Cane Toad Time

Toadscape

You know it’s summer in the Sunshine State
when from beneath your desk
there’s a shuffling sound
a gruffly plop and scrape
then you look down
straight into the gloating gob
of the most gruesome pest around here
worse than the pollies, rats and mice
it’s the common cane toad,
that dastardly settler-borne scoundrel.
Out, out, you damn hopping creep
before for the five iron I reach
and augment your next ungainly leap.

Jinjirrie, December 2014

For anyone who hasn’t seen the definitive cane toad movie:

A Ballad for the Grabbit – Tony Silvertongue

George the Goanna

TONY SILVERTONGUE

Do not denigrate our P M
He leads this fair and precious land
And speaks his mind into the ether
Maybe sometimes he leaves his teeth there!

Do not denigrate or call him names
Like Phoney Tony, Flash or James
For princely ears deserve respect
Yet growing debt is what we get.

Chorus
O Tony who art thou that leads us
Can we trust thy tongue to please us
Can we trust thy silver tongue
Oft times the laird, oft times the merde!

In shiny lycra, dashing knight
Keeping fit in skinny tights
You are our hero of the day
Please make the bad things go away!

Do not denigrate our Prime Minister
Or rhyme Abbott with Grabbit – it’s too sinister
Ruling the unruly mob
He may be the best man for the job …..
Tony Abbott may be God!

Chorus
O Tony who art thou that leads us
Can we trust thy tongue to please us
Can we trust thy silver tongue
Now the journey has begun.

Copyright Gabrielle Shootingstar 2013

Children As Grass

golden sheaves
spread in school yard
salt coast grown,
resistant stems
of native centuries
warned from homes
to wretched refuge
without respite
no shafts to freedom
where none are safe

threat of grass
and budding seed
shields real estate
coveted by
lawnmower men
with tunnel vision
of western pretexts,
colonial deterrents
to permanence,
not never again,
but again and again

unseen drone buzz
no fertilising bee
searing scythe
explodes from thirsty sky
row on row ripped
before flower blown
monstrous harvest
in Gaza charnel house
beneath earth strewn
with blood and bone
olive tree kernels awaken

August 2014

Names of Palestinians Killed in the War on Gaza since 8 July

AUGUST 1 UPDATE: Child death toll in Gaza approaches 200 and rising

Related Links

The IDF prepares to attempt to cover its tracks, but thousands of photos of disproportionate death and destruction don’t lie. Israel has been engaged in a deliberate, planned act of genocide, with accompanying war crimes. Its attack on the Occupied people of Gaza breaches the Geneva Conventions in the first place. Israel to the Hague!

Another vile story calls for genocide of Gazans in the Israeli media, this time in JPost and phrased as ‘humanitarian relocation of the non-belligerent Arab population’

The author of this scurrilous piece of incitement, Dr. Martin Sherman of the Israeli Institute for Strategic Studies, has the gall to quote Einstein in support of his solution for the Palestinian question “No, periodically mowing the lawn is not a policy that can endure for long – it simply will not cut it. The grass needs to be uprooted – once and for all.”

How do these drooling fascists live with themselves?

More zionist genocidalists – Prof. Efraim Inbar is director and Dr.Eitan Shamir a research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

Against an implacable, well-entrenched, non-state enemy like the Hamas, Israel simply needs to “mow the grass” once in a while to degrade the enemy’s capabilities.

Another genocidal Israeli lawnmower man: David M. Weinberg is Director of Public Affairs at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies

Racism is the Foundation of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge Joel Beinin:

The viciousness of Mordechai Kedar, lecturer in Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, was even more creative than Shaked and Elitzur’s merely genocidal proposal. “The only thing that can deter terrorists like those who kidnapped the children and killed them,” he said, “is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” As a university-based “expert,” Kedar’s heinous suggestion is based on his “understanding” of Arab culture. “It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,” he explained, hastening to add, “I’m not talking about what we should or shouldn’t do. I’m talking about the facts.”

Racism has become a legitimate, indeed an integral, component of Israeli public culture, making assertions like these seem “normal.”

Israeli security officials sardonically call these operations “mowing the lawn” because well-informed observers know that Hamas cannot be uprooted and is capable of rebuilding its military capacity. There is no long-term strategy, except, as Gideon Levy put it, to kill Palestinians. Major General (res.) Oren Shachor elaborated, “If we kill their families, that will frighten them.” And what might deter Israel?

Times of Israel publishes a zionist’s defence of genocide – the article was withdrawn but is archived.

Behind the Lying Eyes of Mark Regev

Behind the lying eyes of Mark Regev from One Democratic State Group on Vimeo.

Discrimination against Arab families:

‘In an attempt to lure the small ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism into his new government, the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has agreed to pay extra child allowance to religious Jewish families with many children in a way that guarantees the extra payments do not also go to large Arab families.

This is the latest in a long line of manoeuvres by successive Israeli governments to ensure that Jewish and Arab citizens receive differential child allowances so that higher birth rates among Jewish families can be encouraged without also encouraging increased fertility among Arab families.

Such schemes are widely seen as being part of government initiatives to counter the perceived “demographic threat” posed by high Arab birth rates and maintaining Israel’s Jewish majority. Child allowance was only equalised for Jews and Arabs in the mid-1990s.’

Olmert and the ‘demographic threat’:

‘The time is fast approaching when Arabs will constitute a majority in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. Then, Olmert said, Palestinians will abandon their calls for an independent state and instead will demand a one-man-one-vote system in a binational state that they will control.

“The day we come to that, we will lose everything” Olmert said. “Even when they carry out terror, it’s hard for us to convince the world of the justice of our cause.”

“How much the more so,” he continued, “when all they ask for is one man, one vote? I shudder to think that the same liberal Jews who led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will be at the forefront of the struggle against us.”’

More Olmert:

‘Mr Olmert said it was not the first time he had articulated his fears about the demographic threat to Israel as a Jewish state from a faster growing Palestinian population.

He made similar comments in 2003 when justifying the failed strategy of unilateral withdrawals from Israeli-occupied land which holds large Palestinian populations.

“If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,”

Rape of Palestinian women:

‘If the Or Yehuda banner only hinted at rape and the WhatsApp image played coyly with it, a leading Israeli academic blatantly floated the idea of using rape against the Palestinians at the very start of the current round of hostilities.

On July 1, just after the bodies of three Israeli teens who had gone missing in the West Bank were found, Bar Ilan University lecturer Dr. Mordechai Kedar spoke on Israeli radio about raping Palestinian women in order to deter “terrorism,” saying that only the knowledge that Israel could dispatch agents to rape a Palestinian militant’s mother or sister, as retribution for his crimes, could deter him from carrying out those actions.’

Here’s Netayahoo in 2003 bemoaning the ‘demographic threat’ of Palestinian wombs in Israel:

Israel’s growing demographic problem is not because of Palestinians, but of Israeli Arabs, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday.

Speaking at the Herzliya Conference on security, Netanyahu said Israel had already freed itself from control of almost all Palestinian Arabs. He said he could not foresee a future in which “any sane Israeli” could try to make Palestinians either Israeli citizens or “enslaved subjects.” The Palestinians would under all circumstances rule themselves and administer their own affairs, he said.

“If there is a demographic problem, and there is, it is with the Israeli Arabs who will remain Israeli citizens,” he said. The Declaration of Independence said Israel should be a Jewish and democratic state, but to ensure the Jewish character was not engulfed by demography, it was necessary to ensure a Jewish majority, he said.

Joseph Massad – “Are Palestinian Children Less Worthy”

Who could forget these IDF T-shirts?

Deliberately killing children:

“Monica Awad, the spokeswoman of the UNICEF, condemned Israel’s targeting of women and children in its ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip.”

In an interview with Al-Jazeera on 31 July, Awad said “Israeli forces had deliberately killed 264 children in Gaza, which is equal to 11 children per day, and injured more than 2,000.”

“Where’s the international community’s reactions to the slaughtering of children in Gaza? Where are the international human rights covenants?”

IDF Sniper Admits On Instagram To Murdering 13 Gaza Children

Visible in Gaza

They shot the child in her innocent beauty
said she was a human shield
she made them do it they said
yet she was just a child.

They shot the mother who held the child
her womb a demographic threat
she made them do it they said
yet she was only a mother.

They shot the boy who ran from them
said his stones were missiles
he made them do it they said
his face blazes at them still.

Sylvia Posadas, July 2014.

Fado of the Gazan Fishermen

Gazan fisherman hounded by the Israeli Navy

For Mariza

From Almina Port, Gazan fishermen
sail captive over turbulent ocean of loss
harvest shrinking shoals in three mile noose
run gauntlet of Israeli gunboats

For you I sing of exiled torment
and people of Gaza in 1948 expelled
from Ashdod which was Asdoud then,
where you are to play for expeller
who warps music to tighten ruthless grip
against return from prison to home shore

Waves pound Israel’s aggravation
Gazan women struggle to survive
enmeshed by colonial occupation
this cruel siege is strangulation,
humanity’s humiliation, starvation
of this ‘small, poor city which resists’
within pitiless apartheid fence
steadfast Palestinians subsist

Cast the net with us, with them, for BDS
prepare feast of freedom, rights and justice
when fishermen may trawl the coast
free as seagulls to seek sustenance

Sylvia Posadas, May 2014

As part of the ceasefire agreement of November, 2012, Israel agreed to allow the Palestinians to fish within six nautical miles, but unilaterally decreased the allotted area to three miles.

Last May, Israel decided to allow the fishermen to fish within six nautical miles, but the Israeli navy continued to attack them, even within the three nautical miles.
http://www.imemc.org/article/67725

“To go over six miles is death,” says Abu Nayim. Ideally he would be out at around 11 miles, in early November, with the last flush of the sardine season on. But Israel has not permitted any Gazan boat beyond six miles since 2006. Once, when he may have drifted over, an Israeli gunboat tossed a live grenade on to the nets. In the past month the fishing boats of Gaza have come under fire 10 times.
http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2013/dec/08/fishing-under-fire-in-gaza

There are some 4,000 fishermen in Gaza. According to a 2011 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, 90 percent are poor, a 40 percent increase from 2008 resulting
from Israeli limits on the fishing industry.

http://fishingunderfire.blogspot.com.au/

The fisherman said that since 2010, Israel has not returned any of the small fishing boats it has confiscated.

Jihad has two young children and has been a fisherman since he was ten. His family is a family of fishermen. Thirty-one people from Jihad and Shabaan’s families depended on the confiscated fishing boat. It was their only source of livelihood. Jihad’s family owns another small boat, without a motor and slightly damaged.

“Neither of them worked,” Shabaan’s father said. “There is no hope for them.”
http://palsolidarity.org/2014/03/soldiers-opened-fire-at-our-boat-and-engine-we-were-about-to-sink/

“Silence for Gaza” – Mahmoud Darwish

Related Links

Letter from O Comité de Solidariedade com a Palestina:
“Mariza, não participe no branqueamento público dos crimes de Israel!”

Petition: Cancele o seu concerto em Israel/Cancel your concert in Israel