Here’s an audio slideshow of Abdel Qader Nada, one of the Free Union leaders, explaining the conditions that led Real Estate Tax Collectors to strike in 2007, and later establish Egypt’s first independent trade union in 51 years.
Bolivia breaks Israel ties
Something Mubarak doesn’t have the courage to do:
President Evo Morales announced Wednesday he was breaking relations with Israel over its invasion of the Gaza Strip and said he will ask the International Criminal Court to bring genocide charges against top Israeli officials.
Morales’ ally Hugo Chavez of Venezuela broke ties with Israel last week.
Morales told the country’s diplomatic corps that the Israeli attack “seriously threatened world peace” and he called for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Cabinet to face criminal charges.
Morales chided the United Nations’ “Insecurity Council” for its “lukewarm” response to the crisis and said the U.N. General Assembly should condemn the invasion.
He also said Israeli President Shimon Peres should be stripped of his Nobel Peace Prize for failing to stop the invasion.
‘The government is treating us in the same way as Israel is treating the Palestinians!’
From Egypt and Beyond…
…there is one phrase that I’ve kept hearing again and again: “The government is treating us in the same way as Israel is treating the Palestinians!”
The idea here is that people around the region identify and sympathize with the Palestinians not simply because they share a common culture or language (or for that matter an irrational hatred of Jews, unrelated to the Zionist colonization of Arab land, as some would have it), but also because they share a common experience of oppression and dispossession.