Clemency for Leonard Peltier -- Dignity for the Indian People!

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Vigil for a FREE PALESTINE. Saturday Jan 19, 12-2pm, Westlake 4th&Pine

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Please join us this Saturday to call for an end to THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE.

 

Come join us to demand Justice, Equal rights and an End to Ethnic Cleansing!

 

 What: Vigil for a FREE PALESTINE

Where: Westlake 4th&Pine

When: Jan 19, 12-2pm

 

See you there......

 

 

Amin Odeh

VoicesofPalestine.org

"Stand up for what is right,even if you are standing alone"

Sodastream presents...How to profit from Occupation, Oppression and Apartheid

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Bab Al Shams Part of Ongoing Strategy to Take Back Palestinian Land #BabAlShams

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#BabAlShams

Live from #babalshams Village in Occupied Palestine!

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5 Broken Cameras -- Great Movie Showing in Seattle + Palestinian Leader Iyad Burnat

Tweet UPDATE:   5 BROKEN CAMERAS NOMINATED FOR AN OSCAR!!!!!!  SO EXCITING!   JAN. 9, 2012

Documentary - Feature
"5 Broken Cameras"
"The Gatekeepers"
"How to Survive a Plague"
"The Invisible War"
"Searching for Sugar Man"

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1699936/oscars-nominations-list-2013.jhtml

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On January 13th at 7pm, please come hear Iyad Burnat speak. This event is free.

Iyad Burnat is head of the Bil’in Popular Committee and a leader in the village’s non-violent popular resistance movement. Since 2005 citizens of Bil’in have held weekly demonstrations against the building of the Israeli separation wall through the community’s agricultural lands, and the steady encroachment of illegal settlements. These demonstrations are the subject of the recent award-winning documentary film 5 Broken Cameras, which was made by Iyad’s brother, Emad Burnat. During his American tour, Iyad will tell the stories of Bil’in and life in the occupied West Bank, and talk about strategies for non-violent popular resistance with a goal of peace and prosperity for all people.

On January 17th at 7pm, please come see 5 Broken Cameras, a film made by Iyad's brother. $0-$10 sliding scale. Nobody turned away. All money will go to Iyad Burnat for his speaking tour.

5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village threatened by encroaching Israeli settlements. Shot almost entirely by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, the footage was later given to Israeli co-director Guy Davidi to edit. Structured around the violent destruction of each one of Burnat's cameras, the filmmakers' collaboration follows one family's evolution over five years of village turmoil. Burnat watches from behind the lens as olive trees are bulldozed, protests intensify, and lives are lost.

Both events take place at Washington Hall, 153 14th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122

Washington Hall is wheelchair-accessible. Please be fragrance free.

Sponsored by
Jewish Voice for Peace Seattle
UW Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights

Jewish Voice for Peace is a diverse and democratic community of activists inspired by Jewish tradition to work together for peace, social justice, and human rights.
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MAN -- MUST WATCH! Perfecto.

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

Tweet 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.

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

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

Idle No More - Seattle Flash Mob 12.22.12

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

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

Gaza's Ark -- Celebrated in Song by Dave Lippman

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Sympathy from the Devil - William Norman Grigg

Tweet 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. 

Outrage Over Children Killed in Cold Blood -- Terrorism With a Bigger Budget

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

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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. 

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.

How We Can Solve the Palestinian Israeli Problem (Official Version)

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I LOVE THIS MOVIE!

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

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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. 2^nd 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!

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

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Bring Leonard Peltier Home in 2012!

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Bring Leonard Peltier Home 2012 Concert

• LEONARD PELTIER
• DECEMBER 4, 2012
• BY: SHIRLEY PENA
• Subscribe

On Friday, December 14, 2012, The Beacon Theatre will host a diverse, devoted and distinguished line up of North American musicians to sing for freedom for LEONARD PELTIER.

Credits: 

 

Image courtesy of Randex Productions. Copyright 2012.

Child Casualties As a Result of U.S. Drone Strikes

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