Editor's note: Mazin Qumsiyeh visited Corvallis in March, as part of a year-long peace tour of the United States. His mid-valley stop was sponsored by the group Corvallis/Albany Friends of Middle East Peace. During his stop here, he made a number of appearances and spoke at area high schools. As Israel launched its airstrikes in the Gaza Strip, he sent an e-mail to Corvallis' Jeanne Raymond, a member of Corvallis/Albany Friends of Middle East Peace. The piece below is excerpted from his e-mail.

It was not possible to sleep here for two nights now. The events and the images of death and carnage of children, of policemen, of people that look like my mother and my son and my sister and my friends were simply too much.

Gaza has run out of stretchers and many are now carried to hospitals (which are running out of supplies) and morgues on commercial street signs, in blankets or simply by their limp limbs. Three mosques were destroyed. -.

I was watching Israel shell the university in Gaza City, including its faculty of science and a residence dorm for female students, and was thinking of my university and my lab and office at Bethlehem University. I was then shocked by more horrific scenes and news. In one house, five young sisters killed. In another, six family members including four children killed while eating breakfast. In a scene that haunted me where four children were killed with their mother, I saw rescue workers try frantically to pull the remaining surviving girl whose legs were crushed under a huge boulder from the roof. As some of them were calming her down and working hard, just next to them other workers pulled the dead body of her sister (she looked like she was 3 or 4 years old). They quickly covered her but I think her sister noticed. Sometimes the dead are envied for their suffering has ended. Her suffering is just beginning.

I thought of all the thousands of relatives of all the victims and how they feel. I thought of friends I lost and talks with people in Gaza. I thought of my mother who at 76 has seen so much suffering and still she cried at the new images of new atrocities. -.

I examine numbers of homes, police stations, civil society building destroyed. I read (a report from) the Al Mezan Center for human rights which rationally states that most Gaza victims are civilians. But even my rational mind refuses to deal with these things. How could it handle just that one image of the young girl's anguished pained look under the rubble of her house? And so tears stream down again to to try to wash the image, to no avail. How could my mind examine rationally the statements of "leaders" saying this carnage is not the fault of the bombers and war criminals, but of Hamas! -.

Can someone ask Western media or the Western governments ruled by elite racists who keep spouting the nonsense about "Hamas" and "rockets" (projectiles that are militarily of little use and have no explosives and which have killed one person this year), why targeting civilian police stations, mosques, homes with children, ports, fishing vessels, streets, and more in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, murdering hundreds of civilians, would be an acceptable action? -. And what would they expect from a starving 1.5 million people to do? -. Even if one buys the U.S./Israeli government propaganda, would it be acceptable to bomb cities in Europe and the United States for any perceived or actual crime of a portion of their society or even their leaders?

But again I think it is not best for me to try and reason things through in such times of calamities and little sleep. I got so many letters of support but please redirect your letters and energies elsewhere. Redirect them to challenge the injustice directly. Jesus made a statement directly relevant for us today:

"You are the earth's salt. But if the salt should become tasteless, what can make it salt again? It is completely useless and can only be thrown out of doors and stamped under foot. You are the world's light - it is impossible to hide a town built on the top of a hill. Men do not light a lamp and put it under a bucket. They put it on a lampstand and it gives light for everybody in the house."

It is thus the time when people who claim they want peace and justice to stop talking about it and actually work for it. Put your lamp higher. It is time for real change. It is time for a world Intifada (uprising against injustice). It is time to do something concrete (like throwing our shoes at someone?).