By Ingrid B Mørk

The vultures have been circling; they descended on Sharm el-Sheikh.
Was it all about the gas??

Funny, isn’t it, how no-one mentions the gas.
I have it on authority that the gas field off the coast of Gaza is worth $4 billion, that it belongs to the Palestinians, that the Israelis will steal it, by force and that this has been their agenda since the year 2000. I was told this, by the same person, who told me the same things, several years ago.

In that case, the recent carnage in Gaza and previous attempts to overthrow Hamas, had nothing at all to do with the squibs Hamas fire from Palestinian land, into Palestinian land.

All the death and destruction, the starving of the people of Gaza, the attempted coup by Fatah and the attempted emasculation of Hamas, was because Israel wants yet another resource which the Palestinians have. The gas.

John Ging talking on the BBC about the devastation in Gaza by the Zionists asked, “For what.”
The Zionists want Gaza and its natural gas field; they are doing a deal with BG.
They are paranoid and they are dangerous.
Livni has announced that they are not finished with Gaza.
The Egyptian soldiers are apparently erecting tent villages for the “refugees”. Part of the Zionist plan is to “transfer” the Palestinian “refugees” from Gaza into Egypt, and then they can concentrate on the West Bank. The plan for the “refugees” there is to transfer them into Jordan, and then they have it all. I believe they want southern Lebanon and parts of Syria and Iran as well. I hope the Arabs get their act together before it’s too late.

Yes, everything is out in the open, (well almost everything.) Naked aggression toward the Palestinians, which means that the Zionists thumb their noses at world opinion because they know, as do the rest of us, that loyalty for them is bought, with the hard-earned dollars of the US, UK and European tax-payer.
On the other hand, the love and the outpouring of grief and anger by millions of “ordinary, extraordinary,” people, in towns and cities worldwide, comes from the heart and is, therefore, priceless.
It remains to be seen which will vanquish the other. I’m rooting for the latter.
If the US tax-payers begin demanding accountability for the use, or misuse of their tax dollars, as well as tax payers in European countries, maybe then the mighty, aggressive, Zionist war machine will grind to a halt.
Ingrid B can be reached at : inbmoer@online.no

Immigration to Dubai isn’t limited to Pakistanis – it is attracting people from the West too.

By Fakhr Ahmad

Dubai real estate is red hot, not because of its desert climate of over 120°F, but because of the presence of the world’s largest companies and the hottest personalities.

Be it Britney Spears, Madonna, Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson, Tom Cruise, Tiger Woods or even Brad Pitt, nearly every top western celebrity either owns a villa or a super-luxury condo in one of the most expensive parts of the world – Marina West and Palm Islands in Dubai.

Long gone are the days when Dubai was just a favourite destination for labourers from South Asia, white-collar professionals from India and Pakistan and top businessmen of the subcontinent, who have been flocking to the tiny city-state since the early 1970s.

http://www.newsline.com.pk/NewsNov2008/cover4nov2008.htm

By Paul Doolan, Head of History, Zurich International School, Switzerland.
Stories this year of thousands of Chinese infants made ill by contaminated milk powder briefly caught the world’s attention. Yet in 2007 alone, according to the United Nations International Children’s Educational Fund (UNICEF), one and a half million babies died who otherwise might not have done if they had been breastfed: a figure that compares with the number of those murdered at Auschwitz. The ‘bottle versus the breast’ controversy has raged for over a hundred years, but the no less contentious ‘mother versus wet nurse’ debate goes back much further in history.
Obviously, before the arrival of farming, all human infants were breastfed. Since the dawn of homo sapiens there was no other choice. As Valerie Fildes, the medical historian, puts it: ‘Either an infant was breastfed by its mother, or some other mother, or it died.’ Romulus and Remus could count themselves very lucky. The ancient Egyptians recognized the vital importance of breastfeeding. Very early images show the goddess Isis suckling her son Horos and thereby, symbolically, the pharaoh. He is breastfed at birth, at his coronation and at his death. At each of these critical junctures in his life it is breast milk that provides him with spiritual nourishment and bestows immortality. The Egyptian concept of sacred milk was widespread in the Greco-Roman world where we find tombs containing statuettes of divine nursing mothers like Demeter, Gaia and Hera. The first Christian images of breastfeeding are already to be found in the catacombs of Rome, where the Virgin Mary nurses Jesus.
http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=33033&amid=30259576

by Shaheen Sardar Ali

Dedicated to the Girls of Swat who may never go to school again! from their sister who was fortunate enough to be educated

Excerpts:

Today, the 15th January 2009 civilisation, democracy, human rights,
rule of law, equality, justice and equity stand defeated. Today, the
Government and people of Pakistan have succumbed to a disparate group of faceless, semi-invisible individuals hiding behind an opaque mask of religion and declared all girls’ education as outside the pale of Islam. ’Iqra’[Read], a mandatory injunction in the Qur’an for every Muslim male and female, has been reduced to a meaningless word trampled under the feet of worldly gods speaking in God’s name. The great and glorious of the state of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, in a state of complete denial whine and whimper as the state recedes under their very eyes…………….. For today, the parallel ’taliban’ the only government with any writ in Swat has declared all girls’ schools closed forever.

But who cares for the Swat Pukhtuns from the back of beyond. Let them shut down girls’ schools and chop up heads, hang them from poles and tree tops. After all, Islamabad is thriving, we have a democratically elected President, Prime Minister and Parliament. Swat and FATA are very far away and only become significant when foreign masters are in town and demand action. After agonising, weeping, brooding and making angry conversations with whoever cared to listen, I decided to share these thoughts with anyone who may wish to read and capture the tormented soul of a Swati woman sitting continents away from her beloved homeland. Is the pain greater when one is far away from home and loved ones. Does everyone living in the ’diaspora’ experience a sinking feeling at the sound of a ringing telephone in the early hours of the morning, fearing some horrible news awaiting at the other end of the telephone. Does everyone sit glued to the television set in the anxious hope of more news of Swat, FATA and the country.
For more, please cut and paste the following pdf file in your browser.

http://www.sacw.net/Wmov/Shaheen.pdf
http://www.sacw.net/article512.html

Understanding Gaza

By GABRIEL KOLKO

How will history describe the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza? Another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the descendants of the victims? An election ploy by ambitious Israeli politicians to win votes in the February 10 elections? A test range for new American weapons? Or an effort to lock in the new Obama Administration into an anti-Iranian position? An attempt to establish its military “credibility” after its disastrous defeat in the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006? Perhaps all of these…and more.
But one thing is certain. Israel has killed at least 100 Palestinians for each of its own claimed losses, a vast disproportion that has produced horror in much of the world, creating a new cause which has mobilized countless numbers of people—possibly as strong as the Vietnam war movement. It has made itself a pariah nation—save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it has enflamed the entire Muslim world
As Bruce Riedel, a “hawk” who has held senior posts in the CIA for nearly 30 years and is now one of President Obama’s many advisers, has just written: “…the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central all-consuming issue for al Quaeda,” and “Muslims feel a profound sense of wrong about the creation of Israel that infuses every aspect thinking and activities and has become the rallying cry used the convince the ummah of the righteousness of al Quaeda’s cause.” That was before Gaza. Much of the world now detests Israel but most it will live for many years to come with the consequences of Israel’s atrocities. Muslim extremists will now become much stronger.
Charges of war crimes are now being leveled—and justifiably so—at the Israelis, many of whom themselves come from families that suffered in the hands of the Nazis over 60 years ago and now claim that the Holocaust was the only tragedy—as if the far more numerous deaths of goyim throughout the world after 1945 count for nothing. The United Nations and human rights groups are demanding that Israel be brought to justice for what now amounts to having killed over 1300 Gazans with immense firepower, many of which, like phosphorous bombs, are illegal. Israel has already prepared its senior officers to be ready to defend themselves against war crimes charges and Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz several weeks ago warned the government was expecting a “wave of international lawsuits.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/kolko01212009.html

by Ariane Sherine

http://www.justgiving.com/atheistbus

Islam on Chicago Transit Authority buses

http://www.gainpeace.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=56:cta-bus-ad-campaign-press-release&catid=13:press-release&Itemid=21

by Marlene Zuke

Remember when life was simpler, and diets weren’t full of processed food and chemicals? No, not the 1950s. Increasingly, we are developing nostalgia for a much earlier epoch: the Pleistocene, when humans lived in small hunter-gatherer groups and didn’t worry about high cholesterol.

Lou Beach
Although the box-office lure of skimpy fur garments cannot be underestimated, movies like “10,000 B.C.” are popular because they appeal to our sense that life used to be more in sync with the environment. A recent cartoon shows one of those evolutionary progressions — ape to man walking upright to man slouched over a computer — with the caption “Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/health/views/20essa.html?_r=1&ref=science

by Taslima Nasrin

1
My mother’s eyes became yellowish, egg-yoke like.
Her belly swelled out rapidly like an overly full water tank
ready to burst at any moment.
No longer able to stand up, or sit down, or even move her fingers, she just lay there.
At the end of her days, she did not look like Mother any more.

Relatives appeared each morning, every evening,
telling Mother to be prepared,
telling her to be ready to die on the holy day, Friday,
uttering la ilaha illallah, Allah Is One!

They warned her not to disappoint the two angels—
Munkar and Nakir.

The relatives wanted to make certain that the room
and yard would be clean
that the perfume shurma and the blue eye shadow atar
would be present when Death would finally arrive.

The disease had nearly devoured her entire body;
it had stolen her last remaining strength;
it had made her eyes bulge from their sockets,
it had dried her tongue,
it had sucked the air from her lungs.

As she struggled to breathe,
her forehead and eyebrows wretched with pain.
The whole house demanded— shouting—
that she should send her greatest respects and reverence
to the Prophet.
Not one doubted that she would go to Jannatul Ferdous,
the highest level of heaven.

Not one doubted that she would soon walk hand-in-hand
with Muhammed, on a lovely afternoon,
in the Garden of Paradise…
No one doubted that the two would lunch together
on pheasant and wine.

Mother thus dreamed her lifelong dream:
She would walk with Muhammed
in the Garden of Paradise.

But now, at the very time that she was about to depart from this Earth, what a surprise!

She hesitated.

Instead of stepping outside, and entering that Garden,
she wished to stay and boil Birui rice for me.
She wished to cook fish curry and to fry a whole hilsa.
She wished to make me a spicy sauce with red potatoes.

She wished to pick a young coconut for me
from the south corner of her garden.
She wished to fan me with a silken hand-fan,
and to remove a few straggly hairs from my forehead.

She wished to put a new bed sheet upon my bed,
and to sew a frock with colorful embroidery—
just for me.

Yes, she wished to walk barefoot in the courtyard,
and to prop up a young guava plant with a bamboo stick.

She wished to sing sitting in the garden of hasnuhena,

“Never before, had such a bright moon shone down,
never before, was night so beautiful.. .”

My mother wanted so desperately to live.

2
There is, I know, no reincarnation,
no last judgment day:

Heaven, pheasant, wine, pink virgins —
these are nothing but traps
set by true believers.

There is no heaven for mother to go.
She will not walk in any garden with anybody whatsoever.

Cunning foxes will instead enter her grave;
they will eat her flesh;
her white bones will be spread by the winds…

Nevertheless, I do want to believe in Heaven
over the seventh sky, or somewhere—
a fabulous, magnificent heaven—
somewhere where my mother would reach
after crossing the bridge,
the Pulsirat— which seems so impossible to cross.

And there, once she has passed that bridge
with the greatest ease,
a very handsome man, the Prophet Muhammed,
will welcome her, embrace her.
He will feel her melt upon his broad chest.

She will wish to take a shower in the fountain;
she will wish to dance, to jump with joy;
she will be able to do all the things
that she has never done before.

A pheasant will arrive on a golden tray.
My mother will eat to her heart’s content.
Allah Himself will come by foot into the garden to meet her;
he will put a red flower into her hair,
kiss her passionately.

She will sleep on a soft feather bed;
she will be fanned by seven hundred Hur, the virgins
and be served cool water in silver pitcher
by beautiful gelban, the young angels.

She will laugh,
her whole body will stir with enormous happiness.
She will forget her miserable life on Earth…

An atheist,
How good I feel
just to imagine
somewhere there is a heaven
Taslima Nasreen is a Bangladeshi writer who was forced into exile by a death fatwa by the Islamists. She was granted an asylum in India but had to leave because of the politics of the major political parties. She is currently in Sweden and will move to France in February, although she prefers to live in Bangladesh or India. Her website is http://taslimanasrin.com/ Ed.