My name is Chuck Hamilton, and I’m from Chattanooga, TN,
USA. I’m 53 years old and have favored
Scottish independence most of my life, joining the SNP in 1997 just before the
700th anniversary of the Battle of Stirling Bridge and the devolution
referendum. I had to leave that body
after the Westminster Parliament voted to dissallow foreign membership in UK
political parties in the early 2000s but have been associated with the SRSM and
have friends who are members and ex-members of the SSP. Personally, I would like to see Scotland
completely independent as a republic, preferably a democratic socialist
republic.
Here on this side of the Atlantic, I was with the Democratic
Party until the 1990s when the neo-Dixiecrats of the Democratic Leadership
Council took it over and turned it into the neoliberal cabal it is today. Since then I have been a member of a few
socialist parties until joining the Green Party USA and changing support to
Jill Stein a few weeks before Bernie Sanders did to the movement which
supported him what Mir Hussein Moussavi did to the Green Movement in Iran in
2009. Among other things, I have also
been involved since the 1990s to varying degrees over the years with a local
group founded by Maxine Cousins and Lorenzo Ervin in 1983 called Concerned
Citizens for Justice, now serving as the local branch of Black Lives Matter,
which very openly supports the Palestinian people.
Speaking of the Green Movement, I’d like credit to go where
credit is due with regards to the conversation Neil and Kevin had on
Independence Live about Facebook becoming a tool for political activists in
terms of educating, agitating, and organizing.
While there had been some small-scale activity politically, it was the
Iranian Green Movement which pioneered doing that on a mass-scale during the
events of 2009, the following year, and into 2011, when the events of the Arab
Spring, the Israeli social justice movement, the indignado movement in Spain,
and the Occupy movement took over the center stage. I should point out, by the way, that almost
everyone active in the Green Movement and posting to Facebook back then still
is and is still doing so.
It was in 2011 that I became involved with the Palestinian
anti-apartheid movement. I had traveled
to Paris to meet and spend time with the French Iranian woman with whom I was
having a relationship, mostly over Skype, leaving the day after 300 tornadoes
had struck the Southeast USA. After we’d
spent a week together, she and I took a boat tour and met two fellows, one a
Palestinian Arab and the other an Israeli Jew, who were in the city attending a
conference of anti-apartheid activitists from Palestine and Israel. A photo we had taken of the four of us
together (with the caption “A Palestinian, an American, an Iranian, and an
Israeli got onto a Batobus tour boat on the River Seine in Paris”) serves as
the cover for my Facebook newsgroup, Terran News.
The Jewish, or, to be more exact, Judaicist, State of Israel
in the Levant (JSIL) is a sectarian ethnocracy engaged in widespread racial
discrimination, ethnic-cleansing, deliberate cultural destruction, vicious
apartheid that would make even the most hardcore white supremacist in South
Africa (or in the American South, for that matter) cringe with embarrassment,
and occasionally outright genocide in the narrower definition of the term. By the definition of Raphael Lemkin, the
Polish Jew who coined the term, all of those things are genocide. As a genocidal entity, Israel does not have a
“right to exist” as a state. Its people
do, no matter how bigoted many of them are, but they do not “have the right” to
their own state apparatus with which to manifest the fruits of that bigotry
upon its targets while at the same time denying those targets, their fellow
humans, equal access to that same apparatus to use in their defense, as is the
case, now and since 1948.
As great as the atrocities suffered by the Palestinians of
the West Bank, and Palestinian citizens of Israel for that matter, are, those
still pale in comparison to the situation of those in the Gaza Strip, which
would be more accurately called the Gaza Ghetto. It is the world’s largest prison camp, the
largest in the entire history of the world.
Within its walled, barbed wired, machine gun-equipped towers are 1.82
million people crammed into a mere 138 square miles. That’s 13,188 humans per square mile, the
highest density in the world. Even that
is being generous; the loosely-defined buffer zone around the prison walls
reduces the available territory even more.
Imagine if Scotland won independence and enacted a
constitution granting full citizenship only to those who could prove descent
from one of the historic Highland clans, Lowland houses, or Border grains, and,
furthermore, were registered Protestant Christians. The only difference would be a lack of native
population to ethnically cleanse and condemn to years of occupation and harsh
oppression. The fairest solution, the
only fair and just solution, is to dissolve both JSIL and the PA (Palestinian
Authority) and establish in its place One Democratic State that is completely
secular and guarantees to all its people equal rights before the law. Now, I know working out the details would be
a wee bit hairy and face more than a few obstacles to overcome, but that is the
only solution to the situation in the Southern Levant.
Yeah, I know, ODS (One Democratic State) seems like a
dream. But thirty-five years ago it
seemed as if the situation in apartheid South Africa, a state strongly
supported by Israel, mind you, even to the point of sharing it nuclear weapons
technology, would go on for decades or even a century. Ten years ago, no one envisioned that Burma,
or Myanmar, would have a mostly elected civilian legislature or that Aung San
Syu Kyi would be first minister in all but name. I know that in most countries where it took place
the Arab Spring has stumbled or collapsed, but no one at the time thought any
of the regimes against which the people rose would be removed from power. Two years ago, most people thought another
indyref was years or decades in the future.
Until Brexit happened.
The way the people of the world can support Palestinians and
the Israelis fighting for their human rights is to support the Boycott, Divest,
and Sanction movement, and to make their support known on Facebook and other
avenues of education and agitation.
The name of my Facebook newsgroup, Terran News, comes from a
saying I had posted on my old Yahoo360 page when that still existed. “I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth. The whole world is my home, and all its
people my brothers, sisters, and cousins.”
There’re no exceptions to that last bit.
In closing, I’d like to say to my Palestinian friends, Sayati
yawm’lana, and to my fellow Scots nationalists, Thig ar latha. Alba gu brath.
Link to the pocast: http://ungagged.podbean.com/e/two-furra-pound/
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