RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A Palestinian man who was killed by Israeli forces on Sunday in Kufr Malik village near Ramallah was left under an Israeli military jeep for three hours before he died, an eyewitness said.
Nabil Abd al-Karim recounted the details of the incident saying that Abdullah Iyad Ghuneimat, 22, was heading to his work in a poultry farm when Israeli forces shot him in the back and chased him down as he tried to return home.
The jeep then hit Ghuneimat pushing him into a wall that collapsed on him and caused the jeep to overturn on him as well, Abd al-Karim said.
Soldiers vacated the jeep and left Ghuneimat under it with his back crushed and his leg completely severed, he added.
He was left under the jeep for three hours screaming in pain while gas and oil from the jeep dripped over him and the vehicle crushed his body, the witness added.
After three hours of Israeli forces preventing any assistance or medics to come to his aid, residents of the village attacked Israeli soldiers with their bare hands and managed to lift the jeep from over him, but it was too late as Ghunaimat had already died.
His body was taken in an ambulance to the Palestine Medical Complex.
Thousands participated in his funeral which started from his village’s mosque to its graveyard where he was laid to rest.
Participants in the funeral chanted calls for revenge.
His mother, who broke down after hearing the news and received treatment, said her son was executed by Israeli forces in cold blood.
Earlier, an Israeli army spokeswoman said that during army "activities," a "suspicious man" attempted to throw a Molotov cocktail at Israeli forces.
One of the army vehicles swerved and lost control, hitting the Palestinian on the side of the road, she said, referring to the incident as an accident.
She said Israeli emergency services arrived on the scene to treat "everyone" harmed, although she added that she could not confirm Ghanayim's death as he had been attended to by Palestinian medics.
Yusef a-Shawamreh at Separation Barrier near where he was later murdered by IDF (Abed Al-Hashlamoun, EPA)
In March 2014, the IDF murdered a 14 year-old boy , Yusuf a-Shawamreh, who crossed the Separation Barrier near Hebron to forage for edible plants his family could sell at the market. His family owned farmland that the Barrier had made inaccessible to them. He was crossing to harvest plants from his family-owned plot. This is one of the many portions of the West Bank in which the Wall in effect confiscates private Palestinian land and annexes it to Israel.
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The boys crossed the Barrier where it had been breached with a wide opening for passage (watch an IDF video of the incident annotated and translated by B’Tselem). It had been this way for two years and the boys regularly crossed. In fact, in a 35-mile stretch of the Barrier, there are nearly 20 such openings where 12,000 cross into Israel each month for various purposes, mostly to work illegally in construction and other jobs. Neither these boys, nor the workers desperate to earn a living pose any security threat to Israel.
After the murder, the IDF announced an investigation and as almost always happened, it closed the file without taking any action. The army claimed that the boys had cut through the fence and thus endangered Israeli security. In fact, they did not do so. There already was a break in the fence, as I noted above. The TV news segment (video displayed) below notes that the IDF soldiers lying in ambush were there because there was a break in the fence. If this break indeed posed a security threat to Israel then it should’ve been repaired, but wasn’t. Not to mention, how does a 14-year-old boy picking flowers from his family’s plot of land endanger state security?
B’Tselem responded by demanding the army turn over all documentation concerning the crime so that it might make a determination whether to file an appeal with the civil authorities. As a result, it received the video displayed above which shows two boys crossing the barrier and three IDF soldiers lying in ambush. Once they cross, the soldiers open fire on them (though conveniently for the IDF, you can’t see the actual murder itself due to the terrain and location of the surveillance camera).
The army justifies the killing by saying that it first fired in the air and shouted warnings for the boys to stop. Only when they refused and continued on their way did a solider fire at them. As you’ll see below, the army knew these children well. It was their normal routine to harvest these edible plants. It knew where they were going. It knew they posed no danger. Yet it fired on them anyway. This is cold-blooded murder.
B’Tselem responded to the army’s whitewash thus:
By justifying the use of lethal fire in broad daylight at youths who posed no danger to any other persons, the [IDF] conveys a cynical lack of concern for the life of a Palestinian teenager. Israel’s security forces in the area are well aware that, for the past two years, Palestinians have been crossing the Separation Barrier at the breach at that particular point at this very season to pick gundelia on their own farmland. In his testimony to B’Tselem, a-Dardun stated that police officers had detained him and three of his friends at the very same spot two days before this incident. He said that, before letting them go, the police officers beat all four of them and confiscated the plants they had picked.
The decision to mount an armed ambush at a point in the barrier known to be crossed by youths, who pose no danger whatsoever to anyone, for the purpose of harvesting plants is highly questionable. It also indicates, at the very least, extremely faulty discretion on the part of the commanders. Moreover B’Tselem’s findings are markedly different from the description given by the IDF Spokesperson: the youths made no attempt at vandalism; they were crossing through a long-existing breach, and the soldiers did not carry out suspect arrest procedure, shooing at a-Shawamreh with no advance warning.
The military’s open-fire regulations around the Separation Barrier prohibit opening live fire at Palestinians crossing the Barrier, if they are identified as posing no risk to security forces. However, as revealed in a previous publication concerning shooting near the barrier, the regulations present the prohibition as an exception to the rule. This is compounded by public and media rhetoric considering every Palestinian who crosses the barrier as a potential terrorist. In reality, security forces are well aware of the fact that hundreds and even thousands of Palestinian workers regularly cross through breaches in the Separation Barrier to reach places of employment in Israel.
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There are literally thousands of such cases of IDF murder of Palestinian children. All of them are heartbreaking. But in this case, Raviv Drucker, one of Israel’s foremost investigative journalists, decided to produce a segment on the killing for his TV news program, HaMakor. This video segment brings Shawamreh, his life and death into the homes of the Israeli viewing public. Not that it will change anything. Children will continue dying (500 were killed last summer during Operation Protective Edge). But at least we can say they knew. Israelis knew what their soldiers were doing in their name. They chose to ignore it. But they were told. If this reminds you of a colloquy heard in Europe in the days following the end of World War II, then you have a good memory.
Raviv Drucker closes the segment by noting the military prosecutor found no criminal liability in this incident. To which Drucker replies, if there was no criminality here then I don’t know what criminality is.
Perhaps the worst irony is that last week, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, under enormous pressure from Israel (and perhaps the U.S.) ignored the recommendation of his own staff investigator and refused to list Israel as a nation which endangers the lives of children in conflict zones (Hamas was also removed from the list). Watch these videos and then tell me Israel doesn’t debase the value not only of the adult Palestinian lives it takes, but especially those of the children. What can we say of a nation which kills children with such impunity? And then forgives itself without shedding a tear?
It is a moral obscenity that Israel managed to squirm its way out of designation on the List of Shame.
It’s a mistake common to many reactionaries.It’s not what we do that is wrong, it’s just that we aren’t getting the message across. It was something we heard repeatedly during the Thatcher era. But if it was just a question of image, then the BBC's pro-Israel propaganda during Operation Protective Edge should have done the trick. Repeatedly it took its cue from Israel. Israel's killing operations were merely 'acts of retaliation' for Hamas's fearsome rockets. Never once did they even ask who fired first. Not once did they ask why Israel killed primarily civilians whilst Hamas killed mainly soldiers. But the BBC's propaganda tirade also failed - why? Because people could see the death and destruction. So is it likely that Israel's spotty, racist students are going to succeed where the BBC failed?
As we've always argued, Israeli 'humanitarian relief' lasts as long as the cameras are flashing
So each Israeli student is now going to be trained as a propagandist (weren't they always?).
The Israeli state has decided that it’s not what they do that is the problem, but the way it is portrayed. So the students are being urged to talk up Israel’s technical achievements, whereas this is possibly the worst of all Israel’s propaganda strategems. After all does the fact that Hitler pioneered the autobahn, or Mussolini made the trains run on time and eradicated malaria from the environs of Rome make these regimes any nicer?
Israel's Arab women are summoned into the fray - except no one asked them. The only Member to have been suspended from the Knesset is the secular Arab MK Haneen Zoabi, for saying the killing of 3 settler teens was not a terrorist incident (which it wasn't). Avigdor Liebermann's call to behead Israeli Arabs merited no response.
How do you prettify the slaughter of 1,400 Gazan Palestinians, including 500 children? Were the children terrorists too? What about the 4 children murdered on the beach in front of the world’s journalists? What that just a ‘tragic accident’? Or the many videos of wanton violence such as on this blog over the last week?
How do you justify the army evicting Palestinians from a pool in the West Bank in order that the settlers don’t undergo bodily pollution? Or the ‘death to the Arabs’ marches through Jerusalem each year and in other places too?
Or the eviction of Bedouin villages in the Negev?
It will take more than improving a student’s stutter to explain the Apartheid Wall, the confiscation of land for settlements or the checkpoints dotted around the West Bank. It is one of the sadder delusions of the settler colonial that they think they do nothing wrong and they’ve just got to improve the message.
Creating Israel's paid propagandists - the Hasbara Fellowship
The mere existence of this programme, coming in the wake of the paid Zionist trolls operating out of situation war rooms in Herzyliya is itself proof that Israel is rotten to the core.
A new initiative currently underway, takes students who are meant to fly abroad on different delegations, and requires them to undergo a minimum of 10 hours of public diplomacy training. The effort is meant to combat the de-legitimization of Israel abroad.
YNet, Shachar Chai 19.6.15.
Students who go on youth delegations abroad are now required to undergo training in Hasbara and public diplomacy. The first course is currently underway, and is attended by students who will be sent to Germany, China and France.
Students at the IDC Herzliya “war room,” seen here in a screenshot, focus on posting propaganda justifying Israel’s attack on Gaza on Facebook.
The decision to conduct the training was made in the Education Ministry after operation Protective Edge, as criticism of Israel and its policies grew around the world, and due to the recent discussion surrounding the boycott movement.
Photo: Avihu Shapira
The youth delegations are made up of students who fly to international competitions and from now own must undergo a minimum of 10 hours of training, during which they will learn about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the policies of the State of Israel, and will be equipped with tools to deal with bodies who "seek to delegitimize Israel and her image."
The lessons will take directed, and so at the end of the course every group will be assigned a task specific to the country they will be visiting.
Students working the “Hasbara war room” at IDC Herzliya, seen in a screenshot from a Ynet video, see their role as a civilian equivalent of military service.
Osher Anijar, a 9th grade student from Rabin high school in Eilat, is set to fly to Germany, as part of a student exchange program. Her and her friends from the exchange are taking part in the first course. "Until now we learned about the Israel-Palestinian conflict, about the Arab countries and Israel's borders," she says. "They explained to us that its important to give a good first impression. We were shown videos which show how Israel is seen in the world."
Do the lessons help?
"Very much, my knowledge was expanded and that’s important. I personally have a problem speaking in front of people, sometimes I stutter, and the lessons gave me more confidence. I hope I can represent my country proudly," she says.
The National Coordinator of Youth Leadership, Hadara Rosenblum said: "The decision after Protective Edge, where students who flew abroad were met with questions like what is happening in Israel? What is happening in Jerusalem? They where asked about the security barrier, and the country's border. In the end of the day these students who fly abroad do represent Israel, they fill an important task in Israeli hasbara, sometimes without even knowing it. So it is important that they leave here with the necessary knowledge to deal with the tough questions."
Of course in one sense Mozes is correct. Obama is weak. Not because he is Black but because he is a Zionist Democrat who goes along with Israeli racism. Whilst professing outrage at the mass murder in Charleston, he turns a blind eye and worse to Israel's daily slaughter of Palestinian lives.
Obama's crime in the eyes of the Israeli political establishment and most Israeli Jews is that he took the 'piss process' (as the peace process is known in Israel) a little too seriously. He didn't realise that it's only necessary to go through the motions. You don't actually have to believe in it. And therefore he is rightly seen as weak. Of course if the United States had any morality in its foreign policy then it would cut off aid to Israel as and until it disgorged the territories it has conquered and permitted the right of return of the refugees. But to expect the imperialist beast to take flight with the dove is asking a bit much.
And as Israel is the world's most racist society and also its most right-wing, it is to be expected that a Black President of the USA will be the target of Zionist racists. The fact that the government is stuffed with racists and that Mozes's hubbie is none other than Israel's racist Interior Minister and Deputy PM, Silvan Shalom, is to be expected. After all, as David Sheen points out, he is busy every day in incarcerating Black asylum seekers in Israel's concentration camp in the Negev desert.
So when Mozes professes concern that her hubbie might divorce her and get a get (a Jewish divorce) I think we can reassure her that in the quiet of her married bliss they can both go on sharing racist 'jokes' to their heart's content. Nothing to be worried about dear though it obviously sounds good to outsiders.
And Israel's former Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, ascribes Obama's apparent partiality to Islam (don't notice he throws them $3 billion unlike Israel) to his father(s). If this is the level of Israel's diplomatic corps. it's no wonder that they are having difficulty tackling BDS. It's no use sending legions of trained Israeli students, full of hasbara, abroad if they spend their day making racist 'jokes'.
Tony Greenstein
What's a racist joke between friends? Her excuse? Someone sent it to her. Presumably she retweets all the racist crap she's sent.
‘Obama coffee’ is black and weak — racist tweet from wife of Israel’s vice premier
The internet is buzzing with the racist tweet by the wife of an Israeli minister.
Silvan Shalom
Mozes is a journalist and radio host. She’s married to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s vice prime minister and minister of the interior. The Independent says Mozes has since removed the tweet and apologized.
Obama’s attitudes toward Islam clearly stem from his personal interactions with Muslims… I could imagine how a child raised by a Christian mother might see himself as a natural bridge between her two Muslim husbands. I could also speculate how that child’s abandonment by those men could lead him, many years later, to seek acceptance by their co-religionists
Is there an emergency brake on this car? And who does Mozes hang out with that she hears this kind of thing?
Both statements are bizarre examples of Israeli leaders’ difficulty understanding an increasingly diverse world that is at odds with Zionism. So we see a growing siege mentality, an inability to connect, and extreme anger even at the President of Israel’s best ally. It’s hard to imagine this coming out of any politician’s mouth in the U.S., at that level. And it’s more evidence of Israel’s racist rightward reality, which is regularly reported on our site and regularly papered over in the New York Times. Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana documented this 6 years ago and people said they were lying. And it’s likely just to get worse from here.
White Supremacy and anti-Semitism Combine to Make a Mass Murderer
The cold eyes of a racist murderer
"The Scottsboro Boys" meet with their attorney Samuel Leibowitz
This is a report from the Deep South Daily. It shows how the local white political establishment is still in bed with out and out racists, who now go by the title of Council of Conservative Citizens. Dylann Roof has issued a deeply racist and anti-Semitic manifesto:
Members of the South Carolina Council of Conservative Citizens protesting in 1999. Kim Truett/AP
But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there. From here I found out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.
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The other reason is the Jewish agitation of the black race.
…
Jews
Unlike many White naitonalists, I am of the opinion that the majority of American and European jews are White. In my opinion the issues with jews is not their blood, but their identity. I think that if we could somehow destroy the jewish identity, then they wouldnt cause much of a problem. The problem is that Jews look White, and in many cases are White, yet they see themselves as minorities. Just like niggers, most jews are always thinking about the fact that they are jewish. The other issue is that they network. If we could somehow turn every jew blue for 24 hours, I think there would be a mass awakening, because people would be able to see plainly what is going on.
I dont pretend to understand why jews do what they do. They are enigma.
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How about we protect the White race and stop fighting for the jews.
John Hill, with the South Carolina Council of Conservative Citizens, speaks during a news conference
Lovely stuff. Historically the white supremacists were also anti-Semitic and that persisted up to and including the time of Joe McCarthy.
Jews were prominent in support of Black civil rights. In the seminal case of the Scottsborough Boys when 9 Black teenagers were charged with raping two white women, it as the Communist Party which sent Samuel Leibowitz, a Jewish attorney, down to Alabama to defend them.
Dylann Roof, the Charleston gunman whose racist ideology was influenced by the Council of Conservative Citizens
It was only gradually, as the same racists became Zionists, that they played down their anti-Semitism in support of Israel – because, like our own home-grown racists, they came to understand that there was no more racist state than Israel when it came to dealing with Arabs and Blacks (there is a particular hatred in Israel for Black asylum seekers, who have been incarcerated in a desert prison camp, and for the Falashas, the Black Ethiopian Jews).
"The Scottsboro Boys"
But even today, prominent Southern racists like the President of Christians United for Israel John Hagee are out and out anti-Semites. Hagee is notorious for having said that god sent Hitler to drive the Jews to Israel and that Hitler was nothing more than god’s hunter.
"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."
Mississippi Republican leaders attend a rally in Blackhawk, Mississippi in July 2003. The rally was put on by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization. The event was attended by over 500 people, including a former GOP National Chairman. From left-to-right: MS GOP campaign strategist Chip Reynolds, former state senator Robert Huggins, Ray Martin, then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Haley Barbour, John Thompson, and CCC Senior Co-ordinator Bill Lord.
Mississippi Republican leaders attend a rally in Blackhawk, Mississippi in July 2003. The rally was put on by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization. The event was attended by over 500 people, including a former GOP National Chairman. From left-to-right: MS GOP campaign strategist Chip Reynolds, former state senator Robert Huggins, Ray Martin, then-Republican gubernatorial candidate Haley Barbour, John Thompson, and CCC Senior Co-ordinator Bill Lord.
A surprising number Mississippi politicians have ties to the white supremacist organization that radicalized Dylann Roof, the gunman who killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night. A list of state leaders with ties to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC) includes U.S. Senator Roger Wicker and former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.
“Mississippi is toting a load of fat blacks on welfare,” the Council’s website once read. “Though disgust is a natural reaction when some blubbery welfare queens buys her pork chops and cream pies with food stamps, remember that the government is subsidizing this gluttony.”
“If the South seizes upon queer marriage and beheads that serpent, then a new era for States Rights will commence,” the Council wrote. “By the Grace of God, queer marriage may be the petard upon which Brown v. Topeka (the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision that desegregated public schools), and all other pernicious civil rights regulations, will be blasted down the memory hole.”
Constant headlines from CCC websites led gunman Dylann Roof to commit the Charleston church massacre, he revealed in a manifesto:
“[The Trayvon Martin case] prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?”
So who exactly are the Mississippi politicians who have ties to the white supremacist organization? The list of politicians in Mississippi who have participated in CCC events, compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2004, includes 23 Mississippi current and former Mississippi politicians. Of the 23 listed, 15 still hold elected office in Mississippi today.
Let’s start with the former governor.
During his first gubernatorial run in 2003, Haley Barbour spoke at the Blackhawk Rally in Blackhawk, Mississippi. The rally, held by Mississippi CCC Chairman Bill Lord, was to raise money to provide busing for white-only academies —like the Carroll Academy. The Southern Poverty Law Center goes into more detail on these fundraisers:
The CCC is the direct descendant of the segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s, having been largely built on the earlier councils’ mailing lists. The Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, ordering desegregation of the nation’s public schools, sparked the growth of the White Citizens Councils, which declared, “We will not be integrated. We are proud of our white blood and our white heritage of sixty centuries.” The councils’ first order of business after the court decision was to create private, all-white schools that came to be known as segregation, or seg, academies. By 1975, at least a half million white students had withdrawn from public schools to avoid mandatory desegregation.
The Carroll and Calhoun academies, which both were founded in 1968 and offer classes from kindergarten through high school, are revered by the CCC. The CCC’s longtime national field coordinator, Bill Lord, who was president of Carroll Academy for 14 years in the 1980s and 1990s, called them “the miracle of the century.” In 2004, Lord wrote in the Citizens Informer that the academies create “an atmosphere free of social experiments” for those who want to “associate with persons of like persuasion,” presumably meaning other whites. According to his biographical profile, Lord helped organize both Carroll and Calhoun academies, as well as six others in Arkansas and Tennessee.
The CCC works hard to support the schools, holding barbecue fundraisers that bring in substantial donations. In 1999, for instance, the CCC reported that it had raised over $100,000 for Calhoun Academy. The group also prominently features activities taking place at the academies in its publications. The CCC’s April-June 2010 Citizens Informer, for example, ran a photo of the Carroll Academy Lady Rebels basketball team along with congratulations for having won a championship.
In February 2010, Carroll Academy hosted a CCC meeting that featured Jeppi Barbour, brother of Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, describing a petition drive for a ballot proposal the would require voters to show ID before voting.
Kay Cobb, then a Mississippi Supreme Court presiding justice, also attended that rally.
In 2012, while Gov. Barbour was considering a run for the White House, he effectively derailed his ambitions when he made national headlines for praising the original White Citizen’s Council.
Another national figure, Senator Roger Wicker, was a Congressman when he spoke at a Council event in Byhalia, Mississippi in 2000. Present at that rally was CCC CEO Gordon Baum and President Tom Dover. Wicker refused to comment.
But most of the state leaders contacted by the SPLC about their associations with the CCC who did comment expressed bewilderment.
Rep. Gary Chism, who spoke at multiple CCC meetings from 2001-2003, said that he had never read the group’s materials; he thought the Council’s purpose was simply to “preserve some of the symbols” of the Old South.
Rep. Bill Denny was even more confused. He thought it was a “business group.”
Then-Rep. Joey Fillingane, now a state senator, who attended a “Save Our Heritage Rally” in 2000, said at the time that he was not aware that the event was sponsored by the CCC. He was invited by a local preacher to what seemed to be “a revival meeting of sorts,” he said.
Rep. John Moore told the SPLC that they should investigate the NAACP instead, adding that he did not see the CCC as a “KKK-style organization.”
The other leaders contacted refused comment, including former Rep. Jack Gadd, who was the only Mississippi Democrat identified by the SPLC as a member of the Council.
Dylann Roof, the Charleston gunman whose racist ideology was influenced by the Council of Conservative Citizens.
These leaders shouldn’t have been so confused by the goals of the CCC. After all, Republicans had been making negative headlines for years for their associations with the group. A report in the Miami Herald in 1999 shocked political observers when it was revealed that 17 Mississippi lawmakers had attended Council events between 1997 and 1998.
The attempt to deny knowledge of the CCC’s racist leanings has been tried before. After then-U.S. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi gave a speech to the Council’s national board, welcomed its leaders to Washington, and posed for photos with them, he claimed that he didn’t know what the Council was about.
After the SPLC published the report in 2004, the Council ceased to publish the names of its speakers and attendees to protect the identities of the politicians it associates with. But it has continued to tease events with state leaders, including an unnamed Mississippi Supreme Court Justice.
Today, a cached version for the official website of the Council shows a story at the top entitled, “CofCC deeply saddened by Charleston spree killing.” In that posting, the Council notes that notes that 25% of Roof’s Facebook friends were black and writes that “it is unclear what caused Roof to go on the shooting spree.”
Others recent stories on the CCC website include, “White females attacked with concrete block in racial hate crime,” “15 more black on white murders,” “Two black men execute white man while yelling racial slurs in residential Vancouver neighborhood,” “Another white baby murdered by black gangsters,” and “The Truth About Interracial Rape.”
But instead of addressing it he's made a furious attack on Labour, two of whose MPs rounded on him in the Commons yesterday.
He accused the opposition of 'going out every day scaring and frightening people' and 'deliberately misrepresenting' the government's fit-for-work schemes.
And he attacked Labour because the party introduced the work capability assessment in 2007, before the Coalition expanded it.
Jacqueline Harris, from Kingswood, Bristol. Her family say she took her own life after being refused benefits
MP Marie Rimmer asked him: "May I ask again why the Government are refusing to publish - even though the Information Commissioner has instructed them to do so - the up-to-date statistics relating to the number of people who have died, having been found fit for work at their face-to-face assessment?"
The petition was started by ex-welfare advisor Maggie Zolobajluk, 63
Mr Duncan Smith replied: "I find it absurd that Opposition Members deliberately try to misrepresent what happens under such schemes.
"I remind the honourable lady it was her Government who introduced the employment support allowance and the work capability assessment, and at no stage did they say that that led to people committing suicide.
Mark Wood, 44, with complex mental health issues starved to death after being sanctioned
"People in that situation are often in a very delicate and difficult position, and I find it disgraceful that she is going round making such allegations."
Under pressure: 200,000 people have joined a petition against Iain Duncan Smith
That made MP Debbie Abrahams thunder: "Does the Secretary of State think that he and his Department are above the law?
"Why does he refuse to publish the details of the number of people who have died within six weeks of their claims for incapacity benefit and employment and support allowance, including those who have been found fit for work?"
But Mr Duncan Smith said: "I find it unbelievable that she, the honourable lady and others have spent all their time trying to make allegations about people going about their work.
"It is a crying shame that Labour members want to go out every day scaring and frightening people. It is no wonder they lost the election."
He also claimed his department 'doesn't collate the numbers' at all - appearing to fly in the face of his own officials' advice.
Maggie Zolobajluk
Movement: The petition was started by ex-welfare advisor Maggie Zolobajluk, 63
His civil servants have openly admitted they collect the data, have published it before, and are planning to publish more in the future. Read the full ruling here.
The Coalition's welfare changes saw people told to find work despite having chronic illnesses - some of whom died before getting their benefits back.
Petition founder Ms Zolobajluk said: "I could see what was happening in the community. It was so predictable. These cuts came in and left people feeling helpless."
The request to release the figures was made under the Freedom of Information Act by campaigner Mike Sivier.
He asked how many people who died between November 2011 and May 2014 had been found 'fit for work', or told they could move towards getting work.
The sister of a mentally ill man who starved to death in David Cameron's constituency after his benefits were wrongly cut has accused the Government of "killing the very vulnerable", as official figures emerged suggesting dozens of people could have died in similar circumstances.
Freedom of Information requests by the Disability News Service revealed that the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has investigated decisions made about welfare payments following the deaths of 60 people since 2012 – the first time the DWP has tacitly admitted there could be a link. However, campaigners believe the number of deaths could be far higher, claiming the changes to benefit rules have amounted to "passive euthanasia".
A public meeting in Witney in Oxfordshire on Thursday will hear from the sisters of two men who died after their benefits were cut, Mark Wood, 44 and David Clapson, 59. Mr Wood, who had a number of mental health problems, was found starved to death last year after his benefits were reduced to £40 a week because he was deemed fit for work. A government review later found that this decision had been a mistake.
The Prime Minister has said his death was "tragic" and pledged to "help find the answers to make sure that lessons are learnt". However, Mr Wood's sister Cathie Wood, 49, said she felt that members of the Government believed "these people aren't worth having around".
"They must, in their secret hearts, think that," she said. "It worked; he died. They say they want to protect the very vulnerable, and they are killing the very vulnerable. I think it is a really huge, hidden scandal and there are going to be more people who die this winter."
Mr Wood, who had been "desperately trying to be independent", was reclusive, and only told his family that his benefits had been cut shortly before he died. The coroner said his death was probably partly caused by his being "markedly underweight and malnourished".
A DWP report into his case,due out in June, has been delayed. Officials now say it will not be ready until next year. Ms Wood said she suspected it would not be revealed until after the general election. Mr Clapson, a former soldier and a Type-1 diabetic, died in July after his benefits were cut. He had no food in his stomach, £3.44 in the bank and no money on his electricity card, leaving him unable to operate his fridge where he kept his insulin. MPs are to look into his death after a petition calling for an inquiry gathered more than 210,000 names.
"I feel [benefit] sanctions are cruel and harsh on the weak and vulnerable, which my brother had become through no fault of his own," his sister Gill Thompson said. "My brother didn't create [a fuss], he just walked away … he wasn't one for a scene. My brother has gone, there is nothing can be done to bring him back. All I want now is lessons to be learnt and no one else to die, and his passing not to be without meaning."
In 2013, some 871,000 people were sanctioned by the DWP, losing some or all of their benefits for weeks or months. John Pring, of the Disability News Service, said the admission the DWP had looked into 60 cases since 2012 was significant. "It does seem to be the first kind of solid evidence that the DWP do seem to accept there's some link between mistakes they make in their procedures and the deaths of people," he said.
Mr Pring suspected there were "a lot more" cases, saying he knew of more than 60 from inquest reports alone. The true number, he said, could be anything from about that to several thousand. John McArdle, from campaign group Black Triangle, has compiled a list of 70 people who died after their benefits were cut, including many mentally ill and disabled people. He said this was likely to be "the tip of the iceberg". "These people are being cut loose and it's a policy that amounts to passive euthanasia. These are very vulnerable people who require our support, care and love," he said.
Thursday's meeting was organised by the Green Party, of which Mr Wood was a member. Stuart Macdonald, prospective Green parliamentary candidate in Witney, said: "Mark Wood was told that he didn't deserve to have any more money. He felt [£40 a week] was what he deserved … and it was his fault if he couldn't manage. He had more money from his sister but he gave that away to charity because he didn't feel he deserved it."
A DWP spokeswoman said Mr Clapson had not appealed against the removal of his benefits or sought hardship payments. Of Mr Wood's case, she said: "The coroner attributed Mr Wood's eating disorder and food phobia as the likely cause of his death." She said the DWP spent £94bn a year on working-age benefits "to ensure that a safety net is in place to support some of the most vulnerable people in society".
In peoples’ understandable determination to uncover the truth of the Nakba and what happened in 1947-8, the massacres of the 1967 War have barely been covered.
Still from the film Censored Voices shows a former Israeli solider listening back to an interview, censored by the military after the 1967 war.
Palestinian refugees from the 1948 War
A new Israeli film from Mor Loushi delves into some of the detail. The execution and mass graves of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai have been known about for some time and the deliberate sinking by Israel of the USS Liberty, an American spy-ship has also been well documented, as has the joint US/Israeli cover-up.
The iconic photo that the Zionists used to whitewash the invasion - 3 soldiers at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall
Israeli Generals Yitzhak Rabin, Moshe Dayan and Uzi Narkis in Jerusalem
The 1967 war occurred because the bluster of Nasser allowed Israel a golden opportunity. Having blocked Israeli ships from the Gulf of Aquaba Nasser foolishly ordered the UN troops in the Sinai to withdraw. Israel of course took full advantage of this in order to conquer the Sinai, Golan and West Bank.
“In the operation we had to cleanse the inhabitants. This uprooting of a villager, rooted in his village and turning him into a refugee, by simply expelling him, and not one, two or three of them but a real eviction. And when you see a whole village is led like lambs to the slaughter without any resistance you understand what is the Holocaust.” — An Israeli soldier’s testimony in the documentary Censored Voices, directed by Mor Loushi (2015)
The USS Liberty, a spy ship, was attacked and nearly sunk by Israel because they didn't want the US knowing what their plans were. US President Johnson covered it up. It was only when the US sent planes to defend it that Israel called off the attack
In the wake of the June 1967 war, the Israeli author Amos Oz, then a reserve soldier in the Israeli army, together with a friend collated interviews with Israeli soldiers who participated in the war and asked them about the emotions the fighting triggered in them. The interviews were published as a book titled Conversations with Soldiers, more popularly referred at the time by my generation as the ”shooting and crying” book.
General Ariel Sharon at the battle of Abu-Ageila
The military censor (a function that still exists today, held recently by the present minister of culture, Miri Regev), erased 70 percent of the evidence since he claimed it would have harmed Israel’s international image.
An over confident Nasser laughing with Airforce pilots
This month an industrious Israeli filmmaker, Mor Loushi, is showing her new documentary based on most of this erased material. The atrocities reported by the soldiers include forced expulsions, like the one quoted above, graphic descriptions of summary executions of prisoners of war and hints of massacres of innocent villagers.
Evil repertoire
This 48th commemoration of the 1967 war coincided with the 67th commemoration of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine before and after Israel’s founding in 1948. There is more than a symbolic connection here. The evil repertoire confessed by the soldiers in the new film reminds us of the atrocities perpetrated 67 years ago on a much larger, though similarly horrific, scale.
The 1948 atrocities were ignored by the international community and for a long time the entire Nakba was denied while the Holocaust memory seemed to provide carte blanche to Israel to continue the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
No wonder then, when in 1967 Israel’s territorial appetite was satisfied with the occupation of the whole of historic Palestine, as well as large territories from Egypt and Syria, it was achieved with the help of similar inhumane ethnic cleansing operations of expulsions and massacres.
There was one difference between the two chapters of atrocity committed in the two wars. In 1967, Israel was less secure about possible global, and even American, complacency in the face of its cruel methodologies on the ground and therefore attempted to hide them from prying eyes. The wall of secrecy Israel built, however, nearly cracked, when the US navy ship USS Liberty eavesdropped on the communications between the troops in the Gaza Strip on 8 June 1967, revealing probably both the summary execution of Egyptian prisoners of war and Palestinian civilians. The ship was destroyed on the same day from the air by the Israeli air force.
Later on, the atrocities were substantiated by eyewitnesses and came to the fore when mass graves were exposed in 1995 in the al-Arish area in Sinai, straining Egypt’s relations with Israel, as CNN reported at the time.
The network interviewed, for the first time, relatives and survivors of these war crimes who recalled the massacre of hundreds. The link between the unprovoked assault on the USS Liberty and the wish to hide the massacres and executions was thoroughly investigated by James Bamford in his 2001 book Body of Secrets.
Thus, the newly released tapes corroborate atrocities already known and told by those who were their victims (in this case, including 34 American navy personnel). This was very much in the same way as Israeli documents declassified in the 1980s corroborated the Palestinian oral history and testimonies of the Nakba.
Purifying the perpetrators
In both cases, it took a while for the victims’ version to be heard after years of being brushed aside by Western academia and the media as a figment of an oriental imagination.
The Israeli eyewitnesses in the new film do not mention names of places or dates — neither do we know who the Palestinian or Egyptian victims were. De-naming and dehumanization are two sides of the same coin and thus the new harrowing testimonies are cautiously presented as an act purifying the perpetrators rather than honoring the victims.
It is another case of “shooting and crying”: namely the problem is not that a girl lost her eye, a man’s house was demolished or an unarmed prisoner of war was executed. The aim is to cleanse the tormented soul of the victimizer and there is nothing like a good confession to make it all go away. Names and dates, and even more so real human beings, require not only acknowledgement but also accountability. Saying sorry is not always enough, especially when the lesson is not learned. And, thus, year after year since 1967, including in recent weeks, Palestinians, with faces and names, are still expelled, imprisoned without trial and killed.
Permanent reality
This new film gives the impression that these crimes were the inevitable outcome of the June 1967 war. But in fact the crimes committed after the war were much worse in every aspect. The atrocities were not the outcome of the war, they were part of the means used by Israel to solve the predicament the new territorial achievement produced for the Jewish State: it incorporated in 1967 almost the same number of Palestinians it had expelled in 1948.
After the war, other means were added in the search for reconciling this predicament. The aim was still the same: to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible. The new strategy, after the war, was based on the logic that if you cannot uproot people you root them deeply in their areas of living without any outlet or easy access to the world around them.
The Palestinians all over Palestine were, since 1967, incarcerated in small enclaves surrounded by Jewish colonies, military bases and no-go areas that bisect their geography. In the occupied territories, Israel created a matrix of control many African National Congress leaders regard as far worse than the worst of apartheid South Africa. The Israelis marketed this method to the world as a temporary and necessary means for maintaining their rule in the “disputed” territories. The “temporary” means became a way of life and transformed into a permanent reality on the ground, for which Israel sought international legitimacy through the 1993 Oslo accords – and nearly got it.
This month as we commemorate the 48th year of the 1967, war we should remind ourselves once more that this was a chapter in a history of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and occasionally genocide of the Palestinians.
The “peace process” that began more than two decades ago was based on the assumption that the “conflict” began in 1967 and will end with Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The “conflict” had actually begun in 1948, if not before, and the worst part of it was not the 1967 military occupation of those parts of Palestine that Israel had failed to take over in 1948, but rather that the international immunity for these crimes still continues today.
One can only hope that those with the power to effect change in the world will understand, as did the soldier quoted in the opening of this piece, that there is more than one holocaust and that everyone, regardless of their religion or nationality, can be either its victim or its perpetrator. The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.
Six Day War atrocities: Veteran's account of captives in Egyptian uniforms being shot in the desert adds fuel to scandal; 'A prisoner was given a shovel and started to dig. Then he was fired at'
Gabriel Brun, a Jerusalem journalist who served as a signals sergeant- major in the 1967 Six-Day War, described yesterday how he saw fellow Israeli soldiers shoot dead five prisoners of war in Egyptian uniforms.
His story added fuel to an escalating scandal sparked by a retired brigadier-general, who confessed to executing 49 Egyptian prisoners during the 1956 Suez war. Egypt, with whom Israel signed a peace treaty in 1979, has demanded a full account. The Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was chief of staff during the 1967 war, has ordered an investigation.
"What I saw happened on the morning of 7 June, the third day of the war,"Mr Brun, who was then 24, told the Independent. "I was at El Arish airfield in the Sinai desert, attached to the headquarters of an armoured division. I saw 120 to 150 Egyptian soldiers sitting with their hands tied behind their backs in a makeshift hangar made of sandbags. About 20 yards away I saw a trestle table with two men sitting behind it, their faces masked with khaki handkerchiefs. Individual prisoners were pushed out of the group, brought before this table and apparently interrogated. Some were sent back. "I was about 30 or 40 yards away, so I couldn't hear what was said. I saw one man questioned, then marched about 200 yards into the desert by two military policemen. "He was given a shovel and started to dig. After about 15 minutes, I saw the shovel thrown out. Then each of the two soldiers fired a round into the hole. Another guy was brought and shot, falling into the same hole. A third prisoner was brought to cover up the grave, then was marched back. "I saw five prisoners killed in this way. Earlier I had heard 10 similar shots. I interpreted those to mean that another five were executed."
Mr Brun said an officer explained to him afterwards that the victims were Palestinian "terrorists", who were wanted for murdering Israelis and had tried to get away by merging with the fleeing Egyptians. The interrogators were officers in army intelligence.
Arye Biro, 69, the retired brigadier who admitted killing 49 Egyptian PoWs in the 1956 war, said on Wednesday he was not proud of what he had done, but did not feel like a war criminal. "I have ached over what I did," he said, "but under the same circumstances I think I would do it again." Mr Biro commanded a paratroop company which dropped in the Mitla Pass, one of the two main routes from central Sinai to the Suez Canal.
"We were hundreds of kilometres behind enemy lines,"he said. "Egyptian planes were flying over us unhindered. Egyptian troops were pouring into the area, and the prisoners were shouting, 'Just you wait, the Egyptian army will slaughter you'." The paratroops were ordered to head south. According to Mr Biro, they had no transport for the prisoners and feared they would reveal the Israelis' position. So he and a lieutenant ordered the prisoners to lie face down, then shot them.
"They didn't cry out,"he said dispassionately. "It was all over in a couple of minutes." The paratroops' brigade commander was General Ariel Sharon, now an opposition Likud MP. He was not in the Mitla Pass at the time of the executions. But the battalion commander, Rafael Eitan, was. Mr Eitan, who rose to chief of staff, is now a hard-right candidate for prime minister. Asked if Mr Eitan ordered the killings, Mr Biro replied: "Ask him." According to Meir Pa'il, a military historian and retired colonel, Moshe Dayan, who was chief of staff in 1956 and defence minister in 1967, reprimanded Mr Eitan for the killings during a meeting with battalion commanders.
Michael Bar-Zohar, an author and former Labour MP who handled Dayan's public relations after the 1967 war, said: "In every one of our wars, Israeli soldiers have killed PoWs. The high command did not want it, but it was tolerated up to a point. I know of only one case - in the 1982 Lebanon War - where an officer was court-martialled for killing a prisoner.
Israeli papers are calling it a 'lynching'. Another word might be justice. Those who slaughter civilians aren't entitled to the benefits of Geneva Convention protection - be they al-Nusra or ISIS.
UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) troops move through Israel’s Golan Heights before crossing into Syria, August 31.. (photo credit:REUTERS/BAZ RATNER)
Despite the continuing pretence that Israel is only providing humanitarian assistance to Syrians, regardless of political affiliation, the truth is now widely known. Israel has a de facto agreement with the Al Qaeda Al Nusra Front along the Syrian border.
Military Ambulance
This was highlighted a few days ago in a rather spectacular fashion when Syrian Druze from the village of Majdal Shams, who live in the Occupied Golan Heights, attacked an Israeli ambulance conveying 2 Al Nusra fighters to hospital, killing one and severely injuring another. The reason for this was a recent massacre in North-West Syria near Idlib.
Meeting between al-Nusra and Israeli army earlier this year
Twenty-thousand Druze live in the Golan Heights as well as 110,000 in Israel. Earlier in the year a Druze Sedki al-Maket, who photographed a meeting between Al Nusra and the Israeli security services, was arrested by Israel, which promptly instituted a gag order preventing news about it being published. http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/israel-supports-isis-and-al-qaeda-in.html
The feeble Israeli explanation beggars belief. Does Israel provide ‘humanitarian medical assistance’ to fighters from Hamas or Hezbollah? Does it return them to Gaza and Lebanon afterwards? No, what it does do is hold up pregnant Palestinian women at checkpoints until they or their child dies. Tony Greenstein
Total of 12 people detained for suspected involvement in ambulance attack that left one Syrian dead and another hurt
Israeli police said Thursday they arrested three more suspects in attacks by members of the Druze minority on military ambulances transporting wounded Syrians to the hospital.
In one of two incidents Monday, one Syrian was beaten to death and a second was hurt in an unprecedented outbreak of violence by Druze on the Golan Heights that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called a “lynching.”
Two soldiers were also injured in the incident while trying to protect the wounded Syrians. Both soldiers were also members of the Druze community, according to a report in Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth Thursday.
Syria’s Druze are traditional allies of President Bashar aAssad, and have become caught up in the fighting.
“During the night, police and border guards in the north arrested three more suspects from the Druze community suspected of involvement in the events,” police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement.
She said a gag order had been imposed on all other details of the investigation.
Police said they carried out a “wave of arrests” Wednesday, with media saying nine people had been detained.
Monday’s deadly incident took place hours after Druze in the neighboring Galilee region of Israel blocked and stoned a military ambulance they suspected was taking Syrian rebels to the hospital.
Both incidents demonstrate the anger felt by Druze towards the rebels and towards the Israelis, whom they suspect of providing medical help to the fighters.
Israel does not rule out the possibility that some of those given medical care are rebels.
Syria has said the two men in the ambulance were members of Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front. Israel says they were civilians.
The Druze are a secretive offshoot of Shiite Islam. Officials say there are 110,000 of them in northern Israel and another 20,000 on the Golan Heights.
NEW YORK – The Syrian ambassador to the UN has long complained of a Zionist conspiracy working with the Syrian rebels to overthrow President Bashar Assad.
Now, a report from the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) reveals that Israel has been working closely with Syrian rebels in the Golan Heights and have kept close contact over the past 18 months. The report was submitted to the UN Security Council at the beginning of the month.
The documents show that Israel has been doing more than simply treating wounded Syrian civilians in hospitals. This and a few past reports have described transfer of unspecified supplies from Israel to the Syrian rebels, and sightings of IDF soldiers meeting with the Syrian opposition east of the green zone, as well as incidents when Israeli soldiers opened up the fence to allow Syrians through who did not appear to be injured.
At one point, a small tent city was erected around 300 meters away from the Israeli sector for about 70 families of Syrian deserters, the report said.
The Syrian army then sent a letter of complaint to UNDOF, warning them to evacuate the camp or it would be considered a target, and claiming that terrorists were using the camp to cross into Israel.
Israel’s health ministry says around 1,000 Syrians have received treatment in Golan hospitals, but maintains that only civilians are treated. The UNDOF report, on the other hand, says they have seen Israelis treating civilians as well as insurgents, including members of al-Qaida and Islamic State.
The report said UNDOF “observed at least 10 wounded persons being transferred by armed members of the opposition from the Bravo side across the cease-fire line.”
UNDOF has monitored the Golan Heights buffer zone between Israel and Syria since 1974. Six countries contributed to the 1,200-strong brigade.
UNDOF peacekeepers have been the target of kidnappings and attacks carried out by al-Qaida on the Syrian side since September, causing hundreds of troops to withdraw to across Israeli border.
Legislation Proposed to Stop Foreign Funding of Israeli Human Rights Organisations
No government likes to be taken to task over human rights abuses. Most deny, as a matter of instinct, that any such abuses have taken place. But it is only the worst of the worst governments seek to destroy or cripple the very organisations that have been criticising their human rights record.
Even the United States government of George Bush didn’t seek to destroy its critics over Iraq. Even the British government didn’t try and destroy those organisations that criticised its use of torture in Ireland.
Only police states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia target the human rights organisations themselves in their efforts to cover up their abuses. Israel describes itself as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East' but in its attack on human rights organisations, as well as other forms of dissent (Israeli Arab, cultural) it is demonstrating that its democratic veneer covers a police state practice.
No organisation has been demonised more in recent weeks than ‘Breaking the Silence’ [BTS]. Why? Because it has taken and publicised the testimony of soldiers in the attack on Gaza last summer, Protective Edge, which contradicts the official version that all was sweet and light and that Israel bent over backwards to protect the human rights of the civilian population.
testimony catalog number: 470948 rank: Staff Sergeant unit: Armored Corps area: Deir al-Balah area period: 2014
But everything else that they didn’t specifically instruct us to avoid shooting at – and except for a few other places, where nearby [IDF] forces were located to avoid friendly fire – you could shoot anywhere, nearly freely. There are also times when we said, “Let’s fire over there, worst case they’ll ask what we shot at, we’ll say it was a ‘suspicious spot,’ that it looked threatening.” That happened a few times
It was all scorched, burned to the ground. Entire streets where one building is half-destroyed, the next one totally destroyed, the next one half-destroyed. Entire streets that were totally shelled.
Entire streets that were totally shelled, and I needed to verify a certain target that had clearly been obliterated. I opened up the footage and saw that it was taken right after the strike had been carried out, and there were lots of people there, and lots of ambulances, and a whole lot of smoke and lots of commotion. And from what we knew, that area was supposedly devoid of civilians.
You said earlier that you did know the neighborhood was supposed to be empty of civilians? Yes. That’s what they told us. They told us – maybe really so we wouldn’t think the IDF does immoral things – they told us the civilians had been informed via leaflets scattered in the area, and that it was supposed to be devoid of civilians, and civilians who remained there were civilians who apparently chose to be there. Who told you that? The commanders, in off-the-record type conversations, or during all kinds of briefings. Just so we’d know, for our general knowledge, that this is what’s going on. That there’s no civilians supposed to be there, and any who are – are there because they chose to be. In conversations between us it was summed up as, “There’s nothing we can do, war is war.” You don’t really talk about it – any discourse or opinions that are slightly ‘deviant’ are pretty much silenced.
At one point early on an older woman came near, and one of the officers said she should be shot. They told him to fire [warning shots] in her direction, and after a few shots she backed off. Later on, lots of people with white flags came over and [warning] shots were fired near them, too.
During the first entrance [to the Gaza Strip] we were near Beit Lahia, in a place called the Bedou’iyya. We were there for a few days. When we got there, there were white flags on all the rooftops. We had been prepared for something very… For some very glorious combat, and in the end it was quiet. We set ourselves up in our spot and slowly, slowly, [the Palestinians] started returning.
The Israeli government, apart from running an (unsuccessful) campaign to ban a BTS exhibition in Zurich, has found that the White House arranged a meeting with people from BTS. The next stage in the campaign is to hit its funding, on the ground that BTS is dependent on mainly foreign funding. That of course is true and funders include ‘soft’ Zionist groups like the New Israel Fund. What is so hypocritical is that Netanyahu’s election campaign to remain leader of Likud was funded from abroad!
What has been particularly irksome to the Zionists is that BTS has been invited to speak in places normally reserved for Israeli government and hasbara speakers such as the Hillel centres, which cater for Jewish students.
Although there has been a recent breakaway from the Hillel movement, launched by the Open Hillel movement [see Hillel's SwarthmoreChapter Rejects Zionist Impositions on Students] these invitations to speak have also come from the mainstream Zionist Hillels, suggesting dissension in the ranks.
The Likud lobby in the United States has not been slow to respond and its response is interesting.
Executive Director of the absurdly named Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), Asaf Romirowsky, wroteagainstBreaking the Silence in June 2013 in the aftermath of former IDF Spokesman Barak Raz'scriticism: Barak Raz, spokesman for the IDF’s Judea and Samaria Division, correctly blasted the group and its actions, stating that “Breaking the Silence is an organization that engages in nothing – but nothing – other than a smear campaign targeting the IDF. This smear campaign has nothing to do with rooting out their observed problem. Furthermore, none of their work helps the IDF (or Israel, for that matter) provide a solution.”
… BtS has become the poster child for groups like J Street [a slightly less hawkish version of Aipac but still very much pro-Zionist and anti-BDS - TG] and others on many North American campuses that want to engage in “honest debate” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In reality, these groups do nothing more than fuel a skewed view of Israel in order to pressure Israel to succumb to Palestinian demands, thereby only contributing to the isolation of the Jewish state. Further, it is also the pervasive tactic employed by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) in their political warfare against Israel.
The adaptation of soft power by the pro-Palestinian camps and far-left Jewish groups is one of the main vehicles used in this political warfare. Breaking the Silence plays a central role in this agenda, now spearheaded by J Street."
Note how broad brush assertions such as ‘smear campaign’ are not backed with even an iota of evidence. Instead the Israeli army spokeman ‘correctly blasted the group’ even though SPME is not in a position to make such a judgement. BTS are attacked, not because of the inaccuracy of what they have said but because of the effect such criticisms will have in ‘contributing to the isolation of the Jewish state’ and isolating Israel and fueling‘a skewed view of Israel’. And of course there is the mandatory Guilt by Association techniques, so beloved of McCarthyists through the ages. Scholarly? Barely high school stuff.
Another anti-free speech group is NGO Monitor, whose President, Gerald Steinberg also indulges in guilt-by-association. Apparently BTS ‘receives part of its budget from individuals who support the BDS.’ The clinching argument of course, although we are not enlightened as to who these wicked individuals are! Apparently the ‘The central issue is how tainted money buys preferential influence and skews the Israel debate on campus’. There is the word ‘skew’ again. No mention of the ‘tainted money’ of Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire backer of Netanyahu who owns the Israeli free sheet Israel Hayom which is driving the rest of Israel’s press out of business.
Apparently ‘Tiny radical groups like "Breaking the Silence" are able to flood the market of ideas’. Far more preferable that people like Adelson buy peoples’ opinions instead.
Not to be outdone, RussellRobinson, CEO of the Jewish National Fund, which administers and buys land in Israel only for Jews, i.e. it is an openly Apartheid organisation, in "Hillel is Not The Place ForAnti-Israel Discussion," expressed concern about anti-Israel events in Hillel. Apparently, in the Zionist police state that should be Hillel, ‘I have witnessed time after time, speakers that condemn Israel do so without being properly vetted and fact-checked. Often listeners absorb every word as though it were based on facts when it is nothing more than biased opinion and misinformed rhetoric.’ Clearly there is a problem here having speakers who are not thoroughly vetted and ‘fact-checked’ beforehand! But these are the hurdles one must clear in order that Israel can remain the only democracy in the Middle East. Tony Greenstein
JERUSALEM — An organization of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to shedding light on the dark side of the country’s military is coming increasingly under fire, roiling a country in the grips of a battle against the burgeoning threat of international isolation and boycotts.
The group, Breaking the Silence, says that without its work, stories of improper or even illegal behaviour against Palestinians would remain hidden from an Israeli public that reveres the military. But the group has come under attack from legislators who threaten its funding and say it could help turn Israel into a pariah state.
Since its founding in 2004, Breaking the Silence has collected the testimonies of more than 1,000 veterans in a bid to expose the underbelly of the decades-old occupation of the West Bank. It has taken those accounts to audiences in Israel and around the world, including a recent 10-day photo exhibit in Zurich, Switzerland.
This comes as Israel confronts a growing boycott movement focused on companies doing business in its West Bank settlements.
The European Union also has ratcheted up measures against settlement products. The settlements, built on land captured in the 1967 Mideast war which the Palestinians want for a future state, are seen as illegitimate by the international community.
Breaking the Silence does not call for a boycott of Israel. But critics say it feeds into a global trend that unfairly singles out Israel and is bent on “delegitimizing” the world’s only Jewish state. In contrast to other rights groups, Breaking the Silence presents a unique threat because its members were devoted soldiers before coming out with their claims.
“We will not ignore the fact that an organization, whose sole purpose is to tarnish (Israeli) soldiers, is operating internationally in order to cause serious damage to Israel’s image,” said Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s deputy foreign minister.
The group was created by soldiers who served during the Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s. It has since built an organization of some 60 active members that, beyond collecting testimonies, holds lectures and meetings and organizes trips for Israelis to the West Bank to expose them to the daily realities of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. Military service is largely compulsory for Jewish Israelis.
Breaking the Silence often makes waves with its reports, and in May, it released the accounts of dozens of soldiers who fought in last year’s Gaza war.
The group concluded that “a troubling picture arises of a policy of indiscriminate fire” that killed innocent civilians. The Israeli military, which has launched dozens of investigations into alleged wartime misconduct, rejected the report, saying the claims lacked proof and could not be investigated as the group grants soldiers anonymity for their testimony.
Yehuda Shaul, Breaking the Silence’s co-founder, described its critics as hard-line Israelis bent on perpetuating Israeli rule over the West Bank.
“So long as we are in uniform and are going to kill and die for settlements and for the occupation, then everything is fine, but the moment we break the silence, suddenly we are traitors. That’s the hypocrisy of the Israeli right-wing,” Shaul said.
Shaul said that the majority of Breaking the Silence’s work is in Israel, but it has been lambasted for taking its message abroad.
A group of pro-Israel Swiss lawmakers last week criticized the Zurich exhibition, saying it “instigates evil propaganda, disinformation and furthers ideologies that run counter to peace.” The Swiss Foreign Ministry said its support for the group is “consistent” with its goal of supporting “a fair and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”
Israel attempted unsuccessfully to have the Swiss Foreign Ministry pull its funding of the exhibit. But an exhibition planned at a fair on Israel-German relations in Cologne, Germany, was canceled following an Israeli request.
Top: Ayelet Shaked: BTS is slandering Israel;
Bottom: Tzipi Hotovely, we will not ignore the fact that they are acting to damage Israel’s image.
The Zurich exhibit comes at a time of surging panic over the possible economic effect of boycotts, which Palestinians say are necessary after more than 20 years of failed peace efforts.
Hotovely, the deputy foreign minister, called for an urgent ministry meeting to examine how to rein in Breaking the Silence. Israeli opposition legislator Yair Lapid said that “extremist organizations” like Breaking the Silence “harm Israel’s efforts in the struggle” against the boycott movement. More than 7,000 people are part of a Facebook group called “My Truth,” which attempts to counter Breaking the Silence and staged a protest in front of the Swiss Embassy in Tel Aviv last month.
Much of the criticism comes over the group’s foreign funding. Many of its international projects are supported by European bodies, and opponents see that as a way to influence the very citizens and governments who could one day choose to boycott Israel.
“It’s a world tour funded by the European governments under the facade of human rights that is so damaging,” said Gerald Steinberg, who heads NGO Monitor, which tracks the funding of Israeli rights groups like Breaking the Silence.
Breaking the Silence and other rights groups face a looming threat from a bill expected to be introduced in Israel’s Knesset that could limit their foreign funding by requiring senior government officials to approve the donations.
Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who is behind the bill, said this month that Breaking the Silence is “slandering and harming the state of Israel.”
Shaul said the group is determined to continue its work.
“What harms Israel more than anything is the occupation and what harms Israel the most is the settlement enterprise and our unwillingness to end the occupation,” he said.
Associated Press writer Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report.
In which other country would one group of citizens be prevented, through planning laws, from building houses, whilst the dominant group is allowed to build? In Israel not only are half the Palestinian villages ‘unrecognised’ and liable to instant demolition, but even those which are recognised are not permitted to expand.
Official ‘Judaisation’ policy blamed for severe housing crisis as anger mounts over family made homeless twice in two months
Middle East Eye – 24 June 2015
The start of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan has been bitter for Tareq Khatib.
The Israeli authorities razed his home for the second time in two months last week. Now under house arrest, he is confined to a friend’s home and separated from his wife and children.
His lawyer has warned that he should expect a bill from the state for hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover the costs of the demolitions and security operations.
Arab Israelis take part in a rally organized by the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, in protest against the demolition of homes in Arab communities, at Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, April 28, 2015. (AFP/JACK GUEZ)
Fingering prayer beads, the 48-year-old father of five looked disconsolate, his hopelessness compounded by fatigue from the afternoon heat and a long day without food or water.
A relative of Abdelrahman Shaludi, a Palestinian who killed two Israelis with his car last month, displays his portrait inside his family home after it was razed by Israeli authorities in east Jerusalem Silwan neighborhood on November 19, 2014, (Photo: AFP/Ahmad Gharabli)
“Where are my family and I supposed to live?” he asked. “It seems the government thinks the only place for us is out on the street, without a roof over our heads. It’s like they are waging a war against their own citizens.”
A relative surveys the ruins of Tareq Khatib’s home / Photos: Jonathan Cook
In the darkness before dawn on June 15, hundreds of Israeli police entered the Galilee town of Kafr Kana, close to Nazareth, to destroy Khatib’s almost-completed house.
It was carried out like a military operation, he told Middle East Eye. Police, some on horse-back, sealed off the roads to the area while others fired stun grenades and rubber bullets as dozens of neighbours and relatives tried to stop the demolition. Four people were arrested, including Khatib himself.
Residents of Kafr Kanna stand in the rubble of a demolished home (Photo: Hassan
Treated like an enemy
Khatib’s long and unsuccessful battle to build his family a home legally has come to symbolise a much larger struggle by Israel’s Palestinian minority against decades of land confiscations, severe planning restrictions and an ever-escalating housing crisis.
Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinians, a fifth of the population, have citizenship but their leaders say they are treated more like an enemy population.
A man walks amidst the rubble of a house belonging to an Arab-Israeli family .
The formation in May of an ultra-nationalist coalition under Benjamin Netanyahu has further raised fears that the destruction of Khatib’s home will herald a wave of house demolitions in the Galilee.
Interior ministry officials are evasive about figures for unauthorised building in Israel, but experts say the number of such homes is believed to have reached around 30,000 in Israel’s Palestinian communities.
“That means one in 10 Arab homes in Israel is treated as illegal by the government and faces the threat of demolition,” said Hana Swaid, who was until recently an Arab member of the Israeli parliament.
He heads the Arab Centre for Alternative Planning, an organisation promoting fairer land and housing allocations for the Palestinian minority.
According to Swaid, the housing problems faced by Khatib and thousands of other Palestinian families in Israel derive from an official Zionist policy of “Judaisation”.
“The goal since the state’s creation has been to Judaise territory. That doesn’t mean just building communities for Jews but tightly restricting where Arab citizens can live. They are trapped with no options for the future for themselves or their children.”
The result has been rampant overcrowding in Arab communities, with a chronic lack of open spaces, proper roads, and industrial and commercial centres offering employment opportunities.
100,000 homes needed
Khatib’s troubles gained public attention in April when he, his wife and three of his children were evicted. The house he had built two years earlier in his family’s olive grove, on the edge of Kafr Kana, was destroyed.
Some 26 other homes in the town are threatened with immediate demolition. Despite repeated appeals from the local municipality, planning officials have refused to expand the town’s residential area for more than 15 years.
Arfan Khatib, a local councillor, told the Haaretz daily that parts of Kafr Kana – the place where Jesus reputedly performed his first miracle, turning water into wine – now looked more like “refugee camps”.
Tareq Khatib said:
“I have been trying for years to get a permit to build on my land without success. We couldn’t keep living in a small rented apartment for ever, so I decided it was time to build.”
A recent study, according to Haaretz, showed that approval of at least 100,000 additional homes was needed over the next decade to avert a deepening housing crisis among the Palestinian minority.
Based on the housing ministry’s current estimates, barely a fifth of the necessary building permits will be issued to Palestinian citizens. In recent years approval rates have actually fallen.
The demolition of Khatib’s house in April, along with five homes in three buildings in the village of Dahmash in central Israel, triggered a general strike by the country’s Palestinian minority and a protest by thousands in central Tel Aviv under the banner “Fighting for our homes”.
Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List, the main Arab party in the Israeli parliament, told the demonstrators: “A family which loses its home, built on its own private land, is shattered.”
Simultaneous efforts to hold an emergency debate in parliament on the minority’s housing problems were blocked by opposition from the Jewish parties.
The attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, meanwhile, has warned that a failure to enforce demolitions would be “irreconcilable” with the rule of law.
House built in six days
Angered by the demolition in Kafr Kana, local residents rallied to Khatib’s side and rebuilt his house this month in just six days.
Their efforts now lie in ruins. A large mound of rubble and twisted steel wires marks the spot where his second house briefly stood.
A torn green canvas and crumpled metal frame close by are all that is left of a large tent the family had been living in while they finished the house. Friends were able to salvage only mattresses, blankets and chairs before the bulldozers set to work.
“They chose their moment carefully,” Khatib said. “That day we were due to get the house connected to water and move in. Now nothing’s left.”
Will he try to build his house a third time? He shrugged, the mammoth task one he is apparently not yet willing to contemplate. “The system is rigged against us,” he said.
The interior ministry, which oversees building permits, was unavailable for comment. Government officials, however, regularly claim that Palestinian citizens like Khatib are refusing to abide by planning rules and prefer to build illegally.
Jeff Halper, director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), said thousands of Palestinian families in Israel were trapped in what he termed the same “matrix of control” that operates in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where demolitions also regularly take place.
“People are surprised that Israel demolishes three times more homes inside Israel, against its Palestinian citizens, than it does in the occupied territories,” he told MEE. “The number of demolitions in Israel undermines the idea that the policy is simply a problem of the occupation.”
ICAHD, he said, had launched a new campaign called “Judaising Palestine” to emphasise that Israel’s goal was confinement and displacement of all Palestinians wherever they were living in historic Palestine.
Despite a slow-down in Jewish immigration in recent years, Judaisation is still being actively pursued.
In late 2013 the Jewish National Fund, an international Zionist charity with semi-governmental status, announced it would invest $1 billion over the next decade to encourage 250,000 Jews from the US and Europe to move to the Galilee and Negev.
Jewish-only communities
The land and housing problems faced by Israel’s Palestinian citizens, note experts, have a long history that started in the immediate wake of the 1948 war that established Israel as a Jewish state.
Israel confiscated most of its new Palestinian minority’s lands, as well as that of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians freshly made refugees. It then nationalised 93 per cent of its total territory on behalf of worldwide Jewry.
Israel built hundreds of rural, land-hungry communities for Jews, including farming collectives like the kibbutz, that exclude Palestinian citizens through admission committees, said Swaid.
The Palestinian minority has been mostly confined to some 130 separate communities occupying just 2.5 per cent of Israel’s land.
“While over 1,000 new Jewish communities have been established [since Israel’s creation], not a single Arab settlement has been authorized,” notes the website of Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian minority.
The Or Commission, an Israeli judicial-led inquiry, concluded in 2003 that systematic discrimination in land and housing had been a major cause of unrest in the Galilee three years earlier. Israeli police shot dead 13 unarmed Palestinian citizens and wounded hundreds more during demonstrations in Israel at the start of the second intifada.
The commission observed that waves of massive land expropriations had been viewed by the Palestinian minority as a “dispossession enterprise”. Despite a sevenfold increase in the Palestinian minority’s numbers since the state’s founding, it added, zoning for residential areas had barely increased.
Destroyed 80 times
The picture in Israel’s south, in the semi-desert Negev, is particularly extreme, Maysanna Morany, a lawyer with Adalah, told MEE.
There, several dozen Bedouin villages have been unrecognised by the state and 10,000 homes are automatically under threat of demolition.
The small village of al-Araqib, near Beersheva, has become a test case for the government, with the authorities destroying the entire village more than 80 times over the past five years.
Last month the Israeli Supreme Court also approved the demolition of another Bedouin village, Umm al-Hiran, to make way for an exclusive Jewish town on its land.
But there are severe problems too in the 120 or so recognised Arab communities in the Galilee and Triangle areas in the north and centre of the country, where 20,000 homes are ruled illegal.
In most cases it is because they are built in communities either lacking a state-approved master plan or with a long out-dated master plan that fails to take account of the Palestinian minority’s growth, said Morany.
Umm al-Fahm, the second largest Palestinian town in Israel after Nazareth, with a population of 50,000, has no master plan, making all its homes illegal.
A change in approach has been blocked because planning committees, dominated by Jewish officials, have refused to abandon the state’s Judaisation policy, said Swaid.
Recent research based on interior ministry data showedthat no Palestinian citizen held a professional position on any of Israel’s planning committees, which oversee and approve community master plans. Further, none of the 74 staff of the interior ministry’s Planning Authority was Arab.
Munther Khalil - Al Qaeda terrorist Israel was conveying in ambulance, who was killed
This post expands on my original one reporting this incident. Some of the material in it may look familiar to those who read the original post. This one names, for the first time outside of Syrian sources, Munther Khalil, the Syrian Islamist killed by Golani Druze this week. It also confirms that the IDF lied in claiming he was a civilian.
When Israel conquered the Golan in 1967, it launched a 50-year occupation of the Syrian Golan in which tens of thousands of Syrian Druze lived. Though an armistice line now separates the Druze in Syrian and Israeli-occupied zones, both communities are deeply intertwined. The sense of solidarity now, in the midst of a raging civil war, is no different than Diaspora Jews felt in 1967 before the war broke out. Millions rallied around the world concerned about Israel’s fate. Now the Druze in Israeli-held Golan are fearful for the fates of their brothers and sisters.
Israel's friends in al-Qaeda
Israel claims, falsely, that it is neutral in the Syrian civil war. Unfortunately, the world media are taken in by this charade. Israel intervenes regularly on behalf of the Syrian Islamist rebels. The UN observed the IDF unloading supplies in boxes at the armistice fence, which were then picked up by Islamist fighters. Al Monitor even reported that the IDF shells government positions inside Syria. The Israelis meet regularly with al-Nusra commanders (who are affiliated with al-Qaeda) to offer intelligence. A Syrian Druze videotaped one such meeting, which was aired on Syrian TV. He was promptly secretly arrested by the Shabak. The Israeli media was forbidden from reporting his name, Sedki al-Maket, thanks to a security gag order (I was the only journalist outside Syria who reported his name and story).
Netanyahu gives a pep talk to wounded al-Nusra terrorist
Israeli TV reported that Israel has built a camp for Syrian army deserters in Israeli occupied Golan. Israel has also bombed Hezbollah and Iranian convoys inside Syria carrying advanced weaponry meant for the Lebanese front. It has assassinated several senior Iranian generals and Hezbollah commanders on Syrian soil as well. It opposes Assad not so much for political or ideological reasons, but because the regime’s chief allies are Israel’s arch-nemeses, Iran and Hezbollah.
Israel's allies in al-Nusral
Israel’s alliance with Islamists makes for some strange bedfellows. Prime Minister Netanyahu is the first to raise the rallying cry for western resistance to the tyranny of Islamism. He regularly invokes the specter of the savagery of ISIS in counterpoint to the civilizing force of Israel. But when it’s in Israel’s interest, it’s more than willing to make common cause with such forces.
Israeli soldiers stand on tanks in the Golan Heights
…Jerusalem must ask itself some difficult questions: can its bet on the rebels pay off? Or does stability on the northern border depend on the continuation of the regime? Support for these sectarian groups carries many dangers. Their trustworthiness fluctuates, as do the figures who lead them. He who today will not act against Israel may change his spots [literally “shed his skin”] tomorrow.
…Israeli policy over the past few decades has been characterized by a series of bad bets. At the end of the 1980s, it enabled Hamas to rise from the midst of Gaza’s Islamist groups. It did this out of the flawed assumption that this was the proper way to weaken Fatah…As a result [Israel] created its own Trojan Horse [within Palestine].
With the IDF’s entrance [sic] into Lebanon in 1982, Israel disregarded the Shiites and rushed to ally itself with those it saw as the most powerful in the land: the Christians. So it paved the way for Tehran to offer protection to the disadvantaged and enable the rise of Hezbollah.
Something very similar happened in Afghanistan when the mujahedeen were first our friends, and then morphed into the Taliban and became our sworn enemies.
So far, the Syrian Islamists have deliberately not targeted Israel. This is no doubt due to the aid it offers them on the battlefield. Further, al-Nusra knows that Hezbollah is Israel’s primary opponent. The Lebanese militia constantly probes in this sector and mounts attacks against Israeli forces. Al-Nusra doesn’t seek or need to compete with Hezbollah in that regard. It would rather confine is efforts to the Syrian theater, than expand to attack Israel itself.
Recently, fighting on the Syrian side of Golan has heated up. There, the Druze villages have been largely loyal to the Assad regime over the decades. When al-Nusra and FSA forces attacked Druze villages in northern Syria, killing 20 residents, those living on the Israeli-occupied side of the Golan became restive and angry. They couldn’t sit back and watch as their cousins died at the hands of Islamists.
Not to mention that their religion, though an offshoot of Islam, is considered heretical by fundamentalist Islamists. The Druze under threat rightly believe that they and their ancient religious traditions are in grave jeopardy. Thus, Israel’s alliance with the al-Nusra front puts it diametrically at odds with the Golani Druze under Israeli Occupation.
In recent days, Israeli TV aired an interview (Hebrew, at the 2:00 mark) with a wounded Syrian fighter who was treated in Israel after being evacuated from the combat zone. What he said raised the ire of the local Druze to the boiling point:
TV interview: “What would you do if you captured a Druze?” “It depends.”
In this context, the interview I mentioned above was a lightning bolt through the Druze community. The interviewer asked the fighter (who was affiliated with the FSA):
Interviewer: [What would u do] if you caught an Alawite?
A: I would kill him
I: And if you caught a Druze?
A: It depends
I: And if you caught a Shiite?
A: I would kill the Shiite
This answer didn’t go down well among the Druze. Sandwiched between this vow of murder directed at Syrian Alawites, the traditional Druze ally, is a temporizing claim that he might or might not kill a captured Druze. This, with the backdrop of 20 Druze murdered only a few days earlier, was enough to mount a mini-revolt among Golani Druze.
Munther Khalil, Syrian Islamist fighter killed by Golani Druze
Israel regularly evacuates Islamist fighters wounded in the fighting against the regime in the region. Angry local Druze intercepted an IDF ambulance carrying two wounded Syrians, whom the IDF claimed were civilians. They beat the army medics, who were forced to flee. They then beat one of the wounded Syrians to death and severely wounded the other, before the authorities intervened and rescued him.
Munther Khalil: the IDF’s Faux Syrian “Civilian”
Syrian Islamists calling themselves the Revolutionary Command Council in Quneitra and the Golan, published a Facebook memorial to the victim who was killed in the attack. The page says in Arabic:
Munther Khalil– the wounded man who was killed by Druze people from Majdal Shams in Israel
May Allah have mercy on you, and accept you as one of the Shahids
His picture features him brandishing a gun in full rebel garb. He is clearly nota civilian.
Haaretz reporter Amos Harel also reports(Hebrew) that the two Syrians were Islamist rebels:
The two wounded were from one of the Syrian rebel organizations fighting in the heart of the Golan against the Syrian army.
The IDF lied in order to conceal its own contributing role in this tragic incident. A common occurrence in such circumstances.
The Israeli military is aghast at the Druze attack, since it infringes on its right to meddle in Syrian internal affairs unmolested. Defense minister Yaalon called the killing a “lynch.” This is Israeli code for ‘Arab savagery.’ It is used to differentiate Israeli behavior, supposedly civilized and humane, from that of Palestinian (or Arab) militants.
In the case of the Golan killing, the IDF is attempting to paint the Golani Druze as uncivilized beasts when, in fact, they are legitimately angry at Israel’s new alliance with their enemies, the al-Nusra Front. When Israel first occupied the Golan did it figure that the inhabitants would embrace the occupiers and become like them? Did it give any thought to the views and interests of the occupied and how they differed from those of Israelis? It’s doubtful. Now they are paying the price for their obliviousness and for fifty years of military occupation of Syrian Druze.
The latter are now demanding that Israel intervene in the civil war to save their brethren under attack from al-Nusra. This is the sort of insanely complex strategic dilemma that comes from playing with fire. If Israel continues its “arrangement” with al-Nusra and the latter conquers Syrian Druze villages and imposes fundamentalist Islam replete with revenge killings and beheadings, then it risks igniting a tinderbox inside Israeli-occupied Golan. If it takes the side of the Druze against al-Nusra it risks the leverage it has with the only viable force opposing Israel’s most dangerous enemies, Hezbollah and Iran.
When you play with matches, you’re bound to get burned.
When your whole existence is one long lie, it’s no surprise if your lies begin to catch up with you. In my first article on collaboration between Israel and ISIS Israel Supports ISIS and Al Qaeda in Syria
Syrian-rebels-in Idlib
I wrote about the arrest of Sedki al-Maket, a Druze living on the Golan Heights (which Israel illegally annexed from Syria) for exposing Israel’s duplicity.
Sedki filmed Israel soldiers handing over boxes of ammunition to al-Nusra and this footage was given to the Syrian regime which broadcast it on TV. I based this on an article from Richard Silversteine Israel Secretly Arrests Golani Druze, Accusing Him of Exposing Rebel-IDF Collaboration
Israeli military vehicle fired on
I also quoted from an article in Ha’aretz in which a senior officer in the Northern Command was quoted as saying that ‘IDF Northern Command officer says he thinks the U.S.-led coalition intervened too early against the Sunni militants, and 'not necessarily in the right direction.'
I also cited an article from the Jerusalem Post quoting the commander of the Syrian Armed forces Lt. General Ali Abdulla Ayoub that Israel working with ISIS and al-Qaida
Aftermath of Israeli airstrike nr Damascus
There is no doubt that Israeli leaders and military were unhappy about the United State focussing on ISIS when in their eyes the enemy was Iran and what they called the Shi’ite Crescent. This has become crystallised around the nuclear agreement that Obama is trying to negotiate with Iran. During the Israeli election campaign, Netanyahu made an unprecedented attempt to undermine Obama by openly allying with his Republican critics by addressing Congress directly.
FSA fighters
The problem for the US is of course Iran is crucial to the defence of the Iraqi state. Only the Shi’ite militias and their Iranian sponsor stands between an ISIS victory and the demise of the Iraqi state. The Iraqi state has proved itself incapable of defeating ISIS for a whole series of reasons. It’s army consists of thousands of ghost soldiers who don’t exist, many of those who do exist pay part of their salaries to officers in order not to have to actually take part in its activities, the supply of weapons and provisions to those who do fight often leaves a lot to be desired, it lacks motivation etc. Iraq is a Shi’ite sectarian state that has failed to incorporate its Sunni citizens and has, in many cases, forced them into the tender hands of ISIS. Until the US cuts its losses in Iraq it is caught between a rock and a hard place.
The same is true, to a lesser extent in Syria. The ‘moderate’ armed opposition doesn’t exist and apart from the Kurds in the North, the anti-Assad coalition is made up of ISIS and al-Qaeda. Israel is not unhappy about this, the US is unhappy but it unable to do a great deal apart from bomb ISIS. A strategy that is useless without forces on the ground.
Israel has always wanted to see a Syria divided into its confessional components. The US may indeed settle for this but it is not happy about ISIS coming out on top, not least because the Saudi regime may be next on ISIS’s menu.
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said Monday that Israel has been providing aid to Syrian rebels, thus keeping the Druze in Syria out of immediate danger. Israeli officials have previously balked at confirming on the record that the country has been helping forces that are fighting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
During a briefing with Israel’s diplomatic correspondents at the IDF’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, Ya’alon said that Israel’s ongoing humanitarian assistance to Syrian rebel fighters, a source of growing conflict between Israel and its own Druze population, safeguards the minority population in Syria.
“We’ve assisted them under two conditions,” Ya’alon said of the Israeli medical aid to the Syrian rebels, some of whom are presumably fighting with al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front to topple Syrian President Bashar Assad. “That they don’t get too close to the border, and that they don’t touch the Druze.”
The Druze on Israel’s side of the Golan, Ya’alon charged, acted “irresponsibly” last week by attacking an Israeli ambulance carrying wounded Syrian rebel fighters. One person was killed and another wounded during what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu termed a “lynching.” The person in the Israeli ambulance was not affiliated with the al-Nusra Front, and his death would provoke calls for revenge, Ya’alon asserted.
Israel has treated over 1,000 wounded Syrians in its hospitals since the onset of the civil war in 2011.
Israel will continue to act with sensitivity regarding the Druze, Ya’alon said. “On the other side — the rebels on the other side feel that we’re acting sensitively,” he said.
Israel has provided humanitarian assistance to wounded Syrian fighters located near the shared border since the civil war stated, the defense minister said. He said that such aid is extended under two conditions – that the fighters don’t let Islamic extremists to get close to the border, and that they don’t hurt the local Druze population.
An IDF ambulance that was attacked by Druze Israeli residents in the Golan Heights as it ferried Syrian war casualties for medical treatment in Israel, June 22, 2015. (Basel Awidat/Flash90)
Jerusalem’s policy vis-à-vis the Druze in Syria “is very complicated and sensitive,” Ya’alon said, adding that it is not in the rebels’ interest to publicize the fact that Israel assists them.
“Our general policy is that we’re not getting involved in the Syrian war,” he stressed, although there were certain red lines Israel would act to maintain, such as the smuggling of so-called game-changing weapons to Israel’s enemies.
”We will not tolerate any violation of our sovereignty or even accidental fire from Syria into our territory. We will act immediately to strike at those who plant explosives near the border or fire at us,” he declared.
Ya’alon also reiterated his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, repeating his belief that there will not be a permanent peace deal “in our generation.”
This, he said, was not because of any Israeli objection to Palestinian statehood, but rather due to the refusal of the Palestinian leadership to negotiate or make the necessary concessions.
Over the years, Jerusalem has taken several steps in a bid to renew the diplomatic process, including freezing settlement construction and releasing Palestinian terrorists, and has accepted in principle a US-brokered framework agreement, but Ramallah was and remains unwilling to negotiate earnestly, he said.
“The ball is not in our court,” Ya’alon declared. “There is much to do to advance issues, but whoever believes that with all kinds of pressure [from the international community] a permanent agreement can be imposed is mistaken.”
Rather than merely maintain the “status quo,” Ya’alon said, both sides could do much to find a “modus vivendi” to improve the lives of Palestinians living in the West Bank.
On the Iranian nuclear negotiations, Ya’alon said that he believes the world powers will signa “bad” deal with Tehran, “if not this week then in the near future.”
The prospective agreement would not freeze Iran’s military nuclear program for a decade, as not a single facility would be closed and no centrifuges would be dismantled, he said.
“Even if there are inspections, they will only be in those facilities that the Iranian agree to,” he said, adding that Tehran has for decades managed to mislead inspectors, for instance by building a large secret enrichment facility in Qom.
“If this regime is emboldened by the sanctions relief [it is to receive as part of the deal, which will pump billions of dollars into the economy] before the 10-year period is over, then who will guarantee that they won’t try to break out to [reach for a bomb]?” he said.
Israel and the US differ fundamentally on the Iranian issue, he said. “They see Iran as a part of the solution; we see it as part of the problem.”
Rabbi Shenburg is accused of raping fellow Jewish Israelis.He is of the far-right, even in terms of the Israeli rabbinate.He was ordained by Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, who was Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel for 10 years and a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Zionist Nazi Kach movement.
Usually it’s the practice to protect the names of the victims of rapists. But in this case Israeli Police have acted to prevent the naming of the perpetrator. A gag order even prevents Israeli papers from knowing of the existence of such an order.
Rabbi Ezra Sheinberg, deposed after accusations of rape among married female followers
Rabbi Ezra Sheinberg, deposed after accusations of rape among married female followers
Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Ezra Sheinberg, until recently head of a yeshiva and other institutions in the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, was arrested by Israeli police at Ben Gurion Airport as he attempted to flee the country. His name may not be reported in Israel according to a judicial gag order obtained by the police. He stands accused by married women among his followers of engaging in sexual acts and rape. He was removed from his state-funded post after the investigation began.
Sheinberg was ordained by Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, then the chief rabbi of Tzfat. The former founded a pre-military yeshiva in Tzfat in 1999. This phenomenon has contributed markedly to the massive increases in settler officers and a rightist slant among the IDF officer corps. He also led 3,000 settlers in prayer at Joseph’s Tomb a holy site in Nablus under contention between radical settlers and Muslims.
Rabbi Berland on his way to court in full religious regalia (EPA)
Sheinberg has cultivated relationships with the Israeli Orthodox women’s community. This rebbetzin even boasts of taking spiritual and halachic supervision from him. I imagine this passage may disappear from her website soon (unless she is one of his victims).
The yeshiva he founded, Yeshivat Ha’Ari, has removed his biographical page, which is preserved here (in Hebrew).
In a similar development, Rabbi Eliezer Berland is resisting deportation from Holland to Israel, where he stands accused of similar sexual crimes. Berland has taken to donning his full religious regalia in court hearings, including tallit and tefillin. This is certainly not just an exploitation, but a perversion of Judaism in order to save the neck of an accused sex abuser. It would make Moses roll over in his grave and should make most Jews sick to their stomach.
The Report accused Israel’s security forces of infringing the rights of the Palestinian demonstrators in Nabi Saleh.
On 31 August 2012 Two demonstrators at the village were injured by bullets when IDF soldiers fired warning shots in the air during a protest gathering. The IDF undertook to investigate and said that soldiers were reacting to stone-throwing but of course nothing happened as a result. Below is a film of Palestinian children in Nabi Saleh talking about their own arrest and the effect of the night-time raids. Below that is a description from the Nabi Saleh solidarity page of what the struggle of this small village is all about.
An Nabi Saleh is a small village of approximately 550 people, twenty kilometres north west of Ramallah in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
The Israeli colony of Halamish (also known as Neveh Tzuf ) was established on lands belonging to the villages of An Nabi Saleh and Deir Nidham in 1976. In response to the illegal colony being established on their land, the residents of An Nabi Saleh and Deir Nidham began holding demonstrations in opposition to the stealing of their land and the establishment of the colony (whose establishment violates international law). The residents of An Nabi Saleh and Deir Nidham lodged a court case against the colony in Israel’s high court, but were unable to stop the construction the illegal settlement.
Since its establishment in 1977, Halamish colony has continued to expand and steal more Palestinian land. In 2008, the residents of An Nabi Saleh challenged the building of a fence by the colony on private Palestinian land and which prevented Palestinians from accessing their land. The Israeli courts ruled that the fence was to be dismantled Despite the Israeli court ruling, the colony continued to illegally annex more Palestinian land. In the summer of 2008, the Israeli colonists from Halamish seized control of a number springs, all of which were located on private Palestinian land belonging to residents of An Nabi Saleh.
In December 2009, the village began weekly non-violent demonstrations in opposition to the illegal Israeli colony of Halamish annexing of the fresh water springs and stealing of more of the village’s land. Since An Nabi Saleh began its demonstrations, the Israeli military has brutally sought to repress the non-violent protests, arresting more than 13% of the village, including children. In total, as of 31 March 2011, 64 village residents have been arrested. All but three were tried for participating in the non-violent demonstrations. Of those imprisoned, 29 have been minors under the age of 18 years and 4 have been women.
Recently two prominent leaders of the village’s non-violent struggle, Naji Tamimi and Bassem Tamimi, were arrested for their role in the non-violent struggle. Today, they remain political prisoners in Israel’s jails, charged with “incitement” and organising “illegal” demonstrations. Since the demonstrations began in December 2009, International peace activists and Israeli activists opposed to their government’s occupation and apartheid policies have joined in solidarity An Nabi Saleh’s non-violent demonstrations.
Our aim is to provide solidarity with people of An Nabi Saleh and their non-violent struggle against Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian people and the continued stealing of their land by the illegal Israeli colony of Halamish. Through this blog, we will provide english language updates, news and information on the village and their struggle, as well as action alerts on how you can stand in solidarity with An Nabi Saleh and the Palestinian people in their struggle for self-determination, freedom, justice and human rights.
How Hamas got to capture Avera Mengistu and the circumstances surrounding it we do not know. What we do know is that Hamas have captured another Israeli. We also know, from the war crimes committed by Israel during Operation Protective Edge, when they literally flattened whole neighbourhoods in Rafah to kill their own soldier, Hadar Goldin, that they are determined, in accordance with the Hannibal Directive to prevent a repeat of the of Gilad Shalit, which resulted in the release of over a thousand prisoners (many reimprisoned) in exchange for him, even if it means killing the Israeli prisoner.
What we don't however expect is for Wikipedia to follow the lead of Israeli Wikipedia and meekly bow to Israeli censorship and a gag order that prevents people even knowing that there is a Gag Order in place.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Israeli national security state is the IDF military censor and the ways in which it stymies the free flow of ideas and information within Israeli society. Unlike in the U.S., where the NSA and the covert side of the CIA operate in almost total secrecy (except when someone like Edward Snowden comes along), Israel is a place more uncertain and anxious about such things. There the military censor even publicly addresses criticism of her role. Not because she wants to (I would argue), but because the military constantly feels the need to justify the restrictions it places on Israelis and the sacrifices it forces them to accept. One of the ten most powerful armies in the world has an inferiority complex that compels it to self-justify.
That explains a speech delivered by Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil at a conference on intelligence and special operations sponsored by the magazine, Israel Defense. Her remarks were, as you might expect, self-serving, solipsistic and even racist. She claims that she has developed an “innovative” set of censorship guidelines that are “responsive” to modern times. I’ll let you be the judge after you finish reading her wit and wisdom here:
“Israel is a democratic, liberal, western society which protects its secrets through means which are draconian and at times even self-contradictory.
We are a civilian society in which there is a critical public debate [about intelligence matters] and it’s difficult to maintain censorship and prevent the publication of secret material. Today, a guy sees a terror attack from his balcony and sends a photo to the newspaper–how can we control that?
…We in the military censor’s unit don’t hide information. We protect information which is critical [to our defense] in terms of our enemies. They don’t have the same abilities we do. They don’t have Unit 8200 [Israel’s NSA]. They don’t have a Jewish brain. Therefore the enemy relies to a great extent on publicly accessible information. We, in the context of our democratic debate, offer a great deal of basic accessible information: the test succeeded or failed, budgets, order of battle, weapons, who guards what, technological developments. We in the censor unit aren’t suited to stop it all. We can only prevent [publication of] that which poses certain danger to national security…When I retire I won’t write a book because it can’t possibly pass military censorship.”
Of course the censor “hides” information. Nor does it only hide information which might damage national security. It censors information that might damage the reputation of the IDF or its senior officers. Such behavior equates the army with the state (“l’etat, c’est moi“).
As an aside, I’m pleased to say that Vaknin-Gil views me as a thorn in her side and publicly made light of my work and the role I play in combatting Israeli censorship.
The real shocker in the above passage is Vaknin-Gil’s portrayal of Unit 8200 as a product of the Jewish mind. It’s like saying the NSA is a product of the American mind. I suppose in some ghoulish way you could argue that America’s technological sophistication enabled the creation of the frightening tools the NSA devised to spy on all of us. But even if that’s the case, is this cause for celebration?
Only an army officer living in a non-democratic state could celebrate the army’s ability to spy on both its enemies and its own citizens as an extraordinary national achievement. I should correct myself here since she doesn’t portray Unit 8200 as a product of Israel, but of Jewishness. The term I translated as “Jewish brain” derives from the Yiddish, Yiddishe kop. The term has a distinctly proud ring to it, and boasts of “Jewish genius” with an air of superiority. What’s ironic about her choice of term is that she doesn’t celebrate the “Israeli brain,” because there is no Israeli or Hebrew equivalent for yiddishe kop. That means Israel’s lethal espionage capabilities as represented by Unit 8200 become a proud Jewish achievement.
I for one want nothing to do with Unit 8200 as product of Judaism or Jewish identity. This is once again a distortion introduced by Zionist ideology which deliberately conflates Israel with Jewishness. There is nothing Jewish about signals intelligence.
Speaking of Unit 8200 as a product of Jewish genius, I note that I published a scoop in 2014 identifying the commander of Unit 8200, Brig. Gen. Ehud Schneerson, as a distant relative of the Lubavitcher rebbe. No doubt he earned his position due to his distinguished yichus and yiddishe kop!
Further, the idea that IDF intelligence capabilities somehow derive from Israel’s national genius is also troubling and racist. The only reason Israel has such advanced capabilities is that it has made this a national priority since it’s founding. Any Arab state which had done the same would have made the same achievements Israel did. In fact, Iran is late to this game but shows every sign of being able, within a reasonably short period of time, to compete credibly with Israel in this field. When it reaches this level there will be some Iranian censor boasting that the IRG’s intelligence units are a product of “Iranian genius.”
It’s all a bunch of malarkey foisted on nations by insecure generals who need to justify their own positions, influence and power.
Censored Wikipedia article on Avera Mengistu
Vaknin-Gil conveniently omitted another important element of Israeli opacity when it comes to national security. If the censor doesn’t prohibit publication of sensitive material or information, the security services have another powerful tool: the gag order. They go to a cooperative judge (usually judges who were IDF lawyers or worked for the security apparatus) and get a gag order which determines that publication of facts or information would either damage an investigation or the national security.
A perfect example of this is the case of Avera Mengistu, the Israeli-Ethiopian citizen who entered Gaza just after last summer’s war and has been detained there since then. I was the first journalist to publish this story and did so in Mint Press News. No Israeli publication may do so. There is not just a gag order on this story. There is a comprehensive gag order meaning that the media not only may not refer to Mengistu, but they may not even say there is a gag order in place preventing them from reporting the story. It’s the most draconian form of judicial censorship of the media.
I’ve speculated in Mint Press about why Israel is so skittish about Mengistu’s story. First, there is an element of racism involved. Gilad Shalit was Ashkenazi and white. Mengistu is Ethiopian and black. Ethiopian-Israelis have little power in society. They are second or third-class citizens akin to Israeli Palestinian citizens. If Israel doesn’t have to acknowledge Mengistu it won’t; because doing so empowers Hamas to demand a high price for his return. The truth is that Mengistu isn’t worth anything to the Israeli government, so it gags any reference to him. Speaking his name will force its hand.
Israeli Ethiopians at Tel Aviv rally against racism wearing T-shirts with Avera Mengistu’s name and a question mark, a clear act of rebellion against the Israeli gag order on his case
In a related matter, an Israeli Wikipedia editor read my Mint Press story and created an article about Mengistu. The censored article is displayed here (and as a Word doc here), the Talk page for the article, which was also deleted, is archived here. Within a short time, an Israeli former reader and commenter at this blog who was banned (while here he used various nicknames, itself a comment rule violation, ‘dude,’ ‘journalist,’ and ‘tankist’) began a campaign to eliminate the Wikipedia entry. At first he did this anonymously. When I called him on this he began using the Wikipedia identity, kigelim. I also noted he had a self-interest in censoring the article because he’d been banned from this blog. Those participating in the Talk page for the article refused to acknowledge this fact as legitimate.
His first argument was that the article violated Wikipedia standards for journalistic credibility. However, Mint Press is a respected online publication with high journalistic standards. He never gave up on this argument. But other ones were developed as well. Another group of editors claimed falsely that I’d authored the article using a different Wikipedia identity (sockpuppetry). When I disproved this claim, they regrouped, beginning a campaign among fellow pro-Israel Wikipedia editors to delete the article. There are internal pro-Israel Wikipedia discussion groups and kigelim alerted them to the article and they pounced on it. Interestingly, an editor is not permitted to mount a public (i.e. outside of Wikipedia) campaign on behalf of editorial decisions. But internal lobbying among Wikipedia groups and editors is perfectly acceptable. A vote was held and those seeking deletion won.
In this way, pro-Israel elements working within Wikipedia achieved precisely the same outcome that Israeli censorship does inside that country. They silenced a key world information source which is supposed to be open and accessible to all regardless of political or ideological belief. They turned Wikipedia into a playground in which all the worst excesses of Israeli paranoia and anti-democratic tendencies are found. They perverted this fabulous resource and imposed the worst excesses of Israel-style censorship. Fools like these cheapen Wikipedia and betray its mission.
UPDATE: Kigelim has now threatened to report me to a “Wikipedia committee” and get me blocked from participating in Wikipedia unless I “apologize” to the “community” for my “baseless allegations.” Actually, if he has the power to initiate such a proceeding I’d welcome it. So bring it on.
UPDATE I: Poor Kugelmass (aka kigelim), tried to harrass me on Wikipedia and got shut down so quick his head spun. And further, he was accused of being a “single-purpose account” created to stalk me. Try again, buddy. Oh, and I’m sorry your “butt hurts” (in joke, you have to read the link).
When Mengistu is finally released (this will take much longer thanks to the draconian impact of Israeli censorship and pro-Israel editors in Wikipedia), then the article will be restored and the naysayers will be exposed for the prejudiced pro-Israelists they are.
Last week, Israeli-Ethiopians protested against Israeli racism. One of the chants heard in the crowd was the name of Avera Mengistu and another Ethiopian who was killed in a police beating. Israeli and Wikipedia may silence the truth. But you can’t silence an entire ethnic group when it knows it’s getting the shaft.
Indeed, Israel has completely abandoned its responsibilities for almost all African refugees under international humanitarian law. But should that come as any surprise?
In this Friday, June 27, 2014 file photo, African migrants clash with Israeli soldiers after they left Holot detention center in southern Israel and walked towards the Border with Egypt near the southern Israeli Kibbutz of Nitzana.
In October 2014, just after Operation Protective Edge ended, an Israeli Facebook friend of mine reported a rumor that an Ethiopian-Israeli citizen crossed into Gaza and was detained there. The next day I confirmed the truth of the story through an independent Israeli source. Here is what I wrote then:
“An Israeli-Ethiopian from Ashkelon crossed the border into Gaza several weeks ago. The man was allegedly mentally ill and no one knows what drove him to do this. He is being held by authorities in Gaza. Israel has placed a gag order on the incident and the media may not report it. His family has been told not to speak to the media as this might endanger him by raising his profile, though I’d venture to guess that the real reason is that it would embarrass the Israeli government and raise his value in a prisoner exchange.”
Smoke rises following what witnesses said were Israeli air strikes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. (Reuters)
Another rumor was that he’d been swimming off the southern coast and a strong current had taken him from Israeli waters to Gaza. Once there, he was reportedly picked up by a vehicle, presumably security officials, and driven away. He hasn’t been seen since.
Hamas offered further circumstantial evidence via a billboard it erected in Gaza which featured images of Oron Shaul, an Israeli Defense Forces soldier, who Israel claims was killed during the war. Shaul’s image is displayed behind bars, indicating that Hamas claims he is alive. Another interesting feature on the billboard is an avatar with a question mark, which indicates Hamas claims it has a mystery captive, which points to the Ethiopian-Israeli.
The Hamas billboard alluding to the detention of Avera Mengistu (the picture next to Shaul Oron’s with a question mark)
Back in October, I tried diligently to follow up on this story without success. But an Israeli published an anonymous comment on my blog last week, naming the captive Ethiopian-Israeli as “Avera Mangisto.” I broadcast this name — probably more likely spelled “Mengistu” in English — via social media, asking if members of the Ethiopian community could confirm it. “O.” did so on Facebook. I asked her if she could help me contact the man’s family. We both did, and she succeeded in interviewing Avera’s divorced father, Aylin, and his brother, Netan’el.
Aylin was more willing to talk. He was saddened and frustrated by the experience. He’d almost lost all hope. Netan’el, after some halting discussions, refused to speak. He directed us not to contact his father either. But before we reached this impasse, O. held several conversations with both of them. They each confirmed that Avera, who is age 24, is being held by the authorities in Gaza.
Facebook photo of detainee Avera Mengistu.
The government instructed the family to remain silent on the matter. Officials told them they were doing everything possible to return him, yet they appear to have done little or nothing. O. said the government “brainwashed” them into believing it was doing something. She added that if Avera were “white” — her term — Israel would have treated him as it did Gilad Shalit, the Ashkenazi Jew for whom Israel exchanged 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.
There is also a gag order on the story, which prohibits Israeli media from covering it. Even some Ethiopian journalists refused to speak with me, concerned about their own vulnerability in Israeli society.
Ethiopian Jews at anti-racism rally with Mengistu tee shirts and a question mark
Yesterday, for example, Haaretz quoted Israeli and Hamas officials denying that German foreign minister Franz Steinmeier was once again negotiating for a prisoner exchange which would return the remains of IDF soldiers Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin to Israel. Not a word in this story about an actual live Israeli held in Gaza. The pernicious gag prohibits it.
This secrecy serves the interests of the Israeli government, but not the interests of the victim. If the public knew about this, they might demand the state do all in its power to free him — which would certainly include the exchange of Palestinian prisoners. The Israeli far-right detests freeing Palestinians it considers terrorists with “blood on their hands.” Whenever the government has freed such prisoners, the extremists have pummeled the ruling Likud party. Netanyahu wishes to avoid this at all costs. And it is far easier to avoid such a situation when the prisoner is Ethiopian, since neither the government nor the public cares as much as it would for a Jewish Israeli prisoner.
The issue of prisoner exchange is indeed so fraught that Israel has instituted the Hannibal Directive, which calls for the army to kill its own soldiers when they are captured alive by Hamas in battle. The IDF would rather murder its own soldiers than have to give up 1,000 Palestinian prisoners to secure the return of a single live Israeli. This controversial policy was invoked several times during Operation Protective Edge.
I twice emailed Israel’s official negotiator assigned to secure the release of prisoners (dead or alive), Col. Lior Lotan, for a response to questions I posed to him about the negotiations. As of press time, I had not heard back from him. I tweeted to Paul Hirschson, a foreign ministry official, asking for help in identifying the Israeli official responsible for these talks. Instead of answering my question, he replied that Hadar Goldin had been buried, implying falsely that Israel was only negotiating about the return of what he called “some body parts.” A second MFA official, Eyal Lampert, whose profile claims he works at the foreign affairs ministry’s “Japan and Korea desk,” said the ministry didn’t pay him enough to deal with “twits [sic] like mine.” He added that neither he nor Hirschson works for “costumer [sic] services.” With such quality staff, it’s easy to understand why Israel’s reputation is what it is in the world.
Operation Solomon as hasbara
African refugees sit on the ground behind a border fence after they attempted to cross from Egypt into Israel as Israeli soldiers stand guard near the border with Egypt, in southern Israel.
Israel “rescued” thousands of Ethiopians in 1991 and brought them to Zion in Operation Solomon. While the nation basked in the good publicity generated by such a rescue, the reality on the ground was much different. Israel’s chief rabbi did recognize the Ethiopians (known at that time as Falashas) as Jewish, but they were treated little better than Palestinian-Israeli citizens. As polls of Jewish Israelis confirm, racist attitudes toward Palestinians, Mizrahim and Ethiopians are the norm.
Recently, an IDF soldier was walking the streets of Tel Aviv with his bicycle when he was accosted by a private security guard and a police officer. They ripped his bicycle from his hands and assaulted him in broad daylight despite the fact that he was wearing an IDF uniform. Video of the attack was major news on national TV. The country was embarrassed. It would not be unusual for an Ethiopian to be assaulted by the police, but an Ethiopian in an IDF uniform? That trespassed social norms. The police officer was fired from the force and faces a criminal charge — an unusual example of anti-African racism being firmly rejected.
A decade ago, Gabriel Dawit, an Ethiopian-Israeli, drowned, either accidentally or as a suicide in the aftermath of the suicide of his brother, off Nahariya on the northern coast. His body later washed up on the Lebanese coast and was retrieved by Hezbollah. Though the IDF Directorate of Military Intelligence and other security agencies knew this, for three years they didn’t tell the family. The family sued the state, demanding a $500,000 settlement for the suffering inflicted on them. Israel eventually agreed to pay $50,000.
Israel advocates will point out that Yityish “Titi” Aynaw, Miss Israel 2013, is an Ethiopian woman, who is proud of her country and participated in hasbaraactivities, even re-joining the IDF so she could participate in Operation Protective Edge on the international stage. But tokenism is not the same as true equality, which Ethiopians do not enjoy.
Israel violates international refugee protocols regarding African refugees
A Sudanese refugee family sit on the ground surrounded by Israeli army soldiers after they crossed illegally from Egypt into Israel. The Israeli Cabinet voted unanimously Sunday, Dec. 11, 2011, to finance a $160 million program designed to staunch the flow of illegal African migrants into Israel by stepping up construction of a border fence and expanding a detention center to hold thousands of the new arrivals. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
Israel also has 60,000 African refugees, who fled civil wars, famine and genocide in countries like Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia. Unlike the Ethiopians I mentioned above, the former do not have citizenship. In fact, Israel has refused to even offer them rights reserved for refugees under international law. Until recently, there was no provision for hearing asylum requests, and only 45 (.07 percent) such requests have been granted out of thousands of applications to date.
Recently, in violation of international protocols, Israel told many of these individuals that they must agree to “voluntary” deportation (there is a $3,500 “inducement” to agree to leave) or face imprisonment in Saharonim, a prison for violators of immigration laws. Haaretz has been reporting extensively on the plight of those who agree to deportation. These deportees are flown on a plane to Rwanda, whose dictator, Paul Kagame, agreed to accept them in return for economic assistance and arms deals that likely facilitate the genocide in neighboring Congo.
Four such Eritrean refugees from Israel, who were sent to Rwanda, ended up in Libya and were beheaded in the now-infamous Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beach executions. Their relatives remaining in Israel confirmed both their departure and their execution, after watching the horrific video.
Galia Sabar, a Tel Aviv University professor, traveled to the African countries that receive these refugees and researched their living conditions and fate. Her findings, published in Haaretz, reveal that Rwanda has appointed someone who is essentially a smuggler who receives the names of deportees arriving at the Kigali airport from Israeli police. He meets them at the airport, drives them to a guesthouse, tells them they may not leave it, and eventually spirits them out of the country — all the while, taking a cut of all proceeds of their expenses and hiring new smugglers who take them across the Rwandan border into neighboring Sudan.
The refugees have no legal status in Uganda. They live there in squalor, paying hundreds of dollars per month for a rented room or more for a room in a private residence. Such expenses quickly eat up that bribe that Israel provided to persuade them to leave. For obvious reasons, many of these people see Europe as their next hope for refuge, which was how the Eritreans ended up in Libya.
Israel has totally abandoned its responsibilities for these individuals under international humanitarian law. Not that international law is a principle Israel respects in any event.
Richard Silverstein has published the Tikun Olamsince 2003. It exposes the secrets and misdeeds of the Israeli national security state. He lives in Seattle.
The vote by Greeks to reject the blackmail of the European leaders should be welcomed by any democrat. The Greek people have said a resounding 60% NO to the bankers and speculators. It is no surprise that our own UKIP, the ‘anti-Europe' party has been so quiet, because of course they too are led by a banker.
Burning the EU flag in Athens
On Sunday the Greek people voted, despite all the pressure put upon them, to reject the ‘offer’ of the IMF and European Central Bank. They had been told that a no vote wouldn’t mean a revised offer but Greek ejection from the Euro zone. Despite this blackmail Greek people have refused to accept permanent austerity, further unemployment and savage cuts to pensions.
Even the IMF has finally accepted, that Greece’s debt of €340 billion cannot be repaid and that much of it needs to be written off. Previous bailouts have, according to Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, been “about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”
In 1941 Nazi Germany invaded Greece and devastated the country. Today democratic Germany is using the banks to achieve the same objective. When Martin Schultz, the German ‘social democratic’ President of the European Parliament, declared that the best outcome of the Greek referendum would be a technocratic government, he gave the game away. Europe’s banks and leaders intention is to overthrow a democratically elected government.
The weakness of Syriza and Alex Tsipras is that they have not mapped out an alternative strategy to further negotiations and the present freezing up of the economy. What Syriza needs to do is to make it clear that unless there is a debt write off and an end to austerity, then Greece will exit the straitjacket of the Euro and go back to a devalued Drachma with all debt written off. It’s strange that given such a clear example of the undemocratic bullying of Greece there hasn’t been a word out of UKIP. Maybe that’s the price of being led by a banker!
Given that the Greeks have the ability to print Euros it is surprising that they haven’t already done so! Either way, there is no alternative other than to resist the dictatorship of Hollande, Merkel et al. It is a great pity that Varoufakis, the Greek’s motor biking Finance Minister, has resigned. He showed great panache and style.
Below is an interesting article presenting an alternative analysis to that of the BBC’s Robert Peston and all the other financial pundits.
According to mainstream media, the current economic crisis in Greece is due to the government spending too much money on its people that it went broke. This claim however, is a lie. It was the banks that wrecked the country so oligarchs and international corporations could benefit.
Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?
Varoufakis votes
Except that it is a big fat lie … not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.
Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.
In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.
If you are a fan of mafia movies, you know how the mafia would take over a popular restaurant. First, they would do something to disrupt the business – stage a murder at the restaurant or start a fire. When the business starts to suffer, the Godfather would generously offer some money as a token of friendship. In return, Greasy Thumb takes over the restaurant’s accounting, Big Joey is put in charge of procurement, and so on. Needless to say, it’s a journey down a spiral of misery for the owner who will soon be broke and, if lucky, alive.
Now, let’s map the mafia story to international finance in four stages.
Stage 1: The first and foremost reason that Greece got into trouble was the “Great Financial Crisis” of 2008 that was the brainchild of Wall Street and international bankers. If you remember, banks came up with an awesome idea of giving subprime mortgages to anyone who can fog a mirror. They then packaged up all these ticking financial bombs and sold them as “mortgage-backed securities” at a huge profit to various financial entities in countries around the world.
A big enabler of this criminal activity was another branch of the banking system, the group of rating agencies – S&P, Fitch and Moody’s – who gave stellar ratings to these destined-to-fail financial products. Unscrupulous politicians such as Tony Blair got paid by Big Banks to peddle these dangerous securities to pension funds and municipalities and countries around Europe. Banks and Wall Street gurus made hundreds of billions of dollars in this scheme.
But this was just Stage 1 of their enormous scam. There was much more profit to be made in the next three stages!
Stage 2 is when the financial time bombs exploded. Commercial and investment banks around the world started collapsing in a matter of weeks. Governments at local and regional level saw their investments and assets evaporate. Chaos everywhere!
Vultures like Goldman Sachs and other big banks profited enormously in three ways: one, they could buy other banks such as Lehman brothers and Washington Mutual for pennies on the dollar. Second, more heinously, Goldman Sachs and insiders such as John Paulson (who recently donated $400 million to Harvard) had made bets that these securities would blow up. Paulson made billions, and the media celebrated his acumen. (For an analogy, imagine the terrorists betting on 9/11 and profiting from it.) Third, to scrub salt in the wound, the big banks demanded a bailout from the very citizens whose lives the bankers had ruined! Bankers have chutzpah. In the U.S., they got hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxpayers and trillions from the Federal Reserve Bank which is nothing but a front group for the bankers.
In Greece, the domestic banks got more than $30 billion of bailout from the Greek people. Let that sink in for a moment – the supposedly irresponsible Greek government had to bail out the hardcore capitalist bankers.
Stage 3 is when the banks force the government to accept massive debts. For a biology metaphor, consider a virus or a bacteria. All of them have unique strategies to weaken the immune system of the host. One of the proven techniques used by the parasitic international bankers is to downgrade the bonds of a country. And that’s exactly what the bankers did, starting at the end of 2009. This immediately makes the interest rates (“yields”) on the bonds go up, making it more and more expensive for the country to borrow money or even just roll over the existing bonds.
From 2009 to mid-2010, the yields on 10-year Greek bonds almost tripled! This cruel financial assault brought the Greek government to its knees, and the banksters won their first debt deal of a whopping 110 billion Euros.
The banks also control the politics of nations. In 2011, when the Greek prime minister refused to accept a second massive bailout, the banks forced him out of the office and immediately replaced him with the Vice President of ECB (European Central Bank)! No elections needed. Screw democracy. And what would this new guy do? Sign on the dotted line of every paperwork that the bankers bring in.
(By the way, the very next day, the exact same thing happened in Italy where the Prime Minister resigned, only to be replaced by a banker/economist puppet. Ten days later, Spain had a premature election where a banker puppet won the election).
The puppet masters had the best month ever in November 2011.
Few months later, in 2012, the exact bond market manipulation was used when the banksters turned up the Greek bonds’ yields to 50%!!! This financial terrorism immediately had the desired effect: The Greek parliament agreed to a second massive bailout, even larger than the first one.
Now, here is another fact that most people don’t understand. The loans are not just simple loans like you would get from a credit card or a bank. These are loans come with very special strings attached that demand privatization of a country’s assets. If you have seen Godfather III, you would remember Hyman Roth, the investor who was carving up Cuba among his friends. Replace Hyman Roth with Goldman Sachs or IMF (International Monetary Fund) or ECB, and you get the picture.
Stage 4: Now, the rape and humiliation of a nation begin under the name of “austerity” or “structural reforms.” For the debt that was forced upon it, Greece had to sell many of its profitable assets to oligarchs and international corporations. And privatizations are ruthless, involving everything and anything that is profitable. In Greece, privatization included water, electricity, post offices, airport services, national banks, telecommunication, port authorities (which is huge in a country that is a world leader in shipping) etc. Of course, the ever-manipulative bankers always demand immediate privatization of all media which means that the country gets photogenic TV anchors who spew establishment propaganda every day and tell the people that crooked and greedy banksters are saviors; and slavery under austerity is so much better than the alternative.
In addition to that, the banker tyrants also get to dictate every single line item in the government’s budget. Want to cut military spending? NO! Want to raise tax on the oligarchs or big corporations? NO! Such micro-management is non-existent in any other creditor-debtor relationship.
So what happens after privatization and despotism under bankers? Of course, the government’s revenue goes down and the debt increases further. How do you “fix” that? Of course, cut spending! Lay off public workers, cut minimum wage, cut pensions (same as our social security), cut public services, and raise taxes on things that would affect the 99% but not the 1%. For example, pension has been cut in half and sales tax increase to more than 20%. All these measures have resulted in Greece going through a financial calamity that is worse than the Great Depression of the U.S. in the 1930s.
After all this, what is the solution proposed by the heartless bankers? Higher taxes! More cuts to the pension! It takes a special kind of a psychopath to put a country through austerity, an economic holocaust.
If every Greek person had known the truth about austerity, they wouldn’t have fallen for this. Same goes for Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and other countries going through austerity. The sad aspect of all this is that these are not unique strategies. Since World War II, these predatory practices have been used countless times by the IMF and the World Bank in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
This is the essence of the New World Order — a world owned by a handful of corporations and banks; a world that is full of obedient, powerless debt serfs.
So, it’s time for the proud people of Greece to rise up like Zeus and say NO (“OXI” in Greece) to the greedy puppet masters, unpatriotic oligarchs, parasitic bankers and corrupt politicians.
Dear Greece, know that the world is praying for you and rooting for you. This weekend, vote NO to austerity. Say YES to freedom, independence, self-government, sovereignty, and democracy. Go to the polls this weekend and give a resounding, clear victory for the 99% in Greece, Europe, and the entire western world.
A highly amusing article from Business Insider UK about the Greek Debt Crisis and how the EU deliberately engineered the crisis by taking over the debt owed to private banks onto the shoulders of European tax payers.
It is an even greater reason why the Greeks should junk the debt and leave the Euro. Below is also my Comment article that The Argus, a local Brighton/Sussex paper prints each week.
REUTERS/Stefanos Rapines A man casting his ballot at a polling station at the village of Anogeia in the island of Crete, Greece, on Sunday. Greeks voted overwhelmingly against accepting a bailout proposal from Greece's creditors.
Greece has effectively voted to default on its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union, and it is a massive defeat for Germany's Angela Merkel and the trio of creditors she led that insisted there was no way out for Greece but to pay back its massive debts.
The vote is huge lesson for conservatives and anyone else who thinks this is about a dilettante government of left-wing idealists who think they can flout the law while staging some kind of Che Guevara-esque dream:
Wrong.
This is what capitalism is really about.
From the beginning, Merkel and the EU have operated from the position that because Greece took on debt, Greece now needs to pay it back. That position assumed — bizarrely, in hindsight — that debt works only one way: If you lend someone money, that money is repaid.
But that is NOT how free markets work.
Debt is not a guarantee of future payments in full. Rather, it is a risk that creditors take, in hopes of maybe being paid tomorrow.
The key word there is "risk."
If you're willing to take the risk, you'll get a premium — in the form of interest.
But the downside of that risk is that you lose your money. And Greece just called Germany's bluff.
The IMF loaned Greece 1.5 billion euros, due back in June, and Greece isn't paying it back. Greece has another 3.5 billion due to the ECB in July, and that looks really doubtful right now.
More astonishing still is that Merkel et al knew Greece could not pay back this debt before these negotiations started. The IMF's own assessment of Greek debt, published just a few days ago, states: "Coming on top of the very high existing debt, these new financing needs render the debt dynamics unsustainable ..."
"Unsustainable"! Germany's own bankers knew Greece couldn't pay this back. And yet Merkel persisted.
Take a look at Greek gross domestic product. To pay back debt, you have to have a growing economy. That's a basic law of economics. It's how credit cards work. It's how mortgages work. And it is how sovereign/central-bank debt works. But Greece's economy was never in a position to benefit from debt, because it has been shrinking for years:
The ECB president "blew up," according to one attendee. "Trichet said, 'We are an economic and monetary union, and there must be no debt restructuring!'" this person recalled. "He was shouting."
And so there was no restructuring agreed for Greece. The country paid off its immediate debts to the private financial sector — investment banks, basically — and replacement debt was laid onto European taxpayers. The government agreed to a package of harsh government spending cuts and structural reforms in exchange for loans totalling €110 billion over three years.
Trichet made a colossal, elementary mistake. The right place for risky debt by definition is in the private markets, such as Goldman. The entire point of private debt investment is that those creditors are prepared for a haircut. The risk absolutely should not be borne by central banks that rely on taxpayer money for bailouts.
Had Trichet made the opposite decision — and left the Greek debt with Goldman et al — then Sunday's vote would be a footnote rather than a headline in history. "Goldman Sachs takes a bath on Greek debt." Who cares? Goldman shareholders and clients, surely. But it would not have triggered a crisis at the heart of the EU.
Italy, Spain, and Portugal are now watching Greece closely and thinking, hey, maybe we can get out of this mess, too.
Conservatives who hate paying taxes and urge small businesses to pursue tax-avoidance strategies take note: Your dream just came true in Greece.
If Greece were more socialist — more like Germany, with its giant corporations that have massive unionised workforces paying taxes off their payrolls — then tax collection would be a lot higher in Greece.
Greece is now most likely an international pariah on the debt markets. It may have to start printing its own devalued drachma currency. It will have no access to credit. Sure, olive oil, feta, and raki will suddenly become incredibly cheap commodities on the export markets. Tourism in Greece is about to become awesome. But mostly it will be awful. Unemployment will increase as Greece's economy implodes.
But the awfulness will be Greece's alone. Greece is now on its own path. It is deciding its own fate.
A highly amusing article from Business Insider UK about the Greek Debt Crisis and how the EU deliberately engineered the crisis by taking over the debt owed to private banks onto the shoulders of European tax payers.
It is an even greater reason why the Greeks should junk the debt and leave the Euro. Below is also my Comment article that The Argus, a local Brighton/Sussex paper prints each week.
REUTERS/Stefanos Rapines A man casting his ballot at a polling station at the village of Anogeia in the island of Crete, Greece, on Sunday. Greeks voted overwhelmingly against accepting a bailout proposal from Greece's creditors.
Greece has effectively voted to default on its debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union, and it is a massive defeat for Germany's Angela Merkel and the trio of creditors she led that insisted there was no way out for Greece but to pay back its massive debts.
The vote is huge lesson for conservatives and anyone else who thinks this is about a dilettante government of left-wing idealists who think they can flout the law while staging some kind of Che Guevara-esque dream:
Wrong.
This is what capitalism is really about.
From the beginning, Merkel and the EU have operated from the position that because Greece took on debt, Greece now needs to pay it back. That position assumed — bizarrely, in hindsight — that debt works only one way: If you lend someone money, that money is repaid.
But that is NOT how free markets work.
Debt is not a guarantee of future payments in full. Rather, it is a risk that creditors take, in hopes of maybe being paid tomorrow.
The key word there is "risk."
If you're willing to take the risk, you'll get a premium — in the form of interest.
But the downside of that risk is that you lose your money. And Greece just called Germany's bluff.
The IMF loaned Greece 1.5 billion euros, due back in June, and Greece isn't paying it back. Greece has another 3.5 billion due to the ECB in July, and that looks really doubtful right now.
More astonishing still is that Merkel et al knew Greece could not pay back this debt before these negotiations started. The IMF's own assessment of Greek debt, published just a few days ago, states: "Coming on top of the very high existing debt, these new financing needs render the debt dynamics unsustainable ..."
"Unsustainable"! Germany's own bankers knew Greece couldn't pay this back. And yet Merkel persisted.
Take a look at Greek gross domestic product. To pay back debt, you have to have a growing economy. That's a basic law of economics. It's how credit cards work. It's how mortgages work. And it is how sovereign/central-bank debt works. But Greece's economy was never in a position to benefit from debt, because it has been shrinking for years:
The ECB president "blew up," according to one attendee. "Trichet said, 'We are an economic and monetary union, and there must be no debt restructuring!'" this person recalled. "He was shouting."
And so there was no restructuring agreed for Greece. The country paid off its immediate debts to the private financial sector — investment banks, basically — and replacement debt was laid onto European taxpayers. The government agreed to a package of harsh government spending cuts and structural reforms in exchange for loans totalling €110 billion over three years.
Trichet made a colossal, elementary mistake. The right place for risky debt by definition is in the private markets, such as Goldman. The entire point of private debt investment is that those creditors are prepared for a haircut. The risk absolutely should not be borne by central banks that rely on taxpayer money for bailouts.
Had Trichet made the opposite decision — and left the Greek debt with Goldman et al — then Sunday's vote would be a footnote rather than a headline in history. "Goldman Sachs takes a bath on Greek debt." Who cares? Goldman shareholders and clients, surely. But it would not have triggered a crisis at the heart of the EU.
Italy, Spain, and Portugal are now watching Greece closely and thinking, hey, maybe we can get out of this mess, too.
Conservatives who hate paying taxes and urge small businesses to pursue tax-avoidance strategies take note: Your dream just came true in Greece.
If Greece were more socialist — more like Germany, with its giant corporations that have massive unionised workforces paying taxes off their payrolls — then tax collection would be a lot higher in Greece.
Greece is now most likely an international pariah on the debt markets. It may have to start printing its own devalued drachma currency. It will have no access to credit. Sure, olive oil, feta, and raki will suddenly become incredibly cheap commodities on the export markets. Tourism in Greece is about to become awesome. But mostly it will be awful. Unemployment will increase as Greece's economy implodes.
But the awfulness will be Greece's alone. Greece is now on its own path. It is deciding its own fate.
On the Mint Press web site, where Richard Silverstein had broken the story I wrote:
TIME FOR ZIONISTS TO EAT HUMBLE PIE Q. Why won't Hamas announce they captured an Israeli? A. B/c it isn't true Q. Does Israel leave only alledged 'blacks' captives? A. Elhanan Tannenbaum, a white Ashkenazi was Hezbollah captive for over 3 years. Harvela If his lips moved he's lying . Much like you Greenstein KilkulOlam This gag order can be just another dilution of Silverstein. He has no proof this actually exist. He just says so. This whole article is full of anti-Israel propaganda in the usual Silverstien tradition. If he truly believes in what he writes about Mengistu..... Let us hope that KilkulOlam has the honesty to admit he was comprehensively wrong and apologise. Harvey Garfield, being a friend of every anti-Jewish fascist, has long ago shed every ounce of moral decency, including the ability to discern the truth. See The Times of Israel 9.7.15. Hamas holding two Israelis hostage in Gaza for months
Mengistu's parents
Of course the Israel right or wrong trolls won’t apologise, not least the fascists’ friend Harvey Garfield, but it shows them, once again, to be the liars they are.
Since the Israeli courts have now lifted the gag order, after an application by Ha’aretz, (whose own role in this affair has been atrocious) it appears that there is a second Israeli captive. He is an Israeli Bedouin i.e. an Arab god forbid and clearly doesn’t count as a genuine citizen of Israel. We cannot expect any efforts on the Israeli government’s behalf to get him released. I mean, he’s not even Jewish!
Avraham Mengistu
The most disgraceful aspect of all is the utter bankruptcy and cowardice of Wikipedia which REMOVED an article on the capture of two Israelis by Hamas, because of the determination of Israeli Wikipedia to preserve their government’s censorship.
Let us hope that Wikipedia takes a hard look at its role in this affair and ceases bowing to Israeli censorship, including the rewriting and ‘editing’ of articles on Palestine.
