Most Holy Father...

Your Holiness,

I read with great respect and deep feelings your speech of apology to the Indigenous people of Canada and the forgiveness you begged for the evil committed by so many Christians against them. I noted that there were representatives of Indigenous nations whose cultures, beliefs, and histories were wiped out of the face of the earth by white colonizers. I, myself, visited Canada, the US, and Australia and listened to horrifying stories of survival from these schools, whereby they were prevented from speaking their native language or exercising their habitual cultural ways of life under the claim of civilizing them, considering that they were deemed by Western settlers as totally uncivilized.

I listened to stories of their elderly and found out that they held great spiritual, ethical, and human values, which were totally abhorred by the White men who didn’t understand the meanings of these cultural practices and did not even try to because they came with the perception that those are Primitive people and the mentality that they are there in order to introduce them to civilization. In Australia, I found myself talking to an Aborigine family in Arabic because they look so much like us, the Arabs, and their spiritual, family, artistic, and social values echo ours in many ways. I visited their homes and fell in love with their amazing artistic creativity, which western officials now call "Australian art" or "Canadian art", while they are the amazing arts of the Indigenous people who were forced to abandon their language, habits, beliefs, and cultures.

In one meeting with an Indigenous professor at Minnesota University in the 1990s, she told me that they called them "Red Indians" at a time when they are neither red nor Indians and that the new settlers of their land didn’t understand their culture and behaviors, so they ridiculed everything they did and interpreted it in a way that is designed to prove their superiority and the Indigenous people's inferiority to them. One of the examples she mentioned to me was the following: she said native Americans used to depend on buffalos for food, but they would not kill one unless they got truly short of food, and thus before killing a buffalo, they hold a dance of apology to it for being forced to kill it in order to survive while promising to use it to the last piece and not waste any piece of it. Since then, I often wondered how huge the loss of humanity is that we hardly know anything true about the cultures, ethics, and beliefs of Indigenous peoples throughout the lands conquered by white settlers in south and north America, Canada, and Australia.

The apology of Your Holiness, Pope Francis, to the Indigenous people of Canada raises the question of how many are left of them and what good it could do to correct history. There is one way in which Pope Francis and other dignitaries may serve history and humanity, and that is, by standing against practices similar to the ones to which Indigenous people were subjected centuries ago. One place in today's world in which the same practices of the white settlers are repeated is Palestine. In Palestine, settlers started arriving over a century ago claiming that it is a land without people, while the fact is that it is the birthplace of Christ, the cradle of Christianity, and the place from which prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven.

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The Palestinian people are descendants of old civilizations that enriched human knowledge in different domains. They are renowned for their agricultural skills and elegant artistic contributions, as well as for their intellects, literature, and their harmony in human life. The Zionist settlers find it impossible to understand why the Palestinian woman surrounded the olive tree truck with her body in order to prevent the Israeli bulldozer from uprooting it because in our Arab culture, you plant trees but you never uproot a tree just as you have children, but you never kill a child. 

The Zionists are not only demolishing old, Arab beautiful houses in occupied Al-Quds but have reached an unprecedented level of criminality that they force Palestinian families to demolish their houses with their own hands. Arab houses are different from any house anywhere as it takes generations to build one that the entire extended family contributes to and lives in afterward as it is designed to embrace the children, their parents, and their grandparents, and in this capacity, it is the memory book of the entire family, their children, their youth, and their old times.

The Arab culture is one of the oldest Indigenous cultures in the world, and all that the Israeli settlers have been doing for the last one hundred years is to wipe every trace and evidence of Arab culture in Palestine, from language to social habits, agricultural traditions, and spiritual and ethical values. In addition to that, the Israeli occupation of Palestine has reduced the number of Christian and Muslim citizens through the apartheid measures taken against them and turned a huge number of them into refugees. In 1914, Jews represented 8% of the total population of Palestine, while in 1922, the percentage became 11.1% and it increased to 31.5% in 1948. This reveals the increase in the number of Jews, while the Arab population, including Muslims and Christians, witnessed a decline in the same period. According to a statistical study conducted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics in 2003, the total population of "Israel" is about 6.7 million, 5.1 million of whom are Jews, 1 million are Muslims and 142 thousand are Christians. 

On the history of catholic schools, Pope Francis said, “It pains me to think that Catholics contributed to policies of assimilation and enfranchisement that inculcated a sense of inferiority robbing communities and individuals of their cultural and spiritual identity severing their roots and fostering prejudicial discriminatory attitudes."

Your Holiness,

The very same thing is happening today and every day to the people of Palestine. Their children are shot every day from point blank and their men and women are arrested, imprisoned, and killed with no mention or regret from anyone in the world. After your grand apology to the Indigenous people of Canada,  and before you retire, may you please visit the land in which Jesus was born and try to kindle light across the globe against the Israeli apartheid policies in Palestine, the practices of genocide, apartheid annihilation practiced by Zionist settlers, and the government that supports them and uses them as a tool in this war of annihilation? Perhaps saving the Palestinian people, the Indigenous people of Palestine, before it becomes too late would be the best and most meaningful tribute your holiness may pay to the Indigenous people of Canada, Australia, the two Americas, and perhaps the entire world.