Will the International Community Ever Stand up to the Terrorist Aggressor State known as Israel?

Protests in Galway against armed Israeli attack on naval humanitarian aid convoy.
Location was the Liam Mellows statue at Eyre Square

Th
is week’s armed pirate attack in international waters by the Israeli military on a peaceful flotilla bringing humanitarian aid to besieged Gaza, resulting in the deaths of civilian passengers and the hijacking of ships and their occupants, is another demonstration of the terrorism that is a key characteristic of the Israeli state.

In the last few days, Israel has arrogantly dismissed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty signed by 189 states to make the Middle East a ‘Nuclear Free Zone’; in the last few weeks, it has vowed to continue expanding illegal Jewish colonial settlements on Arab lands; in the last few months it has been shown to have stolen international passports (including Irish) to provide cover for assassins sent to kill an opponent in another country; in the last few years, it has invaded Gaza and Lebanon killing thousands of innocent civilians, deliberately obliterating urban areas, transport/government infrastructure and covering agricultural lands with anti-personnel cluster bombs; in the last three years it has organised an illegal air, sea and land blockade of Gaza that represents the longest siege in modern times; in the last decade it has built a huge fortified wall on Arab lands in order to confine Arabs into nothing more than large concentration camps; in the last few decades it has built up an illegal nuclear weaponry arsenal; consistently defied UN resolutions; introduced racists laws against Arabs; and has invaded, occupied and settled Arab lands with racist Jewish colonial settlers brought in from Europe and beyond, ensuring in the process that any indigenous peoples left are stripped of their personal/national dignity by denying them control of their own roads, food and water supplies.

What more evil does Israel have to do before the western political community has the courage to take on the powerful Zionist financial and political lobby in the USA, Britain and elsewhere, as exposed by that fine elder statesman ex-US President Jimmy Carter, and put an end to the aggression and expansionism of a state that is a central cause of instability in the Middle East and the world?

The Irish government should be praised for unequivocally condemning Israeli piratical action and calling for an end to the illegal siege of Gaza. But surely, Ireland should now go further by expelling the Israeli ambassador and calling for a EU trade boycott of Israel? Likewise it should demand the sacking of the European taxpayer-funded 'Middle East Peace' envoy Tony Blair, who is distrusted in the region from his term as British Prime Minister, who spends so much of his time on the lucrative US lecture circuit or by acting as a high paid consultant to financial institutions/corporations whilst seeming to go AWOL when Israel launches one of its regular terrorist campaigns against unarmed civilians. Sadly he lacks the moral conviction of those brave Jews and Israelis such as the ‘Rabbis For Palestine’ who took part in demonstrations this week in London and elsewhere against the Israeli state murder machine.

Ireland’s Only Computer Museum Exhibition Opens in NUI Galway

I finally got my wish! I coordinated the opening of what is probably Ireland’s only historical exhibition, dedicated to the development of communications and computer technologies, at the National University of Ireland Galway. The museum is appropriately located at my workplace -the on-campus Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), which is the world’s largest Institute researching the next generation of the World Wide Web.The exhibition represents a collaboration between NUI Galway and the multi-sectoral ‘eGalway’ group of the Galway City Development Board. Under the chairpersonship of Dr. Chris Coughlan of Hewlett-Packard, representatives of GMIT, NUIG, Galway City Council, state agencies and the local business sector collected an intriguing array of vintage computers, telephones, microprocessors, data storage devices and other memorabilia that collectively illustrate how improvements in communications have dramatically impacted on society throughout the centuries.

This unique science heritage facility, which will be open for one month, tells the fascinating story of key moments in the history of communications. Yet it is designed to be more than just a tribute to the past and a collection of historical artefacts. For it has a central tenet of inspiring today’s youth to consider careers as scientists and engineers by highlighting the importance of ‘innovation’ to human progress and the crucial but oftentimes overlooked contributions of young people and of Ireland to advances in global communications technologies.

For instance, the invention of ‘Radio’ had a very strong Irish input. It was also avidly embraced by young people worldwide and spawned the birth of ‘Teenage Culture’ during the Jazz Age. This association has only increased over the decades leading to today’s digital world where many of the significant inventions in modern technology, from the personal computers to Google, Facebook and YouTube, have been created by innovators in the late teens to late twenties age bracket.

Chris Coughlan says, “a key aspect are the exhibits on IT companies that established significant manufacturing and research operations in Ireland and worked with the Irish third-level educational sector such as Verbatim in Limerick and Apple in Cork. Being based in Galway, we have of course given a special prominence to the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) who became in 1971 one of the first such multi-national entity to establish an export manufacturing operation in this country and in many ways heralded a major shift in Irish economic development. From its Galway plant, DEC provided a range of mini-computers and software that became the backbone of many industrial and engineering plants across Europe. Its presence here acted as a catalyst for numerous other US high-tech and business companies to follow suit by establishing their primary European operations in Ireland.”


There are also exhibits on the development of the portable computer, the printer and the microprocessor. Equipment on display include DEC Vax, Digital Rainbow, Apple 11, Apple Macintosh, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Vic-20, BBC and the Sinclair ZX81


There is one section of the museum though that should be very popular with all those that consider themselves ‘Young at Heart’, namely the computers that allow users to play the legendary video games of the late 1970s, including ‘Pacman’, ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’!

I hope British People kick arrogant & anti-people Brown & Labour from Government

I really hope that the British Labour Party is given a trouncing at the general elections. They long ago betrayed so many of their fundamental principles & are now the embodiment of the saying that "power corrupts".
Brown/Blair presided over a corrupt Parliament where many Labour MPs became paid lobbyists for vested interests, fiddled their expenses, refused to scrap the outdated Trident nuclear submarines missile service costing the taxpayers billions of euro, backed an illegal colonial war that killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. Britain has huge debts, manufacturing has all but disappeared & endemic poverty has only increased. Endemic employment has worsened. Brown's two-face approach to Gillian Duffy in Rochdale portrayed his arrogance & contempt for the public, particularly core Labour supporters. She made clear that she was a veteran Labour supporter & asked him perfectly reasonable questions about the economy, jobs & emigration. He smilingly praised her for her community ethos & but was caught angrily demeaning her off camera. Brown is an arch-hypocrite. Then he brings in war criminal Tony Blair to shore up his campaign. The sun-tanned Blair is supposed to be EU & International Peace Envoy to the Middle East. Is he ever there? He has done nothing constructive that helps the downtrodden Palestinian people. He seems to spend his time on the lucrative US lecture tour circuit or undertaking paid consultancy work across Asia. I am writing to the Irish Foreign Minister asking for his sacking.