they were the ones whose presence caused all the attacks on the camps.
I had thought the old people could retire when the PLO went, and the children could grow up - instead of having bullets put through their heads, and having their throats slit. I was a fool, a real fool. It had never occurred to me that this would happen. It was a grim moment. I felt forsaken by God, by men, by a world without a conscience. How could little children suffer the agony and the terror of watching scenes of torture, of their loved ones being killed, of their homes being blown up or bulldozed over. For these children, the mental scars, the psychological wounds would probably never heal. It was one thing to die suddenly. It was entirely different to watch loved ones being tortured and killed, while awaiting one's own turn.
