pete mcgovern

Not a peep from Western governments, or their opposition parties, to condemn the state-sponsored assassination of an(other) Iranian nuclear scientist by Israel. I'm not a fan but at least The Guardian/Observer has the cojones to write about the research from three Israeli human-rights organisations on the impact of intimidatory night-time searching of Palestinian homes - link here . Testimony includes that from Israeli soliders: “It wasn’t my job but they were looking for women to search Palestinian women [in Hebron]. I thought it was cool. I was 19 years old and playing war. I wanted to be part of it, to see how it was from the inside. In the end it was a turning point for me. “When I got inside, the commander said, ‘you have to search the women’. The family was really scared. I have this strong image of this other soldier who I really liked. He had a small machine gun. He’s holding it in front of this cute three-year-old. He has a face mask on and he pulls off the mask and smile

ensō  explained

for Richard M.

 I've started reading the journal, ' A Woman In Berlin '; a record of life between April 20th and June 22nd 1945 as the Russian army encircled then captured the city. 8 weeks of a life. Friday, 20 April 1945, 4 P.M. Rummaging through the few books owned by the tenant of this apartment (where I also found the blank notebook I'm using to write this), I turned up a novel. The setting is English aristocratic, with sentences like: ' She cast a fleeting glance at her untouched meal, then rose and left the table .' Ten lines later I found myself magnetically drawn back to that sentence. I must have read it a dozen times before I caught myself scratching my nails across the print, as if the untouched meal which had just been described in detail was really there and I could physically scrape it out of the book. A sure sign of insanity. Onset of mild delusions brought on by lack of food. The book was published anonymously in Germany in 1959 then withdrawn after an extreme