31 July 2025 – Borges said that heaven will be a library. This is how I felt in Hodges and Figgis Bookshop after visiting the old Trinity college Library in Dublin. The new books and the old manuscripts and the serious ess of it all compared to the AI hype and post-truth internet flood.
22 June 2025 — Two nuclear powers attacked a non-nuclear power because they are worried it might join the club. North Korea and Pakistan and India are indeed celebrating today because they did it quickly and nobody can attack them in this way any longer.
The celebration also has the proponents of so called the right to preemptive strikes where you attack a country because you fear without any convincing evidence that they might attack you in the future.
We are now in the 20s of the 20th century … embrace the bumpy ride of a “new world order” of pax Israelo-Americana
21 June 2025 — I was not that worried maybe because I lived in war zones a lot. But as a journalist I asked around. The best answer came from this man who told me not to worry at all because these were very well-trained pilots with a good airlines and that they are well informed and that they seize the quiet periods between volleys of passing missiles to cross the sometimes-lethal airspace and land. That is what exactly happened and safely just now after midnight.
Obviously these are the worries of the privileged who watch the war from the skies or as video games or horror movies or even actual ‘Hunger Games’ where Palestinians are killed by Israeli soldiers and war machines while lining up in Israeli-organized food distribution centers or sleeping in tents that they had to flee to several times in several places since the Israeli genocidal retaliatory war started after the Hamas attack. We are the privileged and remain unable to stop this carnage while the powerful in the west and the region cheer on or seem largely impotent just like us.
And shameless people and talking heads say we do not know what is really happening in Gaza because there are no journalists there. Grrrrrrr. Ask Israel and it will give you a list of Palestinian journos in Gaza. After all it killed over 200 of them, many reportedly on purpose and in a premeditated fashion. Secondly, Israel itself as the country that has occupied Gaza since 1967 has banned foreign media from entering Gaza. Here is the last Palestinian journalist victim.
6 June 2025 — And shameless people and talking heads say we do not know what is really happening in Gaza because there are no journalists there. Grrrrrrr. Ask Israel and it will give you a list of Palestinian journos in Gaza. After all it killed over 200 of them, many reportedly on purpose and in a premeditated fashion. Secondly, Israel itself as the country that has occupied Gaza since 1967 has banned foreign media from entering Gaza. Here is the last Palestinian journalist victim.
4 June 2025 — His mother was killed while trying to get food from the Israeli supervised death traps where tens of people have been killed under the watch of the Israeli army and most likely by them. “We have no guns .. god knows who else will be killed … We have no guns .. we are civilians .. “ … with Israel preventing foreign media from going to Gaza we rely on the remaining brave Palestinian journalists many of whom have been killed by the Israeli soldiers/bombs (over 150 Palestinian reporters killed).
27 May 2025 — Cannot escape the haunting images described by Palestinian Gaza poetess Rawan Hussein (and she write the poem in 2021 after one of the then “conventional” Israeli killing campaigns in Gaza before the current genocidal war:
“Alone we grow old tonight,
weave hours and wear them,
gobble the terror that runs
down our kids’ mouths.
Who will devour
our rusted lips?”
Who will devour their rusted lips? Who?
Read full short poem here.
26 May 2025 — Today the director of Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American ex marine, resigned on day 1 of the operation after he found out the operation was designed to be under Israeli control and to cleanse parts of Gaza by moving Palestinians towards distribution points and distributing aid according to preset rules not based on need.
This Foundation was designed per the New York Times in late 2023 to allow Israel to channel the aid through private companies that are not malleable to humanitarian principles thus making aid a tool in the gigantic and disproportionate massive Israeli campaign that has so far killed over 55 thousand Palestinians and turned 2 million people into a state of destitution in a wasteland.
Starvation as a tool has so far failed in Gaza and it will fail unless genocide and ethnic cleansing is the objective. So far this seems to be the outcome of this war.
25 May 2025 — And when you re-read a book on Gaza published in 1995 (almost 30 years after Israel took control of this Palestinian territory in 1967) and you find only ONE reference to Hamas in its 360 pages, you understand the history of the Palestinian tragedy did not start in 2023 and did not start with Hamas but way back and with Israeli occupation, subjugation, and now ethnic cleansing.
25 May 2025 – Alaa Al-Naggar had been serving as a doctor treating people injured in the Israeli “retaliatory” attacks when one of these bombs (American?) killed most of her children, leaving her the one she is seen here visiting. No, they were not collateral damage, since more than 16000 Palestinian children have been killed in this genocidal campaign. Invoking an assumed shared humanity or recalling the international law precepts on proportionality and necessity no longer work for this carnage.
2 May 2025 — What shall we do with all this rising anger and deepening need for justice (or for some a percolating desire for revenge) when political avenues are cluttered or blocked and freedom of expression is curtailed including in countries that bragged for long about protecting it?
Such anger makes the strong unbridled murderers while it turns the weak into time bombs that most likely implode or explode killing themselves before others. And in all cases this justifiable anger eats away at everybody’s soul or the dream of becoming better, kinder, richer within, and compassionate.
Dark days indeed.
1 MAY 2025 — Guess who is dehumanizing whom?
28 March 2025 — President Trump asked Vice President Vance “to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from … the National Zoo.” I spent a lot of time over the years at the Washington Zoo. Now I am very afraid they will impose a tariff on the Chinese Pandas, deport Asian elephants, return these Gorillas to Africa …… This is not a joke, read the white house statement linked in first comment. The rest of the order is scary (or in Bannon’s terms just shit to flood the zone).
27 March 2025 — “Liberals in the West – on our campuses and in our politics – have contributed to an anti-Palestinian hysteria by carving a ‘Palestine exception’ into their liberalism. What they have chosen to overlook – the ethnocratic, racist character of the Israeli state; its brutal, authoritarian policies towards Palestinians – has now been embraced as a model for their own societies by Trump and the far right. The right to have rights was always asymmetrical, but its denial has now been radicalized by MAGA to include virtually anyone who incurs the disfavour of the Trump administration.
There is of course a difference between hypocritical liberalism and violent right-wing authoritarianism. But the one has helped pave the way for the other. Behind Armstrong’s cowardice, and the cowardice of her accomplices in the university administration and faculty, lies the hope, or the calculation, that caving to Trump’s ultimatum will allow Columbia to function ‘normally’ again. Research funds will return, along with donations from wealthy supporters of Israel, and the campus will be quiet. But the result is to make a mockery of the academic freedom the university claims to uphold, and to ensure the erosion – the destruction – of the university’s values. The campaign of repression is already spreading to other targets. Submission is no way to stave off fascism.” — Adam Shatz — LRB 25/3/2025
Full commentary here.
26 March 2025 — This is a very disturbing video simply because the “crime” this Turkish student was accosted and handcuffed for by all these masked and likely armed security people in American was that Ms. Ozturk was listed as one of several authors of an opinion essay published last March in the Tufts student newspaper. The essay criticized university leaders for their response to demands that Tufts “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and divest itself from companies with ties to Israel.
18 March 2025 — I had some doubts a few days ago that Trump might have already proven worse for the Middle East than Biden, until I listened to Democrat in Chief Chuck Schumer, leader of senate minority, constructing an excuse for Netanyahu and the Israeli murderous retaliation by basically saying Palestinians primarily die because Hamas uses them as human shields. Really? And what did Schumer tell Netanyahu? He told the NY times that he asked the Israeli premier to try to lower civilian death.
The problem is not whether republican or democrats rule DC as far as the ME and Palestine are concerned, it is the plight of a biased imperial elite who cannot handle the decay of their hegemony and power and who are ultimately structurally biased in favour of Israel — regardless of who rules Israel and how.
18 March 2025 — And as we pay needed attention to developments in Syria, to Trump new surprises and Musk’s shenanigans, to Ukraine’s climb down the tree and Putin beating his chest, to Rwanda exploits in DRC ……. As we pay attention to all of that, the Israeli military has resumed obliterating “human shields”, aka Palestinian women/men/children in Gaza, while also blocking food, energy supplies, and movement for nearly two million people in one of the world most densely populated and destroyed area (well Israel had already killed at least 45000 Palestinians and injured many more and destroyed most of Gaza in retaliation for an armed Palestinian group – that is Hamas- killing nearly 1150 Israelis and kidnapping nearly 250 others).
The whole bloody charade of brushing away all those innocent people (up to 18000 children) by claiming they are Hamas human shields is OBSCENE. They are killed by the Israeli military using Israeli (or American or European) ammunition and in response to Israeli orders.
Nothing justifies this wanton revenge at this scale and in such an atrocious manner.
This is genocidal and not counterterrorism and certainly in violation of the laws on war let alone disproportionate and in the long term very counterproductive.
And yes, Hamas will have to be brought to task and held accountable for whatever actions they committed but how is wallowing in Palestinian blood achieving this!? War crimes are never justifiable!
27 February 2025 — We used to complain that under liberal capitalism rules and norms, goods and money can move far much easier than humans. Now under wild illiberal capitalism (read racist and neocolonial) we can add Israeli and American military planes and guns to the list of very mobile objects that barely, if at all, observe laws or restrictions when they violate borders and kill humans and destroy assets.
This week alone they operated freely in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and probably other countries which did not make it to the news. Capitalist centres of influence and their vassals are wreaking the international norms and rules EVERY day, and of course second tier influencers like India, South Africa, Brazil or gulf oil countries are either too weak or effectively aiding and abetting the new world dis-order.
Resistance there must be in these centres and beyond and it is the ethical, moral and farsighted activity to help preserve and improve and enrich the human race and not only the whiter richer and militarily stronger “races”.
7 February 2025 — When I worked for WFP, the largest world food aid organization, a few of us (very few) worried that we were too dependent on American funding (it was about 50% then and it is 40% now of the nearly 9-billion dollar budget).
Our largely western friends thought we were naive and not realist enough. We saw firsthand how this funding politicized the organization and was engineered sometimes to benefit the US farming industry.
So today we can have a moment of gloating mixed with anger that the US announced it will stop various modes of funding to WFP affecting over half a million tons of food or (in one email) freezing aid valued at more than US$340 million. Some of this food was recalled while currently en route by sea and some was in overland transport.
Food aid was always politicized as I wrote in the piece linked in first comment. But what Trump and Co have been doing is beyond cynical. Food aid a as a mood of human solidarity should remain since the world produces enough food several times over not for any single person to go hungry but making it subject to political machinations is problematic self-serving realpolitik while running it according to whimsical imperial tantrums is so obscene.
This is obviously part of Trump overall non-plan to dismantle the ailing world order; raze it and build a new one like he is planning to do with Gaza and replace it with a resort like the French Riviera — except that the new global disorder seems to be designed to fit the likes of Elon Musk and those who would like to live in a French style exclusive seaside resort for the ultra-rich.
Photos below from WFP food warehouse in Kabul in 2000 and a food distribution in Herat. My analysis of food aid politics and Reuters report on suspension of some US food aid to WFP are in comments.
19 January 2025 — Palestinian poet Refaat Al’ar’eer was killed by an Israeli bomb on December 6, 2023, after he wrote this poem below. Let us execute his will left in the poem below, let us make kites, the least we can do now on the day of a temporary ceasefire in a war that killed more than 45,000 Palestinians.
“IF I MUST DIE”
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
