Quantcast
Channel: Tony Greenstein's Blog
Viewing all 2415 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

Prevent – Preventing Free Thought and Freedom of Speech

February 14, 2016, 7:02 pm
$
0
0
Yet another example under the Prevent ‘anti-terrorism’ programme of how a school student whose only crime is supporting the Palestinians is hauled in to face an interview with the counter-terrorist police.

Headquarters of MI5 - Britain's Secret Police and Intelligence Service - Primary Purpose is to Spy on British Citizens
Can there be any doubt that Prevent has nothing to do with ‘terrorism’ and everything to do with creating a climate of fear in which people will be afraid to support people who suffer from oppression?  It is noteworthy that there is no example of supporters of Israel being hauled off to an interview with the Police despite the massive terror caused by the Israeli state.

That is why we need to build a movement in this country to destroy Prevent before Prevent destroys our democratic freedoms.

Tony Greenstein
Extremist Palestinians - Objecting to Israel's Confiscation of Their Land
Anti-terror police question schoolboy for wearing pro-Palestine badge

Teenager referred by his teachers after trying to raise money to help Palestinian children
Under the controversial Prevent strategy, schools have a legal obligation to report signs of extremism REX Features
A schoolboy has been questioned by anti-terrorism police because he wore a "Free Palestine" badge to school.
Meeting at Goldsmiths which heard of the Interrogation of School Student 4 Supporting Palestinians
Rahmaan Mohammadi's teachers at Challney High School for Boys in Luton referred him to police under Prevent - the controversial government anti-radicalisation programme, which critics have claimed is heavy-handed, discriminatory and ineffective.

As well as wearing pro-Palestine badges and wristbands, Mohammadi was in possession of a leaflet advocating Palestinian rights by pressure group Friends of al-Aqsa. He had also asked for permission to fundraise for children affected by the Israeli occupation.
The wearer of these badges displays symptoms of 'extremism'
Friends of al-Aqsa is a non-profit NGO which defends the human rights of Palestinians under the Israeli occupation. The group's supporters are currently boycotting the Co-op, after the company's banking arm shut down the Friends of al-Aqsa account "without explanation".

Bedfordshire police visited Mohammadi's home with a folder of information about the schoolboy, and spoke with him and his parents. They concluded that he was not at risk and no further action was taken.
The Prevent Duty is Primarily About Curbing Freedom of Expression
Mohammadi described his experiences at a meeting of campaign group Students Not Suspects at Goldsmiths University in London. He alleged that police warned him not to talk about Palestine in school, and further claimed that staff members had approached his 14-year-old brother and pressured him to to tell Rahmaan to "stop being radical". 

Last year, hundreds of academics signed an open letter in the Independent criticising the "chilling effect" of the Prevent strategy on free speech and political dissent in the UK. 

The £40m programme has been plagued with problems since its inception 12 years ago. Critics say it has fostered an atmosphere of Islamophobic paranoia which is more likely to fuel radicalisation than prevent it.

Internal police statistics obtained via a Freedom of Information request suggest only 20% of people referred to Prevent are assessed as at risk of radicalisation. 

Prevent also came under fire last year for exending its legal obligation of surveillance into nursery schools, since which time children as young as three have been referred under the programme.

Bedfordshire Police told the Sunday Times: "The officers spoke to the boy and were satisfied that he was not at risk and he was given advice and support."
↧
Search

Israeli Soldiers Gloat Over a Girl They Critically Injured

February 14, 2016, 7:27 pm
↧
↧

Antonin Scalia - No One Dares Say What Needs to be Said

February 16, 2016, 9:43 pm
$
0
0
Reagan, senile before his time, was ultimately responsible for the black robed thug
An excellent article from the World Socialist Web.

It covers the welcome and long overdue death of a monster, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. I know I’ve posted on this before but I think this article spells out more clearly the political hypocrisy of the establishment – both its conservative and liberal wings, in the USA.

As Shakespeare noted of MacBeth, nothing became Scalia's life so much as his leaving of it.


The Glorification of Antonin Scalia

16 February 2016
Scalia speaking to the well endowed
The sickening tributes across the official US political and media spectrum to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly on Saturday at the age of 79, are a barometer of the putrefaction of American democracy.

The universal deference towards Scalia from what passes for the “liberal” faction of the establishment is particularly repulsive. The statements of the Democratic presidential candidates, the supposed “socialist” Bernie Sanders no less than Hillary Clinton—echoing similarly sycophantic drivel from the likes of the New York Times—are monuments to political cowardice.
Scalia being sworn in
One would say these people lack the courage of their convictions if they had any convictions to lack!

They have sprung into action to join their Republican counterparts in hailing Scalia as a towering figure in American jurisprudence. Virtually every description of the deceased justice includes the words “brilliant” and “intellectual.” One is reminded of the programmed acclamation of Sergeant Raymond Shaw recited by his brainwashed fellow soldiers in the film The Manchurian Candidate: “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.”

Sanders took time off from his hollow calls for a “political revolution” to demonstrate his political obeisance to the ruling class, declaring, “While I differed with Justice Scalia’s views and jurisprudence, he was a brilliant, colorful and outspoken member of the Supreme Court.”

Clinton praised Scalia as “a dedicated public servant who brought energy and passion to the bench.”

President Obama called Scalia a “towering legal figure.” The New York Times’ Ross Douthat hailed Scalia for “putting originalist principle above a partisan conservatism,” and for his “combination of brilliance, eloquence, and good timing.”

No one dares say what needs to be said. The object of their veneration was a black-robed thug and sadist who used his position on the bench to attack the basic civil liberties laid down in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights—separation of church and state; due process; protection from arbitrary arrest, search and seizure; the right to trial by jury; protection from cruel and unusual punishment; the right to vote.

His supposed juridical brilliance boiled down to starting with the political outcome he desired (invariably reactionary) and then cobbling together pseudo-legal arguments to justify his ruling—often with flagrant disregard for legal precedent and the unambiguous language of statutes and constitutional provisions.

In one case last year, Scalia argued that a police officer did not use “deadly force” when he climbed onto an overpass and used an assault rifle to kill an unarmed man fleeing in a car. According to Scalia’s reasoning, it was not deadly force because the officer claimed to have been aiming at the car, not the person in the car.

Perhaps the most infamous example of this method—absurdly described in the media as “constitutional originalism”—was the 2000 Supreme Court decision Scalia engineered to halt the counting of votes in Florida and hand the White House to the loser of the election, Republican candidate George W. Bush.

The 5-4 decision to steal the election all but acknowledged its own speciousness when it declared that the justifications it advanced could not be applied to any future cases. In his separate concurring opinion, Scalia declared that the Constitution did not give the people the right to elect the president.

At the time of the theft of the 2000 elections, the World Socialist Web Site wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision to stop the counting of votes, and the acceptance of that ruling by the Democrats and the entire political establishment, demonstrated that there was no longer any significant constituency for democratic rights within the American ruling class.

The reaction to Scalia’s death is a measure of the further erosion of democratic sentiment in the ruling elite.

Scalia personified the decay of bourgeois democracy in the United States over a protracted period of time. Appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan, he flourished and exerted increasing influence in the decades of political reaction, militarism and Wall Street criminality that ensued, continuing without a hitch under Obama. Not only in the anti-democratic substance of his rulings, but also in his methods and bearing, he embodied the promotion by the ruling elite of backwardness, prejudice and outright cruelty.

He was corrupt and made no bones about his corruption, proudly voting to remove limits on corporate bribes in elections and flaunting his private outings with Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was a party in a case before the court. He was a bully, making a practice of baiting and harassing lawyers who came before him.

Throughout his career, Scalia consistently advocated positions that can only be described as barbarous and fascistic. Fittingly, his last judicial act was to deny a stay of execution. He was a figure who relished the power and trappings of the state, openly defending torture and internment camps.

Scalia worked tirelessly to break down constitutional and democratic limits on state power, infiltrating fascistic doctrines into Supreme Court jurisprudence. His theory of executive power, according to which the American president has unlimited and unreviewable powers for the duration of the “war on terror,” resurrects Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s “state of exception” doctrine in all but name.

Scalia’s mere presence on the court testified to the advanced decay of American democracy. That decay is linked, on the one hand, to the extreme growth of social inequality, accompanied by the rampant parasitism and criminality of the ruling class, and on the other hand to unending war, which has its domestic reflection in the build up of the repressive state apparatus that Scalia championed.

The bitterness of the disputes over his replacement is a reflection of the importance of his role in American politics over three decades during which the political establishment shifted violently to the right.

The deference shown to such a figure from all quarters of the political establishment should be taken as a warning by the working class. The ruling elite fears above all the growth of social opposition and class struggle. It exalts the legacy of Scalia because it is preparing police state methods to defend its power and property against an insurgent working class.

Tom Carter

Copyright © 1998-2016 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved
↧

From Israeli Censorship to World Internet Censorship & Dirty Tricks

February 17, 2016, 6:24 pm
$
0
0

Brig.-Gen.-Sima-Vaknin-Gil - reading one of the papers she censors
In the article below we see how Israel is fighting anti-Zionist and BDS on-line using a variety of dirty tricks and paid trolls.  But who is this Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel's Ministry for Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy?  Well she is or was the Chief Military Censor in Israel.  As such she is eminently qualified to try and censor pro-Palestinian activists abroad.

Despite being the 'only democracy in the Middle East' Israel has a highly developed system of censorship which involves submitting articles prior to publication.  Included in realm of censorship is social media, which Israel is increasingly trying to control outside its borders via sweet heart deals with Facebook and Zuckenberg.

Censorship in Israel derives from the  British Colonial Military Regulations which were never repealed  The excuse is that Israel is in a permanent state of war which in turns derives from its permanent state of emergency.

Tony Greenstein

"I want to create a community of fighters,"said Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel's Ministry for Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, to Israeli tech developers at a forum last month dedicated to the topic.
Anat Kamm - copied and leaked 2,000 Israeli Military Files - served 3.5 years, betrayed by Ha'aretz as source
But who is this Sima Vaknin-Gil?

She is the just retired Chief Military Censor who said the following in an in-depth interview in Hebrew some months ago:

Brig.-Gen.-Sima-Vaknin-Gil - Israel's former Chief Military Censor
Col. Ariella ben Avraham new chief military censor
BDS - the target of Israeli dirty tricks
* For the 8 o'clock evening news, the censor already sits at the TV news desk at 6pm and had managed to go through the whole line-up before going on air.

* "I find it very troubling that the work I've done was on uniform. It reminds me of such regimes that I do not wish to be associated with"she says, followed by "I can tell you that seniors in Israel, in the security services, share my view that censorship and democracy do not go hand in hand, and more so when it's censorship on uniform."

* Yisrael Ha'yom newspaper (the Adelson owned 'Bibiton') has a former military censor as its managing editor.

* “This strange agreement under which we live wouldn’t work if you and I didn’t come from the same place, in which you wish to do your job but don’t wish to harm security--and I must do my job, but don’t wish to harm freedom of speech. At the moment we understand that we both have identical interests, we can work under such an agreement. But this is something that only fits Israeli culture. It would never work in the US or in Britain.”

* One incident which had, according to her, unexpected consequences had proven the tremendous power placed in the hands of the censorship. During the last week of 2008, the first day of Operation Cast Lead, two “Arab” reporters working for PressTV, Khader Shahin and Mohammed Sarchan were located by the border with Gaza and were reporting in real time on the movement of military forces. Through the direct intervention of Vaknin-Gil the two were arrested, brought to trial and convicted of negligently transmitting information to the enemy. They were both sentenced to two months in prison.

“This was my mistake,” says VG. “I didn’t know Khader Shahin. He’s not on my speed-dial like Roni or Yoav [Roni Daniel and Yoav Limor report for Israeli channels]. If they had made a mistake I would have called and told them: “Roni, stop talking about this, it’s forbidden.”
Anat Kamm - Israel's Julian Assange
I tried to reach Khader in a variety of ways but didn’t succeed. Finally, I activated the police in order to find them so that I could speak to him and explain that this was forbidden.

“It turned out that by making the call to the police I activated the power of the censor in emergency. The request to locate him meant an automatic arrest for violating section 113 of the criminal code: transmitting information during wartime. This is a story I always tell about myself, that I didn’t understand the power of the censor. I didn’t understand that what I do can activate a power that is so serious, so draconian. Therefore I want to tell you, my friends--whoever thinks the censor has no power, they simply don't understand.”

Censorship in Israel: 'A unique model'

Censorship and democracy do not go together, says Sima Vaknin-Gil, Israel's chief censor, who says her job is to ensure 'the absolute minimal harm to free speech, while guarding the secrets only.'

May 03, 2010|By Batsheva Sobelman, Los Angeles Times
  • Appointed by Israel's defense minister, chief censor Sima Vaknin-Gil has tremendous powers but says she uses these sparingly, balancing state security and freedom of speech.
Appointed by Israel's defense minister, chief censor Sima Vaknin-Gil… (Batsheva Sobelman / Los…)
Reporting from Tel Aviv — Privy to the nation's top secrets, she keeps private ones pretty well too.
"She" is Sima Vaknin-Gil, Israel's chief censor. It's her job to keep sensitive information that could harm state security out of the media.
Appointed by the defense minister, she has tremendous powers but says she uses these sparingly, balancing state security and freedom of speech.
Most democratic countries balk at censorship, but a recent poll shows half of Israel's Jewish population believes that freedom of expression is too free in Israel.

Covertly, Israel prepares to fight boycott activists online

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israel is using its world-leading expertise in cyber security to take on the growing threat of the global pro-Palestinian movement to boycott Israel.


The Israeli government recently allotted nearly $26 million in this year's budget to combat what it sees as worldwide efforts to "delegitimize" the Jewish state's right to exist. Some of the funds are earmarked for Israeli tech companies, many of them headed by former military intelligence officers, for digital initiatives aimed at gathering intelligence on activist groups and countering their efforts.

"I want to create a community of fighters," said Sima Vaknin-Gil, the director general of Israel's Ministry for Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, to Israeli tech developers at a forum last month dedicated to the topic.

Initiatives are largely being kept covert. Participants at the invite-only forum, held on the sidelines of a cyber technology conference, repeatedly stood up to remind people that journalists were in the room.

Among the government officials involved in the efforts are some of Israel's top secret-keepers, including Sima Shine, a former top official in the Mossad spy agency, and Vaknin-Gil, who recently retired as the chief military censor responsible for gag orders on state secrets.

Israel has established itself as a world leader in cyber technology innovation, fueled by graduates of prestigious and secretive military and security intelligence units. These units are widely thought to be behind some of the world's most advanced cyber-attacks, including the Stuxnet virus that attacked Iran's nuclear energy equipment last decade.

Each year, these units churn out a talent pool of Israelis who translate their skills to the corporate world. Now Israel is looking to harness their technological prowess for the fight to protect Israel's international image.

Vaknin-Gil said her ministry is encouraging initiatives to expose the funding and curb the activities of anti-Israel activists, as well as campaigns to "flood the Internet" with content that puts a positive face on Israel. She said some of these actions will not be publicly identified with the government, but that the ministry will not fund unethical or illegal digital initiatives.

Established about 10 years ago, the pro-Palestinian "BDS" campaign is a coalition of organizations that advocate boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Inspired by the anti-apartheid movement, BDS organizers say they are using nonviolent means to promote the Palestinian struggle for independence.

The movement has grown into a global network of thousands of volunteers, from campus activists to church groups to liberal Jews disillusioned by Israeli policies. They lobby corporations, artists and academic institutions to sever ties with Israel.

The movement has made inroads. U.S. and British academic unions have endorsed boycotts, student governments at universities have made divestment proposals, and some famous musicians have refused to perform in Israel. The BDS movement also claims responsibility for pressuring some large companies to stop or modify operations in Israel. In its latest push, it has urged top Hollywood actors to reject a government-paid trip to Israel being offered to leading Oscar nominees.

Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BDS movement, said "quite a few web pages" that BDS websites linked to have mysteriously disappeared from the Internet.

"We assume Israel's cyber sabotage is ongoing, but we are quite pleased that its detrimental impact on the global BDS movement has been dismal so far," he said.

Israel says the movement is rooted in anti-Semitism and seeks not to change Israeli policies, but ultimately to put an end to the Jewish state.

Many online activists driving anti-Israeli campaigns on social media are tech-savvy, second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe and the U.S. who have grievances against the West and also lead online campaigns against European and U.S. governments, said Elad Ratson, who tracks the issue for Israel's Foreign Ministry and spoke at last month's cybersecurity forum.

He said they often create code that allows activists to blast thousands of messages from social media accounts — creating the illusion that many protesters are sharing the same anti-Israel or anti-West message online.

Israeli officials lobby Facebook to remove pages it says incite violence against Israelis, and there has been talk of advancing legislation to restrict Facebook in Israel. A Facebook representative met with Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan in Israel last week about the matter.

Ratson said social media giants are beginning to close inciting users' accounts. Twitter said in a statement this month that since mid-2015, it has closed more than 125,000 accounts that were "threatening or promoting terrorist acts, primarily related to ISIS,"the Islamic State group. But he said Islamist activists are simply moving to "Darknet" sites not visible on the open internet.

Some Israeli tech companies are starting to build sly algorithms to restrict these online activists' circle of influence on the "Darknet," so activists think their message is reaching others when in fact it is being contained, Ratson said.

Other Israeli companies work on forensic intelligence gathering, such as detecting digital or semantic signatures buried in activists' coding so they are able to track and restrict their online activity.
Firewall Israel, a non-profit initiative sponsored by the Reut Institute, an Israeli think tank, is building an online platform to help pro-Israel activists around the world communicate about anti-Israel activism in their communities. At a recent event the initiative held at Campus Tel Aviv, a Google-sponsored event space for entrepreneurs, an Israeli web expert taught young activists how to mine the internet for BDS activities.

"Delegitimizers are engaged in a Disneyland of hate,"Igal Ram of Firewall Israel told seminar participants. "We want to act against the people who run the Disneyland ... and the useful idiots who help."


Inspiration, an Israeli intelligence analysis company founded by Ronen Cohen and Haim Pinto, former military intelligence officers, launched a technological initiative some months ago to collect intelligence on BDS organizations in Europe, particularly Scandinavian countries, the U.S., and South America, Cohen said. He said the initiative aims to dismantle the infrastructure of groups he said were responsible for incitement and anti-Semitism against Israel. He declined to give specifics.

"It's no different than an operation, which you sometimes read about in the newspaper, in Syria or Lebanon," Cohen said. "It's the kind of thing that, if you want to do it in the future ... you can't work in the open."


↧

"then each took the hand of the other and then they were seen no more"

February 17, 2016, 7:41 pm
$
0
0
A powerful and moving song by Leon Rosselson, Britain’s foremost protest folk singer.  Leon Rosselson is a socialist who has devoted his musical talents to supporting the oppressed.  He has signed many letters to the newspapers attacking Israel’s murderous policies and he is both an anti-Zionist and a member of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods.

The song below will be ‘controversial’ only to those whose eyes are blind to the parallels between Nazism 80 years ago and its bastard offspring, Zionism.

It is precisely because Zionism wishes to exonerate the Nazis that Netanyahu (& he wasn’t alone) put forward the thesis at the last World Zionist Organisation Congress that the responsibility for the holocaust of European Jews was not that of Hitler but the Palestinian Mufti of Jerusalem.
Leon Rosselson
For Zionism today, any opposition to racism, even of the Nazi kind is embarrassing and does not fit with its war against the Palestinians.  Hence the desire to draw an equals sign between the Palestinians and the Nazis whereas the correct designation is that of Leon Rosselson, between Zionism and the Nazis.

Tony Greenstein

I was watching the news from Gaza
And I fell asleep on my chair
And when I woke up from my slumber
A young girl was standing there.

She said, My name is Rivka
They killed me because I’m a Jew
I died in the ghetto of Vilna
In nineteen forty two.

The ghetto was like a prison
They wouldn’t allow us to leave
Some said they were going to kill us all
We didn’t know what to believe.

That day I wore my new red dress
My bubbe had made for me
And in that crowded ghetto
It made me feel proud and free.

I looked up at the soldier
I looked him in the eye
I forgot to bow my head down
And so I had to die.

He smashed my head with his rifle
Because I was too bold
I was killed in the Vilna ghetto
When I was seven years old.

And then out of the darkness
A young boy’s gaze met mine
He said, My name is Mohammed
My country is Palestine.

I’ve lived all my life in Gaza
And the only time I feel free
Is when I go down to the harbour
And feel the wind from the sea.

That day I went with my cousins
We ran down to the beach to play
Then the soldier fired a shell at me
And blew my life away.

They want to crush our spirits
They want us to be afraid
Locked up in the prison of Gaza
The prison that they have made.

To them our lives don’t matter
They force us to live in a cage
I was killed on the beach in Gaza
At eleven years of age.

They don’t think that we deserve freedom
Or belong to the human race.
Mohammed, my brother, said Rivka,
This world is a cold, cold place.

Mohammed, my friend, my brother,
Let us leave this world of war.
Then each took the hand of the other
And then they were seen no more.

But I saw spokesmen and politicians
Lining up to speechify
And every word was a hypocrite
And every word was a lie.

I saw children still being slaughtered
The monster must have its fill
While the people with power sat on their hands 
And supplied the weapons that kill.

I weep for the people of Gaza
And they are weeping still
And I curse the ones who do nothing
And encourage the monster to kill. 


Comparing Nazis to Jews? Leon Rosselson explains‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed’

February 17, 2016 by Robert A. H. Cohen 

It’s shocking.
But that’s the point.
You’re not supposed to do this. But he has.

Songwriters have creative licence but has Leon Rosselson gone too far?

A Nazi soldier smashes the head of Rivka, a seven year old girl wearing her new red dress in the Vilna ghetto in 1942. An Israeli soldier fires a shell onto a Gaza beach and kills Mohammed, an eleven year old boy playing football with his cousins in 2014. In the songwriter’s dream, Mohammed and Rivka take each other’s hand and “leave this world of war”– together.

The Polish ghetto has been twinned with the Gaza Strip.
Nazis are on a parallel with Israelis.
And in life and in death, Rivka and Mohammed are together and equal.

Leon Rosselson has given us a new song that will outrage some but bring many more to tears.
But is the comparison of Rivka and Mohammed fair? Isn’t such a coupling of victims a dishonest slur against the state of Israel, a gross exaggeration, and an offence to the memory of the six million?

Hold those questions in your head while I introduce you to Leon Rosselson, England’s finest radical songwriter.
Radical songwriter/Compassionate heart

At the age of 81 Rosselson has just announced that his new album ‘Where are the barricades?’, will be his last.

It marks the end of more than fifty years of recordings that have charted the struggles between the left and the right, the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak. And, in more recent years, the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, Zionists and anti-Zionists, and between Jews and Jews.
Leon Rosselson gained national recognition in the early 1960s through appearances on David Frost’s BBC satire show That Was The Week That Was (TW3). Over the years he’s sung with many of the greats of the 1960s and 70s English folk music scene including Martin Carthy, Roy Bailey and Sandra Kerr.

I first discovered Rosselson’s music in the early 1980s through a passionate Billy Bragg rendering of probably his most well known song ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. The song tells the doomed story of a community of 17th century English radicals called the Diggers whose attempt to ‘build a common treasury for all’ is violently crushed. Rosselson succeeds in turning the story of their defeat into a song of inspiration and hope.
Invariably Leon Rosselson delivers his songs with wit, humanity and a great deal of compassion. His best songwriting tells stories or describes emotionally charged encounters. He chooses his words with great care and sings them as a concerned, committed, chronicler of our times rather than an angry revolutionary. In fact, it’s hard to imagine this Jewish son born into a communist household in North London ever climbing barricades or storming the citadels of power. That would have been a waste of his talents anyway.

Not a nation, not a religion

If you want to understand how Rosselson’s Jewish and communist roots have informed his songwriting you can find it beautifully set out in a song called ‘My Father’s Jewish World‘.  Rosselson’s take on the Judaism he inherited from his parents is summed up in the chorus:

It’s not a nation
Not a religion
This Jewish Spirit is still unbroken
It’s like the candle that mocks the darkness
It’s like the song that shatters the silence
It’s like the fool that laughs at the dragon
It’s like the spark that signals rebellion
It’s like the dance that circles unending

All of this needs to be understood as we return to ‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed‘.

Rivka & Mohammed

Rosselson wrote the song while Israel’s 2014 Gaza assault was still underway. Mohammed was one of the more than 500 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces during that summer. Before the new album version was recorded, Rosselson put this front room performance on YouTube:

On first hearing ‘Rivka & Mohammed’ it struck me how many political taboos Rosselson was breaking.

Through his story-telling/song-writing we see the two characters not as representatives of Jews or Palestinians but as children killed because of hatred, cruelty and the ability of human beings to dehumanise each other.
The Levellers
Rosselson universalises their situation refusing to allow politics and nationalism to create a divide of righteous and unrighteous dead. The point is that Jews cannot forever been seen as only and always the ‘victims’. We have shown our ability to be bringers of pain, suffering and death. In such circumstances, where should a Jew, still filled with the Jewish Spirit of our ancestors, choose to stand?

Rosselson’s song succeeds in ‘shattering the silence’ and it would be good to think that Rivka and Mohammed could ‘signal a rebellion’ against the collective denial about Israel that still grips most Jews.

It’s wrong to equate Israel with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust  in my view. Such attempts at direct historical comparisons are poor history and invariably lead to a row about anti-Semitism rather than current oppression and suffering. But if the question is: Can the hatred, intolerance and violence seen perpetrated by Nazis against Jews been seen in the behaviour of Jews towards Palestinians (with the Jewish state itself as a protagonist) then the answer is ‘yes it can’.

The essential truth is that any people in any place can become afflicted with Nazi behaviour if the circumstances are right. That ought to be the real lesson of the Holocaust. The tragedy for both Jews and Palestinians is that Zionism has created those circumstances in Israel/Palestine.

So what does Rosselson himself have to say about the song? I’m grateful to Leon for agreeing to answer my questions.

An interview with Leon Rosselson
Leon Rosselson

Cohen: Your song about Rivka & Mohammed draws an equivalence between Gaza today and the Vilna ghetto in 1942. Is it the individual suffering or the political circumstances that you’re  comparing, or both?

Rosselson: I am not the only one to see parallels between Jews in the ghettos of Warsaw and Vilna and Palestinians in the ghetto of Gaza.  There’s a youtube video of photos of the destruction in the Warsaw Ghetto alongside photos of the destruction in Gaza with Paul Robeson singing the Vilna Ghetto song & a quote from a Nazi chief-of-staff to the effect that ‘Jewish terrorists’ are to blame for the death & destruction in the Warsaw ghetto alongside a quote from an Israeli functionary that ‘Hamas terrorists’ are to blame for the destruction in Gaza.

The racism of the Nazis, dehumanising Jews (and so making them disposable), is matched by the racism of prominent Israelis and government spokesman dehumanising Palestinians, calling them ‘little snakes’, ‘two-legged beasts’, ‘drugged cockroaches’ and suggesting – as in an article in The Times of Israel – that there are times when genocide is permissible.

That’s the background. But the song is a story about two children who share a common humanity and a common fate. The key line, for me, is ‘Then each took the hand of the other’.  Given the contempt in which Zionism and Israelis hold the Jews of Eastern Europe for going passively into the gas chambers (as the myth has it), it’s not a stretch to show that this Jewish child sees – not an Israeli child – but this Palestinian child as her friend, her brother.

So the song is both personal and political.

Cohen: You must have known the song would be provocative and controversial, even outrageous, for some listeners. Was that your intention from the start or just where the creative process took you?

Rosselson: I don’t write songs to be controversial or provocative.  Any song that implies criticism of Israel is going to be seen by Israeli supporters as provocative so that really doesn’t enter my consciousness.

I wanted to express my anger and dismay at what Israel was doing in this attack on Gaza, what those who called themselves Jewish were doing to another people. I don’t think that saying directly what I think, what I feel makes for a very good song so I looked for a story that would carry what I wanted to say.  When I’d calmed down a bit, I changed the ending, omitting the curse.

Cohen: Does the ‘monster’ only represent Israel?

Rosselson: It seemed to me that it was an appropriate word for a state that uses its immense military power to crush a defenceless people. Doubtless there are other monsters in the world.

Cohen: What reactions have you had to the song as a recording and in performance?

Rosselson: I haven’t so far had any hostile response, probably because Jewish supporters of Israel don’t usually come to my concerts. Sometimes they do, particularly in America. Mostly audiences are moved by the song.  My daughter can’t listen to it without crying and it took me time to be able to sing it without openly showing emotion. It is, after all, desperately sad.

Cohen: What for you would be a good outcome for Israel/Palestine?

Rosselson: I think now there is no 2-state solution however desirable some, like Uri Avnery and, of course, mainstream politicians think it would be. It’s not going to happen. It wouldn’t anyway solve the problem (the ‘demographic’ problem, as Israelis see it) of what rights Palestinians – 1 in 5 of the population – would have in a Jewish state.

I’m against a Jewish state as I’m against an Islamic state or any state that excludes, by definition, a minority of its population. So one state with equal rights for all its citizens would be the best solution. So no Palestinian state either. Until that happens,far off into the future, the conflict will continue.
‘The Ballad of Rivka & Mohammed’ can be found on Rosselson’s final album ‘Where are the Barricades’. You can buy from his website or on iTunes. For more of his songs with an Israel/Palestine theme ‘The Last Chance’ is the album to buy.
↧
↧

Oxford University Labour Club – An Old Story – Support Palestinians Cry Anti-Semitism

February 19, 2016, 7:21 pm
$
0
0
It is the story of how malevolent people, like Oxford University’s upper class fool, one Alex Chalmers, deliberately confuse support for the Palestinians and opposition to Zionism, with anti-Semitism.
Alex Chalmers - right-wing aspiring former Chair of Labour Club
People like Chalmers make a virtue of their racist ignorance.

The fact is that Zionism, the movement amongst Jewish (& non-Jewish) people for a Jewish settler colonial state was always a minority amongst Jewish people until WW2.  It was seen as a Jewish form of anti-Semitism because it accepted the anti-Semitic idea that Jews did not belong in the nations amongst whom they lived, in the Jewish diaspora, but only in their own racial state in Palestine.
The spires of Oxford University
Historically the Strongest Supporters of Zionism were Anti-Semites, Nazis included
That was why nearly all the worst anti-Semites supported Zionism historically.

For example Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for Ostland (Eastern territories) and the Nazi Party’s main theoretician, who was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946, wrote in 1919 that ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’ [Francis Nicosia, Third Reich & the Palestine Question, p.25 citing Die Spur 1920 p.153.]

As Nicosia noted, Rosenberg ‘intended to use Zionism as a legal justification for depriving German Jews of their civil rights.’ Rosenberg ‘sanctioned the use of the Zionist movement in the future drive to eliminate Jewish rights, Jewish influence and eventually the Jewish presence in Germany.’ [Nicosia, TRPQ, pp. 25-26.]
Israeli has legalised the status of three settlement outposts in the West Bank  Photo: AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti
Indeed it is difficult to recall even one significant anti-Semite who didn't support Zionism.  

Zionists in turn returned the compliment.  Jacob Klatzkin, the editor of the Zionist Organisation paper Die Welt and founder of the Encyclopedia Judaica wrote that:
If we do not admit the rightfulness of anti-Semitism we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism... Instead of establishing societies for defence against the anti-Semites who want to reduce our rights, we should establish societies for defence against our friends, who desire to defend our rights. B. Matovu, “TheZionistWish and the Nazi Deed’Issue, Winter 1966-7. Uri Davies, ‘Utopia Incorporated’ p. 17.

What the wholly contrived Oxford Labour Club affair  is about is supporting Israeli Apartheid.  It has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.  As far as the pathetic Chalmers and ilk are concerned it is perfectly legitimate to occupy Palestinian land for 50 years, to steal it, to shoot its inhabitants and of course to rule them under military law whilst Jewish settlers are subject to another legal system altogether.  2 different sets of law for 2 groups of people is usually counted as Apartheid but despite being at Oxford, Chalmers is too stupid to understand this.
Oxford University Labour Club votes to support Israel Apartheid Week
Indeed it is worse than the stupidity of an upper class idiot.  To equate opposition to Israel as anti-Semitism, it to assume that all Jews are supporters of Israel and Zionism.  And that is certainly anti-Semitic.  The idea that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitism is to condemn the Jews who died in the holocaust as anti-Semites.  It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews were opposed to Zionism.  The majority party of the Polish Jews was the Bund.  In Warsaw, in the last free elections, it took 61% of the vote and gained 17 out of the 20 Jewish Council seats, compared to one for the Zionists.  It is to blame the Jews who died in the holocaust for their own deaths. 

Israel is not a Jewish state except in the same sense that Apartheid South Africa was a White state.  In other words, being Jewish in Israel is to possess privileges that non-Jews do not possess. 

Noni Csogor, the co-chair of Oxford Uni's Labour Club who didn't resign is not much better than Chalmers.  She states that rising anti-Semitic violence in Britain is a problem.  She assumes that it is rising whereas even the Zionist Community Security Trust's latest report shows it has dropped by a third since last year, whereas the murder in the past couple of days of a Muslim preacher demonstrates which community is under attack - and it isn't the Jewish community.  Anti-semitism in Britain is a marginal prejudice.

I should add that about 30 years ago I spoke to Oxford University's Labour Club.  It was the most right-wing but also the most stupid Labour Club I have ever addressed.  Among its members was the right-wing Times columnist Oliver Kamm.  Kamm it was who asked the most imbecilic question I have ever had to answer.  How he asked could Zionism be considered a form of racism if the Jews weren't a race?  My answer was short and to the point.  By his definition, since the Jews are not a race, the Nazis too could not be considered racist!  Kamm has since taken his wit and intellect to Rupert Murdoch's rag.

The Labour Party is apparently holding an inquiry into affairs at Oxford university Labour Club.  If Jeremy Corbyn has any mettle then he will squash this contrived and planned affair.  We will see if Jeremy Corbyn’s appeasement of Labour’s Right continues.

Tony Greenstein 

Oxford University Labour Club co-chair, Alex Chalmers, resigns amid anti-Semitism row

Chalmers says Oxford student left 'have some kind of problem with Jews' and that club members' attitudes towards certain disadvantaged groups is 'becoming poisonous'
Aftab Ali Student Editor Wednesday 17 February 2016

Alex Chalmers, pictured, said senior club members have been expressing their ‘solidarity’ with Hamas Alex Chalmers via Facebook

The Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) - the largest student Labour group in the country - has become embroiled in an anti-Semitism row following the resignation of one of its chairs after the club decided to endorse Israel Apartheid Week.

Co-chair Alex Chalmers, a student at Oxford’s Oriel College, issued a strongly-worded statement on Monday which said he was stepping down from his position because a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford “have some kind of problem with Jews.”

Despite highlighting the benefits he received during his time with the OULC over the past two terms, Mr Chalmers said the club was becoming “increasingly riven by factional splits.” He added: “Despite its avowed commitment to liberation, the attitudes of certain members of the club towards certain disadvantaged groups was becoming poisonous.”

He continued with a list of issues he had taken with the club: “Whether it be members of the executive throwing around the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their ‘solidarity’ with Hamas and explicitly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former co-chair claiming that ‘most accusations of anti-Semitism are just the Zionists crying wolf’, a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford, more generally, have some kind of problem with Jews.”

Oxford University’s Jewish Society (Oxford JSoc) said it was “saddened” by the anti-Semitic reports coming out of the club, but said it “stands fully in support of Alex Chalmers’ decision to resign.”

However, the society added how it was “unsurprised” by the news, and said this is not the first time it has had to deal with anti-Semitic incidents within the student left, adding how “it will not be the last.”

The society continued: “It is a significant and worrying issue and one that, on many occasions, Jewish students have felt that they are fighting alone. We are grateful that Alex Chalmers has made the statement that he did and has brought the issue of anti-Semitism to the fore in a way that Jewish students have so far been denied.

Noni Csogor, remaining OULC co-chair and student at Corpus Christi College, said she was “deeply upset” with Mr Chalmers’ decision to resign, adding that he was also “right to highlight growing anti-Semitic violence in the UK as a major issue.”

She continued: “It’s also horrifying that Jewish students feel unsafe on campuses. It’s unsurprising, given incidents like that at KCL Israel Society a few weeks ago, and I’m sure OULC members would join me in condemning the silencing of Jewish students, who often have uniquely nuanced perspectives on the Israeli state.”

She said Jewish students spoke on both sides of the debate on whether to support Israel Apartheid Week, but added how the allegations of anti-Semitism within the club are being taken “very seriously.”

She said: “I will be discussing, with my executive committee, how to deal with the kinds of statements Alex mentions, and what concrete steps we can take in future to preserve a club that’s been a safe haven for Jewish students in the past.”

Labour Students - the autonomous student wing of the UK Labour Party and the largest political student organisation in the country - also said its members were “deeply troubled” to hear reports of anti-Semitism at “one of our most prominent Labour clubs.”

In a statement, Labour Students continued: “We unequivocally condemn any form of anti-Semitism. We are taking these allegations very seriously and will do whatever is necessary to ensure every Labour club is a safe space for Jewish students.

“We are proud of the long history we have of working with the Union of Jewish Students and the National Union of Students to protect Jewish students on campus, and this will always be a top priority for Labour Students.”


The University of Oxford has yet to respond to the Independent’s request for comment although, according to The Telegraph, the institution said it “does not tolerate any form of harassment or victimisation, including on the grounds of religion and belief,” adding how it expects the entire university community to “treat each other with respect, courtesy, and consideration.”
↧

Yet Another Israeli Extra-Judicial Execution

February 20, 2016, 5:02 pm
$
0
0
Once again we see Israel using massive force against a young Palestinian person who posed no threat at all.

This is in the nature of the 'only democracy in the Middle East'

Video shows execution of Palestinian in Jerusalem
Maureen Clare MurphyRights and Accountability 19 February 2016

The apparent execution of a Palestinian in occupied East Jerusalem was caught on video by Al Jazeera on Friday.

Israel says that the young man was carrying out a stabbing attack on Israeli Border Police officers when he was killed at the Damascus Gate to Jerusalem’s Old City.

But videoof the incident released by Al Jazeera indicates that the young man did not pose an immediate threat to anyone’s life when massive lethal force was used against him.

The video shows a Border Police officer shooting at the man, who falls to the ground. Then several other heavily armed officers shoot dozens of bullets into the body of the man as he lies on the ground and as passersby hurry away from the scene:

The video is a shocking display of Israel’s routine and reflexive use of lethal force, which has resulted in the slaying of approximately 170 Palestinians, including dozens of children, since a new phase of violence began in October last year.

Al Jazeera media workers who were at the scene to film a field report told the Ma’an News Agency that “six Israeli officers on site surrounded the Palestinian and ‘fired almost 50 bullets’ after he had already been shot twice and fallen to the ground.”

An Israeli police spokesperson told Ma’an that the Israeli forces opened fire on the young man after he drew a knife on them. Two officers were lightly wounded after being stabbed in the upper body and taken to hospital.

Palestinian media reportedthat a Palestinian bystander was wounded by shrapnel in her foot and was taken to hospital for treatment.
Muhammad Abu Khalaf (via Quds)
Israeli media circulated a photo of the ID belonging to the man killed during the incident, identifying him as 20-year-old Muhammad Abu Khalaf from the Jerusalem-area town of Kufr Aqab.

The Quds news network stated that at least 10 Palestinians have been slain at Damascus Gate since October, and that 11 alleged attacks have been waged at the main entrance to the ancient walled city.

Two Palestinians were shot and killed there on Sunday after an alleged armed attack on Border Police and three other youths were slain there two weeks earlier during a similar incident.
Israeli forces killed two more Palestinians on Friday.

Khaled Yousif Taqatqa, 21, was shot during confrontations between protesters and the Israeli military in the village of Beit Fajjar near the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society told the Ma’an News Agency that medics were prevented from treating the young man at the scene and that he died of his injuries at a hospital in Jerusalem.
An image of Taqatqa circulated on social media after his death:
And in the West Bank village of Silwad, near Ramallah, Israeli forces shot dead a Palestinian man who allegedly attempted to ram them with his car.

No Israelis were injured during the incident.

The slain man was identified by Palestinian media as Abed Raed Hamad, 22, a student at Birzeit University focusing on journalism and media.
Photos of the incident show the man’s car crushed into a military jeep:

An image of Hamad circulated on social media after the incident
Israeli forces killed two other Palestinians in Silwad last December, both of whom were allegedly waging car-ramming attacks when they were shot dead.

But investigations by journalists and a human rights group suggest that one of those killed, Mahdia Hammad, was not attempting any attack and was trying to get home to feed her baby when soldiers opened fire at her.

Meanwhile in Washington on Friday, the State Department condemned a stabbing attack in a West Bank settlement on Thursday in which a US citizen was fatally wounded.

The Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretzreportedthat Tuvya Weisman, who lived with his wife and infant daughter in Maaleh Michmash settlement, was a soldier in Israel’s Nahal Brigade and was off duty when he was stabbed and another Israeli moderately wounded.
An image of Weisman in his uniform circulated after the incident:
The two Palestinian attackers, Omar Rimawi and Ayham Subih, both 14, were shot by a bystander and are reported to be in serious but stable condition in separate hospitals in Jerusalem.

An image circulated on social media shows Rimawi on the right and Subih on the left:
An image of the scene appears to show the two on the ground and bleeding:
Israeli media published a video of Israeli soldiers apparently raiding and documenting the boys’ homes to prepare to demolish them.

The pair are the youngest to have killed an Israeli since October, according to Ma’an, referring to data compiled by Israeli intelligence.

Nearly half of the more than 200 attacks the Shin Bet says have been waged since October were “committed by assailants aged 20 or under.”

The alleged attacks, mostly involving knives or car-ramming, have largely taken place at Israel’s settlements and military checkpoints in the West Bank – symbols of the occupation.


Approximately 30 Israelis and two US citizens have been slain during such attacks.
↧

Israeli Winner at Berlin Film Festival Calls Israeli Government 'Fascist' at Movie Screening

February 21, 2016, 11:47 am
$
0
0

While Netanyahu spreads hate, 'Junction 48' spreads love and coexistence - Udi Aloni

Israeli Winner at Berlin Film Festival Calls Israeli Government 'Fascist' at Movie Screening
Actress Salwa Sakkara (left), actor Tamer Nafar, director and producer Udi Aloni and actress Samar Qupty pose at the 2016 Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 13, 2016. AP
Haaretz and Reuters Feb 20, 2016

Israeli director Udi Aloni made headlines in Berlin when he called the Israeli government "fascist"at a Q&A session about his award-winning film "Junction 48."

Aloni, whose Arabic-language hip-hop film featuring mostly Palestinian actors, said that Germany shouldn't supply Israel with submarines because of its fascist government. He also mentioned at the session Palestinian hunger-striker Mohammed al-Qiq as an example non-Jews' lack of rights in Israel, saying that Qiq was dying in administrative detention without being accused of committing a crime.
Udi Aloni - Israel film director 'Junction 48'
Aloni, who is the son of Meretz founder Shulamit Aloni, responded to comments on his statements by saying that he was addressing his criticism toward the Israeli government and not the state, and added that his film spreads love and coexistence, as opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who spreads hate.

"Junction 48" took the Panorama Audience Award for best fiction film. The film "Who's Gonna Love Me Now?" by Tomer and Barak Heymann was voted best Panorama documentary.

"Junction 48" tells the story of a Palestinian rap star and his girlfriend who live near Tel Aviv in the mixed Jewish-Palestinian city of Lod, known until recently as one of the main drug-running centers of the Middle East. 
Scene from Junction 48
Actress Samar Qupty said it should be easy for Palestinians to identify with the movie, even though it depicts people living lives that are radically different from strict Muslim traditions. 

Her character, for example, allows a picture of her face to be used on a poster advertising a hip-hop concert, prompting members of her family to say they plan to injure her if she performs.

"It's still a revolutionary movie because it doesn't talk about the way we Palestinians are usually represented in the world,"Qupty said.

"We are representing ourselves by the new generation without trying to prove anything to anyone, with our 'goods' and 'bads',"she told Reuters in an interview. "We are trying to present what is the real new generation trying to do without making the reality looking any better or any worse." 

Director Aloni was pleased with audience reactions. 

"We are all so optimistic because we also brought some young kids that we gave them tickets, you know, 20 years old that don't know anything about us and they adore it. 

"So probably the choice of having Tamer [Nafar], he is so charismatic, and hip-hop that is so universal, it was a very good move." 

Singer Nafar doesn't expect everybody in the Middle East to love the film but he is confident it will open up a debate. 

"It's going to open a stage and I think it's very important and the movie is not here to give solutions, the movie is here to raise the right questions,"he said.
↧
Search

Guardian Letter from 22 Jewish people Criticises False Allegations of anti-Semitism at Oxford University Labour Club

February 24, 2016, 5:05 pm
$
0
0

As I have already posted, Oxford University Labour Club – An Old Story – Support Palestinians Cry Anti-Semitism a trumped up, fabricated charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ has been levelled at Oxford University Labour Club for having the temerity to support Oxford’s Israel Apartheid Week.

 

Its co-Chairperson, Alex Chalmers, resigned because he was unable to tell the difference between opposing Zionist racism and opposing Jews.  His lack of any intellectual prowess is not untypical of the upper class twits that inhabit Oxford University. 

 

It was therefore felt that Chalmers and the Zionists’ rent-a-gob Labour MPs, Louise Ellman and John Mann, were in need of some enlightenment, which is why 22 Jewish people sent a letter to the Guardian last week in response to their coverage.  The Guardian published the letter on the Internet today and it is copied below.


Antisemitic? Or just against the Israeli government’s oppressive actions?

Antisemitism is conspicuous by its absence in your article on “antisemitism” at Oxford University Labour Club.

Antisemitism is abuse, discrimination and hatred of Jews as Jews. Examples of such abuse might be the description of the US ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, as “a little Jew boy” by former Netanyahu aide Aviv Bushinsky.

If someone had suggested that people should follow the suggestion of the chief rabbi of Safed, Shmuel Eliyahu, that Jews should not rent rooms to Arabs but instead applied an equivalent policy to Oxford’s Jewish students, we could understand and would share the concern.

Perhaps MPs John Mann and Louise Ellman prefer another description for the situation on the West Bank whereby two systems of law operate – one for Palestinians and the other for Jewish settlers? Or why half of Israel’s Arab villages are “unrecognised” and liable to instant demolition, whereas Jewish villages and towns are always recognised?

Whether Israel is an apartheid state or not is a perfectly legitimate political debate. Jewish students can be found on both sides of this debate. It is not, however, antisemitic.


Those who deliberately confuse antisemitism and anti-Zionism give comfort and aid to the real antisemites in our society. Like the boy who cried wolf, they ensure that if antisemitism does rear its ugly head, people will assume that this is just another false accusation.


Tony Greenstein
Professor Haim Bresheeth
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead
Professor Steven Rose
Miriam Margolyes
Tamar Steinitz
Merav Pinchassoff
Amanda Sebestyen
Deborah Fink
Craig Berman
Susanne Levin
Leah Levane
Ben Young
Richard Kuper
Miriam Yagud
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi
Beryl Maizels
Brian Robinson
Mike Cushman
Les Levidow
Miriam Scharf
Hope Liebersohn
↧
↧

Robin Yassin-Kassab and the Syrian Revolution

February 26, 2016, 3:58 pm
$
0
0

Father & Son - Bashir and Hafez al-Assad


Assad & the Vortex of Terror
I went to a meeting tonight at Sussex University to hearRobin Yassin-Kassab, who is of mixed Syrian and English parentage, speak about the Syrian revolution and what has gone wrong.  Sponsored by Sussex Friends of Syria society it was both illuminating and depressing.
Devastation in the Syrian civil war
Robin is the co-author of a new book Burning Countryabout the Syrian revolution.
Robin Yassin-Kassab
The problem with the meeting was the controlled nature of the ‘conversation’ whereby an interlocutor posed a number of questions throughout, leaving little time for genuine discussion. Unfortunately Robin chose to shield himself, via his interlocutor, from criticism.
Syria Anadolu
It is somewhat unfortunate that the Sussex Friends of Syria Society felt the need to protect Robin from criticism.  It suggests that he is not so confident of the case he makes when subject to challenge.  Despite criticism of him as a war-monger by a number of people, I went with an open mind.  I went  away with a number of doubts as to his motives and political position, not least in view of his repeated attack on 'leftists' - as if there was a unified left position on Syria and in particular his support for Turkey's attacks on the Kurds.
Damascus
Robin Yassin-Kassab clearly has an encyclopedic knowledge of Syria and the different groups.  His knowledge of the revolutionary councils and the Syrian civil society, the democratic formations that have been thrown up in the struggle against the Assad regime is impressive.  What is less than impressive is his political judgement.
Protests at death of 6 people in Egypt

Robin accurately described the grisly record of the Syrian regime of Bashir al-Assad and before that Haffez al-Assad.  It is a regime to which the United States rendered prisoners to be tortured [see Daraa protests are the spark Syria needed] like Maher Arar who was kidnapped at John F Kennedy airport by US security and deported to Syria rather than Canada, even though he was a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen.  He was tortured and detained for a year in Syria before being released back to Canada. The Canadian government compensated him for his terrible ordeal but it is noticeable that the US Courts refused to allow a challenge to the actions of the US government.

It is a regime which has used barrel bombs and poison gas against civilians and which has killed the vast majority of the 250,000 people estimated to have died in the civil war, which uses torture as a matter of course and which ‘disappears’ those it tortures and kidnaps.

No one should believe that the road to revolution or peace in the Middle East goes through the Assad regime.

Likewise I have no doubt that he is right to say that Assad deliberately stimulated the growth of the Jihadi groups in Syria, both as a means of confessionalising the struggle and as a way of painting himself as the bulwark against Islamic terrorism.  He did this by, amongst other things, releasing some 1,500 Islamists in 2011 at the same time as he was slaughtering demonstrators on the street.

There is also no doubt that the Russian intervention and bombing on the side of Assad has made the situation far worse and further that their intense bombing, which has primarily targeted the civilian resistance against Assad has caused mass civilian casualties.  The Russian bombing has been targeted at civilian structures – schools, clinics and homes – and as such they have been guilty of war crimes.  It is, in this context, a pity that Stop the War Coalition hasn’t been more outspoken in condemning the Russian attacks.  Propping up Assad is not an answer to the present conflict.

I can even accept that many people joined Islamist groups like Jaysh al-Islamand Ahrar ash-Sham as a consequence of the oppressive qualities of the Assad regime.  There is no doubt that the Free Syrian Army or components thereof deserve support in their battles against both the Assad regime and Isis, although the FSA have also allied with the Al Qaeda group al-Nusra Front.

If this were all that Yassin-Kassab had to say about the struggle of the different groups in Syria, then he would be worth listening to. 

What Yassin-Kassab fails to perceive in what was often a rant against ‘leftists’ was that the Syrian revolution takes place in a context, viz. that Israel in particular wishes to see Syria split into its confessional parts – Sunni, Alawite, Kurdish.  A scenario that the United States will not be disappointed with.  In just the same way as the US attack on Iraq split the country into three and pitted Shi'ite against Sunni in a country where there had been little or no conflict between them before the invasion.

That is the context in which Hezbollah has come to the aid of the Assad regime.  It is also, to a lesser extent the reason why the Iranian regime has become involved in propping up Assad.

For Israel and the United States, Hezbollah is undoubtedly the key target, as it is the only force in the Arab world to have defeated Israel, in 2006.  The strengthening of imperialism will not, in the long terms, be of any comfort to the Syrian or the Iraq people. 

What I most took exception to was Yassin-Kassab’s support for Turkey’s shelling of the Kurdish PYD, on the grounds that they were operating in Arab areas and presumably because they were fighting some of the murderous Turkomen groups.  Yassin-Kassab also attacked the Kurdish PKK which is fighting against the genocidal Turkish regime of Erdogan in the South of Turkey.  The PKK was a nasty Marxist group from what I could ascertain rather than the self-defence group that is overwhelmingly supported by the Kurdish people.

Whilst professing support for Kurdish self-determination Yassin-Kassab also supports repression by the Turkish state, which is somewhat at odds with support for the self-determination of the Syrian people.  I wasn’t able to pursue the point because of the vigilance of Yassin-Kassab’s protectors at the meeting which suggests that this is rather a sore point.

I also interjected at the end of the meeting when Yassin-Kassab referred to fundamentalism in the region.  I pointed out that much of it was a product of a deliberate strategy by the West.  When I said that Saudi Arabia was the fount of fundamentalism in the region Yassin-Kassab demurred and when I pointed that the Saudi regime was a creation of British and then American imperialism he sought to locate the rise of the regime in the 17th century rather than as a product of the first world war and Britain’s sponsorship of Ibn Saud, which included both finance and weaponry, in his battles against his rivals in Arabia, in particular Sharif Hussein of Mecca [see Israel andSaudi Arabia - The Roots of a Special Relationship].  It is indicative of the fact that Yassin-Kassab fails to place the travails of the Syrian people in the context of Western imperialism.

Tony Greenstein

See After Tunisia: Robin Yassin-Kassab on Syria and ‘I was terribly wrong’ - writers look back at the Arab spring five years on 

Members of Egyptian group Ultras Nahdawy during a demonstration against the death of six people at anti-regime protests west of Cairo, July 2015. Photograph: Belal Wagdy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images


Robin Yassin-Kassab’s book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, co‑written with Leila al-Shami, is published by Pluto.
↧

Time for Palestine Solidarity Campaign to Break with the Quisling PA

February 27, 2016, 2:17 pm
$
0
0
PA collaborates with Israel’s torture agency

The Banana Position - A Torture Stress Position Used by Israel
 This is a shocking report from Electronic Intifada.  Not only does the PA torture most of those arrested by its Preventive Security Forces but it also hands those it has tortured onto the Israeli military in order that they can be detained and tortured again.
Article on the Oslo Accords October 1993 predicting the collaboration of the Palestinian security forces
We know that Quisling-in-Chief Mahmoud Abbas has defended the ‘sacred’ nature of the PA’s co-operation with the Israeli military.  Abbas vows to uphold ‘sacred’ security coordination with Israel
Israeli doctors are an essential part of the torture system
 We also know that Abbas’s security forces have done their best to quell the latest uprising against the Israeli occupation.
Stress positions used by Israel and Palestinian security forces
The Times of Israel reported that:
‘Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told the leaders of his Fatah movement’s Tanzim militant wing Sunday to immediately work to calm spiraling tensions with Israel….. Abbas has said several times he is working to calm tensions and doesn’t want to see violent unrest spread, though Israeli officials accuse him of inciting a spate of terror attacks and violent West Bank clashes. 
Abbas has also spoken in recent days to Fatah leaders who have led calls for more terror attacks against Israelis, including Mahmoud al-Alul and Sultan Abu al-Inin, and demanded that they cease making statements in support of such attacks.’

Stop urging violence, Abbas tells Fatah militant leaders


According to Israel Today,  in an interview with Defence News, Major General Majid Faraj,the head of Palestinian intelligence, said that in the previous three months the PNA security forces prevented approximately 200 attacks against Israelis and detained about 100 ‘potential terrorists and confiscated their weapons’.

It is absolutely clear that the PA and its security forces operate as a sub-contracted arm of Israel’s military.  It does the dirty work for the Israeli armed forces.  In October 1993 I wrote, in an article Birthright sold for a mess of potage for London Labour Briefing [which students of the Bible and the story of Jacob and Esau will recognise!)  which criticised the then almost universally applauded Oslo Accords: (see)
‘The agreement provides for a Palestinian police force of up to 30,000 strong.  Their first duty will be to suppress Palestinian dissent and any resistance to the Accord.  Little wonder that this provision evokes such Israeli enthusiasm…. This agreement will lead, not to an independent state but to further misery and defeat… In effect the prison guards will be removed from inside to outside the prison walls… There will be plenty of pretexts for the Israeli army to go back into the autonomous areas…’

It is almost embarrassing how accurate this article is in its predictions.  Every single prediction has come true.  Yet I didn’t have a crystal ball.  Fortune telling is not my expertise.  A simple Marxist analysis of what the Oslo Accords represented, stripped of the nationalist rhetoric and a concrete analysis of the situation of the Palestinians resulted in an article that predicted, quite correctly, that the Oslo agreement represented a ‘massive victory for imperialism’.
Israeli actor in torture session
We can begin to erode that victory by first of all cutting our links with the PA and not giving it any 
credibility.  That means cutting links with the Palestinian mission in London led by Professor Hassasian.  Those with any illusions in this mission should think carefully.  Despite his rabble rousing speeches, the London mission is part and parcel of the PA’s operation. 
Another Israeli stress position that Palestinian forces also use
Recently I wrote twice to the Mission suggesting that they might make their voice heard over the death sentence (later commuted to 800 lashes and 8 years in prison) for Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh  Unsurprisingly I heard nothing by way of a reply.

Tony Greenstein

Shikma - Israeli Torture and Detention Centre

PA collaborates with Israel’s torture agency

Charlotte Silver 25 February 2016

Shikma prison in Ashkelon is the site of routine torture of Palestinians by Israeli interrogators, according to a new report.

Rafael Ben-AriChameleons Eye

Palestinian prisoners are being held in painful positions for up to 35 hours, according to a new report.
The Israel Security Agency, known as the Shin Bet, is confining detainees to filthy cells smaller than the size of an adult body stretched out, the report also reveals.

Compiled by the Israeli human rights organizations HaMoked and B’Tselem, the report focuses on the Shikmainterrogation center in Ashkelon, a city in present-day Israel.

It is based on 116 affidavits from Palestinian “security prisoners,” most of whom were still under detention when they testified.

The detainees – the majority men under the age of 25 from the Hebron area of the occupied West Bank – recalled their arrest, transfer, interrogation and holding conditions to attorneys while sitting behind a glass partition, with their legs tied to the chair and under the supervision of a prison guard.
The report is a product of a three-year investigation. More than half of those interviewed reported they were forbidden to meet a lawyer or denied access to the International Committee of the Red Cross for all or part of their time at Shikma.

That is despite how Israel’s own prison rules stipulate that a prisoner must be allowed access to the Red Cross within two weeks of detention.

Collaboration

The report also highlights the collaboration between the Palestinian AuthorityPreventive Security force and Shin Bet.

Thirty-nine of the detainees interviewed were arrested and interrogated by the Palestinian Authority before being arrested by Israel.

Most of those were arrested by Israel less than a month after being released by the PA, and usually interrogated about the same matters.

Adi Awawdeh, 21, was detained by the PA for 70 days, during which he was physically and mentally tortured. Just a week after he was released, Awawdeh was arrested by Israel. When he arrived at Shikma, his interrogator showed him his file from the PA and said, “Here’s your file. It’s all ready. Do you want to add anything and save us some time?”

The report accuses the doctors at the detention facility of complicity in the torture program. One 18-year-old high school student had a swollen face because of the beating he received by soldiers on the way to Shikma.

Although the student also had epilepsy, mental health issues and a head injury resulting from being hit by shrapnel two years earlier, a doctor at the center pronounced him to be healthy.

The student was not provided with regular medication during his 44 days at the center. After losing consciousness while being tied to a chair on one occasion, a doctor gave him painkillers and his interrogation continued.

Court-approved cruelty

The report notes that the ill-treatment at Shikma is far from isolated. It makes clear that the interrogation system followed in the center was shaped by the Israeli state and describes cruel and degrading treatment as “inherent” to the Shin Bet’s policies.

Israel’s justice ministry has responded to the report dismissively, charging the authors with “distorting the existing reality” to advance an agenda on the basis of “several isolated incidents.”

But in fact the interrogation methods described in the report bear a striking resemblance to the methods the Israeli government and judiciary have already sanctioned.

In 1987, the state-appointed Landau Commissionreviewed the Shin Bet’s interrogation methods. Headed by Moshe Landau, a former president of the Israeli high court, the commission concluded that both physical and psychological “pressure” were necessary to defend Israel against “hostile terrorist activity.”

“Terrorism,” according to the Landau Commission, included essentially any activity related to Palestinian nationalism.

An unpublished annex to the commission’s report listed interrogation tactics that it deemed acceptable. That list has been approved by the Israeli state.

In 1999, Israel’s high court ostensibly banned the Shin Bet from using the list of Landau-approved techniques, but left the option available in cases of “ticking bombs.” This exception was regularly invoked after the second intifada broke out only two years later.

The decision gave Israel a legal framework within which it could torture that the United States would later replicate.

According to the US Senate report on torture published in 2014, the CIA argued in 2001 that “the Israeli example” could be used “as a possible basis for arguing that torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.”

Israel’s torture and abuse has never been reserved for “ticking bombs.”

Firas Misk, a 24-year-old from Hebron, was arrested while working in Tel Aviv without a permit to be in Israel.

“They banged my head against the wall several times … At least three of them sat on top of me, beating the hell out of me, punching and hitting my head and chest with clubs,” Misk said.

Cells like graves

The new report demonstrates that physical violence begins immediately upon arrest, which frequently occurs in the middle of the night.

“Imagine being in bed with your wife and soldiers coming in just like that. I woke up to see a soldier in front of me, pointing a gun at me,” Ashraf Asfur, a 34-year-old student and farmer from Hebron, said.

Violence upon arrest can consist of slamming a detainee’s head against the wall to beating sessions that last up to an hour and a half. One detainee reported that he was beaten until he passed out.

The very little food the prisoners receive once they arrived at Shikma was reportedly not fit for human consumption. Detainees report being given dishes of raw, moldy and foul-smelling food, sometimes uncooked chicken and rotten eggs.

At Shikma, interrogation sessions can last more than 24 hours. The detainees were held there for between three and 58 days.

During their interrogations, detainees were placed in non-standard chairs that force them into straining positions. For instance, their chairs would be tilted backwards or forwards or the legs weren’t even.

Some reported that their chair had a fifth leg that was affixed to the ground in the middle of the chair, so that they would swirl around on their chair throughout the interrogation.

In their cell, detainees were provided filthy, threadbare blankets, too thin to give them any respite from their cold cells that were infested with cockroaches, flies and other insects. Many prisoners developed fungal infections and other skin problems.

Some detainees were held in solitary confinement for 18 consecutive days.

“A solitary confinement cell: it’s like a grave, with yellow light and no window,” said Nur al-Atrash, a 25-year-old from Hebron. “They pump in really cold air, you feel helpless. There were times when I started banging my head against the wall, I didn’t know what else to do.”

Awad Ghaidan, a 21-year-old owner of a car parts store from Qibya, also likened his cell to a grave.

“You start dreaming and imagining stuff,” he said. “Sometimes I asked myself whether I was dead or alive.”
↧

From a Jewish Ghetto to a Ghetto Jewish State

February 28, 2016, 1:40 pm
$
0
0
Netanyahu plans fence around Israel to protect it from 'wild beasts'
Israeli PM says proposed barrier would also solve problem of Hamas tunnels from Gaza, but plan already has critics in his own cabinet

You might be forgiven for thinking, following Netanyahu’s announcement that his reason for wanting to build a wall surrounding Greater Israel, because of the danger of ‘wild beasts’, that lions, tigers, elephants etc. were common species in the Middle East.  Unfortunately I have to disappoint you.  They are completely absent from the Middle East.
What Netanyahu was referring to was human beings – Arabs to be precise.  And not only the Arabs outside Israel but the Palestinians inside Greater Israel are also ‘wild beasts’.  According to Deputy Defence Minister, Eli Dahan, Palestinians are animals of the non-human variety.  [see New deputy defense minister called Palestinians ‘animals’, Times of Israel 11.5.15.]

Rabbi Dahan when asked what he would do if a law permitting gay marriage was proposed in the Knesset responded ‘under no circumstances. A Jew and a goy [non-Jew]can also not marry.”   He explained that “In any case, a Jew always has a much higher [level] soul than a goy, even if he is a homosexual ... ‘The hierarchy of the human species as told by Eli Ben Dahan

Dahan’s ministerial responsibilities include the Civil Administration i.e. Military Rule over the Palestinians in the West Bank.  As far as he is concerned, the Palestinians he rules over are human animals, which was precisely the attitude of the Nazis to the Jews.  They were ‘human cattle.’  Which was why Jews were deported to the extermination camps in cattle trucks.

Politicians such as David Cameron have nothing to say about this overt racism.  And why should they?  They have signed up to support the Jewish state come what may and includes turning a blind eye to its racism, its theft of Palestinian land etc.

We might expect someone like Jeremy Corbyn to have something to say about the matter but he too has gone AWOL on the question of Palestine.

But it is one of life’s ironies that Israel is the living antithesis to the major act of liberation of European Jews in the 19th Century, the Emancipation of Jewry.  Contrary to the assertion of academics like Rumy Hasan [see Dangerous Liaisons: The Clash between Islamism and Zionism (NG Publishing, 2013), see my Review in the Journal of Holy Land Studies] Zionism isn’t so much a  product of the Enlightenment as a reaction against it.  Just as the Dreyfuss Affair was a reaction against the French Revolution and the Emancipation of French Jews so Zionism began from a rejection of the Enlightenment.
A Palestinian girl walks in front of a section of the Israeli barrier in al-Ram in the West Bank on the outskirts of Jerusalem, May 25, 2011. The government is planning to surround the entirety of Israel with security barriers.
As Max Nordau, the Vice-President of the Zionist Organisation explained at the first Zionist Congress in 1897 Emancipation was the consequence of the “geometric mode of thought of French rationalism” By this he meant that there hadn't been a sincere change in the attitude of non-Jews to Jews but that the logic, the rationale of the French Revolution, with its call for liberty, equality and fraternity, dictated that the Jews too must be given their freedom.
For Nordau Zionism was an attempt “to transform millions of physically degenerate proletarians” i.e. the Jews of E Europe. Nordau’s only doubts regarding Zionism were that the Jews might not be “anthropologically fit for nationhood.” [Complete Diaries of Theodore Herzl p. 275/276].
Zionism hated the Enlightenment and the emancipation of Jews because the ghetto kept Jews together, prevented marrying out and assimilation.  In this they were at one with the Orthodox Jews also saw their power disappear as the walls of the ghetto crumbled.  The ghetto and anti-Semitism kept Jews together, which is the secular purpose of Zionism.  Emancipation, free thought, inter-mixing allowed Jews to live with non-Jews and ‘disappear’ into them.
'Losses' to assimilation, i.e. the voluntary loss of Jewish identity is equated in the racist Zionist mind to physical destruction in the gas chambers
That is why Zionists compare assimilation, the free decision by Jews not to retain their Jewish identity, because they marry non-Jews etc. to the holocaust, which involved the physical destruction of millions of Jews.  Likewise the existence of abortion was also compared to the losses incurred in the holocaust by former Chief Rabbi Emmanuel Jakobovitz. [see an article in the Settlers News 
Agency Arutz Sheva Op-Ed: The Silent Holocaust]

It is therefore one of life’s ironies that the Jewish Ghetto, one of the most infamous of social institutions in Europe, has now been recreated in the Jewish State of Israel.  The Jewish Ghetto was first created in Venice in 1516 and the Roman ghetto, created by Pope Paul IV in 1555, was the last ghetto to be abolished, when the Italians took Rome from the Pope in 1882.

But whereas the Jews of Europe didn’t have much choice about having to live in a ghetto Israeli Jews are now going to erect their own ghetto walls to keep the non-Jewish beasts at bay.  Having already sealed off much of the West Bank with their Separation Fence, the Zionists are now going to complete the job.

Tony Greenstein

Binyamin Netanyahu inspects the new fence at the border between Jordan and Israel near Eilat, saying: ‘In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.’ Photograph: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool/EPA

Netanyahu plans fence around Israel to protect it from'wild beasts'

Binyamin Netanyahu has announced his intention to “surround all of Israel with a fence” to protect the country from infiltration by both Palestinians and the citizens of surrounding Arab states, whom he described as “wild beasts”.

The Israeli prime minister unveiled the proposal during a tour of the Jordan border area in Israel’s 
south, adding that the project – which would cost billions of shekels – would also be aimed at solving the problem of Hamas infiltration tunnels from Gaza, a recent source of renewed concern.
He called the border project a part of a “multi-year plan to surround Israel with security fences to protect ourselves in the current and projected Middle East”.

Describing the need for new walls and fences on Tuesday, Netanyahu said: “In our neighbourhood, we need to protect ourselves from wild beasts.

“At the end of the day as I see it, there will be a fence like this one surrounding Israel in its entirety. We will surround the entire state of Israel with a fence, a barrier.”

Netanyahu said the Israeli government was also examining ways of sealing gaps in the existing separation wall that runs along large areas of the occupied West Bank.

That separation wall – ordered to be built at great cost by former prime minister Ariel Sharon – was originally credited with a drop in the number of violent attacks by Palestinians in Israel, not least suicide bombings, a key feature of the second intifada in the first few years of this century.

That judgment has been undermined by the apparent ease with which Palestinians assailants have managed to enter Israel in the current wave of violence since October.

The war in Gaza in 2014 also demonstrated how easy it was for Hamas to tunnel beneath the barriers surrounding the coastal enclave into Israel itself.

“If you’re thinking of erecting a fence there you have to take into account that they could tunnel underneath it,” Netanyahu said. “The people who said that there is no significance to [retaining] territory in the modern age should go to Gaza.”

The proposal was, however, criticised by one of Netanyahu’s own cabinet ministers, education minister Naftali Bennett of the hard-right Jewish Home party, who has been embroiled in a series of recent disagreements over security policy with the prime minister.

Commenting on the proposal, Bennett said: “The prime minister spoke today about how fences are needed. We are wrapping ourselves in fences. In Australia and New Jersey there is no need for fences.”

Netanyahu’s use of the phrase “wild beasts” – also translated as “predators” – recalled his use of equally incendiary language about Israeli Arabs on the eve of last year’s elections whom he described as “coming out in droves”.

The prime minister made his comments as he visited a section of approximately 18 miles of fence being built from the Red Sea city of Eilat to near where Israel is constructing a new international airport. That alone is costing $77m (£53m). In 2013, Israel also completed a five-metre-high fence along its border with Sinai.
↧

Paul Jay, Real News Network's Devastating Critique of Gilad Atzmon's anti-Semitism

February 29, 2016, 10:05 am
$
0
0
blowing his own trumpet - Gilad Atzmon
I haven't posted anything about Gilad Atzmon, the anti-Semitic Israeli Jazzman who pops up from time to time around the fringes of the Palestine solidarity movement.

Ever since his friend, Frances Clark-Lowes, was expelled from Palestine Solidarity Campaign for holocaust denial I have posted very little on him.

PSC AGM – A Crushing Defeat For Gilad Atzmon and the Anti-Semites Holocaust denier Frances Clarke-Lowes Expelled by Massive Majority 


Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon


The following analysis by Paul Jay, from the Real News Network, is an excellent analysis of why Gilad Atzmon is deeply anti-Semitic.

Tony Greenstein

Letter to Gilad Atzmon from Paul Jay, The Real News Network
Dear Gilad,

Gilad, you asked for a chance to respond to Max Blumenthal’s accusation that your views are anti-Semitic. I promised to read some of your work and then reply. I've now read enough to give an answer.

First let me make a few things clear about my point of view.

I think any state based on religion or ethnicity is racist and inherently anti-democratic. Israel fits that bill, as do others.

I think the occupation of the West bank and siege of Gaza is illegal. In the brutal wars against the Palestinian people, Israel has committed countless war crimes.

If this was 1948, I would be opposed to the establishment of the State of Israel. A democratic, secular, inclusive state where everyone who was living on the territory of Palestine could become a citizen is what should have been created.

That is what should happen now. If Palestinians vote for a two-state solution that is their right, but it’s also their right to demand one-person one vote and thus transform the current Israeli state into a truly democratic one.

Now, let’s turn to your thesis.

I do not think that Zionism grows out of “Jewish ideology”. In fact, I reject the concept that there is something one can call a generic Jew or a Jewish ideology.

In your book The Wandering Who, you define Jewish ideology as someone who politically identifies as a Jew, “Jewishness is an ethno-centric ideology driven by exclusiveness, exceptionalism, racial supremacy and a deep inherent inclination toward segregation”.

In Israel, where national character and Jewish identity merge given the ethnic/religious basis of the state, this argument may have some merit, but it has nothing to do with the national and class ideology of thousands of Jews around the world who have little to no affinity with Israel and do not begin their political equation with “what’s good for the Jews”.

I’m not suggesting there are no such Jews, probably a majority at least when it comes to support for Israel. As odious as this is, this type of chauvinism is nothing unique, whether it’s Aryan, Han, Japanese, Russian, Saudi or American. Many nationalist cultures consider themselves to be “chosen” and “exceptional”.

Polling shows younger generations of American Jews are increasingly more distanced from feelings of affinity with Israel. Of course, they may adopt the religion or ideology of Americanism in its place (an ideology, in spite of its crimes, you seem to have no problem with as it’s not Jewish). 

The point is that the internalization of racism is not inherent in identifying ones cultural and ethnic roots as being Jewish, and to do so, is nothing uniquely Jewish.

Just as it is pointless talking about a generic Catholic without taking into consideration country of origin, national psychology, and most importantly class – it’s meaningless talking about a generic Jew.

There are Catholics whose politics begin with “what’s good for the Catholics” . . . mostly to be found in the Vatican, but not exclusively. There are many Muslims who say the same about Islam.

But millions of people identify as Catholics and Muslims who do not start their political equation from identity politics. There is no “Catholic ideology or Muslim ideology” above national and class interest. The world view of a Sri Lankan catholic peasant has far more in common with an Indian Hindu peasant than with a Brazilian catholic finance capitalist. That’s not to say there are no instances of tribalism that influence sections of the population, but again, nothing uniquely Jewish about it.

There is no generic Jew.

A Canadian of Jewish Ashkenazi East European origin, who has no religious beliefs but identifies as a cultural Jew, opposes the Israeli occupation, has some nostalgic feelings about grandparents who spoke Yiddish and made chicken soup on Fridays, and most importantly understands that the Nazis made no differentiation between believers and non-believers when they knocked down the door . . . has far more in common, shares more of a world view with a progressive Muslim Canadian, than with an Israeli Jew who is dripping with racist hatred for Palestinians.

Hitler and the Zionists created a vision of a generic Jew with a metaphysical identity, transmitted by blood or the product of a Jewish soul. The Zionists concocted that this “identity” necessarily leads to support for the State of Israel. That’s why they promoted Hebrew as a modern language and virtually suppressed Yiddish – to invent an identity out of time and place.

Your thesis is the same as the Zionists. Your “Jewish ideology” exists only in abstract form and you also conclude it necessarily leads to support for Zionism. Unless a Jew renounces being a Jew, as you have, they must believe in “exclusiveness, exceptionalism, racial supremacy and a deep inherent inclination toward segregation” . . . in one form or the other. Your definition transcends nation and class, because for you, the Jewish identity trumps all other factors.

You write on the comments section of TRNN, “My scholarship is not concerned with Judaism (the religion) nor am I referring to Jews (the people). I am critical of Jewish Identity politics and Jewish ideology. I elaborate on Jewish-ness and Jewish culture as opposed to Judaism. Race, genetics or biology have never been part of my study. If anything, I am critical largely of Jewish secular politics and culture rather than the Jewish religion.”

Your writing is so self-contradictory that I’m sure you can find a quote that will deal with all criticisms, even if your statements are opposed to each other.

You write in your email to me and elsewhere, “Zionism is a dynamic continuation of Jewish-ness: it (Zionism) is racist, exclusive, supremacist and self- centered, yet it is not Judaic. It has very little to do with Judaism. It may be messianic in a territorial sense, yet it lacks the Judaic divinity. In fact, in this sense, Zionism opposes Judaism." (The Wandering Who footnote 46, P’197)

Yet in the same email you write, “However, it is rather obvious and very embarrassing to admit that the Judaic God, as portrayed by Moses in Deuteronomy 6:10, is an immoral and evil God. It is a God who leads his people to plunder, robbery and theft.”

Further down you write “In short, it is actually impossible not to see the continuum between Deuteronomy 6:10 and the crime against the Palestinian people that is committed by the Jewish State in the name of the Jewish people”. 

So Jewish ideology is not Judaic, but its roots are to be found in a continuum from Deuteronomy 6:10.

You claim this is an attack on an ideology, not Jews themselves, but I think it’s mental gymnastics.  Certainly you admit to hating your own “Jewish ideology”, and when you assert that all those who ascribe to a Jewish identity necessarily have this ideology - it amounts to the same thing.

One could say, as the Catholic Church does, they don’t hate homosexuals, only their behavior, but it is completely disingenuous. Just as the Church is homophobic, your position is anti-Jewish.

Anti-Semitic because even though technically Semites include those from the region, since the late 19th century the term has been used to mean hatred of Jews. So I think Max Blumenthal’s charge is justified.

Do I believe you hate all Jews? No. But your theory leads to that.

I think you are rejecting a vicious form of racism that permeates Israeli society. For that I applaud you. It’s not easy to break with the pressure put on Israelis to fit the mold and give up any independent thinking.

This racism does express itself amongst some people of Jewish origin in North America and elsewhere, who as a result of experiencing the WWII genocide, or in a desperate search for meaning in their lives, or to create business alliances or advance their careers, have latched on to a fictitious poisonous brew cooked up by Zionist leaders to win support for the occupation.

But there are people who identify as Jews around the world, who reject all of this and share most, if not all, of the positions of the Palestinian solidarity movement. 

Your “Jewish ideology” also has nothing to do with the brave Israeli Jews who put their lives and freedom on the line working in the solidarity movement, or refuse to join the armed forces, and other forms of resistance. Most of them could leave but choose to stay and fight. They don’t have to renounce their identity as a Jew to denounce the racist nature of the state and call for an end to the occupation.

You have many critics who are activists and Jews in the Palestinian solidarity movement. You seem to have special venom for them, denouncing them as just another form of Zionist ideologues. 

But you have also been denounced by leading Palestinians. In a statement of which you must be aware, signed by twenty-three Palestinian activists, it says: 

“Atzmon’s politics rest on one main overriding assertion that serves as springboard for vicious attacks on anyone who disagrees with his obsession with “Jewishness”. He claims that all Jewish politics is “tribal,” and essentially, Zionist. Zionism, to Atzmon, is not a settler-colonial project, but a trans-historical “Jewish” one, part and parcel of defining one’s self as a Jew. Therefore, he claims, one cannot self-describe as a Jew and also do work in solidarity with Palestine, because to identify as a Jew is to be a Zionist. We could not disagree more. Indeed, we believe Atzmon’s argument is itself Zionist because it agrees with the ideology of Zionism and Israel that the only way to be a Jew is to be a Zionist”. I don’t think these leading Palestinian activists can be accused of basing their critique of you on their “Jewish ideology”.

I’m going to post this letter in the comments section under the Blumenthal interview. As far as you answering Max goes, or responding to this letter, you are free to write a response and have it posted there. But I will not interview you about these issues.

I believe your theories have no historical or factual basis. I share the view that your theories serve Zionist propaganda and divide the solidarity movement. I concur that your thesis is anti-Semitic at its core. I don’t think a debate about these issues is called for or serves any kind of useful intellectual endeavor. I will not get into a drawn out back and forth with you on this.

While I appreciate much of your critique of the Israeli state, your theoretical work on the roots of Zionism is just not a serious analysis.

Your hatred for all things politically left, especially Jewish and left, is superficial and banal. I quote your email to me, “Sadly we have to admit that hate-ridden plunder of other people’s possessions made it into the Jewish political discourse both on the left and right. The Jewish nationalist would rob Palestine in the name of the right of self-determination, the Jewish progressive is there to rob the ruling class and even international capital in the name of world working class revolution. I better stay out of it. “

It’s beyond me how you can’t see that the Israeli state is a product and significant piece of the system of international capital, something you seem anxious to defend from “Progressive Jewish robbers”. Here you reveal your ideological roots as a defender of the “ruling class”.

Your grandfather would have been proud; you describe him in your book as a “. . . veteran Zionist terrorist. A former prominent commander in the right-wing Irgun terror organization”. You write, “More than anything, though, my grandfather hated Jewish leftists”.

When you equate the militarist Zionist state's occupation of Palestinian lands with those who want a more equitable society, and call them all plunderers who share this “Jewish ideology” - then you also hate Jewish leftists "more than anything". You hate them more than Zionism and building a united front against it.

Paul Jay

Senior Editor
The Real News Network
↧
↧

Rewriting History – First the Holocaust now the Nakba – Netanyahu style

March 4, 2016, 10:36 am
$
0
0
It is illegal to teach about the Nakba in Israel today.  History is what the State says it is.  The word ‘Nakba’ is officially banned from Israeli, including Israeli Arab, textbooks.  By  banning a word, Israeli’s stupid leaders, led by Netanyahu, believe that they can rewrite history itself.  That Israel’s Palestinians will somehow forget about what happened in 1948.  What this is really about is removing knowledge of the Nakba from Israeli Jewish history.

However even the most stupid Police state doesn’t reclassify files that have already been declassified.  The secrets are already out.  They have already been studied.  What kind of mentality is it that believes that by reclosing the archives you can change or rewrite history?
I guess the mind of mentality that can rewrite the history of the holocaust and pretend that it was the Palestinians not Hitler who was responsible – step forward Netanyahu!

Tony Greenstein 

Classified: Politicizing the Nakba in Israel's state archives
Documents that have already been cited in history books are being re-classified in the State Archives.
Israeli troops in Gaza in 1957 when a number of massacres of civilians took place before Israel withdrew - all excised from official memory
Israeli state archive documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified in recent years, according to a recently hired assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Palestinian refugees fleeing to Lebanon in 1948
Shay Hazkani, who was Israel Channel 10′s military correspondent from 2004-8 and will soon complete his doctorate at New York University, discusses the background and politics of the state’s decision to re-classify various documents in an interviewfor the Ottoman History Podcast.
In the interview, which was recorded in July 2014 (I came across it recently by chance), Hazkani estimates that about one-third of documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified starting from the late 1990s, when the archives were digitized.

Embed from Getty Images

These reclassified documents were used extensively by prominent “new historians” like Benny Morris (“Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem”), Avi Shlaim (“The Iron Wall”), Hillel Cohen (“Good Arabs” and “1929″) and Ilan Pappe (“Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) and cited in their books.
But even though these books certainly exist in the public domain, and they do cite original documents in the Israeli state archives that note orders given to the nascent Israeli army to expel Palestinians during the 1948 war, the government of Israel continues to promote its official narrative — that the Palestinians left of their own accord. Hence the government and, more specifically, the security establishment attempts to control the discourse by re-classifying these documents.
The 25-minute interview is embedded below and well worth your time. Among other things, Hazkani explains that Israel adopted a law in 1955 that specified documents could be kept classified for a maximum of 50 years. But the Mossad, the army and the Shin Bet, which control very large archives, refused to comply with the law. Petitions to declassify specific documents have been brought before the higher courts, with some pending now.

Toward the end of the interview, Hazkani recounts a fascinating anecdote involving his own experience with re-classified documents, this time connected with an incident reported by Joe Sacco in his graphic novel “Footnotes in Gaza.” Sacco traveled to Gaza in 2002 and 2003 to research the book, which was published in 2009. The “footnote” refers to an incident that occurred during the Israeli army’s three-month occupation of Gaza during 1956-7, during the Suez War.
For the book, Sacco interviews several Palestinian eyewitnesses who describe having seen the Israeli army shoot and kill at least 100 civilians out of the hundreds that were rounded up and herded into a schoolyard in Rafah. According to the witnesses, the event took place on November 12, 1956. The details, as drawn and described in Sacco’s book, are quite harrowing, which explains why articlesabout the book published in Haaretz caused a furore. In the podcast, Hazkani recounts having followed the online discussions and debates about the claims in Sacco’s book.

One blogger, recounts Hazkani, writes in a post about having seen a specific document that confirms some of Sacco’s account. Hazkani happened to be on his way to the archive when he read that post; and since the blogger cited a specific file number, he asked to see it. But when he received the file, it contained a note that indicated the document had been reclassified the previous day — the same day the blogger had published his post.

There is obviously an inherent contradiction in Israeli authorities so clumsily trying to reclassify damning documents that have already been cited by well-known historians, even as it invests so much money and effort in promoting its image abroad as a transparent democracy. Israel is obviously not the only country that tries to shape its image by keeping documents classified for extended periods or even indefinitely. Hazkani mentions colonial archives recently uncovered in Britain, and Turkey’s still-classified archives from the Ottoman era. But Israel’s attempts to redact or classify documents after they have been extensively cited seems counter-productive at best.

1948 no catastrophe says Israel, as term nakba banned from Arab children's textbooks

Israel's education ministry has ordered the removal of the word nakba– Arabic for the "catastrophe" of the 1948 war – from a school textbook for young Arab children, it has been announced.

The decision – which will alter books aimed at eight- and nine-year-old Arab pupils – will be seen as a blunt assertion by Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud-led government of Israel's historical narrative over the Palestinian one.

The term nakba has a similar resonance for Palestinians as the Hebrew word shoah– normally used to describe the Nazi Holocaust – does for Israelis and Jews. Its inclusion in a book for the children of Arabs, who make up about a fifth of the Israeli population, drives at the heart of a polarised debate over what Israelis call their "war of independence": the 1948 conflict which secured the Jewish state after the British left Palestine, and led to the flight of 700,000 Palestinians, most of whom became refugees.

Netanyahu spoke for many Jewish Israelis two years ago when he argued that using the word nakba in Arab schools was tantamount to spreading propaganda against Israel.

Palestinians have always maintained that the 1948 refugees were the victims of Israeli "ethnic cleansing". But in recent years a new generation of revisionist Israeli historians has rejected the old official narrative that the Palestinians, supported by the neighbouring Arab states, were responsible for their own misfortune.

Reflecting those changing perceptions, Ehud Olmert, Israel's last prime minister and leader of the centrist Kadima party, referred to Palestinian "suffering" at the Annapolis peace conference in 2007.
Netanyahu's Likud takes a different view. "There is no reason to present the creation of the Israeli state as a catastrophe in an official teaching programme," said the education minister, Gideon Saar.

"The objective of the education system is not to deny the legitimacy of our state, nor promote extremism among Arab-Israelis."There was bitter controversy in 2007 when nakba was introduced into a book for use in Arab schools only, by the then education minister, Yuli Tamir of the centre-left Labour party.

"In no country in the world does an educational curriculum refer to the creation of the country as a 'catastrophe',"Saar told MPs in the Knesset yesterday. "There is a difference between referring to specific tragedies that take place in a war – either against the Jewish or Arab population – as catastrophes, and referring to the creation of the state as a catastrophe."

Arab MP Hana Sweid accused the government of "nakbadenial". The follow-up committee for Arab education said: "Palestinian-Arab society in Israel has every right to preserve its collective memory, including in its school curriculums."

Jafar Farrah, director of Mossawa (Equality), an Israeli-Arab advocacy group, told Reuters the decision to excise the term nakba only "complicated the conflict". He called it an attempt to distort the truth and seek confrontation with the country's Arab population.

Yossi Sarid, a dovish former education minister, said the decision showed insecurity. "Zionism has already won in many ways, and can afford to be more confident,"he said. "We need not be afraid of a word."

Israeli Arab activists have also pledged to carry on marking Nakba Day in the face of planned legislation that would withhold government money from institutions that fund activity deemed detrimental to the state.

These include commemorating the nakba– on the same day as Independence Day – "rejecting Israel's existence as the state of the Jewish people" and supporting an "armed struggle or terrorist acts"against Israel. An initial version proposed by the far-right foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman would have banned all Nakba commemorations and carried sentences of up to three years in prison.

By the book

Japan has long been criticised for toning down aspects of its wartime atrocities in textbooks, particularly the Nanjing massacre and use of sex slaves. Russia has taken up Soviet techniques of airbrushing history, a book being banned two years ago for positing that Vladimir Putin had established an "authoritarian dictatorship". A decade after Nelson Mandela's release from prison, black schoolchildren in South Africa were still studying textbooks that extolled the voortrekkers and offered only minimal explanations of their own history. In Britainit was an exam paper that caused offence when a poem by Carol Ann Duffy containing referencing knife crime was removed from the GCSE syllabus. The Carol Ann Duffy poem began: "Today I am going to kill something. Anything./ I have had enough of being ignored and today/ I am going to play God."
↧

Iran’s Brutal Suppression of the Kurds

March 4, 2016, 11:15 am
$
0
0
Bahar was an active member of the Komala, a Kurdish political group that pushed for agrarian reform, workers' and women's rights and the importance of diminishing the clout of tribal chieftains. In the aftermath of the uprising, she was arrested by the Revolutionary Guards for one year due to her political involvement. She has lost track of how many of her friends and acquaintances were executed. (Photo: Airin Bahmani)
There is a widespread belief that because Iran is or was in conflict with the United States and because of the hostility of Netanyahu and the Israeli state, it is therefore a progressive state.  The article below on the brutal repression of the Iranian Kurds shows that the Iranian state is one of the most repressive in the world.

The Iranian state itself, with the use of the Basij, the paramilitary wing of the Revolutionary Guards, and the penetration of its agents into every level of society best resembles both the Stalinist use of the secret police, for example the Stasi and Hitler’s use of Nazi party spies and watchers at every level of society.

Iran is currently executing something like 1,000 people a year, dwarfing even Saudi Arabia and second only to China.  Its method of execution, which is hanging from cranes, is more akin to slow strangulation and therefore particularly barbaric.
Sanandaj is the main stage of the young Shiite regime's massive counterinsurgency against progressive Kurdish aspirations. (Photo: Airin Bahmani)
The West, which now sees large profits beckoning with the end of sanctions, is quite willing to avert its eyes from the repression of the regime because the West’s conflict with Iran was never about human rights (although it was a useful pretext).  Trade always oils human rights abuses and Iran is no exception.  There are differences between Saudi Arabia and Iran, not least in the vigorous civil society in the latter, which is more testament to the populace and the legacy of secularism rather than the brutal rule of the Islamic clerics.  Likewise women are in a stronger position in Iran compared to Saudi Arabia.

Although of course anti-imperialists will always support Iran against Israel, which is the main arm of imperialism in the Middle East, this should not mean that we support the Islamic state of Iran when it comes to the Kurds or its own people.

Tony Greenstein

Iran's Kurdish Leftists Share Experience of Post-Revolution State Repression

Friday, 26 February 2016 00:00 By Bruno Jäntti and Airin Bahmani, Truthout | News Analysis

Daughters of Mariam were involved in Kurdish leftist politics before, during and after the ousting of the Shah. Two of the daughters were arrested and tortured. One was executed. (Photo: Airin Bahmani)
A view of the city of Sanandaj, the center of Kurdish life in Iran, marks the end of a hectic, eight-hour-long bus trip. The shuttle zigzags higher up, affording a rugged view of one of Iran's northwestern mountain ranges and a stunning valley where Sanandaj is located.

At the city border, there is a checkpoint operated by the Revolutionary Guards. This is the first contact with state officials during the more than 500-kilometer journey from the Iranian capital of Tehran to the unofficial Kurdish capital. Iranian authorities inspect and keep record of all vehicles to and from Sanandaj. After armed officials of the Revolutionary Guards have searched our shuttle, we are permitted to continue to the city.
Sanandaj is the main stage of the young Shiite regime's massive counterinsurgency against progressive Kurdish aspirations. (Photo: Airin Bahmani)
High walls rise in Sanandaj, extend for many kilometers and enclose vast areas, forming a number of closed zones within the city. "State officials, including personnel of the enormous security apparatus, have their own shops, schools, hospitals, swimming pools and gyms. They have small cities inside Sanandaj," according to Bahar, an Iranian Kurdish woman in her 50s who has been deeply involved in Kurdish left-wing politics before, during and after the Iranian revolution. "Government employees live a well-off, sheltered life behind their walls and fences."

In Iran, the Revolutionary Guards, institutionally separated from the military, preserve the country's politico-religious system of government. Following the Iranian Constitution, the Revolutionary Guards enforce the Shiite norms of the Islamic Republic. Basij, the paramilitary subdivision of the Revolutionary Guards, serves as a national intelligence network and imposes adherence to the state's moral code.
Kurdish men in Sanandaj. Iran is exceptionally diverse ethnically, religiously and linguistically. According to human rights groups, the Islamist leadership continues to discriminate against many of the country's minorities. (Photo: Airin Bahmani)
The Iranian government recruits citizens to Basij from nearly all spheres of Iranian society. According to a conservative estimate, the number of Iranians who belong to the Basij system is in the millions. During peacetime, Basij's duties include gathering intelligence on the political views of private citizens and communities and providing that information to the relevant state organs.
Among Iranian left-leaning dissidents and organizers, Basij is known for apprehending and subduing critical political activists. Bahar describes Basij as the eyes and ears of the government. "The efficacy of the institution is based on its gigantic size as it aggressively operates and recruits in comprehensive schools, associations and institutions - both government and privately owned - and at university level.
"Anyone can be a Basiji. It is not a rare occurrence that a Basiji hides his or her state affiliations from family and relatives," Bahar said.
Kurdish men in Sanandaj. Iran is exceptionally diverse ethnically, religiously and linguistically. According to human rights groups, the Islamist leadership continues to discriminate against many of the country's minorities. (Photo: Airin Bahmani)
The perks and benefits that Basij collaboration entails are considerable and enticing to many citizens who might otherwise not harbor deep-seated sympathies or loyalties to the Shiite leadership.

The perks include monetary bonuses, housing benefits and food stamps. Senior high school students joining Basij may be rewarded with scholarships to prestigious universities. It is likely that US-driven sanctions against Iran used to make these carrots ever more tempting. In a survey conducted in Tehran, 55.4 percent of Basij members were working class and 43.4 percent were lower middle class. Furthermore, official Iranian sources confirm that 62 percent of Iranians regard the multiple benefits offered by the state to Basij members to be the primary motive behind citizens' interest to join the organization.
Roja's son was executed by the state as part of the suppression of the uprising. (Photo: Airin Bahmani)
Quelling the Progressive Iranian Kurdish Uprising

The atmosphere of suspiciousness and cautiousness instigated by Basij has a decades-long history, not least in the Kurdish areas of the country. For Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamist cadre, which had just spearheaded a revolution, arguably the gravest and most immediate domestic challenge emerged from northwestern Iran in the form of a progressive, democratic and pluralistic Kurdish grassroots uprising.

During and after the Iranian revolution, the most powerful Kurdish political groupings were the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI) and the Komala. The KDPI advocated for a center-left platform and sought to secure Kurdish autonomy from Khomeini. Already in April 1979, the KDPI presented the government an elaborate deal in which Tehran would take the lead in matters of defense, foreign relations and long-term economic planning. In return, the central government would allow the establishment of an autonomous Kurdistan with its own parliament, which would exercise far-reaching legislative powers. In the KDPI's proposal, Kurdish was to be recognized as an official language along with Persian.

Partly in agreement with the KDPI's autonomy model, the Komala platform revolved around an emphasis on agrarian reform, workers' and women's rights and the importance of diminishing the clout of tribal chieftains. Initially a Marxist and feminist underground established in the late 1960s, the Komala gained immense popularity among Iranian Kurds soon after the revolution. The Komala enjoyed vast support among the country's Kurdish population and had its most prominent strongholds in Sanandaj, Marivan and Baneh - all significant Kurdish cities in close proximity to one another.

"Fostering democratic process with a strong emphasis on a feminist and pluralistic platform was among the primary aims of our insurrection,"Bahar said.

Although a solid majority of Iranian Kurds had supported the revolution, no consensus was reached between any Kurdish organizations and Khomeini on the future status of Iranian Kurdistan. Soon, fighting erupted between government forces and Kurdish fighters. The ensuing confrontation between the Shiite triumphalists and Kurdish political movements was to be a showcase not only for the Revolutionary Guards and its paramilitary Basij, but for the entire Islamist enterprise.

Of the numerous Iranian Kurdish cities, Sanandaj swiftly emerged not only as the center of left-oriented Kurdish popular uprising, but the main stage of the armed conflict. Exuding confidence in its ability to comprehensively reconfigure the post-Shah Iranian state at a rapid pace, the Shiite elite launched a full-scale counterinsurgency. Kurdish cities became targets of a heavy bombing campaign as the Islamists fired shells from state installations within those cities. Tehran also deployed its air force against the Kurdish rebellion.

Ultimately, incursion by the Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitaries into Iran's Kurdish cities, particularly Sanandaj, proved an epoch-making event in the counterinsurgency. The Revolutionary Guards quickly smashed the armed wing of the revolt. State forces began searching houses one by one, hunting down the architects of the insurgency.

After resorting to a large-scale program of torture, interrogation and blackmail, the Iranian authorities managed to chart the structure and plans of the rebellion. Between 1979 and 1982, the Iranian government killed approximately 10,000 Kurds - a considerable portion in mass executions.Lasting Emotional and Physical Trauma

Every single eyewitness interviewee of ours, including Bahar, recollects how the state delivered death sentences in the style of an assembly line. A preponderance of the death sentences was issued by the judge Ayatollah Sadiq Khalkhali, who earned the nickname the "Hanging Judge." Our interviewees stressed the personal role of Khalkhali in subduing the uprising.

When Khalkhali died in 2003, his legacy was praised in the Iranian Parliament. Speaker of the Parliament Mehdi Karoubi paid tribute, in particular, to Khalkhali's performance in the early phases of the revolution.

"We were all waiting for our turn,"Bahar said. "Participants in the uprising were being arbitrarily executed. State forces inflicted the most cold-blooded torture techniques on us, making sure that those of us who they preferred alive did not die."

Bahar was released after a year in custody. Most of her family members were either summarily executed or managed to flee the country.

"Later, we got back the body of our cousin Reza, a member of the Komala,"Bahar said. "His torso was full of burns, contusions and bruises. A large emblem of Iran, the crescent and a sword, was burned to his rib cage. Reza was far from the only member of my family who was tortured to death."

Later, the Revolutionary Guards destroyed Reza's grave, alongside the graves of all other known political activists and prisoners. It was inconceivable for the authorities to allow any indication of a political status of those buried in the main cemetery in Sanandaj. Furthermore, they did not tolerate the gravestones to be inscribed with the names of the deceased if they had any affiliations with the uprising.

After the early phases of the uprising, the authorities stopped delivering the bodies of Kurdish activists back to their families. "All we have left of Reza is his memory and a location he was buried in,"Bahar said.

It is not just through the experiences of her family members and friends that Bahar is familiar with the details of the state's counterinsurgency campaign. In 1983, she was arrested by the Revolutionary Guards.

"We were taken to an interrogation room one by one. When it was my turn, they blindfolded me and brought me into the room. There were a number of interrogators and officers present. They forced me to lie down on my stomach and tied me to a metal bed. I was bombarded with questions on my political activities, my motives, my comrades and their whereabouts. My answers did not appeal to the interrogators. They began lashing the soles of my feet with power cables. This happened continuously, day after day, until I was unable to walk. If I wanted to move, I had to crawl. The interrogators brought me a wheelchair. Then the foot whipping continued."

In its crackdown on the uprising, the Iranian government routinely resorted to lethal torture as well as torture that caused permanent damage. "The pain inflicted on many of us was so severe that it will stay with us for the rest of our lives. Presently, in 2015, I can still feel it every single day. Bastinado [foot whipping] led to neuralgia. According to a doctor, nerve pathways in my feet have been damaged and will never heal."

Bahar shared in great detail how she and all of her comrades gave it their all, as she put it, "to finally emancipate [Iran] from the yoke of authoritarianism ... [which the nation] had witnessed since the ousting of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953."

The organizers of the uprising will carry with them the defeat they suffered for the rest of their lives. "We longed for a social and political change and were ready to risk everything to attain it," Bahar said. "Notwithstanding our best efforts, we did not succeed. What we were left with is lasting emotional and physical trauma."

Roja, an 84-year-old woman of Kurdish descent whose nine children all participated in the uprising as members of the Komala, digs up a photo album of her son who was executed in Sanandaj in 1982. It is prohibited to engage in any commemoration of those killed in the suppression of the uprising, hence documents such as photos must be hidden. As routine practice, Revolutionary Guards deploy officers to put an end to all forms of organized commemoration.

Looking at photos of her son, Roja commented on the political trajectory of Iran after the Shah. Roja, who has lived under the rule of Reza Shah, Mohammed Mossadegh, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and now the Islamists, observed that never in her lifetime "has there been such a long period marked by a lack of momentum in Kurdish popular-based progressive politics as after the quelling of the uprising in the early 1980s. The state reached its goal of completely annihilating Kurdish leftism."

That every single one of our 24 interviewees can list countless people from their circle of acquaintances who were either executed or severely tortured suggests the scope and brutality of Tehran's counterinsurgency.

A most salient conclusion to be drawn from our interviews with organizers of and participants in the uprising is that the Shiite republic ultimately succeeded in completing something in which even the Shah and his secret police, the Savak, had failed: obliterating the socialist and progressive political momentum among the Iranian Kurds.

Copyright, Truthout. 

Airin Bahmani

Airin Bahmani is an Iranian Kurdish political commentator specializing in the domestic and foreign policies of Iran. She is regularly featured in the Finnish media as a pundit on Islamophobia, Kurdish politics, feminism and the Islamic State. She majors in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Helsinki.

Bruno Jäntti

Bruno Jäntti is an investigative journalist specializing in international affairs. He is a contributor to Al Jazeera, Le Monde Diplomatique and a number of Finnish newspapers and magazines. He focuses on Middle Eastern political processes and has worked extensively in the region, including Northern and Southern Kurdistan.

Related Stories

Kurdish Political Prisoners on Hunger Strike in Turkey: An Open Letter
By Richard D. Wolff, Peace and Democracy Party | Press Release
The No State Solution: Institutionalizing Libertarian Socialism in Kurdistan
By Alexander Kolokotronis, New Politics | Report
Arduous Battle of Kurdish Socialist Forces in Rojhelat
By Bruno Jäntti, SpeakOut | Op-Ed 
↧
Search

Jeremy Corbyn and the Retreat from Palestine

March 5, 2016, 3:59 pm
$
0
0

Elected as supporter of the Palestinians - beating the retreat
Jeremy Corbyn's recent statements to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is a wholly Zionist and establishment group, that he recognises Israel's 'right to exist' [no one doubts the State exists, the question is what type of State it is] is a formula indicating acceptance of Israel's right to be an Apartheid state. When this is coupled with Corbyn's appointment of an overt Zionist Fabian Hamilton, to join Hilary Benn in the Shadow Foreign Office team, it is clear that Corbyn has retreated in regard to his previous support of the Palestinians.
Stephen Pollard - Jewish Chronicle Editor, launched attack on 'anti-Semitic' Corbyn.  Has no problem defending real anti-Semites like Michal Kaminski
Corbyn's overt support for a 2 States solution, which no Israeli government minister supports and which no observer believes is possible, given the extent of colonisation and settlement of the West Bank, is a code for accepting the current status quo. Over 4 million Palestinians are subject to a different legal system (military) from that of the Jewish settlers (civil Israeli law) in the same area, the West Bank. This is Apartheid.
Fabian Hamilton - Zionist who calls Palestinian supporters 'anti-Semitic' - appointed by Corbyn as junior Shadow Foreign Office Minister
“This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognise Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.” Tzipi Hotoveli, Deputy Foreign Minister, Israel
In the words of Israel’s religious nutcase and Deputy Foreign Minister, Tzipi Hotoveli, “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognise Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.”
Bishop Desmond Tutu - calls Israel worse than Apartheid in South Africa - obviously anti-Semitic!
Giving lip service to a '2 States solution' provides a pretext for the continuation of the present Apartheid situation. Israel cannot grant the right to vote or any other civil or political rights for those living under Israeli military rule because this would threaten Israel's Jewish majority in the Jewish State. The 2 States formula is a means of avoiding having to confront the fact that there is a conflict between being a Jewish State and a Democratic State.
Michal Kaminski - fresh from calling on the remnant of Polish Jews to apologise to their oppressors, pays tribute to the holocaust dead at the Yad Vashem propaganda museum in Jerusalem
My article details the recent history of Zionist attacks on Corbyn and how he has responded by trying to appease those critics. Of course appeasment only whets the appetite of the aggressor, witness the recent attacks on Oxford University Labour Club for 'anti-Semitism'

No backtracking on Palestine

Unfortunately the Labour leader appears to be beating a retreat, writes Tony Greenstein


Jeremy Corbyn: long and consistent record

I first met Jeremy Corbyn over 30 years ago when I chaired the Labour Committee on Palestine/Labour Movement Campaign on Palestine.1 It would be no exaggeration to say that Jeremy, along with Ken Livingstone and the late Joan Maynard, were the most consistent supporters of the Palestinians. He later became a patron of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a regular fixture at PSC annual general meetings.
Hilary Benn - Shadow Foreign Minister who believes Saudi allies in Syria are part of a socialist, anti-fascist struggle
The policy of the LMCP, which Jeremy Corbyn sponsored, was to support a democratic, secular state in the whole of Palestine rather than a two-state solution. We did not support the ‘right to exist’ of the apartheid state of Israel, for whom its Palestinian citizens are a demographic threat. We supported the creation of a unitary state of its own citizens, regardless of ethnic or religious affiliation, rather than a state of the Jews.

The 1982 Labour Party conference, held in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, passed an emergency resolution calling for a democratic, secular state in the whole of Palestine. People forget the international reaction to an invasion which killed over 20,000 people. Two thousand Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps were butchered with medieval savagery by Israel’s Phalangist allies. The Israeli army lit up the night sky in order that they could kill their victims, mainly women and children, more efficiently. The Labour Party reaction mirrored that of British society, which was one of horror. In Britain a group of us formed the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
It was therefore no surprise that the Zionist movement, when it was obvious that Corbyn was heading for victory in the Labour Party leadership contest, pulled out all the stops to prevent it. Together with the Daily Mail, Zionists attempted to brand him a holocaust denier. This is somewhat ironic, given that in the 1930s the most pro-Hitler paper was the same Daily Mail. Citing a magistrate who had complained that “The way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage”, the Mail commented that “the number of aliens entering the country through the back door [is] a problem to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed”.2
Jonathan Arkus of the Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews
On the basis of an article alleging that Corbyn had attended a concert organised by a holocaust denier, Paul Eisen,3 the Zionist movement engaged in a conscious and sustained smear campaign. Leading the pack was the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, a member of the cold-war far-right Henry Jackson Society, who posed a series of questions to Corbyn.4
Unfortunately, instead of responding with a few questions of its own, Corbyn’s campaign decided to treat them as genuine queries. Needless to say, their answers were never going to satisfy the Zionists. Those of us with experience of the Zionist attack dogs know that they cry ‘anti-Semitism’ whenever support for the Palestinians is on the agenda. Only last month Oxford University Labour Club was the subject of vicious attacks - it was labelled anti-Semitic after it decided to support Israeli Apartheid Week.5
Stephen Pollard - Editor of the Jewish Chronicle and friend of anti-Semites who support Israel
It is no accident that the Zionist movement in this country acted as the outrider for those who wanted to keep the Labour Party safe for capitalism. It is an article of faith for New Labour that they must stand firmly alongside US imperialism - which means unquestioning support for the Israeli state. ‘Anti-Semitism’ has become the rallying cry of The Guardian, its Comment is free editor Jonathan Freedland and liberal bourgeois opinion in general.

‘Anti-Semitism’ is today’s false anti-racism of the right.6 It is sometimes called ‘new anti-Semitism’ to distinguish it from the traditional variety. ‘New anti-Semitism’ has nothing to do with hatred of, discrimination or violence against Jews. It is about opposition to Zionism and the state of Israel.
According to Abe Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League (which specialises in defaming its opponents), Israel has become “the Jew among the nations”.7 Criticise Israel and you are criticising the collective Jew, which makes you an anti-Semite! If you criticise Israel for its confiscation of land or locking up Palestinian children and torturing them, then you are a vicious Jew hater. Telling the truth can be equivalent to anti-Semitism where Israel is concerned.

Zionist anti-Semitism

Of course, if you hate Jews but love Israel then there is no problem. Even English Defence League thugs understood this when they physically attacked the stall of Birmingham Palestine Solidarity Campaign, carrying an Israeli flag in one hand, whilst giving Hitler salutes with the other!8

Christian Zionism provides the best example of this form of anti-Semitism. According to pastor John Hagee, president of the million-strong Christians United for Israel, Adolf Hitler was not so much a genocidal anti-Semite as a hunter, sent by god to drive the Jews to Israel!9 According to Hagee’s interpretation of Jeremiah, Hitler was an agent of God! Abe Foxman, always eager to detect signs of ‘anti-Semitism’ when criticism of Israel is involved, leapt to Hagee’s support: “Pastor Hagee has devoted his life to combating anti-Semitism and supporting the state of Israel.”10

Stephen Pollard is a British replica of Foxman. In 2009, the Tories left the European People’s Party in the European parliament, and joined the European Conservative and Reformist Group. The ECRG contained far-right politicians such as Michał Kamiński of Poland’s Law and Justice Party and Robert Zile of Latvia’s For Fatherland and Freedom.

Both Kamiński and Zile had a record of support for fascism and anti-Semitism. On July 10 1941, up to 900 Jews were burnt alive in a barn by fellow Poles, under the approving eye of the SS, in the village of Jedwabne. Although the majority of Jedwabne’s population was Jewish before World War II, today there are no Jews left in what was a 300-year old community.11 Polish-Jewish historian Jan Tomasz Gross estimated that 300 Jews had been burnt alive,12 but a subsequent book by Anna Bikont13 revises these figures to over 900. The massacre led to a national Polish apology in 2001.
Jedwabne was represented by Kamiński in the Polish parliament from 1997. He vigorously campaigned against any apology. In an interview with the nationalist Nasza Polska newspaper in March 2001, Kamiński argued that Poles should not apologise for Jedwabne until Jews apologised for “murdering Poles”.14 Kamiński had previously worn the Mieczyk Chrobrego - the Chrobry sword, symbol of the National Radical Camp, which “practised violent anti-Semitism, including attacks on Jewish students, buildings and businesses, organised boycotts of Jewish businesses and attacks on leftwing groups”.15

None of this, however, stopped Pollard, who led the campaign to smear Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-Semite, from defending Michał Kamiński. In a quite extraordinary article for The Guardian16 Pollard claimed that Kamiński was “one of the greatest friends to the Jews in a town [Brussels] where anti-Semitism and a visceral loathing of Israel are rife”. Note the sleight of hand. Kamiński is a “friend to the Jews” because of his support for Israel, notwithstanding the fact that he is an anti-Semite.

Historically anti-Semites have been some of the strongest supporters of Zionism, from Édouard Drumont and Heinrich Class to Adolf Eichmann and Alfred Rosenberg. Next year the Zionists will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, when Britain, in the form of its foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, agreed to sponsor the Zionist settlement in Palestine. Balfour was also the home secretary who, in 1905, introduced the Aliens Act, whose aim was to prevent Jewish refugees from Czarist Russia entering Britain.

Kamiński has been feted in Israel. Not only has he made the ritual trip to Yad Vashem, the holocaust propaganda museum in Jerusalem, but in 2009 he was a guest speaker at the World Summit on Counterterrorism conference at Herzliya.17

 Robert Zile is also a fully paid up anti-Semite. Every March he marches with the veterans of the Latvian Waffen SS in Riga. Yet like Kamiński he is a strong supporter of Israel.

Appeasement

Instead of responding to the Zionist attacks on him by pointing to their hypocrisy, Corbyn has chosen to appease his critics by playing down his support for the Palestinians and retreating into meaningless soundbites.

For example, Corbyn sent a letter to a Zionist heckler at the Labour Friends of Israel meeting he addressed at Labour Party conference, reassuring him that he was pleased to “have the opportunity to express how I felt about progressing the peace process in the Middle East … Israel has always, and will continue to be, recognised by both myself and the Labour Party.”

Last week, following talks with Corbyn, the Board of Deputies of British Jews was quoted as saying that they “were pleased that Mr Corbyn gave a very solid commitment to the right of Israel to live within secure and recognised boundaries as part of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict”, whilst demanding “more clarity” that the Labour Party “will maintain its longstanding opposition to boycotts against Israel”.18

People need to face up to the fact that one of the consequences of the attacks on Corbyn has been a retreat from his previous political positions. I have never heard Corbyn previously speaking about the need to recognise the state of Israel. He used to be more concerned about recognising its repressive qualities. Instead of distinguishing between the oppressor and the oppressed, the coloniser and the colonised, Corbyn has depoliticised the issue, calling for peace in the abstract.

It is as if Corbyn had called for peace between white proponents of apartheid and black South Africans rather than supporting the abolition of apartheid. This is one of the political liabilities of Corbyn’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament-style politics. Instead of opposing imperialism and Zionist settler colonialism, Corbyn imagines that ‘conflict resolution’ via United Nations diplomacy will solve what is at heart a political problem - the racist oppression, dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians.

No-one in Israel seriously believes that a two-state solution is achievable. There is not one government minister who supports it. The leader of the Israeli Labour Party, who is more hawkish than prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, also opposes a two-state solution. In the words of Israel’s religious nutcase and deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotoveli, “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognise Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.”19

Corbyn retreats into the weasel words of Israel’s ‘right to exist’. The problem is not Israel’s rights, but the lack of Palestinian rights. Israel defines itself as a Jewish state. What does that mean? It is a state which counts how many Jews it has compared to non-Jews. It is an ethno-religious state, in which Jews have privileges compared to non-Jews. So, for example, because I am Jewish, I have an automatic right to ‘return’ to a state where I have never lived. Palestinians who were born in Jerusalem have no such right. But like all settler states, Israel is very good at portraying itself as the victim. Corbyn pays homage to Israel’s right to ‘secure borders’ (Israel frames its racism in terms of its own security needs), while it seems Palestinians have no need of security.

Not only is partition - a two-state solution - neither desirable nor feasible, but it serves as a pretext for Israel’s continuing denial of even the most basic civil or political rights for Palestinians in the occupied territories. ‘Two states’ provides a justification for a situation where there are two legal systems - military law for the Palestinians and civil Israeli law for Jewish settlers on the West Bank. The idea that Israel is going to withdraw over 600,000 settlers behind an imaginary green line is the stuff of dreams.

Jeremy Corbyn, as a patron of PSC, was a supporter of boycott, divestment and sanctions. But this is an issue over which he has recently gone very quiet. Corbyn has forgotten that Israel is a Jewish supremacist state, which defines its Jewishness in terms of maintaining an 80% Jewish majority population. It is a state where virtually all areas of public life, from housing to education and employment, are segregated. A symptom of Israel’s Nuremberg mentality is the decision of the education ministry to ban a book, Borderlife, from the high school syllabus because it depicts a romantic relationship between Jewish and Arab teenagers. In an ethno-religious state, inter-marriage is seen as equivalent to national treason, a betrayal of one’s racial kith and kin.20

Corbyn’s retreat from the Palestinians is best demonstrated by the appointment of a rightwing Zionist, Fabian Hamilton, as a junior shadow foreign office minister. In a recent article Hamilton was quoted as saying that boycotting the Jewish state without taking action against other countries is “simply anti-Semitic”.21Perhaps Bishop Desmond Tutu and Ronnie Kasrils (a Jewish member of the African National Congress and former government minister in South Africa) are also anti-Semitic for supporting a boycott of Israel?

Hamilton said that he was “staggered” to have been appointed and that when he initially asked if his support for Israel was a problem, he was “told by Corbyn’s office in clear terms it wasn’t”. I was also staggered by this totally unnecessary concession to the Zionist right. The appointment of an open Zionist suggests that Corbyn has effectively decided to abandon his previous support for the Palestinians.

Appeasement of Labour Friends of Israel will not serve the cause of either socialism or peace in the Middle East. Nor will it help Corbyn’s own precarious position as leader. Quite the contrary.

Notes

1  . In 1982, following the passing of our successful amendment at the 1982 Labour Party conference, the Labour Committee on Palestine was taken over by the Workers Revolutionary Party, with the help of our Treasurer, Ted Knight.
2 . Daily Mail August 20 1938.
3 . Daily Mail August 7 2015.
4 . Jewish Chronicle August 12 2015.
5 . See letter from 22 Jewish people:
6 . See T Greenstein, ‘Redefining anti-Semitism - the false anti-racism of the right’ Return No5, December 1990.
7 . Israel now Jew Among Nations - Foxman
8 . The Fascist EDL Attacks Birmingham Palestine Solidarity Campaign Stall
9 . Hagee: Pro-Israel, Anti-Semitic?  The Nation  23.5.08.  Max Blumenthall.
10 . www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-wilson/hagee-still-sells-controv_b_107545.html.
11 . Pastor Hagee Still Sells Controversial 2005 'God Sent Hitler' Sermon, Apologizes To ADL For Wrong Sermon Huff Post Politics 23.5.11.
12 . T Gross Neighbours: the destruction of the Jewish community in Jedwabne, Poland London 2000.
13 . The crime and the silence, which won the European Book Prize in 2011.
14 . The Observer October 11 2009.
15 . Jewish Chronicle October 10 2009.
16 . The Guardian October 9 2009.
17. World Summit on Counter Terrorism: Terrorism’s Global Impact - ICT’s 9th International Conference
18 . Jewish Chronicle February 9 2016.
19 . The Guardian May 22 2015.
20 . ‘Marriage to an Arab is national treason’ Ynet 27.3.07.  Roee Nahmias
21 . Jewish News January 13 2016.
↧

Without Comment

March 6, 2016, 10:53 am
$
0
0
Mossad Agents Monitoring Dolphin Nuclear-Armed Sub Get Stuck in Mud, German Mayor Sends $2,000 Towing Bill to Mossad

Screenshot from German TV report of Dolphin sub in German canal
A German TV new segment reports (German/video) that recently several Mossad agents were found monitoring the progress of a German-built nuclear-armed Dolphin submarine headed through a northern German canal to Israel. The Mossad spies were presumably offering security or monitoring the progress of the sub near the shipyard where it was built on the Baltic as it made its way through the canal to the North Sea (and from there to the Atlantic).  I suspect they were offering security in case someone sought to harm the sub or videotape it as it sailed on the surface of the canal.

North German mayor shows spot where Mossad spies got stuck in mud
In order to track the sub, the bungling spies rented a car and stashed their automatic weapons (!) in the car.  But they didn’t foresee that the ground along the canal would be muddy from winter rain.  Nor did they rent a vehicle with four wheel drive.  To top it all off, they entered a forbidden zone along the canal, where their vehicle promptly got stuck in the mud.

At first, asking for help, they [the Mossadniks] had approached a local elderly lady, who notified the mayor. They explained to the mayor that they were investigating the environment because they were planning to sail the channel this upcoming summer.** This sounded “funny” to the mayor, [no one “sails” in the channel since it’s too dangerous–everyone uses their engines] and he called the police, who found two automatic weapons (“Maschinenpistolen”) in the trunk. At this point, they changed their story, claiming to hold Israeli diplomatic status, and that they were there to monitor the German/Israeli submarine (transponder: NOK28), which true enough passed through the channel on that day.

The Germans then ordered a tractor to pull them out of the mud. The bill: 1263€. The town mayor was pretty upset to find Israeli spies in his jurisdiction.  Especially when he had to pay the bill for their ineptitude.  So he sent the bill to the Israeli embassy for immediate payment!  He also wondered how it was that Mossad agents were entitled to carry automatic weapons in their vehicle.

It is absolutely shameful for any Mossad agent to be forced to blow his cover on foreign soil.  These guys were probably immediately shipped back the Mossad HQ for retraining or cashiering!

Just as Bibi Netanyahu and his polices are driving Israel into the mud, so too this Mossad caper drove these poor shleppers into the mud.  Too many parallels to let this go without comment!!

Here is more background reporting on the Dolphin submarine program which (in a dark irony) offers Israel the ability to incinerate the Middle East in another Holocaust.


Thanks for parsing some of the finer points of the news report go to a German-speaking Facebook Friend.  And thanks for the passage translated above to Jens Moeller Andreasen. H/t to Christoph Germann for his tweeton the original German TV story.
↧
↧

Sir Michael Marmot Turns A Blind Eye to the Israeli Medical Association's Complicity in Torture

March 8, 2016, 3:39 pm
$
0
0
Ironically the WMA resolution on the Prohibition of Doctors' Involvement in Torture was passed in Israel where doctors freely participate in torture, with the blessing of the Israeli and World Medical Association
This letter below is from the electronic edition of the British Medical Journal from retired consultant physician Dr Chris Burns-Cox and consultant psychiatrist Dr Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry.

Dr Derek Summerfield
Dr Chris  Burns-Cox





















It concerns the deliberate turning of a blind eye by the World Medical Association, whose President is British doctor Sir Michael Marmot, to the complicity of Israeli doctors in the torture of Palestinian prisoners.  Just as with the involvement of American doctors in CIA torture, the WMA neither sees, hears or says anything.

If  you are a doctor and interesting in joining the 71 British doctors who, earlier this year, submitted a complaint to the WMA please contact derek.summerfield@googlemail.com
The Israeli Medical Association Condones and Approves of Israeli Doctors' Participation in Torture and Openly Refuses to Listen to Evidence From Those Who Are Tortured

The campaign about doctors and torture in Israel five years on

Yoram Blachar - Israeli President of WMA - consistently supported IMA's complicity with torture
It is 20 years since Amnesty International concluded that Israeli doctors working with the security services “form part of a system in which detainees are tortured, ill-treated and humiliated in ways that place prison medical practice in conflict with medical ethics”. (1) In 2009 725 physicians from 43 countries appealed to the World Medical Association (WMA), the official international watchdog for medical ethics, attaching a raft of more recent evidence from reputable human rights organisations which supported Amnesty’s conclusions, and pointed to the studied refusal of the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) to take action. The IMA is a WMA member and at the time the WMA President was the IMA President Yoram Blachar. The WMA refused even to acknowledge the submission and it became clear that the WMA would not act against the IMA under any circumstances.(2)

We write as lead signatory (CB-C) and convenor (DS) of a fresh submission made in January this year by 71 UK doctors to the WMA, attaching a comprehensive report from the Israeli organisation Physicians for Human Rights (PHRI), with detailed case studies showing the complicity of Israeli doctors working in security units in which torture of Palestinian detainees was routine.(3) The BMJ has previously reported on this.(4) We also submitted a study published last November which showed that sexual torture too was endemic.(5) Why are the doctors posted to these units not protecting the detainees and protesting, and why has the IMA never acted on such reports, as required to do by the WMA Declaration of Tokyo? The new WMA President is the UK medical academic Sir Michael Marmot, and we looked to him to bring his international reputation to bear on a case that has been a standing reproach to the idea that global regulation of the ethical behaviour of doctors is even-handed and effective.

Marmot sent us an acknowledgement of receipt on 18 January. Within days, alerted by various reports of an IMA victory, we were staggered to see on the website of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (wiesenthal.com) a letter from the WMA President on WMA notepaper, dated 25 January.(6) Written to Dr Shimon Samuels, Director for International Relations at the Centre, Marmot said that our allegations had been sent to the IMA for comment but at the same time exonerated them in respect of our earlier unanswered complaints. He wrote that "investigations have revealed no wrong doing . . . by the Israeli Medical Association”. We are not aware that any proper investigations have been carried out either by the WMA or, for that matter, the IMA. On the contrary, for many years the PHRI have tried to get the IMA to conduct such an investigation but found the IMA consistently unwilling. As they concluded in ‘Doctoring the Evidence, Abandoning the Victim: the Involvement of Medical Professionals in Torture and Ill-treatment in Israel’, “persistently repeated requests calling the IMA’s attention to cases arousing suspicion of doctors’ involvement in torture and cruel or degrading treatment, have not been dealt with substantively.” PHRI noted that IMA ethical codes privileged a duty to assist the security services ahead of duty to the patient.(3)

Marmot added that the IMA “have repeatedly affirmed their commitment to the policies and positions taken by the WMA”. This is to take verbal assurances at face value and the evidential record appears to say otherwise, and consistently so since Amnesty’s 1996 verdict. In the era of evidence-based medicine, why does evidence from authoritative sources not count? The WMA has refused further comment.

Marmot has accorded the IMA once again the support and approval of the WMA, and of himself as President. He has done so without examination of the evidence, old and new, to which we (and PHRI) point. This is good news for the IMA, but bad news for Israeli doctors thrust into ethically compromised roles, and bad news for Palestinian detainees with little to protect them.

The WMA itself risks being morally complicit in this misconduct. The WMA website carries Marmot’s inaugural speech in Moscow last September. In it he affirmed that “the WMA upholds the highest ethical standards of the practice of medicine”. Involvement of doctors in torture is a matter of unsurpassed gravity for the reputation of the medical profession, the WMA, and now of Michael Marmot himself. We again call on the WMA for a thorough and transparent examination of the evidence conducted by neutral parties.


1. Amnesty International. “Under constant medical supervision”, torture, ill-treatment and the health professions in Israel and the Occupied Territories. London: Amnesty International, 1996.

2. Meyers A, Summerfield D. The campaign about doctors and torture in Israel two years on. BMJ 2011;343:d5223.

3. Public Committee Against Torture in Israel/ Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Doctoring the Evidence, Abandoning the Victim: the Involvement of Medical Professionals in Torture and Ill-treatment in Israel. stoptorture.org.il 2011.

4. Gulland A. Doctors in Israeli detention facilities are complicit in torture, says report. BMJ 2011;343:d7200.

5. Weishut D. Sexual torture of Palestinian men by Israeli authorities. Reproductive Health Matters doi: 10.1016/j.rhm.2015.11.019.

6. http://www.wiesenthal.com/atf/cf/%7B54d385e6-f1b9-4e9f-8e94-890c3e6dd277...
↧

Pew Research Poll Proves that Israeli Society is the Most Racist in the World

March 8, 2016, 6:28 pm
$
0
0
Nearly half of Jewish Israelis want to expel Arabs

 A very interesting survey of opinion amongst Israeli Jews.  There are flaws in the survey, in particular the question as to whether Israel’s Jews wish to live in a democratic society or one ruled by Jewish religious law.

Unsurprisingly the 40% of Israeli Jews who define themselves as secular said no to rule by the rabbis but that does not mean they are in favour of democracy.  It simply means they favour civil Israeli law based on Zionist principles of racial discrimination.

That is brought out most clearly when 79% of Israeli Jews say they believe Jews should get preferential treatment compared to Arabs.  And if there was any doubt about the matter 48% of Israeli Jews supported expelling Israel’s Arabs as opposed to 46% who were opposed.
Just imagine if, in any Western European country, a majority of the White population were in favour of expelling Muslims or Blacks.

What this survey proves beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the Israeli settler colonial state is a racist state unlike no other in the world.

It is also interesting that in Israel just 8% of Jews identify with the Left, however that is defined.  The socialist Zionist dream is, in other words, destroyed.  The pursuit of a society based on racial supremacy has resulted in society becoming an overtly right-wing society.  Those who identify as ‘centrist’ are also on the right.  In Israel centrist would be seen as right to far-right in most civilised countries.
55% of Israeli Jews see being Jewish as a matter of ancestry i.e. race
Equally interesting is that 22% of Israeli Jews see being Jewish as a matter of religion whereas 55% see it as a question of ‘ancestry’ and culture.  Ancestry is a code word for race and biological inheritance.  In other words 55% see being Jewish as a racial not a religious question.
Literally are the chickens coming home to roost.

For full report go here

Tony Greenstein


Nearly half of Jewish Israelis want to expel Arabs, survey shows

Israeli security forces frisk Arab Israelis near the Central Bus Station in Herzliya on January 5, 2016. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)
Pew study finds 79% believe Jews should get preferential treatment over Arab citizens; number of those who believe settlements are helpful to Israel’s security growing; majority identify as centrist
Nearly half of Jewish Israelis agree that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel, and a solid majority (79 percent) maintain that Jews in Israel should be given preferential treatment, according to a Pew Research Center in Israel survey published on Tuesday.

The poll, with 5,601 in-person interviews of Israeli adults, conducted between October 2014 and May 2015, found that Israeli Jews increasingly believe the West Bank settlements help, rather than hurt, Israel’s security – and most (61%) believe Israel was given by God to the Jewish people.

Three-quarters of Israeli Jews feel deeply connected to American Jews, but over half feel US policy is not supportive enough of Israel. Meanwhile, support for the two-state solution among Jewish Israelis hasn’t changed considerably in past years (though they are less optimistic than their American counterparts), but among Arab Israelis, it has plummeted.

And overall, the majority of Israelis identify as political centrists.
Expulsion of the Arabs
The survey makes no distinction between Palestinian Arabs of the West Bank and citizens of Israel in its question about whether Arabs should be expelled from Israel. And yet, 48% of Jewish Israelis said they were in favor, 46% were opposed, and 6% said they didn’t know.

Breaking it down into religious groups, the Modern Orthodox (the report uses the Hebrew term dati’im), were the most likely to support such a measure, at 71%. At the opposite end, secular Jews were most opposed, with 58% against (but over one-third supported it). Jews of Sephardic or Mizrahi ancestry — many of whom have ancestors who were expelled from their countries of origin — were more keen on the idea (56%) than their Ashkenazi counterparts (40%).

Nearly half of Jewish Israelis agree with the statement: Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel (screen capture: Pew Research Center)
Self-identified right-wing respondents were significantly more enthusiastic about the idea (72%), while those who identified as left-wing were solidly opposed (87% against). Among centrists, 37% backed it, 52% opposed it, and 9% replied that they did not know. There were no considerable differences found between settlers (54% support it) and those residing elsewhere (47% support it).

Most Jewish Israelis believe they should get preferential treatment in Israel (Pew Research Center)
Overall, Israeli Jews also overwhelmingly feel (79%) they deserve unspecified “preferential treatment” over non-Jewish minorities in Israel. Settlers were slightly more inclined to support preferential treatment (85%) than the rest of the population, but the view was popular among all Jewish groups in Israel regardless of religious level, particularly among the ultra-Orthodox (97%) and Modern Orthodox (96%), although 69% of secular Jews and 85% of traditional (Masorti) Jews also agreed.

At the same time, the majority of Israeli Jews (76%) said they view a Jewish state as being compatible with democracy – but the opposite was found among Arab citizens, with 64% maintaining Israel cannot be both a democracy and a Jewish state (63% of Muslims, 72% of Christians, and 58% of Druze feel this way).
Just 8% of Israeli Jews see themselves as identifying with the Left
God, the land of Israel, and the settlements

Some six in ten Israeli Jews (61%) believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jews. The ultra-Orthodox and Modern Orthodox were nearly unanimous on this point (99 and 98 percent, respectively), while 85% of traditional Israeli Jews concurred. Among secular Israeli Jews, 31% agreed, 19% disagreed, and 50% said they don’t believe in God or don’t know.

Roughly one-fifth of Christians and Druze in Israel held this belief as well (19% and 17%), but “due to political sensitivities, Muslims in Israel were not asked this question.”

Marking a shift from past polls, some 42% of Jewish Israelis say the settlements help Israel’s security, 30% say they hurt Israel’s security, and 25% say it makes no difference. The differences were largely divided along partisan lines, with 81% of left-wing participants maintaining the settlements are damaging, 62% of right-wing respondents saying they are helpful, and centrists divided equally on whether it helps, hurts, or makes no difference (32% for each). Asked to place themselves on a political scale, some 55% of Israelis identified as centrist, 37% as right-wing, and 8% as left-wing.

View of the Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, in the West Bank, February 25, 2016 (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
In a 2013 Pew survey, 35% said the settlements hurt Israel, 31% said they help, and 27% said it made no difference at all.
Just 14% of Israelis identify with the racist Israeli Labour Party or the left-Zionist Meretz.  There is no support for the mixed Jewish-Arab communist party Hadash
Israel and the US

Three-quarters of Israeli Jews feel they share a common destiny with American Jews to a great extent or to some extent, and 59% maintain US Jewry have a “good influence” on Israel (only 6% said American Jews have a bad influence on Israel; the remaining 31% said their influence was neither good nor bad.)

But generally speaking, Jewish Israelis find US support lacking.

Some 52% say “US policy is not supportive enough of Israel,” while 34% say the amount of support is about right, and 11% say the US is too supportive. Some 62% of right-wingers, 49% of centrists, and 33% of left-wingers espouse the view that the US is not sufficiently supportive.

Meanwhile, a majority of Arab citizens – 77 percent — said the US was “too supportive” of Israel. Some 86% of Christians, 76% of Druze, and 75% of Muslims feel this way.

The end of the two-state solution?

Some 43% of Israeli Jews believe Israel and a Palestinian state can coexist peacefully side-by-side, while 45% do not, and 13% say it “depends.” Those who identified as left-wing were far more likely to believe in the two-state solution (86%), than those on the right (29%) and those in the center (46%). The figures were not dramatically different from those recorded in 2013 (when 46% said it was possible.)

Half of Arab Israelis are optimistic about the two-state solution, while 30% said it was not viable. This poll marked a deep decline in Arab Israeli faith in the two-state solution, from 74% in 2013, to 64% after peace talks broke down in 2014, to 50% after the 2014 Gaza war.

The Pew study also cited an annual Haifa University poll that asked Arab Israelis whether the two-state solution should be the guiding principle to end the conflict, but not whether it was possible. The data shows that since 2003, the numbers have fallen from 89% to 71% in 2015.

But while Israeli Jews and Arabs increasingly feel the two-state solution is not feasible, the poll points to a population that is holding out (at least until 2013): American Jews. Some 61% of US Jews believe the plan to be possible. The greatest optimists are American Jewish self-described liberals, 70% of whom maintain it can happen. The data on American Jews was drawn from a 2013 Pew study, and compared to the recent findings on Israelis.
↧

Brighton Demonstration to Send off Caroline Lucas MP – the Proposer of NHS Reinstatement Bill

March 11, 2016, 2:25 am
$
0
0

Peter Kyle - Hove Labour MP Opposes Bill because the Private Sector provides 'innovation' in the NHS

Caroline Lucas MP addressing the demonstrators before setting off for the House of Commons
On a cold and wintry Friday morning, about 100 demonstrators, together with a samba band, gave a send off at Brighton railway station to Caroline Lucas, the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion and the proposer of the NHS Reinstatement Bill.
Momentum supporters from Brighton Labour Party in support of the NHS Reinstatement Bill
A group of us from the Labour Party were at the picket from Momentum in order to emphasise that this was a Bill deserving of support from socialists in the Labour Party.  
demonstration at Brighton station
I was told that the New Labour Tory Lite MP for Hove, Peter Kyle, was not going to support the Bill as he supports the involvement of the private sector NHS.  Kyle is the pro-war MP for Hove who was probably to  the right of the losing Tory candidate at the last election, Graham Cox!

If it is true that Kyle opposed the bill because he believes that innovation only comes from the private sector in the NHS, as opposed to grubbing around for profits that could be used for the benefit of all, then Kyle deserves to be censured by the District Labour Party in Brighton for scabbing on the NHS.

The purpose of the Bill is to repair some of the damage to the NHS caused by the Tory/Lib Dem Health & Social Care Act 2012 and to fully restore the NHS as an accountable public service by reversing 25 years of marketization in the NHS, by abolishing the purchaser-provider split, ending contracting and re-establishing public bodies and public services accountable to local communities.
This is necessary to stop the dismantling of the NHS under the Health and Social Care Act 2012. It is driven by the needs of local communities. Scotland and Wales have already reversed marketization and restored their NHS without massive upheaval. England can too.
The Bill gives flexibility in how it would be implemented, led by local authorities and current bodies.
It would:
  • reinstate the government’s duty to provide the key NHS services throughout England, including hospitals, medical and nursing services, primary care, mental health and community services,
  • integrate health and social care services,
  • declare the NHS to be a “non-economic service of general interest” and “a service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority” so asserting the full competence of Parliament and the devolved bodies to legislate for the NHS without being trumped by EU competition law and the World Trade Organization’s General Agreement on Trade in Services,
  • abolish the NHS Commissioning Board (NHS England) and re-establish it as a Special Health Authority with regional committees,
  • plan and provide services without contracts through Health Boards, which could cover more than one local authority area if there was local support,
  • allow local authorities to lead a ‘bottom up’ process with the assistance of clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts and NHS England to transfer functions to Health Boards,
    • Defend NHS Speaker
  • abolish NHS trusts, NHS foundation trusts and CCGs after the transfer by 1st January 2018,
  • abolish Monitor – the regulator of NHS foundation trusts, commercial companies and voluntary organisations – and repeal the competition and core marketization provisions of the 2012 Act,
  • integrate public health services, and the duty to reduce inequalities, into the NHS,
  • re-establish Community Health Councils to represent the interest of the public in the NHS,
  • stop licence conditions taking effect which have been imposed by Monitor on NHS foundation trusts and that will have the effect of reducing by April 2016 the number of services that they currently have to provide,
  • require national terms and conditions under the NHS Staff Council and Agenda for Change system for relevant NHS staff,
  • centralise NHS debts under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) in the Treasury, require publication of PFI contracts and also require the Treasury to report to Parliament on reducing NHS PFI debts,
  • abolish the legal provisions passed in 2014 requiring certain immigrants to pay for NHS services
  • declare the UK’s agreement to the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and other international treaties affecting the NHS to require the prior approval of Parliament and the devolved legislatures,
  • require the government to report annually to Parliament on the effect of treaties on the NHS.


↧
Viewing all 2415 articles
Browse latest View live
Search