From: THE MODERN WORLD BOOK OF WONDERS BY PAUL TOWNEND (1950)
Allow One species to completely dominate all other species on the planet in numbers .
Give that species the capacity to modify the living environment to suit its own purposes.
Give that species an understanding that it has a right to eliminate all species that are not immediately useful to it.
Give that species an understanding that it is superior to all other species using criteria based on its own species’ traits.
Give that species an understanding that dead inanimate things that amuse it are more important than other living things.
Give it limited powers of empathy and understanding towards other species that are not its own.
A tragic and heart-bleeding video below of a Borneo orangutan futilely trying to fight off a mechanical digger which has destroyed its beautiful home and its sustenance and countless more other living things that will be forever no more ( note the condescending language used of “seemingly defending its home “. ) for a few dollars in pay for the loggers and a few thousands of dollars to the logging company. This is why we are destroying the only home we will ever have – our beautiful earth.
Not just in Borneo, but all over the world for the last three thousand years , we have destroyed the trees and living world that made this world our home – for no purpose whatsoever…..
We have witnessed the incredible barbarity shown by Israeli soldiers towards Palestinian protesters in the last few weeks of the “Day of Rage” and the marking of 70 years of theft and violence by the Israeli population against Palestinians since the Nabka: 70 years of murder, terror, torture and imprisonment, for the crime of not giving away the lands of their ancestors to the settler invaders.
Penned in Palestinians who are , as one journalist put it, “like sheep for the slaughter”.
Despite the dictatorial behaviours of the Turkish President, and his many other shortcomings , President Erdogan is quite specifically accurate in calling Israel an ‘apartheid state”. Israel has, over the past 70 years, progressively ‘acquired’ former Palestinian land and walled in those remaining who dared to stand up to the U.S. funded military might of Israel. Arabs in Israel, (who have the exactly the same genes as the original Jewish inhabitants of Israel); are discriminated against in a very systematic and ‘legal’ way by the Israeli state. Settler extremism, violence and bigotry reinforce those laws. We only need to look at the extreme racist rants of Israelis in leadership positions in Israel, to convince ourselves of the obscenity of their stance. Or perhaps you might like to endure this list of disgusting anti-Palestininan behaviours and statements from a series of Israeli ‘leaders” by the Angry Arab
Thus the latest targeted killings of largely defenceless ( apart from stones and a few molotov cocktails) Palestinians protesting their illegal walling in by Israel, are just one more example of the barbarism that is the state of Israel. A systematic, crude and vicious attempt to destroy the Palestinian people in order to acquire their lands. The extraordinary bravery and tenaciousness of generations of Palestinians since the Nabka , should never be forgotten.
As Jonathan Cook notes: the Wests’ direct and implicit endorsement of Israeli very literal terrorism towards Palestinians over the past 70 years , will result in further atrocities by Israeli troops and settlers.
And as the former UN Rapporteur for Palestine puts it ‘The feeble Israeli claims of its right of self-defense or attributing Palestinian martyrdom to Hamas are so shallow and lacking in credibility as to discredit further rather than provide justifications for this exhibition of homicidal violence on a massive scale not as isolated incident but as a series of arrogant reenactments.”
Negotiated via U.N. auspices, the Iran deal limited Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium and thus limit any potential for Iran to develop nuclear weapons; something it has always said is has not intended nor planned to do. UN inspections prove that Iran has indeed complied with the JCPOA in full since its inception in 2015. The deal in no way prohibits Iran’s develop of missile technology, which would be seen by any state as a sovereign right to protect itself from aggressors.
And Iran has many threatening states to protect itself from. These include Israel, who sees Iran as its major spoiler to the ongoing expansion of Israeli territory in the Middle East; particularly because of Iranian support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, who roundly defeated Israel in its last attempt to occupy Lebanon in 2006 . Then there is Saudi Arabia, the despotic regime which pretends to be a ‘monarchy” who actively supports protects and funds the Salafist terrorists across the Middle East and beyond. Salafists believe that all other Islamic and other religious beliefs other than their own are ‘heretical”, and therefore those people who hold such beliefs need to be either forcibly converted or disposed of. Hence the millions of Shiite peoples of Iran and its Shi-ite theocracy are anathema to the Saudi ‘princes’. Iran is a large country of over 80 million people, and while its economy has been made vulnerable by years of U.S. and other Western countries sanctions, it has managed to develop a wide range of responses to those sanctions, and particularly a home grown defence industry.
Iran is therefore not significantly vulnerable to attack by Saudi Arabia , despite S.A.s huge defence spending ($76 billion in 2017 – third highest in the world after the U.S. and China) , as opposed to Iran’s approximately $14 billion), largely because of its very effective home grown ballistic missile systems. (it is always amusing to note that U.S. military ‘specialists always attribute this or that countries’ home grown military capabilities to some other country – implying in some way that the specific country does not have the technology , research capability and technical know-how that only the great and exceptional U.S. has!)
And finally, Iran’s perhaps most significant threat comes from the United States, who has desperately tried to destabilize Iran’s theocracy in every way possible way since its inception in 1979, after overthrowing the U.S. and and U.K. installed despot, the ‘Shah’ of Iran .
The U.K. has also played a supporting role to the U.S. since 1953 in supporting the salafist regimes in the Persian Gulf and encouraging the export of Saudi and Qatari jihadist terrorists to Middle East states which are not active supporters of Western colonialism or Israeli expansionism.
Thus the latest move by the Trump administration to undermine the U.N. JCPOA agreement and threaten sanctions against countries and companies that do not comply with its renewed sanctions against Iran, is simply part of the ongoing war by the United States against Iran that had its inception in the overthrow of its brutal dictator , the Shah.
The drivers for this ongoing war against Iran are largely economic: primarily re-acquisition of the huge Iranian oil market by American oil companies will buffer the U.S. against the imminent collapse of the local shale oil market, whilst ensuring that Iranian owned oil and gas is not pipe-lined through to Europe and Turkey.
However the other major U.S. impetus for Iranian destabilisation and overthrow of its independent theocracy is the role of Israel and its Zionist lobbyists in Washington. Now that Saudi Arabia has been bought into the Zionist fold and accepts the Israeli theft of Palestinian lands since 1948 as legitimate, there is only Iran as a significant power player in the Middle East who is able to confront Israeli expansionism. A tame Iranian regime that supported both Israel and U.S. colonial policy in the Middle East would mean Chinese and Russian commercial and strategic ambitions there could be thwarted, and U.S. and U.K. (and to a smaller degree, French) companies could make billions exploiting the region. With the truly psychopathic John Bolton now as Trumps defence advisor, drooling for war with Iran, and Israel’s Netanyahu frothing at the mouth for the U.S. to bomb Iran, all options are truly on the table.
While Iran does not have an effective airforce, due to the long-standing sanctions against it; it’s ballistic missile capacity is indeed formidable, although largely deprecated by U.S. defence analysts . Should the U.S. launch an attack on Iran’s infrastructure, as it has continually threatened to do over the years, the U.S. would undoubtedly be able to , over time, obliterate much of Tehran and its key urban centres as it has done in North Korea, Vietnam Libya and Iraq in the past, along with the consequent huge suffering and civilian casualties that entails. However in the first days and weeks of such a war, Iran’s widely dispersed military units, and particularly its missile and anti-ship units, will be able to inflict massive damage on U.S. military bases and aircraft carriers in the Gulf because of their close proximity to Iran. An ongoing guerilla war against U.S. economic and military interests in the Middle East could well last for years. In comparison to the U.S. war against Iraq, Iran’s military capabilities cannot be under-rated as American defence analysts are wont to do in their arrogance. This would not be the “cake-walk” that the neocons pretended the Iraqi invasion would be!
Should Israel also enter the war, as it has often promised to, then Tel Aviv is now well within missile striking distance by Iran’s Lebanese allies. Hezbollah.
One would hope that the crazies like Netanyahu and John Bolton will finally be locked away somewhere safe for the rest of humanity’s sake , and the fools like Donald Trump fade into quiet oblivion, but sadly it seems , that may not be the case…
The recent cruise missile attack by the U.S. and its allies the U.K. and France ( former colonial exploiters in the region) raises some interesting dilemmas for Western military planners .
If we are to believe the Russian military assessment of the strike, 71 of the of 103 cruise missiles were brought down by Syrian air defence systems, particular via the Russian made Pantsir surface-to-air missile systems.
While the United States and its two allies have claimed that the missile attack was in response to their espoused view that there had been a gas attack by the Assad military in Douma against the civilians trapped there, the evidence seems to suggest that this attack was aimed at eliminating the air support threat from the Syrian Air Force for the jihadists those 3 Western governments have been extensively supporting since the start of the war to overthrow the Assad regime.
Having failed in their bid to convince the United Nations of a ‘no-fly’ zone in Syria on multiple occasions ( ie elimination of Syrian government aircraft from the skies above rebel-held territory) ; the use of a chemical weapons attack as a pretext for bombing airfields has become the next best option. Using The American government ( and Muslim Brotherhood) funded Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), and the largely British intelligence funded and managed White Helmets to produce videos purporting to show a chemical weapons attack in Douma, Western media has been united in showing moral outrage at ‘animal Assad’s” killing of his own people, and baying for more attacks on the Syrian military.
The apparent logic given by Western media and politicians for ‘animal Assad” to drop barrel bombs filed with toxic chemicals on the people of Douma was to demonstrate that there was no hope for the rebels there and they should surrender. According to this logic, it was worth the risk of a repeat of the previous cruise missile attacks ordered by President Trump last year for the Assad regime to drop a few barrels of toxic chemicals on Douma to dislodge the few remaining “rebels’ there who were already negotiating an exit with the Syrian government from the enclave . One assumes those politicians and the Western media think their publics are very very stupid….Unfortunately for Western intelligence, the overrunning of the last of the rebel enclaves in Ghouta and their departure in buses to Idlib came far sooner than they expected, allowing the Syrians and Russians and journalists like the respected British Robert Fisk, to enter the area where the supposed gas attack had occurred and interview civilians and medics there .
One finds it strange that neither Western media nor their governments have bayed for large cruise missile attacks on the Al Qaeda affiliate Al Nusra, or ISIS, or any of the other head-choppers supported by Gulf and Western states. And that in fact there have been no reported cruise missile attacks by Western countries on ISIS throughout this entire war. How could this be one wonders?
The chemical weapons scam is largely similar to the earlier and still ongoing farce in the Western media about Assad’s “barrel bombs”. “Barrel bombs’ are nothing but impromptu explosives packed in drums and dropped from government helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. They are in fact, unguided ordinance, which the majority of the aerial weapons at play in Syria by the United States and its allies, as well as the Russians and the Syrian government, are. But we are somehow expected to believe that packing munitions into oil drums and dropping them on targets creates far worse dangers, chaos, injury and death than those caused by other unguided munitions. But again the ‘barrel bomb’ farce is one more attempt by the Western media and politicians to remove the threat to their tunnel based jihadists from aerial warfare of any kind. If the Syrian airforce can be removed and then the Russian airforce, then ISIS and the other Al Qaeda affiliates and salafists out to exterminate all Christians , Allawites, Shi-ites and other non fundamentalist Sunni sects in Syria, will have a much free-er hand on the ground.
Despite American denials, it would appear that in fact the vast majority of the cruise missiles were therefore aimed at Syrian airfields, rather than the alleged chemical weapons storage and production facilities ( which had been vetted by the OPCW as ‘clean’ just last October 2017). The Syrian and Russians had in fact deployed most of their more effective anti-missile stations around those airfields; and if they are to believed, destroyed the vast majority of the incoming missiles at those airfields. There is some speculation that Russian electromagnetic interference jamming systems may have played a part in the incoming missiles’ lack of effectiveness, but that cant be confirmed as yet.
Very clearly, the battle to partition Syria by the West and its Gulf allies using jihadists is far from over.
But -as in previous unilateral totally illegal strikes ( ie not approved by the U.N. Security Council) by Western governments on states that do not comply with the Western political and economic agenda , this latest missile attack provides ample rationale to China, as the upcoming dominant global power, that missile strikes on countries who do not acquiesce to its political and economic agenda, are a completely legitimate response, in the future.
It may not be too long before China’s aircraft carrier armada are patrolling the seas off the United States, the U.K and France..
The recent very fake news from the White Helmets about Assad’s government gassing civilians in Douma in Ghouta province of Syria has clearly been orchestrated by Western intelligence agencies ( who largely control the White Helmet’s agenda and their Al Qaeda affiliates on the ground in Syria). As has been noted elsewhere, Syrian government forces have no need to gas anyone; they are on a roll and likely to overrun all Al Qaeda rebels in the Ghouta area in the next week..And in fact Syrian government forces and Russian advisers now control the area where the gassing supposedly occurred. An unfortunate fact for the U.S. now gunning for war…
The appointment of John Bolton as Secretary of State for the U.S., who along with U.S.’s U.N. representative, Nikki Haley, know no other response to perceived threats to U.S. global omnipotence than war and more war, is a solid indication that the U.S. intelligence community and State Dept is indeed preparing for war with Russia.
Russia has given categorical statements at the U.N. , and to the U.S. , that missile attacks against the Syrian government will be responded to “at source” ie by attacking U.S. French or U.K. aircraft , airbases or aircraft carriers that carry out such attacks.
As noted in a previous post on this site; the argument in NATO command and the Western “think tanks”, is that by destroying once and for all, the threat of Russia as an state entity capable of having an independent foreign policy and economic pathway, all the other dominos; China, Iran, North Korea who currently oppose Western global control, will inevitably ‘fall into line”
We know from previous experience, that Western countries; particularly those who have signed up to NATO, will indeed fall into line with their masters, and both acquiesce and actively participate in whatever horrific actions the Americans and their British allies have decided upon.
The blatantly absurd arguments about Saddams’ little trucks full of WMD, or the viagra given to Libyan soldiers so that they could rape Libyan civilians, or any of the ridiculous other casus belli formulated in the rather small brains of the military strategists in London and Washington over the past 60 years since the second world war, have been promulgated by a compliant (or perhaps ‘bought”) Western media without analysis, and accepted as fact by the vast majority of the Western world’s population. We do not need rational or factual arguments, any old rationale, however ridiculous, will do to destroy another country and its population.
We are after all, as members of the Western world- defenders of democracy and freedom and civilised humanity- are we not?…..
Except this time, making war with Russia as a major nuclear power, and with very formidable weaponry, will not be the ‘cake-walk’ it was supposedly going to be in Iraq. In addition it is unknown at this point, but likely, that China will have to take a stand beside Russia in the lead-up to war-knowing they will be next if Russia falls. The writing is on the wall for the Chinese with Trump’s ‘trade war”, and the Chinese have demonstrated they will not be bullied by the U.S.
If you think that none of this could be possible , (we wouldn’t risk global war- would we?) it is well to be reminded about the last Western allies in the pursuit of ….something…. invaded Russia.
Why should such barbaric partners therefore need things like evidence or truth when responding to allegations by the jihadists they support in Syria, of gas attacks by the Syrian military ( and therefore Russia).
There is a higher goal here- the pursuit of more money and power…
As the great journalist John Pilger notes in his 1st April 2018 article about the Ecuadorean Government’s silencing of Julian Assange , we are being subjected to a constant battering on many fronts to ensure we only listen to the ‘right’ information about the world around us.
The demonisation of Russia can partly be explained by Western Government’s concerns about the role of RT.com providing an alternative meme ( in most cases as legitimate -and often more so than its Western news-agency counterparts) to that expressed through what is termed Mainstream media (MSM) . Mainstream Media is in essence, western media which toe the dominant political party line – whether it be anti-Russian, anti-Trump, pro-‘intervention’ ( read ‘killing’) in other countries, or most importantly, pro-consumerism.
But this attempted silencing of alternative media stories, no matter how legitimate or truthful they are, not only extends to foreign entities like Russia or China , it also includes any highly visible figures like Assange who do not espouse what is known to be ‘right’ by our esteemed leaders, and the multitude of internet bloggers who research and analyse the stories behind the stories.
The recent bizarre attempt by western governments and MSM, to conflate alternative opinion as ‘fake news”, borders on the psychotic. It is a witchhunt against those who do not respect the often infantile repetitive lies told in the MSM or by apparently intellectually impaired politicians such as U.K’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, or for that matter Donald Trump. By now the old lies about the reasons we must fight wars in ‘foreign’ lands for ‘freedom and democracy” or to “save civilians”, are wearing remarkable thin.
Thus the ‘establishment’ is now flailing around for a further reason why we should just accept that the mass-killing of ‘other’ people is good for them. In John Pilger’s belief, this media frenzy against those who detour from the party line is a significant threat to the establishment, with the intended war against Russia and China looming and the drums beating ever louder – they can not afford a dissenting “fifth column” in their midst who can undermine the thirst for war or the need for civilians to rally behind the flag.
As the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal has made clear; it is not just Russia and the ‘enemy’ who is manipulating public opinion through ‘slanted stories’ and twitter bots! SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s British parent company, prides itself on its capacity to manipulate public opinion in both foreign lands and internally in the UK. We can be sure that there are many other western companies and intelligence services who, despite their actual minimal real intelligence, aim to manipulate public opinion at home and abroad. In the United States, this is an easy task. The vast majority of Americans have limited education, no understanding of foreign countries and no memory for history- an ideal subject for manipulation!
In the United States therefore we have something passed into law by Congress in 2016 called
The Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act would ensure America’s national security infrastructure helps counter the false narratives that harm our security — delivering truthful information and making the world a safer place for the United States and our allies.”
Note .. that as written into the NDAA, the legislation’s provisions establish an inter-agency body “to track and evaluate counterfactual narratives abroad that threaten the national security interests of the United States and United States allies,” and to develop “procedures to expose and refute foreign misinformation and disinformation and proactively promote fact-based narratives and policies to audiences outside the United States.”
Where the ‘facts” come that the public needs re-education on, and the ‘false facts’ that the public needs protection from, do not of course need to be stated. Our respective governments always know best! -don’t they??
As we have seen in the ludicrous litany of lies put out by the British government around the Salisbury nerve gas poisoning affair, all the key mainstream UK and other Western media have jumped in lock-step to push the U.K government Russian-basking charges without once examining the implausibility of the facts presented. Whether these media agencies and their journalists are paid, bribed, coerced or blackmailed into regurgitating this British propaganda, is unknown at this point,
This is of course not something new. State entities have always attempted to manipulate their publics to ensure compliance to the official line -whether it be going to war, or maximising the potential threats of other states to maximise profits for the corporates who fund the ruling “elite” . In all cases, the states’ manipulatory processes are for short-term gain and almost inevitably have a long term negative impact on their public.
The most telling and catastrophically fatal example of this flaw in our ‘democracies”, is the media and political drive for corporates to produce more ‘things’ and for their publics to consume more things. All analysis shows that in a closed system like our little world, this drive inevitably leads to planetary disaster – but it helps keep political parties in power…for now….
Postscript
A useful analysis of military propaganda here from Adam Ramsay here
Over the last few years we have seen an increasing crescendo of Western media implicating Russia in wars of aggression, threats to its neighbours and more recently involvement in gas attacks in both Syria and now the U.K.
Russia as one of the major international suppliers of natural gas and oil , is like Iran ( and previously Iraq and Libya) , one of the few states not aligned to Western corporate interests. And like China, (a major oil importer) operates a defence arsenal -both conventional and nuclear, which is largely independent of Western suppliers.
After the breakup of the Soviet bloc in the 1990s, and the resultant Yeltsin years of asset stripping by newly emergent Russian “oligarchs” and Western companies, Russia under Putin has slowly regained some of the strengths it had acquired as a communist nation. But this time with a much stronger ethnic Russian flavour, as the Baltic states and many of the Eastern ‘Stans’ of Soviet times, devolved from the newly formed Russian Federation .
Western interests had intended that any Russian resurgence would be minimal and closely aligned to Western corporates. However President Putin’s presidency has had a strong focus on Russian nationalism, independence and self-reliance-all anathema to Western ‘think-tank” and government foreign policy planners..
With NATO pushing hard against Russian borders in the West, and the Polish and Baltic states electing ever more nationalist governments, Russia has responded with increasing its defence arsenal – both nuclear and conventional. The capabilities of many of these new weapons , like the Kalibr cruise missile and the newly announced Russian hyperspeed missiles have come as a surprise to Western defence analysts. Russia’s military successes in supporting the government of Syria against the Western and Gulf State supported jihadists attempting to overthrow the Syrian regime have also confounded Western military analysts. Russia’s brief war on its borders in Ossetia and in Georgia and its seizure of the Crimea and its centuries old Russian naval base there, after Western intervention in the Ukraine , also came as a surprise to those in the West who expected easy victories there.
However what is much more of a threat to Western interests than all of the above, is Russia’s capacity to be an overland ( and thus secure) conduit for China’s vast consumer production to Europe and beyond . Bizarrely though, it is the military and economic pressure by the West which has cemented the alliance between China and Russia and further enabled the “One Belt One Road” project . In addition, this reinvigorated Russo/Chinese alliance will ensure China’s access in the long-term to essential oil for its factories which is not at risk from maritime attack or blockade by the U.S. or its allies.
While the U.S. remains the largest economic, and by far the largest military power in the world; that power is indisputably waning. Endless fruitless wars have drained its coffers, as well as inflicting enormous suffering on so many of the world’s populations. Rampant corruption at all levels of American society, but particularly in Washington, has left government and strategic vision entirely in the hands of greedy corporates, whose only ‘vision’ is more power and money for themselves. It’s strongest ally, the U.K. has long suffered from the loss of income from the colonial states it is now largely unable to ravage, but its moneyed classes hold still to a vision of a truly “Great” Britain. The “City of London” , the mercantile capital of the world in many respects, has reaped, and continues to reap, enormous profits from the largely illegal siphoning of capital from what were once the state enterprises of the Soviet Union into London’s coffers, via Russian ‘oligarchs‘ . The British press and politicians like to portray these “oligarchs’ as “Putin’s men” , whereas in most instances they are extremely anti-Putin because of Putin’s nationalist views and his desire for Russian money to stay inside Russia .
The recent Kemerovo mall fire tragedy in Siberia, with its obvious implications of corruption and negligence at the Siberian governorship level, will both require and assist Putin to further crack down on corruption in Russia.
Now, entrance the ‘Novichok’ affair…Moon of Alabama and Craig Murray, among many others, have effectively destroyed any argument by London’s ‘ruling classes’ , that this was indisputably a Russian government initiated nerve agent attempted murder of a Russian ex double agent and his Russian daughter. However what seems often missed in these accounts of the counter-arguments to the British Government’s spin on the attempted murders is the extraordinarily implausible likelihood that such nerve agent deaths would not only occur within a few kilometers of Britain’s only Chemical Weapons facility at Porton Down near Salisbury, (where disgusting and inhumane activities are carried out in the name of the Western world, and in direct contravention of the U.K.s obligations as a signatory to the UN Conventions on the prohibition of chemical and biological weapons), but that a few weeks before, the BCC had aired a British /American spy drama called “Strike Back” in which Novichok was used by a disgruntled ex-Russian spy. The laws of probability say that those two events, and the actual attempted murders, cannot be coincidence. Now add in into the mix the current controversy over Facebook personal details being leaked to benefit Trump’s presidential campaign by SCL subsidiary , Cambridge Analytica. As Bella Caledonia notes: SCL is a very British company dedicated (and funded by the British Ministry of Defence) to manipulate public opinion in a multitude of foreign and domestic environments. There in Bella Caledonia’s post you will note that in 2005 SCL ” went public with a glitzy exhibit at the DSEI conference, the UK’s largest showcase for military technology. It’s ‘hard sell’ was a demonstration of how the UK government could use a sophisticated media campaign of mass deception to fool the British people into the thinking an accident at a chemical plant had occurred and threatened central London.” And the Novichok affair gets rather messier for Western ‘intelligence’ here..
As SCL notes on its website: ‘SCL is experienced in using data driven communication to achieve behavioral change in civilian groups. National programs across the spectrum from social programs, health campaigns, and educational initiatives can all be designed using advanced data analytics informed by our behavioral tools. SCL combines the micro-segmentation data from the target audience and combines it with behavioural profiles to increase the effectiveness of information campaigns.’
Hmmm- might a display of ‘novichok” in some quiet little British city be helpful in pushing the case that Russia ( and instrumentally Vladimir Putin) is indeed the demon we have always thought her to be? And here is the ‘proof’ in 5 slides that Her Majesty’s Government was able to persuade its NATO allies that Russia did indeed do the deed. Demonstrably we are indeed talking about totally incompetent UK politicians , defence planners and easily bought NATO allies here…
Nine-year-old Mohammed Jaber remembers how he took his pocket money and went out with his 5-year-old sister Ghina, as the long summer day of fasting came to an end, in the month of Ramadan. “My parents try to keep me indoors, but I was bored, so we went to buy jellybeans and chips,” he says. Once on the street, in the densely populated al-Bureij refugee camp, he heard that the neighbours had received a call warning of an air strike. Mohammed rushed back home. There are no shelters in Gaza, so his parents and their six children took cover in a bedroom.
“Mohammed remembers the last war two years ago. He knew what was going to happen,” his mother Mariam explains, recalling how the child, white with fear, ran and picked up a pillow to cover his face and ears. “I thought he was going to suffocate himself,” she says. Suddenly, the deafening explosion sent pieces of shrapnel and glass flying through the room. “All my children started screaming. I managed to calm them down, but after that they were in shock; they would not speak.
“Since then, Mohammed has started bedwetting again, and my 5-year-old daughter Ghina keeps saying, ‘Mama, people will bomb our house.’ Whenever her father goes out, she clings to him. She thinks he will not come back if she lets him go.” Mariam does not know what to tell her young children. “I cannot tell them the truth, that there is no safe place, and we cannot leave.”
With specific demeaning laws for ‘Arabs” as opposed to Jewish settlers. With walls constructed to keep out the rightful Arab occupiers of their own lands in Palestine. With the evil brutality of Israeli settlers against the people and children they have stolen their lands from ( and Israeli laws which allow that brutality to be wiped away) – with the ongoing imprisonment of children without trial (or a “Military” ( read show-trial) trial for those Arab adult and children captured or killed or tortured for their ‘misbehaviour’ against Israeli troops on their own lands -it is small wonder Palestinians remain angry against their oppressors.
One day soon perhaps, the Israeli population will begin to understand that their continued oppression of the rightful owners of Palestinian lands can only lead to the destruction of Israel. Continued fictional presentations of Arabs as lesser beings by a bigoted society only exacerbate the inevitability of that end.
Only negotiation with real truth and honesty by the Israeli entity with Palestinians, and and an acknowledgment and compensation for the dreadful wrongs committed by that entity over the last 70 years , will allow a one state solution to occur ( the only viable solution) , where Jews and Arabs can once more live harmoniously together in Palestine/Israel.
I note with sadness but no surprise, that New Zealand has once more joined the Western cabal aiming to destabilise North Korea.
Given that New Zealand and her allies inflicted horrific genocidal acts on North Korean civilians in the Korean War (with many millions dead) and the subsequent 50 years of threats of nuking North Korea, annual massive war games on the Korean armistice line, a refusal by the Americans to negotiate a peace treaty, and ongoing threats to decapitate the North Korean leadership, it is small wonder that the North Korean regime feels its only safety is in a nuclear deterrent.
The hypocrisy of the US and its ‘allies” to advocate for a ‘non-nuclear’ Korean peninsula, while patrolling its waters with nuclear armed weaponry, no longer astounds me.
The symbolism of a shared North/South Korean flag at the Winter Olympics must be deeply troubling to those whose only negotiating option is war.
Perhaps our esteemed new Foreign Affairs Minister, Mr Winston Peters, might wish to read some history?
A wonderful and hugely sad post by George Monbiot on the world around us , which we, for some reason differentiate as “nature”. And the inexorable tragic loss of species, lives and our own humanity in the process-and ultimately, our own survival….
While Russian capacity to understand or even work as an equal partner with its ever-more-powerful eastern neighbour is currently limited- this China/Russia alliance has enormous future consequences for global trade and dominance ( 
New Antarctica 