I hear a lot of stories. This morning, sitting at the Hoito coffee bar, where I had gone to deliver to Urho the copies I made of the newspaper articles he wanted, I was given 2 stories by 2 different Finnish Canadian men. One from an 80yr old man wearing a wolf fur Russian-style bomber hat that looked like a rolled porcupine, the other by an overweight middle-aged man who fancies himself an outlaw having driven 10 cop cars into the ditch with his white Camaro.
But today I am going to tell you the story that Urho told me on Monday when I was telling him about Palestine and explaining Hamas to him and who the real terrorists were and how Zionist Jews, both proto-Israeli terrorist groups like Irgun and, since 1948, the Israeli army have for more than 60 years been killing innocent Palestinian villagers and farmers in order to raze their villages and claim their lands and put their own towns on top of them, and even green spaces--like Canada Park. The 14,000 Palestinian inhabitants of Beit Nuba, Yalu and Imwas, the three demolished villages that once stood where Canada Park is now, were forcibly expelled from this land. If you are NOT Palestinian or an Arab national (highways of racism exist all over Israel--including in the West Bank which only Israeli settlers can drive on), you can drive on the John Diefenbaker Parkway, named after a former Canadian prime minister, that now travels through the stolen lands seeped in Palestinian blood.
Here is one story of how that blood found its way under that park in Israel paid for by Canadians:
Urho told me that in the early 80s he met a man in Florida; it was 1982 to be exact. He was going to the same pilot school as Urho and he was an Israeli, now an American, about 40 yrs old and his name was Moti Gal. Moti told him that as a young man he had been in the Israeli army but he had been given a very hard time because he had refused to do what he had been ordered to do. Indeed, his army superior had held a pistol to his temple because Moti said he will not go and kill the people he had been ordered to kill.
He recounted to Urho a story of being trucked, along with a group of other young soldiers both male and female, into a Palestinian village in the dead of night. He said that the missions they were trained for were for night, and that there were trucks bringing troupes of soldiers to these villages where unsuspecting villagers lay sleeping. The soldiers didn't carry guns, but knives. Long knives, said Urho, showing me with a flourish. The soldiers were trained to use knives so that they wouldn't make a sound and give away their "mission."
Urho said Moti told him that it was after one of the members of his troupe, a 19 yr old female soldier, came back and gleefully showed him her bloodied knife that he felt revulsion and refused to participate in the killings. That's when the gun was put to his head.
Urho told me that Moti told him that he had a very hard time after that and spent some time in jail and was humiliated and scorned by others for his military "failure" and when he was free he went to America. And that's where Urho met him, in aviation classes. He was a real smart man, said Urho, and was eventually hired by the Saudis as a pilot.
And that is what Urho told me about Moti from Florida.
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