[casi] Edward Said on Iraq and Arabs: Dignity and Solidarity

[bob.steel1@DELETETHISjuno.com]

Edward Said: On Dignity and Solidarity
On June 14, Edward Said spoke at the American Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee convention in Washington D.C. In this major address he spoke of
Rachel Corrie, the so-called road map to peace, the failings of Abu
Mazzen and the portrayal of the Arab world in the U.S. media. The
national listener-sponsored radio and television show Democracy Now!
aired the speech on June 26.
To listen or watch Democracy Now's broadcast online click here
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT
In early May of this year, I was in Seattle lecturing for a few days.
While there, I had dinner one night with Rachel Corrie's parents and
sister, who I think are here. In fact, I saw them. Where are they? Could
you stand up, please?
And I'm going to speak impressionistically, Craig, because I felt you
were still reeling from the shock of your daughter's murder on March 16
in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer. Mr. Corie told me that he himself had
driven bulldozers, although the one that killed his daughter
deliberately, because she was trying valiantly to protect a Palestinian
home in Rafah from demolition, was not an ordinary caterpillar bulldozer,
but a 60-ton behemoth specially designed by caterpillar. ThereÕs a
project right there -- to demonstrate and prevent as many of these
caterpillars special house demolishing caterpillars from ever getting
there--a mass action that as Americans we can do. TheyÕre specially
designed to destroy homes. They have no other purpose. And it's a far
bigger machine than anything he had ever seen or driven.
Two things struck me about my brief visit with the Corries. One was the
story they told me about their return to the U.S. after their daughter's
funeral. They had immediately sought out their U.S. senators, Patty
Murray and Mary Cantwell, who are both Democrats, told them their story,
and received the expected expressions of shock, outrage, anger, and
promises of investigation. After both senators returned to Washington,
the Corries, at least when I saw them in May, never heard from them
again, and the promised investigation hasn't yet materialized, although
there is talk about it. And there is talk that the senators are working
behind the scenes to do something.
As expected, the Israeli lobby had explained the realities to them, and
both senators simply begged off. An American citizen was willfully
murdered by the soldiers of a client state of the United States, using a
United States built instrument of death, a terrorist instrument without
so much as an official peep or even the routine investigation that has
been promised her family. But the second and far more important aspect of
the Rachel Corey story for me was the young woman's action itself. Heroic
and dignified at the same time.
She grew up in Olympia, a city 50 miles south of Seattle, and she had
joined the international solidarity movement, gone to Gaza to stand with
suffering human beings with whom she had never had any contact before.
Her letters back to her family are truly remarkable documents of her
ordinary humanity that makes for very difficult and moving reading.
Especially when she describes the kindness and concern shown her by all
the Palestinians she encounters who clearly welcome her as one of their
own because she lives with them exactly as they do, sharing their lives
and worries, as well as the horrors of the Israeli occupation and its
terrible effects on even the smallest child. She understands the fate of
the refugees and what she calls the Israeli government's insidious
attempt at a kind of genocide by making it impossible for this almost
impossible for this particular group of individuals to survive, those are
her words. So moving is her solidarity that it inspires an Israeli
reservist
 called Danny, who has refused service in the Israeli army to write her
and tell her, and I quote from the letters, "you are doing a good thing.
I thank you for it."
What shines through all the letters she wrote home, and which were
subsequently published in the London Guardian, is the amazing resistance
put up by the Palestinian people themselves, average human beings put in
the most terrible position of suffering and despair, but continuing to
survive and stay on just the same. We've heard so much recently about the
"road map" and the prospects for peace that we seem to have overlooked
the most basic fact of all, which is that Palestinians have refused to
capitulate or surrender, even under the collective punishment meted out
to them by the combined might of Israel and the United States. It is that
fact, that extraordinary fact of Palestinian resistance, which is the
reason for the existence of a "road map" and all the numerous so-called
peace plans before them, not at all because the United States and Israel
and the international community have been convinced for humanitarian
reasons that the killing and the violence must stop.
If we miss that truth about the power of Palestinian resistance, despite
all its failings and all its mistakes, and God knows there have been
many, we miss everything. Palestinians have always been a problem for the
Zionist project, and many solutions have perennially been proposed that
minimize rather than solve the problem. The official Israeli policy, no
matter what--whether Ariel Sharon uses the word occupation or not, or
whether or not he dismantles a rusty, unused tower or two, has always
been not to accept the reality of the Palestinian people as equals, nor
even to admit that their rights were scandalously violated all along by
Israel. Whereas a few courageous Israelis over the years have tried to
deal with its other concealed history, most Israelis and what seems like
the majority of Americans, of American Jews, have made every effort to
deny, avoid, or negate the Palestinian reality. That is why there is no
peace.
Moreover, the "road map," as I told the Secretary [of State Colin Powell]
yesterday, the "road map" says nothing about justice or about the
historical punishment meted out to the Palestinian people for too many
decades to count. What Rachel Corrie's work in Gaza recognized, however,
was precisely the gravity and the density of the living history of the
Palestinian people at the national community and not merely a collection
of deprived refugees. That is what she was in solidarity with. And I want
to remind you that that kind of solidarity is no longer confined to a
small number of intrepid souls here and there, but is recognized the
world over. Five years ago, Rachel Corrie would not have gone to
Palestine. She wouldn't have perhaps heard about it. Now the situation
has changed. In the past six months, I have lectured on four continents
to many, many thousands of people. What brings them together is Palestine
and the struggle of the Palestinian people, which is now a byword for
 emancipation and enlightenment, regardless of all the villification
heaped on them by their enemies.
Whatever the fact, whenever the facts are made known, there is immediate
recognition and an expression of the most profound solidarity with the
justice of the Palestinian cause and the valiant struggles by the
Palestinian people on its behalf. It's an extraordinary thing that
Palestine this year was a central issue, both during the
antiglobalization meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as well as during the
Davos meetings, at both ends of the worldwide political spectrum. Just
because our fellow citizens in this country are fed an atrociously biased
diet of ignorance and misrepresentation by the media, when the occupation
is never referred to in lurid descriptions of suicide attacks, the
apartheid wall which is 25 feet high, five feet thick, and 350 kilometers
long that Israel is building is never shown on CNN and the networks, or
is so much as referred to in passing throughout the lifeless prose of the
road map. And the crimes of war, the gratuitous destruction and
humiliation, the
 maimings, the house demolitions, agricultural destruction and death
imposed on Palestinian civilians are never shown for the daily,
completely routine ordeal that they are.
One shouldn't be surprised that Americans in the main have a very low
opinion of Arabs and the Palestinians. After all, please remember that
all the main organs of the main establishment, of the established media
from left liberal all the way over to fringe right are unanimously
anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian. Look at the media during
the buildup to the illegal and unjust war against Iraq. And look at how
little coverage there was of the immense damage against Iraqi society
done by the 12-year sanctions. And look how relatively fewer counts,
journalistic accounts there were of the immense worldwide outpouring of
opinion against the war. Hardly a single journalist, except Helen Thomas,
who's an Arab-American, has taken the administration to task for the
outrageous lies and confected facts that were spun out about Iraq as an
imminent military threat to the United States before the war, just as now
the same government propagandist who cynically invented facts about
weapons
 of mass destruction are now more or less forgotten or shrugged off as
irrelevant.
They're let off the hook by media heavies in discussing the inexcusable
situation for the people of Iraq that the United States has now
singlehandedly and irresponsibly created there. However else one blames
Saddam Hussein as a vicious tyrant that he was, he had provided the
people of Iraq with the best infrastructure of services like water,
electricity, health, and education of any Arab country. None of this is
any longer in place. It's no wonder then that with the extraordinary fear
of seeming anti-semitic by criticizing Israel for its daily crimes of war
against innocent, unarmed Palestinian civilians, or criticizing the U.S.
government and being called anti-American for its illegal war and its
dreadfully run military occupation, that the vicious media and government
campaign against Arab society, culture, history, and mentality, to say
nothing of the campaign against Arab Americans and Muslim Americans in
this country, has been led by neanderthal publicists and "orientalists"
 like Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis.
This has brought too many of us into believing that Arabs really are an
underdeveloped, incompetent, and doomed people, and that with all the
failures in democracy and development, Arabs are alone in this world for
being retarded, being behind the times, unmodernized, and deeply
reactionary. Here is where dignity and critical historical thinking must
be mobilized to see what is what, and to disentangle truth from
propaganda. No one would deny that most Arab countries today are ruled by
unpopular regimes and that vast numbers of poorly disadvantaged young
Arabs are ruled by--are exposed to the ruthless forms of fundamentalist
religion. Yet it is simply a lie to say, as The New York Times in its
editorials and in its news reporting regularly say, that Arab societies
are "totally controlled" and that there's no freedom of opinion, no civil
institutions, no functioning social movement for and by the people.
Press laws notwithstanding, you can go to downtown Amman today and buy a
Communist party newspaper there, as well as an Islamist one. Egypt and
Lebanon are full of papers that suggest much more debate and discussion
than these societies are given credit for. The satellite channels are
bursting with diverse opinions in a dizzying variety.
Civil institutions are, on many levels, having to do with social
services, human rights, syndicates, women's rights, and research
institutes, very lively all over the Arab world. In Palestine alone,
there are over 1,000 N.G.O.'s, and it is this vitality and this kind of
activity that has kept society going despite every American and Israeli
effort made to vilify, stop, or mutilate it on a daily basis. And if you
compare, as I think salutary to do, the American media and its reporting,
especially the leading newspapers like The Post or The New York Times on
the op-ed page, or FOX or CNN, you compare those with the Arab satellite
channels or the newspapers that one can read, you know, published in
London, published in Beirut, published in Cairo, etc., I mean, who are we
kidding? The range of opinion is much greater in the Arab world than it
is here.
This propaganda campaign has made even Arabs believe the lies about them
that, of course, are being put out by people who wish them no good, but
to want portray them as sort of retarded, you know, primitives, who are
basically trivial and sort of out of it in general. Under the worst
possible circumstances, Palestinian society has neither been defeated,
nor has it crumbled completely, and this is, of course, Sharon's
predicament. Kids still go to school. Doctors and nurses still take care
of their patients. Men and women go to work. Organizations have their
meetings, and people continue to live. Which seems to be an offense to
Sharon and the other extremists who simply want Palestinians either in
prison or driven away altogether. The military solution that they've
tried hasn't worked at all and never will work. Why is that so hard for
Israelis and Americans to see?
So I want to suggest that it's our role to help them to understand this
not by suicide bombers, but by rational arguments, mass civil
disobedience by organized protests here and everywhere. The point I'm
trying to make is that we have to see the Arab world generally, and
Palestine in particular, in more comparative and critical ways than silly
books like Bernard Lewis' "What Went Wrong."
And Paul Wolfowitz's ignorant statements about bringing democracy -- he
should bring democracy to the Pentagon. How about that? His arguments
about bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic world can even begin to
suggest-- whatever else is true about the Arabs, there is an active
dynamic at work because, as real people, they live in a real society and
not in some, you know, day dream or wet dream invented by Paul Wolfowitz
and Richard Perle. With all sorts of currents and counter-currents in it
that can't easily be caricatured as just one seething mass of violent
fanaticism.
The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which
one expresses solidarity rather than endless criticism and dismissive,
frustrating discouragement, and crippling devisiveness. Remember, the
solidarity shown towards Palestine here and everywhere in Latin America,
Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. And remember also that there is a
cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and
terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a
noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights. I want now to
speak about dignity which, of course, has a special place in every
culture known to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and humanists.

I shall begin by saying that it is a radically wrong orientalist, and
even, indeed, racist proposition to accept the fact or notion or the
theory that unlike Europeans and Americans, Arabs -- and we're told this
all the time in the media -- Arabs have no sense of individuality, they
have no regard for individual life, no values that express love and
intimacy and understanding that are supposed to be the exclusive property
of culture like those of Europe and America that had the Renaissance, the
reformation, and enlightenment. Among many others, it is the vulgar
Thomas Friedman who has been peddling this absolute rubbish which has,
alas, been picked up not by many other Americans, and this is the sad
part of it, but by equally ignorant and self-deceiving Arab
intellectuals. I don't need to mention any names here. They have seen the
atrocities of 9/11, a sign that the Arab and Islamic world are somehow
more diseased and more dysfunctional than any other, and that terrorism
is a sign of
 a wider distortion than has occurred in any other culture. We can leave
to one side the slightly inconvenient fact that between them Europe and
the United States account for 80% of the violent deaths of the 20th
century. I mean, that's just a little unimportant fact. The Islamic world
in those conflicts hardly provided a fraction of that damage.
And behind all of that specious, unscientific nonsense about wrong and
right civilization, there is the grotesque shadow of the great false
prophet, Samuel Huntington, who has led a lot of people to believe that
the world can be divided into distinct civilizations battling against
each other forever. On the contrary, Huntington is dead wrong on every
point he makes. No culture or civilization exists by itself. None is made
up of things like individuality and enlightenment that are completely
exclusive to it, and none exists without the basic human attributes of
community, love, value for life, and all the others. Even Arabs have
those things in their culture. To suggest otherwise, as he does, is the
purist, invidious racism of the same stripe, as people who used to argue
that Africans have naturally inferior brains or that Asians are really
born for servitude, or that Europeans are a naturally superior race. This
is a sort of parody of Hitlerian science directed uniquely today
 against Arabs and Muslims.
And we must be very firm, of not even going through the motions of
arguing against it. It is the purest drivel. On the other hand, there's
the much more credible and serious stipulation that like every other
instance of humanity, Arab and Muslim life has an inherent value and
dignity which are expressed by Arabs and Muslims in their unique cultural
style, and those expressions need not resemble or be a copy of one
approved model certified by Richard Perle, suitable for everyone. The
whole point, the whole point about human diversity is that it is, in the
end, a form of deep coexistence between very different forms of
individuality and experience that can't all be reduced to one superior
form that we should all follow. And that's behind this absolutely
ridiculous, this hubristic, arrogant idea that somehow America has gone
to Iraq to liberate the Iraqis and show them the true way. I mean, who
gave them that authority? What came over President Bush to--I mean, who
can barely get
 himself on to a golf course? This is the serious argument foisted on us
by pundits all over the mainstream media who beware the lack of
development and knowledge in the Arab world, and has been picked up by
the United Nations in that Arab human development report, which is full
of the most immature and purile generalizations about how many books are
translated. For example, they say 300 books have been translated in the
Arab world only. Well, how many books have been translated from other
languages into America? Only 300? And this is the most powerful, richest,
most developed culture in the world. If you ask how many books from
Arabic have been translated into English, I'll tell you what the figure
is in this country-it's 13 books in the last four years. That shows how
advanced America is, right? And these are the figures that this report
bandies about so that more Arabs feel, we're terrible, we're really
behind everybody, and we really have to take it on the chin and blame
 ourselves as some guy on television said, "It's a wakeup call for the
Arab world." As if the Arab world has been asleep waiting for this guy to
wake it up. My God.
All one has to do, if one has the sense, is to look at the huge variety
of literature, of cinema, of theater, of painting, of music and popular
culture produced by and for Arabs from Morocco to the Gulf. Surely that
needs to be assessed. And let me, in this connection, mention something
that I'm sure most of you don't even know about. Under the worst possible
conditions, you know, on the West Bank, Ramallah is a city under siege
most of the time. There are curfews. People can't get from one town to
another, one part of a town to another. There's always the fear of
getting picked up by the Israelis and detained. There are 5,000 prisoners
now held without being charged by Israelis. In spite of all this, and the
bombings and the house demolitions, etc., there is now a flourishing
Palestinian music conservatory where hundreds of eager kids come for
piano lessons and violin lessons and clarinet lessons and cello lessons,
under fire, to teachers who give of their time and of their gifts
 freely. And now this has spread all over the West Bank, not just in
Ramallah, but there is a branch in Jerusalem, thereÕs one in Bethlehem,
and so on and so forth.
Now, I have some papers here. I'm not good at selling things but, here's
a recording made by a group from the conservatory of Arabic music, a C.D.
Here is an account of it, and here's some leaflets which will be
available at the back of the hall for you to look at, and I recommend it.
It's a very worthwhile, humane project to support. It's precisely this
will kind of thing that never gets mentioned. They just talk about
suicide bombers, right? But the Palestinian kids are very gifted, that
there is a marvelously accomplished young Palestinian pianist who's now
playing at the best halls all over the world. That there's another one
who's only 13 or 14 years old who's considered to be a child prodigy, all
of them having connections with this conservatory. That's never
mentioned. It's all suicide bombers and fundamentalists. So surely those
things need to be assessed.
As indications of whether or not Arabs are developed, and not just how on
any given day statistical tables of industrial production either indicate
an appropriate level of development or they show failure.
The more important point I want to make, though, is that there's a very
wide discrepancy which we all feel today between our culture and society
on the one hand, and the small group of people who now rule these
societies. Rarely in history has such mediocrity and such an absence of
creativity and independent thought been so concentrated in so tiny and
unrepresented a group, unrepresentative of a group as the various kings,
generals, sultans and presidents, all of them overweight, who preside who
preside today over the Arabs. The worst thing about them --the worst
thing about them as a group, almost without exception, is that they
represent only the lowest, the most uninteresting common denominator of
their people. This is not just a matter of democracy or no democracy. It
is that they seem radically to underestimate themselves and their people,
in ways that close them off, that make them intolerant and fearful of
change, frightened of opening up their society to their people,
 terrified most of all that they might anger "big brother," that is the
United States.
Instead of seeing that their citizens are the potential wealth of their
nation, they regard them all as guilty conspirators, vying for the
ruler's power. This is the real failure, how during the terrible war
against the Iraqi people, not a single Arab leader had the self-dignity
and confidence to say something about the pillaging and military
occupation of one of the most important Arab countries. Fine. Fine, it
was an excellent thing that Saddam Hussein's appalling regime is no more.
Who could fight with that? Who could disagree? But who appointed the U.S.
to be the Arab mentor, to be almost, the nanny? Who asked the United
States to take over the Arab world, allegedly on behalf of its citizens
and bring it something called democracy, especially at a time when, in
our own country in America, the school system, the health system, and the
whole economy are degenerating into the worst level since the 1929
depression.
Why was the collective Arab voice not raised against the U.S.'s
flagrantly illegal intervention? Where the French objected, but the Arabs
said nothing, which did so much harm and inflicted so much humiliation
upon the entire Arab nation. This is truly a colossal failure in nerve,
in dignity, in self-solidarity. With all the Bush administration's talk
about guidance from the almighty--we heard some of it last night--doesn't
one Arab leader have the courage to say as a great people we are guided
by our own lights and traditions and religions? But nothing. Not a peep.
As the poor citizens of Iraq live through the most terrible ordeal and
the rest of the region quakes in its collective boots, each one petrified
that its country may be next. And as for what's happening to
Palestinians, Egypt still has commercial and, of course, diplomatic
relationships with Israel, as do Jordan and Morocco, all to safeguard
their rulers' continuing U.S. patronage. How indecent. How indecent and
indecorous the embrace of George Bush, the man whose country--whose war
destroyed an Arab country gratuitously by the combined--how indecent it
was that the combined leadership of the major Arab countries last week
embraced him so warmly. Was there no one there who had the guts to remind
George W. what he had done, to humiliate and bring more suffering to the
Arab people than anyone before him, and must he always be greeted with
hugs and smiles and kisses and low bows? Where is the domestic, the
diplomatic and political and economic support necessary to sustain an
 anti-occupation movement on the West Bank and Gaza?
Instead, all one hears is that foreign ministers preach to the
Palestinians to mind their way, avoid violence, and keep at the peace
negotiations, even though it has been so obvious that Sharon's interest
in peace is just about zero. There has been no-- there has been, I mean,
this is unimaginable. Unimaginable that there has been no concerted Arab
response to the separation wall or to the assassinations or to the
collective punishment.
Only a bunch of tired cliches repeating the well-worn formulas authorized
by the state department. Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low
point in Arab ability to grasp the dignity of our own and our Palestinian
cause is express, I'm very sorry to say, by the current state of the
Palestinian authority. Abu Mazzin, a number two colorless figure with no
political support among his own people was picked for the job by Israel
and the United States precisely because he has no backbone and no
constituency. He's not an orator, or a great organizer. He doesn't know
any languages except Arabic, about which I'm not so sure, and nor is he
anything more than a dutiful aide to Yasser Arafat. And because I'm
afraid they see in him a man who will do Israel's bidding, how could even
Abu Mazen stand there to pronounce words written for him like a
ventriloquist Ôs puppet by some state department functionary. Instead of
saying I'm not going to read from your speech, I'm going to read my
 speech. He didn't even have the dignity to say that. And he reads a
speech in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering, but then
amazingly says next to nothing about his own people suffering at the
hands of Israel.
How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself,
and how could he forget his representation of a people that has been
fighting heroically for over a century, just because the U.S. and Israel
have told him that he must? And when Israel simply says that there will
be a Palestinian state without any contrition for the horrendous amount
of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer, sadistic,
systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian man, woman, and child,
I must confess to a complete lack of understanding as to why a leader or
representative of that longsuffering people doesn't so much as take note
of it, to say there's this. You know, we don't want to you account for
it, we just want you take notice of it. I am filled with incomprehension.
Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity? Has he forgotten that since
he's not just an individual, but also the bearer of his people's fate
especially at a crucial moment?
Is there anyone who is here, who is not bitterly disappointed in his
total failure to rise to the occasion and stand with dignity, the dignity
of his peopleÕs experience and cause, and testify to it with pride and
without compromise, without ambiguity, without the half-embarrassed,
half-apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take when they are begging
for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white father. But that
has been the behavior, but that has been the behavior of Palestinian
leaders since Oslo, and alas, even since Haj Amin, a combination of
misplaced, juvenile defiance and plaintive supplication. Why on earth do
they always think it is absolutely necessary to read scripts written for
them insultingly by their enemies? The basic dignity of our life as Arabs
in Palestine, throughout the Arab world and here in America, is that we
are our own people with a heritage, a history, a tradition, and above
all, a language. It neednÕt be Arabic, it could be English, but it's
 our language, as Palestinians that is more than adequate to the task of
representing our real aspirations, since those aspirations derive from
the experience of dispossession and suffering that has been imposed on
each Palestinian since 1948. Not one of our political spokespersons--the
same is true of the ArabsÉ ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of
what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go.
Slowly, however, and I conclude here, the situation is changing, and the
old regime made up the Abu Mazens of this world is passing and will
gradually be replaced by a new set of emerging leaders all over the Arab
world. Leaders who are more self-confident and who have a better idea of
themselves than the old leaders did. The most promising is made up, I
think, of a new Palestinian organization whose members are called the
National Political Initiative in Palestine. They are grass roots
activists whose main activity is not pushing papers on a desk, nor
juggling bank accounts, nor looking for journalists to pay attention to
them, but who come from the ranks of the professionals, the working
classes, and young intellectuals and activists, teachers, doctors,
lawyers, working people who have kept society going while also fending
off daily Israeli attacks.
Second, these are people--these are people committed to the kind of
democracy and popular participation undreamt of by the Palestinian
authority whose idea of democracy is stability and security for itself.
Lastly, they offer social services to the unemployed, health to the
uninsured and the poor, proper secular generation to a new generation who
must be taught the realities of a modern world, not just the
extraordinary worth of the old world. For such programs, the National
Political Initiative stipulates that getting rid of the occupation is the
only way forward, and that in order to do that, a representative national
unified leadership be elected freely to replace the cronies, the
outdated, and the ineffectiveness that have plagued Palestinian leaders
for the past century. Only if we respect ourselves as Arabs and Americans
finally, and understand the true dignity and justice of our struggles,
only then can we appreciate why, almost despite ourselves, so many people
all over the world, including Rachel Corrie and the two young people
wounded with her from I.S.M., Tom Hurndel and Brian Avery, have felt it
possible to express their solidarity with us. I leave you with one last
irony.
Isn't this astonishing that all the signs of popular solidarity that
Palestine and the Arabs receive occur with no comparable sign of
solidarity and dignity for ourselves, that others admire and respect us
more than we do ourselves? Isn't it time we caught up with ourselves,
with our own status, and made certain that our representatives here and
elsewhere realize there's a first step. That they are fighting for a just
and noble cause, and that they have nothing to apologize for or anything
to be embarrassed about. On the contrary, they should be proud.
We should all be proud of what our people have done and proud also to
represent them. Thank you very much.


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