November 12, 2005
THE GOOD MARTYR:
Life and Hope Flow From Palestinian Boy's Death: In Peace Overture, Family Donates Organs to Israeli Patients (Scott Wilson, November 12, 2005, Washington Post)
Ismail Khatib and his wife, Abla, have offered a response that has drawn praise from Israeli leaders and challenged Palestinians in this cramped refugee camp, a focal point of Israeli-Palestinian violence for years.Posted by Orrin Judd at November 12, 2005 9:19 AMAhmed, the couple's son, was shot twice last week by Israeli soldiers in what the military said was a mistake made during the heat of street fighting near their house. The boy had been holding a toy gun. He died two days later in an Israeli hospital, and the Khatibs made the surprising choice of allowing his organs to be harvested for transplant to Israelis.
Six people, including five Israeli Jews, have received the boy's heart, lungs, liver and kidneys since then. The recipients range from a 58-year-old woman to a 7-month-old girl, who died two days ago after failing to recover from surgery that gave her half of Ahmed's liver. The rest are recovering.
"My son has died, God rest his soul," Abla, 34, said Wednesday in the family's small living room, filled throughout the morning with women paying quiet condolences. "Maybe he can give life to others."
The donation, which the mechanic and his wife have described as a peace overture that others should emulate, has at least momentarily transformed a persistent conflict between two peoples into a shared drama of ordinary people looking beyond a war that Israeli human rights groups say has killed 672 Palestinian and 118 Israeli minors in the last five years.
I remember what happened in Italy. The world doesn't promote this like we do.
Posted by: Sandy P at November 12, 2005 10:10 AMEvery now and then a fellow human (The Khatibs)inspires me to pick up a picket sign and march. These days the equivalent for me stuck off in rural California is located at
www.petitiononline.com/khatib/petition.html
The core of the petition is below these long-winded instructions, which I have written because too many people were having problems.
LONG WINDED INSTRUCTIONS:
If this addy above does not click through from the blog where I’ve posted it, you may have to copy and paste the addy. In Windows Explorer this involves holding down the left mouse button and “painting your way across the text until you’ve highlighted the whole thing. Release the mouse button.
Then you hold down the CTRL key and tap the “c” key.
Next you need to find the addy bar and move the mouse to it. It should highlight when the mouse hits it. Now you need to tap the delete key. The addy space should be blank.
You should now be able to hold down the CTRL key and tap the “v” key and it should copy the addy in the addy space. Then you either tap the enter key or left click to reach the site.
There appear to be some problems at the site if you are using Firefox. I can’t do anything about those.
Yes, I am a retired computer science teacher, and I am used to being detailed, sorry if this is old news.
NEW NEWS
Once you are at the site you should see the title of the petition, and then, on the second line to the right, you need to click on “sign the petition.”
After you filled in the name and other stuff, it will do a preview when you click on “preview signature.” You have to do this to get to the “approve the preview screen.”
You then have to click on “approve the preview” to actually sign the petition. It’s a bit weird, and time consuming, but it works. You might be able to use this for your own needs, and it is free, and the petitions can be amazingly trivial.
THE CORE OF THE PETITION STATES:
“We, the undersigned, would like to place in nomination the family of Ahmed Ismail Khatib, for both “Family of the Year” and the Nobel Peace Prize. At least some of us will make holiday cards honoring them as exemplars of the highest order for the season, with their story on the back. Let the universe know humans by this family’s actions, and not by actions of the warring “statesmen” of all factions everywhere who dominate the news media with their lies and horrific stupidities.”
The rest is the AP story, not the best, but it serves to inform newcomers to the topic.
CHEERS,
Douglas Keachie
Is this the day then that Golda Meir prophesized would bring peace to the Middle East? The day when Palestinians would love their children more than they hate Jews?
Would that it were so.
Allahu Akhbar.