MF GALAXY

Below is a feature conversation recorded for Up Close, an interview progamme on Canada's Christian Television Service. The interviewer is sketch comic and independent filmmaker Neil Grahn. We met at CJSR and then reconvened at Sharifa's Sambusa House, a mainstay in the Somali community here, to discuss religion, spirituality, politics, social justice and human rights. PART ONE PART TWO PART THREE PART FOUR PART FIVE PART SIX

You might expect that CIA analysts, present or former, would approve of the US-funded Israeli occupation of Palestine. Read on: "We have long played with words about this, labeling Israel's policy ' ethnocide,' meaning the attempt to destroy the Palestinians as a people with a specific ethnic identity. "Others who dance around the subject use terms like 'politicide' or, a new invention, 'sociocide,' but neither of these terms implies the large-scale destruction of people and identity that is truly the Israeli objecti ve. "'Genocide'--defined by the UN Convention as the intention 'to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religi ous group' -- most aptly des cribes Israel's efforts, akin to the Nazis', to erase an entire people. (See William Cook's "The Rape of Palestine," CounterPunch , January 7/8 , 2006 for a discussion...