I’m late posting again, if you can be ‘late’ attending to something as voluntary as blogging. This is partly due to starting to make a Christmas cake. I don’t want to say too much about this (and certainly won’t be tagging my cake) as I noticed a whole load of cake links on my blogs a few days ago. I have a very sweet tooth so this would be fair enough but I don’t recall letting on about that until now, which makes those links a bit mysterious.

I’ll be posting about the following:

1) Bethlehem
2) Incitement to religious hatred
3) Work Hunt
4) Other personal

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We watched a presentation (by powerpoint) about the impact of the Israelis’ ‘Wall of Separation’ on Bethlehem yesterday evening. It was totally unsympathetic to the Israeli point of view and clearly showed the plight of a few families and individuals whose homes or businesses are close to the wall. One thing that I hadn’t realised is how convoluted the layout of the wall is. In the section we saw pictures of (just outside Bethlehem) it seemed to have chopped up the country like a giant bagatelle board (with the residents and visitors as the ball bearings). There were photographs of one woman’s house where all the windows on every side had a view of this wall – about 30 feet away from the house. We were told of folk who no longer went into their garden because the Israeli guards could look down on them and sometimes jeered at them. People’s livelihoods are being destroyed and an unavowed intention seems to be to make life unbearable so that people leave to go and live abroad.

To their credit, some people from this part of the world are going to lobby the local MP about the matter on 24th November.

There seem to be two different possible responses to Israeli policy. Firstly, that the policies infringe ordinary human rights, the right to own property for instance, and, secondly, that they wrong because they undermining the historic presence of these Palestinians whose families have lived in this particular place for hundreds of years. The presentation argued against what is happening on both scores, which is understandable, but I’m not sure that using both lines of reasoning doubles the effectiveness of the Palestinians’ cause.

The argument about historic rights is historic itself. The Old Testament has a lot to say about the rights of the Israelites to inhabit the promised land and the Law of Moses (Leviticus) fleshed out the broad idea with specific instructions making it generally impossible to sell land except on a leasehold basis so that the original owners or their successors had it restored to them when the year of jubilee came around.

My own view is that this sort of historic right is by the by. There are too many uprooted peoples and rootless individuals for it to be practicable or desirable to add historic rights to the basic rights we all need to survive and prosper. Also, the whole Zionist project has sounded that bell too loudly and resonantly for anyone else to have much of a chance in the Holy Land. Maybe by concentrating on just the basic human rights that are being trampled upon, the Palestinians would have a better chance of calling into question what the Israeli government is doing and on the basis of what rights.

I checked out the UN declaration of Human Rights on the web and this is what it says about property:

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.

http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm

The European Convention on Human Rights Protocol 1 Article 1 provides for the right to the peaceful enjoyment of one’s possessions.

The wall building we were being told about is near the place venerated as the tomb of Rachel. I’ve been reading HV Morton’s ‘In the Footsteps of the Master’ and he says that nearby is spot favoured by Holman Hunt and where he probably found inspiration for some of his religious paintings. There’s an irony in the contrast between the inspiration that people like Holman Hunt and Morton found in visiting the Holy Land years ago and the depressing stories you hear today.

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The episode of the BNP’s Nick Griffin’s trial for inciting race and religious hatred has been such a disaster that you can’t help wondering if the BNP’s leader sprung a trap that the BBC and the Attorney General walked into, or, maybe, Nick Griffin sees all his meetings as opportunities to lure unwary members of the establishment into providing him with some of the publicity in their gift.

The fact that the meeting where Nick Griffin made his remarks was not a public one should have warned the CPS off. The authorities have enough difficulty in maintaining the law about what’s said in public without trying to police what’s said in private as well.

Nick Griffin’s reputation will forever more go before him. In a relatively short space of time he’s achieved ‘evil rabble-rouser’ status in the media so his utterances now prompt the quandary ‘is that wicked because Nick Griffin said it or is Nick Griffin wicked because he said that?’ In the case of his remarks about Islam we need to remind ourselves that the wise use generalisations as little as possible and generalisations as sweeping as his are the sign of onewho has lost touch with reality or who has says things not because they are true but for the effect their words will have.

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The work hunt is happening but there’s not much progress to report. I did e-mail the voluntary sector recruitment agency to ask for a meeting but they’ve not replied so presumably they don’t bother with meetings.

I came across an advertisement for working as a trainer on a freelance basis with an organisation called Momentum Consultants. Instead of requesting your CV or having you complete an application form they have an interesting questionnaire which seems to designed to tease out whether you have a moral compass that’s in alignment with their views. However, they don’t spell out what they believe in and it seems to me that that’s putting me the candidate at a disadvantage. I spent quite a while this morning searching for more information but with no success. I’ve decided to give them a miss partly because they seem too inscrutable and partly because I’m wary of training roles – I know what hard work it is. It would have to be a special organisation to tempt me back into doing it.

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I paid a visit to the Noah’s Ark at Lurgashall on the Friday before last and I took another look at the war memorial in St Lawrence’s churchyard. My interest was piqued because in addition to the men listed (29 of them and it’s a small village) there was a solitary woman’s name, Ellen Potter. I’ve been searching on the internet today and a site called ‘Roll of Honour’ gave a little information about all the people named. Ellen Potter was a member of Queen Mary’s Auxiliary Army Volunteers and held the rank of forewoman (equivalent to a sergeant) and she died in hospital in Middlesex in early 1919. What she died of it doesn’t say but at a guess she would have been a victim of the influenza epidemic of that year. Neither does it tell you about what she actually did as a volunteer but generally the volunteers acted in a clerical capacity behind the front.

I haven’t done much walking since last blogging except for a stroll around Petworth Park which, like the Noah’s Ark, has favourite place status.

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As you would expect I’m following the news about what the allies are going to do in Iraq avidly. Of course there’s lots of talk about a change of policy and a lot of the comment is along the lines of ‘so many mistakes have been made in the past that it’s surely not possible to make any new ones’. The decisions that are taken now may not compare to the mistake of invading Iraq in the first place but there’s a lot of scope for more reputations to be blighted in time for the elections in the US and the UK in 2008 and 2009.