My Letter To Australian MP Mark Dreyfus About Gaza
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
I wrote the following letter to Mark Dreyfus, my local MP here in Australia:
Dear Mr Dreyfus,
Today I saw the skeleton of a young man in Gaza picked clean by dogs, his arms and head intact but the rest of his body was bone and gristle. The colour of the bones was still a bright fresh red. He had been shot only days ago but the cats and dogs had got to him already and gnawed his bones clean. I have never seen anything like it.
Every single day brings fresh horrors to my screen. Each time I think I can no longer be shocked, I am proven wrong. The image of that man made me gasp. It literally took my breath away. I then had to sit with my hands over my eyes while I waited for my heart and breath to come back to normal.
When I close my eyes at night, all I can see is skeletal babies, their little mouths gaping open like baby birds waiting for a worm. I have started to dream about it. Each night I carry a child, a new child, a different baby, trying to find food for them. I wake up with a shadow of an ache in my arms because in my dreams their bones are as brittle as egg shells and I have to be so tender and careful.
This. Must. Stop. All the waffle of who-did-what-and-when burns to dust when babies are starving. No amount of words can make that right. No amount of words can extinguish the images from my eyes, the ache in my heart, and the alarm going off in my head for those babies.
Please do what you can! I beg of you. Please make it stop. It’s all I can think about and I am not alone. Every day the numbers of people like me are growing. Every day more eyes snap awake.
Australians can use this form from GetUp to urge their local MPs to take action on Gaza.
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I remember from the early weeks of the genocide, watching a video of a man holding the body of a decapitated baby. I’m wasn’t even sure what I was seeing at first. The shock coursed through my body like lightning. Then, only a few months later, the somehow more graphic image of a man’s entire body crushed by an IOF bulldozer. Of course, the horrors beyond comprehension continue and now feature babies and children slowly starving to death. I do not know how we are supposed to exist alongside people who not only excuse these atrocities, but cheer them on. I pray there will be a reckoning, but I’m not holding my breath.
I have been writing my MP here in Canada. I’ve sent her stories I’ve seen on substack, annd pictures, and I’ve begged her to have her government put a stop to Canada’s complicity. She’s a new MP, elected in 2024, a member of the governing Liberal Party. A young mother, teaches primary school children, active in helping those in need in her rural community. I get no reply.