75th Anniversary of Al Nakba • May 15, 1948: A Brief History of Palestine and Its People

The Road to Nowhere by Ismail Shammout 1930-2006. He was expelled from Lydda in 1948. The plight of the refugees is depicted in many of his most famous paintings.

Palestine, the mythic “land without people for a people without land” was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919.

The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine in the late 19th century to reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs’ inherent anti-Semitism. The Zionists were then forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to today.

The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true.

Chronology of recent actions and escalated rhetoric of the US against Cuba

At the evening gathering in Montreal, the Consul General of Cuba Mara Bilbao Diaz, read a chronology of recent hostile actions taken by the U.S. against Cuba. It is printed below.

Commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising: A timeline (2)

Close-quarter combat in the Easter Rising: A reportage-style account of the combat that took place during the Easter Rising. The second in a two-part series. (For part one see here.)

Commemoration of the 1916 Easter Rising: A timeline (1)

Close-quarter combat in the Easter Rising: A reportage-style account of the combat that took place during the Easter Rising. The first in a two-part series. (For part two see here.)

USA: Hundreds of undeclared wars

A list compiled by the U.S. Congressional Research Service of American military conflicts finds hundreds of cases but only 11 in which war was formally declared. Undeclared wars include “the Korean War of 1950-1953; the Vietnam War from 1964 to 1973; the Persian Gulf War of 1991; global actions against foreign terrorists after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States; and the war with Iraq in 2003.”

The Canadian war on science: A chronological indictment

JOHN DUPUIS, reblogged from Confessions of a Science Librarian, concentrates on the Harper agenda regarding “natural sciences, environment and some public health topics rather than looking more broadly at how the Conservative government treats the humanities, social sciences, memory and heritage institutions and just generally any sort of evidence-based policy- or decision-making.” How $50 million in federal funding is being directed to such pseudo-science centres of big capital as the Perimeter Institute in Kitchener-Waterloo; the militarization of research, especially the role of Lockheed Martin; and the reactionary ostracism of science and scientists from Iran, Cuba and other countries merits definite attention. – TS

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THIS IS a brief chronology of the current Conservative Canadian government’s long campaign to undermine evidence-based scientific, environmental and technical decision-making. It is a government that is beholden to big business, particularly big oil, and that makes every attempt to shape public policy to that end. It is a government that fundamentally does not believe in science. It is a government that is more interested in keeping its corporate masters happy than in protecting the environment.

Waging war on Iraq: A timeline of Canadian intervention since 1990

By JON ELMER and VALERIE ZINK*

Protest against the deployment of the HMCS Iroquois, Halifax, on February 24, 2003

The Canadian government long ago joined this war on Iraq: for the past 12 years the Canadian Navy has been enforcing a senseless and cruel economic war on the civilians of Iraq which has cost more than one million lives. 

Fourth of a series on Canada’s involvement in the Iraq war, Shunpiking Online. Please note that the timeline ends in February, 2003 and hence does not cover the ensuing material (export of arms, provision of territory and infrastructure), military, political-ideological participation of Canada in the war against Iraq.