universality

The court heard that Mr Doomadgee, 36, was drunk and walking towards the post office when Hurley pulled up in a police van on the day in question.

"There is not a lot of evidence as to what Cameron (Mulrunji) Doomadgee did to deserve being arrested," prosecutor Peter Davis, SC, said. "Mr Doomadgee resisted being arrested and he resented it. That might be the spark that caused all this."

An autopsy of Mr Doomadgee's body revealed his liver had been "cleaved in two" while his portal vein had been ruptured. He also suffered broken ribs and a bruised jaw.



http://www.justice.qld.gov.au/courts/coroner/findings/mulrunji270906.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_deaths_in_custody

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/rsjproject/rsjlibrary/rciadic/rciadic_summary/

An indigenous Australian is 11 times more likely to be in prison than a non-Indigenous Australian, and in 2003, 20% of prisoners in Australia were Indigenous, and 10 of the 39 deaths that occurred in prison custody (26%) were Indigenous.
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Could we vouch for our own behavior under these circumstances?


The Warsaw Ghetto uprising.




The first operations carried out by the Jewish underground were directed towards the Jewish collaborators: high-ranking officials in the Jewish Police and Judenrat accused of assisting the Germans, Jewish traitors who helped the SS soldiers capture their own people and lead them to their death. Along with the execution of traitors and collaborators, the underground began collecting money for funding the purchase of weapons and ammunitions from the rich people of the ghetto.

The Gazan population is being thrown into more misery by an Israeli blockade of electricity, fuel and even food. (Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that it will be a humanitarian blockade; if you believe that, I have a bridge over the River Jordan you can purchase inexpensively from me). UNRWA is warning against the blockade. With an unemployment rate of 50% and widespread malnutrition, caused by the ordinary everyday Israeli pressure on Gaza, the territory's population can't take much more extra deprivation without an immense human toll being exacted.

If Bush and the Israelis couldn't live with a Hamas electoral victory, they should have excluded Hamas from running a year and a half ago. - Juan Cole

The most difficult thing to try to understand about the current situation in the occupied territories is not why its happening, but why hasn't it happened sooner. The parallels between the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the present state of the occupied territories are, I know, far fetched, the closer truth would be the state of the townships in south africa under the apartheid regime, yet the idea is the same, at what point does a society under extreme pressure with little in the way of hope begin to turn upon itself. And is it the final straw for the formation and birth of something better?

The Israelis have long demanded the impossible, complete capitulation before meaningful dialogue, while at the same time reneging on any form of restraint upon their own actions. They point to the withdrawal from Gaza as a sign of their own largess, while at the same time firing an average of 300 artillery shells a week into the tiny enclave and blockading the sea and land crossings under a thousand dubious rationales, starving the residents of even the most basic of needs.

The US made its demands clear, aid would be cut off if elections were not held, then cut off all aid when elections were held because they didn't like the outcome. The European Union, in a sop to the post-Iraq histrionics of the Bush regime, did the same. The world looked the other way while the people of the occupied territories were held hostage to living up to the demands for democracy. Perhaps we need to revise our own desires to see anything other than our own narrow interests writ in others lives and nations and end all this blatant hypocrisy in calling for democratic governance, we can clearly see that it doesn't live up to the ideals we call for. Do I contradict myself, very well, I shall contradict myself and call it foreign policy.

The PLO overturned its decades old call for the return of all the old lands of Palestine and recognised Israel and the right of the state of Israel to exist, as demanded by the UN, the US and Israel itself. In return they received, an increase in the rate of building of settlements, an increased expansion of the territories beyond the UN mandated borders of 1967 claimed by Israel, vast increases in the numbers and frequency of checkpoints, a "security" wall built predominately on occupied territory, targeted assassination's, an increase in poverty, a decline in security and little that could honestly be called progress on a two state solution.

Its near impossible to say as the Israelis have said that they are seeking an equal partner to create the possibility of a solution when all their actions are designed to weaken and destroy and the other side. Arial Sharon spent his life pursuing the justifications of the settlers and championing their cause, the mere fact that he gave a fraction of leeway towards the end of his murderous life, does not in any way overlook the horrors he perpetuated, yet he was seen as the one who in the end was looking for and endorsing that "equal" partner. Give me a break.

When a few Palestinians cheered the sept 11 terrorist acts, or openly supported the dictator saddam, they did so in the full knowledge that each shell and bullet fired into their midst came with a US made or financed stamp upon it, knew that the each of their olive groves torn from the ground to make way for the illegal settlers homes was made possible by the billions provided by the US treasury. Any idea that the US could be seen as an honest broker in talks had shattered on a thousand demands given in by US administrations to the immensely powerful Israel Lobby in Washington.

Now we have such luminaries as the the former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, and President of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs, Dore Gold, spouting such well worn tripe and hate at the Palestinians, attaching the cliches of the war on terror as though it were truth in their complicity to the current state of events.

Dore Gold: Hamas is a radical Islamic group, coming out of the Muslim brotherhood, which has branches in Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the Muslim brotherhood is the basically, the founding father of a lot of radical Islam we're seeing today in the region, including Al Qaeda.

We cant have democracy, we cant have peace, we cant have an equal partner or give one inch of stolen ground, because all roads lead back to al queda. Pure emotive rubbish designed to sway western opinion

Hamas provides these extremely radical organisations with sanctuary.

Its a short step to calling Hamas the architect of 9/11, and their ends any semblance of rational discussion.

what we ended up getting was this radical regime, which is now hosting Al Qaeda affiliates... if we're not careful about blocking off the entrance points into the Gaza strip.

The big lie, we are starving Gaza, blockading humanitarian supplies, invading to stop what the western leaders fear most, a guy in a cave in afghanistan. Ludicrous in the extreme.

TONY JONES: Yes of course, the argument by your opponent is that Israel caused these states or mini-states or whatever you like to call them, to fail in the first place.

Dore Gold: ...unfortunately the Palestinian people elected Hamas in the January 2006 elections, and Hamas rather than moderating with power, seems to be more extreme than ever, as I said, is hosting organisations that openly affiliate with Al Qaeda.

DORE GOLD: Well, in my personal opinion, Mahmoud Abbas is a man I personally negotiated with. I understand that he has tried to build a reasonable civil society among the Palestinians, but he had a very difficult time in doing so. Well, the question is: "What do you have to work with?"

When Mahmoud Abbas was first appointed to the post, he tried to negotiate the release of prisoners from Israeli jails to shore up a degree of support form his people and show that he had some authority, the Israeli's, under Sharon, deliberately snubbed his request, instead they negotiated directly with Hama's and released a cache of Hamas supporters directly undercutting Abbas's authority. The Israeli's do have direct complicity in the current battles between Fateh and Hama's, they have spent the past twenty years cultivating them for the very purpose of being able to declare the idea of a partner in peace to be dead.

DG: Today, there's still Saudi support for Hamas, but most of the support comes from the Iranians. The Iranians see the Hamas takeover as a golden opportunity to spread their influence to their eastern Mediterranean, to the Palestinians, to build up a military presence there. And I think that those military dangers, that Iranian penetration is going to be the source of the real crisis here, with all due respect to the constitutional difficulties the new Palestinian Government faces.

So we come full circle to where the right of Israel would like it to be with the justification for a military adventure in Iran and the final death of the peace process and a two state solution. We cant have peace when all roads lead to war, even when the roads are paved in lies and deception.

When the first Jewish collaborator was shot in the Warsaw uprising was his last thought of finding a partner in peace, or were his thoughts of trying to find some semblance of harmony in an impossible situation. We face an impossible situation now, with options no less stark, just a hundred times more tangled than the black and white our leaders and spokesmen spout in their facile cliches.