In America principles are goods placed on sale to the highest bidder. Career paths are paved with bricks forged by selling yourself out at every opportunity.
Cash in your chips at the next square and move on to another chance for a sell-out.
Guardians of integrity are rare beasts on our fruited plain. Experience has taught me that wealth management is incompatible with free and open society. But weapons of wealth management are the coin of our realm.
A kind and gentle hint: the system is gamed.
Marking my 50th post on this blog, I leverage what goes for my political capital (49 previous articles) by suggesting that
become essential reading for billziegler1947 readers.
THE SHADOW is the sole remaining underground newspaper in New York, the home of Stanley Cohen and the only living boy in New York. Mr. Cohen is following the same principled path he began in 1969 and his principles are not for sale.
Imagine that you are looking for a source for truth on Palestine. It’s right here on @StanleyCohenLaw all day long.
But if you need an additional source for truth on that occupied land, consider the words of anthropologist Jeff Halper. He graduated from Hebrew Union College in 1969, the same year I graduated from another Cincinnati institution on Clifton Avenue. I am presently reading and recommending his
Jerry Rubin is best known as one of the Chicago 7 of ’68, he was also a fellow University of Cincinnati alumnus who decided that selling stock portfolios was the new revolutionary act. Rubin gave an address in Cincinnati the late 60’s. That was before joining the “revolution” on Wall Street as the Reagan era began.
I was still at U.C. during Naksa (’67 War) learning geography from Laurence G. Wolf.
Today, speaking truth to power is the best way I know to find yourself in a Gulag.
Israel is a state recognized completely and thoroughly by the United States and a few South-Pacific island territory/nations. The prisons in Israel are legally available for detaining pre-teen Palestinians, indefinitely. Not the vision evoked by Leon Uris’ Exodus, more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
But if you are looking for an investment opportunity for idle dollars, prisons are wise investments. Billions of dollars accrete to a single individual. It’s where the smart money goes.
Download the App buycott on your iPhone or on whatever app supports it to scan bar codes while shopping
BDS Movement Full List: here is an up-to-date and handy reference to the players: who they are, where they are and why they matter. Their game is gaining your participation through witting or unwitting complicity.
BDS Marin: here is one of the many local groups thinking global. The list above does not include Nestle among boycotted products but this Marin County movement does include them. So it’s good to cross compare.
BDS Movement on Twitter: here is another social media avenue for learning, teaching or contributing. I’ve just received an article that delves into the HP security matrix. Life is an ongoing dystopia for Palestinians. HP has really earned it’s place on the BDS list. I’m looking into their other products but do not want to make it overly complex, or less focussed, at this moment.
Please feel free to contact me (ziegler.bill@gmail.com) or leave a comment on this post. Truth and accuracy are important, let me know if something isn’t correct. Participation is vital.
Yesterday I attended a screening of Ghost Town – The Story of Hebron. A well attended event successfully delivered by the Cincinnati Palestine Solidarity Coalition. A fellow supporter of the Palestinian cause noted that I had a bottle of Tradewinds Tea in front of me. Nestle, a Swiss company of notable size, owns Tradewinds: they have plants in the West Bank.
We are presently working on a locally based BDS Movement for the Cincinnati area. Look for us at local businesses that unknowingly contribute to the massive human rights violations in territories occupied by Israel since 1967: the Naksa.
I was a sophomore at the University of Cincinnati at the time of the Six Day War, working on my B.A. in Geography: it was a subject topic in Human Geography that became the stuff of current events in the classroom. In 1971 I completed my M.A. in the same field at Kansas State University. I was born 8 months before the Nakba, so my personal hallmarks coincide in memory with the hallmarks of Palestine these 68 years now. A difference: I have never been a refugee but 6 million Palestinians from Palestine still are. BDS helps everyone.
No time is a good time to support an Apartheid state. I am personally complicit in supporting Apartheid by continuing my American citizenship. Rather than renouncing my home land I am at this moment exercising First Amendment rights, rights that are not available in the State of Israel. Lucas Koerner learned firsthand what may occur if you stand on a public square in Jerusalem. No one should feel discomfort at taking a stand, whether by #StandWithIsrael or #StandWithPalestine.
The First Amendment is one resilient set of words. I like its resonance. It’s available to the most marginalized people. Majority rule makes the world safe for the already comfortable. The Tyranny of the majority (dated 23 February) seeks to restrict basic human rights that already belong to the marginalized, on those less powerful. Just keep repeating this lie: “Majority Rules” from the playground to adulthood and you’ll think it’s truth.
Meanwhile, in this age of one dollar one vote you can still use the dollars at your discretion to cast a BDS vote.See you in the marketplace.
I am a supporter of Palestinian independence and a foe of apartheid: the dramatic separation of “the other” by a privileged people. A de jure and de facto status quo is brutally enforced upon the other. I have followed Palestine and Israel for a long time. I stand on the side of justice and human rights as defined by the United Nations. Palestine is a people whose culture is constantly threatened. Israel enjoys independence, Palestine does not.
Contemporary movements arise in unexpected ways. They blossom in this era as related hashtags: #OneStruggle
Olive trees are an immortal theme in the land of Palestine.
A Palestinian grandmother or mom and her children protecting their olive trees from demolition
Metaphor: olive branch in Genesis 8:11
When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.
South Africa was another victim of British Empire. It was divided and conquered. Upon attaining independence from Britain, the State of South Africa adopted the divide and conquer technique. It was called Apartheid.
Apartheid (Afrikaans pronunciation: [ɐˈpartɦɛit]; an Afrikaans word meaning “the state of being apart”, literally “apart-hood”) was a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP), the governing party from 1948 to 1994.
This painting on the separation wall dividing Israeli and Palestinians employs the vehicle (metaphor) of art. Simple but powerful. It reminds me of all the graffiti that adorned the west side of the Berlin Wall (some might have called it the Berlin Fence between 1961 and 1989) until both the west and the east sides of that wall finally fell in 1989.
News item:
The Defense Ministry resumed construction on Monday of the separation barrier near Beit Jala, south of Jerusalem, even though the High Court of Justice had invalidated the building of the barrier in that region and ordered the state to reconsider it.
(August 17, 2015 Haaretz)
India gained its independence from the British Raj in 1947.
British Raj (rāj, lit. “rule” in Hindi) or British India, officially the British Indian Empire, and internationally and contemporaneously, India, is the term used synonymously for the region, the rule, and the period, from 1858 to 1947, of the British Empire on the Indian subcontinent.
The British relinquished their imperial hold on Palestine the following year. In 1948 truth became a victim of war.
There is a worn slogan: “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But Palestine was not an uninhabited region.It was the home of three (3) cultures in 1948: three adherents of a monotheistic faith, secular and others, such as Bedouin nomads.
When the British left the three cultures remained. 700,000 Palestinians began a diaspora (67 years so far) that relocated them to the West Bank of the Jordan River, a small segment along the Mediterranean known as Gaza and throughout the world.
Many Palestinians lived on the Mediterranean coast in 1947. Certainly this would be my choice too, the climate is that of Southern California. Californians prefer the coast, but they also live elsewhere in their state. They live in Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego, i.e. all over the state of California. Many Israelis enjoy the Mediterranean coast, but some prefer Jerusalem, a divided city similar to the previously divided Berlin: capital city of the German Democratic Republic and largest city of the German Federal Republic at the time of Nakba.
During the 1947 creation of the state of Israel, the homeland of the Palestinian people for more than a thousand years was taken from them by force. All subsequent crimes–on both sides–inevitably follow from this original injustice. Yet a peace process in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has continued over the years despite the ongoing violence which has prevailed since the very beginning.
Was the event of 1948النكبةم Nakba Catastrophe) or Israel Independence Day יום העצמאות (Yom Ha’atzmaut)?
Catastrophe number two: the event of 1967: النكسة يوم (The Naksa World Turned Upside Down).
Below, Moriarty as metaphor for the poorly understood victims of great crimes: the Palestinian people:
Picture to yourself the pilot fish with the shark, the jackal with the lion—anything that is insignificant in companionship with what is formidable: not only formidable, Watson, but sinister—in the highest degree sinister. That is where he comes within my purview. ‘You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?’
‘The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks -‘
‘My blushes, Watson!’ Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.
‘I was about to say, “as he is unknown to the public”.’
‘A touch! A distinct touch!’ cried Holmes. ‘You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law…
from A. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story The Valley of Fear.
![Apartheid (Afrikaans pronunciation: [ɐˈpartɦɛit]; an Afrikaans word meaning "the state of being apart", literally "apart-hood") was a system of racial segregation in South Africa enforced through legislation by the National Party (NP), the governing party from 1948 to 1994.](https://billziegler1947.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/apartheidsignenglishafrikaans.jpg)
billziegler1947 