BRIEF ENCOUNTERS

Sung by, in my humble opinion, the finest female vocalist we have ever produced who somehow fickle fame eluded  - POLLY BOLTON.

                                                            BRIEF ENCOUNTERS 

                           https://youtu.be/NMZoe7uOgUo?si=e4FO2a-HUi6kpseX

  

The right to protest is being eroded as we more and more resemble a Soviet State

 Todays march against the genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel has police asking for members of the public to  hand over photographs of demonstrators supporting a democratically elected government in Palestine.. I seems that our government meanwhile is sharing intelligence and providing armed support to those committing genocide and running an apartheid regime in the Middle East. Shame on them.. I never thought that I would live to see the day in this country.

Israel’s War Crimes will only end when they have exterminated the Palestinian people.

 The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة, romanized: an-Nakba, lit. 'the catastrophe') is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations.The term is used to describe the events of the 1948 Palestine war in Mandatory Palestine as well as the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

During the foundational events of the Nakba in 1948, approximately half of Palestine's predominantly Arab population, or around 750,000 people, were expelled from their homes or made to flee through various violent means, at first by Zionist paramilitaries, and after the establishment of the State of Israel, by its military. Dozens of massacres targeted Palestinian Arabs and over 500 Arab-majority towns, villages, and urban neighborhoods were depopulated, with many of these being either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jews and given new Hebrew names. Israel employed biological warfare against Palestinians by poisoning village wells. By the end of the war, 78% of the total land area of the former Mandatory Palestine was controlled by Israel.

The Palestinian national narrative views the Nakba as a collective trauma that defines their national identity and political aspirations. The Israeli national narrative views the Nakba as a component of the War of Independence that established Israel's statehood and sovereignty. Also, they negate or deny the atrocities committed, claiming that many of the expelled Palestinians left willingly or that their expulsion was necessary and unavoidable. Nakba denial has been increasingly challenged since the 1970s in Israeli society, particularly by the New Historians, although the official narrative has not changed.

Extracted from Wikipedia.

 Meanwhile succesive British governments have contributed to this slaughter by supplying Israel with intelligence and arms.

 Our present Prime Minister and his wife meanwhile busy themselves with accepting thousands of pounds worth of luxury clothes.

 Shame on them all. I am so mortified of this country’s policies in the Middle East that I no longer possess a British passport.

All of my heroes are dead.

 Pete Seeger was the last to go; Phil Ochs the first. I suppose it is the result of being very old myself and I,  certainly, won't be anyone's hero. The following extract is taken from "The Church Times" ( yes I am very catholic in my reading habits - no pun intended) and is taken from a review of a new biography on the subject. Any guesses from my two readers out there? Clue - he was not a folk singer.

Nevertheless, the author points to the many government reforms that civilised Britain in ways that we now take for granted. Among these were further regulations on racial discrim­­ination, abolition of capital pun­ishment and corporal punishment in prisons,  legalising abortion and same-sex relations, reforming divorce laws, and the creation of the Open University.

Further, the Government could be proud of its record on housing, social services, health, and its help for the poorest, promoting equal pay for women and attempting to end the stigma attached to those on state benefits by recognising that the re­­cipients had rights

Julian Barnes

 "The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of the old superstitions. And tyrants had moved on as well. Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out. Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant’s skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change, that granite encloses yet more granite; and there is no cave of conscience to be found”.

Nakba

 

The Invasion continues..