Saturday, October 02, 2010

Free to sail, free to blog

September was a tough month at work, squeezing out many better ways of spending my time. But a couple of news stories around the world helped put things in perspective.

Starting with the picture above, of the catamaran of Jewish peace activists, including a holocaust survivor, trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Take a look at the picture above, in particular the two yachts towards the distance.

Even though this photo must have been taken in the waters off Gaza I'm sure those two yachts were not Palestinian. For if they were the yachts would have been not detained but shot at before they'd sailed 30 minutes from shore. Palestinian fishing folk are often killed while within the minimal (and illegal) 3 mile sea boundary of what is the world's largest prison camp.

And then the story of Hossein Derakhshan who was sentenced to over 19 years in jail in Iran for blogging. He used to write occasionally for The Guardian, and ironically one of his stories was about the blogging revolution in Iran.

Let's be grateful we are free to travel whether by yacht or kayak, we weren't ethnically cleansed into refugee camps where hundreds of our children are then killed by bombs dropped by F16s and where we can blog without fear of anything more than the grammar police.

2 comments:

Baydog said...

Well said JP. And well written. No typos.

JP said...

Thanks Baydog!

However much I might gripe about the last month's 6 day week work time table there are many things to be grateful for.