Notes on why Celtic Supporters Fly the Palestinian Flag.

Notes on why Celtic Supporters Fly the Palestinian Flag.

Epitaph on a Tyrant

W. H. Auden - 1907-1973

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

President Joe Biden offered some advice. Get the bad guys. And avoid the mistakes—he didn’t need to spell it out. President George W. Bush (junior) and his coterie of former oil men made after 9/11 when approximately 3000 Americans died. The Peter Principle suggests that people in a hierarchy rise to a level of respective incompetence. Even with the furthest outlier, the moron’s moron, President Trump, his political instinct for self-preservation at any cost would have proven correct. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor John F. Kennedy, no current or past American President could have survived politically without filling enough body bags to appease a jingoistic public stoked up by their national media for revenge.   

President George W. Bush (senior) had in the 1990s proposed a new world order. It was just a matter of rejigging the plan. David Armstrong (2002) Drafting a Plan for Global Dominance, showed that the war on defeating terrorism, the pre-emptive strikes of threatening and attacking other countries was a return to colonialism. In the words of Colin Powell: ‘I want [the United States] to be the bully on the block’.

Luis Enrique Meja Godoy (1945-) translated by Dinah Livingstone

Revenge.

My personal revenge will be your children’s

right to schooling and to flowers.

My personal revenge will be to give you

these hand you once ill-treated

with all their tenderness intact.

Iran would be the lesson to the world after Iraq. The domino effect was in place. Like Dr Strangelove, no limits. Syria, North Korea, even China were in play since the Cold War with Russia ended. The political dividend:  ‘Go massive, sweep it all up, related or not,’ was a memorandum Donald Rumsfeld had written to other neo-Conservatives in the then Reagan administration.  Saddam Hussein was an enemy of Islamic fundamentalism but had to be categorised as a different type of Islamic fundamentalist. But the same kind of terrorist. A threat to the Western world and America in particular.

Ferreydun Tavallah (1919—85)

Wretchedness.

My soul is bored of the repetition

                of days and nights,

My heart tired, my problems unsolved;

But still that bitter, black hope,

Like a broken dagger,

                remains at my breast…

 

Beware of my wretchedness, beware!

I am a man who makes love

                with the corpse of his dead hope.

The Iraqi link to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction could not hold. The link to Iran and Iraq and al-Quida and over 200 million Arabs was established in the American public mind by what George Orwell called the ‘five-minute hate’ and the logic of self-defence of American and Israeli interests. Like Martin Ford’s in The Rise of the Robots in which a rogue artificial intelligence takes over this world and other planets to produce the perfect paper clip, security can never be secure enough and calls of ever increasing resources would be needed to protect around five million Israelis.  

Pastor Martin Niemoller:

‘First they came for the Jew Palestinians

and I did not speak out –

because I was not a Jew Palestinian

Then they came for the communists

and I did not speak out-

because I was not a communist

Then they came for the Trade Unionist

and I did not speak out –

Edward W.Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and forced into exile 1948 from British Palestine. Covering Islam and Terrorism1997/2002, he notes the most effective propaganda was the most basic: men with beards. Mosques as a backdrop. The association between Islam and suicide bombers was, of course, men with beards coming out of Mosques. The rise of Isis in the devastation that was Iran—men with guns and beards—simplified what United Secretary of Defence termed the ‘known knowns’. All Arabs are terrorists and should be treated as such, unless they are part of an oil-rich kingdom like Qatar, who offered to act as mediators in the current conflict.

Seamus Heaney 1939—2013.  

Human being suffer,

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols

Beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

Stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

Faints at the funeral home.

 

History says, Don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longer for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up.

And hope and history rhyme.

 

So hope for a great sea-change

On the far side of revenge

Believe it is a further shore

Is reached from here

Believe in miracles

And cures and healing wells.

 

Call miracle self-healing:

The utter, self-revealing

Double-take of feeling

If there is fire in the mountain

Of lightening and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

 

That means someone is hearing

The outcry and the birth-cry

Of new life at its term.

The disposed like Said, the 750 000 who lost their homes and livelihood when Israel established its homeland, those in the West Bank and Gaza, have swelled in number. Around 2.1 potential terrorists in Gaza. Half of them women and children. 20 000 pregnant women being told to move from the North to the South of the open-air concentration camp they live in for their own safety.  

Charles Bukowski (1920—94)

War

war, war, war,

the yellow monster

the eater of mind

and body,

war,

the indescribable,

the pleasure of

the mad,

the final argument

of

ungrown men.

Said writes of the known knowns too. Before this terror, another, earlier Palestinian terror. The good bad old days. Water, food and electricity cut off.

‘But for all its horror, Palestinian violence the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people has been stripped of its context and the failure to see that it is a failure in humanity.’

‘…so remorseless has been the focus on the phenomenon apart, a pure, gratuitous evil that Israel, supposedly acting on behalf of pure good, has been virtuously battling in its variously appalling acts of disproportionate violence.

‘I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and got away with it

In the same way, Benjamin Netanyahu, who used his office of Prime Minister of Israel to keep him out of jail (Donald Trump did not create this model) and for personal gain has to react to the killings and kidnappings to survive politically. Not only for Hamas’s incursion into the State of Israel. But also the response time of six hours in which mass murder took place. Someone else has to pay for getting it so wrong with the wall breached so easily and readiness of troops on the ground even if it ends in a world war.

Rumi (1207-73) born in Afghanistan understood.

Only Breath

There is a way between voice and presence

Where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens

With wandering talk it closes.

Seamus Heaney 1939—2013 poetry Chorus From The Cure At Troy as a palliative from Joe Biden, added to the annual $4billion grant voted by Congress. Israel can take the dollar to pay for its nuclear weapons, fighter jets, tanks and ever increasing defence costs. It can keep building higher and higher walls. Window dressing.  

Rumi (1207-73)

Not a Christian  or Jew or Muslim, nor Hindu,

Buddhist, sufi or zen. Not any religion

Or cultural system I am not from the East

or the West, or out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not

composed of elements at all I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next

did not descend from Adam or Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace

of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two

worlds as one and that one calls out to know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that

breath breathing human being.

Rumi knew you cannot imagine the significance of Christ’s crucifixion if good cannot triumph over evil? Emily Dickinson: That Love is all there is…Is all we know of Love’.