ICC Hunting Israeli And Hamas War Criminals

It may be woefully late but finally the International Criminal Court has got around to issuing arrest warrants for members of the Hamas leaders and the Israeli Government for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip since October 8 2023.
My question would be why only charge the Israeli Government for war crimes since 2023 because they have been literally getting away with murder with the backing of it's useful idiot ally America for decades, occupying, attacking and killing unarmed Palestinians, building a wall that incarcerates a whole population, holding over 9000 Palestinians in its prisons without charge, destroying farms, bulldozing homes and businesses, building apartments on occupied land in defiance of United Nation Resolutions and building a secret nuclear weapon program.
The United Nations has 65 resolutions against Israel including in 2019 when a UN investigation into the killing of 183 protesters in Gaza concluded that Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity with soldiers intentionally using live ammunition against children, women, journalists, health workers and people with disabilities resulting in over 6,000 people injured and 183 killed.
The charges against the Hamas leaders include extermination, murder, hostage taking, rape and other acts of sexual violence, torture and cruel treatment while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are alleged to be criminally responsible for a number of international crimes including the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, wilfully causing great suffering, wilful killing, intentional attacks against a civilian population, extermination and murder and  persecution.
The next step is for the three ICC judges to rule on whether the arrest warrants can be issued, expected to be a rubber stamp exercise, which will allow any country to arrest any of the named war criminals to be arrested and handed over to the Hague for trial.
With boring predictability, Netanayhau called it antisemitism and 'a moral outrage of historic proportions' while Hamas issued a statement strongly denouncing decision as it 'equates the victim with the executioner'.
As the Hamas leadership is holed up in Qatar and Israel's chief ally is America and neither are signed up to the ICC, it is unlikely any arrests would be made in those nations but the ICC was at pains to point out that there is no direct comparisons between the two sides, except to lay out his claim that they have both committed a series of war crimes and crimes against humanity which  human rights groups have applauded the way that the ICC is to applying the law to both sides.
The issuing of the warrant would put Netanyahu in the same unattractive war criminal category as Vladmir Putin, Colonel Gaddafi, Klaus Barbie, Eichmann, Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Radovan Karadžić , Ratko Mladić, Saddam Hussein, Candido Noriega and the entire Khmer Rouge regime, which is not attractive company and Netanyahu, Gallant and the Hamas leadership will not be able to travel to any country that is a member of the court, for fear of arrest which means 124 countries will be out of bounds, including the UK and most of Europe and would make it almost impossible for nations to do business with a government whose leader is wanted for war crimes.

We Are All Just Human's Trying To Live

There are a few times in my life when i have read something which has stayed with me forever and one of them is the Carl Sagan monologue used to describe the famous picture of Earth taken by Voyager 1 as it turned its camera around as it passed Saturn and photographed our Planet 4 billion miles away which become known as the Pale Blue Dot.  
Sagan's words were perfect and start with: 'That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives' and these words came back to me when my writing partner and I were cranking out the Famous Dead Bloggers series of posts, all these people, the famous, the infamous and kings and queens, murderers, Saints, dictators and doctors have all come and gone and left enough of an imprint for a couple of bloggers to write about them hundreds or thousands of year later.
Globally, average life expectancy is 73.16 years so it is fairly safe to surmise that in 100 years from now, almost everyone on Earth, all 8 billion of us will be different, there will be hardly anyone alive today who will be alive in 2124 as almost the entire population in 1824 was different in 1924 and the same in 1024 to 1124 or 124bc to 24bc, pick any era from the tens of thousands of years that us humans have been on the Earth.
This blog is called Falling On A Bruise which is a Evelyn Waugh quote which means doing something painful again and again in exactly the same way and i thought it summed up perfectly what we have been doing since time immemorial, falling on the exact same bruise again and again with our wars and persecutions of anyone of a different ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, nation, political beliefs or any other reason our nefarious minds have dreamt up to forcibly remove anyone who we deemed 'different'.
It is amazing to think that a whole new group of people have come along and acted and thought in exactly the same way as the previous ones which must say something about either nature or nurture, the Psychological debate over how much a person's characteristics are formed by either biological factors such as genetics or their upbringing or life experiences but that argument has been going on since the Ancient Greeks thousands of years ago so i'm not about to make a declaration on it, if great minds like Plato or Aristotle couldn't work it out then i'm not about to.  
Sadly, if it is Nature and it is a genetic trait to want to kill, subjugate and persecute each other then there is no hope for us and it will continue for as long as humans survive on this ball of rock but if it is nurture and all these horrific things are shaped by our upbringing and experiences, then we have a chance to reverse what we have been doing to each other since we evolved.
I come down on the Nurture side but not because i have any particular insight or evidence for it, to me it means we have a chance to escape the depressingly long chain of events which have blighted mankind and all it takes is for us all to deal more kindly with one another regardless of how hard some people try to tell persuade us some of us are 'different', because we are not and have never been, we are all just human beings trying to get through our allotted 73.16 years as best we can.

People Who Use Long Words

Don't you just hate people go all sesquipedalianism and use big words just to make themselves look perspicacious? I know i do so you won't be seeing any reference to antidisestablishmentarianism here and i won't be trying to find a way to work pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis into the post, that would just be floccinaucinihilipilification.
Not that i am in anyway a suffer of hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia but stuffing a sentence with long words which leads to lots of incomprehensibilities is pointless, it doesn't lead to honorificabilitudinitatibus or anything so i keep away from doing it at all.
Luckily my German is non-existent because  how the hell would the word for the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling be included so rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz will be kept firmly out of things and there is nothing super about supercalifragilisticexpialidocious which was a word made up for a movie.
Doctors may need to be able to say pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism or thyroparathyroidectomized but i don't although they may want to take a psychological look at why some people feel the need to
use such long words but as i am not doing that, no need for any psychoneuroendocrinological here thankfully.
This post then is safe for all bibliophobes from Taumatawhakatangi­hangakoauauotamatea­turipukakapikimaunga­horonukupokaiwhen­uakitanatahu in New Zealand to
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales.

Into The Last Weekend Of The Season

Last week was a bit of a strange one for Arsenal fans as we all turned into Tottenham fans for their game against Manchester City on Tuesday and Tottenham fans turned into Manchester City fans and hoped their team lost to stop Arsenal from winning the league.
I am not expecting my team, Arsenal, to clinch the Premier League this weekend but there has been much talk on if it is ever ok for you to cheer for your own team to lose but these were Tottenham fans and to be fair to them, stopping someone else from winning something is pretty much as good as it gets for a team who last won the top league when the Beatles were still an unsigned band and Yuri Gagarin was looking down on us all from Space.
Such was the Spurs fans fervour in stopping Arsenal by losing, they even forfeited a chance of qualifying for the Champions League themselves and the millions that brings which would come in very handy for a team who have a huge Harry Kane shaped hole in their forward line.
And so to the final day of the Premier League season and even if Arsenal beat Everton this weekend it is likely Manchester City will beat West Ham and win their fourth Premier League title in a row so it is amazing how much success a team can have when they spend a billion pound building a team and face 115 charges for breaches of Premier League rules.
This weekend then there will be some very strange alliances with Arsenal fans cheering for West Ham, Tottenham fans will be cheering Manchester City, Manchester United fans will be cheering Arsenal
and Chelsea fans will be cheering for Sheffield United and Nottingham Forest fans will be hoping that Luton don't win 13-0 against Fulham and relegate them.
Hopefully, Arsenal will be blowing bubbles and sending a massive Thank You basket to David Moyes and his West Ham players Sunday evening but if not then Que Sera, Sera and all that and well done Manchester City and we will get our hands on the 2024 Premier League title when you get stripped of all your titles for cheating anyway.

Sex Educations Should Be About Everything

The UK government has released new plans for relationships, sex and health education (RSHE) in primary and secondary schools in England. This would see age parameters introduced for key issues in sex education, with no education on sex at all for children under the age of nine, then puberty taught at age eight and nine, conception and birth when children are nine and ten and explicit discussion of sexual acts when children are aged 13 and 14.
I have no disagreement with any of that and most kids have the internet and will know all about it by the time the lessons roll around anyway, i remember my sex education was a couple of video's in the classroom when i was about 9 or 10 and then all us kids talking about it in the playground afterwards and asking older brothers and sisters and that was it.    
One thing the Government are saying can't be taught is anything around the concept of gender identity which does trouble me a bit because it is leaving out a big part of sex education, when i was a kid we had Section 28 Laws which were introduced by Margaret Thatcher who said that: 'Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. All of those children are being cheated of a sound start in life' which meant that schools were banned from 'promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality' so i never learnt about it.
Looking back at that now it looks outdated and just plain wrong to not teach children about homosexuality, i assume the thinking was if they taught it then some children may turn out gay which is exactly what i assume the thinking is behind keeping quiet about gender issues.
I don't know if the incoming Labour Government will make any changes to it but if it isn't going to be taught it should be at least discussed because the children will be seeing it in their everyday life so it shouldn't be ignored.
The Section 28 of my day just led to homosexuals being classed as 'not normal' and 'weird and strange' but nobody bats an eyelid now except the Churchy types who have that kind of backward looking mentality anyway and try to uphold the 'marriage is only between a man and a woman'  nonsense and by not discussing gender identity then this will also happen to anyone questioning their gender.
If you are going to teach kids about sex and sexual relationships then you need to tell them everything and not just cherry pick the bits you want. 

Genocide? What Genocide Ask Israel

Israel have been in the International Court of Justice today to defend itself against it's ruling that it is committing genocide against the Palestinians and called the ruling 'obscene', explained that it made 'extraordinary efforts to protect civilians' and said what was going on was a 'tragic conflict but no genocide'.
Obviously the country committing the genocide is always going to say they are not but if Israel say they are not then we really should take them at their word.
Of course that would mean dismissing the United Nations definitions of exactly what Genocide is called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2 and overlook part 1, 'killing members of the group' which would mean we ignore the 35,000 death toll so far with many more bodies buried beneath the rubble of their homes and other buildings.
Part 2, relating to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment can go to one side along with the 2,200 Palestinian men, women and children being held in administrative detention, without charge or trial and all those videos of prisoners being severely beaten and humiliated Palestinians.
No need to look at part 3 where it defines genocide as deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction so subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services so Israel not allowing aid into Gaza and attacking aide convoys when they did arrive, bombing every hospital in Gaza so there is no Health Service in the strip and people dying from starvation and disease as the utilities have been bomb damaged and Gazan's have been ordered to leave their homes en-mass and cross the country, we'd better make sure this part of the Genocide Act it is well out of sight.
Of the five acts of Genocide, we could easily pin 3 on Israel and the ICJ and ICC have but Israel is saying it hasn't done any of the above and who are we to argue, it isn't as if it has been militarily occupying Palestine and murdering them and stealing their land for over 60 years or anything.
Hang on...

Hey Men, Drive Like Women

Some of my posts may be contentious but we are firmly in uncontroversial territory here because this one is about why are men such bad drivers?
In France 84% of fatal road accidents are caused by men and the figures aren’t much better for the UK so why can’t everyone drive like us women?
The French safety awareness organisation, Victims and Citizens, has just unveiled a series of posters that read: “Drive like a woman'.
This isn't just the French being typically French and trying to start an argument because they have statistics to back it up which state that according to the French government, 84% of fatal road accidents and 93% of drink-driving crashes in France are caused by men.
The French are said to be among the most aggressive drivers in Europe with 91% routinely break the speed limit, 65% using their phones while driving, and 32% admitted to deliberately hitting the vehicle of a driver that annoyed them which all lead to 3,000 road deaths a year..
Analysis of British drivers show that men are almost three times as likely as women to be involved in accidents that kill or seriously injure pedestrians and in America male drivers were involved in 72.3% of fatal crashes on US roads so wherever you go, the ones with testicles are causing more serious road accidents than the sex which hasn't.
So how do we all drive like women? The French suggest be more cautious and less aggressive, slow down, be patient, leave a sensible gap between you and the car in front of you which may mean that it will take you longer to get where you are going, but you and the people around you would all get there alive and you won't be scraping bits of pedestrians off your front bumper which seems fair.
I understand that men will be mumbling is there anything they can do like a man and of course there is, you can park for us when we get there because driving like a woman is one thing but parking like one is probably not the best idea. Over to you men, just not too far away, you will then have to carry the shopping in from where you park up.

Put The Camera Phones Down For Now

Whereas usually the only people who see the Northern Lights are the few hardy souls and polar bears of the Arctic Circle, last weekend the Sun spat out a flare so large that even people as down as the
South Coast of England were able to see one of natures most impressive phenomenons.
The usual Solar Flares which are emitted by the Sun and only visible to the lucky few are of the A, B, C and M variety but occasionally the Sun gets it full paddy on and coughs up an extreme X-class flare such as the one last week which was an X2 and had a million camera phones pointing up to the night sky but the Sun is in the peak of its 11 year Solar Cycle and the European Space Agency are saying we could expect some more and no sooner said then done, on Tuesday the Sun spits out what has been measured as an X8.7, four times bigger than the one which so delighted everyone at the weekend.
The not so good news is the direction it came out of the Suns surface at because rather than hit us straight in the face like the last one, this one was emitted as the Sun was rotating away from us so we won't be seeing it lighting up the Sky unfortunately, the ESA putting out a statement that due to its location, this flare will likely NOT have any geomagnetic impacts on Earth.
The good news is that the current cycle, which began in late 2019, is predicted to reach its peak in July 2025 and as we approach it, we can expect more frequent and intense solar events, potentially leading to more opportunities to witness the awe-inspiring northern lights.
The largest ever Solar Flare came in 2003 and was so strong the X-ray detectors failed when they got to X17 but scientists estimate that it reached x28 strength but it only delivered a glancing blow to Earth as it shot down the side of us at a speedy 4,473,873 mph.
The proper name for a solar flare is a Coronal Mass Ejections which sounds like one of those films that should come in brown paper bags and be carried by shifty looking men in raincoats and they are not dangerous to us but  they can play havoc with electrical systems and can disrupt radio transmissions and cause damage to satellites and electrical transmission line facilities, resulting in potentially massive and long-lasting power outages.
So if your radio starts crackling or your lights flickering, it could be due to a coronal mass ejection. If you hear heavy breathing coming from that mac wearing neighbour it is probably another type of mass ejection we really shouldn't think too much about.

There Is Another Genocide Going On

 
While everyone is paying attention to the Israeli genocide going on in Palestine, there is another one happening right now in Africa in Sudan where Human Right Watch are saying Sudanese forces in the Darfur region are initiating a genocide against non-Arab ethnic communities.
 The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), along with allied militias, have been ethnically cleansing the region and since April 2023 and have killed tens of thousands in a systematic campaign to remove, including by killing, ethnic Massalit residents.
The HRW report found that women and girls were raped and subjected to other forms of sexual violence, detainees have been tortured and destroying critical civilian infrastructure, targeting neighborhoods
and sites, including schools, in Massalit displaced communities and then looted, burned, shelled, and razed neighborhoods to the ground, after emptying them of residents.
According to HRW, these attacks constitute “ethnic cleansing” as they appeared to be aimed at destroying in whole or in part the Massalit in West Darfur and have called for an investigation into genocide.
The International Criminal Court are currently investigating and have said that they have: 'grounds to believe that both the paramilitaries and the army are committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
While Israel is rightly being castigated for their genocide in the Middle East, we shouldn't be blinded to the one going on in Africa.

Younger Generation Plonkers

Say what you want about the younger generation, prats, pillocks, plonkers and tosspots because they wont understand you anyway because young people appear unaware of some of the insults we throw at them, the Numpties.
In a survey of 2,000 under 28 year olds, 62% had never heard of Lummox, 60% didn't know what a Bampot was and Blighter (54%), Ninny (51%) and Cad (47%) were all insults which would sail over their innocent heads.
They may not all be Drips (42%), some may take umbrage at being called a Tosspot although 36% wouldn't, the dirty Toerags (34%) and a third would just look at you gormlessly if you said they were a pillock (33%) or a Nitwit (27%).    
If any of them had watched Only Fools and Horses they would know about Plonker although 25% said had never heard of it and 26% wouldn't know what a Git was which means i have wasted so many decent insults throw at under 28's because that is one i use most of the time.
So let's celebrate the Prats (25%) and Numpties (22%) and insult them even more because otherwise our words will be replaced by thing like 'Karen' or 'Boomer' which just do not have the same satisfaction as calling someone a miserbale git or a 9 carat gold Plonker.