Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Boycott

McDonalds looks lengang in the morning now. I guess the boycott is on now. Hardly any queue


Don't know about Starbucks ....


But this is an alternate for those who need some kind of Mc...




Thursday, January 08, 2009

Sense of helplessness

As the days go by and we watch again and again the images of dead Palestinian children in rows of white shrouds, we ask (again), what can we do?

What else can we do beyond boycotting US products, as suggested by former Malaysian PM, Tun Dr. Mahathir? Would anyone notice? How can we do that? I am using Microsoft Word to do this. It’s a US product. Please help me find an alternative. Maybe try Open Office that even though it is also a US product, it’s free, thus not contributing to the US income.

Maybe that will help in curtailing the USD3 billion that the US sends DIRECT to Israel and the multitude of billions that it spends buying off Arab Saudi, Egypt, UAE, Kuwait to lie quietly and let Israel run wild. You think that would do it… hmmpf … then you must be less of a skeptic that I am.

What else can we do? Do we get into a chemistry lab and start building bombs and throw them at the nearest US embassy or any business that have the name American? Would that help the children of Gaza? You think? I don’t think so, because in my books two wrongs definitely don’t make a right. I will be committing a sin by killing innocent non-combatants in ‘war’. I do think that Al Qaeda have completely got it wrong by 9/11.

What else can we do? Donate to the funds that assist in humanitarian aids? That would assuage our guilt of letting this happen. Maybe some percentage of that assistance does get to the Palestinians. I do hope no one skim off the top of these aids. May Allah curse them if they do that. But with the blockade, can they get it through.

I guess this sense of helplessness comes from the fact that whatever we do may not make a difference. Evil will triumph as it has for these many years, at least 61 years for the Palestinians. We still buy American goods, still use Google and still watch American programs on TV. We are not prepared to suffer discomfort or inconvenience.

In the end our prayers to Allah to help the Palestinians, to strengthen the Muslim ummah so that it can fight this is the best possible way, to strengthen ourselves so that we are willing to experience discomfort a little bit so that we can make a dent, no matter how big, in the US economy, for Allah to make the people who actually make decisions in the US to see the light, for Allah to punish those that perpetrated these injustice.

In the end as in the beginning, there is only Allah that we can rest all our hopes and prayers.

BTW, I’m switching to Open Office. And this ... probably will be last blog on www.blogger.com until I can figure out where to send this.