Aftermath

Most people don't realise that Palestine has a winter too - of course down in Gaza it's nothing like as severe as the sub-zero temperatures experienced in the mountains in places such as Ramallah. But even so, the next two to three months can have their share of miserable cold days. 

So my heart goes out to the thousands of people in Gaza who will have to endure that winter in tents or sharing crowded flats with friends and relatives. The long term effect of this kind of treatment on future Israeli Palestinian relations is easy to imagine. No excuse for asking "Why do they hate us so much?" 

NOTE: I found this image on the International-communities-against-Israel Facebook page. If you want me to remove it, please get in touch. 

Heroes

The surgical team of al Shifaa hospital in Gaza who continued working night and day over the past week dealing with the hundreds of civilian casualties caused  by Israel's last atrocity.

Photo courtesy of Marium Barghouti of Twitter 

The Horror of Gaza

Israel has been bombarding Gaza for nearly a week now, and the inevitable consequence of bombarding densely populated urban areas is a lot of dead children. Children killed in the cruellest way imaginable.

Until relatively recently, there was of course a complete taboo on images of this kind ever getting beyond paramedic and military training programmes. Like so much else in the world the Internet is changing all that, to the point when I wonder if aerial bombardment of urban areas even has a future.

It's hard to express how much Israel is damaging itself by bombarding Gaza, and how much images like this damage Israel's cause. The sheer RAGE I'm feeling now at people like Netanyahu and 'Mr Cool' President Obama is impossible to express. And I'm not alone.

NOTE: I've found these pictures being distributed from several places and on FaceBook, and am assuming they are in the public doman to help spread the word about Gaza. If you can prove to me you own a picture or pictures here, please let me know and I'll either remove them or credit you. 

I Told You So

The result of the US election which came in on Wednesday morning last week gave me the chance to type the most beautiful phrase in the English language:

I told you so

Predicting the future is bloody difficult, as my 100% wrong Olympics prediction proved, so it's nice to get the US election result correct, especially as America has been such a bitterly divided country for almost 15 years now. 

Sorry to say I'm also taking enormous pleasure from the howling and madness of the more extreme Republican and conservative commentators. Their reactions are nicely summarised on Andrew Sullivan's blog here.


Although it's as well to point out that as time passes and emotions cool, not every conservative has lost his or her mind:

U.S Election

As I type, Americans are choosing their next President; whether to keep Barack Obama for another 4 years, or whether to bin him and elect Mitt Romney instead,

Towards the end of last year I choose Barack Obama to win the race and I'm sticking with that prediction, although the race will be a tight one and America has been bitterly divided almost 50/50 between Republicans and Democrats since 2000.