Daily atrocities remembered, Gordon at Khartoum. Gordon; ” Hey effendi, I distinctly said, a butter knife, and YOU a man of EDUCATION!!!! This won’t do’!

Dear reader, as the smoke settles and the blood runs dry, another reflective piece from our nearer North, (‘the Paris End’) correspondent Ira Main.

‘The explosion in Paris is a bomb we have built and detonated ourselves.

When Middle Eastern despots were “our kind of people”. Nice King Farouk of Egypt before he ate his cabinet.

Daily atrocities unnoticed in Palestine.  Driving on the wrong side of the road!

Another ‘nicer kind of despot’ being treated royally. The Shah of Iran and Princess Margaret’s other sister.

We have been supporting dictators, bumping off leaders, stealing oil and murdering people throughout the Middle East for at least a hundred years. We have bombed indiscriminately, butchered innocents wholesale and all in the cause of controlling the oil supply.. These are the bare facts of the case.
To express our horror at the Paris killings is disingenuous. We have watched, every night for years and years as our drones and pinpoint bombing raids massacred people in countries all over the Middle East. Why weren’t we horrified by this and why are we so easily horrified now?
We accused the ordinary German people of turning a blind eye to the Jewish exterminations in WW2. We treated them with a dismissive contempt. We, by our TVs today, watching, aware, and doing nothing are behaving just as contemptibly.
We are all appalled at the Paris killings. That this has at last come to Paris demonstrates to me, not the psychopathic nature of a Middle Eastern people but their extraordinary courage and restraint in the face of a century of oppression and exploitation by the West. I’m amazed it hasn’t happened sooner.

Ira Maine

And this is not the final word, who said, “not the end, but the beginning of the end”, from our mid north correspondent, comes this scintillating reflection on “them and us”.

Ira,
Can you remember the reaction to Anthony Mundine (the Aboriginal boxer) when he said of 911 that they’d brought it on themselves?
And when that SBS journalist who was kidnapped in Baghdad caused apoplexy in our then Foreign Minister when he talked about the thinking of his kidnappers (as if they were human)
Society can be very unforgiving to those that speak uncomfortable truths.

Recorded daily life with ISIS. The banality of Evil.

That recent hi-tech massacre in Gaza is also never much spoken about (lest you’re accused of being pro-holocaust)
The non sequitur reigns supreme…
Goddonya Ira,
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter (Martin Luther King Jr)

Frank

Daily local atrocities recorded posthumously. Lest we Forget.