09) THE ANTIDOTE FOR DESPAIR IS ACTION

By Kevin Neish, Victoria, BC

            "For heavens sake, why are you going back on another flotilla to Gaza!!"

            I've heard this comment/question repeatedly since I returned from an Israeli prison after the attack on my ship, the Mavi Marmara, last May.

            In a nutshell, I'm returning because the illegal blockade of Gaza is still in place. The job is not done. I gotta go back or I couldn't live with myself.

            And it's all my mom and dad's fault. As a little kid, I remember my Marxist mother and father repeatedly standing up for just causes. They would stand, almost alone in the 60's, for Cuba, the USSR, unions and peace, and against the Vietnam war, nuclear bombs, apartheid South Africa, fascist Spain and book burning McCarthyites here in Victoria.

            They risked financial loss, political and social banishment and physical assaults. And in the end, they usually, eventually, were proven right. While I was on the Mavi that night last May I thought about them a lot, while watching fellow aid workers be shot, bleed and die all around me, having Israeli guns put to my head, watching others get beaten and everyone being deprived of human dignity and basic rights for three days.

            I don't remember being scared, I remember being outraged, all the more so when I returned to Canada, to hear Israeli-scripted questions from the mainstream media. It was a horrific three days, even though I expected that my Canadian passport and white skin would likely get me home safe. All I could think about, was that the Palestinians have gone through all this, and much much worse, for years and years on end.

            Once you know something, "taken the red pill", you can't go back, you can't "take the blue pill" and ignore what you've seen and walk away, at least I can't. Sometimes, I feel that I'd give anything to take a blue pill and move into blissful ignorance, just for a while, but this isn't a movie, it can't and shouldn't happen.             In a high school political science class, which I not surprisingly failed, I remember a quote from a Nuremburg WWII war crimes judge. He said that when citizens are faced with an immoral law, they have not only the right, but an obligation, to disobey that law. So when Rosa Parks refused to obey the law and not move to the back of the bus, or when Gandhi milled his illegal salt, or when Greenpeace illegally sailed into atomic bomb test zones, they broke the State's laws, but they were all morally right and history absolved them all.

            The flotilla against the blockade of Gaza, has been deemed illegal by Mr. Harper and we are being sued by Canadian Zionists to try to bankrupt and stop us, but we are doing the right thing. Someone has to do something to make it end, and 40 or so Canadians aboard the Tahrir will try to do the right thing, with a ship full of medicines, witnesses and hope, regardless of Mr. Harper and his Zionist supporters.

            Hopefully some Canadians feel the same way and will support us and be apart of our effort. Contact your MP and the media and tell them how you feel. Demand justice. Do the right thing.

            If you want to keep track of the Canadian Boat to Gaza or make a donation, check out www.tahrir.ca. If anyone wants to keep track of me on the Mavi Marmara take a peek at www.kevinneish.ca. For info on the Freedom Flotilla 2 in general, see www.freegaza.org.

            Watch for us sailing to Gaza around the 24th of June.

(The above article is from the July 1-31, 2011, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)