DESPERATE SITUATION: Mohammed al-Neder, 21, mourns over the body of his 4-month-old brother Ahmed, who was killed by Israeli fire, during his funeral at Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City
THE Global Sumud (steadfastness) Flotilla will launch its largest fleet yet in a bid to get aid into Gaza next spring, it has announced.
The group, which organised the 40-plus-vessel flotilla which earlier this year became the first to get within 70 nautical miles of Gaza since Israel began blockading the Palestinian territory in 2009, said it plans a new mission with over 100 ships and 1,000 participants.
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Despite an official ceasefire agreed as of October 10, Gaza remains gripped by a humanitarian crisis, with insufficient food and shelter in a harsh winter. Israel insists it is meeting the ceasefire condition of allowing 600 lorryloads of aid in a day, but these are vetted by Israeli military agency Cogat and it admits 80 per cent are private-sector vehicles, many carrying commercial goods which residents of Gaza — where the economy has been destroyed by the war and the preceding 17-year illegal siege — cannot afford.
“This mission is also not only about those at sea. It is about the millions around the world who are ready to say ‘enough is enough’,” the flotilla organisers said.
“Together, we rise against apartheid, racism, imperialism, colonialism, ecocide, and all systems of oppression.”
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
MetropolitanRepublic staff celebrating at the Silverback Awards, November 2023. (Credit: MetropolitanRepublic Uganda)
MetropolitanRepublic enlisted social media influencers to promote giant oil project as climate campaigners suffered beatings and arrests.
Last November, a beaming group of staff from MetropolitanRepublic collected their gorilla-shaped trophy at the Silverback Awards, Uganda’s top advertising and public relations gala.
The South African PR agency had won its prize for promoting the “sustainable development” of Uganda’s untapped oil reserves by French oil company TotalEnergies.
MetropolitanRepublic — which is part-owned by British communications giant WPP — described the brief for the award-winning “Action for Sustainability” campaign in its entry to the Silverback Awards: to devise an approach that “squashed all the negative PR” from protests against TotalEnergies’ plans for a 1,443-kilometre pipeline to export oil from Uganda’s Lake Albert via neighbouring Tanzania.
An accompanying video featured photographs of Ugandan anti-pipeline campaigners to illustrate this “backlash” and described them as “haters”.
“How do you launch a successful project off the back of this?” asks the narrator in the video. “Well, you develop a 360 PR campaign that retells your story the way it should be told.”
A screenshot from the award submission published on the Silverback Awards’ website. The Tilenga pipeline is a feeder pipeline under construction to carry oil from the Tilenga oilfields to the start of EACOP. (Credit: Silverback Awards)
Now, DeSmog can reveal that Ugandan police or military personnel have arrested, beaten, threatened, or harassed at least eight of the 15 campaigners pictured in MetropolitanRepublic’s award submission video.
These incidents — documented via video taken at protests, interviews with the campaigners, and police records — took place both before and after the video was published on the Silverback website in March.
There is no indication that MetropolitanRepublic’s campaign or the award submission led directly to any specific incidents affecting the activists. Nevertheless, DeSmog found that the agency engaged a network of social media influencers to post hundreds of times in support of TotalEnergies’ plans to mitigate the impact of the pipeline — even as protestors were being beaten and harassed.
“These PR firms are sponsoring our oppression,” said Hillary Innocent Taylor Seguya, one of the campaigners pictured in MetropolitanRepublic’s award submission video. “The more you push misinformation to the rest of the world, the more it means that you don’t care about our rights.”
Protestors from student human rights group Justice Movement Uganda opposing the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline. (Credit: Bruce Nahabwe)
Since the pipeline project was first announced in 2017, advocacy groups have highlighted concerns over the displacement of communities in Uganda and Tanzania, damage to ecosystems and wildlife, and the climate impact of burning Uganda’s oil. The outcry has prompted some banks, insurers, and the PR company Edelman — which has represented oil companies for decades — to shun the project, known as the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP.
In June this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged communications agencies to stop working for fossil fuel companies, saying PR campaigns run by “Mad Men fuelling the madness” were making the climate crisis harder to address.
MetropolitanRepublic, however, defended its role in promoting the pipeline — a joint venture between TotalEnergies and state oil companies from Uganda, Tanzania, and China.
Cross-party MPs urged for a concerted effort for lasting peace.
On March 9, the eve of the start of Ramadan, more than 1,200 people from 28 countries around the world met at the Baitul Futuh Mosque for the 2024 National Peace Symposium.
The Baital Futah Mosque in Morden, London, is the largest mosque in Western Europe and is the administrative headquarters of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, the third most popular branch of Islam.
The Peace Symposium, now in its 18th year, is organised by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Attended by dignitaries, including Ambassadors of State, MPs, and academics, as well as representatives from charities and faith communities, this annual event is aimed at promoting a deeper understanding of Islam and other faiths, and bringing communities together for the cause of peace.
As wars continued to devastate communities in Gaza, Ukraine, Yemen and Sudan, as peace-making efforts fall deeper into crisis, this year’s Peace Symposium called for immediate ceasefires and to build sustainable global peace.
The panel of speakers comprised of cross-political party representatives. Dame Sioban McDonagh, Labour MP for Mitchem and Morden, spoke of the oppression and suffering in Gaza. Addressing the Symposium, the MP said: “The Ahmadiyya community has been at the forefront of calling for peace since the very start of the conflict. It is his holiness who urged all world powers to de-escalate and work towards a lasting peaceful solution.”
The Israeli use of administrative detention, a controversial practice that allows the Israeli occupation to hold suspects without trial for months or even years, has reached its highest level since 2003, according to a report by an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.
B’Tselem said that as of November 2021, there were 1,128 Palestinians in administrative detention, including 10 minors and two women. The group said this was the largest number of such detainees since the end of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2003.
The group accused the Israeli occupation of using administrative detention as a “tool of oppression” and a “means of collective punishment” against Palestinians, especially those involved in political or social activism. It said that most of the detainees were held based on secret evidence that they and their lawyers could not challenge in court.
DESPERATE SITUATION: Mohammed al-Neder, 21, mourns over the body of his 4-month-old brother Ahmed, who was killed by Israeli fire, during his funeral at Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City
