Category: Genocide

Battle of the Ceasefires:? Israel, Hamas Struggle for Moral High Ground

By James M. Dorsey

Gaza being bombed on 30th July 2014
Gaza being bombed on 30th July 2014



Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

Synopsis

If Israel came close to destroying Hamas in two earlier confrontations in 2008/9 and 2012, it has succeeded in the latest round of fighting to rescue the group from potential demise. Hamas is emerging as the key player capable of cornering Israel politically and diplomatically despite its military superiority.

Commentary

THE EFFORT to achieve a ceasefire in the Israeli-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip resembles a see-saw with at times Israel and at other times Hamas rejecting a halt to hostilities or violating a brief silencing of the guns in a bid to ensure its collapse. The back and forth reflects in the first instance a battle between Israel and Hamas to occupy the moral high ground.

But more importantly it highlights a growing realisation that Hamas is emerging politically strengthened from the death and destruction in Gaza while Israel is fighting a rear guard battle to turn military success into political victory. Continue reading “Battle of the Ceasefires:? Israel, Hamas Struggle for Moral High Ground”

On being human

Humans?by Arjun Janah
It’s not about Arab or Jew, my friend,
It’s more about humans and whether we’ll end.
It’s not about Hindu or Muslim or Serb,
It’s more about children and what they deserve.
2014 July 23rd, Wed.
Brooklyn


The Last Kiss?(photograph)

The Last Kiss.jpg

The Last Kiss?– photograph by Ali Jadallah
source:?http://www.pinterest.com/pin/361695413796613744/

UN independent expert calls for boycott of businesses profiting from Israeli settlements

From
Avaaz.org?<avaaz@avaaz.org>?to
Shahidul

Thank you for taking action to end the violence in Israel and Palestine. Please share the email below with your friends and family and post this link on Facebook and Twitter:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/israel_palestine_this_is_how_it_ends_loc/?ttaZvfb
Thanks again for your help,
The Avaaz team Continue reading “UN independent expert calls for boycott of businesses profiting from Israeli settlements”

The Gaza Bombardment – What You're Not Being Told

The corporate media isn’t just distorting the facts on the Gaza assault, they’re flat out covering them up.

On July 7, 2014 Israel began a massive assault on the Gaza strip of Palestine. In the first week aloneIsrael dropped over 400 tons of bombs, killing over 130 Palestinians. Most were civilians, about?half of them were women and children.?By the time you are watching the the number will be higher.

Continue reading “The Gaza Bombardment – What You're Not Being Told”

Life in Occupied Palestine


Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American, gives her eyewitness perspectives on average citizens living in occupied Palestine. Baltzer spent 5 months in the West Bank working with the International Women’s Peace Service. Her presentation highlights how the Israeli government’s policies have drastically and negatively affected normal Palestinian life, and how this perspective has been omitted from most news outlets in America. A must-see for anyone interested or curious in Israel/Palestine relations.

Gaza

by Sudeep Sen
 
Soaked in blood, children,
their heads blown out
even before they are formed.
 
Gauze, gauze, more gauze ?
interminable lengths
not long enough to soak
 
all the blood in Gaza.
A river of blood flowing,
flooding the desert sands
 
with incarnadine hate.
An endless lava?stream,
a wellspring red river
 
on an otherwise
parched-orphaned land,
bombed every five minutes
to strip Gaza?of whatever
is left of the Gaza strip.
With sullied hands
 
of?innocent children,
we strip ourselves
of all dignity and grace.
 
Look at the bodies
of the little ones killed ?
their scarred faces?smile,
 
their vacant eyes stare
with no malice
at the futility?of all
 
the blood that is spilt.
And even as we refuse
to learn from the wasted
 
deaths?of these children,
their parents, country,
world? weep blood. Stop
 
the blood-bath ? heed, heal.
 
Sudeep Sen?is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and ?one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene? (BBC Radio).?
 

Collateral Damage

Raghu Rai/Magnum Photos

In 1971, the Pakistani Army had free rein to kill at least 300,000 Bengalis and force 10 million people to flee.

By?

In the 40-odd years that America and the Soviet Union faced off in the cold war, the people who presumed to run the world started with the knowledge that it was too dangerous, and possibly even suicidal, to attack one another. But the struggle was fierce, and what that meant in practice was that the competition played out in impoverished places like Cuba and Angola, where the great statesmen vied, eyed and subverted one another, and sometimes loosed their local proxies, all in the name of maintaining the slippery but all-important concept known as the balance of power.

THE BLOOD TELEGRAM

Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide: The New York Times

By Gary J. Bass

The peace held, of course ? that is, the larger peace. The United States and the Soviet Union never came to blows, and the nuclear-tipped missiles never left their silos. For the third world, where the competition unfolded, it was another matter entirely. The wreckage spread far and wide, in toppled governments, loathsome dictators, squalid little wars and, here and there, massacres so immense that entire populations were nearly destroyed. Continue reading “Collateral Damage”

50 years of independence

The 1971 memory project

I am starting this project with the hope that people across the globe can help me identify and hopefully trace as many people as possible in these photographs. I shall be regularly uploading images and linking them up with my social media. Please comment, link, tag, share these images and help me locate the people in them. Please also feel free to share insights into the situation, particularly if you happen to have been present.
I would like to complete this by 2021, when I would like to curate a major show to commemorate 50 years of Independence. Please feel free to send me pictures to. Please try to provide as much information as you can about the photograph and the photographer. Ideally we would like all the photographs to be credited.
Thanks for your help.
Shahidul Alam.
Here is the first image. It was taken by one of our finest photojournalists, and a dear friend,?Rashid Talukder. The photograph was taken on the 10th January 1972, when Mujib returned to an independent Bangladesh upon his release from captivity in Pakistan. The person dangling from the jeep with the Rollei hanging is another famous Bangladeshi photographer Aftab Ahmed:
 

The return to Bangladesh of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, released from captivity in Pakistan. Photo: Rashid Talukder/Drik/Majority World
The return to Bangladesh of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, released from captivity in Pakistan. Photo: Rashid Talukder/Drik/Majority World

You may tag individuals in this photograph here?(Requires Facebook)

The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide.

?By Gary Bass. The Economist

UNTIL 1971 Pakistan was made up of two parts: west and east. Both Muslim-dominated territories were born out of India?s bloody partition 24 years earlier, though they existed awkwardly 1,600km apart, divided by hostile Indian territory. Relations between the two halves were always poor. The west dominated: it had the capital, Islamabad, and greater political, economic and military clout. Its more warlike Pashtuns and prosperous Punjabis, among others, looked down on Bengali easterners as passive and backward. Continue reading “The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide.”