Love for Palestine

Love is blessing from Allah for which we should be grateful, but people often misconceptions about the meaning of love itself. This is especially among youngsters who are not mature yet to understand real love. What’s so popular among us around this time, i.e. February is the celebration of Valentine’s Day, which is strongly attached to the word ‘love’. But readers, in case you don’t know, this has no bases or reasons for us, Moslems, to celebrate; this pagan culture should be left as our religion forbids us to follow such culture.

In this edition, we will not tell you about love between a man and a women or love between parent and their children. Now, we take on more step further and decides to offer you something about love among Moslems. This kind of love has no boundaries no matter where we live, what our race is, what language we speak, or what skin color and other physical appearances we have. It’s love to our brothers and sisters in Islam.

Beloved readers, now is the time for us to express our love to our brothers and sisters in Palestine and make real actions. We know that more that one thousand people were killed; Jews in Israel are barbaric as they struck not only military Palestinian but also children and women who are not supposed to be objects of war. Indeed, this cruel genocide must be stopped immediately, and every country, especially Moslem’s countries, should make endeavors to resolve this problems. Sadly, many Moslem’s countries haven’t done much; they can do nothing but waiting for decision of UN and the USA. Is this a sign that or love among Moslems is getting diminished? It’s high time we make actions! As the largest Moslem country, Indonesia has a responsibility to address this conflict. Our empathy to our brothers and sisters in Gaza manifests our deep love that goes beyond love to our couple or anything. Our prophet Muhammad SAW says, “It’s not perfect of someone’s faith if he or she does not love his/her own brothers and sisters like he/she loves his/her own self” (Hadist narrated by Muslim)

The real actions we can do are (but not limited to) the following.

First. Pray to Allah SWT that He may give strengths and patience to our brothers and sisters in Gaza; may Allah also value our prayer as a good deed for us.

Second. Donate our money. This is the thing that our brothers and sisters urgently need; they need money for their daily needs, such as food, medicines, housing, etc. We know that our situation now is not very good either as the crisis is happening in this country. But we have to believe that every single rupiah we sincerely donate will mean a lot for them, and be rewarded as well. So, move right now, transfer our money through SMS, bank accounts, or to any organizations committed to distribute it to our brothers and sisters there.

Third. Boycott any products of companies that support Israel either financially, or military. We can easily find those products on the internet; try googling right now.

Forth. Do the best for everything we can, so that we can contribute to develop the more we have the chance to play role in the global world. We can help and protect Moslems countries from being attacked by other countries.

Those contributions may seem trivial, yet if it is done together in a huge number of people, they will surely have some effect. Our love for our brothers and sisters in Palestine in much nobler and sublimer than just the love on Valentine’s Day mentioned above. Verily, one rupiah or any amount of money given to Palestinian is much better and much more valuable that a bar of chocolate, a bunch of flower or a greeting card given on Valentine’s Day. It’s time to love our brothers and sisters in Palestine; time to love, time to give.