Pro-Israeli spin doctors kill too…

Dilsa Demirbag Sten, the dark-haired assimilation advocate and newspaper columnist favoured by the liberal power elites in Sweden, has once again used her intellectual capability and twisted logic to deliver an attack on several Swedes who recently dared to denounce the brutal killing of civilians in Gaza.

She tries to emerge like delivering an objective analysis by saying, without delay, that one can both criticise Israel and Hamas. But after reading her column in today’s issue of the daily Göteborgs Posten, it is clear her main purpose is to endorse Israel’s arbitrary war on a 1.5 million defenceless refugees.

Using well articulated oratory she tries to shift the Swedish public attention away from the violations of international law inherent in the Gaza assault: collective punishment, disproportionate military force and attacks on civilian targets, including homes, mosques, universities and schools - all of them well documented, as told by Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the president of the UN General Assembly, during an emergency session in New York on Thursday.

Dilsa Demirbag Sten wants us to stop thinking about the slaughter in Gaza and to focus instead on the question about how vulnerable the Jew communities around the world are in a time of war like this.

Recently I read the Israeli scientist Haim Harari’s book “A view from the eye of the storm”. Just like him and many other pro-Israeli opinion makers around the world, Dilsa Demirbag Sten worries about the nasty attacks coming from the European Left and from Muslim high-profile individuals who try to delegitimize the state of Israel and dehumanize the Jews.

I agree it is right to worry when you have to deal with people who are both fools, naïve and anti-Semitic; people who “need their steady diet of hatred to survive”. Like Harari and Demirbag Sten, I do also worry about the vast industry of lies which feeds the industry of hatred. But contrary to them, I can worry as much when pro-Israeli opinion makers deliberately spread dangerous, vicious lies – because those are lies which also kill.

Dilsa Demirbag Sten ends the column stating that the ”people of Gaza need leaders who want peace, not to wipe out their neighbours”. I think the people of Israel need just the same and, of course, I believe they also would be better helped without the work of disingenuous, power-avid spin doctors. And I hope, one day she too will understand that.

 

 

Chameleon fight at the Swedish parlament

Luciano Astudillo, the Social Democratic Party’s Member of Parliament in Sweden and Member of the Committee on the Labour Market, got the Minister for Employment Mr. Sven Otto Littorin to lose his temper and run out during a parliamentary debate about what needs to be done in order to secure that Swedes temporarily working in Danmark do not miss their right to unemployment benefit fund.

Minister Sven Otto Littorin is a conservative man of intellectual pedigree and with a distilled smile, a calculating politician who always seems to be in control at any situation. His outburst today can therefore easily be read as an unwritten but clear sign of the Government’s desperation about the worsening state of affairs in Sweden.

Luciano Astudillo, born in 1972 and raised in a home of Chilean immigrants, can still do even better. I met him first in the late 1990s when he lived in Malmoe and enthusiastically fought against racism and really wanted all citizens to have equal access to, as well as sharing, the gifts of Sweden.

Luciano Astudillo can still inspire a generation of young immigrants that will follow in his footsteps. But he needs to stop playing the actual deceptive role that, even if it guarantees him a triumphant chameleon-like career within the Social Democratic Party, it will drain him of political vitality.

Astudillo’s discourse needs to go back to its roots and bring racism back to the forefront of the Swedish national consciousness. Otherwise the legatee of Victor Jara will begin to sound like Rage Against the Machine, it means with a political stance that best can be described as “righteous indignation with minimal introspection”.

Yes, “waterboarding” is torture…

“Waterboarding”, the interrogation technique – which simulates drowning – was approved by the White House to brake down Al Qaeda captives in 35 seconds. John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent, admitted that on December 2007.

Mr Kiriakou told the ABC network then: “This isn’t something done willy-nilly… This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department.”

Eric Holder, the US attorney-general choice nominated by Barack Obama, has recently said he believes “waterboarding” is torture. “No-one is above the law, the president has a constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law of the United States,” he said in Washington DC, according to Al Jazeera.

Well, the next four years we the people will have plenty of time to see how strictly it applies to the Obama administration. Guantanamo is indeed not only a “sad chapter in American history” but also a dreadful chapter in the history of human kind. And History, that one written by historians and not by spin doctors or the embedded media, will certainly never absolve those accountable for the crimes committed behind Guantanamo’s walls.

Stockholm at -8º

Vi fryser

och kämpar med nästa steg

in i det kommande…

(Nelly Sachs)

Even a slaughterer deserves a prize

We live in a perverted world. A world where the more harm you do to the people, the more essential you become to your nation. A world where anyone can get at least five minutes of fame. Or a prize. Yes, in the twisted, mediatised and globalized world we live in nowadays, even President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, the false-hearted crook who got powerful by the money and blessing of the cocaine cartels, and who was the political architect behind the creation of bloodthirsty paramilitary death squads, can get a prize for his fighting in favour of human freedom and against international terrorism!

No, I’m not joking. On January 9 it was announced that President Alvaro Uribe is the first winner of the freedom prize created by the City Council in Cádiz, Spain. The Spanish union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) as well as Amnesty International are against such an international recognition of one of Latin Americas’ biggest slaughterers.

I think they are wrong. They should just let Alvaro Uribe come to Andalucia and get his prize.

Let him do it and, while he is at the ceremony enjoying the sound of clapping hands, let Judge Baltasar Garzón Real at Spain’s criminal court, Audiencia Nacional, issue an international warrant for the arrest of Alvaro Uribe for the deaths, torture and forced displacement of Spanish citizens or their descendents in Colombia during the last ten years — surely there are some of them among the tens of thousands of people victimized by Alvaro Uribe as Commander in Chief of the Colombian Army and, in extension, of its paramilitary protégées.