Attack on Freedom: Activists to Take Spain to ECHR Over ‘Gag Law’
Sputnik – 14.12.2015
A group of lawyers and journalists are taking Spain to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over the country’s controversial “gag law,” which activists say is an attack on freedom of speech and information rights.
The coalition of activists, known as ‘Defender a quien defiende’ (DqD) launched a triple lawsuit with the ECHR, calling for the immediate repeal of the law.
The highly controversial Citizen Security Law, dubbed the ‘gag law’ by critics, was passed by the governing Popular Party (PP) earlier this year and came into action in July, despite widespread protests and demonstrations.
DqD has labeled the law “authoritarian,” with critics arguing that it restricts the right to legitimate protest and allows authorities to harshly crack down on any form of anti-government demonstration.
Under the law, the vague description of “disrespecting a police officer” can attract a fine of US$662 (€600), while those guilty of staging an “unauthorized protest” can be hit with financial penalties as high as US$662,000 (€600,000).
Many photojournalists have taken aim at the law, which also makes it illegal to photograph a police officer, with many arguing that it severely affects their ability to do their job.
DqD argues that such provisions “violate” basic freedoms, expressions and the right to protest, in turn restricting journalists and photojournalists from subsequently sharing certain pieces of information with the public.
“They are particularly affected since the law jeopardizes their main function: to report on events of public relevance,” the lawsuit states.
Photojournalists are “obliged by police to stop filming or photographing police actions for fear of being penalized,” the lawsuit says, amid fears that it may allow instances of police misconduct to go undocumented and unreported.
The law has already attracted controversy since it came into effect in July after a man was fined US$662 (€600) for calling police “slackers” on social media.
In another controversial instance a woman was fined US$883 (€800) for taking a photo of a police car parked illegally in a disabled zone, however the fine was later scrapped.
The timing of the ECHR lawsuit, which is to be officially launched with a press conference on Tuesday, comes at a critical time for the ruling controversial Popular Party (PP) ahead of the country’s December 20 election.
All three major opposition parties have vowed to scrap the highly unpopular law if they win power, with some analysts saying the controversy around the matter could influence swing voters who remain undecided on who to vote for in the national election.
Rights group urges end to Dutch sale of ‘attack dogs’ to Israel
Ma’an -December 13, 2015
BETHLEHEM – A Palestinian animal rights group has called on the international community to pressure the Dutch government to halt the sale of “attack dogs” to Israel.
Said Ahmad Safi, Executive Director of the Palestinian Animal League, said in a statement that dogs exported by European countries — especially the Netherlands — have long been used by the Israeli military as “living, breathing weapons — leading to devastating injuries on many civilians.”
Palestinian human rights organization, Al Haq, has reportedly carried out attempts to sway the Dutch government to place a ban on the export of the dogs for such use.
“As a result of communication between Al Haq and the Dutch government, officials in the Netherlands have suggested that they will consider placing restrictions on the export of dogs to Israel, but no firm decision has been reached, nor has any action been taken to date,” PAL said in a statement.
The restrictions would join one of several placed by European countries on trade with Israel, the European Union most recently passing a decision to label products made in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Such measures are part of a boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS) pushed by activists and increasingly by politicians, in effort to place pressure on Israel to stop ongoing violations against Palestinians.
Bulgaria closes busy border crossing with Turkey
Press TV – December 13, 2015
Bulgaria has shut its busy border crossing with Turkey, which is known for notorious activities of human trafficking and smuggling.
The busy Bulgaria-Turkey border crossing at Kapitan Andreevo, which is an important point of entrance to the European Union, would remain closed until further notice.
The closure came after Bulgaria detained some 14 customs officials in an anti-corruption raid on Sunday.
“All customs officers from the morning shift, who control the entries into Bulgaria at the Kapitan Andreevo (border checkpoint) were detained within a probe against contraband,” Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) quoted Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor Sotir Tsatsarov as saying.
“We apologize to travelers” over the closure, the prosecutor added.
Media reports indicated that a queue of a dozen kilometers long of trucks, waiting to enter Bulgaria, had formed on the Turkish side.
According to Tsatsarov, State Agency for National Security (SANS) conducted about 100 raids in five towns close to the border.
Kapitan Andreevo is the largest and busiest border checkpoint in the Balkans. The crossing is also considered a major crossing point on the route between Europe and the Middle East.
In recent years, Bulgaria has deported hundreds of refugees at its border with Turkey as the poorest country of the European Union grapples with a sharp rise in the number of refugees from non-EU states.
The developments also come as European countries reportedly remain divided over how to deal with refugees, most of whom are fleeing conflict-hit zones in the Middle East and Africa.
The influx of asylum seekers into Europe has sparked pro- and anti-refugee sentiments across the continent.
Leader of several Balkan countries have repeatedly threatened to shut their borders if their northern European Union neighbors refuse to accept refugees.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov recently announced that Balkan nations desired a Europe-wide solution to the crisis, but would not become a “buffer zone” for the tens of thousands of newly-arriving refugees.
Sofia has already started mobilizing hundreds of forces to its border with Turkey to stop trespassing refugees amid ongoing measures elsewhere across Europe to counter the influx.
According to the recent figures released by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), over 924,140 refugees have reached Europe’s shores so far this year while more than 3,670 people have either died or gone missing in their perilous journey to the continent.
Thousands gather in Montenegro capital to protest NATO membership
RT | December 13, 2015
Shortly after Montenegro’s bid to join the North Atlantic Alliance was given the green light, thousands flooded the streets of the capital to protest the upcoming membership and remind people of lives taken during the NATO invasion of 1999.
Former Montenegrin President Momir Bulatovic and opposition leaders called the rally on Saturday in Montenegro’s capital, Podgorica. They gathered at least 5,000 supporters outside the parliament, according to the local Vijesti newspaper. The protesters held national flags while patriotic and pro-Russian chants rang out from the assembled crowd.
Bulatovic, who was also prime minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1998 to 2000, told the rally that joining NATO would mean the “blood of innocent people on our hands,” and emphasized his country had been against the alliance’s wars until recently.
“What has Afghanistan done wrong, what has Iraq done wrong? Why has Libya been destroyed, what’s happening today in Syria? Can we close our eyes to that?” he said.
He added that Montenegro’s ascension into NATO is strange, because “in 1999 NATO attacked Yugoslavia [and] bombs fell on Montenegro as well.”
“It’s impossible to erase such [actions] with an apology,” he said as quoted by Sputnik, adding that by letting his country in, NATO simply wants to have “a few more soldiers against Russia.”
The protesters chanted “Russia” as well as “NATO Murderers” in reference to NATO’s war in 1999 against the former Yugoslavia, which took the lives of many civilians in the alliance’s nationwide bombing raids against what were called military targets.
© Ruptly
One of the placards raised by the protesters showed the faces of six civilians – including children – who died in NATO’s airstrike on the small Montenegrin village of Murino in May 1999. The village had no military significance, nor did it host any troops at that time. The bombing added further to the so-called “collateral damage” log of NATO’s war against the former Yugoslavia. No official apology or inquiry followed that incident.
Montenegro was offered NATO membership at the alliance’s summit on December 2. It was pushed forward by the current pro-Western President Milo Djukanovic. Montenegro remained part of a union with Serbia until 2006 and has since been actively integrating in EU and NATO structures. According to recent polling by the Podgorica-based Center for Democracy and Human Rights, 37 percent of surveyed Montenegrins oppose NATO membership, with 36 percent welcoming it. The country is home to 600,000 people.
Another anti-NATO protest took place in Montenegro’s capital earlier in October, involving as many 5,000 people who clashed with police after demanding President Djukanovic step down due to his pro-alliance stance.
EU suggests Moscow cut Kiev ‘good friend’ debt rate
RT | December 10, 2015
Russia should show some good will and offer Ukraine a “good friend” rate on its $3 billion debt, suggests EU Ambassador Vygaudas Usackas.
When asked during a Wednesday radio interview, if showing good will implies allowing Kiev not to pay its sovereign debts, the ambassador was ambiguous.
“No, you have to pay the debts. Of course. But sometimes, like good friends, sometimes we have to write off. Therefore, we have made the proposal and agreed to write off 20 percent of Ukraine’s debts. I personally think that it would also be good will from Russia to follow the example of the EU and the US,” Usackas told Vesti FM.
In November, Moscow offered Kiev a three-year installment plan that included no payment this year, and three €1 billion payments in 2016, 2017 and 2018. In exchange for the offer, Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded guarantees from the US, the EU and international financial organizations. Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said this week Ukraine’s Western partners have refused to provide such guarantees.
Commenting, Usackas said the EU and the US have made a 20 percent debt write-off and postponed the payout date by four years and that Russia hasn’t agreed to those terms.
The interviewer asked why the International Monetary Fund so easily changed its lending rules for Ukraine and promised to continue bankrolling Kiev despite the possible non-payment of sovereign debt to Russia, and why Greece, as an EU member, doesn’t get the same privilege.
“This is our business,” replied the EU ambassador, adding that the loans given to Greece are much bigger.
Ukraine’s debt to Russia is due December 20. Moscow has warned Kiev it will file a lawsuit if it fails to pay after a 10-day grace period expires.
EU Member of Parliament: NATO Seeks Ways to Shut RT Down
teleSUR – December 10, 2015
A Spanish member of the European Parliament accused NATO Thursday of openly saying they need to stop Russia Today from continuing their news coverage and operations in general.
“The greatest military in the world, NATO, allows itself to speak in Wales that RT needs to be stopped,” lawmaker from the United Left party of Spain, Javier Cuoso, said during RT’s 10th anniversary celebrations.
The move is likely to lead to further deterioration in NATO’s relations with Russia, which sees the alliance’s expansion eastward as a threat to its national security.
NATO broke off official contact with Russia in April last year over the Ukrainian conflict; NATO accuses Moscow of supporting the rebels there who took over the [Donbas] region and declared reunification with Russia.
Is Germany Bowing to US Pressure by Joining Syria Campaign?
Sputnik – 05.12.2015
The German parliament (Bundestag) has approved launching a military campaign against the Daesh terrorist organization in Syria in a decision some analysts believe was made under strong pressure from Washington.
The German campaign against Daesh is initially planned through December 31, 2016, and will cost the Germans approximately 134 million euros and include up to 1,200 servicemen.
Germany plans to send up to six Tornado surveillance aircraft to Syria and a frigate to support the French Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier deployed in the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen warned that the operation would be “complicated and risky” and that Germany would not share Syrian flight plans with Russia.
Being a member of the US-led coalition against Daesh, Berlin has so far provided only logistical and technical assistance to the international alliance, refraining from participation in the coalition’s airstrikes.
Nikolai Dimlevich, a Moscow-based political analyst, told Sputnik Radio that the decision came under strong pressure from the US.
“Russia, together with Iraq, Iran and Syria, has built a coalition against Daesh and is fighting the terrorists fully in line with international law. Trying the win back the initiative, the Americans are actually forcing their Western European allies to join their coalition [which, unlike Russia, never received any official invitation by the Syrian government.]”
“This is a serious violation of international law and the UN Security Council should do something about it because this creates a very dangerous precedent for others to follow,” Dimlevich said, adding that the German participation was intended to serve as a smokescreen for America’s true intentions in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
“This gives Washington a chance to tell the world that all leading European powers are taking part in the ‘US-led war on terror’ and that breaking international law is a normal thing,” the analyst told Sputnik Radio.
“America is thus assuming the role of a global policeman who feels free to change governments all across the Middle East,” Nikolai Dimlevich said in conclusion.
War Returns to Ukraine
Tensions escalate as Ukraine tries to regain international attention diverted by Syria
By Alexander Mercouris | Russia Insider | November 29, 2015
Whilst all eyes are on Syria there has been a steady deterioration of the situation in Ukraine.
In violation of the ceasefire, shelling of the territories of the two people’s republics has resumed, and the OSCE has confirmed that the Ukrainian military has moved heavy weapons back to the contact line.
The Ukrainians meanwhile have extended their ban of commercial flights to and from Russia by also banning transit flights.
Ukraine has placed Crimea under a food blockade. To the intense embarrassment of its Western backers (see this editorial in the Financial Times, headlined “Kiev should act to end the blockade of Crimea”) it has enlarged this to an energy blockade.
Ukraine claims the power lines to Crimea were destroyed by Crimean Tatar “activists” backed by Right Sector.
Even if this were true, the Ukrainian authorities have done little or nothing to take control of the situation, arrest and punish those responsible for what was after all an act of criminal damage, or carry out the necessary repairs.
Characteristically most Western governments have said nothing, save that there has been some muted criticism from Germany.
Contrast this silence with the furious – and wrong – accusations regularly made in the West against Russia for its supposed use of energy as a political weapon.
All of this is happening to a drumbeat of demands in the Ukrainian media for the country to renounce the Minsk II agreement.
The Russians for their part have responded by stopping coal supplies to Ukraine. Since Ukraine is again failing to pay for its gas, it seems the Russians intend to stop supplying Ukraine with gas on Tuesday.
The two people’s republics have also announced they are stopping their own coal deliveries to Ukraine.
These steps increase the prospects of severe power shortages in Ukraine during what is predicted to be a harsh winter.
The Russians are also due in January to impose sanctions on Ukrainian food imports to Russia. This is in retaliation to Ukraine joining EU sanctions against Russia, and imposing sanctions of its own.
Bizarrely, this systematic severing of trade links with Russia is being hailed in parts of the Western media as proof Ukraine is “successfully reorienting” its trade to the EU and away from Russia, and is becoming “less dependent” on Russia. This of course takes no account of the damage these actions are doing to Ukraine’s economy.
There has also been an orchestrated attempt in recent weeks on the part of some sections of the Western media to talk up Ukraine’s economic situation, with claims that it is “stabilizing”. The US credit agency Moody’s has joined in the game by upgrading Ukraine’s credit rating.
To the very limited extent this is true, it is wholly the consequence of the August ceasefire, which stopped the drain of fighting the war on the civilian economy.
The actions the Ukrainian government and “activists” have been taking over the last few weeks puts this in jeopardy.
What is causing this sudden deterioration in the situation?
At its simplest, it is growing alarm in Ukraine that Western – especially European – support for Ukraine is flagging.
It is now widely accepted that Merkel and Obama are becoming increasingly isolated in their insistence that the sanctions against Russia be extended.
In France Nicholas Sarkozy, Hollande’s likely conservative opponent at the Presidential election, has clearly signaled his opposition to sanctions, aligning himself on this issue with Marine Le Pen.
More to the point, in Germany, Merkel’s coalition partners – the SPD and the CSU – are both becoming openly critical of a sanctions policy with which one senses they both privately always disagreed.
Russia Insider has already discussed the increasingly rebellious line being taken by Sigmar Gabriel, the SPD’s leader and Germany’s Vice Chancellor.
Possibly even more important is the call from Horst Seehofer, leader of the CSU – the CDU’s right wing coalition partner in Merkel’s coalition – for a rapprochement with Russia.
Whilst Seehofer’s comments seem to have been specifically triggered by the migrant crisis and the conflict in Syria, their tone suggests a wider rapprochement.
Interestingly, Seehofer has been forging increasingly close links in recent weeks with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban – a bete noir in Washington – who is known to be a strong advocate of good relations between Europe and Russia.
Back in September – as the migrant crisis was starting to spiral out of control – Orban made another call for a new relationship between Europe and Russia. Significantly he did this straight after a meeting with Seehofer.
The mounting opposition in Europe to the sanctions is being picked up by the “realists” in the US.
Russia Insider recently republished an article in The National Interest – the main publication in which the US foreign policy “realists” express their views – which should be read as a call to the Obama administration to take the lead in diplomatic discussions with Moscow before the sanctions regime collapses, leaving the US looking isolated and humiliated.
A number of our readers misunderstood this article, taking literally its ritual claims about the sanctions’ effectiveness and Putin’s supposedly “desperate situation”.
The sad truth about policy debate in the US today is that it cannot admit defeat, so that even when it retreats it has to claim “victory”.
The key point about the article in The National Interest is not what it says about Putin and Russia.
It is its call for the US to initiate diplomatic negotiations with Moscow to find a face-saving way to end the sanctions before Europe splits away and they fall apart.
The gradual shift towards an improvement in relations with Russia began before Russia’s intervention in Syria.
In fact it has been underway ever since the Minsk II agreement was reached in February. We have discussed the process at length in various articles here on Russia Insider.
However the Russian intervention in Syria and the Paris attacks have markedly accelerated the process, with Western public opinion showing increasing signs of backing Russia.
All of this is causing in Ukraine growing alarm. The Ukrainians must be seething as international attention is refocusing away from them, and as Russia shows signs of winning over Western public opinion to its side.
The consistent response of the Maidan movement whenever it senses it is losing is to double down and escalate and that is what we are now seeing.
A way to rationalise it would be to say that the Ukrainians are trying to provoke Russia into an overreaction, so as to reignite the conflict in order to shore up Western support and get the sanctions – due for renewal in December – extended.
Though this is at a certain level true, it seriously underestimates the purely visceral aspect in Ukrainian behaviour.
For the Maidan movement any sign Russia is gaining credit with the Western public is like a red rag to a bull. There is no need to look for calculation in Ukrainian behaviour in order to understand it.
The underlying problem – as we have said many times – is that the Maidan movement is inherently incapable of the sort of compromise that Minsk II envisages.
To see how that is so, consider what has happened since the October summit in Paris where the Europeans in effect ordered Poroshenko to implement Minsk II within a revised timetable.
The Ukrainians have done nothing of the sort, and the new timetable for carrying out the terms of Minsk II is already slipping.
Any discussion of the internal aspect of the Ukrainian conflict – as opposed to its external aspect – has to proceed from the fact that the present Ukrainian government is simply incapable of compromise unless overwhelming external pressure is brought upon it.
The Russians long ago grasped this. Over the last few weeks there are clear signs the Europeans belatedly are starting to grasp it as well.
The question that remains is for how much longer the Europeans will be prepared to go on making their relations with Russia hostage to the ideological obsessions of the Maidan movement and its neocon supporters.
The mounting evidence – judging from comments by people like Sigmar Gabriel and Horst Seehofer in Germany, Sarkozy in France, and from what happened during the summit in Paris – is that European patience is wearing thin.
Terrorism, tyranny and the end of freedom
By Sam Gerrans | RT | November 27, 2015
Are the powers-that-be using crises such as recent events in Paris to drive through a tyrannical agenda?
Rahm Emanuel – Obama’s former Chief of Staff – once famously said “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste – it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before”.
He was not saying anything new. He was simply rehashing something self-evident to those who deal in strategy rather than hysteria, and passing off as his own something said years before by Churchill.
Today, the world is hysterical about the recent serious crisis in Paris.
Naturally, these terrorist actions are tragedies for those individually impacted by them. But strategically, they are opportunities for “things you think you could not do before.”
A substantial minority of people have now got the point that since “a serious crisis” is so useful to those who rule us, our rulers will not only sit around waiting for things to happen which they can use, they will also initiate such things.
It was the events in New York on 9/11 – in which the laws of physics were apparently suspended – which allowed the Patriot Act to be pushed through and the Plan for a New American Century to be enacted.
But it took several years before opinions unencumbered by official propaganda percolated through society.
Due to the proliferation of social media, that same process of dissemination and cross-pollination of cynicism towards the official version of events was in full sway only a matter of minutes after the Paris bombings were announced.
And while the larger portion of the herd is running about crying out for someone to save it and the architects of policy are calmly ramming through their agenda, the new challenge is how to clamp down on dissent from media orthodoxy.
So what’s coming down the pike?
First off: boarder crackdowns. The Guardian recently noted that: “EU interior and justice ministers are to meet in Brussels where they will discuss tightening checks on all travelers at the external borders of the 26-nation Schengen zone as an emergency measure.
“Cazeneuve called on his fellow ministers to agree on a Europe-wide passenger information register, improved controls along Europe’s external borders, and better coordination against arms trafficking.”
“France has been calling for these measures for more than 18 months, and some progress has been made,” he said. “But it is not fast enough, and it does not go far enough … Everyone must understand Europe has to organize, recover, defend itself against the terrorist threat.”
The Independent informs us that EU ministers (i.e. those bureaucrats none of us voted for and whose power structure mirrors that of the Soviet Union’s Politbureau) are considering setting up their own “CIA-style intelligence agency”.
The current stampede will also help push through other items already openly on the agenda.
In the UK, for example, the government is busy enacting a bill to give police access to everyone’s entire internet history.
Richard Berry, the National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesman for data communications, told the newspaper: “We essentially need the ‘who, where, when and what’ of any communication – who initiated it, where were they and when it happened.”
In short: the police want access to your entire life.
Where this is going is total surveillance, general suspicion, and the removal of the velvet glove from the hand of power to reveal the iron fist which was there all along – all served up in the form of a palliative citing the need to protect us from an outside threat.
From Nero to Bush, nothing changes – except who benefits.
So who does benefit?
Western media are intractably incurious on such questions, barely daring to stray beyond the prescribed narrative and sternly serving up Pentagon press releases as news.
A notable exception is political journalist and author Gearóid Ó Colmáin.
Interviewed by RT, Ó Colmáin stated boldly what many have already surmised but had been denied a platform beyond social media to express.
The points Mr. Ó Colmáin makes include the fact that the war against Syria is orchestrated by NATO; that it has been conducting attacks against the civilian population of that country for four years now, and that this itself is a “terrorist campaign”.
He states that there is a worldwide war the object of which is to make the world’s population submit to a “global order” – a war which serves the interests of what he rightly calls a “tiny and particularly tyrannical ruling elite.”
He says: “There is no War on Terror. There is a war which is being waged using terrorist proxy groups and they are being used against nation states who are resisting U.S. and Israeli hegemony. And they are also being used as a means of disciplining the work forces in Europe. In a period of mass unemployment and austerity, you now have terrorist attacks being committed by terrorists funded, armed and trained by Western intelligence agencies. There is no such thing as ISIS. ISIS is a creation of the United States.”
Finally, someone tells it like it is.
The powers-that-be are going to try to shut people like Gearóid Ó Colmáin up. And they are going to use the very “terrorism” that Mr. Ó Colmáin accuses them of creating to do it.
By means of apparently supernatural prescience the UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron anticipated just such a problem.
In July, 2015, Cameron set out plans to deal with people who question the official line. He is particularly concerned to contain – and we assume later to criminalize – “ideas” which are “based on conspiracy”.
Cameron asserts: “In this warped worldview, such conclusions are reached – that 9/11 was actually inspired by Mossad to provoke the invasion of Afghanistan; that British security services knew about 7/7, but didn’t do anything about it because they wanted to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash.”
In the meantime – as the Independent informs us – France has declared a “state of emergency for three months, allowing authorities to shut down websites and giving police sweeping new powers.”
Those powers “include the ability to put people under house arrest without trial and to block websites.”
As Orwell tells us in 1984: “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
And the “ruling elite” Ó Colmáin refers to is in the process of conflating such revolutionary acts with “terrorism”.
While people at Mr. Cameron’s level and above understand perfectly well how power works, if those whose interests Cameron represents get their way, we the people are to be forced by law to believe the type of foolishness which benefits precisely those interests Ó Colmáin had the forthrightness to identify.
If facts are thought so fragile they need laws to enforce their acceptance, once they are enacted it is time to stop pretending we are free and face reality: We are living under tyranny.
Given the right “serious crisis” of the kind Mr. Emanuel so enthusiastically embraces, the herd can doubtless be stampeded over the cliff of any form of resistance to the political will to drive such new laws through. And once such a principle is accepted, there is no philosophical barrier to expanding it.
The loss of what we thought of as our rights will be achieved under the cloak of what works best: appeals to decency and reasonableness and the need to protect the innocent.
While men such as Ó Colmáin are working to awaken the people to the specter of open tyranny, history and experience are against him.
Gustave Le Bon in his seminal work on realpolitik, The Crowd (1895) wrote: “Whoever can supply them [the masses] with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
By that measure, Ó Colmáin will be thought a terrorist, and those who condemn him hailed as defenders of freedom.
Le Bon believed that the majority respects only tyranny and force and spurns freedom.
We are in the process of learning if he was right.
Sam Gerrans is an English writer, translator, support counselor and activist. He also has professional backgrounds in media, strategic communications and technology. He is driven by commitment to ultimate meaning, and focused on authentic approaches to revelation and realpolitik. He is the founder of Quranite.com – where the Qur’an is explored on the basis of reason rather than tradition – and offers both individual language training and personal support and counseling online at SkypeTalking.com.
Europe-based Forum calls for international pro-Palestine efforts
Palestine Information Center – November 27, 2015
BRUSSELS – The Palestinian Forum in Europe—Tawasol—on Thursday called on the world’s states and the European Union to take serious steps to put an end to Israel’s terrorism against the Palestinian people.
A statement issued by the Palestinian Forum in Europe on the occasion of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People condemned the dramatic surge in the Israeli crimes and violations of Palestinians’ human rights.
The group said a serious pro-Palestine standpoint should be opted for by the world’s governments to urge the Israeli occupation to abide by international legitimacy and withdraw from the occupied territories.
Head of the Tawasol Forum, Zaher Birawi, said a campaign is expected to kick off sometime soon to reach out to the world’s governments, parliaments and European MPs in order to mobilize support for the Palestinian cause.
The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is observed by the United Nations on or around 29 November each year, in accordance with General Assembly mandates contained in resolutions 32/40 B of 2 December 1977, 34/65 D of 12 December 1979, and subsequent resolutions adopted under agenda item “Question of Palestine.”
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From the Archives
Anti-science
The infinite list
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 12, 2022
Almost three years ago science entered a new dark age.
Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, seems to agree. He has been compiling a list of the examples of anti-science we have unfortunately become used to.
I have listed his thoughts so far but the list is continually expanding... continue
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