By Jonathan Cook 15 September 2018 I rarely use this blog to tell readers what they should believe. Rather I try to indicate why it might be wise to distrust, at least without very good evidence, what those in power tell us we should believe. We have well-known sayings about power: “Knowledge is power”, and “Power tends to corrupt, while absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” These aphorisms resonate because they say something true about how we experience the world.
Behrouz Boochani photographed on Manus Island. Jason Garman/Amnesty International via AAP Omid Tofighian August 16, 2018 The Conversation The GM picks me up from the airport. I call him the GM because after the PNG Supreme Court ruled the Manus Island immigration detention centre illegal, this man was able to leave the prison and find work as the general manager of a lodge in Lorengau town. Behrouz Boochani has arranged for me to stay at that lodge.
A mural in Arabic that reads "no harassment" is seen on a wall in Cairo, Egypt, May 24, 2013. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar) The Nation, JANUARY 22, 2018 I helped protect women from assault during the protests—those experiences can benefit feminists all over the world. By Yasmin El-Rifae I wonder how many women were slow to engage with the Weinstein story and the #MeToo campaign that followed. I was. I’ve been writing about sexual violence for years, but I ignored the Weinstein story for several days.
WRITTEN BY STOP THE WAR ON 14 SEPTEMBER 2017. POSTED IN MUSIC AGAINST WAR Lyrics
This one is dedicated to the suit-wearing arms dealers To the champagne-sipping depleted uranium droppers Keep your hand on your gun Don't you trust anyone Keep your hand on your gun Don't you trust anyone First in my scope is BAE Systems Specialize in killing people from a distance Power is a drug and they feed the addiction Immediate deletion of people's existence Who says what is and what isn't legitimate resistance To push the buttons you don't need a brave heart State of the art darts leave more than your face scarred You might impress an A&R with your fake bars Cause you probably think Rolls Royce only make cars This is for the colonizers turned bomb-providers Take this beef all the way back to Oppenheimer They call it warfare but your wars aren't fair If they were there'd be suicide bombers in Arms Fairs Scam for the funds, they will mangle your son If you try to speak out they will stamp on your tongue To your land they will come till you stand up as one It's begun [Hook] Next in my scope is Lockheed Martin They will tell you when the bombs need blastin' Don't think, just listen to the songs, keep dancin' Do they really want us to have our own brains Who do you think is really running Guantanamo Bay And it might be sensitive but I'll mention it Who do you think has got us filling out the censuses Who do you think is handing out the sentences This ain't the BBC so there's no censorship Heard of many mercenaries gettin' with the clever pimp Not a gun seller but none's better than Erik Prince Make money off many things, mainly it's crime This one is dedicated to the Raytheon 9 Scam for the funds, they will mangle your son If you try to speak out they will stamp on your tongue To your land they will come till you stand up as one It's begun http://www.
Today marks the start of a new stage in the campaign for Alaa Abd El Fattah: 25 Days to #FreeAlaa There are two critical dates coming up that will determine whether Alaa is going to spend more years in prison or if there could be hope for his release. 30th of September: The defendants in the case known as ‘Insulting the Judiciary’ will be sentenced. If found guilty the sentence can be anything between a fine and further years in a maximum security prison.
More Walls Painted In 2016 Bahia Shehab started an international street campaign celebrating the work of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. The first intervention was in Vancouver-Canada. In February she sprayed the stanza “Stand at the corner of a dream and fight” in downtown Vancouver. Street expression is no longer tolerated in Cairo. Shehab finds that the work of Darwish is more relevant today with the current political atmosphere in most of the Arab World.
Omar Robert Hamilton Ibraaz, 4 July 2017 Archives are important. Control the past, and you shape the present. Throughout history archives have been a target and a tool of oppressive governments, invading armies and colonial administrators. The national archives in Egypt are kept as hidden from the public as possible, part of a wider project to divorce people from their own history and, therefore, their possibilities as political agents. Israeli armies plundered and erased as much Palestinian history as they could, looting archives from Jerusalem to Beirut.
A still from In the Last Days of the City, a proud requiem to Cairo which cannot be viewed there Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City documents life in the Egyptian capital over 10 years, but authorities have refused him a permit to show it Ruth Michaelson, Wednesday 12 July 2017
Ask a Cairo resident to describe the most frustrating thing about living in the Egyptian capital, and they will likely tell you about the noise, the chaotic streets and the proselytising taxi drivers.
Dr. Ian Alan Paul (Al-Quds Bard College, Abu Dis, Palestine) 9 June 2017 Martin Harris Building – JOHN CASKEN THEATRE The University of Manchester 14:00-16:00 Ian Alan Paul is a transdisciplinary artist, theorist, and curator. His practice encompasses experimental documentary, critical fiction, and media art, aiming to produce novel conditions for the exploration of contemporary politics and aesthetics in global contexts. His projects often incorporate digital/new media, performance, and installation, and are informed by prolonged engagements with continental philosophy and critical/queer/feminist theory.
Arwa Salih. The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student Movement Generation in Egypt. Trans. Samah Selim. London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, Forthcoming 2017. Translator’s Introduction[1] Arwa Salih was an Egyptian communist who came of political age in the early 1970s; in the aftermath of the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, the end of the Nasser era, and the beginning of Anwar Al-Sadat’s transitional regime. She belonged to the transformative political moment instigated by the radical student movement of that decade and the political generation known as ‘the generation of the seventies’.
