Category: Opinion

End the Nakba now

Since 1948, the people of Palestine have lost more than 85% of their land to Israel. The militarisation of the Israeli state has now confined them to a series of open-air prisons, in which the Israeli state routinely rehearses its cruel technologies of war — poisoning the soil, contaminating the water, and terrorising the people.

#Bulatlat20: 20 years of of fearless reporting on human and people’s rights in the Philippines

#Bulatlat’s human rights reporting is true to its name – to search, probe, investigate, inquire, unearth facts. Its stories chronicle the facts, circumstances and travails of human rights victims, as individuals and collectively, while providing the political and socio-economic contexts. Cite any human rights case in the past twenty years and google them to look for accurate, well-written and relevant stories pertaining to these cases, and you may most probably find them on #Bulatlat’s website.

Opinion | In defense of our red (tagged) comrades in the ivory tower!

These red (tagged) comrades were not responsible for the phasing out of jeepneys, for rampant violations of human rights, for the collapse of our agriculture. They took up arms precisely because they know that the peaceful means to achieve genuine social change is irresolvable in the current existing system. They realized that it was the existing system, which is unsustainable, that is utopian rather than the alternative future that they were willing to die for. They were not dreamers! They were realistic! Like the 1968 French student rebellion, they demanded the impossible!

Opinion | Sonya Gregorio’s ‘I don’t care’ as subversion

That the explicitly murderous rhetoric of, and the culture of impunity bred by Duterte has enabled this atrocity, is a glaring fact of our current life. From injunctions like “… kaunting pagkakamali lang barilin mo na,” to promises that no policemen would ever go to jail, everything that Duterte has been saying and doing has provided the very conditions for these atrocities to emerge and fester.