School of Americas Watch has a new flash-animation “recruitment ad” that should generate a chuckle or too – despite the very serious subject.
Check it out at http://www.soaw.org/new/flash.html
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Last week Mike and I went to a seder for the first time. For the uninitiated – like us – a seder is the ceremony/meal that Jews hold to celebrate Passover. The Last Supper was a seder. It was an interesting experience, most of all as all of us there were novices. Some of us had been raised as christians, however, so the readings from the Old Testament were somewhat familiar. But the symbolism of the food items served was new to us, eating bitter herbs to remember the bitterness of the slavery in Egypt, an egg with symbolises spring and new life. Indeed, what I enjoyed so much about the text was the possibility of not reading them literally, but as methaphors for a person’s spiritual or just personal growth. There is even one part where the text has you say “I freed myself” and indeed that may be the whole point.
Other parts of the text were actually just ironic. In one part the readers are exorted to not “oppress the stranger for you were strangers in Egypt”. I wonder how Israelis and Jews in generals can read this verse year after year, while they oppress Palestinians with all their might. But rationalizations are wonderful things – and apparently stronger than any religious beliefs.
Today I found out about the death of two people I cared about.
This morning my uncle Tit
Granted, I’m not the most well-informed person in the world, but I was pretty surprised to learn today that almost two weeks ago, on March 30th, Israel bombed the Palestinian National Soccer Stadium in Gaza. Am I that clueless? Nope, the American and much of the world media seems to have slept through that story.
Though nobody was hurt, the rocket bomb created a large crater in the middle of the field turning it unplayable. Israel first said that it did so because Palestinians were using the stadium to launch rockets against Israel. When that was proven false, they intimated that they wanted to “send a message” to the Palestinians. That didn’t play out well with FIFA, so they changed their story to say that rockets where being launched from somewhere close to the stadium. Aha.
This is not the first action against Palestinian soccer that Israel has taken, a couple of years ago Israel assured that the Palestinians wouldn’t qualify for the world cup by stopping several players from leaving the Gaza strip so they could play in a qualifying game. Predictably, the Palestinians lost.
FIFA has said that it will pay to fix the stadium and it’s considering sanctions against Israel. You can add your voice to those calling for sanctions by going to:
http://www.petitiononline.com/FIFAPal/petition.html
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