Speaking to N1, Reverend Ashraf Tannous, Pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Beit Jala, Bethlehem, Palestine said that no one hears their calls, their 'suffering, the ethnic cleansing and genocide' of the Palestinian people and that everyone is turning a blind eye to what the Israeli army is doing to Gaza. Pročitaj više

“Nobody is trying to do anything. Everybody is silent. I'm speaking about those who are decision-makers, who are in control. We can see all over the world that the people are in the streets, shouting and saying ‘Stop this genocide; Stop this ethnic cleansing; Stop these things that are happening against all the human beings who are created in the image of God and God’s own likeness. Stop the killing of women and children, of elders; Stop destroying houses churches mosques, hospitals, and schools. Stop this genocide’,” Reverend Tannous said, however, he added, “Nobody is hearing [them].”

Governments across the world remain silent to their citizens’ calls, he said, despite seeing “all the unacceptable actions by the Israelis”.

“All the human rights organisations and everything we hear about the ‘human rights’ – they fall down. I’m really ashamed of that because we always heard about ‘human rights’, we always heard how ‘everybody has their own dignity; Everybody has their own space to live, to worship,’ this is only ink on paper. This is not the reality. Everything falls down. The humanity falls down,” the Reverend noted.

For this reason, he sent a message to the international community not to speak to Palestinians about “human rights” because they do not understand what human rights truly mean.

“From now on, don’t come to us and tell us ‘this is not human rights,’ ‘this is not based on human rights.’ Don't come to teach us what is humanity because you don’t really know [anything] about it. You just learned it at schools and universities, you read it, but you never did any action about it,” Tannous said.

He condemned the Western world for having a double standard policy noting that such policies are unacceptable. The Double standard policy is a sin against God and human beings, he warned.