Yes, it's a shame that when we were all being brought up on the ridiculous Exodus story of blond-haired blue-eyed Zionists heroically redeeming the land of Israel, no-one ever mentioned that the prerequisite for the entire project was that the Palestinians would have to cease to exist as a people in their own homeland. The genocide part was kind of a big thing to leave out.
I think you could have made your point without minimizing the seriousness of what he is alleged to have done in Sweden, which is what you did when you summed it up as a bit of rough sex that wouldn't even be a crime elsewhere ("sexual crimes peculiar to Sweden").
In England, it IS a crime to have sex with someone who is asleep, because he or she cannot by definition give consent. Both the Magistrate's court and the High Court who heard Assange's case against extradition mentioned in their rulings that this specific allegation against him would constitute a crime under English law, and that crime would be rape.
So there was no need to characterize the content of these allegations as something that wouldn't be a problem were it not for those persnickety Swedes, with their over-zealous ideas about consent. It's perfectly possible to believe that UK gov's threat to violate the immunity of the Ecuadorean Embassy is outrageous and stupid, and to perhaps wonder about the convenient timing of the allegations against Assange, without doing that.
This Exodus : http://preview.tinyurl.com/nudods7
not this one: http://preview.tinyurl.com/macuqu8
Yes, it's a shame that when we were all being brought up on the ridiculous Exodus story of blond-haired blue-eyed Zionists heroically redeeming the land of Israel, no-one ever mentioned that the prerequisite for the entire project was that the Palestinians would have to cease to exist as a people in their own homeland. The genocide part was kind of a big thing to leave out.
I think you could have made your point without minimizing the seriousness of what he is alleged to have done in Sweden, which is what you did when you summed it up as a bit of rough sex that wouldn't even be a crime elsewhere ("sexual crimes peculiar to Sweden").
In England, it IS a crime to have sex with someone who is asleep, because he or she cannot by definition give consent. Both the Magistrate's court and the High Court who heard Assange's case against extradition mentioned in their rulings that this specific allegation against him would constitute a crime under English law, and that crime would be rape.
So there was no need to characterize the content of these allegations as something that wouldn't be a problem were it not for those persnickety Swedes, with their over-zealous ideas about consent. It's perfectly possible to believe that UK gov's threat to violate the immunity of the Ecuadorean Embassy is outrageous and stupid, and to perhaps wonder about the convenient timing of the allegations against Assange, without doing that.
Percentage of households in Gaza that are food insecure: 61%
Percentage of Palestinian children in Gaza who are stunted from malnutrition: 15%
Complaining that Gilad Shalit was "poorly nourished" because his diet was "primarily Gazan": Priceless.