Like Flies to the Confederate Flag

Commentary

On Dec. 15, 2006 Dallas attorney John Wheat Gibson wrote an email to a Texas reporter explaining that some of the families imprisoned at the T. Don Hutto jail for immigrants had in fact entered the USA legally with visas.

We are grateful that Gibson’s email was circulated on Dec. 18 by Del Rio businessman Jay Johnson-Castro, because otherwise there is a good chance nobody would know about three Palestinian families who are serving terms of indefinite jail time in Texas (and Oklahoma) jails.
On the other hand, try a news search at Google for the key words Perry and Confederate. We tried the search this morning and got 101 hits. If you want to get real attention from Texas media, just put on a Confederate flag t-shirt and play your guitar at the governor’s inauguration.

And so we offer profound apologies to the three Palestinian families–Ibrahim, Suleiman, and Hazahza–for the awful neglect and abuse that they continue to suffer at the hands of officials and reporters in Texas.

Word comes now that two USA citizens–the 4-year-old twin daughters of the Suleiman family–will shortly be deported with their parents, because the USA has not a heart big enough to share with this refugee family. We hope out loud that in the next few days, someone with authority and compassion will lift a finger to change these things.

Meanwhile, we are grievously dismayed by the Governor. When the Governor was informed that people were offended by the display of a confederate flag at his inaugural ball, what did he do? He called the person who displayed the flag in order to commiserate and communicate his solidarity.

We would much prefer a government in Texas that did not imprison children, a media that did not ignore international refugees, and a Governor who would pick up the phone and apologize to Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe. But we have none of these things.

In this seventh year of the 21st Century, we have only the same old news, made increasingly worse by our expectations that things should have gotten better by now.–gm

The governor also called over the weekend, ending the conversation by telling Nugent to “give ’em hell,” Nugent was quoted as saying.–AP