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    Where are the flags for Palestine? Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on November 24, 2023, 10:36 pm

    (Something I knocked together the other morning after not being able to sleep. I might torture it into rhyming couplets and a verse/chorus format at some point. At the moment it's mainly in lines because that's the space allowed by my notebook. I may have mis-remembered some of the numbers - corrections welcome, as well as any other suggestions.)

    *****

    Where are the flags for Palestine?

    Travelled the country North to South
    Where yellows and blues have fluttered for over a year
    From window and doors, even no.10
    People and institutions all over the land
    So quick in Solidarity for ‘people like us’
    The ‘relatively civilised’
    Witty t-shirts with ‘Puck Futin’,
    ‘Slava Ukraini’ (a fascist slogan) comes so easy
    To every mouth, but ‘Free Palestine’ is
    Legitimate Cause For Concern to the Jewish Community
    And ‘from the river to the sea’ a call to genocide threatening those...
    Who are committing genocide.

    Ten thousand killed in a month, four thousand children
    More than in the whole of Evil Putin’s war
    No justification for targeting civilians, we are told
    But if you call them ‘barbarians’ or ‘animals’
    I guess that’s just fine.
    Ukraine was free to retaliate against its aggressor
    With armed force.
    It was applauded for doing so
    And funded to the tune of billions
    In fact the money was rolling in well before:
    6bn to destabilise and fix an election where
    ‘Yats is our guy’
    And Russian speakers in the Donbass and elsewhere
    Faced discrimination and.. bombs
    A trade union building burned with 40 dead,
    An atrocity committed by western-backed neo-nazis
    Against pro-Russia demonstrators in Odessa
    Was this not terrorism -
    Designed to affect a political response
    Through extreme violence?
    Yet they weren’t depicted as butchers,
    Rapists, beheaders of babies, ‘worse than ISIS’.
    Nor the bombers of Nordstream
    Nor the killers of pro-Russian journalists in crowded cafes
    Nor the drone attacks on Moscow
    Nor the destruction of the Khakovka dam
    (If Russia did it, then why not Israel
    Gunning down those kids – human kids –
    At that music festival?
    You know, with Hellfire from above,
    Helicopters, tanks, the Hannibal doctrine and all that.
    No? Okay then.)
    I guess when the victims are
    ‘Orcs’, 'terrorists', ‘animals,’ or rather:
    Troops in an occupying army,
    You can start to forgive, right?

    All down the length of the country,
    On road and rail – many yellows and blues still flutter
    Though solidarity has waned
    Since the military failures
    And the endless stream of money
    Going to Zelensky and co
    To stave off the inevitable
    While people at home shiver in the dark
    And decide between heating and eating.
    Where is the money for Gaza and the West Bank?
    Calls for No Fly Zones and F-16s
    No expense spared to protect Democracy
    (Hamas is an elected government)
    Territorial integrity and the Rules Based Order?
    Not when they are brown people,
    Not when they are Arabs, Muslims,
    Not when they’re in the way of oil and gas extraction
    And redevelopment contracts
    For neighbourhoods of blood-drenched rubble.

    But, but… they bombed their own hospital!
    The paid liars come on screen
    And humiliate with the screaming falsehoods
    They force us to treat credibly
    With nary a retort from all those
    100K/year ‘journalists’
    Suddenly unable to prepare a defense
    Or have any contrary facts to hand.
    (No such hesitation when demanding
    We condemn condemn condemn…
    A resistance organistation
    Opposing genocidal violence.
    Do you condemn the Warsaw Ghetto uprising?
    Do you condemn the partisans of
    Occupied Europe in WW2?
    Of course we mustn’t make such comparisons.
    (The Zionists can, invoking Dresden – not the Blitz –
    But we can’t, or doing so be labelled antisemites)
    It’s the West’s victims we must condemn
    When they have the nerve, the brass front,
    The ingratitude to fight back.
    The Indian Mutiny (rapists, murderers!)
    The Haiti slave uprising (OMG they want us all dead!)
    The ANC (Mandela the terrorist)
    The Vietcong (how dare they not fight us in the open?
    Human shields!)
    The Native American resistance
    (Ok, we’ll name our weapons after you 100 years later)
    Of course, they are the ones we must condemn.
    They are the ones committing atrocities,
    Despite verifiable evidence,
    Never the ones responding to them.
    How could they have the right to respond in kind?

    Evil Putin bombed that maternity hospital in Melitopol,
    Bombed that school with ‘children’
    Written outside on the pavement
    We know this.
    The ‘journalists’ and politicians say it
    With immediate certainty,
    And to doubt it is evidence of your collusion
    With Russian depravity.
    You’re not even allowed to ask for proof.
    But Al-Shifa explodes,
    Days after the IDF ‘taps on the roof’
    With ordinance of the kind
    Hamas fighters could only dream of,
    A direct hit from the only group in the area
    That has targeted munitions with that kind of power,
    The one with a history of destroying
    Schools,
    UN buildings,
    Mosques,
    Refugee camps,
    And numerous medical facilities.
    But no, we need to hear
    Israel’s side of the story
    And give airtime to their
    Barefaced lies and victim-blaming.
    Of course, they did it to themselves,
    Those stupid Arabs.
    They probably did it on purpose to get the sympathy.
    This is what you get when ‘children of light’
    Take it upon themselves to rid the world of
    ‘Darkness’, the uncivilised, ‘Amelakites’
    (There goes the religious justification)
    And the propaganda-addled
    Just go along with all of it.

    The length of the country
    And not one flag for Palestine.
    All I saw was one little girl
    At Kings Cross Station with
    ‘Palestine: now and forever’
    On her t-shirt.
    She had slightly amber-tinted skin
    And big brown eyes.
    To be honest, it made me feel a little unsafe.

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