Persiflage & Paroxysm

Forgive me, I’m human too! God bless the balladeers of that Emerald Isle, they sang happy, funny and sad, they wrote down the worst of their 700-years-worth of experiences under the English boot in flowing simple rhyme that appeared to the enemy but mere harmless entertainment for inebriates, but they are so much more. Their truth echoes across the ages. After a week of disappointments from South Lebanon to Gaza and the West Bank and an ever smiling Netanyahu polluting my TV screen, I just switched off. I took my worry beads and my phone as the sun was just setting and sat on the veranda. The cool breeze and the sky’s reddish bluish tint allowed a flood of repressed emotions and deep feelings to emerge and come to the surface. I found my tears just ran free along my cheeks and I let them.   We are damaged goods, the Irish too. The racialist ideas of the 19 th century saw rational English academics subscribe to ideas that today would be shunned as unscientific and perverse,...

It’s hard for anyone to admit that they have wasted their life believing in an idea that was unrealistic and naïve even at its inception. The idea that Palestine could be liberated is one such idea that just won’t die, it keeps recirculating and reinfecting us with hope. Every 20 or 30 years some regional power decides to use this idea of liberation to achieve some kind of political success over the populations of countries in its region that it wishes to dominate.   Palestine is the perfect idea and cause, pure and good and just, just like the tale of the crucified Jesus. A story of gross injustice and cruelty heaped on a man preaching a new age religion. Same with the plight of the Palestinian people, gross injustice and cruelty. Jesus actually preached and healed and drove out demons in the very environs over which fanatical Western Jews are fighting and burning out farmers and villagers of the West Bank who have more Semitic and Canaanite DNA than many European Jews that ru...

  Religious ethics are holding back Hezbollah from paying Israel bitter Gazan wages, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, it seems religions disagree over what you can or cannot do in war. But let’s not be too hard on religions, the real blame lies with those who interpret religious texts, and the clerics who define those ethics of war if such a thing exists.     I woke up today to more of the same, televised images of torn and mangled bodies piled in bloody heaps broadcast by Al Jazeera. But this massacre was different, they were civilians preforming dawn prayers in accordance with Muslim religious rites. They didn’t see those missiles coming. When medical and civil defense teams arrived at the scene some bodies were still burning. I couldn’t think straight the whole day, I kept pacing up and down my veranda, I didn’t leave the house, I didn’t want to see anyone, I was seething inside, I wanted the resistance to hit back, to take the lives of Isra...