Saturday Mezze: Palestinian Poet Mosab Abu Toha on PBS - PLEASE WATCH

Mezze - المزة - a wide selection of small dishes served as appetizers, including such delicacies as hummus, cheese, eggplant, brains, stuffed grape leaves, calamari, and much more

Family, Friends, Colleagues...

As our national election approaches, as fellow citizens along the full length our political spectrum warn of partisan violence here in our homeland, too many people - especially Americans - continue to ignore, or worse, try to justify - the barbarity, inhumanity, massacres, genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced displacements and forced starvation being imposed on Palestinians and Lebanese - all executed with the connivance and approval of the American government, much of it executed with American-made weapons that the Biden Administration has supplied to the State of Israel.

Within this madness and cruelty, within the ugliness of what has been wrought, I am in awe of the strength and fearlessness of Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha in speaking truth without compromise, in awe of his courage in holding up to us a mirror showing us exactly what we have wrought …

This past Monday, on the PBS Newshour, there was an illuminating, generous and lovely segment on Mosab that everyone should see.

From host Amna Nawaz's introduction: "Palestinian poet, teacher, and writer Mosab Abu Toha was born in Gaza, and that's where many of the poems in his new collection called 'Forest of Noise' were written amidst the chaos and uncertainty of war... We recently met at the Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington, D.C., just hours after more than a dozen of his family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza... This weekend, he says another 22 were believed to be killed …" 

It's just 8:40 minutes long. Please watch it.

Don’t share your tears with me, fellow readers. Make them known on Tuesday when you vote - or don’t.

I won’t judge.

Salamaat,
Robert
theother.azzi@gmail.com