Mercurial: “Subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind.”
In a woefully belated but welcome initiative the UK Parliament’s International Development Committee, the influential cross party oversight body which scrutinizes the Department for International Development, has called for a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Mercurial: “Subject to sudden or unpredictable changes of mood or mind.”
In a woefully belated but welcome initiative the UK Parliament’s International Development Committee, the influential cross party oversight body which scrutinizes the Department for International Development, has called for a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
— W.H. Auden, 1907-1973
National Missile Defense is of a nature to retrigger a proliferation of weapons, notably nuclear missiles. Everything that goes in the direction of proliferation is a bad direction.
— Jacques Chirac, G8 Summit, Naha Japan, July 22, 2000
The nuclear age is an age of terror
Nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons of terror. You can’t use them without killing millions of innocent people. Targetting innocent people, people who are not part of a conflict, is a central defining characteristics of terrorism.
That’s why the world’s governments decades ago decided to work for general and complete disarmament – i.e. for nuclear abolition – in the spirit too of Alfred Nobel.
Today, I want to speak about the once-in-a-generation chance we have, together, to improve the way we enhance the cause of human rights, freedom and dignity.
— David Cameron. Speech on the European Court of Human Rights, January 25. 2012
The Paris Attacks, the current flood of migration, and the incidents in Cologne on New Year’s Eve: it is hard to tell fact from fiction these days; the lines separating these incidents become increasingly blurred. What they have in common: they illustrate the supposed threat under which we all live. The German media does not get tired of stressing and discussing the ungraspable foreign threat.
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
— Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
Human rights is a cause that runs deep in the British heart and long in British history.
(Britain is) Driven by a belief in fundamental human rights and a passion to advance them.
— Prime Minister David Cameron, Speech on the European Court of Human Rights, January 25, 2012
On Sunday, January 3, two passengers who had paid their fares, had passed security checks, boarded the Aegean Airlines flight from Athens to Tel Aviv and found themselves at the centre of a racist onslaught by belligerent Jewish-Israeli passengers. The Jewish-Israeli passengers accused the two other passengers of being ‘terrorists’ and demanding their removal from the plane.
The victims were attacked for one reason only — they are Palestinian, even though one carried an Israeli passport and the other an Israeli residence permit.
