[hat tip]

The Pain in Her Ear and Her Mother’s Sad Eyes Always Remain

By MATS SVENSSON

It is 48 years ago since I last felt the pain. Woke up then and woke up now in the middle of the night. Had just got my own room. When the pain came I went in to mom and dad and lay down between them. My mother woke up while my father continued sleeping as usual.

I was suffering from an ordinary children’s disease, an ear infection. Most people get it at some point during their childhood. All my four siblings at some point felt the burning pain. I often felt it. It began with a slight aching pain, the ear swelling up, the pain occupying half my head and forcing its way to my palate. Despite my pain my mother was calm. She gave me an aspirin. I cried intensively, feeling incredibly sorry for myself. But my mother calmed me and promised that I would soon feel better. “Tomorrow we will go to the nurse and then the pain will go away,” said mother. I was calmed and soon feel asleep against my mother’s shoulder, seven years old.

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“Gaza”, © Golrokh Nafisi, Artist’s website
The drawing is a contribution to the Free Gaza Art Festival

Related:
20 JANUARY 2009: IOF gunboats shell Gaza coasts

As’ad AbuKhalil writes:

M. (who does not want to be identified) sent me this: “Prof. Abu Khalil : On ‘Democracy Now’ Mads Gilbert said this: “…the siege of Gaza, which has been on for eighteen months, which means a lot of starvation, lack of food, water, power supplies, medicines, napkins, anything that people need to live.” By ‘napkins’ I think he means feminine hygiene products. Forcing some half million women to use rags for a year and a half. And little or no water to bathe in. In the context of the horror visited on Gaza I am having a lot of trouble with this. On the one hand, next to the death of a single child, it seems nothing. Yet as a metaphor for the depth of Israel’s moral squalor, everything.”

Dr. Mads Gilbert on Democracy NOW!:
White Phosphorous and Dense Inert Metal Explosives: Is Israel Using Banned and Experimental Munitions in Gaza?

Photo 35 of 42.

Photo 37 of 42.

Updated 2 February 2009:
Facebook deleted 30 of the photos on 25 January. Here is a .pdf file of the complete collection.

Pepe Escobar, The Real News reports:

Journalists’ microphones turned off when Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni challenged in Washington