Over the last few days Caulfield park in Melbourne, Australia, has seen messages of solidarity with the peoples of Gaza that are under seige in Occupied Palestine. Our love and Rage are with you. Free Palestine !!!! *we biked down to the park yesterday arvo to see if any of the placards were still up (all been removed) and we found this pleasant surprise( see grafitti above) . Caulfield is home to the largest Jewish community in the Southern hemisphere.
The New Barbarians
ReplyDeleteA declaration of poetic disobedience from the New Border
[pocha dialogues]
1.-To the Masterminds of Paranoid Nationalism
I say, we say:
“We,” the Other people
We, the migrants, exiles, nomads & wetbacks
in permanent process of voluntary deportation
We, the transient orphans of dying nation-states
la otra America; l’autre Europe y anexas
We, the citizens of the outer limits and crevasses
of “Western civilization”
We, who have no government;
no flag or national anthem
We, the New Barbarians
We, fingerprinted, imprisoned, under surveillance
We, interracial lovers,
children of interracial lovers, ad infinitum
We, in constant flux,
from Patagonia to Alaska,
from Juarez to Ramalla,
We millions abound,
defying your fraudulent polls & statistics
We continue to talk back
(Shamanic tongues)
2.-To those up there who make dangerous decisions for mankind
I say, we say:
We, the homeless, faceless vatos aquellos
in the great American metropolis
little Mexico, little Cambodia, little purgatory
We, the West Bank & Gaza strip of Gringolandia
We, the unemployed, who work so pinche hard
so you don’t have to work that much
We, whose taxes send your CEOs & armies
on vacation to the South
We, evicted from your gardens & beaches
We, within your system, without your mercy
We, w/out health or car insurance,
w/out bank accounts & credit cards,
We, the 7th generation; the 4th world
patiently waiting for Ixtaccihuatl to wake up
We, scared shitless at ground level,
but only at ground level
(Shamanic tongues)
I speak, therefore we continue to be together.
3.-To the Lords of Censorship & Intolerance
I say, we say:
We, mud people, snake people, tar people
We, bohemians walking on millennial thin ice
Our bodies pierced, tattooed, martyred, scarred
Our skin covered with hieroglyphs & flaming questions
We, Living Museum of Modern Oddities & Sacred Monsters
We, vatos cromados y chucas neo-barrocas
We, indomitable drag queens, transcendental putas
waiting for love and better conditions in the shade
We, “subject matter” of fringe documentaries
We, the Hollywood refusniks,
the greaser bandits & holy outlaws
of advanced Capitalism
We, without guns, without Bibles
We, who never pray to the police or to the army
We, who never kissed the hand of a bishop or a curator
We, who barter and exchange favors & talismans
We, who still believe in community, another community,
a much stranger and wider community
We, community of illness, madness & dissent
community of horny angels & demons
We, frail and defiant; permanently outraged but always tender
We shape your desire while you contract our services
to postpone the real discussion
We, the artists & intellectuals who still don’t wish to comply
We, bastard children of two humongous nuns:
“heterodoxia” e “iconoclastia”
We, who talk back in rarefied symbols & metaphors
against the corruption of formalized religion & art
We, the urban monks who pray in tongues & rap in Esperanto
We, who put on masks, penachos & wigs to shout
We, standing still in our underwear
right in the center of the stage
with the words carved on our chests:
“Performance artist: will bleed for food”
“Obsessive artist: will die for one idea”
We, critical brain mass
fuga inminente de cerebros y hormonas
spoken word profética, sintética
We continue to talk back…talk back…tack back…
(Shamanic tongues)
4.-To those who are as afraid of us as we are of them
I say, we say:
We, who have no name whatsoever in the news
We, edited out, pixilated, censored, postponed
We, beyond the video frame, behind the caution tape
We, tabloid subject matter par excellence
We, involuntary actors of “The Best of Cops”
eternally stalking mythical blonds in the parking lot,
We, mistaken identities in your computer memory
We, generic brown & black males who fit all
taxonomic descriptions
We, black & brown nude bodies in the morgue
Taxidermied bodies in the Museum of Mankind
We, prime targets of ethnic profiling & capital punishment
We, one strike & we’re out
We, prisoners of consciousness without a trial
We, of the turban, burka, sombrero, bandana, leather pants
We surround your neon architecture
While you call the FBI, the NSA and “Homeland Security”
(pause)
Yes, we are equally scared of one another
(Shamanic tongues)
5.-To the share-holders of mono-culture
I say, we say:
We, matriots not patriots
We, Americans with foreign accents
We, bilingual, polylingual, cunnilingual,
We, los otros del mas allá
del otro lado de la línea y el puente
We, lingua poluta, disoluta,
rapeando border mistery; a broader history
We, mistranslated señorita, eternally mispronounced
We, lost and found in the translation
lost & found between the layers of my words
We, Americans in the largest sense of the term
(from the many other Americas)
We, from Patagonia to Alaska
From Sao Paolo to New York
We, in cahoots with the original Americans
who speak hundreds of beautiful languages
incomprehensible to you
We (tongues)
We, in cahoots with dozens of millions of displaced
Latinos, Arabs, blacks & Asians
who live so far away from their land
(Shamanic tongues)
We speak therefore you cease to be
even if only for a moment
I am, US, you sir, no ser
Nosotros seremos
Nosotros, we stand not united
We, matriots not patriots
We feel utter contempt for your myopia
& when we talk back, you become tongue-tied
(Shamanic tongues)
6.-To the masters and apologists of war
I say, we say:
We, rebels, not mercenaries like you
We, labeled “extremists” for merely disagreeing with you
We, caught in the crossfire,
between Christian fear & Muslim rage,
We, a thinking majority against unilateral stupidity
against preemptive strikes & premature ejaculation
We reject your arms sales & oil deals
We distrust your orange alert & your white privilege
We oppose the Patriot Act patrioticamente
the largest surveillance system ever,
the biggest prison complex to date
We, who are never polled by Fox News
who never get to debate those TV pundits
We, whose opinions are never on the front page
of your morning paper
We did not vote for you,
do not support your wars,
do not believe in your Infinite Justice
We demand your total TOTAL withdrawal
from our minds and bodies ipso-facto
(Shamanic tongues much longer)
And when we speak in tongues, you evaporate.
7.-Finale:
(Finally facing the audience)
We, baaaad poetry,
We, (Tongues)
We, (Tongues)
We, (Tongues)
We, the shamans exorcising Enron
los brujos against Microsoft
poetas solitarios contra Wal-Mart
dervishes under the arches of McDonalds
We, the ghosts of the past
in cahoots with the future warriors
We, in cahoots with all innocent civilians killed
on both sides of the useless War on Terror
We, nosotros, going crazy to remain sane
literally dying for new ideas
performing against all odds
dancing on the edge of a crater
We, Western World imploding disfunctionalia
We, history’s final chapter…stop!
(pause)
We dedicate these burning words
to our homeboys and homegirls;
the rejects of all dysfunctional communities
embarked on a great political campaign
against the enemies of difference
(Shamanic tongues)
I speak, we speak, therefore we continue to be together
even if only in the realm of the poetic
if only for the duration of this most unusual mass
Thank you for being with me tonight.
Now, should we all scream at the count of 3
as an expression of savage tenderness?
Beautiful
ReplyDeletePalestinian supporters desecrate OZ war memorial
ReplyDeleteby John Searle
Friday January 9, 2009
John Searle, president of the Jewish Community Council of Victoria, the peak body of Victorian Jewry, said today: “Yesterday unknown persons desecrated a memorial in Caulfield Park with pro-Palestine graffiti. This memorial is dedicated to the citizens of Caulfield who died serving Australia in both World Wars.
What makes this act even more reprehensible is that it occurred in a week when a Jewish Australian soldier was killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
This young man died in the fight for democratic values and freedom from extremism, just like those whom the memorial honours. These are the very same values that Israel’s citizens embody in their struggle against Hamas, Hezbollah and their Iranian masters.
As the majority of Melbourne’s Jewish population is located in Caulfield, it is fair to assume that this graffiti was aimed at them. It is the latest in a series of intimidatory actions against Victorian Jewry presumably related to the current Middle East conflict. These include acts of physical and verbal aggression to persons and property, not against Israel, but against citizens of Australia.
As local Jews have no influence on Israeli policy – and nor should they – such actions cannot be seen as fair political protest or comment, but as hate crimes against Jews. Even more to the point, these vile acts are not only aimed at Victorian Jews; quite simply, they are a rejection of the ethics of the multicultural society in which we take such pride.
All fair-minded Australians must recognise this and raise their voices in protest. As for those cowards who violated this tribute to brave defenders of Australian values, they should hang their heads in shame.”
Source: ICJS
The December 2008 Gaza Massacre - an open letter from concerned Australians
ReplyDeleteJohn Docker and Ned Curthoys
We are part of an increasing number of people around the world of Jewish descent who are sickened by the coldly calculated massacre of the Palestinians of Gaza and who utterly repudiate Israel’s claim that it acts in the name of Jews the world over. Like Antony Loewenstein we deplore the ‘myth of Israel’ as perpetual victim and rational peace seeker, and its stranglehold over media reportage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The massacre in Gaza cries out not only for immediate condemnation but for historical explanation. As scholars working in the fields of genocide studies and research into the long history of European colonization, it seems clear to us that Israel – as in the history of white Australia since 1788 – is a genocidal settler colonial society that since its founding in 1948 continually seeks to destroy the foundations of life of the indigenous Palestinians, their health, dignity, livelihood, personal security, access to education, and political organisation, so that the Palestinians can be replaced by colonizing Zionist settlers. Recent genocide scholarship has highlighted how much the original definition of genocide (by Raphael Lemkin in chapter nine of his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) linked genocide and colonization as a two stage process of destruction of the home society (not necessarily by physical annihilation qua Nazism) and replacement by the incoming colonizers. Such has been the continuing historical pattern of Israel in relation to the indigenous people of the land. In 1948 the Zionist forces violently drove out over 700,000 Palestinians by deploying ‘admonitory massacres’, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has evoked in horrific detail in his recent The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006). Pappé details the continuous series of massacres in 1948-49 and sporadically thereafter that the Zionists perpetrated against the Palestinians in order to ‘Judaize’ ethnically-cleansed Palestinian lands. In 1967 the Israeli state conquered the West Bank and Gaza and has aggressively continued a genocidal pattern of replacement and destruction, creating and expanding Jewish settlements, stealing Palestinian land and ghettoizing remaining Palestinian communities, attempting, through a brutal military occupation, to make life humiliating and unbearable for the Palestinians.
What we are now witnessing is a form of settler colonization reminiscent of nineteenth century Australia, in which a settler colonial ‘logic of elimination’ (to quote historian of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe) combines massacre and population sequestration (reserves) to incapacitate the sovereign self determination of an indigenous people. Yet indigenous peoples have always resisted the genocidal processes of destruction and replacement that settler colonialism enacts. The indigenous peoples of Australia have magnificently resisted and still do, despite all their historical sufferings. The indigenous Palestinians as a people are also resisting the disaster that Zionism and Israel have brought upon them, thereby providing the continuing possibility of a future coexistence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
The December 2008 Gaza massacre by Zionist Israel poses an intense dilemma for Israel’s organized Jewish supporters and much of the Jewish diaspora, who have for decades cooperated with and been complicit in the ongoing, incremental Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. Israel is guilty under article II, part C of the UN Genocide Convention, in that it intends to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic group by ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. Will the Jews of the world continue to be so supportive, or will they historically disavow genocidal settler colonialism in the Middle East and question their own previous support? Historically, Israel is the imposition of a European nation state, founded on the notion of one people, one religion, one ethnicity, in an area of the world, the Levant, which through the centuries has been a space where Jews, Muslims and Christians have lived together in the same societies. The very idea so precious to Zionism, of Israel as a Jewish state, is absurd, as the great Jewish jurist and Australian governor-general Isaac Isaacs pointed out in the 1940s. What if Australia called itself a Protestant state, immediately making all non-Protestants second class citizens systematically facing abuse, discrimination, and state violence, as Palestinian Israelis do to the present day? Israel/Palestine should become a democratic state, a democracy where all who live in that land are full citizens whatever their religion or ethnicity.
The Australian government not that long ago in its apology over the Stolen Generations extended sympathy and understanding to the indigenous people of Australia. Why doesn’t it extend a similar sympathy to the indigenous people of Palestine?
John Docker
Ned Curthoys
Committee for the Dismantling of Zionism
1 January 2009
http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents/Gaza/australia.html