There are pages. And pages of them. Too many to read. Well, just scan through and net it out: 150. That’s a lot. But do what with them? Select filename and … click the Checkbox, then Click Delete.

Your skin prickles a little, doesn’t it? Then a little more. They’re still there in the trash. Drag ’em out and have a closer look. Here’s one: Mohammed Fo’ad Hjazi, 4. Four! Was he wearing his brother’s hand-me-down sneakers and a T-shirt with silly cartoon on it?

Here’s a 50-year-old. Did he sell car parts and smoke too much? Was he on the phone with his wife when the jets were streaking and the building was bombed?

Here’s a guy whose life ended at 21. I’ll bet he was a “student” who spent his afternoons hustling pipe for his rocket buddies. I’ll bet he misread UN Charter 51 and thought he had a right to self-defense in the face of military siege. I’ll wear his name because he’ll never, never make that mistake again.

By the time I’m standing on a Vancouver street with a dead person’s name on a placard, they will number more than 170. That will be December 8, a Saturday. Grey and wet in Vancouver, windy and cold in Gaza, where heat is hard to find and the injured, now more than 1,200, will continue to suffer then die.

We’ll be on the street standing silently — except for the declaration of the names of the dead. With luck, every one of them. Does it disturb you that more than 170 people have now died, and that the majority were civilians? That fifty-five of them were kids?

Come to the Vancouver Art Gallery and help us carry their names with dignity. Show Stephen Harper who pays the price for Israel’s military subjugation of Palestine and our government’s self-assured bumbling at the UN. Show our city that its people still stand with the conscience of humanity when our federal government does not.

Meet us at the fountain on the Georgia side of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Saturday the 8th at 1:15 pm. Pick up your sign and help us form a line of names that cannot be ignored. Join us in support of human rights for Palestine.

 

Click here for more information on Saturday’s commemoration, which is endorsed by several Palestine solidarity groups in Vancouver.