20+ days into the Gaza crisis and the humanitarian crisis there gets worse every day.

Over 1000 Palestinians have been killed; 398 women and children are dead, another 4500 injured, 750,000 lack access to water and one million are without electricity. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians have been killed.

Each day that passes guarantees more innocent civilians will suffer. Tell Congress to act swiftly to help more humanitarian aid and workers enter Gaza and to suspend all transfers of weapons to Israel.

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Strategic bombing involves destroying an adversary’s economic and military ability to wage war. It targets its war making capacity and related infrastructure. Terror bombing is another matter. It’s against civilians to break their morale, cause panic, weaken an enemy’s will to fight, and inflict mass casualties and punishment.  FULL ARTICLE

Every language has words that have multiple meanings. Sometimes the meanings are quite the opposite of what the word means. Others, it is similar, but not nearly the word at “face value”.

Take some standard American-English slang as example:

• When someone is “tripping”, it doesn’t mean they are falling, it means they are overreacting.
• When something is “bad”, sometimes it means it is really quite good.
• When someone says “I have no cabbage”, it means they don’t have any money, not that they don’t have any of their most favorite vegetable.

When foreigners come here after studying their “English”, they may be able to translate every word perfectly, yet they may have no idea what the heck we are talking about! It is not a stretch then to acknowledge that when we hear statements or sayings in other languages, that similar misinterpretations can happen quite easily? … and most likely without us even realizing that we have made a mistake in translation? Continue reading →

It is American supplied F-16 fighter jets, helicopter gunships, missiles, and bombs that are destroying the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and murdering the Palestinians who have been packed into the tiny strip of land. What is happening to the Palestinians herded into the Gaza Ghetto is happening because of American money and weapons.  It is just as much an attack by the United States as an attack by Israel. The US government is complicit in the war crimes. FULL ARTICLE

Life in Occupied Gaza. No end of conflict is in sight. Mass slaughter continues unabated. World leaders are silent on halting it. Blame the victims. Back aggression, but people globally say otherwise: In solidarity, we’re all Gazans. We’re all Palestinians. FULL ARTICLE

Caged, starved, sniped, suffocated. They are slaughtered like sheep, but the leaders of the free world just cannot seem to find a moment to comment. Golfing, vacationing, Obama, Bush, even the EU, they just aren’t important enough. My mutterings have become a like a canter. I call out to these stricken and shattered little bodies, who frankly never experienced life to lose it. The only consolation to offer is the respite found in death.  FULL ARTICLE

As we hear the horrifying and sickening reports of the atrocities in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), and as ardent Israel backers predictably justify each one or contest the facts, it’s worth reading a new book (The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about US War Crimes), by a former Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington bureau investigative reporter of the LA Times named Deborah Nelson. FULL ARTICLE

What has Israel won exactly, aside from the haunting images of Palestinian youngsters in UN schools, homes and hospitals, mutilated, some silent and others screaming? This is no victory, but a brief illusion of one. As for the long-term repercussions, that is a whole new story. Israeli bombs over Lebanon in 1982 gave rise to Hezbollah, and its war of 2006 turned a small, resisting militant movement into a major powerbroker that will certainly help shape the future of Lebanon. Israel is now doing the same in Gaza. A victory, indeed.  FULL ARTICLE

For the past 16 months, Gaza has been under siege and experienced a growing humanitarian crisis: isolated; squeezed by sanctions; and denied essentials short of what little donor agencies provide. The Group called the situation “dire.” It’s now catastrophic.  FULL ARTICLE

Do friendly bakers still give customers a baker’s dozen — when you order 12 of something, do the doughboys or doughgirls still give you 13?

Probably some do, some don’t. But the friendly Green Dog is providing a baker’s dozen of something here, Bunkie.  Following are 13 quotations that when uttered or written had nothing to do with the internationally critical situation occurring now in Israel/Gaza.  Conversely, because of their sentiments, the quotations have everything to do with what’s been going on between the Israelis and Palestinians, now and for the past 60-plus years.

Read the quotations and see if you might agree… Continue reading →