Podcasting since 2004; Conversations, conflicts, adventures and monologues from around the world.
It was early July and she was invited to a camp in southern Lebanon. A very special camp. Many nations, cultures, religions, all gathered to work for one common goal. This is my friend Elise’s story of being at the camp as the bombs began to rain down on Lebanon.
No links, listening is all that’s necessary.
They’re coming.
They’re using planes as their method of transportation.
They leave from various US cities, often travelling alone or in groups of 2 or 3.
They travel with a great deal of electronics, mostly ipods, laptops, and other personal devices.
They are very well financed, with enough money to run their operations in Europe for at least 5 months.
They tend to look suspicious, easily identified by speaking loudly in their distinct accent.
And they will stop at nothing, until they can move into our neighborhoods, put up some posters of the icons their worship, and infiltrate our higher education system, posing as students.
… They are the American exchange students. And they arrive in T-Minus 9 hours.
My mission, which few would be brave enough to accept (I need the money and I’m mentally unbalanced), is to assist in this process. I must not show signs of weakness if they complain or make demands of me. I must be stoic and in control. Although they may be determined to disrupt my freedom and way of life, I must meet them head on, for my mission is noble and I will not give in to their desctructive, my-closet-isn’t-big-enough ideology.
Today I’m coming to you from the suburbs of Brussels, Belgium, where I’m staying this weekend in celebration of my godson’s 12th birthday. But now onto more serious matters:
I tend not to talk about US senate races and republicans versus democrats and crap like that. Mostly because there are a zillion blogs working for either party fulltime, so why bother further beating one very dead horse.
Yet for all the bla bla bla about this guy named Lieberman who is a disgrace of a human being even though all the haters voted for him oh-so-often, and how he was beaten thanks to the internets, you don’t hear much about one Jonathan Tasini. Even though he puts the small d back in democrat.
Honestly, I could care less if the democrats take back the senate or the house, as they are as guilty of being the architects of all the death, destruction, and decieving as their republican counterparts. But when it comes to upsurping the comfy two faced democrats who think they’re going to cruise to victory just for having the big D next to their names, I’m all for that.
But what I really wish is that more people took Jonathan Tasini seriously. Who you ask? Jonathan Tasini.. former leader of the National Writers Union, who is running against Hillary Clinton for the democratic nomination in the state of New York. It should be a “slam dunk” for Tasini, since he’s running against a senator who supported the war in Iraq, and has generally betrayed the principals of civil liberties, human rights, and international law, since the day she got into office. Hillary Clinton hasn’t respected democracy or the values of a real “Democratic” party since her early days as the first lady. She is fake as fake can be, and lets be honest, her speeches have that terrible tone like listening to someone scrape their nails against a blackboard.
Yet the bloggers aren’t talking much about Tasini’s challenge. They’re too scared to attack their most well known senator… everyone knows the name Hillary Clinton. So much for independence and the freedom to be critical on the blogosphere.
Therefore I’m delving into the senate races from now on, to give much deserved attention to senators who need to be sent packing. And I’ll be very busy, since an overwhelming majority need to be replaced.
The news reports indicate the that Taliban is alive and well in Afghanistan. Meanwhile life goes on, the militaries of various nations work in the country, and we are left wondering what is going on. In this program I speak with an Afghani translator for the US military, and ask him what changes he has seen.
No Links Today, interview speaks for itself.
Tomorrow is an insanely big day for interviews on the podcast. I’ve got three lined up. Two I’ll leave as a surprise, though I’ve mentioned them before. The other is the interview with a very interesting Afghani doctor who works with the US military in Afghanistan. Which means I need to get to sleep to be fresh and alert when I make that call first thing in the morning.
But before I go off to bed. Today I was catching up on Ha’Aretz articles from the past few days. I really appreciate the reporting in that paper, though Im sure some would scoff at its plethora of opinions and open criticism of the *gasp* Israeli government, which apparently not far from calapse, oddly enough.
In particular today, there is one article that embodies the rediculousness and the iron fisted destructiveness of the Israeli military actions in Gaza, which in theory they pulled out of a while back. This story was about the most modern power station in the middle east, which had been built by a cooperation involving Enron (haha). Back in June the Israeli military bombed the power station, effectively cutting off 60% of Gaza’s energy. The bombing was said to be in response to Hamas militants kidnapping the Israeli soldier. Either that or it was punishment for the citizens having elected Hamas. Even more bizarre, the remaining 40% of electricity for the terroritory is purchased from Israel!
Imagine. Your country/land is crippled by the very government you have to then turn to and pay for electricity which they in effect deprived you of to begin with. Must be a strange purchase to make, maybe no one looks anyone in the eye and they try to forget the exchange after its over.
Also according to the article, Israel could have paralyzed the station simply by withholding fuel; yet for some reason they chose to destroy it. And then we hear about governments blaming the Palestinian Authority for not having control over what people and militants do in their terroritory. They call them ineffective and use violence to inflict collective punishment. Then to add further insult, you had the western nations declaring sanctions against the Palestinian government, which then means they can’t pay the salaries of their employees and YES military. Who then get angry and desperate, and eventually resort to violence.
People always take the cop out and call it a big mess. Everyones fault, they’ll say. Makes it easier to talk about Israel and Palestine that way, you blame everyone and ignore it, that way no one can accuse you of taking sides and there’s no need to pay attention to facts.
Once again that quote I mentioned last week, comes to mind, “It is as if you cut off my arms, chop off my legs, throw me in the ocean, and then ask – why can’t you swim?”
Dear US and UK, please keep your terrorism paranoia to yourselves. We have quite enough of our own here in the Nertherlands.
Like a media sucker, I’m watching the news reports from the BBC. Amazing that they have news reports even though the have no information. They even tell the viewer they have no information. They then proceed to show you video footage of airplanes behind a fence and they invite experts to talk about how they don’t know anything either. Go to commercial, back to our wall street analyst in New York.
They arrested a bunch of people. I can already tell you why. The reason is: if you turn around a plane and scramble f16’s to guide it back to Amsterdam, then someone’s at least gotta get arrested. It’s the least they can do.
One of the girls on the plane was describing what she noticed on the flight, she said
“we were in the air, and some people noticed that a group of south asians were not paying attention to the flight attendants guidelines.”
If being uninterested and ignoring the flight attentant with the useless seatbelt overview is terrorism, than I’ve been terrorizing the skies since I was 12 years old.