Benny, you’ve dyed your hair again!

Friends, next week there is to be a Conference on nuclear security in Washington, one that will be attended by leaders of 47 countries.

According to Al Jazeera, among those expected to attend the summit are Obama, Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.

There was one leader who was supposed to attend who has pulled out and intends instead to send a junior member. Why is he pulling out, you ask? Because Egypt and Turkey intended to raise questions about his country’s nuclear weapon capacity and urge it to sign the NPT (the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty). Who is it, you ask? It’s Benny Netanyahu!

Now, as you would know, Israel has adopted a ‘don’t confirm, don’t deny’ position regarding its nuclear arsenal. The world knows it has nuclear weapons because Vanunu told us. For revealing the truth about Israel and its dangerous deception the poor man was imprisoned for years and is still under house arrest as far as I know.

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Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Photo by Esther Dyson, via Flickr

Friends, this man is a true hero. He is the head of WikiLeaks. He has managed to get hold of a video which shows the U.S. army murdering a group of Iraqi citizens plus two people from Reuters: a journalist and a cameraman. Al Jazeera has the full story.

The video is on U-tube and it was shown extensively on Australian News channels last night. As well as showing the innocent people being mown down by the crew of an Apache helicopter, it records the voices of the murderers. They were having such fun, like killing people is an exciting game. They even used a heavy machine gun on a car and those who were trying to help the wounded.

Friends, this is the side of America that it doesn’t want you to see. It is a horrific side. It shows just how barbaric and brutal war is, just how it turns ordinary people into monsters. The people who did it are not heroes. They are not keeping America safe. They are mass murderers who should be imprisoned for life or executed!

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Before the fall!

Friends, Tiger Woods is about to re-emerge on the world stage. He is uncertain about the reception he will get from the fickle public.

You would all be aware of the lurid details surrounding his fall from grace and I don’t intend to dwell upon them here. Instead I would like to mention that there may be some nations that are ripe for a spectacular fall and Tiger may be an appropriate metaphor for them.

A fall comes about when you lose perspective on things, when you imagine your are more important than you really are, when you allow things like values to slip, when you think you are above all others. There are nations like that, ego-centric nations, nations deluded by religion and visions of their own grandeur, nations deranged by an insatiable greed: for money, for power.

History is replete with examples, the rises and falls of nations brought about by over-stretching. Like Tiger and his many conquests, some nations aren’t happy with acquiring control of just one country, they want control of the world! But that costs money, lots of money, and, eventually, you have to start borrowing to maintain the armies.

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You won’t find the Easter Bunny here!

Friends, the Israelis, always generous and compassionate, gave the Palestinians in Gaza a special Easter present. They bombed them.

Now I know you’ll be touched by this incident though you may be upset that three Palestinian kids were hurt in the attack which blew up a cheese factory, a foundry and two caravans. The kids, aged  2, 4, and 11 were injured by flying glass. Seven missiles were used in the attack and they were fired by helicopters and fighter jets. Outrage was express by some countries around the world.

However, Al Jazeera reports that Silvan Shalom, Israel’s deputy prime minister, adopted a defiant stand and warned of more attacks on Gaza. “If this rocket fire against Israel does not stop, it seems we will have to raise the level of our activity and step up our actions against Hamas,” Shalom told public radio on Friday. “We won’t allow frightened children to again be raised in bomb shelters and so, in the end, it will force us to launch another military operation,” he said. What?

The IDF claims on one hand they won’t allow frightened children to be raised in bomb shelters and then claim the way to do this is to bomb them! Israelis have a strange way of thinking, methinks. It seems to lack any logic and certainly they are never troubled by a conscience.

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Aren’t they grand? Don’t you feel proud? One even has nukes!

Friends, you’ll be excited to know that, according to Al Jazeera today, oil-rich nations in the Middle East and the North of Africa are going to spend upwards of 30 billion dollars upgrading their navies.

Yes, those who normally live in deserts and ride camels are going to take to the seas in heavily armed corvettes, ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum! Anti-piracy and anti-terrorism are said to be the rationale but I guess when you are making billions of dollars from selling oil, you have to spend it on something. After all, when you have 100 Rolls sitting in your garage and a solid gold bathtub, what is left?

This spending is going against the trend elsewhere in the world where many nations (excluding the U.S. of course) are tightening their belts and reducing spending on defense because of the GFC (remember that?). This made those who make the lucrative weapons of war very nervous because they could see an end to their mega-profiteering and the distinct possibility that they might have to flog off a bit of real estate, you know, a castle in Spain or a luxury penthouse in New York, that kind of thing.

But no, this injection of defense spending will make their Christmas a happy, festive time and it will help keep the world on a permanent war footing. Then all we need is an invasion here and an occupation there and, voila, we satisfy the never-ending human lust for killing and violence.

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