Our Life – You Should Be the Last Ones to Criticize It

Americans and Britons alike, and those who revolve around them, have no right to criticize the way that Gadhafi was killed. They exterminated more than a million Iraqis and conducted a mock trial that resulted in the execution of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. They also committed atrocities of rape, torture and defiling of corpses in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries without being criticized or held accountable. It is, however, within our right to protest against the despicable acts carried out by those who detained Gadhafi, while being well aware that the Gadhafi regime itself had committed similar atrocities — raping Libya’s women and children in front of its men and releasing his dogs of mercenaries in the cities to engage in all that pleased them, killing, raping and dragging corpses. Because of this, the Transitional Council forbade the dissemination of statistics on the number of rape cases in Ajdabiya committed by the mercenaries of the regime.

Maintaining your humanity and morals constitutes the touchstone of the revolutionary and resistant; otherwise, you would be committing the same deeds and practices that the tormentor, the system or the occupation perpetrated against you. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada, we have been writing in this column that it is forbidden for us to imitate the occupation’s practices because it forces one to behave as it does, with the same magnitude of brutality. We therefore criticize the killing of women and children that the occupation continues to commit.

If Gadhafi were still alive, he would reveal a lot of the dishonor of the countries that contributed to overthrowing him: how he used to stuff leaders’ mouths with his money to keep them silent; how these leaders handed him the opposition leaders to slaughter as sheep; and how they never made any noise about the massacres he had committed in prisons and elsewhere. If Gadhafi remained alive, he would expose Western leaders, their countries’ intelligence services and prominent businessmen because they colluded with him on the money he had in the form of assets and investments, while his country remained barren and its people slaves.

It is not a heroic act to insert a rod into the buttocks of a detained man who is wounded, even if it was Gadhafi’s cronies who did it and more to their countrymen and their opponents. Ever since the beheading of Hussayn ibn Ali (the Prophet Muhammad’s nephew), may Allah be pleased with him, Arab tyrants have been torturing opponents. This is the reason why exacting revenge on the Umayyad Dynasty crushed and wiped them out. He who resorts to brutal and blind revenge merely invites his opponents to do likewise later. In this way, a dictator sometimes creates a dictator among his opponents.

What concerns us in this context is the tendency for Palestinians in any Arab turmoil to come out the losers. In Syria, it has become evident that some thugs are among the herds of PLO and Fatah dissidents. They fought their people before that, conspired against the revolution and were under orders from the Syrian regime to shell refugee camps in Lebanon — just as the Iraqi regime had dragged some Palestinians to Kuwait and put them on the border to say to the Kuwaitis that the Palestinians were taking part in the invasion of their country. In Libya, some of Saif al-Islam Gadhafi’s thugs, among them the so-called “Palestinian leaders,” took an active role in mobilizing some Palestinians in the People’s Committees so that Palestinians would carry the full brunt. This is despite having expelled them to the desert on the borders of Egypt more than once. We should condemn every Palestinian involved in a regime’s suppression of its people and punish all those responsible for this involvement, for we are not a rod for any repressive regime but must be one against them and reject our own submission.