Friday 13 December 2013

Santa Claus Arrested for Child Slavery Crimes

Santa Claus - "Jolly Old Saint Nick", "Father Christmas", or "Papá Noel" - has been arrested and faces extradition after being convicted of sending poor tiny children up chimneys to do his dirty work.

The popular figure was caught red-handed while forcing a boy down a chimney with a large pointy stick.

The child was later found to be carrying mysterious 'gifts', which a police unit destroyed in a controlled explosion. "I'm innocent", said Santa, as he was led from court in chains, "I spread joy to the World!"


"Mister Claus is being charged of child slavery", said the Prosecutor," The child found at the scene has been indentified as Tiny Tim, who went missing almost 250 years ago in Old London Town. We suspect Claus of being behind a whole bunch of child abductions."

"They do all the dirty work and he takes all the credit. He claims he goes down each and every chimney - but come on, it's impossible. He's much too fat."

Sunday 8 December 2013

The Life You Are Capable of Living


Mandela (1918–2013): A Man Committed to Transforming Society


“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”

Extract from article. Bob Herbert. 2013. Jacobin Magazine. A critique of the “feel good” and “sentimental stick figure” misrepresentations of Nelson Mandela and Dr. King in mass media.


Mandela was an authentic revolutionary who refused to cower in the face of the most malignant of evils.

The tributes after his death would be pouring in immediately from around the world but most of them would try to do to Mandela what has been done to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: turn him into a lovable, platitudinous cardboard character whose commitment to peace and willingness to embrace enemies could make everybody feel good. This practice is a deliberate misreading of history guaranteed to miss the point of the man.

The primary significance of Mandela and King was not their willingness to lock arms or hold hands with their enemies. It was their unshakable resolve to do whatever was necessary to bring those enemies to their knees. Their goal was nothing short of freeing their people from the murderous yoke of racial oppression. They were not the sweet, empty, inoffensive personalities of ad agencies or greeting cards or public service messages. Mandela and King were firebrands, liberators, truth-tellers—above all they were warriors. That they weren’t haters doesn’t for a moment minimize the fierceness of their militancy.

Ronald Reagan denounced him as a terrorist and Dick Cheney opposed his release from prison King was hounded by the FBI, repeatedly jailed, vilified by any number of establishment figures who despised his direct action tactics, and finally murdered. He was only 39 when he died. When King spoke out against the Vietnam war, characterizing the American government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” the New York Times took him to task in an editorial headlined, “Dr. King’s Error.”

Thursday 5 December 2013

Christmas Solidarity Marches for Justice

The Christian Cultural Movement, SAIn Political Party, and Youth Solidarity Path, invite you to join more than 30 solidarity marches organised throughout the month of December in Spain and Latin America, with the purpose of representing the voice of the impoverished in the streets and of emphasising that hunger and other attacks on human life can be eradicated if the political will exists.

Extracted from: solidaridad.net

Every day, more than 100,000 people -half of them children- die of hunger

Campaingn for Justice in North-South Relations
AGAINST THE CAUSES OF HUNGER,
UNEMPLOYMENT AND CHILD SLAVERY
Thou Shalt Not Kill (God)
“HUNGER IS THE MAIN POLITICAL PROBLEM OF HUMANITY”
More than 2,500 million people in the world live on less than 1.50 euros a day, and 90% of the world’s population owns only 17% of its wealth. As a result, the economic North has built walls and fences along their borders with poorer nations in an attempt to fence in hunger. Along these borders, violence and death await the millions of migrants who try to cross through Central America, across the Strait of Gibraltar, into Melilla, or over to Lampedusa.
Amidst the reorganisation of the imperialist economic system (or “crisis” as they call it), the world’s wealth has increased, while hunger has multiplied and the gap between rich and poor has grown. And as the richest 10% owns 83% of the world’s total wealth, the 3 biggest fortunes are equal to the GDP of the 48 poorest countries.
But yet again, the media machine of the First World would love to convince us that climate change is the main cause of hunger, tens of thousands of deaths, and the suffering of millions of families affected by the illness, loss of homes, famine and drought after typhoons or hurricanes.
HUNGER IS NOT A PROBLEM RELATED TO FOOD PRODUCTION, NOR OVERPOPULATION, NOR CLIMATE CHANGE, BUT OF PLANNED, SYSTEMATIC ROBBERY.
The IMF and World Bank have been responsible for the implementation of the plans of “Structural Adjustment” that are now arriving on European shores but have been impoverishing Latin America, Asia, and Africa for over 25 years. These adjustments are provoking and increasing unemployment; precariousness; exploitation; the death of immigrants within our borders and evictions. And these measures help us to understand more and more what the oppressed of the Earth have been suffering for decades.
The Millennium Development Goals have been being used as a weapon against the poor, presenting them as the ones who are responsible for the injustices they suffer. On the other hand, they hide the robbery and exploitation of the economic North over the economic South. Meanwhile, instead of ending hunger (which is its main responsibility), the UN tries to exterminate the hungry by referring to abortion and contraception as “sexual and reproductive health”. That is how they refer to more than 2,000 million children aborted in the world in the last 25 years.

Converting a Public Park into a Night School and Teaching Impoverished Children for the Last 25 Years for Free

At individual level, we often think that a single person can’t do any good for society, particularly at large scale level – that too with no external moral and physical support, inspiration and funding. However, there are people in this world who achieve the glory that hundreds of others can’t reach together.

Master Ayub, one of those extraordinary examples, has been teaching un-privileged and poor children of Islamabad, Pakistan for last 25 years without receiving a single penny.

Converting a Public Park in Islamabad into a Night School, he has been able to teach these young children who will one day be the backbone of Pakistan.

“If Master Ayub leaves, no one will ever teach us again. He gets us books, stationary and teaches us everything,” Shahzeb, a seven-year-old student, said.


Many of these children are forced to work. Yet, every evening more than 100  children gather in a park to learn, to get education.

Master Ayub has his own levels for grades. Syllabus of this school may not equalize the outer world’s standards, but graduates of his school can easily read, write, do complex calculations, even they can speak foreign languages (such as English).

Students are taught special courses, for instance Mathematics, Social Sciences, to meet professional requirements and real life implications of studies.

Some of the children he has taught are now working in government institutions like the Capital Development Authority (CDA) while others are running their own private businesses.

Each student praised Master Ayub and said if it weren’t for him, they wouldn’t even know how to spell their names.

Wednesday 4 December 2013

The Difference A Teacher Can Make

100 years ago in French Algeria, on November 7th of 1913, author Albert Camus was born. The second son of Lucien and Catherine Camus, he was just 11-months-old when his father was killed in action during The Battle of the Marne; his mother, partially deaf and illiterate, then raised her boys in extreme poverty with the help of his heavy-handed grandmother.

It was in school that Camus shone, due in no small part to the encouragement offered by his beloved teacher, Louis Germain, a man who fostered the potential he saw and steered young Camus on a path that would eventually see him write some hugely respected, award-winning novels and essays.

Soon after winning the Nobel Prize, Camus used the occasion to write a touching note of gratitude to this hero in his life…


19 November 1957

Dear Monsieur Germain,

I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour, one I neither sought nor solicited.

But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened.

I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.

Albert Camus