Former DV editor Joshua Frank asks “… are we to ignore the geopolitical situation and just back Russia’s bombings because IS is so damn evil, even if Russia takes out a few innocent Syrian kids along the way?”1
Amidst all the handwringing across the political spectrum, commentators of every type decry the deplorable conditions that prevail in the parts of the world that have been under attack by the US, NATO, and the historic colonial powers of Europe: Britain and France. That is to say jointly and severally the wealthiest countries on Earth concentrated in the North Atlantic region of the world. However, the vast majority of the text generated on this subject is truly tiresome.
The outlawing of narcotic drugs at the start of the Twentieth Century, the turning of the matter from public health to social control, coincided with American’s imperial Open Door policy and the belief that the government had an obligation to American industrialists to create markets in every nation in the world, whether those nations liked it or not.
The Photo that went Round the World
Around 3:30 am September 2, Aylan Kurdi, his brother, mother and nine others drowned trying to reach a Greek island from Bodrum Turkey.
Sometimes so much electronic data has been configured and processed from keystroke to platform software (one used to say “ink spilled” but we already have a generation that has probably never seen ink, and certainly not in fluid form) that the written equivalent of a shout is necessary. When the chattering becomes loud enough, one can scarcely avoid the breach of good manners by yelling “shut up!”.
Since the start of the Canadian election campaign a series of posts have detailed the Harper Conservatives repeated abuse of power. The Tyee published “Harper, Serial Abuser of Power”, which listed “70 Harper government assaults on democracy and the law.” But the widely disseminated list omitted what may be the Conservatives’ most flagrant – and far-reaching –lawbreaking.
It’s fairly obvious to keen observers that Turkey’s Recep Erdogan is not the moderate reformist he once pretended to be, back when Turkey harbored fantasies of joining a surging European Union. In the end, the EU’s temporizing about Turkey’s entry turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Ankara.
The “Srebrenica massacre” is repeatedly referred to in the Western media as “the largest massacre in Europe since World War II,”1 and its alleged Bosnian Serb perpetrators have been relentlessly pursued by the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) from 1995 up to the present time (the former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic are even now on trial for this and other purported crimes).
The recent celebration of two hundred years of Gurkha recruitment into the British Army in London, at the Royal Chelsea Hospital on the 11th of June, attended by the Queen and various dignitaries and celebrities, was not really a cause of celebration. In fact, it is disgraceful and a should be a source of shame for the British, the Nepalese, the Indians, and any country that has ever been invaded by the British Army and was ever part of the British Empire. Its time to call for an end to this outdated colonial practice.
We are Palestinians and Palestinian organizations that declare our solidarity with the Syrian people in their historic struggle for survival, now in its fifth year. We are in a unique position to understand and appreciate the challenges facing our Syrian brothers and sisters, because we face the same challenges.
