Freedom and Gold
Reader comment on item: Will Palestinian Prosperity End the Arab-Israeli Conflict?
in response to reader comment: PALESTINIAN DEVELOPMENT?

Submitted by Mourad Antoine (United States), Dec 31, 2005 at 17:35

An arabic elementary school text book contained a story about a boy who captures a beautiful song bird, and was so determined to keep the bird happy he convinced his rich father to buy him a golden cage. In the late fifties, Charles De Gaulle instituted massive economic and political reforms, in the last throes of France's desperation to keep Algeria.

The next morning the boy was crying, and the bird perched on a tree nearby, was singing that his freedom could not be purchased with gold. The palestinians, no matter the convenient and self serving notions, do not expected their freedom to be handed to them in a gift wrap, they will take it even if they have to extract it like a wisdom tooth. As spiritual beings, we have yet to truly believe that material things do not convert to immaterial things. Freedom and dignity require their own currency.

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