"Hope" by the Palestinian artist Mahmoud Alarawi(1989-):

Many Americans say when asked that they "love" Israel because it's the safe choice. Just like saying that they believe in God, just like saying that they think that United States is the best country in the world in all possible things. People know that they are expected to say these things, so they say them.

Etremely few Americans in reality support Israel because of supposed love for Zionist "democracy". If they would, then they would be madly in love with democracies in other regions too and we would get polls about it and poll results like "Americans love Costa Rica because of it's democracy" etc.

We don't get that, because United States and Americans don't really care about democracy in other countries all that much, otherwise Palestinian elections would create a wave of mushy feelings towards Palestinians in USA.

Ask the true believers and what you get is a mix of fundamentalistic religious feeling and appreciation for overwhelming use of violence and getting away with it. Frankly, many Americans love Israel because it's a nasty piece of work that is seen to be above all laws and as a result gets away with awful things, just like these Americans want USA to get away with it. It's a love between monsters.

Then there are the Christian Zionists, who support Israel "because of the bible". Theirs is an irrational cult devotion to Israel that has very little to do with what happens in reality and very much to do with their religious visions.

Lastly, many Americans see Israel's conquest, ethnic cleansing and bantustan creation in Palestine as re-enactment in miniature form of US history: Zionists as victorious pioneers pre-determined to win, settlers as cowboys and the illegal settlement fortresses as kind of homestads on the prairie and Palestinians left with the role of Indians doomed to be closed into reservations so that all their land can be given to those who have been given a Manifest Destiny. This view is backed by actual research - Americans do view West Bank through Hollywood Westerns.

And lastly, direct and indirect propaganda in US media (there's a lot of not too well-hidden pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda in US mainstream TV fiction) plays a huge role. Without this propaganda saying "I love Israel" would not have to be the safe choice for Americans when polled about these things, as it is now. Unconditional support for Israel has been deliberately made to be one of the pillars of modern America, what it means to be an American.

The parents of Israeli children could vote for peace, but a huge majority votes for Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing and continued oppression in each elections. They really must hate their own children almost as much as they hate children of Palestinians, as they are deliberately creating a violent future for both.

I don't care about the state of the "relationship" between Barack and Benyamin. They can take a hotel room and develop their "relationship" there for all I care.

What I do care about is ending the occupation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, the Jim Crow laws and settler only - roads, the segregated busses and the daily attacks against Palestinians by Israeli Occupation Force(IOF).

I also care about saving the lives of the 8 Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike, heroes the "Western" media tries to avoid mentioning. Foremost of them is now Samer Issawi - member of the leftwing, utterly legitimate DFLP movement which even USA doesn't accuse of "terrorism" - who has been on hunger strike for 242 days against his unjust imprisonment by Israel. I want him and all the other hunger strikers, the ill political prisoners lacking proper medical care, all of them saved.

I don't care whether Benyamin and Barack kiss and smile or throw the cutlery at each other. Neither should anyone else. Lives are important, not the soap opera orchestrated by AIPAC&co.

Zionist BBC thinks this is the biggest news from Obama's speeches today:

President Barack Obama has urged Palestinians to drop their demands for a freeze in Israeli settlement building as a precondition for peace talks.

BBC's handlers in Israel's London embassy must be enthralled.

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The "Western" - especially US and Israeli - media have been for basically years full of stories how Obama should have "romanced" the Israeli public before making any criticism of settlement building and today we have these same stories again, how Obama should praise Israel to high heaven just for getting on his side the people who just voted Naftali Bennett into government and gave Benyamin Netanyahu an extension in power.

Have you noticed how there are no stories whatsoever, even from the most "liberal" of Western media, how Obama should take the same path with the Palestinian public?

Notice how it is taken granted by even those who mildly criticize Israel's activities in the media that the Palestinian public should have no say whatsoever in their own future and the future of the land? That their role is not to influence, but to stand in the sidelines...

US and Israeli media have been full of stories for years how Obama should "capture" the mind of the Israeli public, "romance" them to get them on his side and that it should have been done before any criticism towards Israel's activities in the occupied territories.

Now we have the courtship and we know that there won't be any criticism afterwards, but notice how nobody in the whole of "Western" media seems to think that Obama should do the same with the Palestinian public?

Instead, even the "liberal" commentators have just imagined it with a two-part relationship with Obama and Israeli public, with Palestinians left in the sidelines waiting to be dictated what the two lovebirds come up with.

Voyager 1 has left the solar system - or not (depending on how much importance you put on magnetic fields).

Obama has used the US veto in UN Security Council to stop Israel's illegal settlement building being condemned and sanctioned. Obama has used UN veto to stop Palestine being accepted as a fulll UN member. Obama has declared that US opposes the peaceful BDS movement and that USA will act against all who try to organize boycott of Israel's illegal settlement products and so on.

Without Obama's support, the occupation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid could not go on. To bring the occupation to an end, he would only have to stop using US veto in UN Security Council to "protect" Israel.

It's quite simple: Either you oppose Apartheid & Ethnic cleansing and support the Palestinians, or you support Israel and you support Apartheid & Ethnic Cleansing with it.

You can't be a good person supporting good causes and continue to support Israel, as Israel stands for Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing and torture and you can't divide support for Israel from support to these activities of it.

#PalestineRejectsObama was in Twitter's worldwide trends for about 25 minutes this evening, reaching place 5:

SCREENSHOT of WORLD TRENDING #PalestineRejectsObama twitter.com/docjazzmusic/s…
— Doc Jazz ✌ طارق (@docjazzmusic) 20. maaliskuuta 2013

Obama: Welcome to Occupied JerusalemStop funding apartheidJoin Us | Create infographics

Yesterday #PalestineStrikesBack reached 5th place in worldwide Twitter trends:

RT Keep it trending folks! SCREENSHOT of WORLD TRENDING#PalestineStrikesBack !!! twitter.com/docjazzmusic/s…

— Raimo Kangasniemi (@rk70534) March 19, 2013

This evening #IssawiMustLive achieved rank 3 in Twitter's worldwide trends' list, trending for 20 over minutes:

Watch a screenshot of #IssawiMustLive trending WORLDWIDE ! twitter.com/docjazzmusic/s…
— Doc Jazz ✌ طارق (@docjazzmusic) March 18, 2013

 

Yesterday #FreeALLPalestinians achieved rank 6 in the worldwide Twitter trends', trending about 10 minutes:

Palestinians can't achieve their goals peacefully without strong foreign backing. They are not getting that at the moment.

EU is very slowly waking up and doing a few haphazard moves, but far more is needed. Occupations won't end if the occupier isn't - one way or another - forced to give up them by making them too expensive. When that doesn't happen, then they go on and on.

The problem in Palestine has been that the "West" has never backed it's calls for peaceful resistance by support, but has instead tried to block or nullify both political moves and grass-roots non-violent resistance - or has just suffocated them with silence.

The "West" is far too happy with the supposed Status Quo, which is anything but it thanks to the large-scale settlement building. But how to get that message through to "Western" leaders who don't want to hear it and most certainly mostly don't want to do anything to antagonize Israel's regime, even as extreme as the current one?

Another picture from the London protest today:

Protest from London today in behalf of Palestinian Arafat Jaradat(1983-2013), who was tortured to death in an Israeli prison run by the British G4S "security" company:

Possible 22 000 year old human made tools from a rock shelter in Brazil - or the most ingenious capuchin monkey's in the entire world.

#Justice4PalHunger reached 5th place in worldwide Twitter trends this evening:

Finally, we are trending !#Justice4Palhunger twitter.com/dark__back/sta…

— Ali Rjoub (@dark__back) March 14, 2013

After a total of 259 days on hunger strike against his unjust imprisonment without charges by Apartheid Israel, Palestinian political prisoner Ayman Sharawna's(1976-) health is now "very critical".

A Jesuit pope from Latin America is certainly an interesting development. John Paul II would not approve, even when Bergoglio is like he was, a supporter of rightwing violence - even against clergy. But even a Jesuit collaborator from Argentina is still a Jesuit from the "wrong" continent and might harbour some surprises.

Bergoglio, supporter of the Argentine military junta that killed some 30 000 people by dropping them from airplanes above Atlantic ocean for example, probably chose his name Francis I based not on St. Francis of Assisi(1181/1182-1226), but the Basque aristocrat St. Francis Xavier(1506-1552) who led the Jesuit missionary work in the East Asia. Which could be taken as a sign of concentrating on Catholic communities outside Europe, unlike Benedict XVI, who concentrated on vainly fighting against the beneficial spreading of secularism in Europe.

#IAW2013 is currently trending no1 in S. Africa, 3rd day in a row its trending! More info on #IsraeliApartheidWeek--> bdssouthafrica.com/2011/02/israel…

— BDS South Africa (@BDSsouthafrica) March 13, 2013

Resignation of Benedict XVI(2005-13), a Marxist view.

Awkward moment when Justin Beibers dead hamster is trending yet #FreePalestine isn't. Society is messed up😒

— Yusuf. (@mynameisyusuf_) March 13, 2013

Mohammed Asfour - also translated as Muhammed Asfur - was another brave youth who supported the Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike and was wounded by Israel's brutal occupying forces and died in hospital last week of the wounds he suffered. He would have turned 23 two days after his death.

 

A drawing the now murdered Mahmoud al-Titi made in February of the Palestinian political prisoners on hunger strike:

Activist Mahmoud al-Titi, murdered yesterday by Israel's occupying troops in Hebron:

He was shot by fragmenting bullets. I am pretty sure that use of those are a war crime, but in a world where Israel is worshipped with feverish madness by the "Western" politicians and media - the mirror image of the equally insane religiously based oppression Jews once faced in the "Occident" - Israel can get away with using them, as it has gotten away of using fragmenting missile against civilians in Gaza and artillery shells containing nails in Lebanon.

Israel that commits Ethnic Cleansing has no "right of self-defense", Israel that practices Apartheid has no "right to exist".

Ayman Sharawna has been 251 days total on hunger strike since 1st of July 2012 against his imprisonment without charges by Apartheid Israel's occupation forces:

Rest in peace, comrade Hugo Chavez(1954-2013):

We are fighting for all Palestinians

In jail, my fellow hunger strikers and I are doing battle against the Israeli occupation that humiliates our people

SAMER ISSAWI

My story is no different from that of many other Palestinian young people who were born and have lived their whole lives under Israeli occupation. At 17, I was arrested for the first time, and jailed for two years. I was arrested again in my early 20s, at the height of the second intifada in Ramallah, during an Israeli invasion of numerous cities in the West Bank – what Israel called Operation Defensive Shield. I was sentenced to 30 years in prison on charges relating to my resistance to the occupation.

I am not the first member of my family to be jailed on my people's long march towards freedom. My grandfather, a founding member of the PLO, was sentenced to death by the British Mandate authorities, whose laws are used by Israel to this day to oppress my people; he escaped hours before he was due to be executed. My brother, Fadi, was killed in 1994, aged just 16, by Israeli forces during a demonstration in the West Bank following the Ibrahimi mosque massacre in Hebron. Medhat, another brother, has served 19 years in prison.

My other brothers, Firas, Ra'afat and Shadi were each imprisoned for five to 11 years. My sister, Shireen, has been arrested numerous times and has served a year in prison. My brother's home has been destroyed. My mother's water and electricity have been cut off. My family, along with the people of my beloved city Jerusalem, are continuously harassed and attacked, but they continue to defend Palestinian rights and prisoners.

After almost 10 years in prison, I was released in the Egypt-sponsored deal between Israel and Hamas to release the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. However, on 7 July 2012, I was arrested again near Hizma, an area within the municipality of Jerusalem, on charges of violating the terms of my release (that I should not leave Jerusalem). Others who were released as part of that deal were also arrested, some with no declared reason. Accordingly, I began a hunger strike on 1 August to protest against my illegal imprisonment and Israel's violation of the agreement.

My health has deteriorated greatly, but I will continue my hunger strike until victory or martyrdom. This is my last remaining stone to throw at the tyrants and jailers in the face of the racist occupation that humiliates our people.

I draw my strength from all the free people in the world who want an end to the Israeli occupation. My weak heartbeat endures thanks to this solidarity and support; my weak voice gains its strength from voices that are louder, and can penetrate the prison walls.

My battle is not just for my own freedom. My fellow hunger strikers, Ayman, Tarik and Ja'afar, and I are fighting a battle for all Palestinians against the Israeli occupation and its prisons. What I endure is little compared to the sacrifice of Palestinians in Gaza, where thousands have died or been injured as a result of brutal Israeli attacks and an unprecedented and inhuman siege.

However, more support is needed. Israel could not continue its oppression without the support of western governments. These governments, particularly the British, which has a historic responsibility for the tragedy of my people, should impose sanctions on the Israeli regime until it ends the occupation, recognises Palestinian rights, and frees all Palestinian political prisoners.

Do not worry if my heart stops. I am still alive now and even after death, because Jerusalem runs through my veins. If I die, it is a victory; if we are liberated, it is a victory, because either way I have refused to surrender to the Israeli occupation, its tyranny and arrogance.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/03/hunger-strikers-fighting-for-palestinians-israel

Requiescat in Pace Stéphane Hessel(1917-2013):

Archaeological finds (and speculation horse domestication 9000 years ago) from Al-Magar in the Arabian peninsula going back to 50 000 years ago.

Ancient shoes from Ptolemaic Egypt found: Ancient Shoes Turn Up in Egypt Temple.

The widow of Arafat Jaradat(1983-2013) - tortured to death by Israel for throwing one stone - speaks:

Elizabeth Drabkina: The Palestinian Prisoners' Intifada:

Role of maize in the rise of the Norte Chico civilization of Peru. Agricultural theory gains ground against maritime competitor.

Israel has no right to exist.

That it has, has become a sacred article of faith for the "West" - and thus it needs to be denied and this denial repeated, like all acts of sacrilege that break mind free from an official "truth".

Israel has no right to exist.

The idea that there is a "right" for political entities to exist and that this concept somehow has a real, meaningful connection to their existence in the real world is itself pretty naive.

I suspect that some kind of subsconscious, primitive magical thinking is partly behind this article of faith, that in some mysterious way repeating this holy chant of the "West" is felt to be keeping up the Apartheid state's existence.

Israel has no right to exist.

In reality, denying or asserting the Apartheid state's "right" to exist has no direct connexion to it's physical existence on the ground and as an institution that controls certain piece of land and water in the Middle East.

Israel has no right to exist.

Zionists take it as granted that Israel arrests each day Palestinians and keeps thousands imprisoned, but when Palestinians capture single one of them, they themselves are terribly outraged and basically hysterical about this - its like laws of nature would have been broken.

They just can't accept that others can "play the game" with the same rules as they do.

The privilege of power they enjoy in this terribly unbalanced conflict has cultivated this mindset in them that they can do things which Palestinians can't and when Palestinians do things that they considered to be their privilege - like imprisoning one of them - it shakes the basis of their view of their conflict, one could even claim that it shakes their entire worldview.

Good that the US government thinks that all people are at least theoretically equal when it comes to them being blown up in illegal drone attacks.

Hilary Mantel ruffles royal feathers.

My comment from last night to a small article about the Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong(c.1330-c.1400):

The irony is that nobody really won the long and bloody contest to rule China that had began with the rebellion of the secret Taoist  revolutionary societies in 184.

By 281, all the original three dynasties - Wei(221-264), Wu(222-280) and Shu Han(223-263) - were gone. In 263 Wei conquered Shu Han, but in 264 the Wei dynasty itself was overthrown in a place coup and replaced by the Western Jin(265-316) which conquered Wu in 280 and briefly united China.

In 291 a new civil war began - The War of the Eight Princes - which lasted until 306 and weakened the Western Jin, which experienced then attacks by partly sinicized semi-nomadic tribes which captured and killed two teenage emperors in 311 and 316.

Jin dynasty withdrew to the south, becoming the Eastern Jin(317-419) and the north of China was fragmented to numerous competing dynasties for over a hundred years until the Tuoba-led Northern Wei(386-534) united northern China by the 440s.

The unification of northern and southern China would come only with the brief Sui dynasty(581-618) from the north, which conquered the southern Chen(557-589) dynasty in 589. After a natural disaster and failed attempts to conquer Korea Sui itself started to fall in 616 and from among its ruins rose the Tang dynasty(618-907), which had asserted control by the mid-620s, defeating its competitors.

The silence around Samer Issawi, Ayman Sharawna & their comrades on hunger strike is slowly breaking, but they are close to death. Media is starting to publish small news items, often distorted by the Zionist propaganda in the "West" and politicians have become "concerned".

Of human rights organisations, Amnesty finally had collected enough courage to make an appeal on 12th day of this month.

This night the Zionists kidnapped Samer's brother from the family home, one more attempt to pressure him through his family. They have destroyed the home of one brother, cut water to family home, arrested one brother and sister, who is now under house arrest.

A solidarity tent for Samer has been destroyed 24 times by the Zionists.

New discovery from Teotihuacan's Pyramid of the Sun.

Nature on the Russian mini-Tunguska event.

A good day for meteor (and hopefully meteorite) studies.

Conserving the Diamond Sutra, world's oldest printed book, which was made in 868 and found in the Mogao grottoes at Dunhuang:

Text for the song Hungry by Doctor Jazz, which tells of the record breaking hunger striker Samer Issawi's desperate struggle for freedom against the Apartheid regime, which has imprisoned him without charges:

You'd think you'd read about me in the New York Times
Almost two hundred days without any bite
While I'm withering away in my prison cell
All you read about is the game of buy and sell

in Wall Street - they don't know the way I resist
If they knew, they'd be shocked at the way I insist
Freedom and human rights are on my list
I want to live, breath, move - hell, I wanna exist

If I had an army I'd set it up to defend
Our villages our towns till the very end
But I'm cut off from the world, so there's no supplies
They call resistance terrorism but u know these are lies

If my eyes are blindfolded, my body in chains
Tucked away behind bars the only thing that remains
Is to refuse to be fed from a racist thief's den
To refuse to be treated like a sheep in their pen

I am hungry
For freedom and rights
I am hungry
That's the way that I fight

I am hungry
A prisoner on a hunger strike
Never charged
Never tried
By that damned Fourth Reich

-

Let them say what they say bout my people
If there's one thing we ain't it is sheeple
Why would we give up on our land and allow its theft
Because greed is their creed, there'll be nothing left

We want Justice, how is that too much to ask
You wont touch this, cuz ur not up to the task
Go ahead and lie, and call our enemy 'civilized'
it won't matter no more when Victory strikes

I am hungry
For freedom and rights
I am hungry
That's the way that I fight

I am hungry
A prisoner on a hunger strike
Never charged
Never tried
By that damned Fourth Reich

-

While you're out there in your homes counting dollars and pennies
I've got a question to you when ur done stacking ur twenties
Can u spare a few minutes for a man like yours truly
Whose only crime is that he won't bow to a bully

I'm not asking u to break me out, cuz I'm alright
Can spend a hundred more years putting up this fight
All I want you to do, is speak out for the truth
Don't support a racist state that is vile and uncouth

A song for political prisoner and hunger striker Samer Issawi, who has been 198 days on hunger strike in the Apartheid regime's prison:

© 2013 Doc Jazz Author: Doc Jazz

2000 year old ruins of 35 small pyramids found in Sudan.

Have you heard of record breaking hunger striker and political prisoner Samer Issawi?

6 % of red dwarf stars could have an Earth-sized planet in their habitable zone based on a statistical analysis of data from the Kepler space telescope. This would mean 4.5 billion possibly habitable planets around red dwarf stars alone.

One of my web comments about Richard III from today:

One argument which can be made against claims that the later portrayal of Richard III was just Tudor propaganda is that there never was any attempt by Yorkist pretenders and relatives living abroad to create and cultivate a cult of a martyred good king around Richard III.

In fact, there appears to have been basically no attempts at all to counter the Tudor portrayal of him, which should make us question whether the Tudor portrayal really was so far away from how he was seen by people neutral or even supportive to the Yorkist cause.

When his own designated heir and nephew, the earl of Lincoln, made his move to regain the throne for York in 1487, the earl used Lambert Simnel in an effort to use the memory of Edward IV against Henry VII, instead of trying to appear as an avenger of Richard III.

Richard III's sister, the dowager duchess of Burgundy, safe on the continent and living in a declining but still celebrated centre of artistic patronage, would have had ample resources to draw in an effort to shape his brother's memory after 1485, but no effort was made.

More examples could be easily given, but the fact is that when a lot of people could have stood up for Richard III after 1485, many out of the reach of Henry VII, none did beyond some recorded laments about his fate by the burghers of York.

This, I think, shows that Richard III was viewed at best with indifference by people hostile to the Lancaster and Tudor dynasties and that although propagandistic in nature, the Tudor portrayal of him had a core which was more or less in accordance with the public view of him.

King Richard III(1452-1483-1485) of England is missing no longer. The remains of the third and last king of the York dynasty(1461-1470, 1471-1485) are now confirmed to have been found, with new details revealed of his death on the battlefield of Bosworth.

Last of my grandparents' siblings was buried two days ago. He, a paternal uncle of my dearly beloved, late mother, would have turned 90 during the summer. His father, my great-grandfather, was born in the 1870s (nobody seems to know exactly when anymore) and he was - of which I am very proud - a Red Guard during our civil war in 1918. Several of my great-uncle's half-siblings and one of his siblings, my grandfather's twin brother, died over ninety years ago, in a very different world.

Anselm Hollo(1934-2013) died 29th of January. I have to say I didn't rank him very highly as a poet, I saw him as a rather average talent. Naturally his success, as limited as it was if you think higher visibility, made him if not honestly admired in Finland, then at least it was felt that he should be admired because he had "made it" abroad.

At least 36 dead and 105 wounded in a suicide attack against a police station in Kirkuk, Iraq.