refugees

"Put your best foot forward. I am happy to announce that I am officially done with the fashion industry, I will be moving back to Australia In [sic] order to live the life that I fully deserved. Which is real life. I can no longer deal with the fakes and the lies. My life is too short for this dramatic life. I am thankful and grateful for every sweet souls [sic] that I have crossed path with."

"I am proud to be able to share my own story so people can better understand the true plight of refugees. I want to use my own experience to educate others about a very real issue that – in one way or another – really does affect all of us"

"Some young Syrians struggle to remember a time before violence and loss, before they had to flee their homes and become refugees. We provide a safe space for them to play and be children again"

"If I had this access when I was growing up, I probably would have turned out better. We need it. We need to save the children from what’s really happening"

"I’ve always been very vocal about my frustrations around race in this industry"

"It’s still so strange when people come up and recognise me. But I am so happy to inspire others in similar situations to mine"

"Amid all the din about normalization, I have noticed one startling absence, namely, the current status of the Palestinian refugees living in every major Arab country, whose condition everywhere—there are no exceptions—is unacceptably miserable. Wherever there are Palestinians in the Arab world, there are rules and regulations forbidding them full status as residents, forbidding them work and travel, requiring them to register with the police on a monthly basis, and so on. It’s not only Israel that treats Palestinians badly, it is the Arab countries who do so also. Now see if there is a sustained campaign by Arab intellectuals against this invidious local treatment of the Palestinian refugees: you won’t see or hear one. What excuse is there for the horrible refugee camps in which so many of them live, even in places like Gaza and the West Bank; what right do local mokhabarat forces have to harass them and generally make their lives miserable? And why is there no protracted press campaign to end this appalling state of affairs? Why, because it is much easier (and less risky) to rail against normalization and Hebrew translations than it is to dramatize the unacceptable condition of Palestinian refugees in the Arab world, who are always being told that they cannot be “normalized” because it would implement Israel’s design. What rubbish!"

"I was woken at 6.30 a.m. and given twenty minutes to prepare for departure... When we arrived at the airport my hands and feet were bound and I was thrown into an isolation cell for over three hours. At 11.15 they forced me onto the plane. I began to scream and cry as I was surrounded by six gendarmes and two men from Sabena. The airline men pushed me around and one held a cushion to my face. He almost suffocated me. These men were supposed to accompany me all the way to Lome. Passengers intervened at this point, saying that they would get off the plane if the men did not let me go."

"Her (Semira) death is not a singular incident. The deaths of refugees are the symptoms of policies that no longer see the humanity of those fleeing their homeland, but prefer to see them as numbers, or worse, as a natural disaster, a "flood"."

"As commander of the security detachment at the national airport I believe that I am officially responsible for the death of Semira Adamu."

"Semira was vulnerable to various racialised intersections of exclusion: She was Black, female, young and ambitious She was attractive, eloquent and well educated She was an asylum-seeker whose application had been rejected She was an undocumented person with an 'illegal' status She was a deportable detainee who was deemed expendable She was a whistleblower and defender of detainee rights."

"The death of Semira is part of a series of complaints and is the result of several new laws to get asylum in Belgium."

"Whatever judgment Brussels Tribunal (Tribunal correctionnel) hands down on 12 December to five law enforcement officers tried in connection with the death of Semira Adamu, during an attempt to deport her forcibly by air in September 1998, it has always been clear that governments and state officers have a responsibility to ensure respect for the physical safety and inherent dignity of all people in their custody, including deportees."

"For overnight the Russians and Germans had become comrades-in-arms. How could Goebbels explain this development to his audiences? If he had had more time, the problem would have been much simpler. But here, as many times thereafter, the real significance of the coup was its suddenness: Hitler struck without advance warning. As the Fuehrer wanted to surprise the world, Goebbels was unable to prepare the German people. Neither could he stop all anti-Russian propaganda weeks and months in advance."

"After the first few issues [of Nationalsozialistische Briefe] appeared most of its readers were convinced that Joseph Goebbels was a communist in disguise. In Rheydt, people had thought so for years. There was indeed very little difference between the language of Goebbels and the language of the communists. The Party ‘big shots’ became apprehensive."

"It is true that in the National Socialist Letters, Goebbels put the accent on Socialism rather than on Nationalism, to such an extent that he sponsored an alliance between a Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia; he also flirted with an ideological alliance with other rebellious ‘have not’ counties such as India and China."

"Generals usually know when a war is lost. The German generals had never been absolutely convinced that they could win World War II. They had only hoped to win it mainly because Hitler had promised them that the enemy armies would suffer amoral collapse and that they themselves would not have to fight a two-front war."

"What does espionage cost? The question is certainly as old as espionage itself. It is one which has been discussed a great deal, but little definite information has been available. When Hitler came to power, all the sources became invisible. One of Hitler’s first governmental strokes was to abolish the fiscal report—under the Constitution the Government had to make an account to the people or their representatives of all expenditures. This eliminated all chance of checking espionage expenditures."

"By early 1943 Hitler had become perhaps the most isolated man inside the Third Reich, Every report was rewritten before it was given to him. He no longer saw the newspapers, though, to be sure, they contained little enough genuine information. He saw only clippings. The reason for all these precautionary measures was that nobody around Hitler fancied the hysterical outbreaks to which he was so addicted, and nobody wanted him to have any more brainstorms or intuitions of the kind which had already cost the army so dearly in Russia"

"‘We will never get anywhere,’ Goebbels wrote, perhaps remembering his discussions with Fledges, ‘if we lean on the interests of the cultured and propertied classes. Everything will come to us if we appeal to the hunger and despair of the masses.’"

"If the German Propaganda Ministry is trying to tell the world that there is even the slightest bit of liberty left to the editors in making up their newspapers, the newspapers themselves belie this completely. It is astonishing, to say the least, to what degree they resemble each other. On any one date all of them, in Germany and in the occupied countries, carry exactly the same headlines, talk about the same subjects. Of course, I am not referring to the news of the day. It is only natural that all of them should carry the news of the day or whatever is handed out as the news of the day over there. But the similarity extends even to general subjects, to subjects which are not timely, which could be published today or tomorrow or in four weeks or not at all."

"Next to Goebbels, Himmler was the foremost connoisseur of Russian methods in the Nazi Party. But while the great propagandist was concerned mainly with the theory, Himmler studied the practice of the Bolshevists."

"Goebbels was well informed indeed on some things the Russians were doing. He knew that the Communist had been the first to co-ordinate propaganda and espionage. He knew that Lenin himself was the inventor of total propaganda, and that he had even coined the word to describe it: agitprop—an abbreviation for agitation and propaganda. Propaganda had meant to Lenin persuasion of the masses, and agitation was the aggressive form of persuasion."

"One of the principal reasons for the enmity between Himmler and Göring was Himmler’s tireless scheming to infiltrate Gestapo men into the Army Intelligence Service, and thereby to get control of it."

"German army circles had never cherished any illusions about their Italian partner. It is said that even in the twenties the leading officers of the German General Staff—which by the Treaty of Versailles had no official existence— declared, ‘The next war will be lost by the country which takes Italy for an ally.’ A joke, of course, but it reflects the attitude of Germany’s military men. Their attitude was no different where espionage was concerned."

"At the end of August 1943 Dr. Alexander Loudon, Netherlands Ambassador to Washington, made a most interesting forecast about the outcome and aftermath of the war. He predicted that, with defeat, the German General Staff, the Nazi leaders, and in particular the Gestapo, would go underground to prepare for the next war. As for this war, he said, the Nazis knew that they had already lost it, and were willing and eager to get it over with."

"The Nazis understood early that revolutionizing warfare meant revolutionizing espionage. An Intelligence Service which had been mediocre during the First World War was replaced by one which before and during the Second World War achieved enormous triumphs. The Nazis worked on the basis of total espionage."

"Only in exceptional cases have the Nazis ever used German citizens or former German citizens as agents in the United States. This is only logical. A man or a woman with a German accent would have small chance indeed of convincing a gathering of even the most stupid people that, in advocating America’s isolationism or withdrawal from the war now, he is motivated solely by patriotic feelings for America."

"The thing that strikes you most: there is very little war news in German-controlled papers. There are, to be sure, all the notices of promotions: the new generals, the new commanders. There are also items listing decorations conferred for some distinguished service or other. And there are a lot of what they call in Europe feuilletons, colorful and gossipy essays or think pieces which have to do with the war. But there is precious little news. There are some very good reportages on the life at the front or in U-boats or in bombers, and some good photos. The Germans were always good at that. But when it comes down to actual information, if you really want to know something—you don’t get much."

"In a number of contributions published in the Voelkischer Beobachter [Goebbels] celebrated Lenin as the national liberator of his country. ‘The Soviet system does not endure because it is Bolshevist or Marxist or international, but because it is national—because it is Russian,’ he wrote to a leftist friend. ‘No Czar has ever aroused the national passion of the Russian people as Lenin did.’"

"Hitler and Goebbels also argued at length about Russia and the Fuehrer made it unequivocally clear that Goebbels was no longer to indulge in praising Lenin as a ‘national liberator’ nor to draw any parallels between the Bolshevists and the Nazis. On April 16, [1926] Goebbels noted: ‘His arguments are convincing, but I think he has not quite recognized the Russian problem. Still, I may have to reconsider some of its aspects.’"

"But Goebbels was not a Communist in any sense of the word. And he took pains to say so. ‘Communism is nothing but a grotesque distortion of true Socialist thought,’ he wrote to Count Reventlow, a rightist politician. ‘We and we alone could become the genuine Socialists in Germany, or, for that matter, in Europe.’"

"Total war necessitates total espionage. The leadership of a country must be capable of finding out about and calculating the entire force of resistance of in opponents, military and otherwise."

"[Goebbels] specialized in articles on Bolshevism of a decidedly pro-Russian tone. He worked on a speech, ‘[[w:Vladimir Lenin |Lenin or Hitler?’ In this comparative study he came to the conclusion that Hitler’s ideas were superior. Nevertheless, the comparison was not necessarily unflattering to the Russian."

"Nobody knew better than Goebbels that a Propaganda Ministry was almost a contradiction in terms. Propaganda is the more effective the less people know that they are supposed to be influenced, and vice versa."

"When I spoke out against China's 'one child' policy and other injustices, I was persecuted, beaten, and put under house arrest by the government...In April, 2012, I escaped and was given shelter in the American embassy in Beijing. I am forever grateful to the American people for welcoming me and my family to the United States where we are now free."

"China will see democracy, I’m one hundred per cent sure – it just needs time. If everyone makes an effort to build a more just and civil society then it will come faster and if everyone stands by and does nothing, then it will come slower but is still inevitable. Whether the authorities wish it to or not, the dawn comes and the day breaks just the same."

"The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said more than once that I am a free person. Did I do anything wrong by leaving my home? If other people helped me leave ... this is something that should be praised. Why then when I leave do they break into my home to beat people, detain them."

"We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinner We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan’s gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer’s belly We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognises the importance of small details We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: ‘Our country is loftier and more beautiful!’ We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong."

"My father would read Darwish to me when I was a child and translate it because, in those days, there were not many translations of him. My father would read other poetry and translate it for me, and I just loved it. I loved everything about it: the metaphors, the passion, the care, the tenderness, the flowing quality of the lines. I eventually met Darwish, and he would ask me to read his poems in English; he didn’t like to read his poems in English at all. He read in Arabic, and just getting to be with him was such a landmark in my lifetime’s experience...I felt them [poets] as a wellspring of the spirit of Palestine, and the love and the care for Palestine—that is something that the media often finds easy to overlook. It’s just so insulting—versus the poetry which is so respectful, passionate, loving, and nostalgic."

"I encouraged the leadership in its time of weakness. Now that they are strong, I'm allowed not to applaud. If a Palestinian state is established, I will be in the opposition. That's my natural place."

"Only culture is a guarantee of true peace."

"What is a homeland? It is a place that enables people to blossom, and not a place in which people serve the flag. In my poem, Cease-fire with the Mongolians, I say that I am going to make socks out of the flag. My life's work is not on behalf of a flag."

"When you prepare your breakfast, think upon others Do not forget to feed the pigeons When you engage in your wars, think upon others Do not forget those who demand peace As you pay your water bill, think upon others Who seek sustenance from the clouds, not a tap And when you return home – to your house – think upon others Such as those who live in tents When you fall asleep counting planets, think upon others Who cannot find a place to sleep And as you search for meaning with fancy metaphors, think upon others Who have lost their right to speak And when you think of others, far away, think of yourself And say: I am a candle in the darkness"

"I don't know what I want. Exile is so strong within me I may bring it to the land."

"The sea is the obsession of the poet, because the first poetic rhythm, or the first sense of poetic rhythm, was born of the motion of the waves."

"In my last book I said: “I have one dream: to find a dream.” A dream is a piece of the sky found in everyone. We can’t be boundlessly realistic or pragmatic. We are in need of the sky."

"Interviewer: I know that the comparison between the Jewish fate and the Palestinian fate bothers you, because it hints at a kind of “contest” over who is the greater victim. Darwish: First of all, this comparison doesn’t bother me as long as we are speaking from a place of literary concern. In this domain, nationalism doesn’t exist. I think that this neurosis about whether or not one should accept the comparison will be resolved along with peace. The Jew won’t be ashamed to find the Arab element within him, and the Arab won’t be ashamed to acknowledge that he is also composed of Jewish elements. Especially when speaking about “Eretz Israel” in Hebrew and "Palestine" in Arabic. I am a son of all the cultures that have passed through the land—the Greek, the Roman, the Persian, the Jewish, the Ottoman. A presence that exists at the very core of my language. Every powerful culture passed through and left something. I am the son of all these fathers, but I belong to one mother. Does that mean that my mother is a prostitute? My mother is this earth; she received all of them. She was both a witness and a victim. I am also the son of the Jewish culture that was in Palestine. That’s why I don’t recoil from the comparison. But because of the political tension—which says that if Israel is here the Palestinians must be absent, and that if the Palestinians are here then Israel must be absent—we haven’t accepted the fact that we are the products of similar conditions and have competed with each other over who is the greater victim."

"وَنَحْنُ نُحِبُّ الحَيَاةَ إذَا مَا اسْتَطَعْنَا إِلَيْهَا سَبِيلاَ وَنَرْقُصُ بَيْنَ شَهِيدْينِ نَرْفَعُ مِئْذَنَةً لِلْبَنَفْسَجِ بَيْنَهُمَا أَوْ نَخِيلاَ نُحِبُّ الحَيَاةَ إِذَا مَا اسْتَطَعْنَا إِلَيْهَا سَبِيلاَ"

"لو يذكرُ الزيتون غارسَهُ لصار الزيت دمعا"