Archive for September 2019
Speech for London Rally in Support of Palestinians’ Rights to Exist: Shahd Abusalama
Posted on: September 20, 2019
My Speech
Of Shahd Abusalama for London Rally in Support of Palestinians’ Rights to Exist, Resist and Return
During a #StopArmingIsrael protest during a week of action against DSEI arms fair in September 2017. Photo by David Dinis Photography
My name is Shahd Abusalama and I’m a 3rd generation Palestinian refugee, born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, northern Gaza.
I’m standing here with so many Palestinians, born in Palestine and in exile, to tell the “founding Zionists” of Israel who assumed that the old will die and the young will forget, that we will not forget Palestine, and we will never surrender our fundamental rights to exist, resist and return.
We stand representative of many indigenous communities who faced various forms of oppression across the history of European colonialism and imperialism, to remind the world that settler colonialism is not a culture of the past, but a current reality that we have lived and defied from America, Australia and Ireland to Palestine.
My grandmother described a peaceful childhood in green fields of citrus and olive trees in our village Beit-Jirja. This life, the tastes, the sounds and the smells remained fixated only in her memories as Beit Jirja was dismantled alongside other 530 villages and towns that were depopulated and destroyed by Zionist thugs in 1948.
For Palestinians, the Nakba was never a one-off event that happened in 1948. Israeli colonial oppression has never stopped and many Palestinian communities within Israel, including the people of Khan Al-Ahmar, are still fighting against their ethnic cleansing as we stand here.
My grandparents are present today more than ever as we mark the 71st anniversary of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, for what happened then is why I was born in Jabalia with a gun pointed at my head.
During my mother’s labour, Israeli soldiers disrupted her way to Jabalia UNRWA Clinic as they forced a curfew that indoctrinated to shoot any moving being. Shooting to kill was common in the 1st Intifada when I came to life, and is a common practice now.
We saw it in the shooting and maiming of Gaza’s Great Return March protesters who stood with their bare chests against Israeli snipers to claim their humanity and to bring their right of return, an issue that Israel firmly rejected across the past 7 decades on racist grounds, to the centre of political debate.
Their cries for justice come amidst US-Israeli attempts to push the right of return and Jerusalem “off the table”. It is time that we call those world leaders what they are: racist trolls. It is time to stand firm in our support of the Palestinian right of return, as without justice, there will be no meaningful peace.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip just survived another a 3-day deadly Israeli attack last weekend, which claimed 25 lives, including two pregnant women, two toddlers and a 12 year old child.
While world news was quick to move on after the truce was announced, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip returned to a daily struggle for survival while more deadly violence is expected at any moment. That’s how my family welcomed Ramadan. Following the truce, I heard my parents calling relatives and friends and saying, “glad you survived” before continuing “Ramadan Kareem”.
Imagine living in an open-air prison where there is constant presence of death, and fear of walls falling inwards. This fear of being uncertain about anything, including your own life, even while in your home, is terrifying. This is what 2 million people faced last weekend as they are besieged by Israeli weaponry from air, land and sea, turning Gaza into a laboratory for its lethal arms, which Israel markets as ‘battle-tested’ in notorious arms fairs around the world, such as DSEI which London is hosting again this year.
It is not a coincidence that Gaza comes under attack during Israeli elections over and over again. Those elections are led by criminals using Palestinian children’s blood to win popular support.
Meanwhile, the world is about to celebrate Eurovision in Israeli Apartheid on top of an ethnically-cleansed Palestinian land, a show whose whole purpose is to expose Israel’s ‘prettier face’ while deflecting global attention from its daily crimes against the Palestinians. Shame on all contestant countries, all the participants and audiences if they still support Eurovision in Israel while our victims’ blood haven’t dried.
This is nothing new. This is our decades-long lived experience that is normalized by a dominant media discourse that finds it comfortable to avoid addressing the power imbalance between the occupier and the occupied, to remove the context of settler colonialism and reduce it to conflict, effectively demonizing Palestinians and their legitimate struggle against their systematic dehumanization.
Our injustice is also normalized by tax payers whose money is paid as military ‘aid’ for Israel, by politicians who suddenly fall short on words of condemnation once the perpetrator is Israel, by international institutions doing business with Israel or corporations that enable Israeli crimes, by Muslims of the world who normalize relations with Israel and buy Israeli dates merged with our pains of loss and dispossession, by Zionist Jews and Christians who support the uninterrupted process of ethnic cleansing against the native people of the ‘promised land’ in the name of God.
The best response to such brutality and normalisation is active solidarity!
We have a beautiful demonstration of solidarity today with thousands uniting from different races, religions, genders, professions and cities, to say: we’re not turning our back to the Palestinian people. We know too well that whether Palestine on news headlines or not, Israel is perpetrating violence uninterruptedly.
Every minute, innocent souls are buried, and building that took a lifetime to build are flattened. It is urgent that people of conscience all over the world join in solidarity and resist the collusion of their governments and institutions in this long-standing crime against humanity.
Al Houla Massacre: From artist perspective
BEIRUT — In the aftermath of the killings of 108 people in the Syrian town of Houla, most of them women and children, Arab artists are starting to produce art to reflect on the massacre that has horrified the world.
For days, Syrian painter Heba Akkad said she could only think about Houla.
“I really tried to paint something else but I couldn’t,” Akkad said. Her piece, “Night in al-Houla,” uses a bit of red, a color not often used in her work, and contains faces of people from the town.
“When the piece was exhibited in one of the galleries in Amman few days ago, a woman came by and told me, ‘You should paint something more cheerful.’ I was in shock.
How can you paint something more cheerful hearing the news from Syria?” Akkad asked.
While Akkad pulled out her paintbrushes, a Jordanian Palestinian hip-hop artist named El-Far3i wrote a song called “Birds of Houla” on a sleepless night.
“I couldn’t stand my silence and the world’s silence,” he wrote on Soundcloud, a website for music uploads.
Both artists focus on children in their works, reflecting the mass outrage at the slaying of youth.
Akkad depicts the face of a child while El-Far3i raps: “Tonight, the smell of blood coming from the north is torturing me / Tonight, children of Gaza and Houla will play together / But I feel that from heaven / Their eyes are observing me / the observers, shabiha, and envoys.”
Shabiha are armed militias loyal to the government, believed by the U.N. peacekeeping chief to have been behind most of the Houla killings.
The Syrian government says its own investigation has found that armed rebels were to blame for the deaths, a finding a U.S. diplomat called a “blatant lie.”
Note: In the first 2 years, the Syrian regime might have bombed extensively the “rebellious towns”. Later on, they were the extremist ISIS and Al Nusra that did all the horror calamities.
For the record, 10:45 a.m. June 5: A previous version of this post incorrectly gave artist Heba Akkad’s first name as Heb.
ALSO:
Parents renew calls for justice in Mexico daycare fire of 2009
— Rima Marrouch
Image: “Night in al-Houla” by Heba Akkad
A scene from the Egyptian movie Avocato (Lawyer): the comic actor Adel Imam
Posted on: September 16, 2019
A scene from the Egyptian movie Avocato (Lawyer): the comic actor Adel Imam
Don’t you see me going to jail? Isn’t it proof enough that I am innocent?
Mualaa Ali Mualaa shared a post.
مشهد جامد جدا من فيلم الأفوكاتو … مش شايفني رايح على السجين يبقى كسبت القضية
====================
– فتحت الجلسة؛ إتفضل يا أستاذ قضيتك نمرة 35 و عندنا 175 قضية في الروول .
= بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم؛ سيدي الرئيس حضرات المستشارين، ان القضية التي أمامنا قضية بسيطة جدا و واضحة تماماً، فالمتهم ضبط و هو يتاجر بالعملة الصعبة، و الادلة ثابتة و السجن مصيره لامحالة!
*الله يخرب بيتك يا استاذ.
= ولكن و لتسمح عدالة المحكمة أن أبين بعض النقاط قد تكون خافية على العامة و لكنها بالطبع لاتخفى على سيادتكم؛ هل من العدالة أن نعاقب متهم على جريمة نحن نرتكبها جميعا ؟ أنا لن أتكلم عن الحكومة..
– بقولك إيه : إصطبح و قول يا صبح.
= سيادة الرئيس أنا بقول لن أتكلم عن الحكومة.. فالحكـومة عندنا…
– ياحسن !!
= سيادة الرئيس أرجوا من عدالتكم أنها تسمحلي اني اكمل مرافعتي.
– إتفضل… إتفضل ياسي حسن !
= فالحكومة عندنا تتاجر في السوق السوداء للعملة.
– يا حسن!
= سيادة الرئيـس أنا معايا أدلة..
– خلصنا يا حسن .
= الي انا عاوز اقوله يا سيادة الرئيــس إنه الحكومة بتاعتنا حكومة رشيدة.. حكومة رشيدة حقا! بتجع الفلوس و العملة الصعبة من السوق السودة من أجل مصلحة هذا البلد.. ومن منا ضد مصلحة هذا البلد؟ هاء؟ لاأحد.. بما فيهم هذا المتهم؛
ولكن أيضا من منا لا يتعامل بالعملة الصعبة؟ اني اريد ان اقول يا سيادة الرئيـس : من في هذه القاعـة لا يتعامل بالدولار؟! القضية أيها السادة تحتاج إلى ظمير أكثر من حاجتها إلى قانون، تحتاج إلى روح العدالة أكثر من حاجتها لتفسيرات محكمة النقض.. سيادتك عندك ثلاجة 16 قدم ؟!!
– أيوه !
= جبت الدولارات بتاعتها منين ؟
– من الزمالك .
= و حضرتك ؟
– من العجوزة .
= و سيادتك ؟
– ألفت كتاب في الكويت و دفعولي ثمنه هناك.
= و هربت من الضرايب ! و هكذا يأتي السؤال أيها السادة : إذا كان رب الدار بالدف ضاربا فلماذا لا يرقص أهل البيت ؟ موكلي كان يرقص … و ليس هنالك قانون أيها السادة يمنع الرقص.. هل هنالك قانون يا حضرات المستشارين يمنع الرقص ؟!
– إنتَ قليل الأدب !
– أنا بهرب من الضرايب ياحسن إنت عاوز توديني في داهية ؟
– حكـمة المحكمة ببرائة المتهم، و حبس المحامي لمدة شهر؛ رفعت الجلسة !
Adonis Diaries 