“I was in jail with a Libyan man, his friends came and broke into the jail and let us go, too. There was fighting everywhere. You pray to be in jail with Libyans, because they do not recognize the current government, they will do what they want.” (spoken by a refugee in “the Jungle”)
I’ve written often about our Iraqi refugee friend and his oldest son from Baghdad. I will call them Mohammed and Ahmed. They made the torturous flight last year from Baghdad to Kurdistan and then across Turkey. They were on three Greek islands before permission was granted them to continue their trip. They passed through several countries at the time the borders were being closed. They arrived finally at their destination in late September 2015. Finland.
Two items of interest have tickled the airwaves and triggered some commentary over the last few days. The first was an ABC Four Corners program covering the fate of refugees in the detention facility on Nauru, known euphemistically as a “processing centre” costing $35.3 million a year to the Australian tax payer.
Muslims are the biggest victims of terrorism.
GONE TO HELL Paris – October 3rd, 2016 When good Americans die, they go to Paris. said Oscar Wilde. Paris is also the place where good Africans and Arabs come
Cairo, Egypt — It is hard to imagine a more resilient, more heroic nation than Syria!
With only 17 million inhabitants (according to 2014 estimate), Syria is now facing the mightiest coalition on Earth – the coalition that consists of virtually all traditional Western colonialist and neo-colonialist nations.
It is also facing some of the cruelest and deadliest inventions of the West – the extremist and murderous post- and pseudo-Islamic groupings, similar to those that were already unleashed against the Soviet Union during the war in Afghanistan.
This is going viral for a reason.
Seems our politicians, on both sides of the Atlantic, are under instructions to drop the J-word from their vocabulary. I mean J-for-Justice, conspicuously missing from any discussion about Middle East peace and, more specifically, an end to the hell in the Holy Land.
Only the other day at Westminster a parliamentary question was put to the Secretary of State for International Development asking what assessment had been made of the effectiveness and value for money of the UK’s aid assistance to the Palestinian Territories.
In today's NY Times Nick Kristof asked his readers whether they would have hidden a Jew from the Nazis. In the 1970s I lived in Amsterdam for nearly 4 years and passed the Anne Frank Huis-- now a museum-- on the Prinsegracht a few times a week. It was vaguely, a little circuitously, between my apartment on the Overtoom and my job at the meditation center on Prins Hendrikkade. It was built in 1635.
