Keb‘ Mo‘ Performs “Henry” at the White House

Concerning the coming world peace

and the missing peace – from a purely Palestinian point of view, because of “the missing piece” (of Israel ) in the Middle East…

We are not helpless

Inter-nationally, it could be, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more ”

all over again…

Click for photo

Consider: A Child Is Not a Knife

Consider: Honouring the elderly may not add years to your life but it will add life to your years

Acts of deadly Violence are always big news: Locally, Husby is now on the map of Swedish consciousness – and on many a conscience. It’s an issue almost no one is talking about without some deep-preach after some trigger-happy or perhaps merely frightened Swedish Policeman’s deadly shooting of a 69 year old man who at the end of a chase had locked himself up in his apartment, also frightened – probably frightened out of his wits and almost frightened out of his skin.

Most commentators say that in that situation it was an unnecessary shoot-to-kill.

Inevitably, some rioting

He’s pissed, she’s pissed, you’re pissed (or maybe not at all pissed) we’re pissed (or maybe not every we of us is on board) but they’re pissed, I’m also pissed about this and some other things, although I haven’t opened my mouth – yet – at least not yet like a lamb to the slaughter. When and if I do, you will know that I have opened it although I prefer we to I – as Isaiah 53 is to be understood.

Something to think about since there’s all the yaga-yaga about diversity to the extent that we often forget to Celebrate Sameness or One Love of mankind’s creator, GOD.

Swedish News

Sweden | EuropeNews

Daily Alert !

News from Israel

United with Israel

FrontPage Magazine

Atlas Shrugs

As Johnny Nash sings, I can see all obstacles in my way

“Rabbit, Snakes, Bat and Bear (me) are our Rhino names: Our blog is named for the observation made by the Jazz poet Ted Joans that the situation of a black man is like that of the rhino. Here goes the rhino, lumbering through the rain forest, minding his own business, when suddenly he is ambushed by his enemies. Netted by poachers. Removed from his Aboriginal surroundings. People believe that rhino horns are sources of sexual potency. They feel the same way about us. But the younger generation would prefer seeing us in a rocking chair on the porch of a rest home, swapping stories about the 1960s like Koots Badger.

Rhinos are not news junkies because the news entertains them, but because, like the Jews and gypsies of Europe, they have to be aware of their enemies’ movements, lest they be caught off guard like the Cherokee, or recently the Afghans who were going about their daily chores when assaulted from bombs dropped from thirty-five thousand feet. As the character Salman, the father, says in Wajahat Ali’s play, The Domestic Crusaders, we must be aware of what our enemies think of us. Lest we be taken by surprise. Droned.” ( pages 66-67 of Ishmael Reed’s JUICE)

These one and a half paragraphs came to mind when I read the news in Monday’s Metro that Hamas is negotiating with the Brotherhood’s Government of Egypt that the border crossing with Rafah should be open (ostensibly, we are to suppose, so that they can continue to smuggle weapons, for jihad purposes only – or as Ahmadinejad would swear (on the Qur’an?) about the development of Iranian nukes now nearing a critical stage, “ for peaceful purposes only”

The seriousness of the Hamas move – is exacerbated by the latest fear at the heart of this question here:

Is Egypt Heading toward a Military Regime? , asks Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah

It ain’t easy. It ain’t easy O ! How’s sister Assata Shakur doin’?

Charles de Gaulle asked, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”

It shouldn’t be too difficult with human rights, equality, democracy, social and economic justice and the knowledge that only GOD knows who loves HIM and how much, even if some people think that they have the licence to kill, one piece of shit thinking that “in the eyes of the Lord” he’s better than another piece of shit – a soul without dust …

“As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don’t hate nothing at all
Except hatred “

Some people only have cheese problems.

With regard to e.g. Nigeria, there are even more varieties of peoples than cheeses and the good rallying point of that is that they’re all Nigerians, Nigerian human beings all…

Still ruminating on Achebe and adjacent matters

More on that Wole Soyinka interview…

and it’s part of the world’s literary history

and was a major first for Africa and Diaspora

at that moment in history when

the Swedish Academy awarded Wole Soyinka the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 !

For once there was no controversy about that award, much fanfare, trumpets, fireworks, the whole works, jubilation and merry-making from Tripoli in Libya, Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt, Casablanca, Marrakesh and Fez in Morocco, North Africa, and you can imagine what was going on there in

Abeokuta his home town in Nigeria,

not to mention

Ile-Ife,

Ibadan

and the most populous Lagos –

in fact the whole continent erupted in celebration, from the East to the West and down to the Cape of Good Hope where the good winds were blowing just outside the then Apartheid South Africa – against whom he had declared a theatre War in some preceding years.

First met him in Stockholm in 1979, at the PEN conference reception to which someone had smuggled me in – enjoyed a week of meeting him daily – breakfast at the Grand Hotel once, a restaurant dinner with him and Kofi Awoonor – a walk and talk through Kungsträdgården – in fact saw him off on the bus to Arlanda – at Vasagatan and I remember his parting words, directly from Christopher Marlowe….

Last met him here in Stockholm where he stopped over and spoke at one of the SIDA venues on Biger Jarlsgatan, during his world tour campaign against some of the excesses of that Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha – some puzzlement written on his face and his words to me  followed by a smile, “this face is familiar…” as all Africa was bustling to take photographs with him…. ( more about all that, am working on it)

With the passing away of the other giant of Nigerian and African Literature, Chinua Achebe who is erroneously regarded by some ignoramuses as the great grandfather of African Literature, there are still those who want to posit a rivalry between the two as there was between Salieri and Mozart – and if anyone wants to see it in those terms, then certainly Soyinka is the Mozart of the piece – and I refrain – even in prose – of comparing Chinua Achebe with Salieri, when in fact there is no rivalry whatsoever or competition between poetry and prose or between music and prose or between theatre and prose (in 1979 Mr. Soyinka told me of his appreciation of the Drottningholm Palace Theatre – take my word for it or ask him and his unimpeachable integrity)…

Here is a recent interview with the Nobel Laureate in which he confronts some of these contentious matters – and here I must add that unlike Paul Theroux and his  “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” some Nigerian upstart who is no intimate acquaintance of Mr. Soyinka let alone of the other Nigerian literary luminaries of the 60s and 70s, attempts to demonise those luminaries, Brother Soyinka in particular like some 419 scam artist – for money  – I’m sure that Stefan Jonsson should find this all very interesting, but more on that from Brother Soyinka himself:

]]> http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/20/literary-nigeria-is-very-much-alive-and-vibrant/feed/ 0 http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/20/sweden-ice-hockey-champions-of-the-world-2013-men/ http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/20/sweden-ice-hockey-champions-of-the-world-2013-men/#comments Mon, 20 May 2013 10:51:47 +0000 Cornelius Hamelberg http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/?p=12479 Indeed, the hockey kings on ice…

2013 : Ice Hockey : Sweden , World Champions

More about the heroes in Sweden’s National Hockey Team known as TRE KRONOR

some of the action

Is there something – anything that I must not say in my blog, anything that could be viewed as a violation of freedom of speech ?

For now here’s some newz:

good news: racism is abolished (in france, anyway)

“When I went to university and started climbing the social ladder, I realized that the majority of Swedes are not racists” writes Nima Sanandaji.

This reminds me of an African sailor who boasted to me that when he arrived in Port Elizabeth in then Apartheid South Africa, he was treated like a white man – an honorary white man. It was then that he realised that the majority of South Africans are not racists.

Which in turn reminds me : “ Fox News Channel’s Shepard Smith asked O.J. Simpson if he would take a lie-detector test. “I’m not going to be some dancing monkey for you guys,” Simpson said ( AP Online, June 8, 2000)

Is it really about “climbing the social ladder”? Which social ladder? Does anyone move from home to do that? Does every Christopher Columbus want to climb the maypole?

Much of the discrimination that goes on is based on insecurity – a sort of compulsive attempt at one-upmanship. The nondescript artist discriminates the sharp art critic who thinks his work is worth less than a piece of shit. Some “successful” dark skin doesn’t want to associate with “unsuccessful” dark skins since such an association would “diminish” his hard-earned social capital – in the eyes of his new community. And so on and so forth.

Walk A Mile In My Shoe

About the job market – lots of Iranians and Somalis and other immigrants have moved from Sweden to the UK and complain less there, perhaps due to the UK’s diversity management concept as applied to dealing with citizen unemployment. Some of them have moved back crying about the cost of accommodation and transportation.

]]> http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/19/re-not-all-discrimination-in-sweden-is-racism/feed/ 0 http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/19/the-night-i-saw-the-light/ http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/19/the-night-i-saw-the-light/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 02:47:36 +0000 Cornelius Hamelberg http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/?p=12459 I’ve seen the light and been laughing quietly to myself a lot last night, and humming this song:

Niemen – Strange Is This World

and wondering how some dark little schmuck, discriminated all his life ( and anti-Semitized) would feel if he was not his toady little self but Barack Obama or owned a few tanks and a couple of banks o r could even talk straightforwardly.

Brother Obama?

Sure I’d talk to him. He’s a polite dude and so am I : sure of myself even if shy….

One thing’s for sure: It will NEVER happen again ö – not as long as I live or am alive.

The next time you see my shadow will be in the grave

]]> http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/19/the-night-i-saw-the-light/feed/ 0 http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/18/anti-semitism-in-malmo-dagens-nyheter-takes-focus/ http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/18/anti-semitism-in-malmo-dagens-nyheter-takes-focus/#comments Sat, 18 May 2013 12:08:29 +0000 Cornelius Hamelberg http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/?p=12441 And that’s one reason why it’s not helpful to invite anti-Semitic speakers to Sweden – to help make things even worse.

A lot worse.

On Friday morning my Better Half took off with our Dagens Nyheter which I didn’t miss then – Svenska Dagbladet takes some going through – but late in the evening when she got back home – and with the DN, what a first page surprise it was to see a big picture of a heavily bearded Rabbi Shneur Kesselman, smiling, having fun, his tzitzit dancing around his waist, his right hand keeping the kippah on his head as he was about to tackle No.7 – a little somebody in blue and white football colours, looks like a seven year old dribbling with the ball – getting ready to go past him, an idyllic picture indeed !

But as we’ve all heard time and again all is not well in Malmö, which is just a stone’s throw away from Copenhagen – indeed, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” which in this case is Malmö and the photo is captioned with the DN main headline for 17^th May, 2013: Swedish Jews are fleeing from their old sanctuary

The rabbi, a football parent it says “ is accustomed to encountering hatred and words like “fucking Jew” on the streets of Malmö. DN’s Niklas Orrenius has met Jews who have got tired of antisemitism and chosen to move.”

Still on anti-Semitism : “More cases of hate crimes should be tried in court” by Staffan Kihlström

Social responsibility?

Niklas Orrenius asks, What kind of society will we have if everyone hides / has to hide his identity?

The points made  in these articles cannot be belaboured…

Israel is taking part in the Eurovision contest being hosted this Saturday night in Malmö. Wish everyone the best of luck…

“When I started seventh grade most boys in my class were outspoken neo-Nazis“ reports a young Iranian Kurd. The school in question is somewhere here in Sweden

Worse still in some places – including some places where people come from, some are schooled in Hate

Anti-Semitic schooling

Obviously something has to be done. These kids have to be educated out of racism, anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism…

The ridiculous exaggeration in that proposition was only being foisted on some gullible school kids, probably to allay any unwarranted fears – promoted by concerned parents or the media – and to save them from unnecessary nightmares. Such was certainly not being said to any assembled council of Swedish Generals or face-to-face to any of the commanders or the friendly or not so friendly defence staff of Russian Military might , there in their military academy in Moscow : “ You lack the capability to attack my country” which could have been interpreted as either a provocation or a psychological situation in which the Swedish Chief of military staff or whoever it was who mis-informed the prime minister, could be deemed to have temporarily taken leave of his senses.

Can you imagine the potus of the USA during the cold war years, saying that to some school kids, that the USSR under Nikita Khrushchev, seen rowing here with Tage Erlander on board and elsewhere hammering with his shoe “The Ruskies lack the capacity to attack the USA”?

What’s happened? Times have changed…

2000 Blacks got to be free

Indeed that’s what it is :

Music of many colours

On the international scene, turning our attention to Nigeria oh Nigeria – giant of Africa where the Military is supervising a curfew in the North East of the country.  a country which comprises some two hundred and fifty ethnic groupings in contrast with only about eighty ethnic groups in Ethiopia – minus Eritrea…

It has been variously suggested that a new constitutional umbrella in Nigeria is what could shield the whole country from the teething problems that she continues to suffer from, along religious and ethnic fault lines

Re – “Sovereign National Conference (SNC)

]]> http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/17/one-world-two-countries-sweden-nigeria/feed/ 0 http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/16/re-joseph-s-nye/ http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/16/re-joseph-s-nye/#comments Thu, 16 May 2013 14:32:16 +0000 Cornelius Hamelberg http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/?p=12425 A correction

re- “Last night (Swedish time) I heard Joseph S. Nye saying on CNN that despite the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the many demonstrations against that war in many of Europe’s capitals, the main anti-war campaign song was not the Internationale but the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s anthem, that old Negro spiritual “We shall overcome”. ( In dovetailing out of the question of American intervention in Syria ( boots on the ground vs. no boots on the ground) he did not point out the most obvious – that at least weapons deliverer Russia would not be snoring or found wanting in action about Syria, their old ally, should Uncle Sam decide to go in, guns blazing as usual ( since the days of yore) .

This is what happens when you switch between news channels BBC, Sky News, CNN

Sometimes you don’t remember exactly what was said where – so the other day I reported that Joseph Nye had said certain things on CNN and now it turns out that the things I heard him say were said in the HardTalk studio, facing Stephen Sackur :

BBC HARDtalk – Joseph Nye – Former US Assistant Secretary of Defense (13/5/13)

Subsequent to that, Christiane Amanpour grilling a Russian spokesperson on CNN

From Russia, with wig

There’s a story about Robert Burns sitting on the banks of the Thames with his friend one summer’s day when a boat goes cruising by with the festive passengers on board singing one of his songs… that’s real fame for you, isn’t it?

What is not so known about Sweden apart from little encyclopedic details such as

“René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden”,

is that although it’s the Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, Sweden is a land not only of rivers and lakes (and just as Merry England can boast-talk with poetic conceits about Wordsworth and the Lake District) we are a Sweden with midsummer night dreams and music, a land of poets and poetry, mostly in the Swedish Language…

Göran Sonnevi

Sonnevi bags Gunnar Ekelöf Prize

Gunnar Ekelöf

]]> http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/16/goran-sonnevi/feed/ 0 http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/15/may-15-and-what-else-has-been-happening-on-the-planet/ http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/2013/05/15/may-15-and-what-else-has-been-happening-on-the-planet/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 17:16:10 +0000 Cornelius Hamelberg http://www.thelocal.se/blogs/corneliushamelberg/?p=12379 It’s a great day

The correct answer to the question what else has been happening on the planet? :

Too much! Everywhere, man and his inherited beliefs, Syria, Nigeria…

The film about Sven Lindqvist is showing today, Wednesday on STV2 at 23.30

Johan Croneman writes about it here

Also a reprise of the interview with Shani Boianjiu (in English) from three minutes onwards in this programme

What else has been happening on the planet locally and globally, yesterday and today :

Swedish News

Sweden | EuropeNews

Big news:Kerry in Sweden

And from the hub of planet earth:

Daily Alert !

News from Israel

FrontPage Magazine

Atlas Shrugs

Meanwhile in the beleaguered Nigeria I notice that President Goodluck Jonathan has switched the black hat for something that looks like former Indonesian president Sukarno’s Islamic headgear. Perhaps from that President Jonathan who is a fervent Christian could even go all the way in approaching the Islamists and switch to the full regalia of a black turban, the type that the Shia Sayyids usually wear to distinguish themselves from those who are not descendants of the Prophet of Islam, salallahu alaihi wa salaam, like Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who wears a white turban. But this is not a time for levity. Good thing that the good luck president of Nigeria’s headgear is still black and not white like those hairs in Wole Soyinka’s poem “To my first white hairs “ raising the question, why white ? – which caused the Nigerian critic Chinweizu to call Mr. Soyinka an “uncle tom”. I have been thinking lately about the sort of treatment that Chinweizu Ibekwe the iconoclast and enfant terrible would be capable of meting out to Kenneth Harrow’s “Trash: African Cinema from Below”. I shudder to think of it, from way below, up to my chin, even as I look forward to it. No I am not a sadist, not a masochist either. I espouse ahimsa, an old Jain idea ( I spent almost a year in libraries and Hindu Monasteries in India and the Catskills Mountains in New York 1976 -1979, and I root for fair play, but if war it must be – as Chidi Anthony Opara opines, “ Even cowards display bravery when loved ones are in danger ” – and so if war it must be then there’s no choice but like Old Bill’s Henry V, to

imitate the action of the tiger ..….

Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you. “

Black heart?

Must I/ you/ he / she say, like Lady Macbeth,

“My hands are of your colour, but I shame

To wear a heart so white.” ?

I too love Nigeria – even with the tendency of taking something like a back seat when some national questions are being discussed – in deference to those who have been drinking the waters of the Niger more than I have. I do espouse these ideas about my man Muhammadu Buhari, that “He is upright, disciplined, honest, devout, frugal and patriotic among other superlatives.” not because Fulani was my first language till I was six years old, and this may well have something to do with what is at hand…

(Hopefully, my good friend Farooq Kperogi will soon be doing a grammar and phonology cum pronunciation piece about the difference between hat and heart – whilst Chidi Anthony Opara might evoke some poetic differences between a black hat and a black heart. My good friend Yaya “ leader of the Muslims in Australia” – and no fisherman am I – the one who offered me a room in Mecca as part of his dowry for a Swedish Muslim beauty  – told me that every time I listen to some Shia ill-will or evil about the Sahaba, a black prick would alight upon my heart until with enough black pricks – (like a pointillist) my heart would become all black.

We must be fair to Goodluck Jonathan.

1. We could adduce his change of headgear style as being in imitation of ZIK of Africa!

2. President Goodluck Jonathan did after all float the idea of granting a general Amnesty to the BOKO HARAM people, in his quest for peace with the terrorist Islamists, but the group at large perhaps did not have enough time to co-ordinate a response to the offer of amnesty and immediate peace – the group is terribly fragmented and apparently not all under one chain of command though utterly united in their aim of imposing Sharia law on all of Nigeria – or talaq talaq talaq it looks like they could be going for a divorce from Nigeria – by civil war – and although the North of Nigeria is landlocked, the suffering that could arise  from such a war could be far worse than the Biafra War and that’s why we all have to be cautious and take a few deliberate steps back from the precipice.

The other day, someone asked: boko haram?

That question is relevant but still remains largely unanswered

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