I ask the question, because from the media coverage, or at least the BBC (gutter press probably even worse), as that is the impression given.
If other nationalities were killed, then the focus should be on people killed.
Maybe it was a tour resort dominated by British package holiday makers. I do not know, as I have never been there.
We heard of the bravery of those who tried to save friends and relatives. We did not hear of locals who tried to intervene, locals risking their lives to help strangers.
The gunmen, I say gunmen, as although the initial reporting said a single gunman who was killed, eye witnesses say three, the gunmen targeted Westerners, not locals.
Why?
They target Westerners because of our policies in the Middle East, our support of repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Israel.
The target us because war criminal Tony Blair destroyed Iraq.
It was Tony Blair who created ISIS.
Our corrupt politicians sidle up to the corrupt House of Saud, sell them weapons. Saudi Arabia carries out public beheadings, no different to ISIS.
I see where Russell Brand is coming from, when he criticised the minute’s silence. I feel he was wrong. It was to show respect for those innocent people killed. Where though I agree, is the hypocrisy of those who created the conditions for them to be killed.
The gutter press of course took it entirely out of context, another opportunity to smear Russell Brand stir up hatred.
A moving encounter between Russell Brand and a friend of some of the victims. The man was big enough to hold an intelligent dialogue with Russell Brand.
Canon Andrew White, for sometime based in Iraq, now Jordan and Israel, has been prepared to talk to all sides, anyone who will talk to him. In Iraq he had the respect of Sunnis and Shias. As he has said, it is easy to talk to your friends, we have to learn to talk to our enemies.
I suggest Canon Andrew White is invited onto an extended edition of the Trews. It will be an interesting conversation.
My body belongs to me, and is not the source of anyone’s honour
Fuck Your Morals
Free Amina
A 19-year-old Tunisian female activist has been detained in a psychiatric hospital after posting topless pictures of herself on Femen-Tunisia activist website.
Very reminiscent of Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho being detained in a psychiatric hospital by his family because he wished to be a writer. [see Veronika Decides to Die]
Only identified as Amina, there are now calls for her to be stoned to death.
When are Muslim fundamentalists going to wake up to the fact women have bodies, and it is for them to decided how to use their own bodies? They are not objects to be used, to then be covered up when not in use.
More than 90,000 people have signed a petition calling for those who have threatened Amina’s life to be prosecuted.
An open letter calling for an International Day to Defend Amina has been signed by many feminist and atheist activists, including Richard Dawkins.
The conversation continues, time passes quickly and I need to wrap things up. For the last question, I choose, at random, out of the six hundred people there, a middle-aged man with a bushy moustache.
‘I don’t want to ask a question,’ he says. ‘I just want to say a name.’
The name he pronounces is that of Barbazan-Debat, a chapel in the middle of nowhere, thousands of kilometres from here, the same chapel where, one day, I placed a plaque in gratitude for a miracle and which I had visited, before setting out on this pilgrimage, in order to pray for Our Lady’s protection.
I don’t know how to respond. The following words were written by one of the other people on stage with me.
In the room, the Universe seemed suddenly to have stopped moving. So many things happened: I saw your tears and the tears of your dear wife, when that anonymous reader pronounced the name of that distant chapel.
You could no longer speak. Your smiling face grew serious. Your eyes filled with shy tears that trembled on your lashes, as if wishing to apologise for appearing there uninvited.
Even I had a lump in my throat, although I didn’t know why. I looked for my wife and daughter in the audience, because I always look to them whenever I feel myself to be on the brink of something unknown.
They were there, but they were sitting as silently as everyone else, their eyes fixed on you, trying to support you with their gaze, as if a gaze could ever support anyone.
Then I looked to Christina for help, trying to understand what was going on, how to bring to an end that seemingly interminable silence.
And I saw that she was silently crying too, as if you were both notes from the same symphony and as if your tears were touching, even though you were sitting far apart.
For several long seconds, nothing existed, there was no room, no audience, nothing. You and your wife had set off for a place where we could not follow; all that remained was the joy of living, expressed in silence and emotion.
Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end. Thank you, then, for your tears.
I should have said to the young woman who asked the first question about signs that this was a sign, confirming that I was where I should be, in the right place, at the right time, even though I didn’t understand what had brought me there.
From a conference in Tunis, Tunisia, in April 2006. From Aleph, published in English in September. Published by Paulo Coelho on his blog.
This week an idiot from the US State Department displaying US hypocrisy on Egypt. Last week I heard a similar idiot, only this time it was a British Foreign Office Minister talking about Tunisia. Swap the scripts and you would not have been able to tell the difference.
When will we learn? We prop up these corrupt regimes, eventually they collapse, then we reap as we have sown.
Egypt is the largest recipient of US largesse outside of Israel. It is Uncle Sam who pays for the repressive regime in Egypt. MI6 helped train the corrupt Palestinian Authority to put down Hamas, the same corrupt Palestinian Authority willing to sell its own people to the Zionist State of Israel. In Afghanistan US-UK prop up a corrupt regime that is flooding the West with heroin.
Why do people take holidays in Egypt? Why do they do business with the corrupt regime?
PJ Crowley, the idiot from the US State Department, describes Egypt as “an ally and friend of the United States, an anchor of stability in the Middle East which is helping us pursue a comprehensive peace in the Middle East”.
For this we read working with Israel for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Today there were reports of a massacre in Suez.
Yemen next? Today protesters took to the streets of the capital of Yemen.
Jordan? Even in Jordan unrest has spread to the streets.
Like dominoes they are falling one by one. There are 22 versions of Ben Ali, the Tunisian president who fled Tunisia like a rat up a drainpipe, all must be removed from power.
The Arab street has power. Tunisia proved it. We are all Tunisians now!
After 23 years of iron-fisted rule, Tunisia's president was driven from power by 29 days of violent protests
Fight for your dreams, and your dreams will fight for you. — Paulo Coelho
The world only gets better because people risk something to make it better. — Paulo Coelho
If the people one day decide to live, fate must answer and the chains must break.– Abolkacim Ashabi
Violence in Tunisia now is a product of decades of repression. Regime in Egypt must understand that peaceful change is only way out. — Mohamed ElBaradei
When people take to the streets and totalitarian regimes fall, it happens very quickly. When it happens it takes everyone by surprise, even the participants.
Remember the fall of the Berlin Wall? One totalitarian regime after another fell. That was Eastern Europe and the former communist Bloc.
I remember Romania, when Nicolae Ceausescu addressed a square full of people. They booed, they slow hand-clapped, they heckled, the collapse was then extremely rapid.
Now it is the turn of the Arab world. One dictator ousted, forced to flee the country. Tunisia has fallen. Now having seen it can be done, people across the Arab World, across the Middle East, including Iran, must take to the streets and liberate their countries.
The BBC tried to interview people on the street in Egypt to ask them their opinion of events in Tunisia. Within minutes the police moved in.
Tunisia has sparked the flame which will sweep clean the Arab world and Iran of corrupt despots. Social media is fanning the flames.
The Mullahs and Ayatollas in Iran are jittery. The Green Revolution summer 2009 almost succeeded, had more people taken to the streets it would have done. Earlier this week, books by Paulo CoelhoPaulo Coelho were banned. These are now flooding Iran free to download from the net in farsi. Those who dare to openly criticise the regime are imprisoned and tortured. [see Iran denies banning Paulo Coelho’s books]
Where the Green Revolution in Iran failed, the Jasmin Revolution in Tunisia has succeeeded. The despot has gone, forced to flee the country, the regime though is still in place but for how long?
As we saw with the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, once started, it is unstopable. [see The Shape of the Table]
Summer 2009 the Green Revolution in Iran made extensive use of social media and in particular twitter. The death of Neda was posted by Paulo Coelho on his blog (the doctor who went to her aid was a close personal friend), it was re-posted and reported by his followers and then went viral. UK Uncut has made use of twitter to report and coordinate actions as has the student protests against the hike in student fees. The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia has made extensive use of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Social networking has come of age.
Shame on Barack Obama. Not a beep from the Coward in the White House when protesters were being killed on the streets of Tunisia. Not a beep from the Coward in the White House until Ben Ali fled the country like a rat up a drain pipe. It is not that he does not know as the wikileaks diplomatic cables shows that he knows. Hilary Clinton knows as that is why she is on what she calls her Apology Tour of the Arab World.
The prisons in Egypt are full to bursting with political prisoners. The biggest recipient of US largesse after the Zionist Sate of Israel is Egypt.
Who will be next, the evil Mullahs and Ayatollas in Iran, the corrupt House of Saud? The flame of freedom has been lit, it will continue to burn until all despots in the Middle East are removed.
As Benazir Bhutto wrote in Reconciliation, democracy and Islam are not contrary or in oposition to each other. The Koran calls for tolerance, pluralism, listening to and heeding all opinion.
According to reports on twitter, YouTube has been blocked in Libya, top level meetings are taking place, an internal state of emergency declared.
The repressive regime in Iran, hated by the people, must be very very worried.
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