Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Petition: Lift Travel Restrictions on Palestinian Journalist!!
SIGN THE PETITION To: Israeli and Palestinian Authorities - Palestinian journalist Khalid Amayreh, who lives in the West Bank, has been invited to attend a media conference in Germany. As required, he set about to request all of the necessary travel documents, including a visa that needs to be granted from the German representative office in Ramallah. After routine questioning regarding his political affiliations, it was not only determined that he was not a member of any party, nor formally associated with any organisation, but it was clear that he had never been arrested or detained by Israeli authorities. Mr Amayreh was granted an entry visa to Germany. However, the Israeli military authorities have refused to give him a permit to leave the West Bank. No Palestinian can travel abroad without receiving such a permit beforehand, otherwise he or she would be turned back once arriving at the Israeli-controlled border terminal at the Allenby Bridge.
Mr Amayreh then went to his local District Coordination Office in Dura, where he was informed that his information was forwarded to the Shin Bet (General Security Services) of the Israeli government. Then two days later, the GSS informed the Palestinian office that Amayreh was “barred from leaving the West Bank for security reasons.” No further explanation was given.
His fortune in obtaining the required travel permission did not change as he applied to the Civil Administration Headquarters in Hebron, a metallic pen holding persons seeking the mandatory permission even to go to East Jerusalem for medical treatment, where it is not unusual to find them huddled and waiting their turn for ten or more hours, under the watchful eye of Israeli military watchtowers.
The Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination Office in the West Bank was also unable to mediate on his behalf, as they too are entirely dependent upon the decisions, without clarification, evidence or justification, made by the Israeli Security division.
There is indeed no justification for the violation of this man’s civil and human rights, and along with him, the rights of all others who are denied freedom of movement with no justification whatsoever. The Occupation authorities, while they have no sovereignty over citizens of the Palestinian Authority, dictate what must be done with those citizens and the world seems to consider the violation of their rights acceptable and normal praxis. These people are not pawns on a chessboard, but are individuals who seek the basic liberties that all democracies are obligated to provide for their people. The Palestinian Authority does not exercise its duty of guaranteeing civil liberties to its own citizens, and treats them as if they shall be subject to the whims of the Occupier.
We ask for the immediate revision of the decision regarding Mr Amayreh, so that he is granted the documents necessary for him to exercise his freedom of movement allowing him to continue to provide for himself and his family in the work that he is employed in, as well as for the Palestinian Authority to assume a position that sets the freedoms of its citizens as a priority that is greater than the perceived “security” risks declared by the agency of the State of Israel.http://www.petitiononline.com/k1h2a3l4/petition.html
SPANISH
El periodista palestino Khalid Amayreh, que vive en Cisjordania, ha sido invitado a asistir a una conferencia de medios en Alemania. Según la reglamentación, se le solicitaron todos los documentos necesarios, incluyendo una visa que necesita le sea concedida por la oficina de la representación alemana en Ramallah. Después de un interrogatorio rutinario relacionado con su filiación política, no solamente se determinó que no era miembro de partidos políticos, ni que estaba asociado formalmente a alguna organización, sino que fue evidente que nunca había sido arrestado ni detenido por las autoridades israelíes. Se le concedió al Sr. Amayreh una visa de ingreso a Alemania. Sin embargo, las autoridades militares israelíes se han opuesto a concederle un permiso para salir de Cisjordania. Ningún palestino puede viajar al extranjero sin recibir tal permiso con antelación, de otra manera sería devuelto una vez que llegue a la terminal de frontera controlada por los israelíes en el Puente Allenby.
Después, el Sr. Amayreh fue a su Oficina de Coordinación de Distrito local en Dura, donde fue informado que sus datos personales habían sido enviados a la Shin Bet (Servicios de Seguridad General o GSS por sus siglas en inglés) del gobierno israelí. Luego de dos días, los GSS le informaron a la oficina palestina que Amayreh tenía “prohibido salir de Cisjordania por razones de seguridad.” No le dieron detalles adicionales.
Su suerte para obtener el permiso de viaje requerido no cambió cuando solicitó el permiso en las Oficinas Centrales de la Administración Civil en Hebrón, un corral metálico para detener a las personas que buscan el permiso para ir a Jerusalén Este por tratamiento médico, donde no es raro encontrarlos amontonados y esperando su turno durante diez horas o más, bajo la mirada observadora de las torres de vigilancia militares israelíes.
La Oficina de Coordinación de Asuntos Civiles palestinos en Cisjordania tampoco pudo mediar en su representación, dado que son totalmente dependientes de las decisiones, sin aclaraciones, evidencias o justificaciones, realizadas por la división de seguridad israelí.
De hecho, no existe justificación para la violación de los derechos civiles y humanos de este hombre, y junto con él, de los derechos de las demás personas a quienes les es negada su libertad de tránsito sin ninguna justificación en absoluto. Aunque las autoridades de ocupación no tienen soberanía sobre los ciudadanos de la Autoridad Palestina, dictan qué debe hacerse con esos ciudadanos y el mundo parece considerar que la violación de sus derechos es una práctica aceptable y normal. Estas personas no son peones en un tablero de ajedrez, sino individuos que luchan por sus libertades básicas, mismas que toda democracia está obligada a garantizarle a su pueblo. La Autoridad Palestina no ejerce su deber de garantizar libertades civiles a sus propios ciudadanos, y los trata como si estuviesen sujetos a los caprichos del ocupante.
Solicitamos la inmediata revisión de la decisión relacionada con el Sr. Amayreh, de manera que le sean concedidos los documentos necesarios para que ejerza su libertad de tránsito y pueda continuar desempeñando su trabajo para abastecerse él mismo y su familia, así como también que la Autoridad Palestina asuma una posición que le brinde la libertad a sus ciudadanos como una prioridad mayor a los riesgos de “seguridad” percibidos y declarados por la agencia del estado de Israel.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
http://www.petitiononline.com/k1h2a3l4/petition.html
French abstract:
À: Les autorités israeliennes et palestines
Invité à une conférence en Allemagne, le journaliste palestinien Khalid Amayreh s’est vu octroyer un visa d’entrée en Allemagne par les autorités consulaires allemandes à Ramallah mais les autorités israéliennes lui ont refusé le visa de sortie de Cisjordanie. Cette pétition s’adresse aux autorités israéliennes et palestiniennes pour qu’elles permettent à Khalid Amayreh d’exercer sa liberté de mouvement.
Bien à vous,
Les signataires
SEE ALSO: Finkelstein and Me
The Undersigned
http://www.petitiononline.com/k1h2a3l4/petition.html
French abstract:
À: Les autorités israeliennes et palestines
Invité à une conférence en Allemagne, le journaliste palestinien Khalid Amayreh s’est vu octroyer un visa d’entrée en Allemagne par les autorités consulaires allemandes à Ramallah mais les autorités israéliennes lui ont refusé le visa de sortie de Cisjordanie. Cette pétition s’adresse aux autorités israéliennes et palestiniennes pour qu’elles permettent à Khalid Amayreh d’exercer sa liberté de mouvement.
Bien à vous,
Les signataires
SEE ALSO: Finkelstein and Me
Labels: activism, call to action, human rights violations, Israel, journalism, occupation, Palestine, Zionism
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Peoples court condemns Israel for war crimes in Lebanon
This account, from Workers World, is an excellent summary of what i witnessed in the three days in Bruxelles. I am going to begin my own accounts of it, but in the meantime, please read this article and READ THE FINAL VERDICT (in English, French, Italian and Spanish).
By John Catalinotto Brussels, Belgium
Published Feb 28, 2008
A four-member jury of distinguished legal officials, after hearing and considering two days of intense, moving and precise testimony at the International Associations Center in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 24 found the Israeli state guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in its 2006 war on Lebanon.
Witness holds part of U.S.-maderocket that killed some of his family.
WW photos: John Catalinotto
Some 250 people filling the center stood as one to applaud as Judge Adolfo Abascal from Cuba finished reading the decision. Those in the courtroom, many from Lebanon or from the Lebanese diaspora, already knew or had heard enough to make up their minds. But a formal decision based on a body of evidence can more effectively counter reactionary imperialist propaganda in the corporate media.
The other three judges were Judge Lilia Solano from Colombia, a professor at the National University of Bogotá; Rajindar Sachar, retired chief justice of the High Court of Delhi, India; and Professor Claudio Moffa of the University of Teramo, Italy. A fifth member of the panel, judge of the Court of Appeal Hisham Bastawisi of Egypt, was prevented from participating by the Egyptian government.
Mayor of Nabitiya, Dr. Mustfa Bader al-Din
The organizers counted on the media coverage of the hearing—which was broadcast throughout the Arab world and in Latin America in whole or in part—to bring a convincing statement of Israeli guilt of serious war crimes to their audiences throughout the world. In the imperialist countries it will be up to progressive media and organizations in solidarity with the liberation struggles to spread the news of the tribunal.
There was representative support from organizations in Europe and the U.S., including present and former European Union parliamentary members Louisa Morgantini from Italy and Miguel Urbano Rodrigues from Portugal, and former MP Ángeles Maestro from Spain. Human rights, anti-war and anti-imperialist organizations sent representatives to watch, participate and report on the hearings.
In the introductory session, leading co-coordinator Leila Ghanem (Raoul Jennar was the other) introduced Judge Solana, who presided over the judges’ panel. Solana explained the procedure for the tribunal.
John Catalinotto of the International Action Center (IAC) in the United States, Dr. Paola Manduca of the Permanent People’s Tribunal and Prof. Jean Bricmont of the BRussells Tribunal gave political statements on the issues before the court. Catalinotto focused on U.S. complicity in the war crimes through providing the Israeli offensive with coordinated military aid and diplomatic support throughout the invasion.
Israelis expose their own crimes
What made the 2006 war on Lebanon different from the other U.S.-Israeli aggressions in the region was that the Israeli offensive collapsed. The Lebanese resistance—2,000 fighters led by Hezbollah but joined by other patriotic forces like the Communist Party—inflicted heavy casualties on the most powerful army in the region. Instead of wiping out the popular armed struggle, the Israelis were driven out.
This defeat forced the Tel Aviv regime to re-examine and investigate its own war strategy. Prosecuting Attorney Dr. Issam Naaman pointed this out as he introduced the tribunal case. After the witnesses, he said, the Winograd Report by an Israeli government-appointed committee will “fill in any remaining gaps” in the case.
That the report admits that Israel had planned the aggression months before it took place absolves the Lebanese resistance—which had been charged with provoking the war by capturing two Israeli soldiers.
The others on the prosecution team were Dr. Hassan Jouni and Maitre Albert Farhat, also from Lebanon, and Dr. Hugo Ruiz Díaz Balbuena from Paraguay.
John Catalinotto
Although the Lebanese successfully fought back, this did not prevent the Israeli military from inflicting horrible casualties on the Lebanese civilian population. The prosecutors introduced witnesses who gave evidence of massacres against civilian targets and the systematic destruction of towns and villages and popular housing projects south of Beirut.
Through expert witnesses, the prosecutors also showed that Israel used prohibited weapons, such as uranium-cased bunker busters and thermobaric weapons, and those prohibited against civilians, such as cluster bombs. The Israeli military was apparently testing new weapons on the Lebanese they killed and maimed. More than 1,200 people in Lebanon were killed, the great majority of them civilians, including many children.
First-hand testimony of war crimes
Eyewitnesses were more than observers of the war. They had lost multiple family members, been involved in ambulance driving, been responsible for their town or village. The Lebanese organizations fought heroically, but the Israeli war machine, armed by Washington, rained death on civilians who had the misfortune of being in the south of Lebanon that summer.
Civil defense worker Maher Saloum from Baalbek city provided a moving PowerPoint demonstration of the casualties inflicted on Lebanese children and other noncombatants. His co-workers, while clearly driving ambulances, were equally targeted by Israeli rockets. While not physically wounded, this hero had suffered what in the U.S. would be called post-traumatic stress disorder as he risked his life every day to try to save his compatriots.
One witness held up a piece of the U.S.-made rocket that crashed into the home his family was trying to take cover in as they fled north.
The judges asked each witness if there were any military targets, any Hezbollah fighters, in the vicinity of the bomb or rocket strikes. The answer was always, “No.”
Dr. Ali Mustafa Bader al-Din, mayor of one of the towns in Baalbek in the south, 15 miles from the border with Israel, told of the “250 martyrs” from his district. “I’m asking the people of the world,” he said, “What do they [the Israelis] want from us and our children? We had 423 homes destroyed, but I don’t think they will beat us.
“They tried to drive a wedge between the people and the resistance, but we remained together. The enemy attack failed. We will fight them all our lives if attacked.”
Weapons, environment, economy
After the reports of the deaths, it may not have seemed necessary to show the use of illegal weapons, to decry the long-lasting assault on the environment or to demonstrate the damage in tens of billions of dollars to the Lebanese economy. The “legal” weapons are also murderous in the hands of an arrogant imperialist army. But in a trial, the prosecutors need to demonstrate all the crimes under discussion.
It was hard to look at the photos of the Lebanese people wounded or killed by either old or new weapons. But phenomena like internal bleeding without entry or exit wounds and no evidence of shrapnel, deep burning on one side of the body and none on the other, and high levels of radiation showed that Israel was testing new weapons, most of them manufactured in the United States.
Dr. Rania Masri, who had been an anti-war activist in Raleigh, N.C., for many years before moving to Beirut, gave an excellent and concise presentation of the lasting damage to the environment from the Israeli attack. The most devastating single blow was to an oil storage tank serving an electric power plant, causing an enormous spill that has destroyed the beaches and the aquatic environment all the way from the south of Lebanon to Syria.
Dr. Kamal Hamdan, a macroeconomist, apologized if his “cold view” of the economic impact detracted from the suffering of the Lebanese. He explained that besides the $2.8 billion in direct losses, 60 percent of it in housing, much of it in the popular suburbs south of Beirut, there are other even greater losses. Higher unemployment and inflation rates have impoverished a greater proportion of the Lebanese population.
Almost as an aside, Dr. Hamdan pointed out that U.S. imperialist aggression in the entire West Asian region was aimed not only at guaranteeing access to energy sources but also to give Washington the ability to intimidate both China and the U.S.’s rival imperialists in Europe and Japan by controlling the oil.
Dr. Díaz Balbuena, representing the American Association of Jurists before the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, presented the legal rules of the case, of which only a small part of the testimony has been summarized above.
Introducing the verdict, Justice Lilia Solana made sure to also inculpate the United States for its complicity in the war. The final decision was that the judges “declare the Israeli authorities in charge of the 2006 war against Lebanon guilty of the following international crimes:
1. war crimes
2. crimes against humanity
3. genocide.”
Email: jcat@workers.org
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011Email: ww@workers.orgSubscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.netSupport independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php
By John Catalinotto Brussels, Belgium
Published Feb 28, 2008
A four-member jury of distinguished legal officials, after hearing and considering two days of intense, moving and precise testimony at the International Associations Center in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 24 found the Israeli state guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in its 2006 war on Lebanon.
Witness holds part of U.S.-maderocket that killed some of his family.WW photos: John Catalinotto
Some 250 people filling the center stood as one to applaud as Judge Adolfo Abascal from Cuba finished reading the decision. Those in the courtroom, many from Lebanon or from the Lebanese diaspora, already knew or had heard enough to make up their minds. But a formal decision based on a body of evidence can more effectively counter reactionary imperialist propaganda in the corporate media.
The other three judges were Judge Lilia Solano from Colombia, a professor at the National University of Bogotá; Rajindar Sachar, retired chief justice of the High Court of Delhi, India; and Professor Claudio Moffa of the University of Teramo, Italy. A fifth member of the panel, judge of the Court of Appeal Hisham Bastawisi of Egypt, was prevented from participating by the Egyptian government.
Mayor of Nabitiya, Dr. Mustfa Bader al-DinThe organizers counted on the media coverage of the hearing—which was broadcast throughout the Arab world and in Latin America in whole or in part—to bring a convincing statement of Israeli guilt of serious war crimes to their audiences throughout the world. In the imperialist countries it will be up to progressive media and organizations in solidarity with the liberation struggles to spread the news of the tribunal.
There was representative support from organizations in Europe and the U.S., including present and former European Union parliamentary members Louisa Morgantini from Italy and Miguel Urbano Rodrigues from Portugal, and former MP Ángeles Maestro from Spain. Human rights, anti-war and anti-imperialist organizations sent representatives to watch, participate and report on the hearings.
In the introductory session, leading co-coordinator Leila Ghanem (Raoul Jennar was the other) introduced Judge Solana, who presided over the judges’ panel. Solana explained the procedure for the tribunal.
John Catalinotto of the International Action Center (IAC) in the United States, Dr. Paola Manduca of the Permanent People’s Tribunal and Prof. Jean Bricmont of the BRussells Tribunal gave political statements on the issues before the court. Catalinotto focused on U.S. complicity in the war crimes through providing the Israeli offensive with coordinated military aid and diplomatic support throughout the invasion.
Israelis expose their own crimes
What made the 2006 war on Lebanon different from the other U.S.-Israeli aggressions in the region was that the Israeli offensive collapsed. The Lebanese resistance—2,000 fighters led by Hezbollah but joined by other patriotic forces like the Communist Party—inflicted heavy casualties on the most powerful army in the region. Instead of wiping out the popular armed struggle, the Israelis were driven out.
This defeat forced the Tel Aviv regime to re-examine and investigate its own war strategy. Prosecuting Attorney Dr. Issam Naaman pointed this out as he introduced the tribunal case. After the witnesses, he said, the Winograd Report by an Israeli government-appointed committee will “fill in any remaining gaps” in the case.
That the report admits that Israel had planned the aggression months before it took place absolves the Lebanese resistance—which had been charged with provoking the war by capturing two Israeli soldiers.
The others on the prosecution team were Dr. Hassan Jouni and Maitre Albert Farhat, also from Lebanon, and Dr. Hugo Ruiz Díaz Balbuena from Paraguay.
John CatalinottoAlthough the Lebanese successfully fought back, this did not prevent the Israeli military from inflicting horrible casualties on the Lebanese civilian population. The prosecutors introduced witnesses who gave evidence of massacres against civilian targets and the systematic destruction of towns and villages and popular housing projects south of Beirut.
Through expert witnesses, the prosecutors also showed that Israel used prohibited weapons, such as uranium-cased bunker busters and thermobaric weapons, and those prohibited against civilians, such as cluster bombs. The Israeli military was apparently testing new weapons on the Lebanese they killed and maimed. More than 1,200 people in Lebanon were killed, the great majority of them civilians, including many children.
First-hand testimony of war crimes
Eyewitnesses were more than observers of the war. They had lost multiple family members, been involved in ambulance driving, been responsible for their town or village. The Lebanese organizations fought heroically, but the Israeli war machine, armed by Washington, rained death on civilians who had the misfortune of being in the south of Lebanon that summer.
Civil defense worker Maher Saloum from Baalbek city provided a moving PowerPoint demonstration of the casualties inflicted on Lebanese children and other noncombatants. His co-workers, while clearly driving ambulances, were equally targeted by Israeli rockets. While not physically wounded, this hero had suffered what in the U.S. would be called post-traumatic stress disorder as he risked his life every day to try to save his compatriots.
One witness held up a piece of the U.S.-made rocket that crashed into the home his family was trying to take cover in as they fled north.
The judges asked each witness if there were any military targets, any Hezbollah fighters, in the vicinity of the bomb or rocket strikes. The answer was always, “No.”
Dr. Ali Mustafa Bader al-Din, mayor of one of the towns in Baalbek in the south, 15 miles from the border with Israel, told of the “250 martyrs” from his district. “I’m asking the people of the world,” he said, “What do they [the Israelis] want from us and our children? We had 423 homes destroyed, but I don’t think they will beat us.
“They tried to drive a wedge between the people and the resistance, but we remained together. The enemy attack failed. We will fight them all our lives if attacked.”
Weapons, environment, economy
After the reports of the deaths, it may not have seemed necessary to show the use of illegal weapons, to decry the long-lasting assault on the environment or to demonstrate the damage in tens of billions of dollars to the Lebanese economy. The “legal” weapons are also murderous in the hands of an arrogant imperialist army. But in a trial, the prosecutors need to demonstrate all the crimes under discussion.
It was hard to look at the photos of the Lebanese people wounded or killed by either old or new weapons. But phenomena like internal bleeding without entry or exit wounds and no evidence of shrapnel, deep burning on one side of the body and none on the other, and high levels of radiation showed that Israel was testing new weapons, most of them manufactured in the United States.
Dr. Rania Masri, who had been an anti-war activist in Raleigh, N.C., for many years before moving to Beirut, gave an excellent and concise presentation of the lasting damage to the environment from the Israeli attack. The most devastating single blow was to an oil storage tank serving an electric power plant, causing an enormous spill that has destroyed the beaches and the aquatic environment all the way from the south of Lebanon to Syria.
Dr. Kamal Hamdan, a macroeconomist, apologized if his “cold view” of the economic impact detracted from the suffering of the Lebanese. He explained that besides the $2.8 billion in direct losses, 60 percent of it in housing, much of it in the popular suburbs south of Beirut, there are other even greater losses. Higher unemployment and inflation rates have impoverished a greater proportion of the Lebanese population.
Almost as an aside, Dr. Hamdan pointed out that U.S. imperialist aggression in the entire West Asian region was aimed not only at guaranteeing access to energy sources but also to give Washington the ability to intimidate both China and the U.S.’s rival imperialists in Europe and Japan by controlling the oil.
Dr. Díaz Balbuena, representing the American Association of Jurists before the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, presented the legal rules of the case, of which only a small part of the testimony has been summarized above.
Introducing the verdict, Justice Lilia Solana made sure to also inculpate the United States for its complicity in the war. The final decision was that the judges “declare the Israeli authorities in charge of the 2006 war against Lebanon guilty of the following international crimes:
1. war crimes
2. crimes against humanity
3. genocide.”
Email: jcat@workers.org
Articles copyright 1995-2007 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved. Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011Email: ww@workers.orgSubscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.netSupport independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php
Labels: absolute madness, activism, call to action, documents, EU, human rights violations, Israel, Israeli politicians, Lebanon, military, war, war crimes
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Mazin Qumsiyeh - Non-violence or Non-existence
Here we are on the road again with the very colorful Wheels of Justice bus tour. The prominent slogan on the side of the bus is the most appropriate message for this week of violence. In big letters we have "Nonviolence or Nonexistence" visible for the thousands who saw the bus in the past few days. ... We post some of our public events at http://justicewheels.org and we hope you will join us or organize events for us.We wanted to write more about the tour with a blog of all the great things we did and saw this past week (e.g. the great questions from hundreds of students in WA and OR). However, it is worthwhile to focus on this issue of violence and existence in more detail considering the news from occupied Palestine in this weekly message and add relevant good articles. While we are never shocked by the distorted US media coverage of what is going on, we are sometimes surprised by the audacity of editors and journalists. For example, compare the coverage of the killing of 8 Israelis in occupied Jerusalem with the coverage of the killing of 126 Palestinians in Gaza in the seven days before that; including many children (four playing soccer, babies in mother's arms, etc). BTW, only Israeli papers like Haaretz explained the history of the "school" that the Israelis were killed at (a training school for terrorist Rabbis). It might be worthwhile to put out some quotes on the so-called "cycle of violence" between the occupier/colonizer and the occupied/colonized (and people forget this aspect, the etiology of the disease, when they focus on the symptoms/the violence):
"The curse of Gaza is as powerful as death: if the entire occupation is a tragedy, the occupation of Gaza is its essence: 360 square kilometers, some 1.5 million people, 1 million refugees, and the responsibility is all ours. From the beginning there were those who warned us of the curse, and not only Sapir; even Moshe Dayan used words of caution. It did no good. The euphoria is contagious, the war rolls on, and a wise people is a foolish one. In the Zionist enterprise's march of folly, Gaza stands out as a major milestone, a signpost of weeping. The foundation stone of our tears."
Yossi Sarid
"Many westerners justify Israel's actions because they believe that Israel, as a sovereign country, has the right to defend itself. The truth is, so long as the government of Israel is occupying the Palestinian territories, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and denying the people their freedom, dignity, and human as well as political rights, international law gives them the right to resist and to defend themselves. "
"Many westerners justify Israel's actions because they believe that Israel, as a sovereign country, has the right to defend itself. The truth is, so long as the government of Israel is occupying the Palestinian territories, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip and denying the people their freedom, dignity, and human as well as political rights, international law gives them the right to resist and to defend themselves. "
Sabeel Ecuminical Liberation Theology Center
The United Nations Human Rights Council today labeled Israel’s response to recent rocket attacks from Gaza a war crime and 'collective punishment against the civilian population'
"As long as there is occupation and the brutality and violence it entails, we will mourn Israeli and Palestinian lives. In this context, media coverage that portrays violence as part of a short-term cycle of attack and retaliation obscures the facts, including the role the US has played, through covert action, in fomenting civil war in Gaza, as recently revealed by a groundbreaking report in Vanity Fair. As long as the United States continues to support Israel's decades-long practice of illegally appropriating land, destroying homes, and using disproportionate force--a policy which has proven to be both morally bankrupt and self-destructive for Israel--neither Palestinians nor Israelis will ever know peace."
The United Nations Human Rights Council today labeled Israel’s response to recent rocket attacks from Gaza a war crime and 'collective punishment against the civilian population'
"As long as there is occupation and the brutality and violence it entails, we will mourn Israeli and Palestinian lives. In this context, media coverage that portrays violence as part of a short-term cycle of attack and retaliation obscures the facts, including the role the US has played, through covert action, in fomenting civil war in Gaza, as recently revealed by a groundbreaking report in Vanity Fair. As long as the United States continues to support Israel's decades-long practice of illegally appropriating land, destroying homes, and using disproportionate force--a policy which has proven to be both morally bankrupt and self-destructive for Israel--neither Palestinians nor Israelis will ever know peace."
Jewish Voice For Peace
"The murderers [Palestinians] are the Amalek of our day, coming to remind us that Amalek has not disappeared, just changed its appearance."
Settler Rabbi Ya'akov Shapira, head of the center that trained the "students" in hate at this extremist "seminar/Yeshiva" that created so many extremist colonial settlers.
(For those who do not know what Amalek is they should read the part of the Old Testament were God gets to give the orders for the genocide of men, women and children of the Amalkites, Canaanite native inhabitants of the land to be conquered).
"Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel's recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem has been swift...The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was buried in Gaza.
She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house's inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces."
Ali Abunimah in the Electronic Intifada
"We need to find a legal and legitimate way to kick those few Palestinian Arabs in east Jerusalem who make it their choice to aid and take part in terrorism back to Ramallah,"
"We need to find a legal and legitimate way to kick those few Palestinian Arabs in east Jerusalem who make it their choice to aid and take part in terrorism back to Ramallah,"
Israel's "Public Security" Minister Avi Dichter
"We at Tikkun feel equally grieving for the people killed by vicious and immoral terrorists at the Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav (the ultra-nationalist religious center that developed the ideology which inspired religious Zionists to believe that they had a God-given right to settle and hold on to the territories without regard to the consequences for the Palestinian people already living there) as we do for the victims of Israeli terror (which in the past week killed 120 people, many of them children, many of them sitting in their homes when Israeli troops randomly fire-bombed and murdered them, as documented by the same international human rights organizations that today condemned the attack in Jerusalem by terrorists)."
"We at Tikkun feel equally grieving for the people killed by vicious and immoral terrorists at the Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav (the ultra-nationalist religious center that developed the ideology which inspired religious Zionists to believe that they had a God-given right to settle and hold on to the territories without regard to the consequences for the Palestinian people already living there) as we do for the victims of Israeli terror (which in the past week killed 120 people, many of them children, many of them sitting in their homes when Israeli troops randomly fire-bombed and murdered them, as documented by the same international human rights organizations that today condemned the attack in Jerusalem by terrorists)."
Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun
“Condemning the ongoing Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations, and for other purposes...”
“Condemning the ongoing Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations, and for other purposes...”
US House Resolution 951
Statement on Gaza Bill by Rep. Ron Paul March 5, 2008 (Paul was the only one who voted Nay!):
I rise in opposition to H. Res. 951. As one who is consistently against war and violence, I obviously do not support the firing of rockets indiscriminately into civilian populations. I believe it is appalling that Palestinians are firing rockets that harm innocent Israelis, just as I believe it is appalling that Israel fires missiles into Palestinian areas where children and other non-combatants are killed and injured. Unfortunately, legislation such as this is more likely to perpetuate violence in the Middle East than contribute to its abatement. It is our continued involvement and intervention – particularly when it appears to be one-sided – that reduces the incentive for opposing sides to reach a lasting peace agreement. Additionally, this bill will continue the march toward war with Iran and Syria, as it contains provocative language targeting these countries. The legislation oversimplifies the Israel/Palestine conflict and the larger unrest in the Middle East by simply pointing the finger at Iran and Syria . This is another piece in a steady series of legislation passed in the House that intensifies enmity between the United States and Iran and Syria . My colleagues will recall that we saw a similar steady stream of provocative legislation against Iraq in the years before the US attack on that country. I strongly believe that we must cease making proclamations involving conflicts that have nothing to do with the United States. We incur the wrath of those who feel slighted while doing very little to slow or stop the violence.
(ACTION: Write and/or call to your congressman/women and ask them why they voted in support of Apartheid Israel aggression. Phone numbers for reps here http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/mcapdir.html ).
But perhaps the most poignant comment on violence in Palestine/Israel is these statements from Nurit Peled-Elhanan whose daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber:http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/
(Must Read) The Day the Earth and Sky Traded Places: Gazan Holocaust By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein03042008.html
An Interview with Aharon Shabtaï "Israel's most acclaimed Hebrew poet." He explains need for cultural boycott of Israel: "Israel, 'Guest Of Honour' In Paris And Turin, Does Not Deserve To Be Invited," By Silvia Cattori & Aharon Shabtaï, 26 February, 2008, Countercurrents.org. http://www.countercurrents.org/cattori260208.htm
Racism in Israel on the rise: Association for Civil Rights in Israel publishes annual report; reveals country overwhelmed by racism, restriction of personal freedoms, discrimination, especially towards Israeli-Arabs. Report not surprising, say Arab MKs, By Aviram Zino http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3480345,00.html
But perhaps the most poignant comment on violence in Palestine/Israel is these statements from Nurit Peled-Elhanan whose daughter was killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber:http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/
(Must Read) The Day the Earth and Sky Traded Places: Gazan Holocaust By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein03042008.html
An Interview with Aharon Shabtaï "Israel's most acclaimed Hebrew poet." He explains need for cultural boycott of Israel: "Israel, 'Guest Of Honour' In Paris And Turin, Does Not Deserve To Be Invited," By Silvia Cattori & Aharon Shabtaï, 26 February, 2008, Countercurrents.org. http://www.countercurrents.org/cattori260208.htm
Racism in Israel on the rise: Association for Civil Rights in Israel publishes annual report; reveals country overwhelmed by racism, restriction of personal freedoms, discrimination, especially towards Israeli-Arabs. Report not surprising, say Arab MKs, By Aviram Zino http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3480345,00.html
Vanity Fair: The Gaza Bombshell
After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever. READ MORE.....http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
Analytic Report "REVEALED: THE US PLAN TO START A PALESTINIAN CIVIL WAR, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2008 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9366.shtml
After failing to anticipate Hamas's victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever. READ MORE.....http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
Analytic Report "REVEALED: THE US PLAN TO START A PALESTINIAN CIVIL WAR, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2008 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9366.shtml
GREEN PARTY OF THE UNITED STATES http://www.gp.org
Scott McLarty, Media Coordinator, 202-518-5624, cell 202-904-7614, mclarty@greens.org
Starlene Rankin, Media Coordinator, 916-995-3805, starlene@gp.org
Greens urge economic pressure and cutoff of all military aid to Israel as Gaza situation worsens• Demanding an end to illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, Greens urge widespread grassroots support for the Palestine BDS (Boycott,Divestment, Sanctions) Campaign• Greens blast Clinton, Obama, and McCain for uncritical support of Israel despite mounting crimes.
WASHINGTON, DC -- Calling the Siege of Gaza an international emergency, the Green Party is urging Congress to reject President Bush's FY2009 budget request for $2.55 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Israel, and reiterated the call for a cut-off of all US military aid to Israel."The Siege of Gaza is an ongoing atrocity, with mounting civilian casualties, especially children, killed and maimed by Israeli Defense Forces," said Holly Hart, secretary of the Green Party of the United States and member of People for Justice in Palestine, responding to the mass killing of Palestinians during the past weekend. "Greens are demanding an end to the siege and to the occupation of Palestinian lands, to Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians, and to targeted assassinations, all of which violate international law."
Greens noted that the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces has doubled since the Annapolis peace talks sponsored by the US in November 2007. In some areas of the West Bank, home invasions by IDF since January 1 have resulted in the kidnapping and detention without charges of nearly 400 civilians, including children.
1.5 million Gazans, mostly refugees from Israel in 1948, live in an open-air prison, unable to exit, and with electricity, fuel, and water under Israeli control.
"Peace talks are a sham as long as Israel refuses to discuss the construction of new housing units for Jewish settlers throughout occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank," said David J. Kalbfleisch, a Green congressional candidate in Illinois' 10thdistrict http://www.electdave.org/.
The One Candidate Worth Our Vote: Nader the Best Antidote to American ImperialismBy KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03012008.html
WASHINGTON, DC -- Calling the Siege of Gaza an international emergency, the Green Party is urging Congress to reject President Bush's FY2009 budget request for $2.55 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Israel, and reiterated the call for a cut-off of all US military aid to Israel."The Siege of Gaza is an ongoing atrocity, with mounting civilian casualties, especially children, killed and maimed by Israeli Defense Forces," said Holly Hart, secretary of the Green Party of the United States and member of People for Justice in Palestine, responding to the mass killing of Palestinians during the past weekend. "Greens are demanding an end to the siege and to the occupation of Palestinian lands, to Israel's collective punishment of Palestinians, and to targeted assassinations, all of which violate international law."
Greens noted that the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces has doubled since the Annapolis peace talks sponsored by the US in November 2007. In some areas of the West Bank, home invasions by IDF since January 1 have resulted in the kidnapping and detention without charges of nearly 400 civilians, including children.
1.5 million Gazans, mostly refugees from Israel in 1948, live in an open-air prison, unable to exit, and with electricity, fuel, and water under Israeli control.
"Peace talks are a sham as long as Israel refuses to discuss the construction of new housing units for Jewish settlers throughout occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank," said David J. Kalbfleisch, a Green congressional candidate in Illinois' 10thdistrict http://www.electdave.org/.
The One Candidate Worth Our Vote: Nader the Best Antidote to American ImperialismBy KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON http://www.counterpunch.org/christison03012008.html
Mazin QumsiyehWheels of Justice Tour: Nonviolent education and action against war and occupation in Iraq and Palestine for justice and universal humanrights http://justicewheels.orghttp://qumsiyeh.org
Labels: activism, boycott, call to action, Gaza, hasbara, human rights violations, Israel, Israeli politicians, journalism, Palestine, US, war
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Gaza is victim of a unilateral war! STOP ISRAEL!!!!
Israel is conducting a unilateral war against the population of Gaza. IT CANNOT BE TOLERATED! There is no excuse!!!! On the left, please see the Black Ribbon that Sabbah's Blog has set up. Created by his friend Za3tar, it is suitable to attach to your letters, sites, anywhere you want people to see that we are in mourning and we support our beloved and cherished brothers and sisters in Gaza.Israeli Genocides, Holocausts & Massacres: 55 Victims in 12 hours, names included
Anna Goldman reports from the Gaza Strip
PCAS: www.freegaza.ps/english
Gaza Strip, 1st, March, 2008, (PCAS)- Since the early morning, the Israeli holocausts against Palestinians have started. About 10 of freedom fighters died but the majority was 45 victims from civilians.
The holocaust which was declared by Matan Vilnai, Vice Israeli defence (War) minister, yesterday is being launched by today morning with confines. Diverse sorts of weapons, such as F16 and Apaches planes were used. In addition to using heavy guns, bombs, missiles and cluster bombs as well.
Attalla Family was exposed to a 1-ton-missle fired by F16. The missile destroyed their house which was of 2 floors resulted in killing 4 members including a child.
Around 30 air raids and 50 bombs and artillery shells fired towards the Palestinian civilians. The Jabalya camp which is the position of the military holocaust is densely populated. Around 1000 thousands live in about 1 killo meter. Thus a lot of innocent victims fall quickly.1- Eyad Al Ashram, Male, 26
2- Musleh Abu Ali, Male, 17
3- Jakline Abu shbak, Female, 17
4- Eyad abu Shabk, Male, 14
5- Basam Muhammad Ubaid, Male, 45
6- Basam Ubaid, Male, 15
7- Hamza Al jamal, Male, 40
8- Abdallah Abd Rabu, Male, 4
9- Ibrahim Alzain, Male, 25
10- Mustafa Zaghloul, Male, 32
11- Hamada Abd Al hameed, Male, 29
12- Saeed Al hasheem, Male, 23
13- Husain Al batsh, Male, 27
14- Samah Zaydan Asalya, Female, 17
15- Salwa Zaydan Asalya, Female, 23
16- Tala't Dardona, Male, 29
17- Mustafa Abu Jalala, Male, 28
18- Hasan Safi, Male, 25
19- Abdallah Abu Shaira, Male, 18
20- Mutasim Abd Rabu, Male, 24
21- Hamada Saleh Al abad, Male, 16
22- Mustafa Manon, Male, 22
23- Muhammad Sleem, Male, 24
24- Muhammad Abdalrahman Shhab, Male, 23
25- Ali Al Kitnani, Male, 15
26- Tal'at Dardona, Male, 17
27- Sana Ghad Al abed Saleh, Female, 16
28- Ahmed Albatsh, Male, 16
29- Muslih Muhamad Muslih, Male, 17
30- Thabet Junied, Male
31- Sultan Al zain, Male
32- Mustafa Abu Jalala, Male
33- Muhammad Al atar, Male
34- Nael Abu Alon, Male, 20
35- Muhammad Abd Al mouti Sleem, Male,
36- Saed Dabour, Male, 28
37- Hamada Saed, Male
38- Mahmoud Rayan, Male
39- Jedjad Hatem Abu Hlayal, Male
40- Thari Abu Aubaid, Male
41- Tamer Weshah, Male
42- Ahmed Saleh Abd Al rahman, Male
43- Muhammad Abd Al qader Oqylan, Male
44- Hasan Abu Harb, Male
45- Abd Al rahman Atallah, Male, 60
46- Ibrahim Attalah, Male, 30
47- Sua'd Atallah
48- Unknown
49- Unknown
50- Unknown
51- Unknown
52- Unknown
53- Unknown in Khan Yonis City
54- Unknown in Khan Yonis City
Pictures available in the facebook:
Group 1:
Action4palestine
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5796102347
Group 2:
10000 Say Israel .. Stop killing Palestinians
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9108787671
Group 3:
Freedom for Palestine
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22920137976
ALSO PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD A PETITION:
Labels: absolute madness, activism, call to action, Gaza, holocaust, human rights violations, Israel, Israeli politicians, military, occupation, Palestine, somoud, war, Zionism
Friday, February 29, 2008
Release 11.000 Palestinians in Israeli jails!!! Please sign this petition
please sign and support these political prisoners!Disgrace for Democracy, Israel is detaining right now 40% of the Palestinian MPs who represent the people
Sponsored by:
Iqbal Tamimi Creator of Palestinian Mothers Network
Disgrace for Democracy: 51 Palestinian MPs and Ministers are Detained in Israeli prisons along with 11.870 Palestinian citizens
Sponsored by:
Iqbal Tamimi Creator of Palestinian Mothers Network
Disgrace for Democracy: 51 Palestinian MPs and Ministers are Detained in Israeli prisons along with 11.870 Palestinian citizens
A serious crime and new political slap in the face for democracy is committed by the Zionist system against representatives of the Palestinian people by the abduction of the Palestinian ministers and MPs.
The latest of which was the arrest of MP Ahmed al-Haj from the city of Nablus on 16/12/2007. Al-Haj is over Seventy-years old.
Earlier on the 10th MP Dr. Maryiam Saleh Minister for Women in the Palestinian government has been abducted too. Dr Mariyam is a member in the Legislative Council from Ramallah governorate.
The Minister of Palestinian Prisoner is in prison since many years... for the fifth time.
There are more than 11.870 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, 117 of them are mothers. Some give birth while chained, and their children are forced to live in the cells where they do not live their childhood or play or go out.
I don't have to tell you about lack of healthy conditions, or medical negligence. Some prisoners are denied warm clothes sent to them by their families. They are held in 30 different prisons, and detention centers. 1189 prisoners are schools, collage, and universities students of both genders, 330 of the detained are children. Not only the students were detained, but their teachers too, there are 107 Palestinian teachers in Israeli prisons. 1150 Palestinian prisoners suffer acute illnesses.
A large number of the detained are denied visits by family members.
Thousands of Palestinian detainees in the Negev desert prison and other detention camps such as Ofer prison near the town of Ramallah, Hawara, Qadumim, Megiddo, Nafha, Beer Sheva, Ashkelon and other prisons are shivering from the cold under waves of rain and snowfall coming from northern regions of the world especially that some are detained inside tents made of cloth surrounded by walls open to the cruel cold of the desert, living in wet tents caused by snow falls and rain, sleeping on boards made of wood which gets soaked wet.
Soon, April 17th is the International day of prisoners. I hope you can join in denouncing what the Israeli government is doing to those prisoners, and demand their release to join their families.
Do not rely on journalism to get the news, journalists were the first to be attacked and harassed so that you do not know what was going on.
The records documented 1147 aggressive attacks on journalists by the Israelis. Only between 28th of September 2000, and 31st of March 2007.
Please sign the petition and buy those prisoners some happiness.
We are hoping to get at least 11.000 signitures, one for each prisoner, and present this petition to International Human Rights bodies like Amnesty International, and United Nations. Please Circulate this petition to all the people you can get the message through to them. It is about time we show solidarity for each other on human level.
Labels: activism, call to action, human rights violations, Israel, Palestine, Palestinian politicians
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Justice for Lebanon! International Citizen's Tribunal
I will be attending these sessions in Bruxelles this weekend on behalf of Gaza Vivrà. I will write a comprehensive report upon my return.Proposal for setting up international citizen's tribunal on deeds committed by Israeli army & secret services in Lebanon & occupied Palestinian territories
An international citizen's tribunal on the crimes committed by the Israeli army in Lebanon JUSTICE FOR LEBANON! Feb. 22-24, 2008, Brussels Int'l Jury Schedule
The deeds committed by the Israeli army and secret services in Lebanon, as in the occupied Palestinian territories, is a violent affront to the universal human conscience. These are criminal acts, as many people feel instinctively. They are different from the acts that take place in all armed conflict committed by the aggressor as well as by the aggressed. But feeling is not enough. The facts must be established. They must then be assessed in light of existing international law. This should be done with the detachment and rigour of a process that excludes any a priori conclusions, the results of which will convince all people of good will.
The international community is not an autonomous political and juridical body. It is but a summation of positions adopted by a certain number of governments. In many situations it has proved incapable of applying existing law by distancing itself from geopolitical or ideological contingencies. This impunity has covered up the numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been committed since the end of the second world war.
The unilateral attitude of the United States of America, like the double-speak of many European governments, make it necessary for those defending the law to take the place of failed political powers. The American administration is against any questioning of Israel’s role in acts committed in Lebanon as well as in the occupied Palestinian territories. Germany, Great Britain, Finland and France refuse to support a request formulated at the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the use by the Israeli armed forces of arms that are prohibited by international law. The systematic disinformation practised by an overwhelming majority of the media deprives Western public opinion of balanced information. All this justifies an initiative by the citizens themselves.
This initiative must aim at being of the same high quality as the tribunal initiated by Bertrand Russell during the Vietnam war. It should be carried out with the same rigour, the same credibility and the same concern to go beyond divisions which have no place when it is a question of the rights of people. It must bring together highly qualified experts and personalities who are universally recognized for their moral authority. It must not limit itself up to a restricted circle. For this reason I believe it should not follow in the footsteps of similar initiatives taken in the past, whatever the quality that such work has achieved in the past.
Such an action cannot be carried out properly in a hurry. It requires the formulation of a comprehensive project, together with a precise timetable, the mobilization of appropriate human and financial resources and an irreproachable moral framework. These requirements demand an international mobilization to support such an initiative.
For this purpose we propose that a preparatory committee be set up which will carry out as rapidly as possible all the tasks necessary for launching this initiative. We ask your active participation in creating this preparatory committee.
Coordinateurs:
An international citizen's tribunal on the crimes committed by the Israeli army in Lebanon JUSTICE FOR LEBANON! Feb. 22-24, 2008, Brussels Int'l Jury Schedule
The deeds committed by the Israeli army and secret services in Lebanon, as in the occupied Palestinian territories, is a violent affront to the universal human conscience. These are criminal acts, as many people feel instinctively. They are different from the acts that take place in all armed conflict committed by the aggressor as well as by the aggressed. But feeling is not enough. The facts must be established. They must then be assessed in light of existing international law. This should be done with the detachment and rigour of a process that excludes any a priori conclusions, the results of which will convince all people of good will.
The international community is not an autonomous political and juridical body. It is but a summation of positions adopted by a certain number of governments. In many situations it has proved incapable of applying existing law by distancing itself from geopolitical or ideological contingencies. This impunity has covered up the numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been committed since the end of the second world war.
The unilateral attitude of the United States of America, like the double-speak of many European governments, make it necessary for those defending the law to take the place of failed political powers. The American administration is against any questioning of Israel’s role in acts committed in Lebanon as well as in the occupied Palestinian territories. Germany, Great Britain, Finland and France refuse to support a request formulated at the UN Human Rights Council to investigate the use by the Israeli armed forces of arms that are prohibited by international law. The systematic disinformation practised by an overwhelming majority of the media deprives Western public opinion of balanced information. All this justifies an initiative by the citizens themselves.
This initiative must aim at being of the same high quality as the tribunal initiated by Bertrand Russell during the Vietnam war. It should be carried out with the same rigour, the same credibility and the same concern to go beyond divisions which have no place when it is a question of the rights of people. It must bring together highly qualified experts and personalities who are universally recognized for their moral authority. It must not limit itself up to a restricted circle. For this reason I believe it should not follow in the footsteps of similar initiatives taken in the past, whatever the quality that such work has achieved in the past.
Such an action cannot be carried out properly in a hurry. It requires the formulation of a comprehensive project, together with a precise timetable, the mobilization of appropriate human and financial resources and an irreproachable moral framework. These requirements demand an international mobilization to support such an initiative.
For this purpose we propose that a preparatory committee be set up which will carry out as rapidly as possible all the tasks necessary for launching this initiative. We ask your active participation in creating this preparatory committee.
Coordinateurs:
Raoul Marc JENNA
Réchercheur URFIG / Fondation Copernic
consultant de la GUE/NGL au Parlement européen (bureau 4E202) 7
place du Château, F 66500 Mosset
Tél. (PE) : 00 32 2 283 10 43
Tel. : 00 33 468 05 84 25
Port. : 00 33 632 16 65 52
Leila Ghanem
Anthropologue
Forum Mondial des Alternatives
JUSTICE FOR LEBANON! Feb. 22-24, 2008, Brussels Int'l Jury Schedule
INTERNATIONAL JURY OF CONSCIENCE FOR LEBANON
INTERNATIONAL JURY OF CONSCIENCE FOR LEBANON
International Associations Center
Washington Street, 40
Brussels, February 22 - 23 - 24, 2008
Program
Friday February 22
8:30 to 11:15 p.m.:
· Opening, reception and general presentation (15 min)
· Declaration of the International Peoples Tribunal (15 min)
· Declaration of Jury on the decision to consider only the actions of the Israeli army (15 min)
· Reading the indictment (90 min)
· Reaction of the defendant (30min)
Saturday February 23:
The morning: victims
From 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.:
· 8 victims will testify (15 min each one)
From 11:30-to 11:45 a.m.: coffee/tea break
From 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
· testimony from the mayor of a village (30 min)
· testimony from the mayor of a city (30 min)
From 12:45 to 2 p.m.: Lunch break
The afternoon: witnesses
From 2 to 4:30 p.m.:
· the Lebanese Red Cross (30 min)
· Green Peace Lebanon (30 min)
· A Lebanese economic institute (30 min)
· The international NGOs (20 min each one)
From 4:30 to 4:45 p.m.: coffee/tea break
From 4:45 to 6:45: statements by 4 Lebanese lawyers (30 min each one)
The evening: round table with Lebanese and international journalists
From 8:30 to 11 p.m.: four Lebanese journalists will dialog with a French journalist, a British journalist and a Belgian journalist. The debate will be chaired by a European member of Parliament.
Sunday February 24:
From 9:00 to 10:00 a.m.: statement of Dr Hugo RUIZ DIAZ BALBUENA, attorney and representative of The Association of American Attorneys at the Human Rights Council of the United Nations
From 10:00 to 10:45 a.m.: statement from a representative of Amnesty International and a representative of Human Rights Watch
From 10:45 to 11:00 a.m.: coffee/tea break
From 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.: statement from a representative of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations
From 12:30 to 2:00 p.m.: Lunch break
From 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.: indictment
From 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.: reaction of the defendant
Starting 4:00 p.m.: Jury deliberation
At 5:00 p.m.: Read the verdict
Program
Friday February 22
8:30 to 11:15 p.m.:
· Opening, reception and general presentation (15 min)
· Declaration of the International Peoples Tribunal (15 min)
· Declaration of Jury on the decision to consider only the actions of the Israeli army (15 min)
· Reading the indictment (90 min)
· Reaction of the defendant (30min)
Saturday February 23:
The morning: victims
From 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.:
· 8 victims will testify (15 min each one)
From 11:30-to 11:45 a.m.: coffee/tea break
From 11:45 a.m. to 12:45 p.m.
· testimony from the mayor of a village (30 min)
· testimony from the mayor of a city (30 min)
From 12:45 to 2 p.m.: Lunch break
The afternoon: witnesses
From 2 to 4:30 p.m.:
· the Lebanese Red Cross (30 min)
· Green Peace Lebanon (30 min)
· A Lebanese economic institute (30 min)
· The international NGOs (20 min each one)
From 4:30 to 4:45 p.m.: coffee/tea break
From 4:45 to 6:45: statements by 4 Lebanese lawyers (30 min each one)
The evening: round table with Lebanese and international journalists
From 8:30 to 11 p.m.: four Lebanese journalists will dialog with a French journalist, a British journalist and a Belgian journalist. The debate will be chaired by a European member of Parliament.
Sunday February 24:
From 9:00 to 10:00 a.m.: statement of Dr Hugo RUIZ DIAZ BALBUENA, attorney and representative of The Association of American Attorneys at the Human Rights Council of the United Nations
From 10:00 to 10:45 a.m.: statement from a representative of Amnesty International and a representative of Human Rights Watch
From 10:45 to 11:00 a.m.: coffee/tea break
From 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.: statement from a representative of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations
From 12:30 to 2:00 p.m.: Lunch break
From 2:00 to 3:00 p.m.: indictment
From 3:00 to 4:00 p.m.: reaction of the defendant
Starting 4:00 p.m.: Jury deliberation
At 5:00 p.m.: Read the verdict
The jury is composed of five people, one from each inhabited continent, each of them judges by profession.
The entire hearing will be recorded and filmed. The debates will be translated simultaneously into English, Arabic and French.
Various documents and reports/ratios will be placed at the disposal of the public. A bookstore will be accessible.
The hearing will take place in a room holding 250 people. Videos will be shown in an adjoining room.
"The International Jury of Conscience for Lebanon” is a project which intends to develop the struggle against impunity regarding the crimes committed, which intends to promote international law and in particular human rights and which places the respect of fundamental human rights above any other consideration. The discussion will proceed in greatest serenity and the publicity that arises from it will reside exclusively within the framework of human rights. It will question only the facts that occurred during the conflict of July-August 2006 in connection with the respect of these rights. This project does not include a political debate on the question of the relationship between Israel and its neighbors, nor about the Palestinian question.
Labels: activism, call to action, EU, human rights violations, Israel, journalism, Lebanon, military, refugees, war
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Seeking Palestinians and activists for a Video Quilt to mark the Nakba anniversary
Help Contribute to First-Ever Video Quilt to Mark 60 Years of Palestinian Nakba"I am a Palestinian. We still hold the key and deed to our home in Lyd. WE WILL return!" "I am a supporter of human rights and I want to see the Palestinian refugees return home" "I am from Tabaria. Its my right! I want to go home!"; "My home is in Haifa and I want to return"; "I am not Palestinian, but 60 years of forced exile is wrong. Palestinians must be allowed to return home!"
For 60 years the Palestinian refugees' right to return to their land and homes of origin has been under attack from various forces that wish to rewrite the past and dictate the present and future of Palestine and its people. Despite these attacks, for 60 years Palestinians and their supporters around the world have remained steadfast in not just supporting this right, but demanding and asserting that it is a right that must be implemented if justice and real peace are to be achieved. These voices unfortunately have all too often been deliberately muffled and fragmented ... It's time to collect these voices -- literally.
On this the 60th year of the Nakba we are collectively creating a Video Quilt demonstrating that among Palestinian refugees and their many supporters there remains a strong united voice for the Right to Return. This Video Quilt stitches together the voices of refugees and supporters around the world and will be premiered at the 6th Annual Al-Awda Convention on the 60th year of Al-Nakba. It will be shown online and at various exhibits and venues afterwards. Al-Awda's 6/60 Convention will be held May 16-18, 2008 in Anaheim California.
Help Needed With Video Quilt!
If you or someone you know has a video camera and is interested in helping film for the Video Quilt Project, please let us know. We are looking for individuals across the globe to act as liaisons and videographers. There are many interested individuals and groups who would like to contribute their messages in support of the Right to Return but don't have access to a video camera. Their voices must be heard! If you are interested in assisting with this project please contact: media@al-awda.org
To download an informational flyer visit: http://al-awda.org/until-return/vidqlt1.pdf
To upload and send your own video to us, please use one of the following services:
http://www.yousendit.com (up to 100mb limit, free account)
http://www.sendthisfile.com (unlimited file size upload with free registration, but slow for large files)
Be sure to send all files to: ahasan@ucla.edu
In any format, please mail to:
Al-Awda PRRCPO Box 131352Carlsbad CA 92013, USA
Just as a reminder, these video messages are as simple as
1. Facing the camera2. Stating your name and where you live3. State where you are from (in Palestine or elsewhere)4. State a brief message in support of the Right to Return.
For further information, please see our earlier announcement at:http://www.al-awda.org/alert-video_quilt.html
Until return,
Al-Awda Media Center
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-685-3243
Fax: 360-933-3568E-mail: info@al-awda.org
WWW: http://al-awda.org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible. http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html
Save the Date!
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible. http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html
Save the Date!
Sixth Annual International Al Awda Convention
On The Sixtieth Year of Al Nakba
Anaheim, California
May 16-18, 2008http://al-awda.org
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Become an Al-Awda Sustainer:
Support Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!
Become an Al-Awda Sustainer:
Monthly: http://al-awda.org/sustainers.html
Annually: http://al-awda.org/sustainers2.html
Labels: activism, call to action, journalism, Nakba, Palestine, refugees, right of return, somoud
Saturday, February 2, 2008
The Big Action To Free Gaza Strip
The slow genocide is still underway in Gaza ! Act Now !
We were all pleased to see a new wall tear down, but unlike the Berlin Wall, this does not mean that the occupation is over and Gazans are free.
We were all pleased to see a new wall tear down, but unlike the Berlin Wall, this does not mean that the occupation is over and Gazans are free.
Egypt closed the border back and the 5 days of freedom the Gazans courageously allowed themselves by demolishing the walls of their prison didn't allow them to erase 6 months of blockade, without medicines, without drinking water, without electricity, without fuel, without food balanced, without freedom.
The mainstream media reported that Israel will resume its fuel deliveries to Gaza, but they forget to mention that it will deliver only 20% of the amount necessary to the Gaza needs.
Israel has also announced that on February 7, it would reduce by 5% its electricity supplies to Gaza where power is severely lacking. In Gaza, the humanitarian situation is still dramatic:
86 patients have been killed by Israeli Occupation due to Closure!
1562 patients are in need of treatment outside Gaza Strip and 322 patients have reach a critical stage. If the siege continues, 470 cancer patients will die.
107 class of basic medicines are depleted from Gaza Strip and 97 sorts of medicines are on the verge of depletion
The hospitals treat only urgent cases due to the lack of power and fuel for back-up generators
The mobilization must go on.
We must pursue the work and ask this inhuman siege, which constitutes a war crime involving our governments, be lifted.
Ask your MPs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Union, your representatives to the United Nations how they can sleep the night when people are dying due to their decision
Ask them if the Palestinian genocide is the only way they found to solve the Jewish issue.
Get out in the streets, demonstrate, and organize candlelight vigils in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
Show to your government that you do not agree to be witnesses of that slow genocide without saying anything Take part in the global effort organized on February 23th calling for the End of the Gaza Siege!
Free Gaza!
The action of protests will be across European, Arab, southern and Latin American countries.
Contact us, the Popular Committee Against Siege in Gaza (PCAS), and let us know what you are preparing for this global action!
Please, forward this call around you.
We need your help to Free Gaza !
Freegaza.ps@gmail.com
http://www.freegaza.ps/
Israel has also announced that on February 7, it would reduce by 5% its electricity supplies to Gaza where power is severely lacking. In Gaza, the humanitarian situation is still dramatic:
86 patients have been killed by Israeli Occupation due to Closure!
1562 patients are in need of treatment outside Gaza Strip and 322 patients have reach a critical stage. If the siege continues, 470 cancer patients will die.
107 class of basic medicines are depleted from Gaza Strip and 97 sorts of medicines are on the verge of depletion
The hospitals treat only urgent cases due to the lack of power and fuel for back-up generators
The mobilization must go on.
We must pursue the work and ask this inhuman siege, which constitutes a war crime involving our governments, be lifted.
Ask your MPs, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the European Union, your representatives to the United Nations how they can sleep the night when people are dying due to their decision
Ask them if the Palestinian genocide is the only way they found to solve the Jewish issue.
Get out in the streets, demonstrate, and organize candlelight vigils in solidarity with the people of Gaza.
Show to your government that you do not agree to be witnesses of that slow genocide without saying anything Take part in the global effort organized on February 23th calling for the End of the Gaza Siege!
Free Gaza!
The action of protests will be across European, Arab, southern and Latin American countries.
Contact us, the Popular Committee Against Siege in Gaza (PCAS), and let us know what you are preparing for this global action!
Please, forward this call around you.
We need your help to Free Gaza !
Freegaza.ps@gmail.com
http://www.freegaza.ps/
Labels: absolute madness, activism, call to action, Gaza, human rights violations, Israel, Palestine, somoud
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Badil to the Human Rights Council - A Call for Sanctions
(photo: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters) HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Sixth special sesssion, 23 January 2008
Written statement submitted by Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status
Badil calls on states to undertake sanctions against Israel and prosecute Israeli officials responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes in the OPT
As part of its historical policy to change the demographic composition and impose a Jewish majority in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel forcibly displaces Palestinians from their homes and lands and subjects them to imprisonment and other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law.
In addition to the well-documented Israeli-induced humanitarian crisis in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, Israeli officials and the Israeli High Court are guilty and have abetted serious war crimes, such as collective punishment, indiscriminate and intentional attacks against the civilian population, and torture and inhuman treatment. These officials and the Court are guilty of persecution because they have intentionally and severly deprived Palestinians on ground of nationality of their fundamental rights in violation of international law.
Throughout Israel and the OPT, the Israeli government is also guilty of the crime of apartheid because it imposes an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination against the Palestinian people and has the intention to maintain that regime.
Badil stresses that the Palestinian people need accountability and to see those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity prosecuted and punished. Badil urges all members of the international community to undertake measures of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the governement of Israel until it complies with international law.
Badil recommends to:
1. Urge state members of the UN to take measures such as economic sanctions and diplomatic boycott against Israel for its breach of international law and non-implementation of UN Resolutions, as well as the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on The Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
2. Undertake a study on the applicability of the crimes of apartheid and population transfer to Israel's actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.
Sixth special sesssion, 23 January 2008
Written statement submitted by Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights, a non-governmental organization in special consultative status
Badil calls on states to undertake sanctions against Israel and prosecute Israeli officials responsible for crimes against humanity and war crimes in the OPT
As part of its historical policy to change the demographic composition and impose a Jewish majority in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Israel forcibly displaces Palestinians from their homes and lands and subjects them to imprisonment and other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law.
In addition to the well-documented Israeli-induced humanitarian crisis in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank, Israeli officials and the Israeli High Court are guilty and have abetted serious war crimes, such as collective punishment, indiscriminate and intentional attacks against the civilian population, and torture and inhuman treatment. These officials and the Court are guilty of persecution because they have intentionally and severly deprived Palestinians on ground of nationality of their fundamental rights in violation of international law.
Throughout Israel and the OPT, the Israeli government is also guilty of the crime of apartheid because it imposes an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination against the Palestinian people and has the intention to maintain that regime.
Badil stresses that the Palestinian people need accountability and to see those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity prosecuted and punished. Badil urges all members of the international community to undertake measures of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the governement of Israel until it complies with international law.
Badil recommends to:
1. Urge state members of the UN to take measures such as economic sanctions and diplomatic boycott against Israel for its breach of international law and non-implementation of UN Resolutions, as well as the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on The Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
2. Undertake a study on the applicability of the crimes of apartheid and population transfer to Israel's actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel.
Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights
Ingrid Jaradat Gassner
+972-277-7086
info@badil.org
Ingrid Jaradat Gassner
+972-277-7086
info@badil.org
Labels: absolute madness, activism, boycott, call to action, Gaza, human rights violations, Israel, Nakba, occupation, Palestine, somoud, UN
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Some Human Beings are More Human than Others
Why ethnic campaigning can be unethical
by Mary Rizzo
This blog recently has had some attention from Tony Greenstein. Taking a detour from his general direction of activism (sic) which boils down to exclusively attacking a growing list of other Pro-Palestinian activists - posting the same article that has been proven to be a misrepresentation consisting of a series of out-of-context quotes and insinuations about Gilad Atzmon - he’s using the same method, wallpapering every spot he can think of with his rantings using an identical post (to get the most mileage out of it, I suppose) that my blog is an Anti-Semitic sewer because it had this:
He stated:
“Under a title ‘Peacepalestine Offers Prisoner Exchange’ are four photographs of Ariel Sharon, Gilad Shalit, David Hirsh and myself, with what presumably are supposed to be wanted posters bearing our names, photographs, the title ‘human being’ (presumably this is disputed) and then, in reverse video the word ‘JEW’. All that is missing is the yellow star, but I’m sure Rizzo will manage to find a graphic artist up to the task.”
He then emphasizes that this is “clearly racist and anti-Semitic”.
Well, finally Tony Greenstein and I can partially agree on something. Gilad Atzmon and I have been stressing for years now that asking people to take action or to influence them by merit of some ethnically-based criterion is simply a racist way of thinking and operating, and Tony finally admits as much. If we are people, it shouldn’t matter one iota what group we are born or raised into. Ideologies are mindsets that are not "genetically instilled" and can be adopted or cast off or used at will. We can’t accept an objective ethnic belonging that carries no merit or defect as such, as an ethical device or even a way to persuade people. Ideologies matter, ethnic belonging does not. Belonging to one group or another should be irrelevant when trying to persude people of the value of an argument and influence their opinions. We should move beyond the stage of focussing on a person according to race, sex, religion, nationality or political leaning, and listen to their arguments.
It is too bad that Tony feels the need to continually insist on telling us that he was “The only Jewish speaker” at this meeting or that. Gosh, I didn’t know that there is a census made of the ethnic or religious belonging of the people who speak at meetings and that Tony was privy to that information. He also believes that Jews have special sensitivity to racism. “Jews, of all people, should be the first to oppose racism, whoever the victims and the perpetrators,” he says. While at the same time, he knows how (presumably all) Blacks must feel about it, refering to one of his interlocutors, so that he can be easily identified, apparently, as “a Black Sudanese guy”: “But again Black people have better understanding of racism than white ex-councillors”. (Following this logic, if the white ex-councillors are Jewish, they should be the first to oppose the racism, but other whites certainly are lacking in this moral characteristic.) If one were to judge the way he writes, it seems he does indeed think in racial stereotypes and categories and can’t resist mentioning it as if it were the normal thing to do. Yet, on the other hand, he insists that race does not exist, er… rather, it is a political construct. “Just to be clear. Zionism isn't based on a race, nor is German anti-Semitism for the simple reason there are no such things as race. Race is a political construct.” (Alef message 5 January, 2008) Whether or not there is such a thing as race seems to be a matter of debate for geneticists, and we’ve all seen acceptable arguments from both sides of the debate. Tony is extremely “ethnically aware”, and this is absolutely crystal clear in almost every intervention he has on internet. One might say that it borders on an obsession. Whites, Blacks, Jews, Non-Jews, hardly a single thing he has written escapes this ethnic (or racial, if you like) labeling, complete with a categorical judgment of the sensitivity each group must have to racism issues a priori of their personal experiences. What DOES seem interesting is the fact that when TONY stresses his ethnicity, in his worldview, it’s a good and positive thing. When OTHER people do it, as the Shalit campaigners do, or those who spoof it, as Peacepalestine has done, it’s clearly racist and anti-Semitic. I wish he would make up his mind one way or the other.
I agree that the campaign for Gilad Shalit is clearly racist, but it is far from being anti-Semitic. They will have to presumably find someone to paste in that Yellow Star as Tony suggests, not because the campaign is anti-Semitic, but because it represents to perfection the Jewish Victim role, the only way we are supposed to feel about Jews, especially Israeli ones. To justify what Israel does, we have to know they are clearly victims of some irrational hatred based on the simple fact that they are Jews in an Arab world hostile to their very existence. The Yellow Star would be an apt symbol of the victim paradigm that we should never forget or place into any context, no matter what. Jews are and will be the eternal victim, and you better get the idea that they act only out of reasons of defense. Being victims, we have to empathise with their plight in all instances.
The identifying label of the righteous victim is used to influence people and suspend any other kind of rational thinking or judgment. The innocent victim status is used in the Shalit campaign to instill an idea that goes against reality. We have to suspend our judgment on the role that he fulfilled. We have to think that a soldier who was in an Occupation army, in occupied territory AS an occupier, not a journalist or excursionist, there to render the lives of the people under Occupation a hell on earth and endanger their very safety with his presence, was just an innocent child who needs to be returned to his worried parents. He has become the centre of a “humanitarian” campaign that has very little to do with humanity, despite the text one can read on the banner.
This campaign has been going on for a while. Anyone who has seen even one blog by Israel supporters has bumped into it. It’s really hard to remain indifferent to. Indeed, the graphic artists felt it NECESSARY to point out that Shalit is a Human being. Oh, yes, and a Jew as well. Generally, members of Homo Sapiens Sapiens ARE considered to be Human beings and we don’t need to be told, even though the pictures of Shalit bring more the idea of a lost puppy to mind.
And we all know that if Shalit was an IDF member, well, he could have been nothing other than Jewish. Tony was shocked at the horrible sort of racist labeling. As a matter of fact, he thought it was something I dreamed up myself and not a parody. He was unaware of this campaign. Where has he been hiding? The amount of posts he leaves around would indicate that he’s online a hell of a lot of hours in a day. A legitimate question to ask is what precisely does he do other than post his own repetitious text? He claims that he fights Zionism, but he has NEVER seen a Zionist site or blog since the day of the campaign??? That is longer than a year. How can one fight the enemy if one does not even know what the enemy is up to? Or maybe he’s seen it, but is pretending righteous indignation in order to influence people who may not be familiar with the propaganda tools of Zionism so that they come to think of my blog in the same jaundiced way he does. He obviously detests it, because it exposes his endless smear and silencing campaigns against Gilad Atzmon. Yet, to call it a rightwing blog with an anti-Semitic and conspiracist agenda is really pushing it. Apparently, he may need to convince himself more than he does others. And with the three-person following he has, he has to work harder on it, apparently.
But, leaving aside this provincial matter for the moment, I shall return to the issue of humanity and the Gilad Shalit campaign. I had the good fortune of working for several years in a major advertising agency as a copy editor and then copywriter. Our clients would show us their new product and we would have to come up with an appropriate campaign. The first thing one has to do is to “frame the target”. You have to know who you are trying to convince, and you have to use a language that will appeal to them on even a subconscious level. You have to reach them, then you have to influence them. Later, they will become an additional and correlated (not to mention cost-free) advertising element, by driving around on your motorcycle (in the case of the campaigns I managed).
Bringing that knowledge to the Shalit campaign, we see this: our target probably is NOT the group or individuals that hold Shalit. Most likely, they would not be overly sensitive to the fact that he is a Jew, or at least, this would not be the aspect of his being that would influence them the most. Perhaps those who created the campaign feel that those holding him in captivity are unaware that he is a human, so they have to spell it out, but I tend to believe that since the advert is in English and in Hebrew, our target is the Zio-blogosphere. So, the banner gets picked up and distributed on sites where people go who support Israel or at least aren’t blatantly or even latently pro-Palestinian. I have never seen the banner on a single pro-Palestinian site. Correct me, someone, if I am wrong and it is posted on some site of the sort.
The language then, has got to appeal to the crowd that follows the Zio-blogosphere. It is “normal” for them, I guess, to believe racial profiling is acceptable. If you are a Jew, anyway, and you are a Jew who is doing it, however. I doubt they would be convinced that Tony is right and that it is anti-Semitic. If I were still in advertising and worked on this campaign, I am pretty sure they would like the Yellow Star, though, and should consider integrating it into future versions of the campaign (all campaigns require a refresher in order to remain effective).
Now, what is the most interesting aspect of the entire campaign, attempting to appeal to the humanitarian aspect of the crisis, is we see just how the people who support this campaign think. Take a look at http://giladshalit.blogspot.com/ and see that there is a poll asking the following question:
Poll: One Year On. What should the Israeli Government do?
What action should the Israeli Government take now that Hamas has clear control of Gaza and it has been 1 year since Gilad Shalit was been kidnapped
Negotiate with Hamas
Negotiate with Hamas, release as many prisoners as it takes
Hold the Hamas Leadership directly accountable
Hold the Leadership accountable and give them one final deadline before military action
Hold Leadership accountable, give deadline for military action and total cessation of all Israeli supplied electricty and Water.
view results
Well, how do you think that the public answered as of today's date?
Let me show you the results:
What action should the Israeli Government take now that Hamas has clear control of Gaza and it has been 1 year since Gilad Shalit has been kidnapped
Negotiate with Hamas 18% 127
Negotiate with Hamas, release as many prisoners as it takes 14% 97
Hold the Hamas Leadership directly accountable 10% 72
Hold the Leadership accountable and give them another final deadline before military action 10% 73
Hold Leadership accountable, give deadline for military action and total cessation of all Israeli supplied electricty and Water. 47% 327
total votes: 696
More than half of them (58%) demand that there be military action taken (raids, presumably resulting in deaths of innocent civilians, as is often the case), and a whopping 47% call for total cessation of Israeli-supplied electricty (sic) and Water. (As if it comes from someplace else).
What would the result of such a call be? It isn’t too hard to comprehend, given that Israel has already begun the cessation of supply to the people they keep confined in Gaza. It means treating human beings like their lives are expendable, and actually turning a deaf ear as one hears their cries that they are dying. I would hope that people who care about Shalit would think before they push a little button to state their opinion, and consider that it is very inhumane to cut off basic utilities services of the people who you have made depend on them. It is a form of torture and duress. It certainly is how a complete sadist would operate. Animals in a zoo are treated better than that.
Are the people who are so concerned to show the world that the IDF soldier captured while he was in operative duty is a Human being (oh, and a Jew too), able to even see or feel that the more than one million men, women and children in Gaza are Human beings as well? Or does the fact that there are no longer any Jews in Gaza mean that genocide and collective punishment is acceptable? Was the last human removed from Gaza with the unilateral withdrawal?
But, I don’t know why any of this surprises me. We all have heard that the reason for the breakout of the so-called Second Lebanon War was the capture of two IDF soldiers and the killing of eight in the border zone between Lebanon and Israel. This is the Israeli Government version of the war. Therefore, untold death and devastation is a normal and acceptable price to pay for the lives of a Human being (and Jew) wearing an IDF uniform? We know how many innocent Human beings were killed in the war Israel started. This is the page of the Israeli deaths, and this is a listing of all the casualties. Take a look at it carefully. The civilian casualties are 1,233+ (the plus meaning countless and unknown numbers of those whose death was not immediate, and we can probably add a great deal more to this list, given the situation of utter devastation that Israel created in Lebanon. The civilian wounded tops 5,089 people. The military deaths are 438 - 888+ (given the variable reports) and more than 512 wounded. The situation of devastation caused over one million people (human beings, as far as I know) to have been temporarily made into refugees, “with an unknown number of missing civilians in the south”, as was stated in several articles referenced but no longer available in an online version. It is important to mention that the southern zone of Lebanon, a residential area, was cluster bombed, meaning, the resettlement of humans is quite unlikely, due to the remote possibilities of returning to a land that has been wilfully disseminated with unconventional (and illegal, even in an activity as unholy as war) weapons that will bring about devastation for years to come. These weapons were dropped there precisely for that inhumane purpose by the Israeli army.
So, are we to deduce from all of this that you are only a Human being if you wear an IDF uniform? Or if you are a Jew? Is calling for carnage and devastation to other Human beings a proper response to the capture of a soldier? Judging by the “humanitarian” mode of thinking by those who support the Free Gilad Shalit campaign, I think we can come to some of our own conclusions.
One thing is clear, and that is that we are anaesthetized into thinking that if it is a Jewish activist, campaigning as such, calling for action, be it to “fight anti-Semitism”, “bring down Zionism” or to collectively punish millions of non-Jews (non-Humans?) it is something “normal”. It is indeed not something normal, and it is about time we started to stop expecting people to think in pre-masticated ways, expecting them to assume that a Jew certainly should know better or act in a way that is beyond judgment. This is a call for the end, once and for all, of ethnically based campaigning. It’s just another aspect of racist campaigning, and it treats us all like we are racists and need to be told what is right and what is wrong.
by Mary Rizzo
This blog recently has had some attention from Tony Greenstein. Taking a detour from his general direction of activism (sic) which boils down to exclusively attacking a growing list of other Pro-Palestinian activists - posting the same article that has been proven to be a misrepresentation consisting of a series of out-of-context quotes and insinuations about Gilad Atzmon - he’s using the same method, wallpapering every spot he can think of with his rantings using an identical post (to get the most mileage out of it, I suppose) that my blog is an Anti-Semitic sewer because it had this:
He stated:
“Under a title ‘Peacepalestine Offers Prisoner Exchange’ are four photographs of Ariel Sharon, Gilad Shalit, David Hirsh and myself, with what presumably are supposed to be wanted posters bearing our names, photographs, the title ‘human being’ (presumably this is disputed) and then, in reverse video the word ‘JEW’. All that is missing is the yellow star, but I’m sure Rizzo will manage to find a graphic artist up to the task.”
He then emphasizes that this is “clearly racist and anti-Semitic”.
Well, finally Tony Greenstein and I can partially agree on something. Gilad Atzmon and I have been stressing for years now that asking people to take action or to influence them by merit of some ethnically-based criterion is simply a racist way of thinking and operating, and Tony finally admits as much. If we are people, it shouldn’t matter one iota what group we are born or raised into. Ideologies are mindsets that are not "genetically instilled" and can be adopted or cast off or used at will. We can’t accept an objective ethnic belonging that carries no merit or defect as such, as an ethical device or even a way to persuade people. Ideologies matter, ethnic belonging does not. Belonging to one group or another should be irrelevant when trying to persude people of the value of an argument and influence their opinions. We should move beyond the stage of focussing on a person according to race, sex, religion, nationality or political leaning, and listen to their arguments.
It is too bad that Tony feels the need to continually insist on telling us that he was “The only Jewish speaker” at this meeting or that. Gosh, I didn’t know that there is a census made of the ethnic or religious belonging of the people who speak at meetings and that Tony was privy to that information. He also believes that Jews have special sensitivity to racism. “Jews, of all people, should be the first to oppose racism, whoever the victims and the perpetrators,” he says. While at the same time, he knows how (presumably all) Blacks must feel about it, refering to one of his interlocutors, so that he can be easily identified, apparently, as “a Black Sudanese guy”: “But again Black people have better understanding of racism than white ex-councillors”. (Following this logic, if the white ex-councillors are Jewish, they should be the first to oppose the racism, but other whites certainly are lacking in this moral characteristic.) If one were to judge the way he writes, it seems he does indeed think in racial stereotypes and categories and can’t resist mentioning it as if it were the normal thing to do. Yet, on the other hand, he insists that race does not exist, er… rather, it is a political construct. “Just to be clear. Zionism isn't based on a race, nor is German anti-Semitism for the simple reason there are no such things as race. Race is a political construct.” (Alef message 5 January, 2008) Whether or not there is such a thing as race seems to be a matter of debate for geneticists, and we’ve all seen acceptable arguments from both sides of the debate. Tony is extremely “ethnically aware”, and this is absolutely crystal clear in almost every intervention he has on internet. One might say that it borders on an obsession. Whites, Blacks, Jews, Non-Jews, hardly a single thing he has written escapes this ethnic (or racial, if you like) labeling, complete with a categorical judgment of the sensitivity each group must have to racism issues a priori of their personal experiences. What DOES seem interesting is the fact that when TONY stresses his ethnicity, in his worldview, it’s a good and positive thing. When OTHER people do it, as the Shalit campaigners do, or those who spoof it, as Peacepalestine has done, it’s clearly racist and anti-Semitic. I wish he would make up his mind one way or the other.
I agree that the campaign for Gilad Shalit is clearly racist, but it is far from being anti-Semitic. They will have to presumably find someone to paste in that Yellow Star as Tony suggests, not because the campaign is anti-Semitic, but because it represents to perfection the Jewish Victim role, the only way we are supposed to feel about Jews, especially Israeli ones. To justify what Israel does, we have to know they are clearly victims of some irrational hatred based on the simple fact that they are Jews in an Arab world hostile to their very existence. The Yellow Star would be an apt symbol of the victim paradigm that we should never forget or place into any context, no matter what. Jews are and will be the eternal victim, and you better get the idea that they act only out of reasons of defense. Being victims, we have to empathise with their plight in all instances.
The identifying label of the righteous victim is used to influence people and suspend any other kind of rational thinking or judgment. The innocent victim status is used in the Shalit campaign to instill an idea that goes against reality. We have to suspend our judgment on the role that he fulfilled. We have to think that a soldier who was in an Occupation army, in occupied territory AS an occupier, not a journalist or excursionist, there to render the lives of the people under Occupation a hell on earth and endanger their very safety with his presence, was just an innocent child who needs to be returned to his worried parents. He has become the centre of a “humanitarian” campaign that has very little to do with humanity, despite the text one can read on the banner.
This campaign has been going on for a while. Anyone who has seen even one blog by Israel supporters has bumped into it. It’s really hard to remain indifferent to. Indeed, the graphic artists felt it NECESSARY to point out that Shalit is a Human being. Oh, yes, and a Jew as well. Generally, members of Homo Sapiens Sapiens ARE considered to be Human beings and we don’t need to be told, even though the pictures of Shalit bring more the idea of a lost puppy to mind.
And we all know that if Shalit was an IDF member, well, he could have been nothing other than Jewish. Tony was shocked at the horrible sort of racist labeling. As a matter of fact, he thought it was something I dreamed up myself and not a parody. He was unaware of this campaign. Where has he been hiding? The amount of posts he leaves around would indicate that he’s online a hell of a lot of hours in a day. A legitimate question to ask is what precisely does he do other than post his own repetitious text? He claims that he fights Zionism, but he has NEVER seen a Zionist site or blog since the day of the campaign??? That is longer than a year. How can one fight the enemy if one does not even know what the enemy is up to? Or maybe he’s seen it, but is pretending righteous indignation in order to influence people who may not be familiar with the propaganda tools of Zionism so that they come to think of my blog in the same jaundiced way he does. He obviously detests it, because it exposes his endless smear and silencing campaigns against Gilad Atzmon. Yet, to call it a rightwing blog with an anti-Semitic and conspiracist agenda is really pushing it. Apparently, he may need to convince himself more than he does others. And with the three-person following he has, he has to work harder on it, apparently.But, leaving aside this provincial matter for the moment, I shall return to the issue of humanity and the Gilad Shalit campaign. I had the good fortune of working for several years in a major advertising agency as a copy editor and then copywriter. Our clients would show us their new product and we would have to come up with an appropriate campaign. The first thing one has to do is to “frame the target”. You have to know who you are trying to convince, and you have to use a language that will appeal to them on even a subconscious level. You have to reach them, then you have to influence them. Later, they will become an additional and correlated (not to mention cost-free) advertising element, by driving around on your motorcycle (in the case of the campaigns I managed).
Bringing that knowledge to the Shalit campaign, we see this: our target probably is NOT the group or individuals that hold Shalit. Most likely, they would not be overly sensitive to the fact that he is a Jew, or at least, this would not be the aspect of his being that would influence them the most. Perhaps those who created the campaign feel that those holding him in captivity are unaware that he is a human, so they have to spell it out, but I tend to believe that since the advert is in English and in Hebrew, our target is the Zio-blogosphere. So, the banner gets picked up and distributed on sites where people go who support Israel or at least aren’t blatantly or even latently pro-Palestinian. I have never seen the banner on a single pro-Palestinian site. Correct me, someone, if I am wrong and it is posted on some site of the sort.
The language then, has got to appeal to the crowd that follows the Zio-blogosphere. It is “normal” for them, I guess, to believe racial profiling is acceptable. If you are a Jew, anyway, and you are a Jew who is doing it, however. I doubt they would be convinced that Tony is right and that it is anti-Semitic. If I were still in advertising and worked on this campaign, I am pretty sure they would like the Yellow Star, though, and should consider integrating it into future versions of the campaign (all campaigns require a refresher in order to remain effective).
Now, what is the most interesting aspect of the entire campaign, attempting to appeal to the humanitarian aspect of the crisis, is we see just how the people who support this campaign think. Take a look at http://giladshalit.blogspot.com/ and see that there is a poll asking the following question:
Poll: One Year On. What should the Israeli Government do?
What action should the Israeli Government take now that Hamas has clear control of Gaza and it has been 1 year since Gilad Shalit was been kidnapped
Negotiate with Hamas
Negotiate with Hamas, release as many prisoners as it takes
Hold the Hamas Leadership directly accountable
Hold the Leadership accountable and give them one final deadline before military action
Hold Leadership accountable, give deadline for military action and total cessation of all Israeli supplied electricty and Water.
view results
Well, how do you think that the public answered as of today's date?
Let me show you the results:
What action should the Israeli Government take now that Hamas has clear control of Gaza and it has been 1 year since Gilad Shalit has been kidnapped
Negotiate with Hamas 18% 127
Negotiate with Hamas, release as many prisoners as it takes 14% 97
Hold the Hamas Leadership directly accountable 10% 72
Hold the Leadership accountable and give them another final deadline before military action 10% 73
Hold Leadership accountable, give deadline for military action and total cessation of all Israeli supplied electricty and Water. 47% 327
total votes: 696
More than half of them (58%) demand that there be military action taken (raids, presumably resulting in deaths of innocent civilians, as is often the case), and a whopping 47% call for total cessation of Israeli-supplied electricty (sic) and Water. (As if it comes from someplace else).
What would the result of such a call be? It isn’t too hard to comprehend, given that Israel has already begun the cessation of supply to the people they keep confined in Gaza. It means treating human beings like their lives are expendable, and actually turning a deaf ear as one hears their cries that they are dying. I would hope that people who care about Shalit would think before they push a little button to state their opinion, and consider that it is very inhumane to cut off basic utilities services of the people who you have made depend on them. It is a form of torture and duress. It certainly is how a complete sadist would operate. Animals in a zoo are treated better than that.
Are the people who are so concerned to show the world that the IDF soldier captured while he was in operative duty is a Human being (oh, and a Jew too), able to even see or feel that the more than one million men, women and children in Gaza are Human beings as well? Or does the fact that there are no longer any Jews in Gaza mean that genocide and collective punishment is acceptable? Was the last human removed from Gaza with the unilateral withdrawal?
But, I don’t know why any of this surprises me. We all have heard that the reason for the breakout of the so-called Second Lebanon War was the capture of two IDF soldiers and the killing of eight in the border zone between Lebanon and Israel. This is the Israeli Government version of the war. Therefore, untold death and devastation is a normal and acceptable price to pay for the lives of a Human being (and Jew) wearing an IDF uniform? We know how many innocent Human beings were killed in the war Israel started. This is the page of the Israeli deaths, and this is a listing of all the casualties. Take a look at it carefully. The civilian casualties are 1,233+ (the plus meaning countless and unknown numbers of those whose death was not immediate, and we can probably add a great deal more to this list, given the situation of utter devastation that Israel created in Lebanon. The civilian wounded tops 5,089 people. The military deaths are 438 - 888+ (given the variable reports) and more than 512 wounded. The situation of devastation caused over one million people (human beings, as far as I know) to have been temporarily made into refugees, “with an unknown number of missing civilians in the south”, as was stated in several articles referenced but no longer available in an online version. It is important to mention that the southern zone of Lebanon, a residential area, was cluster bombed, meaning, the resettlement of humans is quite unlikely, due to the remote possibilities of returning to a land that has been wilfully disseminated with unconventional (and illegal, even in an activity as unholy as war) weapons that will bring about devastation for years to come. These weapons were dropped there precisely for that inhumane purpose by the Israeli army.
So, are we to deduce from all of this that you are only a Human being if you wear an IDF uniform? Or if you are a Jew? Is calling for carnage and devastation to other Human beings a proper response to the capture of a soldier? Judging by the “humanitarian” mode of thinking by those who support the Free Gilad Shalit campaign, I think we can come to some of our own conclusions.
One thing is clear, and that is that we are anaesthetized into thinking that if it is a Jewish activist, campaigning as such, calling for action, be it to “fight anti-Semitism”, “bring down Zionism” or to collectively punish millions of non-Jews (non-Humans?) it is something “normal”. It is indeed not something normal, and it is about time we started to stop expecting people to think in pre-masticated ways, expecting them to assume that a Jew certainly should know better or act in a way that is beyond judgment. This is a call for the end, once and for all, of ethnically based campaigning. It’s just another aspect of racist campaigning, and it treats us all like we are racists and need to be told what is right and what is wrong.
Labels: activism, anti-Semitism, Atzmon, call to action, gatekeeping, Gaza, good news, hasbara, human rights violations, Israel, jewish identity politics, Lebanon, military, propaganda, Zionism
Friday, January 11, 2008
Gilad Atzmon (double bill) Letter @ Bush / Brighton Bis
Letter to George W BushWhy don't you Bomb Yourself and Save Us All
President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust Memorial on Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing. AP
This is what President Bush said today at the end of his formal visit to Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
You see Mr. President, it couldn't work out, because at that time Hitler was working for America, killing 'red Communists'.
At the time, America and Britain had an armistice with Nazi Germany in mind.
You simply couldn't just admit that Hitler was a butcher? No one makes peace with industrial mass murderers.
As if this is not enough, at the time your country's military intelligence didn't really buy the story of Nazi Germany's involvement in mass liquidation. Consequently, your country didn't open its gates to Jewish refugees.
However, if you are truly shocked by Nazi inhumanity and regret your country's impotence at the time of the war, now is the time to act.
You can always save the Palestinians.
You can, for instance, just threaten to bomb Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem...
This will be enough to liberate the Palestinians in Gaza Concentration Camp.
In case you are still motivated by a genuine humanist call, you may consider bombing yourself, and saving the rest of the Iraqi people from the genocide you apparently inflicted on them.
Mr President, it is never too late to save humanity from yourself and your ilk.
Letter to the Editor of The Argus, the newspaper that did the smear piece on Atzmon.
Crowd to hear speaker were no racists
Thanks to a story in The Argus on Monday, and Jean Calder's comment piece (The Argus, December 29), last night I was able to hear an interesting talk by Israeli jazz musician Gilad Atzmon. Some people attending arrived clutching the article from Monday's paper.
Unfortunately, because one man stuck up threatening posters at the Brighthelm, I had to hear the talk standing up in the kitchen of a private house while Mr Atzmon's talk was relayed by TV from a crowded upstairs room. It turned out that the protester had originally been invited to debate with Mr Atzmon.
Much of the talk was the fascinating story of Mr Atzmon's life as a Jewish person growing up in Israel in the 1970s. He told us that all he wanted to do as a teenager was play the saxophone, so when he was conscripted into the Israeli Defence Forces his "job" was to play in the army band.
Then he recounted his horror at what he saw when taken on a tour of a camp for Palestinian prisoners run by the Israeli Defence Forces in Lebanon in the 1980s. He called it a concentration camp. He said that as a child the only Palestinians he knew were the ones that cleaned his parents' house and that they were taught nothing about Palestinians as people at school.
His experiences in Lebanon made him question his whole upbringing and he eventually decided he could no longer live in Israel.
I can understand why some may find him offensive. He described his grandfather's Zionist militia, who apparently took part in more than 50 massacres of Palestinians in the 1940s, as Jewish nazis - not a term I feel comfortable with. And his sarcastic, humorous speaking style is mocking of everything whether it be jazz, Marxists, leftists or religious tradition, which can make people feel uncomfortable.
But I am certain that Mr Atzmon and all the people crowded into that small house last night would be the first to oppose all forms of racism, anti-Semitism and nazism. What a shame that it is so easy to prevent proper public discussion on such important issues.
Dave Jones, Springfield Road Brighton
Labels: activism, anti-Semitism, Arab countries, Atzmon, call to action, gatekeeping, holocaust, Palestine, propaganda, UN
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Reunite Georgette Harb with her Kidnapped Family!
Trouble is Double for Georgette Harb Bring Georgette her afflicted family!
Palestinians have consistently lived through the traumas of home destruction, nearly all families have its martyrs from life under occupation these last 60 years. The existing siege only helps them to relive the negative experiences all over again and Georgette is no exception.
A simple modest family came to settle in its home town of Rafah City, Palestine. The family maintained the slogan, " East or west home is best, to have a rest in your own nest" The father made all efforts to secure a very nice house for his family. He didn't care about the location, which was near the military posts of the Israeli border. He thought that they were protected by the International Laws of the UN Charter and that the 4th Geneva Convention is recognized during time of War! Yet, life turned upside down! Georgette Harb is the name of a young Palestinian woman in the Gaza strip. Her name is a little bit strange, her story is strange as well. We met Georgette who seemed to be exhausted and tired of her new tasks, the family's sole breadwinner and she started narrating her story: " My name is Georgette because I have a Romanian mother whom I've never known. Before, 21 years ago, a new flower was planted in the garden of life but unfortunately, it didn't have any mercy from the one who planted it. "That flower is me." I lost my mother when I was one year old when my father decided to leave Romania and return back to his country, Palestine. My mother refused to go, and said; "Palestine is your country and your daughter's as well. So, take your daughter and leave my country and go back whence you came." Her father picked her up and left Romania for Palestine. Here we are, and so the story begins…
He went to the place where his first wife, sons and daughters lived. He went to Yemen because he was a refugee who is banned from entering into Palestine. Georgette went on telling her story, tears streamed like a crazy river and her voice was trembling like that of a very tormented woman! In 1994, Georgette and her family reached Palestine after the Oslo peace agreement. "We lived in the outskirts in what a so-called rented flat, in Rafah, Gaza Strip. Our dream to have our house was finally achieved 3 years ago. Oh… what a dream but Israeli ghosts damaged that dream with no mercy. The 9th of June 2007, 6:00 a.m was a baleful day for us when Israeli armed soldiers backed by tanks stormed our house. My father and brothers fled the house with fear of enemy assault and aggression." Said the panic stricken Georgette. Georgette and the rest of her siblings hid themselves in a bedroom, reckoning it was safe. Yet, the Israeli army was fast like the wind and demolished the external wall of that room. "Into the other room, let us move, hurry up…hurry up… Georgette told her siblings." But sure enough the soldiers were waiting for the innocent family. Finally, we tried waving a white banner through to the soldiers as they sat inside on our garden. We were harmless ladies and children, no men and no guns with us. Half hour under the heat of the sun before an order to return back to the house came where we found to our surprise more than a hundred soldiers were encircling the house. Although the room wall was destroyed, they made us sit amongst the rubble and then brought another 30 captives to the house. While we were about 60 people in this small room without food, water, not even milk for the children, the soldiers outside the room were destroying and stealing everything. They stole jewellery, any monies, a computer and even mobile phones. After the desolation, and torment of the robbery process, the two days of nightmare went away. We thought it over and done but it wasn't to be. On the 27th of Nov 2007, it was another ugly day when Israeli forces came again and took our only treasure. Tuesday 3:30 a.m, Israeli tanks restricted a big area surrounding our home. All men who lived there escaped to safer areas, my father and 3 brothers escaped also. But their fate was completely different to that of the others. While they were escaping, the IDF were waiting for them, first they caught Ramzy and told him to keep silent, Ramzy shouted "what, what do you want?" To try and warn his father and brother, but it was too late. They caught my father, Mohammed and my two brothers Saeed and Ibraheem. Mohammed was shot in his leg and abdomen, Saeed was shot in his leg and jaw and Ibraheem was shot in his leg. Occupation has no mercy, they arrested them all, although they had been dangerously hurt, they left them bleeding for about two hours before taking them to an unknown place. One can only imagine of their wellbeing.
It's now been over four weeks and we still don't know anything of their whereabouts. The questions have to be asked, "Where are our human rights? Is an animal better than a human?
When can we know anything about them? Is there no advocacy or law to defend them? Who will support 6 ladies and three children financially ruined? We need all the help and support we can find."
Support Georgette:
00972599530699
www.freegaza.ps
freegaza.ps@gmail.com
Palestinians have consistently lived through the traumas of home destruction, nearly all families have its martyrs from life under occupation these last 60 years. The existing siege only helps them to relive the negative experiences all over again and Georgette is no exception.
A simple modest family came to settle in its home town of Rafah City, Palestine. The family maintained the slogan, " East or west home is best, to have a rest in your own nest" The father made all efforts to secure a very nice house for his family. He didn't care about the location, which was near the military posts of the Israeli border. He thought that they were protected by the International Laws of the UN Charter and that the 4th Geneva Convention is recognized during time of War! Yet, life turned upside down! Georgette Harb is the name of a young Palestinian woman in the Gaza strip. Her name is a little bit strange, her story is strange as well. We met Georgette who seemed to be exhausted and tired of her new tasks, the family's sole breadwinner and she started narrating her story: " My name is Georgette because I have a Romanian mother whom I've never known. Before, 21 years ago, a new flower was planted in the garden of life but unfortunately, it didn't have any mercy from the one who planted it. "That flower is me." I lost my mother when I was one year old when my father decided to leave Romania and return back to his country, Palestine. My mother refused to go, and said; "Palestine is your country and your daughter's as well. So, take your daughter and leave my country and go back whence you came." Her father picked her up and left Romania for Palestine. Here we are, and so the story begins…
He went to the place where his first wife, sons and daughters lived. He went to Yemen because he was a refugee who is banned from entering into Palestine. Georgette went on telling her story, tears streamed like a crazy river and her voice was trembling like that of a very tormented woman! In 1994, Georgette and her family reached Palestine after the Oslo peace agreement. "We lived in the outskirts in what a so-called rented flat, in Rafah, Gaza Strip. Our dream to have our house was finally achieved 3 years ago. Oh… what a dream but Israeli ghosts damaged that dream with no mercy. The 9th of June 2007, 6:00 a.m was a baleful day for us when Israeli armed soldiers backed by tanks stormed our house. My father and brothers fled the house with fear of enemy assault and aggression." Said the panic stricken Georgette. Georgette and the rest of her siblings hid themselves in a bedroom, reckoning it was safe. Yet, the Israeli army was fast like the wind and demolished the external wall of that room. "Into the other room, let us move, hurry up…hurry up… Georgette told her siblings." But sure enough the soldiers were waiting for the innocent family. Finally, we tried waving a white banner through to the soldiers as they sat inside on our garden. We were harmless ladies and children, no men and no guns with us. Half hour under the heat of the sun before an order to return back to the house came where we found to our surprise more than a hundred soldiers were encircling the house. Although the room wall was destroyed, they made us sit amongst the rubble and then brought another 30 captives to the house. While we were about 60 people in this small room without food, water, not even milk for the children, the soldiers outside the room were destroying and stealing everything. They stole jewellery, any monies, a computer and even mobile phones. After the desolation, and torment of the robbery process, the two days of nightmare went away. We thought it over and done but it wasn't to be. On the 27th of Nov 2007, it was another ugly day when Israeli forces came again and took our only treasure. Tuesday 3:30 a.m, Israeli tanks restricted a big area surrounding our home. All men who lived there escaped to safer areas, my father and 3 brothers escaped also. But their fate was completely different to that of the others. While they were escaping, the IDF were waiting for them, first they caught Ramzy and told him to keep silent, Ramzy shouted "what, what do you want?" To try and warn his father and brother, but it was too late. They caught my father, Mohammed and my two brothers Saeed and Ibraheem. Mohammed was shot in his leg and abdomen, Saeed was shot in his leg and jaw and Ibraheem was shot in his leg. Occupation has no mercy, they arrested them all, although they had been dangerously hurt, they left them bleeding for about two hours before taking them to an unknown place. One can only imagine of their wellbeing.
It's now been over four weeks and we still don't know anything of their whereabouts. The questions have to be asked, "Where are our human rights? Is an animal better than a human?
When can we know anything about them? Is there no advocacy or law to defend them? Who will support 6 ladies and three children financially ruined? We need all the help and support we can find."
Support Georgette:
00972599530699
www.freegaza.ps
freegaza.ps@gmail.com
Labels: absolute madness, call to action, Gaza, human rights violations, Israel, military, occupation, Palestine, refugees
