Poor in our rich land!

The story I’m going to tell is about the reality I have been living in for the past 38 years, maybe as long as the time of the Moroccan State’s presence in the city of Dakhla and I will tell stories about many persons living in the city of Dakhla and my own story too.

I was born in 1977 in the city of Dakhla to a Saharawi family who has lived in this city for centuries, according to the information I have, and I began studying in 1984. Throughout my schooling, I have met people of my age and some of them will be part of this true story, in order to reflect the image of this forgotten city.

Yassin: a Moroccan man who arrived with his family to the city of Dakhla coming from Agadir, a northern Moroccan city, whose father was in the military and worked in the border. He began studying with me and continued his studies; we lived in the same neighbourhood and went to school in the same department. I think I was smarter than him, he lacked intelligence and willingness to learn and nevertheless he is today employed at one of the State institutions. He is married and has three children; he has a house, a car and a library, and he told me that he has built two houses in Agadir and is thinking of establishing a real estate company.

Rashid: this man arrived with his family to the city of Dakhla-Villa Cisneros coming from Marrakech in 1975, in the so-called “Green March”. He arrived at El Aaiún and then moved to Dakhla because his father is a fisherman and wanted to work in the city of Dakhla. He lived in a very small house, and alike his father he became a fisherman too, fishing for a living and providing for their daily needs. But today Rashid has 8 boats (small traditional boats), he bought some type of a new model car, he is married and has four children and he rents houses to indigenous people.

Nadia: this girl arrived with her mother in the early eighties. She married a policeman but after a few years the policeman moved to another city. She stayed with her mother and in the early nineties the girl and her mother engaged in prostitution. Today they possess houses for rent in the city of Dakhla, a taxi and a big villa-type house.

Butcher: a young man arrived in the city of Dakhla, I can´t determine the exact period of time he lived in his first house and then he moved to become a butcher, selling meat. Later on, he became vice-president of the Chamber of Commerce and a great businessman in the city.

Said: is a young man who moved with his family to the city of Dakhla, where his father was a teacher. He completed his studies and he is today an employee in agriculture. 

He is married to another young Moroccan girl who has a project in fisheries. She arrived years ago to the city and possesses property.

I (the story teller): after 38 years I had a monthly salary that did not exceed $150, I am unemployed now and I have no house, I studied and I was very intelligent; I desire to become a doctor as my uncle, who died in the Sahara´s war between Polisario Front and Morocco.

I want to ask the following questions:

- Why does the Moroccan State destroy us?

-Why does it facilitate opportunities for Moroccans and none for us?

-Why are the Saharawi people for decades in the barren land seeing Moroccans divide their land and wealth?

- Why does it make us consumers instead of producers?

- Why does it control every breath of each of us and intimidate us every day?

-Why does it not allow us to work and produce?

-Why does it contribute to make us so poor that we cannot even get married and to become a minority in our homeland?

-Why does it want to make us weak and coward and divided in every detail?

-Why does it try to prevent us from learning?

-Why does it torture and imprison us?

-Why are we divided and deprived of our homes? On the other hand it is there to help Moroccan families to settle in our homeland?

-Why are Moroccan families encouraged to reproduce, each family being offered Moroccan food and material assistance when family members reach 8 members?

-Why is the Moroccan State bringing here thousands of settlers every day, month and year?

-Why does it not allow us to reproduce?

-Why do we have no authority whatsoever in our country?

-Why? Why is that? Why? … The only possible answer is: because we are the enemy!

-Do we ask Morocco to give us from its resources?

-Do Western Sahara and the Sahrawi people deserve all this? Of course not! …

Production and distribution :

Saharawi Center For Media and Communication

the occupied territories

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I believe in the right of return for all refugees.

I think that all Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their ancestral homes and that all Middle Eastern Jews living in Israel and with roots elsewhere in the area should be offered the nationality of the countries where they or their forebears previosly lived.

(I believe the same about Turkey and the Armenian diaspora resulting from the ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Ottoman Empire.)

There can be no partial justice and one injustice can't be used to excuse another; both need to be condemned and the victims given the justice they deserve.

Another victim of Israeli occupation has died: Young Shahid Karim Abu Sbeih died of the critical injuries Israel's brutal IDF caused him earlier this month.

Apartheid Israel has forced 1 700 000 people to live in an area of 365 square kilometers. It's an open air prison camp, blockaded and sieged by colonialist Israel which drove the Gaza inhabitants' parents and/or grandparents from their homes in 1948 and doesn't allow them to return, even when it takes up to 100 000 Jewish immigrants each year.

Baath regime is dominated by Alawis, who are a small minority inside the Shiias.

The Sunni&Shia conflict is almost something of a myth; one of those Huntingdonian conflicts that don't tend to survive close scrutiny well. It does exist, but in every day life it has almost always been just a theological divide.

When Sunni and Shia states have fought, it has usually been about geopolitics (like when Sunni Ottoman Empire fought for over a century in major wars against the Shia Safavid Empire over Mesopotamia) and the same tends to be true now.

Gulf despotates and Saudi Arabia's al-Saud family business can veil their goals in religion - and same goes for their opponents - but behind the Sunni assault that has taken over Arab Spring in Syria are really geopolitics, not religion.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf despots are trying to weaken Iran's increased power in the Middle East and destroy it's allies.

If they succeed in Syria, they will target Hezbollah in Lebanon and then try to re-install Sunni minority in power in Iraq.

People who hate Jews and people who hate Palestinians but claim to love Jews sound almost exactly alike.

Change the name of the people from Palestinians to Jews and you wouldn't know that anything was changed at all; it's the same kind of racism.

War against Syria will take attention away from NSA & GCHQ spying. Far from the first time that war is put in such a use.

Death is coming to many people in Syria who would have deserved to life and the "West" will pretend that they will be fighting just a demonized cartoon villain Assad, just like in Libya they were just fighting Muammar Ghaddafi and in Iraq Saddam Hussein. 

All the ordinary people who will die will be forgotten by the "West". Certainly a hundred people or more die each day in Syria's brutal civil war, but there should have been an another way to end the civil war than "Western" attack.

I had high hopes when Obama was elected, but now I don't believe that they are capable of pushing Netanyahu far enough to get a peace agreement that could realistically work.

That said, any agreement on a peace treaty would probably mean the fall of Israel's divided government and according to polls, even a peace treaty hugely favourable for Israel would have low chance to be accepted in a referendum that Netanyahu has said will decide its fate.

Abbas has promised a referendum too, so he can't utterly surrender and give Netanyahu everything that he wants. Abbas needs at least part of East Jerusalem and most of West Bank with land swaps and something for the refugees to get a peace agreement accepted in a referendum, and chances of that kind of peace treaty being accepted in a referendum in Israel is extremely low according to polls there.

Counting the numbers of killed by each side is a very good way of deciding who is to more to blame.

I can guarantee you that in almost any conflict the side that gives significantly more people than the other is to blame for the continuation of the conflict.

The more powerful has the keys with which to unlock the peace in their hands, yet they refuse to use them and instead kill more people to continue the conflict.

Israel is an Apartheid State, created through ethnic cleansing and still committing ethnic cleansing.

It has partly exiled and partly enslaved an entire nation while itself misusing the sympathy the "West" feels towards Jews as a result of the genocide committed by the Nazis.

Israel's regime hides behind the memory of the Holocaust victims while itself it oppresses and kills innocent people.

"They came to kill" said a witness about the murderous Qalandiya "raid" that killed 3 Palestinians. Deliberate provocation by Israel to create violent response and to end peace negotiations through PA withdrawal, after which Israel and US governments would yet again blame Palestinians for the failure of the negotiations.

The announcements of new illegal settlement units - soon to hit 5000 after Kerry announced the continuation of negotiations - and destruction of Palestinian homes fit to the same strategy of intimidation and sabotage of negotiations that Israel has done many times before. Israel wants violent Palestinian reaction and PA to get the blame for the end of negotiations.

USA government will not challenge this; question is, did it really believe that Israel would not play its usual violent "tricks" against peace or was this a trap from the beginning?

If the "West" attacks the Syrian regime because of the mass deaths in Eastern Ghouta, shouldn't it logically also attack Egypt because of the massacres there?

Then there's Israel - shouldn't it have been attacked when it attacked Gaza in 2008-09 or Lebanon in 2006, killing about as many people as the highest estimates for the number of deaths from Eastern Ghouta are said to be - and the hundreds of thousands of people that the "West" killed itself in Iraq during the last decade...

Somehow the "Western" media forgets that at best in Syria we have a case of a "good serial killer" going after a bad one - except that the "good serial killer" has a bigger death toll. So, let's be honest: It's not about the deaths of civilians, it's about who is claimed to have killed them.

I'm not arguing in support of the Syrian regime, I'm arguing in support of some amount of honesty and objective treatment of different regimes.

I'm also afraid that the fall of the Syrian regime would not be the end for the civil war, that we would see the "West" supporting FSA's "good rebels" against al-Nusra's "bad rebels", with Lebanon and Iraq being brought fully into the war.

Of course, honestly I can't say that there should be no reaction whatsoever to suspected mass murder - of course there should be an international reaction, as there always should in cases like this. I'm just grasping after a world where the reaction would be same for each regime, no matter what country they are ruling, what ideology they represent and with which other countries they are allied with.

Syria needs a negotiated peace. I know it seems to be far, far away at the moment but cruise missiles are not answer any more than chemical weapons. If the "West" attacks and the rebels achieve victory through more massive loss of life, we would probably looking at next step of civil war, between "Western" backed more secular rebels and the al-Nusra Front etc. More cruise missiles and at the same time possibly more ethnic cleansing.

Syrian minorities that have supported or are thought to support the government could be the next Palestinians in the Middle East, stranded on refugee camps. Syria needs a peace that allows all of its people to come home.

Outright rebel victory in Syria would also lead to more bloodshed in Iraq, as the Guilf despotates clearly see Syria as abase from which to reconquer Iraq to the Sunnis and al-Qaeda seems to agree.

I have no illusions about the Syrian government, but I have also no illusions about armed rebel groups or the foreign states backing them.

Every shekel Israel spends counteracting #BDS is a shekel less it has to spend on killing Palestinians & deepening the occupation
— Jinjirrie (@Jinjirrie) August 19, 2013

On Sunday 18 August 2013, the Moroccan authority arrested three Saharawi activists who are members of the Saharawi Association ( CODAPSO- type the full name of the organization. )The activists are Hammad Hammad, Sidi Mohamed and Alal Asofi. The arrest took place at the Karont checkpoint, 40 kilometers away from the city of Dakhla. The Moroccan force police did not give them any reasons for their arrest and detained them for three hours. It investigated them and searched their cars and personal belongings. Eventually, the activists were released and continued their trip to the Dkhala city. 

In the meantime, the Moroccan security forces have besieged and surrounded the ASLAM neighborhood. 

Saharawi Center For Media and Communication

Western Sahara

DAKHALA City / On Sunday 18 August 2013

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SAHARAWI CENTER (SAHARAWI4) on Twitter

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The latest from SAHARAWI CENTER (@SAHARAWI4). saharawi center for media and communication. laayoune westren sahara

@carlesdijous @adfontib Who are playing #Foxconn' employees jumping to their deaths? Or is this side of #SteveJobs' story forgotten? #Apple
— Raimo Kangasniemi (@rk70534) August 16, 2013

You can be against #MB, and still denounce the massacre of the army and #MOI, and be against the sectarian crimes against the #Copts. #Egypt
— Leil-Zahra Mortada (@LeilZahra) August 14, 2013

BBC has become extremely cowardly in many issues in recent years, not just on those touching Palestine. During Samer Issawi's hunger strike BBC's lack of neutrality became very pronounced (he was mentioned off-handedly in two articles during it and his hungerstrike got it's own article only after it ended), and now of course one can look at how BBC tries to tell at little as possible about Edward Snowden's revelations. Fear before power has become collusion.

Answer to hysterical, absurd claims at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13639

European Union has made a small move towards justice, upholding international law. It could do much more, from heavy economic and political sanctions to just freezing the extremely favourable trade deals that it has granted to Israel. More of this hysterical whining and it will do that. I personally suggest you stuff this "blood libel" stuff where the Sun doesn't shine, because it's an affront towards victims of actual historical racism to try to connect their suffering to the illegal settlers.

Protest Against #‎StopPrawerPlan pic.twitter.com/wx2VB9pGf5
— Ahmad Daghlas (@Daghlous) August 1, 2013

BBC pointing out the #RoyalBaby has been born on a full moon. Not sure if they're suggesting it's a werewolf. We may not know for a while.
— The Media Blog (@TheMediaTweets) July 22, 2013

All Israel's settlements on the areas it occupied in 1967 are illegal, building of them are war crimes as are population transfers and ethnic cleansing Israel is committing now on a daily basis.

I understand that some people have a hard time understanding that Israel is bound by same laws as "lesser" states, but that's how it is. Building more illegal settlement fortresses on E1 would separate East Jerusalem from West Bank, would cut a huge chunk out of West Bank, but that's really beside the point because all the settlements are illegal and Israel has no right to keep anything at all of the areas it occupies.

The world and Palestinians have for decades offered Israel 78 percent of British Palestine in exchange of Palestinians getting 22 percent. That Israel demands more is outrageous and really the world, EU in lead, should encourage Israel to embrace peace by bringing back UN plan 1948 borders as a reminder that pre-1967 borders are not the least that Israel can get, but the most.

First Unlooted Royal Wari Tomb of Its Kind Unearthed in Peru

The Wari lords have long been overshadowed by the later Inca, whose achievements were extensively documented by their Spanish conquerors. But in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D., the Wari built an empire that spanned much of present-day Peru. Their Andean capital, Huari, became one of the world's great cities. At its zenith, Huari boasted a population conservatively estimated at about 40,000 people. Paris, by comparison, had just 25,000 residents at the time.

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As the archaeologists carefully removed the fill, they discovered rows of human bodies buried in a seated position and wrapped in poorly preserved textiles. Nearby, in three small side chambers, were the remains of three Wari queens and many of their prized possessions, including weaving tools made of gold. "So what were these first ladies doing at the imperial court? They were weaving cloth with gold instruments," says Makowski.

Mourners had also interred many other treasures in the room: inlaid gold and silver ear-ornaments, silver bowls, bronze ritual axes, a rare alabaster drinking cup, knives, coca leaf containers, brilliantly painted ceramics from many parts of the Andean world, and other precious objects. Giersz and his colleagues had never seen anything like it before. "We are talking about the first unearthed royal imperial tomb," says Giersz.

But for archaeologists, the greatest treasure will be the tomb's wealth of new information on the Wari Empire. The construction of an imperial mausoleum at El Castillo shows that Wari lords conquered and politically controlled this part of the northern coast, and likely played a key role in the downfall of the northernMoche kingdom. Intriguingly, one vessel from the mausoleum depicts coastal warriors battling axe-wielding Wari invaders.

Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

Star is crowded by super-Earths

Scientists have identified three new planets around a star they already suspected hosted a trio of worlds.

It means this relatively nearby star, Gliese 667C, now has three so-called super-Earths orbiting in its "habitable zone".

This is the region where temperatures ought to allow for the possibility of liquid water, although no-one can say for sure what conditions are really like on these planets.

Gliese 667C is 22 light-years away.

In every Israel election Israeli Jewish parents could vote for a better future for their children by voting for an end to the occupation that has gone on for 46 years and for equal rights for all Israeli citizens after 65 years of inequality based on ethnic-religious identities.

They could vote to have their children grow up and live in a country that respects human rights, international law and equality of human beings no matter their background.

But they don't vote for that. They vote for continuation of the occupation, for more Ethnic Cleansing, for intensifying Apartheid.

It seems that Israeli Jewish parents hate Arabs more than love their own children.

It's funny how the countries which are usually full of "Freedom" rhetoric to the extent that it nauseates the foreign observer, appear to nowadays have the most spineless politicians and apathetic populations when it would be time to stand up and protect those supposedly cherished freedoms - or at least a time to show some amount of indignation for the loss of them.

But it seems that the British forget all about Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and other stuff like that and the Yankees, who usually are like silverback gorillas thumping their chests and shouting about "Land of the Free! Live Free or Die!", fall silent and find something more interesting and unpolitical to do when reality bites them by showing the ugly modern truths under all that old heirloom rhetoric.

I'm getting the feeling that the wrong side won the Cold War. We would still have security states, but at least they would be ones without hedge funds.

Through Pats Kokomo:

Committee on the Rights of the Child:http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/co/CRC-C-ISR-CO-2-4.pdf

Concluding observations on the second to fourth periodic

reports of Israel, adopted by the Committee at its sixty-third session (27 May–14June 2013)

Page 19 of 21 72 point: The Committee urges the State party to immediately abide by the High Court of Justice in Adalah et al. v. Commander of the Central Region etal., to take active measures to prevent the use of children as human shields and informants, effectively enforce the prohibition to use of children as human shields and informants and ensure that perpetrators are brought to justice and punished with sanctions commensurate with the gravity of their crimes.

We can be the agent of change, it´s not enough to "like it", please, in order to make an impact share it! Thanks ♥

http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/co/CRC-C-ISR-CO-2-4.pdf

www2.ohchr.org

I have no doubt that United States uses it's spying on Europe to conduct industrial espionage - sharing the loot with the US companies that act as arms of the NSA, FBI and so on - but probably also to spy on European politicians and high ranking bureaucrats, trying to find skeletons in the closet that they can use to blackmail them.

The utterly spineless Viviane Reding for example; her meek "I must believe what the American government says" is hard to explain otherwise, nobody that naive in real life would have an IQ high enough to be able to act as a commissioner.

If the "West" is too weak to stop Israel from ethnically cleansing occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank, if "West" is too weak to stop Israel from building more and enlargening existing illegal settlements, then at least the "West" should stop de facto supporting the ethnic cleansing and illegal settlement building.

If "West" can't do anything for peace, it should at least stop supporting Israel's illegal activities to make peace impossible. No more "deploring" by Catherine Ashton, instead condemnation.

The extremely favourable - to Israel - trade deals that EU has made with Israel should be the first to go.

Israel is able to keep up the occupation, Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing because it has had to suffer no major ill consequences and has instead been able to profit out of the suffering of Palestinians.

Ordinary citizens have been able to enjoy the fruits of occupation too and this always a majority of them votes for more suffering on the Palestinians.

To end the occupation and Apartheid majority of Israelis have to be made to feel that the occupation and oppression hurts them more than it benefits them. That they will come to see that the occupation must end.

Cultural boycott is not counterproductive. It brings pressure on Israel, unlike keeping up the status quo and it's weekly announcements of new illegal settlement building projects and daily attacks by settlers.

Zionists have become comfortable with the occupation. US blocks all international sanctions against Israel, so it's the moral duty of normal people to make the majority of Israelis uncomfortable with the coccupation and oppression.

Israel is an Apartheid state build and kept up through ethnic cleansing. (There's a reason why it's illegal settlements are called "Jewish settlements" you know - no Israeli Arabs, no Palestinians allowed to live in them.)

Israel tortured a man named Arafat Jaradat(1983-2013) to death this year. They arrested him for throwing a stone and demanded that he become an informant for them and when he didn't they tortured him until he died.

Majority of Israeli academics are quite comfortable with the whole occupation and all the human suffering it causes. It's only right that they are made to be pay a price for allowing their government to do commit human rights violations and war crimes.

Commenting in a thread on Politico article on NSA spying and Edward Snowden: 

He isn't giving anything yet to China and it might be that he won't give them anything. If the Chinese government is wise, they just give him a security detail and let him freely meet every possible journalist that wants to interview him.

That would hurt US more than any extra detail he could give to the Chinese and it's hard to think that there wouldn't already be any Chinese spies among the 1 million employees, contractors and subcontractors working for US intelligence services, NSA included.

I would guess that NSA probably has enough moles so that other major states like Russia and less major states that are interested of spying US - like Israel - are pretty well aware of what NSA is doing.

No wonder that Russia, China and in less extent EU are so interested of having their own internet capabilities and constraining the activities of Big Tech allied with US government in the spying.

That of course also means that if US government is ready to pay a price big enough, then Snowden's likely B plan (cross the border to China proper seeking protection there) might not be worth much to him, only to the Chinese.

Swedish Folke Bernadotte saved 30 000 Jews from the Concentration Camps during World War 2.

In 1948 he was sent as UN envoy to Palestine to negotiate peace. Because of his background, it was expected by UN that the Zionists would view him positively and would more easily listen to him.

What the Zionists did - with the future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir playing a major role - was to murder him.

That was his reward from Israel for saving 30 000 Jews from death at the hands of the Nazis. Being murdered.

That's the Israeli idea of justice and how much they really care for the Holocaust.

Commenting to Damian Thompson's article on the Torygraph:

Snowden will not be a "Rightwing" hero, the author is deluded, if he means "Republican" or "Conservative" with the "Rightwing".

Some of them are cheering him because they see him hurting Obama, but in fact he's hurting the intelligence apparatus that both main parties in USA have been building since the beginning of the Cold War and a lot of Republicans don't like this.

Think of Ari Fleischer who has lauded Obama for his actions, calling his second term "The fourth term of George W. Bush."

Instead I think he will be a hero to a lot of people coming from all political ideologies, and probably a traitor to people from most political ideologies. It will be mixed, but those who dislike the current political and geopolitical situation overall in US and in the World will see him the most positively.

What comes to Obama, he will certainly serve his term to the end, probably pretty popular still but his reputation stained by this. One has to remember that this is not about the person in the Oval Office, but the deeper currents in the government that go on from administration from administration.

To truly change things, policies have to be changed, laws have to be changed to create "firewalls", vast amount of personnel needs to be changed and other arms of the government need to be galvanized to do their job in reining in the presidency and the intelligence agencies when they go too far. (I doubt this will happen.)

Observe how Congress has failed in this even when in other issues the party that hasn't been and has wanted to get to the Oval Office has gone very far to obsctruct the presidents. The intelligence agencies, like Pentagon, have been a kind of holy cow hat every politician worships publicly and avoids criticizing "too much".

Since the beginning of 2000, Israel is killed 1579 Palestinian children.

Zionists believe that they should have a right to kidnap, torture, kill people and steal land to their hearts' content without suffering any casualties at all.

And without having to suffer any criticism either.

'

As long as Zionists prefer Ethnic Cleansing, Apartheid and other human rights violations and war crimes to peace, they have no right to complain about if they now and then suffer casualties themselves.

Israeli voters could vote for peace in their elections, but instead majority always votes for more occupation, more Ethnic Cleansing and more racist policies.

US government and tech companies' arrogant behaviour in the PRISM and Boundless Informant issue, when they just assume that all information of "foreigners" belongs to them, that only "Americans" have a right to privacy (as long as they are obedient and don't have any contacts to abroad) is a good example why United States is so hated, loathed and despised elsewhere on this planet.

It hasn't occurred to any representative of US government at any level to even claim (dishonest as it would have been) that they don't steal information of citizens of other countries. They just assume that everybody else except the "American" voter is inconsequential and need not be bothered with even with falsely comforting lies.

So many people who seem to think that Israel must be utterly good and perfect, incapable of doing anything wrong, because it declares itself  to be a Jewish state.

Well, here's news to you: Jews are are no better or no worse overall than other humans - they are not demigods with halos around their heads - and when given the opportunity to commit atrocities with knowledge that they can get away with everything they do, as the "West" has allowed to happen in Palestine,  they fall as hard and deep as any other group of people would.

The problem with the Philosemites is that they have as ridiculous extreme view of Jews as the Antisemites do, just exactly opposite.

Israel is trying to steal what remains of the Palestinians' lands. Everybody who has seen the map of Israeli settlements, it's illegal Wall, it's "Jewish settlers only" roads on the West Bank knows this.

It's a colonialistic landgrab, made possible by the Israel Lobby buying the whole US Congress from decade to decade.

And it's not just the Congress: Bill Clinton has just been paid in advance 500 000 dollars to give a 45 minute talk to one Israeli organization taking part in the colonialist project on the occupied areas.

Israel is using the genocide done by the Nazis as a tool to get away with it's own atrocities. This has to be stopped, Israel must be forced to stop hiding behind the Holocaust and must not be allowed to get away with it's own crimes as a result of a guilty conscience over the Jewish genocide.

Jewish blood can't be washed away from the hands of the "West" by Palestinian blood. Attempt to do so just leaves more blood in our hands.

If international organizations and major states don't bring sanctions to Israel, then normal citizens must act.

And it's not just Israel, the Boycott and Disinvestment movement can and should serve as an example and inspiration to solve other similar situations where the so-called international community is unwilling or uncapable of acting. For example, Western Sahara and West Papua.

The Tibetans are already running their own "Boycott China" campaign, and are now targeting foreign companies taking part in the "re-development" of Lhasa.

I encourage you to support them, the West Papuans, the Sahrawis of Western Sahara and to support the boycott of Israel until justice is done.

PLO has recognized Israel as a state since 1988 and is ready to let Israel get 78 % of British Palestine if Israel let's Palestinians have East Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza.

In 2008 Abbas even offered to give half of East Jerusalem to Israel and betray the rights of refugees, offering that Israel should only take 17 000 refugees back, but even these where too much for Olmert's government, which demanded the whole of East Jerusalem.

Instead of Israel allowing right of return to any refugees - which all have it according to international law - Israeli politicians like the current government minister Tzipi Livni demand that Israeli Arabs should be ethnically cleansed as part of a peace agreement and moved to the West Bank.

ESO - eso1324 - Lightest Exoplanet Imaged So Far?

ESO - eso1324 - Lightest Exoplanet Imaged So Far?

"A team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope has imaged a faint object moving near a bright star. With an estimated mass of four to five times that of Jupiter, it would be the least massive planet to be directly observed outside the Solar System. The discovery is an important contribution to our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems."

Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo | Space.com

Never-Before-Seen Alien Planet Imaged Directly in New Photo | Space.com

A sharp new photo released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) today (June 3) depicts the suspected gas giant (called HD 95086 b) circling its young star (named HD 95086) in infrared light. The star has been removed from the image to allow the planet — shown as a bright blue dot at the bottom left of the picture — to shine through.

Istanbul this evening, as the Taksim Gezi park protest turned into an uprising after police attacked the protesters:

Canadian visa refusal for Palestinian poet overturned after social media campaign | Books | guardian.co.uk

Canadian visa refusal for Palestinian poet overturned after social media campaign | Books | guardian.co.uk

A social media victory is being claimed on behalf of the leading Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan after his visa to enter Canada to attend a prestigious poetry award ceremony - initially denied - was granted on Thursday.

Zaqtan was shortlisted for the C$65,000 (£41,000) Griffin poetry prize in April for his 10th collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, described by judges as poetry which "reminds us why we live and how, in the midst of war, despair, global changes". But the Palestinian poet and novelist, who is also founding director of the House of Poetry in Ramallah, found that his request for a visa to travel to Canada to attend the ceremony was denied by the Canadian embassy in Cairo, according to his translator Fady Joudah, on the grounds that "the reason for the visit is unconvincing".