Category Archives: Politics

Credit Where Credit’s Due

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Far be it from me to withhold credit where it’s due, so without the slightest reservation, I hereby commend Obama for the following deeds:

  • Ordering the closure of the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay (although it’s still outrageous that he’s given them a year to do so). The existence of that place is an abomination and makes any claim to having a free society absurd.

  • Ordering the cessation of torture by the US military. Again, civilised countries do not torture (or put to death, for that matter) their prisoners. There’s no word yet on capital punishment and I’m not holding my breath.

  • Ordering the cessation of secret CIA rendition flights to transport foreign nationals, kidnapped by the US, to CIA-operated prisons in foreign states, where they were subject to torture. You remember these flights, don’t you? They’re the ones Condoleeza Rice, Bush’s defence minister, denied had ever took place. Odd that Obama feels the need to put a stop to something that never happens.

  • Ordering the closure of the aforementioned secret CIA prisons in foreign states.

I must admit, I’m pleasantly surprised by the extent and promptness of some of the above actions.

On the other hand, he told Hamas to end their rocket fire into Israel, but urged Israel only to reopen its border with Gaza. Nothing short of a full condemnation of Israel’s recent actions is acceptable, together with an immediate of US military aid.

Obama also pledged his support for efforts to prevent Hamas from rearming, which is excruciatingly hypocritical, given his country’s continued military aid to the other side. You can’t claim to support the peace process whilst continuing to arm one of the warring factions.

But like I say, credit where credit’s due, even if it is only a drop in a very deep ocean.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

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Did you see the unveiling of the emperor’s new clothes on television yesterday?

I caught only some of it, but I marvelled at the masses, awestruck and unable to see that their new emperor was as naked as they day he was born.

I was surprised that Jesus Christ himself didn’t put in an appearance. You’d almost have expected him to, given the level of rapture that was present. He probably didn’t want to be upstaged by the people’s new messiah.

The new saviour evidently brings salvation from a sordid history of slavery for the blacks and liberation from generations of hereditary guilt for the whites. Everyone’s a winner; except for Afghanistan, Palestine; and anyone else who stands in the way.

At the end of the day, when the rose-tinted spectacles are removed, there’s nothing but rhetoric and histrionics. Only this time, it’s met by blind faith and blinkers by the masses.

Desperate people want nothing more than something all-consuming to believe in, a sense that there’s something more to life than their own insignificant existence. That’s why prison inmates are susceptible to religious conversion and it’s why so many people are now entranced by the lure of an erudite man with half a brain. He represents hope, and for many people, the absence of hope is something with which they cannot cope.

The fact remains: the emperor has no clothes.

Madness

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So far, Israel has:

  • bombed 3 UN schools being used as refugee centres, killing dozens of civilians. An entire family of seven children perished in one of the raids. The UN had given the Israeli army the GPS coordinates of the schools and told them they were being used as refugee centres, after the Israelis themselves had told these people to leave their homes.

  • shot at a UN convoy, bringing aid to Palestinian civilians. The driver of a lorry was killed.

  • interfered with Red Cross workers trying to help victims of the violence. In one now notorious incident, the Israeli army left several Palestinian children inside a house to starve at the side of their mothers’ corpses. When the Red Cross wanted to search for further victims in the bombed out houses, they were told to leave the area by the Israeli army.

And today, reports reach the world that Israel evacuated around 110 civilians to a building on the 4th of January, and then proceeded to bomb it the next day. 30 people were killed, including a 5 month old baby.

The UN security council accepted a resolution today, calling for a lasting solution to the conflict and unfettered access to the wounded for relief workers. The US actually abstained from the vote. I suppose we should be grateful they didn’t veto it.

It didn’t really matter in the end, of course, because both Israel and Hamas blew off the resolution.

The scale of the Israeli disregard for international law does at least seem to have invoked the ire of at least some at the UN and all of those engaged in helping the victims of the conflict. There are now calls to investigate whether Israel is guilty of war crimes (yeah, I wonder), but let’s not cheer too soon. No-one who cares currently has the political clout to actually make such an investigation go ahead and western reporters still aren’t allowed into Gaza.

While I’m venting my spleen, I mustn’t fail to recognise the cowardly inaction of the Dutch government, who have so far defended Israel with the usual has-the-right-to-defend-itself nonsense, which is intended — and serves — to distract and deflect attention from the atrocities being perpetrated. A lot of people understandably find the notion of self-defence a reasonable one, but what is happening today in Gaza has little to do with defence. Clearly, in the eyes of Israel, the only good Palestinian is a dead one.

The Government Of Israel Are Scum

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The title of this entry lacks any subtlety, but the strength of the statement accurately conveys my feelings towards the government of the state of Israel.

There are no words to describe my disgust for the actions of this rogue state, governed by villains and cowards who have repeatedly shown themselves to be bereft of all human decency and empathy. Loveless sociopaths, the lot of them.

I feel similarly about Israel’s puppet-master, the US, which funds the israeli military and supports Israel’s apartheid regime, human rights abuses and countless war crimes and atrocities. Expect more of the same from Saint Obama, who has pledged his support for ally Israel many times. A vote for Obama was a vote for Olmert.

The new 3 hour per day ceasefire is a bad joke. Relief workers say they can’t even begin to make a dent in the mountain of human misery that Israel has already caused, utilising such a brief window. And even that 3 hour window wasn’t instituted until the US finally relented and put pressure on Israel to make a gesture of goodwill after it shelled UN schools in the Gaza Strip.

What country shells UN schools, for crying out loud? Do you see any of the so-called axis of evil states doing that? No, there’s only one nation that would dare do such a thing, secure in the knowledge that it is virtually exempt from the international laws that govern the behaviour of other countries. As long as its lord and master, that other notorious rogue state and the greatest threat to world stability, the USA, continues to apply one law to Israel and another to the rest of the world, Israel need fear nothing from the international community.

Don’t talk to me about Hamas and the need to stop the shelling of Israeli towns across the border. Nothing justifies the actions and tactics that Israel employs, which is one of the reasons the country is so reviled in the first place. Israel is the engine in the anti-semitic machine. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

People Are Revolting

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I can reveal that the stories have not been exaggerated. New Year in Iceland is completely mental!

At 23:15, we put Eloïse in the pram, wrapped Lucas in the sling, and headed up to Hallgrímskirkja, the famous church located on a square where many of the side-streets heading up from Laugavegur converge. Many people head there to watch and set off their fireworks, so we thought that would be a good place to go.

People clearly can’t wait for midnight, because the sky was already incandescent a good twenty minutes before the witching hour commenced. The air was acrid with the stench of spent gunpowder. An ambulance crew carted off the night’s first casualty, who had probably fallen victim to beer, rather than an errant firework.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Amsterdam on New Years Eves long past.

At midnight, all hell broke loose. I struggled without a tripod to take some usable photos of the mayhem exploding all around me. Fireworks are tricky things to photograph well. Eloïse and Lucas remained surprisingly calm as explosions shattered the night sky.

I couldn’t help but spare a thought for the people of Gaza, who, for days now, have also been subjected to loud explosions of a much more sinister nature. One can only hope that continued international pressure on the shameful government of Israel yields fruit sooner, rather than later.

But I digress.

As we headed home, it was close to 01:00, and people were busy piling into the city’s many clubs and bars for one of the all-night parties going on at most of the city’s nightspots.

In other news, protesters stormed our hotel this afternoon and disrupted the traditional annual broadcast that features the prime-minister and other politicians, discussing the country’s future in the year ahead.

People are pretty pissed off here by what has happened to the country’s economy in recent months and tempers are running high. Many are calling for the resignations of the country’s leaders and I can’t say I blame them.

We were walking across Austurvöllur when the shit hit the fan. Fireworks and other projectiles were thrown, the hotel was stormed and occupied, a policeman was hospitalised and a few protesters were arrested. Numerous people were squirted with pepper spray and dragged away by their friends. Video footage is now available at various locations around the Net.

I managed to get to the front of it all and take a few close-up photos of the police staring down the protesters. People were standing right in front of the police, calling them fascists, giving them the finger and spitting at their feet. The police kept their cool, though, and a full riot was averted.

The broadcast was forced off air, though, because the TV company’s cables caught fire and were damaged. The protesters thus achieved a major objective, causing massive disruption to the proceedings.

It was one of the more unusual things I’ve witnessed in Iceland. Like most things Icelandic, it was more low key than it would have been in another country. The police here clearly have less experience of dealing with public disobedience, which is refreshing.

Almost everything was closed today and it will be even deader tomorrow. Most shops don’t actually reopen until Saturday, giving people plenty of time to recover from the hangovers incurred tonight.

What a great day.