Global
Law number one in the ‘law of holes’, is that “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Law number two, “if you are not digging, you are still in a hole”.
These adages sum up Israel’s ongoing political, military and strategic crises, 100 days following the start of the war on Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was faced by the unprecedented challenge of having to react to a major attack launched by Palestinian Resistance in southern Israel on October 7.
This single event is already proving to be a game changer in the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Its impact will be felt for many years, if not generations, to come.
Netanyahu was already in a hole long before the Al-Aqsa Flood operation took place, and he has no one else to blame but himself.
John Colella’s An Extraordinary Ordinary Man is a paean to the writer/actor’s dad and his
Italian-American clan. In his autobiographical one-man show Colella lovingly, vividly brings his
family alive onstage, regaling the audience with vignettes from his youth, growing up amidst the
family business in Chicago. Claudio Pastry was established by Colella’s immigrant grandfather,
who arrived penniless from the Mother Country and created an enduring, thriving business that
was passed down to the playwright’s father.
The bakery became the center of the family’s existence. When John was a child, he relished
learning all of the tricks of the baker’s trade, as well as devouring delicious desserts baked right
on the premises. In the play, indulging in paisano pastries such as cannolis and eclairs, little John
amusingly muses that it was as if he had his own private, personal “Willy Wonka.” He also
idolized his dad, a baker so skillful that to his son, his pop was a three-star-plus Michelin chef,
imbued with mystical flour power.
However, to his son’s surprise, John Sr. would repeatedly counsel his lad to “be anything but a
Thursday 18 January 2024 3PM EST (10 PM Palestine) Professor Mazin
Qumsiyeh Talk "Under the gun in Palestine: Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and
resistance." The War Industry Resisters Network. Register here:
https://secure.everyaction.com/r4R08jSFrUmIft6bA4uxxQ2
Also For those who speak arabic: talk Thursday 18 January 11 AM Palestine
time on environmental impact of war (email me for link)
Saturday Jan 20, 2024 11:00 AM Arizona Time (8 AM Palestine time)
Topic: Resistance in the time of Apartheid & Genocide with Drs. Mazin
Qumsiyeh & Jeff Halper: Via Zoom
“And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.”
Take a day, pore over a few of his words. I’m talking about Martin Luther King, of course. His “day” is over, but his message still pulsates. We must speak! The world is bleeding with the wounds of war and poverty and racism, just as it was 57 years ago, when he spoke — infamously, you might say — at Riverside Church in New York City. He defied LBJ and stared directly into the muzzle of the Vietnam war, declaring it to be moral savagery, declaring the United States to be “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Really, Reilly? Charles Nelson Reilly – a fixture on stage and the little and big screens for about half a century, best known as a habitue of televised variety, talk and game shows plus sitcoms – attended one of America’s most renowned acting schools in Manhattan during the 1950s. But who knew that the comic performer – who appeared countless times in skits on The Dean Martin Show, as a panelist on What’s My Line?, Password and Match Game, as a guest 100-plus times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and as an actor in the sitcom The Ghost & Mrs. Muir – studied acting under the revered Uta Hagen at New York’s fabled HB Studio? That his classmates at Herbert Berghof’s famed Greenwich Village acting outpost included Hal Holbrook, Geraldine Page, Steve McQueen, Orson Bean and many other luminaries – some of whom Reilly would go on to teach at HB Studio himself?
A friend of mine who follows international developments closely recently observed that the United States and Israel have “own goaled” themselves to become widely perceived as together the two most evil governments on earth. It is a judgement that is hard to disagree with regarding the Jewish state if one examines the abundant evidence that Israel is systematically committing war crimes against the largely unarmed Palestinian civilian population in an effort to bring about ethnic cleansing or even genocide in Gaza and on the West Bank. The process would include removing the Palestinians physically and/or killing them if they resist, which is what is currently taking place. Something like 10,000 dead Palestinian children attest to the brutality and inhumanity of the effort, together with nearly 400 doctors and nurses who were directly targeted plus more than 100 UN employees trying to bring aid to the civilians. What Israel is doing is monstrous, almost unimaginable.
