Separating wheat from chaff
A government in a precarious world economy fights for its survival by implementing cuts, as the Cyprus government has done, seeking out welfare/benefit malingerers.
However, careful scrutiny should ensure genuine cases are not trawled with cheaters. Some are in limbo, their disabilities obstacles in job hunting: skill sets outdated, physical problems rendering them unable to work in certain fields, hard to find work from home.
The money given these Cypriots is barely enough to live on. Cutting them, regardless of their difficulties, while tax-free incentives are offered to foreign nationals is unfair. Putting your own house in order should apply universally as it did post invasion, when public servants accepted cuts.
The rewards politicians claim, proving some in society are more equal than others, should be a source of embarrassment, given that when cuts come it’s always the socially-supported poor that endure them. Why not the governing, higher paid too?
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer led the barter bazaar with Bully Trump, a royal invite to sweeten a sour tariff threat, then apparently taking Nato chief Roote’s advice to cut social benefits to pay for defence, targeted the disabled. Backbenchers rebelled at a Labour leader cutting the vulnerable. Then the lame excuses, giving people back dignity through work, jobs that need filling.
Yet there’s still discussion of costly statues to commemorate the late Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip while poor children suffer in damp rentals for lack of social housing.
In Cyprus, logic might have suggested a granting of amnesty to overstayed foreign workers in menial, tough jobs, who speak adequate Greek with no criminal behaviour while resident. Now, as with the UK, there are calls for workers in sectors nationals don’t want to fill.
Western democracy has degenerated into political speech bubbles lacking genuine weight. The sickening, repetitive excuse from the UK and EU is Israel’s right to defend itself, for how long, through how much innocent death?
Post WWII principles of justice and freedom replaced with one law for enemies another for allies, as common people demonstrate Israel’s illegalities. If you’re Palestinian, Israel isn’t a democracy, it demolishes homes for a stone-throwing ‘crime’.
The West criticises torture in Iranian/Russian prisons; Israel tortures Palestinian prisoners. Haaretz wrote of how Trump’s ‘glorified’ IDF forces with US mercenaries ‘distributing aid’ coldly shoot Palestinians desperate for food, without accountability. Preventing Hamas getting food is the excuse for more death.
No official is allowed in to test Israel’s claims or examine external accusations, journalists are kept away, crimes exposed will be ‘looked into’ by Israel alone. Why hasn’t the West insisted on democratic openness if there’s nothing to hide when it condemns the secretiveness of Russian and Iranian regimes? Netanyahu daily flaunts one of Moses’ Ten Commandments – Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
Hypocrisy is a virus, Erdogan bellows at Israel over its occupation of Palestine, Turkey occupies the north of Cyprus. Netanyahu urged Iranians to rise up for their freedom while killing starving Palestinians and blatantly stealing their land. The West remains passive as the UN angrily, yet toothlessly growls.
Film director Nadav Lapid said: ‘Blindness in Israel is, unfortunately, a collective illness.’ Oliver Sears, an Irish Jew wrote in The Irish Times of his Holocaust survivor grandmother’s hideous experiences in a Warsaw ghetto, where 100,000 were deliberately starved to death.
He deplores that Netanyahu’s crimes have dragged Jews worldwide who don’t support him, into the maw of extremist, anti-Semitic violence. ‘The Palestinians, Iranians and Israelis need to be liberated. No one deserves to be held to ransom by their government.’
I’ve heard commentators say, the problems date back to Hamas’ crime on October 7.’ They date back much further. If Israel hadn’t obstructed a Palestinian state when they were gifted theirs at the continuing expense of their neighbour, the ‘problem’ wouldn’t exist. Is the killing of unarmed innocents by the IDF’s sons and daughters a badge of pride now instead of a war crime? Has their government’s settler-greed and arrogance led them to believe they are more equal than others. Hitler’s soldiers said, ‘We were just following orders.’ Israelis will face tomorrow’s judgement.