Cademuir

In reply to my recent letter.

Dear Mr. White,

The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr. Micheál Martin T.D., has asked me to thank you for your recent correspondence. Due to the very large number of letters received on the current crisis, I regret it is not possible to reply in detail to all letters received, but I can assure you that the views of all correspondents have been carefully considered by the Minister.

You will be aware that the Minister has made a number of public statements expressing his concerns and those of the Government, attaching priority to ending the violence and meeting the humanitarian needs of the victims. I attach for your information copies of those statements.

The Minister continues to believe that it is imperative for the two sides to accept the basic outline of an end to the conflict set out in UN Security Council Resolution 1860, and agree an immediate ceasefire. Work to persuade the parties continues both at the UN in New York and particularly in the region, in particular through the good offices of the Government of Egypt. Ireland and its EU partners will continue to be actively engaged in supporting these efforts.

Yours sincerely,

Private Secretary

An Roinn Gnóthaí Eachtracha Preas Ráiteas

Department of Foreign Affairs Press Release

Preas Oifig, Teach Uibh Eachach, Faiche Stiabhna, Baile Átha Cliath 2

Press Office, Iveagh House, St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2. 

Tel: 353 -1- 478 0822  Fax: 353 -1- 478 5942 / 475 7476

"I am appalled at the shelling of UNWRA HQ in Gaza City this morning which has resulted in three local UNWRA staff being injured. I am also aware of some suggestions that white phosphorous may have been used in this attack. If that is so, I would strongly condemn such an act and call for this to be fully investigated by the United Nations. 

Our Representative in Ramallah has been in contact this morning with John Ging, the Executive Director of UNRWA, who has confirmed that he and other international staff at UNRWA HQ are safe. UNRWA have, however, been forced to suspend their activities for a second time following this incident and the heavy fighting reported in Gaza City today. It is of great concern that they have been forced to take this step, at a time when the Gazan population are enduring horrendous suffering. 

Today's events, yet again, underline the necessity for an immediate and permanent ceasefire to be instituted as soon as possible. Intensive diplomatic efforts are underway in the region, both through the good offices of the Egyptian Government and the negotiations on a ceasefire which they are hosting in Cairo, as well as which UN Secretary General Ban is today visiting Israel. We will continue to support these efforts to secure an end to the violence which remains the utmost priority." 

Ends+++

15 January 2009

Press Office

Yesterday Dr Zion Evrony, the Israeli ambassador, appeared before the Dail Foreign Affairs committee to explain his countries war on Gaza. Chris Andrews T.D labelled Israel a 'terror state' and called for the ambassador to be expelled and trate talks suspended; views echoed by several other TD's.

At the end of the meeting Dr. Evrony said that he had heard many false accusations and examples of rewriting of history. Rewriting history? Funny given the statements that Dr Evrony gave to the committee!

Ireland, he said "was lucky in its neighbours" and that Ireland "had never had to fight an outside enemy or use force".

Well theres a rewrite of history!

It's understandable I suppose how he got confused. Afterall there is peace now in Ireland, achieved though dialogue; the British army never managed to bring peace to Ireland. Perhaps rather than accusing people of rewriting history the ambassador should learn some Irish history.

Thought I would put up a short peice about my thoughts on Gaza. Where would we be had London sent in ground troops into Dublin after the Canary Wharf bomb? What if the British never opened up dialog with Sinn Fein? What if the British had demanded a complete surrender as a precondition to talks? What if the British had imposed an embargo on the north and denied the movement of goods and people in Catholic areas?

We'd be still fighting.

Instead we got to this:
Thats Ian Paisley the most fervent Unionist who swore that he would never talk to the IRA. And the bearded guy is Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein the political wing of the IRA. Now they are not exactly best buddies, and we're still on the road to sorting out our problems. But we're sorting them out, without guns.

It looked as though we'd sorted out the Israel Palestine issue too.


But things have gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Both sides have done wrong. Currently Israels response is completely disproportionate and politically motivated, they may be guilty of war crimes, they have been criticised by the UN and ICRC for targeting humanitarian resources, they have internally displaced 80,000 people, they have killed hundred of innocent civilians. All in the false belief that it will make them safer. It won't. This will unite opinion against Israel and will strengthen Hamas. Worse, it weakens Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. I can see no way in which the current Israeli action will bring any peace to Israel, sure it might stop rockets in the short term but longer term it will just cost more lives. Obviously Hamas should not be firing rockets into Israel. (yes that is a gross oversimplification of the current situation and ignores the reasons of how we got here. Sorry. I'm writing a short blog post not a history & politics paper.)

So what is to be done.

Stop the fighting. Forget the details about tunnels, borders, and who officially recognises what. Just stop the fighting now.

Then do what Rabbi Michael Lerner  says in his article Israel in Gaza: Right but not Smart . By far the most sensible plan I've seen on where to go from here. His 7 preconditions to a ceasefire are optimistic; the ceasefire should be immediate on both sides while those points are negotiated. Those points will be hard to swallow on both sides. Actually they will be abhorrent to many, but you need to think of future generations. His 4 steps that Israel can take now should be implemented immediately!

As he says himself in the article this is the only way Israel will ever achieve security.

Salaam Shalom Síocháin

p.s. Here's some pics from the Anti War demo in Dublin last Saturday.

@webmink pointed to this article in a tweet.

Armed with his Canon 5D and his new Lensbaby lens, photographer Duane Kerzic set out to win Amtrak's annual photo contest this week, hoping to win $1,000 in travel vouchers and have his photo published in Amtrak's annual calendar.

He ended up getting arrested by Amtrak police; handcuffed to a wall in a holding cell inside New York City's Penn Station, accused of criminal trespass.

This is daft on so many levels. Duane has documented the ordeal at his website.

I don't have any photos of Penn Station but here are a few that I've taken in the US of train's and stations.

At night taken from Sandycove. I'd been out getting some light pollution shots and decided this was worth of a decent photo.

I've also fixed my camcorder. Apparently running across a pitch with a camcorder still recording on a tripod then banging it into the tunnel caused a little band to slip off its cog. All back together and working now.

I got a new graphics tablet recently. Touching up photos was just too tedious, even with my trusty trackball. As well as touching up things I wanted to use it to actually make some graphics. Derek suggested I look at inkscape; and why not since it costs considerably less than Adobe illustrator. It takes a bit of getting used to, but the learning curve can't be steeper than Illustrators! Plus its free and open source. There are also some cool tutorials to get you started. Being a fan of the Order of the Stick I decided to try David Shaws OOTS Avatar Guide. Here's the result. I'm happy with it!

Tim Bray has a blog entry discussing what he thinks Sun should do.

... the needs of small businesses and startups, which have two ways of buying infrastructure:

1. Getting hardware specs from a Web site, filling in their credit card number, and waiting for delivery.
2. Buying it in the form of services from a hosting or "cloud" provider, which involves getting the specs from a Web site, filling in their credit card number, and waiting for deployment.

+1

Buying stuff from the sun website with a creditcard is difficult I'm told. That needs fixing. And not just for hardware - software and services should be available to easily buy online.

Look at MySQL (yep part of Sun!) for example. A great product for free download. That suits most users. There are some really cool Enterprise extensions to MySQL which you need to buy. But you can get a free 30 day trial and buy the Enterprise product online.

Hell with all the systems has that seem ideally suited to 'cloud' computing why hasn't Sun done this.

IMHO.

I've added a Sea Shepherd feed to twitter at http://twitter.com/SeaShepherd .

This is completely unofficial, but it is taken directly from the news feed from the official website and posted to twitter via twitterfeed.

I went down to Sandycove this evening and took this pic. If it looks a little 'wrong' its probably because its shot though a Cokin 89B IR filter; this is the red channel isolated and converted to B&W.


Here's a slightly different bit of processing. This is just the original image with the 'I'm feeling Lucky' processing in Picassa.