Hyde,
VEGAN ANIMAL LIBERATION ABOLITIONIST ACTIVIST
author of the vital “DigOutYourSoul,” writes with piercing insight and profound honesty. Hyde does not hide her soul, neither should you.
No fellow sentient being is ever your property.
Category: Uncategorized
Nakba: a 71-year perspective
A reign of terror began 71 years ago in Palestine: aptly called The Catastrophe, that terror continues to this day. That land lies at an ancient crossroads, located directly along the shortest land route from Africa to Europe. You have to be a resilient people to have lived there over the past few millennia, resiliency is something that defines such people. Palestinian Social Customs and Traditions
Ethnic cleansing continues even as the Palestinian birthrate increases more rapidly than the Israeli birthrate. There are now 5.3 million Palestinians and 5.2 million Israelis living in the same geography.
Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1516 to 1917 — the United States has only been around for 243 years. How much history, culture, traditions, arts, sciences, music, dance, cuisine, celebrations had flourished in those 401 years? Here is that link again: Palestinian Social Customs and Traditions.
The current political milieu in Israel extends from Rightwing to Ultra Rightwing, and all points in-between. Michael Oren, former Netanyahu ambassador to Washington and now a part of Netanyahu’s government, spoke over the telephone with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker, the interview went off the rails with quite a flourish. Here is an excerpt:
Isaac Chotiner: I am trying to disaggregate the ideas that this is being done for safety and security and there is no alternative, and that it is being done because people are traditional and religious—
Michael Oren: That’s my point. It’s not just security. It’s also ideology, it’s also belief.
Isaac Chotiner: Do you think that there are moral consequences to those beliefs, if they include increasing settlements in the West Bank?Michael Oren: I have to distinguish between what’s right and what’s smart.
Isaac Chotiner: Increasing settlements is which?
Michael Oren: Again, you want to put this in black-and-white terms, but it is not black and white. Increasing settlements where? They are not all the same.Isaac Chotiner: Sure. I just didn’t understand what you meant by right versus smart. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
Michael Oren: It is definitely our right. I think it is our incontrovertible right as Jews to live anywhere in our ancestral homeland.
Isaac Chotiner: Really?Michael Oren Cuts Short a Conversation About Israel
Michael Oren: No question. No question about it. Anywhere. And a member of the Sioux nation has a right to live on Sioux-nation territory. These are our tribal lands. The cradle of our civilization.
Occupation and demolition is heartless and it is brutal. Is it “a moral imperative” to uproot a thousand olive trees tended for a thousand years? The occupiers, protected by the IDF, routinely force families onto the street, then demolish their homes. Does it matter that those families have lived there for centuries? Housing developments in the Occupied Territories look like they’ve been transported from Southern California: reliable electricity, clean water, sewage pipes that dump onto the small isolated pockets that remain well isolated — where dwell the huddled Palestinian masses. Homeless in their own country. The “settlements” connect to Israeli jobs, markets and families over modern highways, fences run along the entire length of both shoulders. “For Israelis Only” — Jim Crow echoes there. Zoom out and you witness the spectacle of a 200 state solution, 200 isolated pockets of huddled masses yearning to be free.
Where you can meet Palestinians
What is it like to be dispossessed, to live under terror for 71 years? The IDF doesn’t just knock on your children’s door in the middle of the night, they break the door down and terrorize the entire family, the entire neighborhood. They do it at whim and with impunity, they keep the kids in holding cells indefinitely.
The British Empire took advantage of several remnants of the Ottoman Empire in 1917 by obtaining a legal instrument (a Mandate for Palestine) drawn up by the short-lived League of Nations. Lord Balfour feared an influx of Semites arriving at British shores, undesirable refugees in an otherwise polite country. He sought to keep them far away from Britannia. Palestine was on the other side of Europe, far from the White Cliffs of Dover.
I maintain that the British Empire signed over their “Mandate for Palestine” to Palestine’s present occupiers.
In 1948, Truman pulled a Balfour on the Palestinians.
Thanks for reading.
Fascists v. Francis
You may think you already know too much about geopolitical regime-change architect Steve Bannon, perhaps you were hoping that the creep had already crept back under a rock — not at all, Bannon fans. Be of good cheer, Altrighteers! Taste fist, AntiFas!
Fulsome News and U.S. Empire Report:
Good news for the Fas: SB has crept under a different kind of rock, the Petrine.
Steve Bannon is working to make friends and influence Fascists in a Europe that has shown entirely too much unity since post-war Fascist losses in 1945. The great man is setting up shop in Italy, just one easy commute away from Vatican City, a world capital where he can simultaneously keep his friends and his enemies close. It’s at a medieval monastery built in 1204 CE (only eleven years before the Magna Carta, for the sake of Christ!), a facility quite large enough to simultaneously accommodate dozens of über-conservative deal brokers. The monastery’s building complex was built in an era when Cannon Law was supreme and unfettered, when separation of church and state was capital heresy.
Bannon is a reliable information (propaganda) source for the rightwing political players in the Roman Catholic Church. A base that has become most rigidly rigid in its resurgent Church Militant: a call to reinvigorate The Crusades — a mission, in their words, that has never ended, that needs recruits to defend The West from Moslems (the word Muslim is insufficiently orientalist for their purposes) that have always sought to conquer European Civilization: The Judeo-Christian West threatened by Mohamedism (orientalist for Islam) and the dreaded boogymen in the “Koran” — perhaps best pronounced perhaps as the “Ko-ran”, those fiery fiends that threaten Israel — perhaps also best pronounced as “Is-real”.
Imagine a placard on the base statue of Mr. Steve in the square of St. Peter.
Steven Kevin Bannon
Founder of Bannon Law, an informed interpretation of Cannon Law
stalwart champion of White Rights, Bannonavellianism , the guy who knows how to get the job done and is ready to drop shells on all the egg shells it takes to make a proper Stalinist Omelet.
Rough-beast incarnate: not the kind of slouch who would limit his reach to Bethlehem.
After leaving the White House, Bannon declared his intention to become “the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.
Steve Bannon Is Done Wrecking the American Establishment. Now He Wants to Destroy Europe’s.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/world/europe/horowitz-europe-populism.html
Thanks for reading.
I come from a “shit-hole”
“The truth is that it is hard for me to say what I am. I was born in El Salvador, and its land and people are synonyms with love and freedom in my heart. But the country itself is an invention of an invader from another continent. Its language, its religion, its traditions all were imposed by the invaders, burned into us with fire and cauldrons. Our 500 year old resistance has left its mark in a perennial PTSD so ingrained in our bones that we don’t even know any other way of feeling is possible.”
billziegler1947 