Letters to the Editor: Call for reversal on basketball game v Israel
Some members of the women's basketball team have decided not to participate in the game against Israel on February 8. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
On the day that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there is a plausible case of genocide by Israel, against the Palestinian people of Gaza, to be heard and ordered provisional measures including that Israel refrains from acts under the genocide convention, take immediate and effective measure to ensure the provision of humanitarian aid in Gaza, prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide and preserve evidence of genocide, Basketball Ireland reiterated its intention to go ahead with the match against Israel on February 8 despite the decision of five members of the team not to participate. (Women’s team to go ahead with Israel game despite player issues, Jade Wilson, January 27, 2024).
As Secretary General of Amnesty International Agnès Callamard has said “the ICJ decision alone cannot put an end to the atrocities and devastation Gazans are witnessing.
Alarming signs of genocide in Gaza, and Israel’s flagrant disregard for international law highlight the urgent need for effective, unified pressure on Israel to stop its onslaught against Palestinians.” Israel has completely or partially destroyed 346 schools in Gaza and all Palestinian universities.
At least 94 Palestinian university professors have been killed in air raids on their homes, including Prof Refaat Alareer, poet and founder of We Are Not Numbers, killed along with his father, his sister, and four of her children. At least 231 teachers and 4,327 students have been killed, with many more among the missing. Israel’s attacks on Palestinian education as part of its genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza has been defined as the crime of “educaricide,” or “killing of learning,” by UN Special Rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal.
Sports infrastructure has been decimated in Gaza. In December Al Yarmouk stadium in Gaza was transformed it into a detention where Palestinian men, youths and children were held without charge, terrorised and abused. The stadium was subsequently bulldozed.
The Palestinian Olympic football team coach and captain Hani Al Masdar, is among those killed by Israel. The office of the Palestinian Olympic committee in Gaza was destroyed.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel has called for international public and official pressure on international sporting bodies to suspend Israel’s membership and ban it from international tournaments and games until it ends its grave violations of international law.
Basketball Ireland must reverse its decision to participate in the match against Israel on February 8. Members of the team have taken the honourable decision not to play in protest against the bombardment of Gaza.
Basketball Ireland should, furthermore, do all in its power to persuade the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) to suspend Israel from international games until it ends its grave violations of international law, particularly its apartheid rule and the crime of genocide it is perpetrating in Gaza.
For well over a century Dubliners and visitors to O’Connell Street have enjoyed an unrestricted view of the Ambassador Cinema building part of the Rotunda Hospital.
This may be all about to change as an application has been lodged with Dublin City Council to erect a 1.7m high railing around this iconic 1764 structure.
Understandable safety concerns arising from continuous anti-social behaviour threatening the building and its staff is driving the application.
We have recently been given absolute assurances of increased garda visibility and presence to reduce crime and anti-social behaviours particularly in the city centre. Dublin City Council surely must now give time for this new policing initiative to bear fruit before permitting any changes to one of Dublin’s best-known and loved architectural features.
The alacrity with which a number of wealthy countries — including the US, Britain, and Germany (all arms suppliers to Israel) — suspended funding to UNRWA is shocking. Does anybody seriously believe that this essential UN humanitarian organisation was involved in the massacre that took place in southern Israel on October 7?
The allegations by Israel are against 12 relatively low-ranking employees — teachers, a social worker, and a storeroom operative — out of a workforce of 13,000. It beggars belief that this would cause funding countries to threaten the existence of a vital lifeline for the people of Gaza at their time of most need.
It’s hardly very surprising that the same countries who are refusing aid to UNRWA —the US, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania — are also the ones who are continuing to supply the Israeli murder machine with unlimited amounts of arms, funds and other supports to continue their relentless killing of innocent men, women and children in Gaza.
The modern-day penchant for “festivalia” knows no bounds, it seems, even it means having to swot up on the myths and legends of yore dredging and donning a notional (and temporary) Christian fervour of the Druidic persuasion. All that, just to have a bonanza-filled bank holiday. Business is business, after all.
Poor St Brigid, there she was so comfortably entombed in her well-deserved eternal slumber. Then, after almost a millennium and a half of blissful downtime, she is rudely awoken by an explosion of febrile festivity, promotional jollity, and merchandising tsunami. Surely such a flux of “spiritual” zeal could well prove all too much for her, having arrived with such sudden alacrity via the awarding of an extra bank holiday by the nation’s high priests.
Ah well, one has to indulge and engage, if only to camouflage the realities of the global chaos, climate armageddon and national dilemmas prevailing. Does Brigid maybe still have the knack to save us?
“Get your hats, flags or colours! Brigid or Patrick or both!”
The document responsible for having the Northern Assembly and Executive return to work is entitled ‘Safeguarding the Union’. A perusal of the document could leave one thinking that it could have been entitled ‘Safeguarding Unionists’, as the language contains a rather oblique and one-sided point of view.
The agreement between the British government and Jeffery Donaldson is being highlighted as some sort of major breakthrough in a return to the Stormont assembly institutions for the DUP.
The reality is that it is a reward for discriminatory behaviour on the part of Jeffery and his ilk who refused to recognise the result of an election in 2021. Since the DUP brought down the institutions, they have been pandered to day in, day out by the British government, and a seemingly neutered Irish Government who needlessly massaged their ego, which had been built up on years of falsehoods.
What sort of signal does this send to the over 75% of voters who did not put their trust in the DUP candidates on election day in 2021? Loyalist Community Council chairman David Campbell is finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill will be the first minister, even describing her appointment as undemocratic?
That’s like the pot calling the kettle black. He conveniently choses to ignore the truth of the LCC/DUP’s blatant disregard for democracy since May 13, 2022 when they collapsed the power-sharing assembly because of the outcome of Brexit that they put their blood and thunder thrust in, resulting in severe economic hardship for people of all creeds and nationalities due to lack of funding and provision of services.
The pandering and facilitation of demands which favour the diminishing powerbase that unionism had manufactured over the decades has got to stop so that normal politics gets to work as it should under the principles of democratic practices such as the result of elections.
