Big_Bird

Joined: 31 Jan 2003 Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 11:38 pm Post subject: An Eleven Year-Old Prisoner in Texas |
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I'm curious as to whether this is getting much media attention in the US. In Australia until very recently, the same kind of thing was going on. Families were being thrown into detention camps in the middle of the desert, some of them for years, and it seemed to take a long time before this kind of thing was finally done away with. And I think it still is going on to some extent, they've merely decided it's not for children. An Australian might be able to correct me on that though. Only quite recently did they stop gaoling kids, when there was finally enough of a public outcry. I hope the same thing happens in the US soon.
An Eleven Year-Old Prisoner
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During the day Friday, the words of 11-year-old Mohammad Hazahza have filled him up and weighed him down. On Friday night, he pours the words back out, as if wanting to be lifted back up.
"Mohammad is so protective of his mother," says Ralph Isenberg in a weary and reverent voice, recalling the day's visits to Dallas reporters. "I watched as he got her chair and made her comfortable. And that's what he did in jail. He protected her from forced labor. When she was ordered to clean the common area, he did that work for her. He really understands family and duty."
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Like two other families of Palestinian heritage who were abducted by USA immigration authorities in early November, the Hazahza family had been split up. Juma and Mohammad were jailed at T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, Texas, while father Radi was locked up at Haskell, Texas along with his four adult children.
The mother and son recall a hard knock at the door and then a crash as men with guns filled their apartment in a pre-dawn raid on November 2. Mohammad describes the guns as AK-47s. If that's not the model number, he was definitely looking down barrels of semi-automatic assault rifles. The family of seven were ordered out of the house. No time to change out of bed clothes.
For Juma, memories of America are mixed with memories of life in Palestine, where she could never stop thinking about the missiles that flew over the house. She knows what it is like to live in fearful conditions. But even in Palestine, she had never been thrown into jail.
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