Stand With London…

Please feel free to share this poster; I just cobbled it together, as I couldn’t be with London today, but I still stand in solidarity. 

Viv la Paris, viv la France, viv la liberté, and together we stand with Paris.

Should this attack in Paris be the result of Muslim extremists, as it looks, they want people to react with hatred, bigotry and calls for retaliation. They want people to hate Muslims, to fear Muslims and anyone who looks like them. They want to drive a wedge between non-Muslims and the 1.6 billion peaceful Muslims who are our friends, neighbours, members of our family and colleagues. Terrorists want us to isolate our friends, and make them feel unwelcome and alone, make them feel attacked. They want to make them feel like the only ones they can turn to are the radicals.

Do not let them do this.

The Enlightenment poured the foundations for the Western world to embrace the principle of religious freedom, whether that god is Jehovah, Buddha, Ganesha, Allah or anyone else. We must embrace our Muslim brothers and sisters in arms, we must condemn those who would spit on them and drive them out in retaliation, we must protect the right to worship freely that they have by virtue of being a human being.

That is how we beat the terrorists. Not with bigotry and hatred, but by saying “those evil extremists are not you, and I will refuse to treat you like they want me to.”

#paris #Love #Peace #France #ParisAttacks #vivlafrance #vivlaparis #vivlaliberté #vivlaliberte #standwithpp #standwithparis #weallstandtogether #instaparis #daneshgah #danesh #isil #isis #islamicstate #hateislamicstate #ParisSolidarity #carillon #L6Njesuisparis #jesuisparis #liberty #liberté

Survival

Some mornings you wake up

and you’re not sure how you’re here

but you’re here,

with your morning breath
smothered in sea salt,

with so much sand in your bed

you could build an army of castles.


On these days

your skin smells of survival,

and if you quiet your mind enough

you can still hear your lungs

choking with every crash of a wave.

But you are not in water

anymore.

And, look at you:

when the ocean chewed you up,

when she broke your bones,

you taught yourself other ways to swim to shore.

Look at you:

you have survived what scientists

haven’t even discovered yet;

things that have not been named.

Look at you:
you are the result

of holding on even

when you were too tired to.

And have you ever seen anything
so beautiful?

WE MUST NOT LOOK AWAY
(the video above contains distressing footage)

In light of the recent, utterly heartbreaking footage of a small, lifeless child being washed up on the beach amid the largest humanitarian crisis since World War 2, I have reprinted below a small piece I published the other day. Little Aylan was washed up on the Turkish shore yesterday. The child and his mother, who also tragically drowned, were fleeing from the clutches of ISIS (IS/ISIL) with the breaths of these barbaric monsters on the backs of their necks as they sought refuge- essentially as refugees fleeing any other conflict.

Why are they less important? Less important than the persecuted Jews of the Holocaust? Less important than children of the London Blitz escaping to Wales? If anyone feels this humanitarian disaster is just about “immigrants”, not refugees, they should look at that footage again.

Europe seems to have no clear, strong leadership. The problem of this ridiculous ‘not in my back yard’ (NIMBY) mentality continues. European government leaders seem to be showing little to no compassion, and few if any, will allow these desperate individuals to settle. There is a clear difference between economic migrants and those in genuine humanitarian need. We, and government leaders, must not look away. The time to act has passed, but it is still not too late.

I don’t know if I’m right, and of course I don’t have the solution. But I know that this situation fundamentally wrong and unbearably heartless. I have to be honest and admit that I had tears in my eyes when I saw the pictures of little Aylan washed up on the shore. And I felt enough is enough, it is time I did something. We all need to do something.

We could simply start by visiting this link:
http://goo.gl/gk49e3

—

The global community is witnessing – or is involved in the biggest mass exodus and movement of refugees from modern day war-torn countries since World War 2. All of these fleeing human beings have unshakable faith and desperate hope to simply to be safe and migrate to our western countries, and yes, we really can afford to support them. Yet, the western world looks away, in the most colossally destructive, compassionately redundant, heartbreaking way. The cringe inducing phrase ‘Not In My Back Yard’ is back, bigger and fiercer than ever. The NIMBY’s who self-censor their own view of the difficult to watch TV news reports: “oh why must they put this on during our dinner. It really does put me off eating.” They live among us, from every socioeconomic background, every faith, every family, every village, town, city, country. They’re everywhere, and it’s starting to feel like it’s becoming everyone. This must not happen. We need to heal our hearts of the hardness, educate our stale & engrained viewpoints and be aware of journalistic misinformation. We can all do more, and it only starts with one.

The photo above [see original article] shows a Syrian mother trying to hold her baby, engulfed by a life jacket after swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, all the while holding her little boys head above the water for gulps of air, before mercifully being rescued. Tens of thousands more do not make it.

Imagine this is your little boy – he’s no different to any 8 year old anywhere.

According to the UN, the vast majority of refugees have fled from Syria, where an estimated 220,000 to more than 300,000 people have been killed during its appalling and escalating war. The lack of compassion from many westerners that have been dumbed-down by xenophobic narratives in the mainstream media has been appalling. For once in your life, think for yourself! These people are human beings, our brothers and sisters who are in a perilous and desperate situation (largely caused by imperialism) that require urgent assistance!

Refugees don’t hide their taxes in the Cayman Islands; Refugees don’t privatise the National Health Service; Refugees don’t influence government cuts to spending; And Refugees don’t scrape together their life savings, leave their loved ones behind, bribe and fight and struggle their way onto the undercarriage of a train, or into a tiny hidden compartment of a lorry with forty other people, watch their friends and loved ones die or get raped, all for the express purpose of bragging about earning £67.46 a week.
Imagine waking your children in the morning, feeding and dressing them, pulling a little girl’s hair into a ponytail, arguing with a little boy about which pair of shoes he wants to wear. Now imagine, as you are doing that, you know later today you will strap their vulnerable bodies into enveloping life jackets and take them with you in a rubber dinghy – through waters which have claimed many who have done the same. Think of the story you’d have to tell to reassure them. Think of trying to make it fun. Consider the emotional strength needed to smile at them and conceal your fear.
Try and envisage how it would feel like when that experience – your frantic flight from war – was then diminished by a vicious, dishonest media that crudely labelled you and your family “migrants,” as if you were a scourge on society. Imagine having little to no voice in countering this description of you so commonly used by governments and journalists.