19 Jan 2025 – Palestinian poet Refaat Al’ar’eer was killed by an Israeli bomb on December 6, 2023, after he wrote this poem below. Let us execute his will left in the poem below, let us make kites, the least we can do now on the day of a temporary ceasefire in a war that killed more than 45,000 Palestinians.
“IF I MUST DIE”
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
25 Jan 2025 — This is Gaza. This is our collective responsibility at least to help those children overcome and work for this genocidal carnage not to happen again.
Mohammad Abou Eida, 14, loved playing music. An Israeli bomb put an end to this dream. And the video is of a children choir that recorded in Gaza earlier this week to accompany Palestinian Singer Nai Barghouthi for a song about a Gazan woman who lost her child.
7 Jan 2025 – This photo of Palestinian doctor Hussam Abu Safiyeh, as he proceeds with dignity towards Israeli tanks in besieged, starved and destroyed. Northern Gaza after the IDF destroyed his hospital, should haunt us and the perpetrators until full accountability is achieved.
This dignity was denied to other Kamal Adean hospital staff marched almost naked in a shameful gesture by the Israeli soldiers.
6 Jan 2025 – Even two weeks before the end of his term, US top diplomat Anthony Blinken still refuses to reflect on US foreign policy failures including a defense of Netanyahu policies in how the genocidal retaliatory war against Gaza Palestinians has been conducted.
Maybe Blinken is saving contrition and self-reflection for his bio after he is done with “public” service and private business engagements.
I Just listened to his diatribes on a NY Times interview where he was basically saying that Israel would have killed many more than the conservative estimate of 45,000 Palestinians and wrecked more havoc (well more than destroying almost all hospitals and displacing the two million Palestinians) if not for his interventions!!!
How amazing and indicative of deep-seated structural biases and lack of empathy and self-reflection but it also goes to show us how and why the world is a worse place after the four Biden administration years — due partly to such policies.
(My comment also applies to what he pontificated on regarding US policies in Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere.)
15 Dec 2024 – Talking at the UN Internet Governance Forum #IGF in Riyadh about freedom of expression and how governments and the tech industry can counter misinformation without repressive censorship or rewarding the sensational spreading of such content
26 Nov 2024 – McKenzie Global institute identified 18 potential arenas of the future that could reshape the global economy, generating $29 trillion to $48 trillion in revenues by 2040. These arenas range from AI software and services to cybersecurity, from future air mobility to drugs for obesity and related conditions, and from robotics to nonmedical biotechnology. These future arenas could generate $2 trillion to $6 trillion in profit by 2040.
Note that these fields include cybersecurity, obesity, and robotics. Global majority countries/communities will be subject to surveillance while robots replace cheap labour and mostly rich people can become slim again!
26 Nov 2024 – Goldman Sachs estimates that unauthorized immigrants account for about 4.4% of the US workforce. The share is much higher in some industries: about 20% in landscaping and private household services, 17% in crop production, 15% in food processing manufacturing, and 13% in construction.
These immigrants earn 20% less on average in hourly wages than native-born and authorized immigrant non-supervisory workers in the same industry. Far right immigration policies will harm vulnerable people and harm the economy just to provide a photo op of handcuffed and marched-away hard workers whose output benefits all Americans to varying degrees.
22 Nov 2024 – I am honoured and ashamed to attend the annual Gala of the Committee to Protect Journalists, honoured because the first award goes to Palestinian journalist Shorouk Alaila, and ashamed because she cannot attend the event in New York as the Israeli government which has been occupying Gaza strip of Palestine for 55+ years and bombarding it in a genocidal campaign for over a year did not let Shorouk out to attend this award ceremony. Glory to her and may she stay with us for many years to come and full respect to the nearly 130 journalists who were killed in the retaliatory Israeli bombardment in the past 13 months.
8 Nov 2024 – Gaza 2024, by Basel Al Mkousi.
5 Nov 2024 – Since the whole world is fixated on the USA today, let us use some time as we wait for exit polls to ponder the following facts about Gaza. In years to come our children, grandchildren and generations to come will ask us, “What did you do then?”
- For the past few weeks, the Israeli forces have been almost fully blockading Northern Gaza with hundreds of thousands of Palestinians under siege, especially around Jabaliya. This is a nearly total blockade of basic humanitarian necessities (read food, clean water, medicines, etc.) while Israeli bombs proudly supplied for self-defense by Western arms manufacturers are dropping on the heads of civilians, and on hospitals.
- The Israeli government claims it is targeting armed Hamas men (or Hezbollah when they bomb Lebanon and sometimes Syria) but the majority of people killed over the past 12 horrendous months have been women and children (Please google international law principles on the conduct of war especially the need to be proportional and to make distinction when you are exacting revenge or aim at military targets.
- Local authorities’ numbers (historically accepted by Israel and the UN) indicate that since October 2023, over 43,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and over a 100,000 injured. (Nearly a third of them children and 25% women or elderly people — i.e. they cannot be termed as fighters — while accepting the ludicrous claims by Israeli PR mouthpieces that see all Palestinian men between the ages of 18 and 60 as armed killers on active duty).
- Among the child fatalities, 786 children are under one year of age, representing about six per cent of killed children.
- Over 35,000 children had lost one or both parents over the past year.
- European officials (see German Foreign minister’s statement) justifying Israeli attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure using a warped reading of the laws on war are implicitly supporting war crimes and possible genocide if the ICJ deems it as such in the future. (If a murderer hides in a hospital this is no excuse to kill and maim many people to get to him and destroy the hospital in the interim. An adviser to the minister should educate her on the Geneva conventions especially the principles of distinction and proportionality).
- Nearly two million people – or about 90 per cent of Gazans had to leave their homes or shelters to flee Israeli bombardment (most of them repeatedly)
- Israel presented allegations that 19 UNRWA staff members (out of more than 10,000 in the Gaza strip) were Hamas supporters or operatives. While the UN investigated this and fired nine of them who MAY have been colluding with HAMAS, Israel KILLED 237 UNRWA employees.
- In October 2024 about 1000 humanitarian trucks were permitted by Israel to enter the Gaza Strip. This represents a daily average of only 36 humanitarian trucks — well about 7% of the pre-crisis average of 500 trucks per working day.
13 Oct 2024 – Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg! One continues walking until frozen either in the eyes of those who don’t see how rich each human being is, or by death!
