Tariq A. Al-Maeena, clsencounters@hotmail.com

On Thanksgiving eve, in the late hour when most American housewives were busy thinking of last minute table items for the following day, when most menu plans were finally ironed out and guest lists confirmed, a nine-year-old boy was murdered.

He was playing soccer in the neighborhood when Israeli Army soldiers atop a watchtower a few hundred feet away shot him in the head in cold blood. These housewives would never know that the pool of blood that had seeped out of this child on the street that day had yet not dried up long after they had gone to sleep. A child, filled with the innocence and laughter of the young.

And on the following Thanksgiving day, when family ties were reaffirmed with each arrival, when the turkey was carved and eaten along with the gravy and stuffing, and the pumpkin pies had made their rounds, a family grieving far away was preparing this little child for burial. A child whose laughter they would no longer hear resonating with joy.

About the time the men-folk settled in comfortable armchairs with their beer or coffee and watched football games through semi-glazed eyes across homes in America, and the women caught up on family affairs or busily arranged the leftovers, this child’s bereaved family was trudging up to the graveyard, the boy’s final resting place on this earth.

And long after the games were over, and the guests had finally departed, this child’s family was in their home, in shock and sorrow over the vacuum that would never be filled again. An innocent voice silenced so brutally and forever.

Those good people that gave their thanks on that day in America may never have come to know of this tragedy. And little did they realize that in some small way each had played a hand in this tragedy in a land so far away.

For it is their tax dollars that ironically fund this brutality. Almost $90 billion alone this year, earmarked for a country whose present government knows only brutality and mayhem against the innocent. Billions more over the years, much of it going into practicing and refining this form of terrorism.

There was no motive, no sense or reason behind this killing. Just a blunt message endorsed by Ariel Sharon. “Leave your lands before you are all shot down.” What better way to get the message across than to instill this horror, a message delivered in the blood of dying children in neighborhoods, to a people slowly being deprived of their own lands.

Today, a wall is being built around the Palestinians. A wall to help Israeli soldiers pick them out with more ease. And thus, to those revelers on Thanksgiving Day, I plead: Say a little prayer for the dead and dying.