'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
(Image by Pressenza Redazione Italia)
Women who took the floor – the Irish Mairead Maguire, the Yemenite Tawakkol Karman, the American Jody Williams and the Liberian Leymah Gbowee – share a contagious force they know how to communicate to the public by involving them not only in the statement of ideas and proposals, but also and above all transmitting personal experience of courage, sacrifice and coherence.
Rome, 15 December 2014 — The Swedish Social Democrat government, which took office only two months ago, has just resigned. The far-right anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats sided with the four-party centre-right opposition alliance, and new elections will be held in March next year.
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T and O style mappa mundi (map of the known world) from the first printed version of Isidorus’ Etymologiae (Kraus 13). The book was written in 623 and first printed in 1472 at Augsburg by one Günther Zainer (Guntherus Ziner), Isidor’s sketch thus becoming the oldest printed map of the occident.| Artist: Isidore of Seville | Wikimedia Commons
In Europe, Sweden has been the symbol of civic-mindedness and democracy – the place where those escaping dictatorship and hunger could find refuge; the country without corruption, where social justice was a national value.
However, in just a short period, the Sweden Democrat xenophobic party, which wants to close the country to foreigners and is now the third-largest party in parliament, was able to topple the government on December 2014.
Similar parties exist in the other Nordic countries – Finland, Norway and Denmark – where they have been similarly able to take a decisive role in national politics. The myth of northern Europe, the modern and progressive Nordic Europe, has vanished.
An Italian Navy vessel prepares to assist an overcrowded boat. | UNHCR/Alfredo D’Amato
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They were hoping to find a better future elsewhere. Now, as the water licks their ankles and another cold night sets in, they begin to wonder if they will make it to shore at all. Surely, they think, while clutching one another, help must be on its way.
But as the number of people making sea journeys in search of asylum or opportunity grows, UNHCR fears that many governments are beginning to lose focus on saving lives.
For this boat, there will be no rescue tonight. Instead it capsizes off the Libyan coast, claiming over 250 lives and leaving just 19 survivors.
13 December 2014 — ON MONDAY, the 19th Knesset voted to dissolve itself, less than two years after its election. For many of its members it was a sad day, a kind of political hara-kiri. They have no chance of re-election. Some of them are so forgettable, that I do not recognize their names or faces.
Uri avnery
They were amazing.The day after, a political bomb exploded on the TV news. Channel 10 – slightly more liberal than the two others – published the results of a quick public opinion poll by a respected pollster.
THE FIRST result was that the Labor Party, after its union with Tzipi Livni’s “the Movement”, will be the largest party in the next Knesset.
Israelis gasped. What? Labor? A party seen by many as clinically dead?
Of course, this is only the first of hundreds of polls to come before election day, March 17 2015. Yet the results had their impact. (Two other polls since then confirmed its findings.)
A second result was that Likud, in second place, would get exactly the same number of seats whether led by Binyamin Netanyahu or by his putative challenger, Gideon Sa’ar, an unglamorous party functionary (and a former employee of mine).
As Interior Minister, he excelled mainly in persecuting African asylum-seekers. (At the last moment, Sa’ar gave up his challenge to Netanyahu.)
Is it possible? Netanyahu the Great, the “King Bibi” of Time magazine, no longer a vote magnet?
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 