Na'am - una mezcla deleitante, llena de armonía, alegría y color.

En días donde el racismo sale por todos los poros de la sociedad israelí, en donde "grandes rabinos" exhortan o mas bien obligan a sus creyentes a no alquilar o vender casas a árabes, rabinas "recomiendan" a mujeres religiosas no salir con árabes, en donde ultra derechistas son perdonados por la justicia por actos de violencia mientras activistas de izquierda son encarcelados por manifestar con una bicicleta en Tel Aviv en contra del sitio a Gaza, en donde hijos de perseguidos, inmigrantes y sobrevivientes se manifiestan en contra de los africanos que buscan asilo, un encuentro natural como el del grupo musical Na'am llena el corazón de esperanza. Porque el encuentro es entre la gente normal, en este caso músicos unidos por un amor común, la buena música. Durante 2 días acompañe a este conjunto, en su primer concierto, no como grupo pero si con todos estos integrantes.
Los sonidos del oud de Nur, de la guitarra eléctrica de Adva, del clarinete de Mati, el bajo de Noam y la percusión de Tanjer se enlazaban en una mezcla deleitante, llena de armonía, alegría y color. Con música original escrita por los integrantes del grupo, el mundo árabe, el judío  y el occidental se encuentran en un dialogo, respetándose entre si, pero creando un idioma nuevo, rico en sabores y fragancias que llenaron el ambiente contagiando rápidamente a la audiencia con el ritmo de la música.
Una experiencia enriquecedora, una gran forma de terminar el anio y de disfrutar de mi trabajo, a veces se me cruza una historia positiva.......  

Happy New Year 2011

"The silence breakers "

Twenty-seven former Israeli soldiers who have given disturbing accounts of what they saw and did during their compulsory  military service in the West Bank and Gaza  have broken cover and agreed to be named and photographed for the first time.  
 The ex-soldiers, deeply troubled by their role in the security forces  over the decade since the beginning of the second intifada in 2000, have ended the anonymity of their testimony to the unique Israeli veterans' organization, Breaking the Silence.
They have allowed  me to take their pictures.
 The decision of the 27 soldiers to "go public" follows repeated complaints  by the Israeli authorities about the anonymity of  testimonies previously published by  Breaking the Silence. Witnesses partly preferred not to use their names to avoid  alienation or distress in  their own communities.
(C) Quique Kierszenbaum

The photos in The Independent

'Our lives became something we'd never dreamt': The former Israeli soldiers who have testified against army abuses by Don Macintyre

Ex combattants de Tsahal, ils refusent maintenant de se taire et parlent

Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights! Get up, stand up: don't give up the fight!

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore,

The General Assembly

proclaims

This Universal Declaration of Human Rights

as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article I

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11

(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14

(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15

(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16

(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17

(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21

(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

(2) Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country.

(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29

(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos 

Una ultima mirada al Monte Carmel

 

 Pasan los días y sigo impresionado con la fuerza del fuego,  solo en momentos como este se puede entender el poder de la naturaleza. En segundos todo cambia, la vida desaparece.

Una vez mas la culpa la tienen los otros.

Mientras las ultimas columnas de humo e el Monte Carmel son apagadas por el “super tanker”  y los otros 32 aviones, bomberos y voluntarios es hora de comenzar a analizar lo ocurrido.

Sobre responsabilidades seguramente mucho se escuchara en estos próximos días, pero 2 estrellas surgen  dentro del debate por la responsabilidad política sobre los echos.

El primero y mas ovio es el del Ministro del interior  Eli Ishai responsable directo sobre el departamento de bomberos quien en las ultimas 24 horas ha comenzado su campania de “yo no fui”.

Es imposible dejar de lado lado el tiempo y esfuerzo que Ishai ha gastado en resolver dos puntos esenciales en su agenda, el de los “inmigrantes y trabajadores ilegales” y el presupuesto para los jóvenes ultra religiosos quienes no trabajan para asi estudiar Torah y son subvencionados por el gobierno. Dos temas controvertidos, dos temas en los que la sociedad israelí se encuentra dividida.Dos temas que muestran solamente su interés sectorial.

Alcanza con revisar los medios electrónicos y prensa escrita para ver en que andaba tan ocupado el ministro Ishai desde el comienzo de su trabajo como ministro.

Es verdad, no solo el es culpable de anios de irresponsabilidad, de falta de profesionalidad y de concentración en objetivos tan problemáticos en el Ministerio del Interior, los ministros anteriores también tendrán que ser investigados y deberán enfrentar las consecuencias, pero es claro que hasta este incendio forestal, el Ministro estaba ocupado en muchas cosas menos en el departamento de bomberos, a pesar de lo que diga.

La otra estrella de esta catástrofe, una estrella que hace sus deberes en todo lo que tiene que ver con apariencia y quien sin duda aprendió del Presidente Chileno Sebastián Piñera en la crisis con los mineros es el Primer Ministro Israelí Netanyahu . Para el esto ha  sido mas que nada un momento de campania en donde se lo ha visto posar cientos de veces en diferentes puntos del incendio.

Como Piñera, Bibi ha transformado esta crisis en su propia campania publicitaria, llena de populismo, llena de pseudo carisma.

Quienes dirigen este país tendrán que olvidarse de las cámaras, y dar la cara para explicar como un país que se ve a si mismo y que es considerado una potencia militar mundial, un país desarrollado con tantos exitos cientificos, no puede controlar un fuego forestal, y prefiere culpar a un par de jóvenes por fumar su narguile (pipa de agua) en el bosque en forma IRRESPONSABLE.

La fuerza oscura de la naturaleza - el incendio forestal en el Carmel

Ayer salimos con Don a cubrir el incendio en el Carmel. Estuvimos en el Kibutz Beit Oren, en el monte Carmel, Usafia, la prisión Damun, la universidad de Haifa asi como tambien en los alrededores donde perdieron la vida 41 guardias penitenciarios en una trampa de fuego que devoro todo lo que encontro en su camino.Les dejo aca la nota que Don escribio.

A smouldering hillside where once was lush green foliage

Donald Macintyre The Independent

Saturday, 4 December 2010

Early yesterday afternoon, a solitary fox crossed the eerily deserted road to Beit Oren in search, no doubt, of a safe haven from the fire that had raged since Thursday. The scorched hillside behind him was a smouldering testament to the fire's ferocity, the lush green foliage of the Carmel forest – known locally as little Switzerland – reduced to ash here, the pall of smoke above the hills visible 50 kilometres to the south.

Inside the kibbutz – closed to the public by the police – it was even easier to understand what he was running from. Perhaps a dozen charred and still smoking buildings were burned out, their contents destroyed. The wreckage of two cars devoured by the fire – only one of them just recognizable as a Mazda 323, lay in a street, precipitately abandoned by its fleeing residents.

In someone's garden you could see the blackened, lifeless leaves of what 24 hours earlier had been an extravagantly spreading cactus; outside one of the houses, half of a severed timber telegraph pole was still burning, hanging crazily from the overhead cables it was supposed to support.

David Kneller had been the last Beit Oren kibbutznik to leave at around 5pm on Thursday, as the fire came licking up the steep hillside from the east and yesterday he was the first who dared to come back. He was greeted with the melancholy sight of what he estimated to be 35 apartments consumed by the fire, including his own and those of three members of his immediate family.

Close to tears, this phlegmatic 54-year-old, a resident here for 20 years, said: "I don't want to say. I cannot say how I feel. It's a terrible feeling."

Mr Kneller, who runs a riding school, said that one of his nine horses had been "terribly wounded" by the fire, but that the other eight were unharmed.

Yet yesterday there was no sight as sombre as that on a bend on Route 721, just outside Beit Oren, where the incinerated metal cage that had been the bus carrying its payload of young prison guard cadets was still parked where it had been consumed by a conflagration from which its driver had been unable to escape.

The windows, the upholstery, the roof, was no more; all that was left of the immolated tyres were the steel cords that had reinforced them from the inside. Most macabre of all the metal frames of the seats had been thrown backwards to an angle of 45 degrees, apparently by the sheer force of the heat that had ripped through the bus from front to back. On the road beside the bus lay the singed remains of a sheaf of papers, packed with carefully written notes from a prison department officer's course, the reminder of a young cadet's hopes for a career halted before it had even begun.

Ranking Mundial de Clubes del Siglo XXI (2001-2010) de IFFHS

La Federación Internacional de Historia y Estadísticas del Fútbol (IFFHS) reveló este martes su ranking de los mil mejores equipos de la década, entre la que hay varios clubes uruguayos.

1. FC Barcelona   España 2.459,0           

           

2. Manchester United FC England  2.436,0           

           

3. Liverpool FC    England  2.362,0           

           

4. Arsenal FC London      England  2.348,0           

           

5. FC Internazionale Milano Italia     2.275,0           

           

6. Milan AC   Italia  2.237,0           

           

7. FC Bayern München  Deutschland   2.231,0           

           

8. Real Madrid CF   España 2.168,0           

           

9. Chelsea FC London   England    2.165,0           

           

10. CA Boca Juniors Buenos Aires Argentina  2.073,0           

 36. Club Nacional de Football  Uruguay   1.437,0           

 117. Defensor Sporting Club   Uruguay   967,0  

 121. CA Peñarol Montevideo  Uruguay     953,5   

A pesar de los anios y la distancia siempre en un rincon del corazon, los numeros son claros el Bolso es grande.