Open letter to Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley

Lalu Hanuman
Submitted by Lalu Hanuman (r), Attorney-at-law, and Secretary of the CARIBBEAN AGAINST APARTHEID IN PALESTINE. [Barbados]

All civilian lives matter

Dear Prime Minister:

Greetings.

Further to our unanswered hand-delivered letter to your Office dated the 29thday of August 2023, asking that Barbados recognises the State of Palestine.

Barbados since its independence has prided itself on a foreign policy skillfully articulated by the Right Excellent Errol Barrow as “friends of all and satellites of none”. This philosophy has successfully guided our engagements with other sovereign nations around the world.

It is a principle that your administration re-emphasised since 2018 when it chose to expand Barbados’ ties beyond our traditional partners in North America and Europe and made a thrust into having diplomatic relations with Africa, the Middle East and Asia. It is a development that we wholeheartedly support and applaud.

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EXCEPTIONALISM – We Are All PALESTINIANS

Submitted by Pachamama

Destruction of Gaza

Destruction of Gaza

As we enter week four (4) of the barbaric slaughter of the sacred Palestinian people a simultaneous and larger war against the peoples of the world pursues apace. Indeed, the savage decades old war against the Palestinians comes within the context and at the height of an American imperial exceptionalism that has had no ‘moral minimum’. This war of aggression against the Palestinians is no different than the wars against economically disadvantaged peoples of the South. It is a  war even against Russia and all of Europe because there must never be another exception to this new and staggering American exceptionalism. It is an exceptionalism that aims to do something no other empire has considered – to have no end, almost Messianic. And nothing, nobody, nowhere is outside its sphere of interests. Its current central focus is Russia but China is to soon follow. The war on Gaza sees the Palestinian people facing the onslaught of the Zionist agents of this vicious American exceptionalism.

We are all Palestinians when, as Caribbean peoples, we are devastated by engineered economic conditions as characterized by booms and busts. The economic wars we are facing is no less criminal in nature than the brutality inflicted on innocent women and children in the open air prison called Gaza. This brutality of capitalism, as war, has reach such a normalization that we have been numbed to the growing billions still living beyond the poverty line, starving, unable to find potable water, lacking basic medicines, denied quality education, shelter and healthy food, even in ‘developed’ countries. These are still happening in a world where the number of billionaires is increasing exponentially. For these are the accepted and acceptable conditions of the Palestinians people and billions more throughout the world who are Palestinians today and have always been Palestinians.

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Palestine, Oh Palestine!

Submitted by Pachamama

"Historical Palestine was peopled by indigenous Palestinians."

“Historical Palestine was peopled by indigenous Palestinians.”

The Zionist regime in Palestine only started to emerge after the 1880’s (AD). And despite the lies told by the Christian Bible, there was never a geographical location anywhere on earth called Israel, never! During the 1890’s the discourse for a Jewish nation state continued to receive popular support in public narratives. After World War One that discourse, with the help of the allied powers, had reached its ascendancy. We then had the Balfour Declaration (1917), the secret Franco-Anglo-Russo, Sykes-Pico Agreement (1916) as the relative winners of WW1 had displaced the Ottoman Empire and now had designs, largely for the petroleum resources, on Western Asia now known as the Middle East and North Africa regions. So the proposed state of Israel was seen as a beachhead for Western oil and capitalist interests.

So Israel, in Western eyes, was merely a cat’s paw for imperialism. Of course, it helped to have this project marketed within the invisibility of biblical writings even when most of its founders were staunchly atheist. Even today, most so-called Jewish people are non-religious. This Zionist project for occupation continued with the Nakba of 1948, the 1967 war, the 1973 war and a series of interventions since. Within the last five years there have been three separate and distinct large-scale slaughters of the Palestinians by the marauding Zionist regime.

Any talk, by anyone, that there was some historic place known as Israel is patently false! Any suggested that some god somewhere in the shy is some real estate agent with an ability to bestow one peoples’ land to another is the type of propaganda that Goebbels would envy – the bible. This propaganda of biblical proportions was deftly deployed by the Rothschild in setting up the colonial, fictitious, settler entity, of an apartheid state which now calls itself Israel.

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The Middle East Revisited: Islamism Based On a Cult of Murderous Violence

Submitted by Charles Knighton

Middle East continues to be the flash point – Israel Hamas Conflict

And so it begins anew. After months of provocation, Israel strikes back against Hamas, only to be almost universally condemned as the aggressor. As I pen this letter (Nov. 17) how this latest drama will evolve is unknown, though I am certain it will not take long for the wilfully naive to again claim all Israel needs to do is return occupied land in order for peace to reign supreme. Unfortunately, those calling the shots in the Middle East and North Africa are groups I would refer to as Islamofascists who view Israel as a whole as occupied land.

Any student of history must see that there is something horribly familiar about today’s Islamist movement. Like the fascism of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, Islamism is based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. Both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories and bent on avenging various historical humiliations at the hands of inherently inferior outsiders. The Islamists, like the Nazis, have a particular loathing of Jews, homosexuals and women. And for Islamists, as for fascists, the ultimate goal is to establish a vast, unconquerable territory—a “caliphate” the Jihadists call it—where their power and ideology will reign unchallenged.

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UN Inquiry Accuses Israel Of War Crimes In Gaza

Submitted by Yardbroom

Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel

Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel

A United Nation inquiry has made the claim that Israel engaged in:

…a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population in Gaza.

It further asserted that some individuals should face:

individual criminal responsibility and both Hamas and the Israeli committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity

Although the inquiry subjected Hamas to censure it was not as severe as that on Israel. The conflict Dec 2008 – Jan 2009 – debated on BU ( Barbados Underground)  – was as a result of tunnels built by Hamas to circumvent the Israeli blockade being bombed by Israel.  Hamas intensified their belligerence and fired rockets into Southern Israel in retaliation, causing panic in the civilian population.  In the resultant war when the Israeli Military crossed into Gaza, in excess of 1,300 Palestinians were killed including 320 children, official figures gave the Israeli death toll as 20.

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