April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

middle east

You can’t handle the truth

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That is the message that the Washington Post has for it’s readers.

The images are contained in thousands of pages of NCIS investigative documents obtained by The Washington Post. Post editors decided that most of the images are too graphic to publish…

The descriptions of some of the photos do indeed sound brutal. A brutality the people in the pictures had no choice to avoid.

The people of America have a right, indeed they have a duty, to see what transpires in their name. It is all too easy to think of war in the abstract when you do not hear the planes flying overhead. Do not feel the earth shake and the air cloud as your neighbours die. Do not wonder where you will get food and water for you family or if indeed any of you will live to need it.

Photos help to pierce through that cloud of complacency.

For more information read Media refuses to print grisly photos

Contact the Washington Post ombudsman:

Deborah Howell

202-334-7582

ombudsman@washpost.com

And so it ends..

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notebook

I had a bad feeling about this year, and I was unfortunately right about that.

Personally I lost a mom, a cat, two jobs, and had two serious health scares.

Politically saw the election of Harper and crew, a renewed and emboldened attack on women’s rights and freedoms, the realization that though the wheel was invented, many still want to put corners on it and have a nuanced discussion over who should be using it, continued death and destruction by the powerful who stand to gain more.. upon the many who have nothing left to lose, and the death of a puppet who had turned on his masters. [Read more…] about And so it ends..

Away in a manger

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Christmas Eve many focus on a birth of long ago, and so I give you a story of birth.

From the Independent

In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem – but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.

Fadia Jemal is a gap-toothed 27-year-old with a weary, watery smile. “What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today? She would endure what I have endured,” she says.

Fadia clutches a set of keys tightly, digging hard into her skin as she describes in broken, jagged sentences what happened. “It was 5pm when I started to feel the contractions coming on,” she says. She was already nervous about the birth – her first, and twins – so she told her husband to grab her hospital bag and get her straight into the car.

They stopped to collect her sister and mother and set out for the Hussein Hospital, 20 minutes away. But the road had been blocked by Israeli soldiers, who said nobody was allowed to pass until morning. “Obviously, we told them we couldn’t wait until the morning. I was bleeding very heavily on the back seat. One of the soldiers looked down at the blood and laughed. I still wake up in the night hearing that laugh. It was such a shock to me. I couldn’t understand.”

Her family begged the soldiers to let them through, but they would not relent. So at 1am, on the back seat next to a chilly checkpoint with no doctors and no nurses, Fadia delivered a tiny boy called Mahmoud and a tiny girl called Mariam. “I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital,” she says now. For two days, her family hid it from her that Mahmoud had died, and doctors said they could “certainly” have saved his life by getting him to an incubator.

Waterboy strikes again

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On the November 27 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, in response to claims made by King Abdullah II of Jordan on the November 26 edition of ABC’s This Week that “we could possibly imagine going into 2007 and having three civil wars on our hands,” Rush Limbaugh said: “[W]ell, let’s just have them. Let’s just have the civil wars … because I’m just fed up with this.” Limbaugh then asserted: “Fine, just blow the place up. Just let these natural forces take place over there instead of trying to stop them.” Additionally, Limbaugh claimed: “[E]verbody comes to us. … So we go and try to fix it and our own people, Democrats and the left in our country do their best to sabotage our efforts, and then we get blamed for trying to clean up the messes that these people start.”

One thing we know about Rush AKA The Waterboy;

“Something’s wrong with his medulla oblongata.”

Day 4 (Dec. 6th Action)

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I don’t know what to write today to introduce you to this video.

It covers many subjects and it is of course up to the viewer to make their own interpretation.

If you think the voices sound familiar, it is Judy Collins and Joan Baez.

*some images are graphic*

For some reason the embedded player was cutting out half way through, it is fine on the youtube site.

Parading Ignorance

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The gay pride parade in Jerusalem has been cancelled due to the actions of the god fearing.

Dear god deliver me from your followers.

Ultra-Orthodox leaders agreed to the compromise proposal following a meeting held Thursday between Jerusalem police commander Ilan Franco and a delegation of ultra-Orthodox leaders headed by Rabbi Yitzhak Tuvia Weiss.

The ultra-Orthodox leaders requested clarifications regarding the parameters of the demonstration, and asked Franco for assurances that the event will be held in a closed and defined area and that the participants will not display any symbol of gay pride outside of the event area.

In addition, the delegation asked that all anti-parade protesters who have been arrested in recent days be released.

According to sources in the ultra-Orthodox community, the sides have reached agreement on all issues with the exception of the release of the protesters and the dropping of all charges against them. The sources said that on that point, the understandings have yet to be finalized.

The delegation was in contact throughout the talks with Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian community in Israel, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Eliashiv, both of whom support reaching a compromise on the issue.

Following the compromise, the High Court of Justice on Thursday rejected the petitions calling for the parade to be cancelled, and authorized the rally. Representatives of the Open House promised the court they would not hold any form of parade.

On Thursday afternoon, ultra-Orthodox leaders in Jerusalem began dispersing leaflets throughout the city calling for an end to the public demonstrations against the march.

Nonetheless, police anticipate there will be protests as well as attempts to disrupt the rally. Far-rightists led by Baruch Marzel are planning to protest against the rally. Additionally, police some ultra-Orthodox Jews who are not followers of the rabbis involved in the compromise to protest as well.

It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It’s like disapproving of rain. ~Francis Maude