“The blade of the rear propeller cleaved Mr Morse’s head from top to bottom. Mercifully death was instantaneous.” (BBC)
What can I say, this upsets me deeply … the instantly part, naturally.
Once we hunted Nazis for decades for their crimes, now we watch phosphorous shells burn hospital warehouses down and incinerate people in the Mediterranean and change channel. We read of old women forced out of their houses, terrified, at gunpoint whilst holding tattered white rags with their children by their side only to be murdered by watching Israeli troops. And such is not an isolated occurence.
Paul Simon sings on his beautiful sound of silence, and we change the channel, ashamed.
Amidst the horror of the Gaza Massacre, which continues and shall never be forgotten, a moment of ‘worth living’-ness.
Some good chap in Denmark has re-visited the sites where the 1953 film “Roman Holiday” was shot and taken a series of now-and-then photos which you can see at http://www.cori.dk/roman_holiday.htm
I like to believe that - were they free of murderous oppression, tyranny and M16’s in the hands of delusional Zionist youths, whose minds were twisted to hatred long ago by their parents - the people of Gaza would adore a beautiful love story as much as any.
I wonder, too, whether the young IDF man with the M16 rifle who cut the family to pieces as the grandmother emerged, white-flag in hand, have done any different had he seen them as human beings?
“”He did it very slowly,” Ahmed said. “He took careful aim at the little girls, and shot Amal [aged 2] and Souad three times. Sammer started running back up the steps toward the house and he shot her also.” - Sydney Morning Herald
“When she was shot, Amal was carrying her favourite toy, a brown bear, which still lay in the ruins yesterday.” - (more…)
Religeous hatred. I’d truly believe in fairy tales if I thought that could be overcome so easily. I’ll leave such people in their ugly, delusional world and include a few beautiful fairy tales in mine.
“I had just left the room, carrying my youngest son on my shoulders. Then a shell came through the wall.
“I rushed back to find their dead bodies - or rather parts of their bodies - strewn all over the room. One was still sitting in a chair but she had no legs.
“Tell me why did they have to die? Who gave the order to fire on my house?”
How amazing is language, that most wonderous achievement of the upright-walking ape. Of all the utterances the ludicrous man-ape has made recently, two of them illustrate just how clever it has become at linguistic manipulation.
First we hear that the Israeli government is keen to investigate any allegation of war crimes in Gaza. Come again? Did I hear that correctly? Had the Nazi occupation of Europe succeeded, I wonder if they would have established an investigation into war crimes in, say, Poland? I’m quite sure they would have set such a thing up and, naturally, that a thorough investigation would have turned up squeaky clean SS guards. Attrocities? War crimes? Surely you jest. Is it just me, or does the establishment of a legal defence team specifically to defend the Israeli military of such charges look a bit, well, telling?
(I use the term ‘Israeli government’ here because the criminals don’t speak for all Israelis, but we haven’t seen those Israeli demonstrations in the UK - not on the BBC, at least.)
So here we have it - take a charge against you and simply turn it around. How wonderfully simple! It can’t have escaped the attention of anyone with an IQ above toad level that the BBC management used this same tactic just days after the Israeli government? (BBC reporters on the ground have tried, as best they can, to tell the truth in this conflict. BBC management, however, betray their integrity).
And if I hear talk of ‘alleged’ war crimes much more, I’ll go mad. They are as ‘alleged’ as global warming is ‘alleged’ and how the word ‘controversial’ is creeping into the BBC reporting. Say something is controversial and immediately doubt is thrown at the subject, a popular tactic of those with no defence other than primitive psycho-linguistic trickery. Allegedly, dinosaurs once walked the Earth, but I doubt it personally.
“One in eight babies in the UK is born prematurely and prematurity is the leading cause of disability and of infant death in the first month after birth.” -BBC
Still think humunz are the result of an intelligent designer? Anyone holding this view demonstrates as much intelligence as their imagined designer.
Irony, it is said, often escapes most Americans and whilst this may be an unforgiveable generalisation, I recently heard one American General say that Iran had to be deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons.
Come again? Did he imply one should deter people from pursuing what America otherwises like to call a ‘nuclear deterrant’? Part of the Mutually Assured Destruction philosophy that Britain, likewise, claims actually prevents nuclear war?
Someone call the Double Standards agency, please.
The International Atomic Energy Agency are sending people to inspect the pile of rubble, courtesy Zion Airlines Inc. - motto “we fly, you die” - that was formerly the construction site of weapons of mass destruction (we are led to believe) in Syria. The rubble, sorry nuclear reactor, was being constructed with the aid of Mysteron technology, oops, North Korean technology and according to this BBC report was viewed by the American government as “not for peaceful purposes”.
The IAEA’s director general Mohamed ElBaradei is quoted as saying:
“It is deeply regrettable that information concerning this installation was not provided to the agency in a timely manner and that force was resorted to unilaterally before the agency was given an opportunity to establish the facts.”
Erm, is it just me, or does the phrase IRAQ WAR come screaming to mind? I recall hearing former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter speaking in Edinburgh a couple of years ago. Understandably he was miffed (to say the least) that the United States government leveled Iraq before he and his team could finish their inspections back in 2003.
But back to the story - was this a nuclear reactor? In a country which has just become a net importer of oil, and which had relied on oil as a major source of revenue, and where oil coupons are being issued so that ordinary people can continue to buy fuel for cooking, why on earth would they be mad enough to look for an alternative source of energy? One shouldn’t stop to consider that when globally 100 new nuclear power stations are planned and 29 are actively in construction, in countries that haven’t yet run out of the black stuff, why should a nation that has effectively run out seek an alternative? Better by far to destroy the Mysteron-inspired evil-doing. Unfortunately for Zion Airlines Inc, no women or toddlers could be found running screaming inside, but better luck next time, there’s always Gaza boys.
Assuming it was a nuclear reactor and the purpose was to assemble a nuclear explosive device - one has to ask what is wrong with this? Yep, you heard me correctly. The Cold War was based on the principle of Mutually Assured Destruction, still the reason given for retention of English nuclear weapons (most Scots want them removed from Scottish soil, we’re a 10-1 minority, hence they’re not British but English. I digress). There’s no mutual unless both sides have the same lethal capacity, this is child’s play reasoning. Rational people might dispute the MADness, but as it is formally stated by the United States and other nations as a fundamental requirement for keeping the peace (read: no global nuclear holocaust) then it should extend to all nations , by their logic.
From Syria’s perspective, you have only to look at this:
“Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not”.
Richard Falk
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that recent events lead to one inescapable conclusion:
Arm yourself with atomic weapons or face annihilation from the United States and/or their proxy, Israel.
This should be self-evident, but let’s look at the current situation. The war machine of the United States/Israeli partnership has Iranian evildoers in their gunsights for daring, in a peak-oil world, to develop non-military nuclear power (as confirmed in the International Atomic Engery Agency report of June 5th 2008: Iranian Uranium enrichment is at a level suitable only for cilvilian nuclear reactor usage; it is categorically not weapons-grade). Israel has nonetheless recently completed military exercises to simulate an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. So the proxy army of Jewish ‘mentalists are rattling sabers once again. And how might their intended target respond to such an attack? Quoting from the BBC:
“The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, Mohammed ElBaradei, meanwhile said an attack would put Iran on a “crash course” to building nuclear weapons and would turn the region “into a fireball”.
Black and white: if you don’t have nuclear weapons, the fanatical alliance of nuclear-armed ‘mentlist Christians and (even more?) ‘mentalist Zionist partners-in-crime will murder you with their high-tech toys.
Life-long CND supporter that I am, having marched against nuclear weapons in towns and villages most of you have never heard of, what would I say to the Syrian or Iranian leadership on this, if asked? In light of the facts, which sane country would not be building a nuclear bomb right now?
I think I may be absurd. You see, after watching Joss Whedon’s wonderful sci-fi series FireFly, I checked up on him and found he claims to be an absurdist. So the power of Google led me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism which has to be one of the most fascinating pages on the web. At least, for people like me.
According to this page, I’m either an absurdist, an Athieistic existentialist or Nihilist … and if I’d studied English further, might know whether to capitlise the first letters of these words or not (I weary of that kind of trivia, written words merely represents a sound, sounds have at their root no meaning other than what we attach, so what difference can capitalisation really make? I know, I know, you see through me, I simply don’t know enough grammar, you got me.)
Further narrowing down leads me to suspect atheistic existentialism more befits my line of thought, but who other than me could possibly care? Well it’s not about me, not completely 
- it’s about a well thought out, philosophical basis on which to underpin everything. Everything being one’s world view, one’s understanding, literally all that a person is, imagines themselves to be, and the framework for the sum of experiences which they term their life.
Reading the words of Camus and Kierkegaard, one has to ask why are the words of these thinkers not taught in Schools? Why are children’s heads filled with non-sensical dogma labeled religion and given some untouchable status? I was lucky enough to have friends (hey Wrecker!) who espoused the views of these thinkers at University but failed to see the significance at the time, thinking they were stating the obvious. They were! But how this beautiful obvious is demonised, feared, hidden away, loathed by the dogmites - the dead minds who fill your world and mine with fear, dread and ignorance.
Carl Sagan’s words accompanied by music and video cry out to be included in this post, an extract from the amazing Pale Blue Dot production - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luAteAz3WQ0
Surrounded as I write by Catholic churches, Catholic-only schools, Church of Scotland shrines here there and everywhere, a 5-minute walk from the aptly named “Holy Corner”, yes, I’d say absurd befits my status nicely.
The phrase “the elephant in the room” is commonly applied when illustrating religious dogma, and what more dogmatic entity than that which colonises Palestine, and terms itself ‘Israel’. But the elephant, in this case, is not Zionist delusion - tempting though that is to write about - but Gaza. What is being done to the people of Gaza is one hell of a big elephant that the world’s politicians seem not to have noticed.
Gaza is Palestine’s lethal open prison. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would urge anyone reading this post to just take a look at this short BBC News article entitled “Life in the ‘open prison’ of Gaza“. The article is sickening.
The collective punishment of Gaza citizens by the Israeli government is not only morally repugnant, but illegal under the most important laws of the 20th Century - those that sought to limit the savagery of human warfare so that non-combatants were afforded (at least in principle) some degree of protection. I have argued this in earlier writing, but the case is made most clearly and eloquently in a petition served to the Supreme Court of Israel by bodies including “The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel” (homepage).
The petition demands a halt to plans by the Israeli Defense Minister and Prime Minister to cut power and fuel supplies to the inhabitants of Gaza, and the specific ‘war crimes’ aspect of this may be found on page 11, from which I quote below:
The actions of the Respondents are subject to humanitarian law by force of the Regulations
concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Hague Convention of 1907,
which apply directly in Israeli law, being part of customary law (heretofore: “the Hague Regulations”),
as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of
War (heretofore: the Fourth Geneva Convention) (HCJ 393/82 Jamaiyat Iskan vs. the commander of
IDF Forces, v. 37(4) 785, 792 (heretofore: the “Jamaiyat Iskan affair”); HCJ 4764/04 Physicians for
Human Rights vs. the commander of IF forces in Gaza, v. 58(5) 385, 393 (heretofore: the Physicians
for Human Rights Affair) and see also Orna Ben Naftali and Yuval Shani, International Law –
Between Peace and War (Ramot 2006), p.243 (heretofore: Ben Naftali and Shani).The basic instruction of humanitarian international law, starting with the commencement of warfare,
is that the local residents “…are under all circumstances entitled to respect for their persons, their
honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs.
They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of
violence or threats thereof…” (Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. See also article 46 of the
Hague Regulations).
But then what would one expect from a State that inflicts torture (BBC) and false imprisonment on those whose land it so brutally confiscated? When senior investigators in the United Nations compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazi’s, well, perhaps they’re just anti-semitic, or terrorist-lovers, or some such nasty thing.