Daily Archives: December 22, 2014

Afghanistan Women Poets

Afghan Women’s Writing Project | Violence Can Never Bring Peace

Violence Can Never Bring Peace

December 22, 2014 Leave a Comment

I don’t know the earth beneath me.

Is this ground meant only to be my bloody grave?

I feel helpless.

I wonder who is God?

I wonder if this land exists

Just as a place for cruelty or destruction.

Violence can never bring peace.

No terrorist can teach me who is God!

The way to Paradise is not through killing,

Blood and ignorance.

Taliban, you make my body a shell—empty from the inside.

I feel helpless.

I don’t know the earth beneath me.

Is this ground meant only to be my bloody grave?

Why can’t we grow flowers there instead?

By Pari

via Afghan Women’s Writing Project | Violence Can Never Bring Peace.

Fail!, Just strange, racism

Richard Mack Announces Plan to Take Over Arizona’s Navajo County as a “Constitutional” Haven | Hatewatch

Richard Mack, the leader of the so-called “Constitutional sheriffs” movement and a longtime figure in the antigovernment “Patriot” movement, made a somewhat startling announcement near the end of his speech Saturday December 13 to the gathering of fellow gun-rights enthusiasts at the “We Will Not Comply” rally in Olympia, Wash.

via Richard Mack Announces Plan to Take Over Arizona’s Navajo County as a “Constitutional” Haven | Hatewatch.

Fail!, Gun-violence, human rights, immigration

Record numbers at German anti-Islam rally | News | DW.DE | 22.12.2014

German society and the political establishment has for weeks grappled with the emergence of the “Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident,” or PEGIDA, whose ranks in the city of Dresden have quickly grown from just a few hundred in October.

Around 4,000 counter-demonstrators marched through Dresden under the slogan “Nazi-free,” warning there was no place for racism and xenophobia in a country marred by racial hatred during World War II.

Most PEGIDA followers insisted they had no connection to Nazis, calling themselves “patriots” concerned by the “watering down” of Germany’s Christian-rooted culture and traditions. They often accuse mainstream political parties of betraying them, and the media of lying.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), called Monday for citizens to launch a “rebellion of the decent” against the anti-foreigner movement, telling a weekly magazine “that’s the kind of public reaction we need now.”

via Record numbers at German anti-Islam rally | News | DW.DE | 22.12.2014.

Apartheid, Fail!, Gun-violence, human rights

Two NYPD cops get killed and ‘wartime’ police blame the protesters. Have we learned nothing? | Steven W Thrasher | Comment is free | The Guardian

Six years ago, I went for a run in New York City. I’d left my watch and phone at home, so when I saw two NYPD cops on a corner, I stopped and said, “Excuse me, officers, can you tell me the time?”

One officer reached for his gun, pulled it out of his holster, and – when he saw the terror in my eyes – started laughing.

“Just kidding,” the white cop said as he put away his gun. “Gotcha!”

He didn’t kill me, obviously. But I was going to die. What little faith I had in the most powerful police force in America died in that moment, too. I felt “social death” in the humiliation and shame of being too frightened to go back and get his badge number. I felt powerless when I tried to report the cop’s threat to a civilian accountability board and was told there was nothing they could do.

via Two NYPD cops get killed and ‘wartime’ police blame the protesters. Have we learned nothing? | Steven W Thrasher | Comment is free | The Guardian.