When law Becomes a Weapon: The Licence to Kill by Javed Akbar

On March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset enacted a law imposing the death penalty exclusively upon Palestinians while exempting Israeli citizens. One cannot corrupt justice where justice, in any meaningful and equal sense, has long since ceased to exist. The world has condemned the measure—but condemnation now carries the weary cadence of ritual, not resolve.

The law was championed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, who reportedly celebrated its passage with champagne in the parliamentary chamber after it cleared by 62 votes to 48. “We made history,” he declared on social media, brushing aside mounting international calls for its withdrawal.

The responses have been swift, if not consequential. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has filed an appeal before Israel’s Court. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights condemned the measure as a legislative veil for extrajudicial killing. The UN Human Rights Office has urged its immediate repeal, citing clear violations of international law. Amnesty International described it as a “public display of cruelty, discrimination and utter contempt for human rights,” while the European Union expressed deep concern over its discriminatory character.

Alain Berset called it a “serious regression,” and Canada’s foreign minister, Anita Anand warned that, in practice, it systematically targets Palestinians, reinforcing a pattern that enables settler violence while further dehumanizing an already besieged people.

By reserving the ultimate punishment—death—for one people alone, the state crosses a threshold from discrimination into something colder and more deliberate: the codification of human worth along ethnic lines. It is a law that declares, without equivocation, that Palestinian lives are more expendable, their rights more conditional, their existence more easily extinguished.

Call it what it is: an apartheid law.

Yet even this legal brutality unfolds against a far darker horizon—the devastation of the Gaza Strip. There, amid shattered hospitals, flattened homes, and uncounted graves, a people endures what many across the world now describe as genocide. Entire families have been erased, a society reduced to rubble, a population trapped between siege and bombardment.

Shame on a statute that elevates inequality into doctrine. Shame on those who celebrate it. And shame, too, on a world that has watched the steady erosion of justice—and responded with little more than calibrated disapproval.

For Palestinians—dispossessed, displaced, and denied dignity since the creation of the Israeli state—this is no aberration. It is the latest chapter in a relentless continuum of injustice. That such a measure can be enacted with brazen confidence, even as proceedings unfold before the International Court of Justice, speaks to a stark and unsettling reality: power, unchecked, now presumes itself above the law.

This is not merely legislation; it is a repudiation of the very principles that sustain any claim to civilization. A law that assigns death along ethnic lines is not governance—it is moral collapse, formalized and enforced. No nation that enshrines such a doctrine can credibly invoke the language of justice, democracy, or human rights. It stands outside the bounds of civilized conduct, defiant not only of international law but of the most basic tenets of human conscience. Such a measure is not only indefensible—it is wholly unacceptable to any society that dares to call itself civilized.

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Javed Akbar is a freelance writer whose opinion columns have appeared in Toronto Star and numerous digital platforms. He can be reached at: mjavedakbar@gmail.com

A street painted against forgetting by Thanos Kalamidas

Book review: Richard Stanford 'Rainbow Street'

There is a particular kind of writer who does not simply tell stories but listens for them; waits, almost patiently for human experience to reveal itself in its quietest, most unguarded moments. Richard Stanford belongs to that rare category. His work has long carried a distinct sensitivity, a kind of emotional precision that feels less like narration and more like witnessing. It is no surprise then that his presence in Ovi magazine has felt less like a contribution and more like a quiet privilege and for me an honour.

What has always distinguished Richard Stanford is not merely his attention to human detail but the way he anchors that detail in time and place. His settings do not serve as backdrops; they breathe, they absorb memory, they bear scars. His prose can be described as photographic but that ...undersells it. A photograph captures a moment; Stanford captures the residue of that moment, the emotional afterimage that lingers long after the scene has passed. His dialogues, in particular, have a way of exposing what characters cannot articulate, allowing the reader to sense the slow, often painful unfolding of the human soul.

With Rainbow Street, Stanford appears to be extending this sensibility into broader, more ambitious terrain. Set in post-war Montréal, the novel presents a deceptively simple premise, a street where each house is painted in bright colours by veterans attempting to reclaim vibrancy after years of monochrome existence. It is an image that risks sentimentality but in Stanford’s hands, it becomes something far more complex. The colours do not conceal trauma; they coexist with it. They are acts of quiet defiance rather than denial.

At the center of the story are Adam Sand and Nicholas Schlott, two figures bound not by blood but by circumstance and emotional necessity. Nicholas, arriving as a three-year-old “without a name and without a past,” is the kind of character who could easily slip into abstraction, a symbol rather than a person. Yet Stanford resists that temptation. Instead, he roots Nicholas firmly in the messy, often uncomfortable realities of neglect and vulnerability. Adam, in turn, is not a savoir but a presence, a flawed, protective force whose care offers Nicholas something fragile but essential, continuity.

Their relationship, spanning two decades becomes the novel’s emotional spine. It is not dramatic in the conventional sense; there are no grand gestures, no sweeping declarations. Rather, it is built from small, cumulative acts of attention and endurance. In this way, Stanford seems less interested in storytelling as spectacle and more in storytelling as accumulation, the slow layering of moments that, together, form a life.

What makes Rainbow Street particularly compelling, at least in concept, is its insistence on community as both refuge and burden. The veterans’ neighborhood, with its bright facades, is not merely a setting but a collective psyche. Each painted house becomes a quiet testimony, a personal negotiation with memory. And yet, beneath this shared attempt at renewal lies an undercurrent of unresolved grief. The street does not heal its inhabitants; it holds them.

Stanford’s work has always suggested that art, at its best, does not resolve suffering but gives it shape. Rainbow Street seems poised to continue that tradition. It is not simply a novel about post-war life, nor is it merely a coming-of-age story. It is, more profoundly, an exploration of how people persist, how they construct meaning, however fragile, in the aftermath of rupture.

In an era that often favors speed and spectacle, Stanford’s deliberate, attentive storytelling feels almost radical. He reminds us that the most enduring narratives are not the loudest ones, but the ones that dare to linger.

Richard Stanford’s Rainbow Street is available at: https://books2read.com/u/3Jd2YB
and Amazon.com: Rainbow Street: 9798385545674: Stanford, Richard: Books

#eBook: Beauty Interrupted by Charles L. Fontenay

 

The Earthmen were selfish; they obviously wanted to hold the people of Orcti back. But no planet has a monopoly on science or the ability to spy!

Birkala stepped to the open gate and entered the garden. It was a more beautiful garden than even the greatest artists of the world Orcti could arrange, for into Erik's planning had gone the aesthetic tradition of many millennia. The green sun that swam in Orcti's violet sky shone down on foliage and grasses of orange and brown and rust, and so carefully were things placed that even the great silver-and-blue lina flowers did not blare their supremacy over lesser plants, as in most Orcti gardens. They blended with the statuary and foliage, with the walks and the pools, tamely contributing their beauty to the balanced picture of peace and quietude.

Charles Louis Fontenay was born on March 17th, 1917 and died on January 27th, 2007. He was an American journalist and science fiction writer. He wrote science fiction novels and short stories. His Nonfiction includes the biography of the prominent New Deal era politician Estes Kefauver. He was editor of the Nashville Tennessean, among other newspapers, worked with the Associated Press and Gannett News Service. He retired to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he continued to write science fiction until shortly before his death.

First Publsihed 1958
Ovi Publsihing December 2023

Beauty Interrupted

Read it online or download HERE!
Or enjoy reading it & downloading it as PDF HERE!
All downloads are FREE!

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Insert Brain Here: Lizard #Cartoon by Paul Woods

 

Originally from Port Macquarie, Australia, Paul Woods is a Cartoonist and Illustrator based in South London who also plays drums, works as a Cameraman and likes bad horror films. His series of cartoons is entitled "Insert Brain Here"

For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Trekking Chat #006 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

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Absurdity Woke 26#008 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Our top story; common sense has left the frame, the inmates are running the asylum
and the asylum is now identifying as a luxury resort. This is Absurdity Woke.

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THE STAIN #Thoughts by David Sparenberg

There is an ecology to war. But we do not teach it to our children. They grow alienated and enlist and never learn how the Earth is forced to suffer from the politics of organized human violence.

There  is an ecology for peace. But it is unknown throughout the nation, not conscious or considered among the masses. Media participates in this sin of omission. Public education fails,  is value-remis, grossly irresponsible, and pedantically misdirecting. The young are taught in the wrong way and for wrong reasons. Were it otherwise, we would not be in this  present crucible of affliction. And this is not the first time in a lifetime that America has motored its way along the imperial road to perdition.

Generation upon generation, power remains in the ferocious clutches of an elite of evil intention. Ordinary people become complicit with political mass murder. Everyday in which bombs explode, homes are blown apart,  survivors are maimed, lives are shattered, and the death count increases, what ought to be intolerable to a simple standard of decency,  continues unexpunged.

Willfully ignorant of the ecology of peace, we the people—banal faces hardened behind masks and turned obscurely toward shadows—roar and rage from killing field to killing field leaving dead zones in the wasteland aftermaths of hypocrisy. We call the technologies of destruction progress and go on patriotically diseased by the fatal, surreal stain of compromise, crime and corruption.

Such is the world we acquest to. Such are the deals we routinely make for petty convenience and landfill commodities. Such are the painted mirrors the civilization of lies addictively stares into.  Already we are slave labor locked behind the gates of hell! Yet we continue to pretend we are not. When is enough deception enough?

How pervasive is the cumulative trauma of time? How  indelible is the stain of the pornography of betrayal,  destruction and the political atrocities of mass murder? When do enough of us tell those who misuse us: “No more!”?

In emergency, truth defines itself in action. Awareness is prelude to what has to follow.  How many of us are sensitive still to make happen what “eventfully” has to follow? Who comprehends the reality of the equation which must be changed? Human worth is on the line. Human survival more than not is likely also. The means of annihilation are among the arsenals and political play things of those who believe in the dogma of their right to dominate populations and  administer death.

Being human is not an evolution of the physical body only. It is the empathy of shared vulnerable. It is a quality of  relatability and the diligent working of imagination with actual possibilities. There is a need in  human identity to be clean—for the stain of guilt and shame brought on by financial dispossession, moral rape, corporate plunder, and weaponized bloodshed, to be removed. There is  also a need at the core of human self-assessment for freedom. Freedom, which is interconnective from the first instance, requires honesty. Honesty is an act of courage.

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David Sparenberg is a humanitarian and eco poet, an international essayist and storyteller. He published four eBooks with OVI Books (Sweden) and the Word Press in 2025, the fourth of which was TROUBADOUR & the Earth on Fire. David will have a fifth new OVI eBook, MANIFESTO: Ecology, Spirituality & Politics in a Higher Octave, published in April 2026. David Sparenberg lives in Seattle, WA in the Pacific Northwest of the United States but identifies as an Ecotopian Citizen of Creation.

The price of distance by Jemma Norman

There is something faintly surreal about a nation attempting to redraw the moral boundaries of its democracy from thousands of miles away. The British government’s decision to cap political donations from citizens living abroad at £100,000 a year and to freeze cryptocurrency contributions altogether, arrives less like a bold reform and more like a belated admission, the system has already drifted too far into the abstract.

Money, after all, has always had a way of dissolving borders faster than politics can define them. For years, the United Kingdom has allowed expatriates, many long detached from the daily consequences of British policy, to exert significant financial influence over its elections. That arrangement rested on a polite fiction that citizenship alone guarantees a shared stake in national outcomes. But what does it mean to “belong” politically when one has not lived under the laws, taxes or social realities of a country for decades?

The case that seems to have crystallized this question is almost too on-the-nose. A single donor, a crypto-investor based in Thailand for a quarter of a century, reportedly funnelled £12 million into a political party that has been more than willing to position itself as a disruptor of the status quo. The symbolism is difficult to ignore. A political movement that thrives on the language of sovereignty and national control has, at least in part, been buoyed by wealth generated and stored in a borderless, largely unregulated financial ecosystem.

Cryptocurrency, in this context, is not merely a technical concern. It represents a philosophical one. Traditional political donations, for all their flaws, are traceable, regulated, and tethered to identifiable institutions. Crypto donations, by contrast, flirt with anonymity and opacity. They introduce the unsettling possibility that political influence can be exercised without the kind of scrutiny that democracy depends on. The government’s moratorium, then, is less about innovation than about visibility about insisting that power, if it is to be legitimate, must also be seen.

Yet the cap itself raises its own ambiguities. Why £100,000? Why not £10,000, or nothing at all? The figure feels less like a principled limit and more like a negotiated compromise, a number large enough to preserve the relevance of wealthy donors while small enough to signal reform. It suggests that the problem is not influence per se, but excess. That there exists some acceptable threshold at which distance and money can coexist without distorting democracy.

This is a comforting idea, but not necessarily a convincing one. There is also, hovering at the edges of this debate, the specter of expectation, the quiet assumption that vast fortunes, particularly those born of technology and global capital, might one day flow into British politics. The disappointment surrounding those expectations has been palpable in certain corners, as though political movements were entitled to billionaire patronage simply by virtue of ideological alignment. It is a peculiar kind of dependency: railing against elites while waiting for one to arrive.

What the government’s announcement ultimately reveals is a deeper unease about control. Who gets to shape a nation’s future? Those who live within its borders, experiencing its consequences firsthand? Or those who, having left, retain both the means and the desire to influence it from afar?

There is no easy answer, only a growing recognition that democracy, like geography, has limits. And that when those limits are ignored, the distance between power and accountability begins to look less like a gap and more like a void.

A law without mercy by Mary Long

There are moments when a law reveals more than its text, when it exposes a nation’s anxieties, its power structures and its moral boundaries. The Israeli parliament’s recent passage of legislation mandating the death penalty for Palestinians convicted of deadly terrorist acts in military courts is one such moment. It is not merely a legal development; it is a statement of intent and a troubling one.

At first glance, the justification appears straightforward, deterrence. Proponents argue that harsher penalties will discourage acts of violence. But this logic rests on a fragile foundation. Decades of research on capital punishment have failed to establish it as a uniquely effective deterrent. Violence born of desperation, ideology, or cycles of retaliation is rarely curbed by the threat of death. Instead, such measures risk deepening the very grievances they claim to address.

What distinguishes this law, however, is not just its severity but its asymmetry. It operates within a dual legal system in which Palestinians are tried in military courts, while Israeli citizens, Jewish or Arab, are generally subject to civilian courts. The new measure, in practice, applies overwhelmingly to Palestinians. Its language may gesture toward neutrality, but its implementation tells a different story. Laws do not exist in a vacuum; they inherit the inequalities of the systems in which they function.

The removal of the right to appeal is particularly stark. Appeals are not procedural luxuries; they are safeguards against error, bias, and the irreversible consequences of flawed judgments. To eliminate that safeguard in cases involving the ultimate punishment is to accept, implicitly, that mistakes are tolerable, even when they cannot be undone. In any justice system, that is a perilous position.

Israeli civil- and human-rights groups have described the law as discriminatory, and it is difficult to dismiss that characterization. When a law disproportionately targets one population while leaving another effectively untouched, the question is not simply whether it is legal, but whether it is just. The distinction matters. Legality can be engineered; justice must be earned.

There is also a broader political dimension. Policies like this do not emerge in isolation; they are shaped by and in turn reinforce a climate of fear and polarization. In such an environment, toughness becomes a political currency. Leaders demonstrate resolve through severity and dissent is often framed as weakness. Yet history suggests that measures perceived as collective punishment tend to entrench divisions rather than resolve them.

One might argue that states have the right, even the obligation, to defend their citizens against violence. That is undoubtedly true. But the means of that defense are not morally neutral. A system that appears to assign different values to different lives risks undermining the very principles it seeks to protect. Security achieved at the expense of equality is a precarious kind of security.

What makes this law particularly unsettling is its permanence. Temporary measures enacted in moments of crisis have a way of becoming fixtures. Once established, they reshape expectations and normalize what might once have seemed unthinkable. The danger is not only in what the law does today, but in what it makes possible tomorrow.

In the end, the question is not simply whether this policy will deter violence. It is whether it will bring the region any closer to a sustainable peace. Justice systems that are perceived as fair can serve as foundations for stability. Those seen as discriminatory often do the opposite. A law without mercy may project strength, but it risks eroding the very legitimacy on which lasting security depends.

George Russell: To see things in the germ, this I call intelligence by Rene Wadlow

“Are there not such spirits among us ready to join in the noblest of all adventures— the building up of a civilization —so that the human might reflect the divine order?  In the divine order there is both freedom and solidarity. It is the virtue of the soul to be free and its nature to love; and when it is free and acts by its own will, it is most united with all other life” George Russell: The Song of the Greater Life

George Russell (1867-1935) whose birth anniversary we mark on 10 April was an Irish poet, painter, mystic, and reformer of agriculture in the years 1900 to the mid-1930s. He wrote under the initials A.E. and was so well known as A.E. that his friends called him “A.E.” and not “George”.  He was a close friend and co-worker with William Butler Yeats who was a better poet and whose poems are more read today.  Both A.E. and Yeats were part of the Irish or Celtic revival which worked for a cultural renewal as part of the effort to get political independence from England.

Ireland lived under a subtle form of colonialism rather than the more obvious Empire in Africa or India where domination was made more obvious by the distance from the center of power and the racial differences.  The Irish were white, Christian, and partially anglicized culturally.  English and Scots had moved to Ireland and by the end of the 19^th century became the landed gentry.  Thus Russell and Yeats felt that there had to be a renewal of Irish culture upon which a state could be built. Yet for A.E. political independence was only a first step to building a country of character and intellect “a civilization worthy of our hopes and our ages of struggle and sacrifice”.  He lamented that “For all our passionate discussions over self-government we have had little speculation over our own character or the nature of the civilization we wished to create for ourselves…The nation was not conceived of as a democracy freely discussing its laws, but as a secret society with political chiefs meeting in the dark and issuing orders.”

For A.E. the truly modern are those engaged in meditation and spiritual disciplines, a way of reaching “the world of the spirit where all hearts and minds are one.” Unless the Celtic peoples create a new civilization, they will disappear and be replaced by a more vigorous race. An Irish identity must be open and unafraid of assimilating the best that other traditions have to offer.  As A.E. wrote“To see, we must be exalted.  When our lamp is lit, we find the house our being has many chambers…and windows which open into eternity.” As he said of Ireland, "a land where lived a perfectly impossible people with whom anything was possible."

When the Irish Free State was created in 1919, the island was partitioned, Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom.  Tensions between the Free State government and the Republicans who rejected the partition led to a civil war.  Even after the civil war’s end in 1923, Republican resistance and general lawlessness continued throughout the 1920s.  During its first decade the Free State government faced a serious crisis of legitimacy.  It had to assert the new state’s political and cultural integrity in the face of partition and the lack of social change.  In its economic structures, legal system, post-colonial Ireland looked much like colonial Ireland.  Therefore the government stressed an “Irish culture” of the most repressive and narrow form.  The Roman Catholic Church had a unique and virtually unquestioned monopoly on education in Ireland.  Popular Irish nationalism had been structured around the antithesis between Ireland and England, and this continued after independence when it was said that all “immorality” — obscene literature, wild dances and immodest fashions — came from England.  After 1923, the Catholic hierarchy fulminated most consistently and strongly  against sexual immorality, not merely as wrong, but, increasingly from the 1920s on, as a threat to the Irish nation.

To counter this narrow, state organized vision of culture, A.E. put all his energies into a revival of rural Ireland through organizing the Farmers’ Co-operative Movement.  He stressed that “the decay of civilization comes from the neglect of agriculture.  There is a need to create, consciously, a rural civilization.  You simply cannot aid the farmers in an economic way and neglect the cultural and educational part of country life…On the labours of the countryman depend the whole strength and health, nay, the very existence of society, yet, in almost every country politics, economics, and social reform are urban products, and the countryman gets only the crumbs which fall from the political table. Yet the European farmers, and we in Ireland along with them, are beginning again the eternal task of building up a civilization in nature — the task so often disturbed, the labour so often destroyed.”

Both A.E. and Yeats came from Protestant backgrounds and were deeply influenced by Indian thought reading the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads where sexual passion is the link between body, soul, and spirit.  In his only novel The Avatars, A.E. wrote “such was the playof Helen which made men realise that beauty was a divinity.  Such was the play of Radha and Krishna which taught lovers how to evoke god and goddess in each other.”  The Avatar in Hindu thought is a spiritual being which takes human form in order to reveal the spiritual character of a race to itself such as Rama, Krishna or Jesus. In Indian thought the Avatar was always a man and came alone.  But in A.E.’s story the Avatars are a man and a woman who teach the unity of all life as seen by the love between the two.  There is but one life, divided endlessly, differing in degree but not in kind.  “The majesty which held constellations and galaxies, sun, stars and moons inflexibly in their paths, could yet throw itself into infinite, minute and delicate forms of loveliness with no less joy, and he knew that the tiny grass might whisper its love to an omnipotence that was tender towards it.  What he had felt was but an infinitesimal part of that glory.  There was no end to it.”

A.E. knew that he was going against the current of the moment. As he wrote “There never yet was a  fire which did not cast dark shadows of itself.”  At the end of the novel, the Avatars are put to death, but their teaching goes on “It is this sense of the universe as spiritual being which has become common between us, that a vast tenderness enfloods us, is about us and within us.” Yet below the surface of narrow tensions in Ireland A.E. saw that “We are all laying foundations in dark places, putting the rough-hewn stones together in our civilizations, hoping for the lofty edifice which will arise later and make all the work glorious.”

He lived the last years of his life in London, outside of Irish politics. He had a close friendship with Henry Wallace who became the first Secretary of the USA New Deal in 1933 and saw in the efforts to help the depression-hit farmers under Wallace his hope for rural renewal.

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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

Carpond #011 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A cacophony of singalongs, stifled yawns,
and surprisingly insightful debates
on the existential dread of a four wheeler vacuum

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