Yet another UN school in Gaza has been hit by shell fire, and as usual, Israel immediately blames Hamas militants, stating that they were firing from the school. Each time the local UN officials have said there is absolutely no proof of this and that they have repeatedly given the Israeli military their coordinates and warned them that there are hundreds of refugees in their facilities.
How many times will Israel use this canard, I wonder? The world is not buying this. There are increasing calls that Israel be investigated for war crimes.
Sidebar for this Video:
UN school in Gaza hit by shells
Jan 17 - Palestinian death toll rises as Israel prepares to decide on a unilateral ceasefire.
At least another six Palestinians have been killed during a wave of Israeli raids on Gaza overnight. The casualties included two boys sheltering at a United Nations school hit by tank fire.
Paul Chapman reports.
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Independent.co.uk
UN condemns shelling of Gaza school
Saturday, 17 January 2009
A United Nations official has condemned an Israeli shelling attack that struck a UN school in the northern Gaza Strip and killed two people.
Spokesman Chris Gunness said the school was crowded with 1,600 people who had sought shelter from Israel's three-week offensive in Gaza.
It was latest incident in which Israeli fire aimed at militants has struck a UN facility during the offensive. Gunness says Israel had the coordinates of the school and knew it was being used as a shelter. He says there should be an investigation into possible war crimes, and that anyone who is guilty should be brought to justice.
The military was investigating the incident and had no immediate comment. But in similar cases, it has accused Hamas militants of staging attacks from schools, mosques and other civilian areas.
More than 1,150 Palestinians have been killed and 5,100 wounded since Israel began attacking Gaza on December 27 with an air blitz, and then moved in with ground forces a week later. A large majority of the dead are civilians.
Here are pictures being sent out of Gaza that the Western media are largely not picking up. In fact, in my own local paper, we are lucky to get more than one AP report a day, usually with no photos.
This video shows how extensive the attacks on children have been.
Zionism, for the few of you who do not know, was a concept created by certain European Jews back in the 19th Century to create a Jewish state in the territory of Palestine by emigration and force of arms if necessary, which resulted in the creation of the state of Israel in 1947/48. Zionism has become associated with Israeli colonialism and race ideology and is criticized by many other Jews.
We have been watching with horror the damage done to children by the Gaza assault, the mangled bodies, the rivers of tears, the traumatized faces, and we have to ask, how can the adults in this world perpetrate such horrors? Where is their humanity, or their shame? If they have none, then they have already consigned themselves to the Devil and will enjoy His tender mercies at the appointed time. But for the rest of us who are still human, do we have it in us to put a stop to the scourge of war that is destroying, not only the children of Palestine, but the children of Israel, of Sudan, Somalia, the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, to name a few? Only a higher identity, a belief in the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind, can end this madness.
To quote from this video's sidebar, first posted on the Internet some two years ago by IstiArief:
Song featured in Sami Yusuf's "My Ummah" album, done with english text of the lyrics.
I made this after watching Sami Yusuf and Isam on a concert together performing this song. They pointed out that this song speaks of any troubled children in the world, even if some lyrics explicitly point to the Palestinian struggle. All of the videos on this song that I saw on YouTube represent that particular struggle only. I'd like to return to the concept of the creators of the music, and try to incorporate all of the world's children's suffering-- this is my attempt at it.
Please rate it and tell me what you think-- constructive criticism is highly preferred over blind offense, and appreciation is always welcomed.
If you want to help, give your time or your earnings to causes you believe in. It's not how much you give, it's that you give.
This is my preference charity outlet that I trust, but you can choose your own: www.islamic-relief.com (International) www.irw.org (USA) - recipient of Four Star Charity by Charity Navigator
This is a song of love, compassion and solace for all the children of the world suffering from war, occupation, oppression and indifference.
Jesus said "Whatever you do to the least of these, you do unto me."
Hundreds of thousands of children have been slain, maimed, beaten, starved, abandoned, orphaned, sexually abused, expolited, enslaved, turned into child-soldiers, and on and on in just this year alone. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia, Sudan, to name some of the major conflicts, have been particularly gruesome for children. What does this translate into in the light of Christ's passage above?
The murder of Christ, relentlessly, daily, ghoulishly.
Some of the worst murderers of Christ are countries that pretend to be Christian, such as the United States, Great Britain, Ethiopia, which are, as I write, employing artillery strikes, air strikes and military engagements that inevitably hit civilian communities or random civilian victims, including children. Moreover, war creates circumstances that traumatize, terrorize and deprive children in these war zones of hope, health, education, and even food and shelter.
But the murder of Christ in the external world is but the result of the murder of Christ in each and every one of our internal worlds. A psychiatrist explained it to me once decades ago, how society takes every very young child, each of them a beautiful child of God, and begins to imprison that child behind bars of denigration, punishment, rejection and/or conditional love, entrapping the body in a coffin of repressed emotions, as the living essence within that child growing into an adolescent is met with painful prohibitions against being itself or expressing itself, including sexually ultimately, for sexuality connects one to Nature and the Cosmos in the most fundamental way. In a word, one becomes armored, armored against one's own feelings and emotions.
Eventually one grows into a socially adjusted and rigid mannequin of the State, to lesser or greater degree, going through the motions of living while actually feeling dead or alienated on the inside, quite divorced from the divinity within, the Christ-essence within. Having lost this core essence, it is an easy step to become a mechanistic automation of the State, nowhere more manifest than in the Armed Forces of a country, where this rigidity, this armoring, is taken to its ultimate extremity both physically and psychologically, where one is now expected to blindly kill, and kill, and kill when so ordered, creating actual rigor mortis in one's victims.
The opposite of the living Christ within us is death and contraction. A nation or people that actually worships war is a culture that worships the annihilation of the life force, a death culture, in a word.
The great psychosomatic pioneer, Wilhelm Reich, actually wrote a book on this subject, entitled The Murder of Christ. Counterpunch Online Magazine actually reprinted Chapter 14 of this profound work back in 2002, the chapter entitled Gethsemane. Here is an excerpt:
Christ is Life. And Christ was manhandled just as Life was manhandled long before him and long after the crucifixion and is still manhandled today.
And all his admirers fled and forsook him while he was captured, just as they all had fallen asleep again and again before he was taken and while he went through the agony of the innocent one in supreme distress.
And even his God seemed to have abandoned him. But Life within had not abandoned him. His Life within kept acting as Life acts, up till the last breath. And this is so because God is Life within and without. God did not abandon him at all, except as an image of misled men, corresponding to no reality.
Life had known who would deliver it to its enemies. It had known it for a very long time. It saw the traitor step up to it and kiss it on the cheek as he still said, " Master! "
And this, again, is the plague.
Christ's story has moved and stirred humanity to tears and sorrow and great art because it is humanity's own tragic story. Men are Christs and victims of the plague, helpless before their own courts and fleeing disciples and sleeping admirers and Judases kissing the Master with a kiss of death, and Marys who give Christ a forbidden, godly love, and deadened bodies that seek in vain God's sweetness in their frozen limbs, but never cease to sense his presence within and without themselves. Men, basically, in spite of all armoring and sin and hate and perversion, are living beings who cannot help but feel the Force of Life within themselves and without themselves.
Christ is Life, dying innocently for many millennia at the hands of a Life that had lost and could not restore God's ways, and therefore kept guarding the ancient laws with glowing, murderous eyes, and swords ready to kill whoever has lived God's life.
Christ is the infant tied down or filled with nuisance drugs until it vomits, not knowing why all is so terribly painful, and slowly settling down into a living death, to grow into a future murderer of Christ.
Christ is the agony of a boy or girl of four lying in his bed in the darkness, desperate because God is stirring in its little body, terrified that mother or father might come and yell or hit because the hands are not above the covers.
Christ is the nightmare of a suppressed God in God-made genitals in infants and children in the first puberty, returning from suppression as terror of ghosts and robbers with knives, and bleak shadows at the windows, as multiarmed octopuses and devils with glowing forks, and a fire burning in hell to engulf the little, poor souls jammed in between God's stirring in their bodies and the parents, the representatives of God on earth, who punish for feeling God in the limbs. This is the source of all sin punished in Dante's inferno, a man-made, madman's nightmare.
And the Judases are the educators and the councils for mental hygiene and the doctors and the priests who guard the entrance to the knowledge of God with threatening words and flaming swords. Did you ever think of how many billions of small children on this earth went through the nightmare of Christ at Gethsemane and Golgatha over the millennia? Did you? You did not. You were " social" and " good to your neighbors " and " liked your enemies like yourselves " and you sent prayers up to heaven for salvation and redemption of your soul, and you knelt before altars of many kinds to obtain forgiveness of your sins. But never, never did you think of the billions of babies and children who bring the very sap of God's fresh life from your endless universe into this miserable world of yours; and you maimed and punished and frightened these children, and do to this very day, for knowing God and living the Life of Christ. And you guard well every single entrance to the houses of knowledge against intrusion of the truth about these countless Murders of Christ committed by you and your appointed ones in the name of God.
And you, defender of the honor of God in some darkened room in some village in some country, don't you think right now, hard, of how you could get at the writer of such " blasphemies " and tar him and put feathers on his skin and put fire to the tar and feathers and make him run screaming with agony through the streets, a warning to every good citizen? You are doing this this very minute. But the times are against you. Some well-guarded gates at the entrances to some of the palaces of knowledge have been broken down and we begin to get an inkling of what has been committed in the name of God for such a horribly long time on so great a number of innocent little Christs, sons of Life and God.
The knowledge of God as the love in your body, which you persecute, is breaking down your guards at the entrance to paradise, which you yourself have put up in your dreams, and your obstruction of living Life on this earth.
You kept brooding over the riddle of the Murder of Christ for centuries and it is your failure to find the answer which revealed you as the true and only murderer of Christ. You kept hiding this well and for a long time. But not much longer will hiding be possible. (http://www.counterpunch.org/reicheaster.html)
This murder of Christ, or as Reich called it, the Emotional Plague, is the halmark of the modern patriarchal, authoritarian state, where only the external symbols of Christ can be worshipped, where the stirrings of Christ within are zealously guarded against by their Fundamentalist priestcraft, the watchdogs of formality, rigidity and alienation.
