by Colin Hyde

No one in Belize who was about in the periods when Dean O. Barrow wasn’t the leader of the UDP and/or the party was not in government forgets that he was quite invincible, springing people, no matter the crime for which they were charged, from the jail and the gallows. My memory doesn’t fail me here when I say that Said said that as a political leader it was improper, some of the people he (Barrow) represented.

Joe Bradley and Fonso should know that it hurts like hell when they sing D Barrow’s praises for his recent string of victories in the courts. His present courtroom triumphs appear to be all civil matters, cases against the government. If the government is guilty, we should pay, because we own the government. Ouch, we have to complain about the pain. The quantum, as they call it, hurts like hell. Da we di feel.

Of course, we have to applaud justice. But no, Sir, we can’t sing the gentleman’s praises. It has to gall us when we think of his successes that are coming so fast and furious that we have to be mortgaging the country to pay off, because when he was overseeing cases for us, he won nada, zilch, none that was of any consequence.

The argument the UDP will forward, the only argument they can forward, is that the cases lost by the government under PM Barrow were fought on a matter of principle. And daam right, it was right that we go to court on a matter of principle to expose those PUP privatization deals.

The question is about the squandering of our money. Our big question is why we paid a fortune to fight cases we knew, had to have known, we would lose. Don’t tell me anybody was buoyed by winning cases in our courts. Is there a lawyer in Belize who doesn’t know the difference between local courts and international courts? If there is any, they should be disbarred, for having no sense.

We hired batteries of private lawyers to fight cases we could not win. While the lawyers in the direct employ of the government, public servants, stood on the sidelines twiddling their thumbs, private lawyers raked in millions, to lose our cases. What was the sense there? Our government gave away too much of the people’s money, and to people who didn’t need it.

You posted a misleading map, Pastor Wade

Recently, Pastor Wade posted a picture on his social media page of tiny Israel surrounded by large Arab nations—his intention there, I expect, being that we should all be prompted to say, poor little Israel, a David among the Philistines. The first failure of Wade here is that he ignores the fact that the Jews are Arabs. Braa, everyone who’s from Arabia or the Arabian continent is an Arab.

Looking at the group that calls themselves Jews, Ann Gibbons in a 2000 story, “Jews and Arabs share recent ancestry”, which can be found at the website science.org, says they are “Y chromosome cousins.” Gibbons says “More than 70% of Jewish men and half of the Arab men whose DNA was studied inherited their Y chromosomes from the same paternal ancestors who lived in the region within the last few thousand years.” She says they are “descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times”, that “in a recent study of 1,371 men from around the world, geneticist Michael Hammer of the University of Arizona in Tucson found that the Y chromosome in Middle Eastern Arabs was almost indistinguishable from that of Jews.”

Of course, all of us having read the Old Testament, we all knew that. There’s no racially pure Jew. There is a Jewish religion, Judaism, which at its core is very similar to Islam. One difference is that the Muslims see Jesus as a prophet, while those of the Judaism faith see Him as an imposter. But many who practice Judaism have Christian virtue. They are the ones who denounce Israel’s savage war.

The map suggests that the non-Jewish countries are homogeneous. That isn’t so. Just listen to the weak condemnation of Israel’s doings from some countries in the region and you will know that. There are a number of Muslim sects. Since 2015, anti-US Iranian Muslims and pro-US Saudi Arabian Muslims have been sponsoring separate Muslim factions in Yemen, a war that in 2021 the UN estimated had killed 377,000 people.

If we swallow this map, then we would believe that wherever you are on the African continent, you are welcome. That is so not true. Coming home, can we say that Central America is homogeneous, all a wi da one? We know that Guatemala claims Belize, Honduras and El Salvador went to war, and socialist Nicaragua and capitalist Costa Rica have a border dispute.

Palestinians can’t walk into other countries in Arabia as freely as they wish. The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada says, “According to sources, Palestinians are subject to the same regulations as other foreigners in Saudi Arabia.” Palestinians can’t walk into Egypt. But Jewish Rabbis get the red carpet. I saw a documentary with a Jewish Rabbi who’s against Israel’s aggression. He said that he is welcomed wherever he goes in countries in the region, that people invite him into their homes and ask him to pray for their families. Those who care to know, know that this war is about power and racism.

I won’t do the exercise to add up how many million people live in Arabia, but regarding the number of Palestinians, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates 14.3 million Palestinians in the world in 2022, with “about 5.35 million in the State of Palestine; 2.72 million males and 2.63 million females.” The Wikipedia says that in 2023 the “the world’s ‘core’ Jewish population (those identifying as Jews above all else) was estimated at 16.1 million.”

What’s with these orcas?

Fishes, especially bad sharks, have been known to attack and bite human beings. I’m not telling you anything. We all saw the movie, Jaws; we all know those sharks are sometimes not all that hospitable when we go swimming in the sea. But sharks and other big fish deliberately sinking boats, we’ve seen that as fiction.

Fishermen in the whaling industry of yore have claimed that whales attacked their boats. In the book, Moby Dick, by Harold Melville, Moby Dick, a whale, attacks and sinks Captain Ahab’s boat. It’s likely an even bet where the sympathy goes when the tables are turned on men with harpoons poised to launch into the sides of the whales. Hmm, since everyone knows that fishermen tell lies more than politicians, most people thought those whale stories were tall tales. All incidents where big fishes breached under or bucked over boats were labeled as accidents.

But when reports started coming in that orcas had taken to attacking great white sharks, for the sole purpose of stealing their livers, skeptics weren’t so sure of their position anymore. This new diet of the orcas surprised many scientists, and it’s a concern for rank and file, because everyone knows that shark liver oil is the best thing for colds and asthma.

No one knows why orcas have taken up a new and very bad habit, sinking yachts in Spain. It’s well documented. My first take on that is that the perpetrators are being led by old orcas who have known domestication, lived in aquariums. These fishes are smart, and the ones in the aquariums understand a task for a reward.

When orcas get old, they send them back to the wild. But Free Willy might not be entirely happy, might be disgruntled, harboring a grievance, about having to hunt for their food, or due to finding out what captivity deprived them of. Or they might just be fed up with what human beings are doing to the environment.