Around the world popular protests are changing the political equilibrium. In Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Tunisia, and in different ways in Syria and Libya people are taking decisions and protesting to overturn despotic regimes. In Israel, 3,383 tents have been erected on city streets by lower middle class and working class Israelis, mostly Jews but also some Palestinians, calling for social justice – , fairer incomes, social housing, better education and health provision in a country whose economy is powered by its military and by the occupation of Palestinian lands. The three weeks protests have been peaceful and creative with 300,000 people demonstrating for social justice. The police is now considering dismantling the tents (because of Tel Aviv residents’ complaints about noise in their leafy streets, but also in preparation for September’s Palestinian state declaration, which the Israeli army and police are preparing to subdue), but Prime Minister Netanyahu has pleaded with the police not to dismantle the tents – he is terrified of the consequences of not being seen to side with those whose demands he knows are justified. Continue reading “And now: it’s equality, stupid”
Category: Ireland
Reply to Ruth Dudley-Edwards
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/ruth-dudley-edwards/ruth-dudley-edwards-gazabound-vessel-really-a-ship-of-fools-2806080.html
Godwin’s Law. That’s what it’s called – the tendency for internet debates to degenerate into arguments where one side labels the other a Nazi. And so we have a contribution to the Israel/Palestine issue akin to an angrily typed hatemail at the fag end of one of these online brawls –Ruth Dudley Edwards saying that the people on the Irish Ship to Gaza supporting Palestinian rights are antisemites, like the Nazi-loving Irish of her youth. Continue reading “Reply to Ruth Dudley-Edwards”
Crisis racism and ‘cultural circumcision’
Like everyone else, I was appalled by the revelations of Prime Time Investigates on Monday 30 May about the impact of the cuts on disabled people and their carers. So appalled that I felt unable to watch the whole programme. I was distressed by the stories of the parents of a Downs’ Syndrome boy going hungry because the mother’s carer’s allowance was cut by €16 a week; of the woman who had to wait more than a year for an MRI scan leading to her back deteriorating beyond the possibility of operation; and of the mother who had to carry her adolescent son upstairs for a bath – the son’s scoliosis beyond operative repair because the waiting list was simply too long. Continue reading “Crisis racism and ‘cultural circumcision’”
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