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”
Norway: It’s multiculturalism, stupid
Much has been written about the implications of the horrible massacre in Norway. After the initial automatic knee jerk assumption that the murderer must have been an Islamist terrorist, the discovery that he was one of Norway’s ‘own’ – albeit an extreme right wing white supremacist – sent shock waves throughout Norway, whose mourning was so dignified and full of quiet determination.
I want to make a three key points about the lessons of this atrocity which cost the lives of 76 people. Firstly, European states and societies need to get over their post 9/11 automatic assumptions that ‘terrorist’ acts are always perpetrated only by Islamists. Such assumptions lead to the racialization of Muslim and Arab-looking people, and to tighter immigration, asylum and travel controls throughout Europe, and, as in this case, miss the point entirely, at a heavy cost of innocent lives. Continue reading “Norway: It’s multiculturalism, stupid”
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”
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