Michael Roberts
The information and interpretations present in this Thuppahi website by “A Observer in a Black Sea Resort” (see refs at end) have been challenged by several Academic friends of mine located in the West (A and B quoted below within this text). However, another friend located in USA …. a Sri Lankan as it happens …. has chipped in with a counterpunch (see C below); while another Sri Lankan has also added a note of significance.
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An Observer in a Black Sea town
” The American Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) assert Russia has no evidence to claim Ukraine was involved in the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall on 22 March 2024.”
Actually, the Russians do have evidence and they have shared some of it with the world including,
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Michael Roberts
Early in the month of February 2023, I was invited by a young friend, Dr Geethika Dharmasinghe, to deliver a Zoom Video Lecture to a small class of her students at Colgate University in New York. These students were following her course on “Religion and Violence in Asia.”
Gandhi speaking and Zahran Hashim in pact with fellow Lankan jihadists 
…. Zahran was one of the two suicide bombers at the Shangri La Hotel in Colombo on Easter Sunday 2019 where where 36 people died
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A Short Essay in the Library of Social Science, presented at ………………………………………………. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2015/2015-04-03-Roberts-2.html with this NOTE “Part II of Michael Roberts’ Review Essay of Nations Have the Right to Kill”
To read the entire essay on our website, click here.
Michael Roberts
The LTTE emerged as an underground militant organization in May 1976. Though sustaining strong informal links with the Tamil United Liberation Front, the parliamentary party committed to independence, the youth who led the LTTE believed that a revolutionary path was the only route available to their peoples.
The pogrom directed against Tamil people living in the south central parts of Sri Lanka in July 1983 resulted in a huge expansion of its personnel. It was around this stage that Pirapāharan decreed that all fighters should carry a cyanide capsule—a kuppi as they call it in Tamil—so that they could “bite it” when imminent danger of capture was looming.
LTTE soldiers in camp seen with the kuppi round their necks (photo by Shyam Tekwani)
Female recruits receive the kuppi at a passing out ceremony
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Michael Roberts
Thilan Samaraweera may not have possessed the natural talents of an Aravinda, Kumar or Mahela, but he was (and is) an intelligent and industrious man who worked at his trade. He also faced that traumatic episode when the Sri Lankan coach was attacked by Pakistani jihadists as they headed for the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore on the 3rd March 2009. He was one of those injured by shrapnel (like Tharanga Paranavithana) and despatched to hospital.
Sri Lankan player Thilan Samaraweera is taken aboard an ambulance on March 4, 2009 shortly after flying home from Pakistan where the Sri Lankan team was ambushed by gunmen just before entering a cricket stadium in Lahore. Seven players were wounded in the attack that also killed eight Pakistani nationals and drew wide spread international condemnation. AFP PHOTO/ISHARA S. KODIKARA
03 Mar 2009, LAHORE, Pakistan — epa01653561 Sri Lankan cricketers board a Pakistani Air Force helicopter, as they are air lifted from Gadaffic cricket stadium, after unknown gunmen attacked Sri Lankan cricket team, in Lahore Pakistan on 03 March 2009. Unidentified gunmen attacked Sri Lanka’s cricket team when it was being escorted to a local stadium in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore, leaving six policemen and two civilians dead and four Sri Lankan players injured, media reports and officials said. EPA/RAHAT DAR — Image by © RAHAT DAR/epa/Corbis
Michael Roberts
On the 25th of April, ANZAC DAY, Australia honoured its war dead in ceremonies large and small throughout the country. This moment has been marked every year –beginning with a ceremony in London in 1916 which recognised the deadly toll and the bravery shown on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey where so many colonial Aussies fought … and died … on behalf of the British state (their “mother-country” to many Aussies then).
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B = The Lahore Assault on the Cricket Entourage in March 2009 …………………… https://thuppahis.com › 2019/10/02 › bewildering-facts… 2 Oct 2019 — Roberts, Michael 2009a “The Lahore atrocity: our cricketing ambassadors,” Island, 14 March 2009. Roberts, Michael 2009b “Cricket and Lahore: This Item appeared in Dilshy Banu’s Facebook post and I have borrowed it and its photographs for circulation via Thuppahi – in part because it marks a little “outpost activity” in the course of the war and largely because I have met Dilshy and respect her courageous career choices and her lines of philanthropic endeavour….. Michael Roberts, 18 November 2021
Dilshy Banu: “Kokkadicholai in Batticaloa: Traversing Tension during Eelam War IV”
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Michael Roberts, reproducing here an expanded version of article printed in Lanka Monthly Digest, September 1999, Vol 6:2, pp. 56-57…. with citations added.
A Kurd in Germany immolates self in protest vs Ocalan’s fate
ONE : In February 1999 a Kurdish nationalist leader, Ocalan, was caught by the Turkish authorities. Kurdish refugees in the Western world erupted in protest. In London a young girl Neila Kanteper set herself alight. In Sydney a young lad was caught on camera with petrol can and cigarette lighter as he threatened similar action. As I walked into the local news-agency in Adelaide that week the proprietor[1] waved the picture of Kanteper in flames in front of me and in considerable alarm inquired how anyone could take such an extreme measure. He could not ever take such a step, he said. His remarks gain in significance from the fact that they were unsolicited and had not been preceded by prior conversation. I was in a hurry and did not explore matters further, but I conjecture that his bewilderment stemmed not only from the method of death by fire, but also from such terminal commitment to a collective cause. The question, therefore, is whether in similar circumstances an act of martyrdom involving death by hand-gun would produce the same level of astonishment. Relatively speaking, death by gun seems to be so much more acceptable to the Western world than death by flame.
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