Halo Halo / Tiny Tips
Halo, halo
It’s said that one person’s death is a tragedy, a million deaths merely a statistic. Apparently a million is not enough when the sky fairy promised you some real estate three thousand years ago.
An August BBC report from the occupied West Bank settlement of Havat Gilad featured a Jewish/Zionist lawyer who was quite open about his genocidal tendencies. Speaking of the retribution he would like to see visited upon Palestinians following an Israeli death, he named four Palestinian villages which have been the subject of various attacks by the Israeli settlers and said that ‘we need to kill all the people’ in them. The reporter asked him a question about the equivalence he was putting on Jewish lives and Palestinian lives and he responded that one Jewish life is worth ten million Palestinian lives.
Whilst the compilers of the Hebrew bible went the whole hog; a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand and a foot for a foot (Exodus 21:24, Leviticus 24:20, Deuteronomy 19:21), even they didn’t go that far.
Questioned further about Palestinian residents in the West Bank, ‘Shimon laid out three options: live quietly under Israeli rule and ownership of the land; voluntarily emigrate to other Arab or Muslim nations; or “if you don’t want to make peace with us, and you don’t want to get out, I don’t have a choice: I must kill you, and I kill you all,” he said’. So, submit, leave or die.
There was not an opportunity in the report fully to assess the mental state of the interviewee. We think it is fair to state that religion causes strange reactions in people. This person would seem unaware of the caution, an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
From one extreme to another
In August at The Big Church Festival, a person was killed and others were injured when a large wooden sign collapsed. This incident prompted a response from the Archbishop of Canterbury who said, ‘she was “sad and shocked” to hear about the fatal incident’. She was also going to do lots of praying for various people involved. “May the God of comfort and healing be with them all” she said.
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John Donne’s poem, No Man Is An Island, relates a belief that we are all interconnected and the death of one person, let alone a million or ten million, ‘diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind.’ The first reaction many would have had would have been to laugh at the irony of a committed Christian being struck down in that circumstance. You were taking the Michael there god weren’t you? We would have felt sorry and diminished afterwards no doubt.
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Lastly, reported by the BBC in September, was that ‘St Paul’s Cathedral has signed a four-year deal with the London nightclub Fabric to stage music events inside the building’. Finally, some rational use of the building.
DC
Tiny Tips
A change in the mode of production would be necessary to address climate change seriously. But obviously, that is not the path of capitalism, which seeks ever-greater expansion, reinforcing the very logic that is generating the crisis (rosalux, tinyurl.com/y5k26rb4).
What is happening outside Iran is deeply concerning. In certain circles that see themselves as progressive or left-wing, the regime is beginning to be viewed almost automatically as a legitimate force simply because it is confronting the United States and Israel. People forget that only a short time ago there was a massacre in which thousands were killed within a matter of days. Now the Supreme Leader and military commanders who were unlawfully assassinated are being praised, while it is overlooked that they themselves were also responsible for killings and repression (rosalux, tinyurl.com/mpjvrn8e).
Three million dogs are at risk of being killed in Morocco ahead of the 2030 FIFA World Cup. Now the influencer and animal rights activist Therése Lindgren is reacting. ‘It’s absolutely terrible’, she says (Expressen, tinyurl.com/5ehj4pxx).
Nicaraguan feminists and human rights leaders began sounding the alarm decades ago. The 2006 absolute ban on abortion; rollbacks in women’s rights; the Ortegas’ denouncement of feminism and misogynist persecution of their own daughter, Zoilamérica, after she accused her stepfather of sexual abuse; attacks on NGOs (to date, more than 5,000 have been shut down), the closing of feminist media, and persecution of leading figures left no room for doubt that the principles of the revolution had been betrayed. The violent repression of the 2018 pro-democracy uprising in the country that left some 350 dead ushered in a period of even greater repression. Constitutional changes in the constitution in 2025 subordinated all powers to the presidency. With the dismantling of checks and balances, the presidential couple was clearly laying the foundation for a perpetual family dynasty (CounterPunch, tinyurl.com/5xxtwnm4).
The coercion of Ukrainians in the occupied territories to take Russian passports is also significant when it comes to what we refer to in our report as the ‘conscription pipeline’. Children are being systematically prepared for future armed service. By being forced into Russian citizenship, boys also become eligible for conscription as soon as they turn 18 (The Conversation, tinyurl.com/4uc7s8zk).
Democratic socialism [sic] often more closely resembles the Nordic model: a capitalist economy in which government takes a larger role in protecting human rights and guaranteeing certain essential goods and services. Actually, this compromise of preserving the fundamentals of capitalism while trying to achieve the egalitarian goals of socialism is precisely what more committed Marxists don’t like about democratic socialism. They might argue that capitalism is inherently unsustainable, exploitative, and unreformable, relying as it does on never-ending growth and abuse of labor, and that working within it is doomed to only limited successes at best (Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/37zv9sdd)
Trump Draws a Hard Line at Mount Rushmore: ‘You Cannot Be Both’ a Communist and a Patriot (Newsbreak, tinyurl.com/mw9ar63k).
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