America Nakba Tour Memories
Category: human rights
Kalief Browder Learned How to Commit Suicide on Rikers
Jennifer Gonnerman is the journalist I credit with introducing me to a young man trapped as thoroughly as the protagonist Kafka introduced in his uncompleted novel Der Prozess (The Trial), a recognition of injustices that compel gentle souls to scream at the every day horror of the everyday.
One year ago billziegler1947 became a vehicle for transporting readers via metaphor: the ancient and modern Greek for “transport.”
The transport stops here, I turn the wheel over to Ms. Gonnerman:
Before Browder ever attempted to take his own life, he saw another inmate in the jail try to end his.
Source: Kalief Browder Learned How to Commit Suicide on Rikers – The New Yorker
excerpt from her New Yorker article published at 10:45 this morning.
On June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder took his own life at his home, in the Bronx. He was twenty-two years old. He had been released from Rikers Island two years earlier, ending an ordeal that had begun on a spring night in 2010, when he had been arrested for robbery, at sixteen. He spent the next three years in jail trying to prove his innocence, and, for about two of those years, he was held in solitary confinement, where he attempted suicide several times. The charges against him were eventually dropped. I met him after his release and wrote a story about him in the fall of 2014.
Please remember Mr. Browder each Memorial Day, acknowledging the fallen and the falling: the failure of a society.
Thanks for reading.
Thalwen Explains Hasbara: إسرائيل
Truth to Power
A single truth can defeat a legion of lies. A 15-year-old shows us how.
I’m reminded of the guy in Poe’s “Telltale Heart.” Truth pulses.
Leanne Mohamad is a 15 year old Palestinian who lives in the UK. A student at Wanstead High School, she took top place in the Redbridge regional final for Jack Petchley’s Speak Out challenge. The Speak Out Challenge is an annual contest that is funded by the Jack Petchley Foundation and the purpose of it […]
via Leanne Mohamad, censored for hoping for freedom — Thalwen’s Rants and Stuffs
Thalwen is setting a higher bar in solid reporting at the same time as the hasbara crowd keeps lowering theirs. This is another one for the reference shelf here at billziegler1947. It may be daunting to publish small unfunded thoughts when I could get paid to sit at a monitor and yell “Go Team Hasbara Go!” but this way I can live with myself.
From Adonis Diaries on Palestine
What happens to a dream deferred?
Drawing two words from Langston Hughes, it explodes.
excerpt from Adonis Diaries:
Senior Fellow Mouin Rabbani: “Ignore Palestine At Your Peril” … The main impression I got – in a variety of rural areas and also in Ramallah and Jerusalem – was how severely abandoned the average Palestinian and Palestinians collectively feel by their own leadership, their own political movements, by the Arab states and increasingly by […]
Read more: Ignore Palestine At your Peril — Adonis Diaries
The Palestinian population is growing faster than any other ethnic group in the geographic region delineated by the British occupying forces.
Between the two largest ethnic groups, and soon, there will be more Palestinians than any other ethnic group. Where? There.
WallWritings gives a perspective from a Methodist point of view by James M. Wall, also provides us somber warnings on the consequences of dream deferment.
I came across a thorough demographic perspective: a modest proposal by Netanyahu’s choice for the IDF, Avigdor Lieberman, from a bit over a year ago in Haaretz by Yuli Tamir:
Thanks for reading.
billziegler1947 
Refugee crisis continues, right to return still a universal human right
It was my privilege to meet personally with Umm Akram, Amena Ashkar and Samir Salem when the North America Nakba Tour visited Cincinnati Clifton Mosque (Masjid): a Cincinnati Palestine Solidarity Coalition event.
The British Empire closed shop on their Raj in India in 1947 and they left Palestine in 1948. At the same time another colonizer opened shop under new management and with a new name. They had owned the place 3,000 years ago and decided to own it again.
Speaking truth to power is not the same as speaking truth to the powerless.
I had a light bulb moment:
Amena momentarily flinched when a questioner referred to an entity I am calling SRL. Her reaction gave me pause and served as a reminder of the entity that controls the narrative: those who lived in Palestine 3,000 years ago and decided to own it again.
Never believe your own propaganda.
I’m calling the entity (one of the words Amena uses) SRL because I am presently learning one of the Semitic languages based on the root system. The larger of the Semitic languages has 300,000,000 speakers, but the principal language in SRL is spoken by 9,000,000. The word antisemitism should be redefined.
My ears and eyes are always open to the slightest mention of anything Palestinian in the news. American media is either corporately owned or corporately sponsored. Censoring the news is ungodly expensive. Without the billions of dollars infused into SRL the whole entity would collapse under its own weight.
Stolen land? What stolen land? Nina Paley’s animated take on land rights is worth your time IMO. Following Nina Paley is worth all the while. If you are having a problem choosing your next Paley animation: Nina Paley Blog.
So my question hangs in the air: “why is it always okay to freely and frequently speak the word Isr**l, wave their colors, celebrate eternal victimhood, speak loud, act brazen, flex Spartan muscles, trot out the toys of a soldier society…
Occupation of another people is not a universal human right.
Back to SRL. The SRLies use the word Palestinian as a curse word. They never even whisper the word PALESTINE.
Thanks for reading.