The concluding sentence of Roy Medvedev’s superb account of Russia during the Stalin years reads:
When the cult of Stalin’s personality was exposed [in the XXth and XXIInd Congresses in 1956 and 1961 respectively] a great step was made to recovery.1
There are few places that can be as vibrant as a school, as creative and colourful or as full of energy and youthful enthusiasm. For children growing up in conflict zones, schools should be places in which they can seek refuge from the violence of daily life. The reality, unfortunately, could not be more different.
Europe is facing the most significant refugee crisis since World War II. All attempts at resolving the issue have failed, mostly because they have ignored the root causes of the problem.
On June 11, Italy’s new Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, blocked the Aquarius rescue ship, carrying 629 refugees and economic migrants, from docking at its ports.
Angela Merkel’s German, and European rule, appears to be coming to an end.
In August 2001, Australia’s dour Prime Minister John Howard demonstrated to the world what his country’s elite soldiers could do. Desperate, close to starvation and having been rescued at sea from the Palapa I in the Indian Ocean, refugees and asylum seekers on the Norwegian vessel, the MV Tampa, were greeted by the “crack” troops of the Special Air Services.
Spain’s new government has stepped up and offered to take in a rescue ship that is drifting in the Mediterranean sea with 629 migrants on board after Italy and Malta refused to let it dock.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a socialist who took office just over a week ago, gave instructions for the humanitarian vessel to be admitted to the eastern port of Valencia, his office said in a statement on Monday.
Left-wing billionaire George Soros' speech 'How to Save Europe' advocated for the European Union to deal with the continent’s refugee crisis by maintaining an open borders policy and spend more than $35 billion per year indefinitely to help Africa. He says that the EU has an excellent credit rating and can borrow the money. [This would throw Europe into debt, making it ripe for harvest] [...]
In those seemingly interminable refugee debates being held in various countries, cruelty is pure theatre. It is directed, stage managed, the victims treated as mere marionettes in a play of putrid public policy and indifferent public officials. Barriers have been set; barbed wire has been put in place. Open zones such as the European Union are being internally bordered up, the principle of mobility derided and assaulted.
When Google Earth was initially released in 2001, I immediately rushed to locate a village that no longer exists on a map, which now delineates a whole different reality.
Although I was born and raised in a Gaza refugee camp, and then moved to and lived in the United States, finding a village that was erased from the map decades earlier was not, at least for me, an irrational act. The village of Beit Daras was the single most important piece of earth that truly mattered to me.
On Tuesday, Palestinians will commemorate the anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, their mass expulsion and dispossession 70 years ago as the new state of Israel was built on the ruins of their homeland. As a result, most Palestinians were turned into refugees, denied by Israel the right to return to their homes.
Israel is braced nervously for many tens of thousands to turn out in the occupied territories this week to protest against decades of its refusal to make amends or end its oppressive rule.
