Covid

MASKING SAVES LIVES

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Why Idle No More Matters -- Winona LaDuke [What Happened in First Nation Villages]

http://www.honorearth.org/news/why-idle-no-more-matters

EXCERPT:
Enter DeBeers, the largest diamond mining enterprise in the world. The company moved into northern Ontario in 2006 . The Victor Mine reached commercial production in 2008 and was voted “Mine of the Year” by the readers of the international trade publication Mining Magazine. The company states it is “is committed to sustainable development in local communities.” This is good to know. This is also where the first world meets the third world in the north, as Canadian MP Bob Rae discovered last year on his tour of the rather destitute conditions of the village. Infrastructure in the Sub Arctic is in short supply. There is no road into the village eight months of the year, four months a year, during freeze up , there’s an ice road. A diamond mine needs a lot of infrastructure. And that has to be shipped in, so the trucks launch out of Moosonee, Ontario. Then, they build a better road. The problem is that the road won’t work when the climate changes, and already stretched infrastructure gets tapped out. 
There is some money flowing in, that’s sure. A 2010 report from DeBeers states that payments to eight communities associated with its two mines in Canada totalled $5,231,000 that year. Forbes Magazine reports record diamond sales by the world’s largest diamond company “… increased 33 percent, year-over-year, to $3.5 billion….The mining giant, which produces more than a third of the world’s rough diamonds, also reported record EBITDA of almost $1.2 billion, a 55 percent increase over the first the first half of 2010.”  
As the Canadian Mining Watch group notes “Whatever Attawapiskat’s share of that $5-million is, given the chronic under-funding of the community, the need for expensive responses to deal with recurring crises, including one that DeBeers themselves may have precipitated by overloading the community’s sewage system, it’s not surprising that the community hasn’t been able to translate its … income into improvements in physical infrastructure.” Last year, Attawapiskat drew international attention , when many families in the Cree community were living in tents. 
The neighboring Kaschewan Village is in similar disarray. They have been boiling water, and importing water. The village almost had a complete evacuation due to health conditions, and , “ … fuel shortages are becoming more common among remote northern Ontario communities right now,” Alvin Fiddler, Deputy Grand Chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, a regional advocacy network explained to a reporter. That’s because the ice road used to truck in a year’s supply of diesel last winter did not last as long as usual. “Everybody is running out now. We’re looking at a two-month gap” until this winter’s ice road is solid enough to truck in fresh supplies, Mr. Fiddler said in an interview.Kashechewan’s chief and council are poised to shut down the band office, two schools, the power generation centre, the health clinic and the fire hall because the buildings were not heated and could no longer operate safely. “ In addition some 21 homes had become uninhabitable,” according to Chief Derek Stephen . Those basements had been flooded last spring, as the weather patterns changed. Just as a side note, in 2007, some 21 Cree youth from Kashechewan attempted to commit suicide, and the Canadian aboriginal youth suicide rate is five times the national average. Both communities are beneficiaries of an agreement with DeBeers.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Idle No More Flashmob -- Westlake Cntr Seattle -- 12-29-12



http://youtu.be/682GlJLqMIA

Folks we met as we stood outside in solidarity with our "Palestine:  It's About the Land" banner.




Tuesday, December 25, 2012

First Nation Chief Theresa Spence on 11th Day of Hunger Strike to Get Harper Govt' to Honor Treaty



http://youtu.be/bjS721JeuUc

She puts her peoples case very eloquently.  HARPER LISTEN TO HER!

Monday, December 24, 2012

Monday, December 17, 2012

Sympathy from the Devil - William Norman Grigg

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33347.htm


EXCERPT:

For the Obama Regime, child-killing is an instrument of policy. This was made clear in a recent story reported by the Military Times describing how U.S. troops in Afghanistan, fearful over the actions of a group of young men nearby called in an airstrike that killed all of the suspected guerillas – only to find out later that three of them were children, aged 8, 10, and 12. The families of the dead children said that they had been gathering dried animal leavings, which are used as fuel. 
The International Security Assistance Force in Kabul issued a statement acknowledging that the airstrike "accidentally killed three innocent Afghan children." That statement prompted Army Lt. Col. Marion Carrington to tell the Military Times that the children may not have been innocent. 
According to Carrington, whose unit is training Afghan police, "In addition to looking for military-age males, [we are] looking for children with potential hostile intent." Since hostility is the natural, and entirely commendable, reaction to foreign occupiers, Carrington is saying that any Afghan child with sufficient awareness to resent the occupation is a legitimate military target. 
What Adam Lanza did once in a fit of murderous irrationality, the Regime over which Obama presides does practically every day – and the killing is carried out by people who act with clear-eyed, clinical indifference to the suffering they inflict. 

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Thoughts on the Newtown Shooting from Halfway Around the World -- Syazwina Saw


http://smpalestine.com/2012/12/15/thoughts-on-the-newtown-shooting-from-halfway-around-the-world/


Living on Twitter is a precarious existence. 
Events do not manifest themselves well in just 140 characters. What you get are soundbites and facts, retweeted as endorsement or vilification, made popular by approval or mockery. When I joined Twitter in the end of 2008, I became a spectator to the Iranian revolution which died almost as soon started. And then there was Egypt, which continues to be a battlefield of ideals, beliefs and morals. Sometimes we fixate on details. Sometimes these prove to be insights. 
And when you live several continents away from the United States, as I do, then waking up in the morning means bracing yourself for whatever happened eight hours ago. Before I went to bed on Friday night, I saw tweets of people sending prayers to Newtown, but without further detail. 
And we woke up to the news of 20 children murdered at school. 
Names and ages of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, California, published on the front page of the New York Times.
Names and ages of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, California, published on the front page of the New York Times. 
My timeline today is a picture of shared grief, horror and disbelief. It is an outpour of sympathy and vilification, of prayer and condolences, of anger and blame. The online debate immediately turned to gun control and mental health, and within the heady brew of blood and politics, a few facts are mentioned again and again: 
Eighteen hours before the shooting in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, Republicans pushed through a bill which allows people to carry a gun or rifle into schools and kindergartens. Obama continues to champion the use of drones in Afghanistan and other countries in order to target terrorists, but which generates a high number of civilian casualties, many of them children. Israel continues to receive funding from the US, most of which goes into the Israeli Defense Forces – two days ago, an IDF soldier killed 17-year-old Muhammad As-Salaymah who was bringing home a cake to celebrate his birthday. 
It appears that there is a pattern here, which continues to perpetuate itself. 
While the culture of violence has become, as with everything else, an increasingly global phenomenon, how it manifests is local. It shows up in our communities and it happens to our children. The death of the young, whatever the circumstances, is always a tragedy in itself. They symbolize our dreams and hopes, our investment for the future which we dream of but may never see fulfilled. When children die, we are left with the scraps of our messes. The empty spaces they leave behind echo our loss, their silent screams creating a wall of grief. 
Unfortunately, when children die, we also reduce them to sound bites. We reduce them to spectacles of previously unimaginable tragedy; we speak of them in whispers and with stunned expressions, as though they are isolated events. We treat their deaths as if they are without context. We fault these tragedies on singular subjects, usually the killer presumed deranged or desperate, and not as if they are the result of years of permitted violence. 
There is something amiss, and its cause is great, its habits too ingrained, that we prefer to hide behind our grief and point fingers. 
We at Sixteen Minutes to Palestine extend our hearts and prayers to the families, friends, and victims of the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
Syazwina Saw
Syazwina Saw is a writer and editor for ISSUE Magazine and a graduate student based in Malaysia. She has also helped in the development of Sixteen Minutes to Palestine. She tweets here.

Saturday, December 08, 2012

The Free Bethlehem Singers at Seattle Figgy Pudding Festival -- 12/7/12



UPDATE:  The next day we serenaded shoppers at Westlake under a Boycott Israel banner


************************************************************************





ONE OF THE SONGS:

ODE TO BOYCOTT
(Tune: Ode to Joy - L van Beethoven) 

Israel, end your occupation: 
There’s no peace on stolen land. 
We’ll sing out for liberation 
’till you hear and understand.
Ethnic cleansing and apartheid 
Should belong to history. 
Human rights cannot be silenced: 
Palestine will soon be free.

>Sing 3x through. 2nd time in ROUND<

We got some really great applause and donations for the Pike Market Clinic, while educating the public who wandered between the competing choral groups.  Cheers!

Thursday, December 06, 2012

Israel and Palestine, An [EXCELLENT] Animated Introduction by Jewish Voice for Peace



http://youtu.be/Y58njT2oXfE

Bring Leonard Peltier Home in 2012!


Bring Leonard Peltier Home 2012 Concert

Friday, November 30, 2012

Bring Leonard Peltier Home in 2012! Benefit Concert in NY, 12/14


LPDOC - PO Box 7488 - Fargo, ND 58106
(701) 235-2206 (Phone); (701) 235-5045 (Fax)
www.whoisleonardpeltier.info - http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info
contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

GOOD SEATS STILL AVAILABLE
FOR THIS EVENT!!!!!!


AN EVENING OF MUSIC & LEARNING
FOR LEONARD PELTIER

JOIN

Harry Belafonte   Jackson Browne   Rubin "Hurricane" Carter
Bruce Cockburn   Pete Seeger
Jennifer Kreisberg Bill Miller Eagleheart Singers Wakeby LakeBuddy
Powless
Geronimo Powless Gina Buenrostro Margo Thunderbird Bear and theWillow

and Speakers Jack Healey (Human Rights Action Center, former
Executive Director ofAmnesty International USA) Peter Matthiessesn
Tom Poor Bear (Oglala Sioux Tribe V.P.)  Bill Means Dorothy Ninham

Friday, December 14th 7:30 p.m. The Beacon Theatre Broadway at West
74th St., New York City
Telephone: 212 465-6500
http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info/
Human Rights Action Center, Washington, D.C.
http://www.humanrightsactioncenter.org/

Tickets available from: Beacon Theatre box office or
<http://www.beacontheatre.com/events/2012/december/leonard-peltier-benefit.html>
or phone 212 465-6500

Ticketmaster
<http://www.ticketmaster.com/Leonard-Peltier-Benefit-tickets/artist/1801643>
or phone 1-866-858-0008


BRING LEONARD PELTIER HOME IN 2012!

www.whoisleonardpeltier.info - http://www.whoisleonardpeltier.info

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Mahmoud Darwish: ‘Silence for Gaza’ via Mondoweiss & Henry Norr

Please to go the link to read Henry Norr's Intro (poem is below):  http://mondoweiss.net/2012/11/mahmoud-darwish-silence-for-gaza.html

Silence for Gaza  -- Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Sinan Antoon


Gaza is far from its relatives and close to its enemies, because whenever Gaza explodes, it becomes an island and it never stops exploding. It scratched the enemy’s face, broke his dreams and stopped his satisfaction with time.
Because in Gaza time is something different.
Because in Gaza time is not a neutral element.
It does not compel people to cool contemplation, but rather to explosion and a collision with reality.
Time there does not take children from childhood to old age, but rather makes them men in their first confrontation with the enemy.
Time in Gaza is not relaxation, but storming the burning noon. Because in Gaza values are different, different, different.
The only value for the occupied is the extent of his resistance to occupation. That is the only competition there. Gaza has been addicted to knowing this cruel, noble value. It did not learn it from books, hasty school seminars, loud propaganda megaphones, or songs. It learned it through experience alone and through work that is not done for advertisement and image.
Gaza has no throat. Its pores are the ones that speak in sweat, blood, and fires. Hence the enemy hates it to death and fears it to criminality, and tries to sink it into the sea, the desert, or blood. And hence its relatives and friends love it with a coyness that amounts to jealousy and fear at times, because Gaza is the brutal lesson and the shining example for enemies and friends alike.
Gaza is not the most beautiful city.
Its shore is not bluer than the shores of Arab cities.
Its oranges are not the most beautiful in the Mediterranean basin.
Gaza is not the richest city.
It is not the most elegant or the biggest, but it equals the history of an entire homeland, because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable, and vicious in the eyes of enemies. Because it is the most capable, among us, of disturbing the enemy’s mood and his comfort. Because it is his nightmare. Because it is mined oranges, children without a childhood, old men without old age and women without desires. Because of all this it is the most beautiful, the purest and richest among us and the one most worthy of love.
We do injustice to Gaza when we look for its poems, so let us not disfigure Gaza’s beauty. What is most beautiful in it is that it is devoid of poetry at a time when we tried to triumph over the enemy with poems, so we believed ourselves and were overjoyed to see the enemy letting us sing. We let him triumph, then when we dried our lips of poems we saw that the enemy had finished building cities, forts and streets. We do injustice to Gaza when we turn it into a myth, because we will hate it when we discover that it is no more than a small poor city that resists.
We do injustice when we wonder: What made it into a myth? If we had dignity, we would break all our mirrors and cry or curse it if we refuse to revolt against ourselves. We do injustice to Gaza if we glorify it, because being enchanted by it will take us to the edge of waiting and Gaza doesn’t come to us. Gaza does not liberate us. Gaza has no horses, airplanes, magic wands, or offices in capital cities. Gaza liberates itself from our attributes and liberates our language from its Gazas at the same time. When we meet it - in a dream - perhaps it won’t recognize us, because Gaza was born out of fire, while we were born out of waiting and crying over abandoned homes.
It is true that Gaza has its special circumstances and its own revolutionary traditions. But its secret is not a mystery: Its resistance is popular and firmly joined together and knows what it wants (it wants to expel the enemy out of its clothes). The relationship of resistance to the people is that of skin to bones and not a teacher to students. Resistance in Gaza did not turn into a profession or an institution.
It did not accept anyone’s tutelage and did not leave its fate hinging on anyone’s signature or stamp.
It does not care that much if we know its name, picture, or eloquence. It did not believe that it was material for media. It did not prepare for cameras and did not put smiling paste on its face.
Neither does it want that, nor we.
Hence, Gaza is bad business for merchants and hence it is an incomparable moral treasure for Arabs.
What is beautiful about Gaza is that our voices do not reach it. Nothing distracts it; nothing takes its fist away from the enemy’s face. Not the forms of the Palestinian state we will establish whether on the eastern side of the moon, or the western side of Mars when it is explored. Gaza is devoted to rejection… hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection, torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection.
Enemies might triumph over Gaza (the storming sea might triumph over an island… they might chop down all its trees).
They might break its bones.
They might implant tanks on the insides of its children and women. They might throw it into the sea, sand, or blood.
But it will not repeat lies and say “Yes” to invaders.
It will continue to explode.
It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live.It will continue to explode.
It is neither death, nor suicide. It is Gaza’s way of declaring that it deserves to live.

[Translated by Sinan Antoon From Hayrat al-`A’id (The Returnee’s Perplexity), Riyad al-Rayyis, 2007]

43rd Native American Day Of Mourning -Nov 22 2012; Thanksgiving Day; Plymouth, Mass.



http://youtu.be/vTXPiRQWJo8

What really happened in Gaza 14-22 November 2012 by Owen Jones



http://youtu.be/NhUnsG4zpMI

Friday, November 23, 2012

Israeli War Crimes: “Surgical Strikes” against Palestinian Children -- Felicity Arbuthnot

http://tinyurl.com/agnfoy4


“Light the fire so I can see my tears 
On the night of the massacre …” (Samih al-Qasim, b: 1939.)
It was that “pinpoint accuracy”, “surgical strike” stuff again, there were “unavoidable tragic errors”, “mistakes”, “scrupulous efforts made to avoid” etc., blah. And as Britain’s Colonel Richard Kemp declared of the fourteen hundred dead of the Christmas and New year onslaught on Gaza in 2008-2009: “Mistakes are not war crimes.” (i)
Colonel Kemp, with impeccable ties to British Intelligence Services, spoke to the BBC from Jerusalem in similar sanguine vein on 21st November(ii) of the then latest twenty four hour bombardment of the tiny, walled in Gaza Strip, where over half the population are children. But Colonel Kemp has seen a fair amount of carnage in his time, from Belfast to the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Seemingly after a while the dead and dismembered are just part of the day job.
The eight day blitz killed one hundred and sixty two Palestinians in what were merciless attacks on families with no where to hide. Nine hundred and ninety nine were injured. Eight hundred and sixty five houses are damaged or destroyed.
Six health centres are damaged, thirty schools, two universities, fifteen NGO offices, twenty seven mosques, fourteen media offices, eleven industrial plants, eighty one commercial stores and a UNRWA food distribution Centre.
In addition seven Ministry offices, fourteen  police or security stations, five banks, and two youth clubs. The sports complex where the Palestinians athletes and paralympians trained for the 2012 London Olympics is reduced to rubble, as is the beautiful and most necessary Gaza Interior Ministry.
On Universal Children’s Day, 20th November, an air strike destroyed the Oxfam-supported Al Bajan kindergarten school and damaged the Al Housna kindergarten. (iii) Oxfam’s Sara Almer commented that more than one hundred and fifty children attended these kindergartens. “The children are safe, but the places where they learned and played are now in ruins.” This in an area: “where they already suffer a high level of trauma …”
The Oxfam project was as a result of the devastation caused by “Operation Cast Lead” between 27th December 2008-17th January 2009, when they also repaired the now re-fractured water and sanitation facilities.
There is a shortage of two hundred and thirty schools in Gaza, the Agency points out – and a ban on importing construction materials, which means the further thirty two damaged, the two universities and all else may well stay that way.
Ironically, on the day of the nurseries’ destruction, the UN Secretary General announced, that marking Universal Children’s Day, the launch of a major UN initiative: “Education First.” The day commemorates the adoption of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The 1989 Convention entered in to force on September 2nd 1990, under a month after the UN embargo on Iraq, with even baby milk formula importation denied.
“The child … needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection before as well as after birth” is included in the preamble to a fine document. (iv)
Four year old twins, Suhaib and Muhammed Hijazi will never learn of the “protection” they are entitled to by the United Nations. They were killed when their home was bombed as the dawn of Universal Children’s Day approached. Their parents, Fouad and Amna died in hospital.
Saraya, eighteen months, won’t grow to read the fine words either, she died of a heart attack, literally frightened to death by the bombardment.
As the lights went off in Gaza’s hospitals, and their generator fuel hovered  on empty, Gilad Sharon – youngest son of eighty four year old former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who has benefited from Israel’s fine health services and been on life support systems since 2006 – stated: “We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki too.”
Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai stated that the goal of the attacks were to: “ … send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.”
Palestine has no army, navy, air force, no heavy weaponry. Israel is an undeclared nuclear power, regarded as having the fourth strongest military on earth.
Gaza was, of course being bombed by American supplied F-16s and a variety of American weaponry. But as Gaza grieved, America had parades across the land, ate turkey, prayed over their festive dinners on Thanksgiving Day, 22nd November.
Reality would have had them burning, city to city, The UN Declaration and Convention on the Rights of the Child, The UN Declaration on Human Rights, The Geneva Convention, The Nuremberg Principles and making a pyre of all the fine, meaningless words which do not end or mask international lawlessness and inhumanity. A bonfire which might light the  lie of the whole murderous hypocrisy of self proclaimed “democratic” nation states.
Notes

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Save Gaza Vigil, Saturday Nov.24, 12-2pm, Westlake (4th & Pine)


Please keep the People of Gaza in your prayers as you gather this evening with your family and friends for Thanksgiving!
 
The Israeli bombing of Gaza has stopped but the suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the Westbank is not over, yet!
Gaza is STILL under illegal military siege by Israel and the U.S! This Siege MUST END!
Please join us this Saturday to call for an end to this genocide against the Palestinian people and to demand justice, equal rights and an end to Ethnic Cleansing in Palestine!
 What: Vigil for GAZA
Where: Westlake 4th&Pine
When: Nov 24, 12-2pm
 See you there......
Amin Odeh
VoicesofPalestine.org
"Stand up for what is right,even if you are standing alone"

Seattle Speaks Out for Palestine Freedom



http://youtu.be/P4siu6b-BZg

Obomba

Thanks, Elliot.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Stop the Massacre In Gaza -- University of Toronto Students

University of Toronto Students

Little Hands by Lina Al-Sharif

Little hands
soft and round
cupped crayons,


in the corner of the paper,


drew smiley sun painted yellow


butterflies, swings, and green meadows,
huddled family, a house with small windows,
and a cloudless sky with a rainbow,


Little dreams,
thoughts of the unknown
as adventure bigger than their small world


Where they roam, float, and soar,


Laugh and agelessly grow,


Little hands,


But big tanks,


With calloused hands,


Found the house of small windows,


Tore the crayoned rainbow


Soft and round
became soon pillars of clouds,


Buried into the ground
so small a shroud
so quite a sound,


Little souls


Soared with the dew
roamed with the dunes
Left our world too soon,


Little hands
now will rain young forever,
no longer drawing dreams on paper,
Little hands,
cup your hands together
and pray for their hands to be tied
forever,
forever and ever.



via Mondoweiss.net
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/11/little-hands.html

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Stop Israel's War Crimes in Gaza -- Freeway Bannering in Seattle -- 11/20/12




Heartbreaking, a boy holding his brother, after their parents were killed in a attacks on #Gaza. #GazaUnderAttack

National Lawyers Guild Calls for Immediate End to Israeli Attack on Gaza



November 19, 2012

Azadeh Shahshahani, President
The National Lawyers Guild calls for an immediate halt to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and demands that the U.S. government immediately cease all aid to Israel. The NLG calls for further action by the U.N. Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council to protect the civilian population of Gaza, to oppose the bombardment, and to oppose any further escalation.
“Israel cannot rely on the cloak of self-defense to justify these ongoing attacks,” said NLG President Azadeh Shahshahani. “Occupying and settling Palestinian land by force, enforcing a blockade and siege of Gaza, assassinating Palestinian leaders, and periodically bombarding and invading both Gaza and the West Bank make Orwellian the Israeli government’s claims of self-defense. And yet the U.S. government trumpets this narrative, giving Israel carte blanche to go on killing Palestinian civilians.”
timeline of events contradicts official Israeli government reports that cite Palestinian rocket fire as the first breach of the recently brokered ceasefire and the justification for Israeli attacks on Gaza.
“Not only did this siege not begin with Palestinian aggression, but the laws of war and the Fourth Geneva Convention bar collective punishment and the targeting of civilian populations, which is clearly Israel’s chosen course of action,” said Andrew Dalack, Co-Chair of the NLG’s Free Palestine Subcommittee. “The Human Rights and Security Assistance Act mandates that the United States cease all military aid to Israel because of its consistent pattern of human rights violations.”
The Palestine Center for Human Rights reported Monday that 87 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli bombardment, including 58 civilians. The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated places in the world, and Israel’s latest bombardment has trapped the occupied territory's inhabitants in a warzone. The situation echoes Operation Cast Lead four years ago, an Israeli military campaign which killed 1,400 Gaza residents, a majority of whom were civilians.
The NLG reaffirms its resolutions to boycott Israel and to support the plight of Palestinians locked inside Israeli prisons. 
The National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has members in every state.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

GAZA and PALESTINE- The Definitive & True Story -- Chris Hedges



http://youtu.be/QQ7yv5fjIJU

"Deadly mistake: IDF Wipes Out Palestinian Family Due to Technical Error"

RT original story here:  http://rt.com/news/gaza-family-idf-mistake-017/

Stop and put yourself in the place of these two men carrying this dead child.  "Technical Error?"  Was the founding of the bloodthirsty Zionist State of Israel a technical error?  Or a blot on the face of of what passes for Western humanity.  Linda

Jewish Voice for Peace Statement on Israel's Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza

http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/jvp-statement-on-israels-operation-pillar-of-defense


As Israel launches operation “Pillar of Defense” in Gaza, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) calls for an immediate cessation of the air strikes and naval bombardment into Gaza and an end to the ongoing siege of Gaza. JVP urges Israel not to exploit its asymmetric power to exacerbate the instability in the region. We urge President Obama to  take a stand against these attacks and to use the power of the United States to insist that Israel pursue all diplomatic measures possible for the sake of life, safety and security on all sides. JVP opposes all attacks on civilians, and urges the end of rocket attacks from Gaza into civilian communities in Israel, which only serve to derail efforts for a just resolution to the conflict.

This operation is named in reference to a  biblical passage in which a pillar of cloud protects the Israelites as they wandered in the desert after leaving bondage in Egypt.
And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; that they might go by day and by night.                                                                                                         Exodus 13:21

It is unseemly to invoke the protection afforded the Israelites wandering in the desert when Israel is the dominant military power in the region. JVP rejects the possibility that such a military operation and escalation of violence will be of any protection for Israelis or Palestinians. As Israel continues to control Gaza by air, land and sea, Israel holds responsibility for the well-being and safety of Palestinian civilians in Gaza who will be traumatized, injured and killed through this escalation of violence. 

JVP calls on our chapters, members, and supporters to join us in redoubling our efforts to advocate for an end to the U.S.’s unconditional military aid to Israel and to intensify our calls for divestment from all companies that profit from this escalation of violence and Israel’s ongoing siege of Gaza.

For Omar Misharawi: Killed by Israeli Airstrikes on 11/14/12 -- Shadab Zeest Hashmi via Pulse Media

Originally on Pulse Media:  http://pulsemedia.org/2012/11/18/for-omar-misharawi-killed-by-israeli-airstrikes-on-111412/


BBC journalist Jihad Masharawi carries his son’s body at a Gaza hospital. (Associated Press)
BBC journalist Jihad Misharawi carries his son’s body at a Gaza hospital. (Associated Press)
Omar Misharawi (Jihad Misharawi, via Paul Danahar)
Omar Misharawi (Jihad Misharawi, via Paul Danahar)
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi
At death you measure
no more than our arms
When we rise
to blow a prayer into your charred lung
we find resplendent
butterflies
milling about — lapidary
punctuations of our time
together
(eleven months in all)
Horror turned honey
and lustrous
as buds of new fruit
Ya Shahid
                                                    You Witnessed
Shadab Zeest Hashmi (born August 16, 1972) is a poet from Pakistan. She graduated from Reed College in 1995 and received her MFA from Warren Wilson. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including Poetry International, Vallum, Nimrod, The Bitter Oleander, Journal of Postcolonial Writings, The Cortland Review, South Asian Review, Universe: A United Nations of Poets. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice, and has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence. Hashmi has served as the editor of Magee Park Poets Anthology since 2000.