Sim-O

Manchester. 8th February 2007

Part One
Part Two

Part Three

Labels: Israel, Palestine

The Boycott Israeli Goods campaign is planning a mass picket of the depot on Saturday February 10th at 1pm in opposition to the sale of Israeli goods and in support of Palestinian farmers who are not able to market their goods internationally The aim is to draw attention to this company’s sale of flowers from occupied Palestinian land on Valentine’s day.

We are asking the British public not to buy blood stained flowers for their loved ones this year. Carmel Agrexco is the largest importer of illegal settlement goods into the UK. The Valentine’s day period is one of their busiest as the company deals with large amounts of fresh flowers from Israel and the settlements. In the UK Agrexco is known under the Carmel, Coral and Jaffa brands.

…The UK is the most important foreign market for Israeli fresh produce. Agrexco exports a wide range of produce to the UK including peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, herbs, spices, flowers and avocadoes. Agrexco is the largest exporter of settlement produce for sale overseas. Much of this produce comes from colonies in the Jordan Valley.

…The company persistently refuses to press charges against the activists because they are scared of having to prove the legality of their business in open court. This follows from actions of 11th November 2004, when Palestine-Solidarity protesters from London and Brighton were arrested after taking part in non-violent blockades outside the same company and 30 August 2006, when demonstrators blockaded the company for 11 hours and no arrests were made.

In September 2005, a Judge ruled that Agrexco (UK) must prove that their business is lawful. The acquittal of the seven activists before they were able to present their defence meant that the court did not have to rule on the legality of Agrexco-Carmel’s involvement in the supply of produce from illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In September 2006 protesters blockaded the company again, Carmel refused to have demonstrators arrested because this would have lead to another embarrassing court appearance where their business methods would have been investigated by a British court of law.

The Valentine’s day picket aims to expose this company’s complicity in murder, theft and damage of occupied land, collective punishment, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and other breaches of International Law to public scrutiny.
Link

Also, don’t conform to this day that the capitalists have invented to empty your pockets. Do you need to be told when to tell your loved one how you feel? Does buying a naff teddy bear or some flowers express what makes that person special to you?
Make it from the heart and not the wallet, then they really will know you love them.

Labels: Capitalism, Israel

Labels: Israel, Palestine

President Jacques Chirac has been forced into an embarrassing retreat after appearing to single-handedly change French policy by saying Iran’s possession of a nuclear bomb would not be “very dangerous”.

In remarks to journalists on Monday, M. Chirac added that if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel “it would not have gone off 200 metres into the atmosphere, before Tehran would be razed to the ground”.

After realising the impact of his remarks, which he believed to be “off the record”, the official transcript of the interview removed the comments and the journalists were summoned back to the Elysée the next day.
Link

A nuke, not dangerous? oh kaay.

Labels: Foot In Mouth, Weapons

Just reading Tim Irelands blog, Bloggerheads, and followed a link to here, Running From Camera:

The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.

It’s worth a look, both of them, especially as Tim currently has a bee in his bonnet about political blogging that, being of a simple mind (me, not him), I am following but would have trouble explaining, so to see what the fuss is about start here…

Labels: Odds and Sods

It’s surprising how we can demonise our enemies and rant and scream hysterically about how they behave so barbarically and how much better people we are, but then if you remove a couple of key words from some text, we could be describing, well, us or them??

In her first interview since the incident, [Miriam] Shear says that on the bus three weeks ago, she was slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women. The bus driver, in response to a media inquiry, denied that violence was used against her, but Shear’s account has been substantiated by an unrelated eyewitness on the bus who confirmed that she sustained an unprovoked “severe beating.”

Shear, an American-****** woman who currently lives in Canada, says that on a recent five-week vacation to ******, she rode the bus daily to the Old City to pray at sunrise. Though not defined by [bus company name] as a sex-segregated (********) bus, women usually sit in the back, while men sit in the front, as a matter of custom.

“Every two or three days, someone would tell me to sit in the back, sometimes politely and sometimes not,” she recalled this week in a telephone interview. “I was always polite and said ‘No. This is not a ******. I am not going to sit in the back.'”

But Shear, a 50-year-old religious woman, says that on the morning of the 24^th, a man got onto the bus and demanded her seat – even though there were a number of other seats available in the front of the bus.

“I said, I’m not moving and he said, ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.’ Then he spat in my face and at that point, I was in high adrenaline mode and called him a son-of-a-bitch, which I am not proud of. Then I spat back. At that point, he pushed me down and people on the bus were screaming that I was crazy. Four men surrounded me and slapped my face, punched me in the chest, pulled at my clothes, beat me, kicked me. My snood [hair covering] came off. I was fighting back and kicked one of the men in his privates. I will never forget the look on his face.”

Shear says that when she bent down in the aisle to retrieve her hair covering, “one of the men kicked me in the face. Thank God he missed my eye. I got up and punched him. I said, ‘I want my hair covering back’ but he wouldn’t give it to me, so I took his black hat and threw it in the aisle.”
Link

A petition is now being filed to try and prevent this happening again.
It isn’t going to be easy though.
Link

Labels: Israel

Labels: Christmas

Due to the arrival of my son & heir, I’ll be taking a break, so, er, just talk amongst yourselves for a while.

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Labels: Odds and Sods