Holocaust 2

Now here is where, dear readers, you must do a mental stretch.  Let’s say that for the past thirty years Hereford, Texas has been under Israeli occupation (an abnormally long time by any historical context) like the city of Jenin in the West Bank.

Because a group of Hereford teenagers threw a few stones at an Israeli tank, they are confined to the City Limits. Anyone trying to sneak out to see a girlfriend in the neighbouring community of Canyon is arrested, beaten severely and perhaps even imprisoned for a month where he will be tortured to force him to tell the names of the stone throwers. The fact that he has no idea who the stone throwers were is irrelevant. At sundown a curfew comes in effect (mass punishment for the stone throwing incident), no one is allowed on the street under penalty of severe beating or if the colour of your eyes is right, imprisonment. The Israeli soldiers have absolute power over which way it will go. Most Hereford citizens have seen a friend or relative killed in cold blood by the Israeli soldiers at one time or another, they all have seen some one carried away in shackles by the occupying Israeli army. Often, just make a sudden move and Israeli bullets start flying in your direction. Most nights our poor Hereford residents go to bed hungry, they no longer have access to what was their land, which is now outside city limits and has therefore been given to a Jewish settler. When you get sick, and that happens a lot to undernourished folk, the odds are there is no medicine available. There has been no street repairs in twenty years and the whole infrastructure for water, sewer and sanitation has long gone into total collapse. A lot of houses have been knocked down by Israeli bulldozers as mass punishment for crimes real and imagined, because of lack of repair materials, the houses still standing are not so hot either. Every now and then Israeli tanks come barreling down the streets and overrun anything in their path, including cars, buses and carts, there is even a record of an old man in a wheelchair being run over by an Israeli tank and killed. You have been stopped and searched and humiliated numerous times! Sometimes Israeli Apache helicopters, paid for in part by the American Taxpayer, comes overhead and rains death from the sky without distinguishing between your uncle or your baby sister. You know, Dear Hereford Citizen that a large number of men from Hereford are languishing in concentration camps in Israel. Is this enough? I could go on and on but it is already too painful probably for all of us.

Given this scenario and not a hope in hell to get out of it, wouldn't the Hereford teenagers be consumed with anger? How much coaxing would it take to send a young Hereford teenager on a mission? How many Hereford teenagers, under those circumstances, would not only consider, but resort to desperate measures? How many Hereford adults would stand on the sidelines and cheer them on? What do you think dear readers? I dare say probably a number of Hereford teenagers, driven by all this suffering, would throw in the whole ball of wax and become suicide bombers.