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Posted on 26 October 2010.
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Posted in LiteratureComments Off on JEWISH BOOKS & STUDIES
Posted on 26 October 2010.
Israeli Website Exposes Zionist Extremism!
My recent video on Jewish extremism has garnered a lot of interest. The following is an article titled Gentiles in Halacha from the Daat Emet Website in Israel. Daat Emet is a secular site written by Jews who reject the Jewish Supremacism that forms the core of Judaism. In Daat Emet you will find validated almost all my assertions about Jewish supremacism.
For pointing out the extreme ethnic hate and supremacist nature of Judaism I am often incorrectly condemned and slandered as anti-Semitic. Yet, the extreme hatred and body of Jewish law against Gentiles (and also against Jewish women) is almost completely unknown to most Gentiles as Zionist-dominated media keeps people in complete ignorance of Jewish extremism. Interestingly, the same press that suppresses awareness of Jewish extremism constantly tells the world about the dangers of Muslim extremism.
Yet, it is Jewish extremism that led directly to the terrorism and ethnic cleansing that created Israel, that tortured more than a hundred thousand Palestinians and other Arabs in their prisons, and that terrorized and harmed millions of people such as in the recent attacks on Lebanon. The Zio=Jewish extremists are fomenting the so-called War on Terror and they are the ones who created the disastrous Afghanistan and Iraq War, wars for Israel not America. The Halacha is the core of Jewish Law.
Halakha (Hebrew: הלכה; also transliterated as Halakhah, Halacha, Halakhot and Halachah) is the collective corpus of Jewish religious law, including biblical law (the 613 mitzvot) and later talmudic and rabbinic law as well as customs and traditions. Like the religious laws in many other cultures, Judaism classically draws no distinction in its laws between religious and non-religious life. Hence, Halakha guides not only religious practices and beliefs, but numerous aspects of day-to-day life.- from Wikipedia
One of the core doctrines of the Halacha is that Gentiles (all non-Jews) are not human beings but animals. Correspondingly, it teaches that it is permissible for Jews to kill, harm, cheat, and steal from Gentiles, in fact such is sometimes even commanded by their law. It actually teaches that Gentiles are in three categories, those that obey all seven Noahide Laws (though in practice no Gentiles fit this category), Gentiles who do not keep the Noahide Laws, and Gentiles who are Idolater Gentiles (as Halacha considers all Christians).
We learn from the laws that we wrote here that there are three levels of killing one who is not a Jew: One, if he is a Noahide gentile, fulfilling the seven laws–a Jew who kills him is not liable to death by the courts as he would be had he killed a Jew, but he is liable to death by the hands of Heaven. The second is a gentile who does not keep the seven Noahide laws (and we know of no gentile who keeps the seven Noahide laws)–this one may be killed, but the Jews are not commanded to kill him.
The third is an actual idolatrous gentile (as Halacha considers all Christians): it is a commandment to kill him. The Rama, in Yoreh Deah 158, section one, writes: “And therefore one is allowed to try medicines on gentiles to see if they help.” This is an explicit halachic license to perform medical experimentation by force on gentile slaves bought by Jews.–from Parashat Maatot on Daat Emet website
Gentiles in Halacha
Foreword — Daat Emet
For a long time we have been considering the necessity of informing our readers about Halacha’s real attitude towards non-Jews. Many untrue things are publicized on this issue and the facts should be made clear. But recently, we were presented with a diligently written article on the subject, authored by a scholar from the Merkaz HaRav yeshiva — so our job was done by others (though we have already discussed some aspects of this issue in the weekly portions of Balak and Matot; see there).
Since there is almost no disagreement between us and the author of the article on this issue, we have chosen to bring the article “Jews Are Called ‘Men’” by R’ David Bar-Chayim (in Hebrew) so that the reader will be able to study and understand the attitude of the Halacha towards non-Jews.
In this article R’ Bar-Chayim discusses the attitude towards “Gentiles” in the Torah and in the Halacha and comes to an unambiguous conclusion: “The Torah of Israel makes a clear distinction between a Jew, who is defined as ‘man,’ and a Gentile.” That is to say, any notion of equality between human beings is irrelevant to the Halacha. R’ Bar-Chayim’s work is comprehensive, written with intellectual honesty, and deals with almost all the aspects of Halachic treatment of non-Jews.
It also refutes the statements of those rabbis who speak out of wishful thinking and, influenced by concepts of modern society, claim that Judaism does not discriminate against people on religious grounds. R’ Bar-Chayim shows that all these people base their constructs not on the Torah but solely on the inclinations of their own hearts. He also shows that there are even rabbis who intentionally distort the Halachic attitude to Gentiles, misleading both themselves and the general public.
For the English readers’ convenience we will briefly mention the topics dealt with in R’ Bar-Chayim’s article:
Laws in regard to murder, which clearly state that there is Halachic difference between murder of a Jew and of a Gentile (the latter is considered a far less severe crime).
A ban on desecrating the Sabbath to save the life of a Gentile.
A Jew’s exemption from liability if his property (e. g. ox) causes damage to a Gentile’s property. But if a Gentile’s property causes damage to a Jew’s property, the Gentile is liable.
The question of whether robbery of a Gentile is forbidden by the Torah’s law or only by a Rabbinic decree.
A ban on returning a lost item to a Gentile if the reason for returning it is one’s sympathy towards the Gentile and compassion for him.
The sum which a Gentile overpays in a business transaction due to his own error is forfeit; whether a Jew is permitted to intentionally deceive a Gentile is also discussed.
One who kidnaps a Jew is liable to death, but one who kidnaps a Gentile is exempt.
A Jew who hurts or injures a Gentile is not liable for compensation of damage, but a Gentile who hurts a Jew is liable to death.
One who overcharges a Gentile ought not return him the sum that the Gentile overpaid.
A Gentile — or even a convert to Judaism — may not be appointed king or public official of any sort (e. g. a cabinet minister).
One who defames a female proselyte (claiming that she was not virgin at the time of her marriage) is liable to neither lashes nor fine.
The prohibition to hate applies only to Jews; one may hate a Gentile.
One may take revenge against or bear a grudge towards Gentiles; likewise, the commandment “love your neighbor” applies only to Jews, not to Gentiles.
One who sees Gentile graveyards should curse: “Your mother shall be greatly ashamed…”Gentiles are likened to animals.
If an ox damaged a Gentile maidservant, it should be considered as though the ox damaged a she-ass.
The dead body of a Gentile does not bear ritual impurity, nor does a Gentile who touches the dead body of a Jew become impure — he is considered like an animal who touched a dead body.
One is forbidden to pour anointing oil on a Jew, but there is no ban on pouring that oil on a Gentile because Gentiles are likened to animals.
An animal slaughtered by a Gentile is forbidden, even if the ritual slaughter performed was technically correct, because Gentiles are deemed like animals. (Daat Emet does not agree that this is the Halachic reason for invalidating a Gentile’s ritual slaughter — but this is not the place to delve into the subject).
Their members are like those of asses” — Gentiles are likened to animals.
Between the Jews and the Gentiles — In the Aggadah, the Kabbalah, and in Jewish Thought
R’ Bar-Chayim’s arguments and conclusions are clear, Halachically accurate, and supported by almost all the existent major Halachic works. It would be superfluous to say that R’ Bar-Chayim fully embraces this racist Halachic outlook as the word of the Living G-d, as he himself pointed out in the “Conclusion” of his article: “It is clear to every Jew who accepts the Torah as G-d’s word from Sinai, obligatory and valid for all generations, that it is impossible to introduce ‘compromises’ or ‘renovations’ into it.”
On the other hand, we want to make it clear that Daat Emet — as well as any reasonable people who do not embrace Halachic laws as the word of the Living G-d — are repulsed by such evil, racist discrimination.
In the Hebrew text we have abridged the second part of R’ Bar-Chayim’s article, “Between Jews and Gentiles — In the Aggadah, the Kabbalah, and in Jewish Thought,” because, in our view, the Halacha is the law which obligates every religious Jew while concepts of the Aggadah, the Kabbalah, and Jewish thought are not binding on anyone, as our rabbis have already written: “And so the Aggadic constructs of the disciples of disciples, such as Rav Tanchuma and Rabbi Oshaya and their like — most are incorrect, and therefore we do not rely on the words of Aggadah” (Sefer HaEshkol, Laws of a Torah Scroll, p. 60a); we have expanded on this issue in the portion of Vayeshev.
Posted in LiteratureComments Off on JEWISH WEBSITE COURAGEOUSLY EXPOSES ZIONISM!
Posted on 26 October 2010.
Zionist Agents Leverage Peace Talks to Free the ‘Most Devastating’ Spy in US History
Reps Frank, Pascrell, Towns and Weiner conspire to free Jonathan Pollard
By Philip Giraldi
(Watch Jonathan Pollard Stealing U.S. Secrets for Israel)
Let us suppose for a moment that an individual enjoying the full confidence and trust of the United States government was given access to the most secret information possessed by the US military, to include how it would react to an attack by an aggressor armed with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Let us further suppose that that individual violated his trust in the most egregious and vile fashion, offering to sell the information to anyone, but eventually settling on a nation ostensibly friendly to the US but not in any way a formal ally. The individual then proceeded to deliver defense secrets literally by the carload, not only information that might plausibly have been construed as relevant to the buyer’s own security, but also strategic defense information that could conceivably have led to the deaths of millions of American citizens. That information was then bartered and re-sold to an enemy who was in a position to use it to devastate the United States, together with sources and methods information on intelligence operations that in short order led to the deaths of many American citizens and also foreigners who had been cooperating with the United States.
Let us further suppose that the individual who stole the secrets was eventually caught because the sheer volume of what he was stealing was detected in spite of the indolence and incompetence of his superiors and he was convicted and imprisoned for life. In the damage assessment made after the arrest, it was determined that the espionage had been the most devastating ever experienced by the United States of America, both in volume and in the sensitivity of the information that had been betrayed.
Fast forward a few years. The country that paid the man to steal the secrets becomes a major beneficiary of US assistance and uses the money to set up a lobbying organization that effectively manages key players in the federal government and the media, making it virtually invulnerable to any criticism. Pumped up by hubris, that country seeks on several occasions to obtain the freedom of its spy, claiming inaccurately that he was only taking information used for purely defensive purposes. Fast forward a few more years and legislators in the US Congress known to be advocates of the foreign country that bought the secrets join in, calling for the release of the convicted spy. The media, also compromised and in the pockets of the foreign lobby, obligingly does not report the tale of American legislators who have apparently sold out.
I am, of course, referring to Jonathan Pollard and his friends in Israel and the United States. Pollard did more damage to the United States than any spy in history. And it was genuine damage, not just a mass of documents that had been routinely classified. Pollard’s Israeli handler, aided by someone in the White House who has up until now evaded arrest, was able to ask for specific classified documents by name and number. The Soviets obtained US war plans, passed to them by the Israelis in exchange for money and free emigration of Russian Jews without any regard for the damage it was doing to the United States. The KGB was able to use the mass of information to reconstruct US intelligence operations directed against it and a number of Americans and US agents paid with their lives. Pollard also revealed to the Israelis and Soviets the technical and human source capabilities that US intelligence did and did not have, which is the most critical information of all as it underlies all information collection efforts. Compounding the problem, the United States has never actually been able to accurately ascertain all of the damage done by Pollard because the Israeli government has refused to cooperate in the investigation and has not returned the documents that were stolen.
And make no mistake, Pollard did it for money. He has since wrapped himself in the Israeli flag and promoted himself as an observant Jew to justify his crime and to obtain his freedom. He is reported to be a very popular person in Israel, an Israeli citizen by act of parliament, and there is a square in Jerusalem that has been renamed “Freedom for Jonathan Pollard Square.” There is also an active “Justice for Jonathan Pollard” movement in the United States supported by the heavyweight Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Never before has there been such a transformation, with a despicable lowlife spy who sold out his country for money turned into a hero.
Pollard is just one symptom of the asymmetrical relationship that makes many mutter “wag the dog” whenever the subject of Israel comes up. If ever a foreign country has stuck its thumb in the eye of Uncle Sam, it is Israel in its willingness to take the United States for a ride while always demanding still more. And when it demands more it is invariably given more, with US politicians and mainstream media ever willing to genuflect and do what is right for the kleptocracy in charge in Tel Aviv.
The latest criminal outrage is a quartet of congressmen who are calling on the Obama Administration to free Pollard to “advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.” Well, first of all, everyone knows that the talks are kabuki, designed to accomplish absolutely nothing while advancing the standing of Obama prior to the US congressional elections in November. Israel continues its creeping annexation of the West Bank aided and abetted by Washington, which will do nothing substantive to stop the illegal and immoral activity. Abbas presumably is being bought off to stay silent while the play unfolds and Hamas, which should be sitting at the table, has been excluded.
That means that the congressmen in question, who actually took an oath to uphold the US Constitution, know that they are doing nothing but throwing yet another bone to Israel. The congressmen are Barney Franks of Massachusetts, Edolphus Towns of New York, Anthony Weiner also of New York, and Bill Pascrell of New Jersey. Mark their names well. Franks and Weiner are presumably acting due to tribal solidarity, but Pascrell and Towns are the straight men in the routine, brought along to make the Free Pollard movement appear to be less than a complete ethnically based sell out.
It is time for the American people to rise up and throw these bums out. Putting them in jail for malfeasance and corruption would be even better. I would like to see a panel of USS Liberty survivors and widows and orphans of the dead intelligence officers question Franks, Weiner, Pascrell, and Towns about their plan to free Pollard. Better still, I would like to see some US veterans groups and their publications develop a backbone and take up the cause, finally saying that enough is enough since it is our soldiers, sailors, and airmen who have paid the price in their blood for the Israeli connection. And then there is the intelligence community. Its leading lobby, Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO), has long ignored Israeli espionage and prefers to regularly express concern about “Islamofascism.” Look in your own backyard folks, it is the Israelis who are skinning us alive, not the Muslims, and Pollard is the poster child of what exactly is being done to us. He is sometimes cited as proof that spies for Israel are caught and punished, but the truth is that he is the only one who has done hard time in jail and only because of the enormity of his crime while all the others have somehow slipped through our criminal justice system. Franks, Weiner, Pascrell, and Towns are only the latest in a long line of collaborator politicians who should sometimes sit back and ponder where their loyalty actually lies. If they persist in their Pollard campaign, they should be regarded as not fit to sit in the congress of the United States. And that goes for anyone else who decides to lobby on behalf of Pollard.
An opportunity is coming in November to remove the snakes from Congress. Let’s organize to get rid of Franks, Weiner, Pascrell, and Towns. To be sure they will be replaced by others who are probably just as attached to Israel or fearful of its lobby as they are, but the time will inevitably come when allegiance to a foreign nation that is a strategic liability for the United States will become unseemly. May that day come soon.
Article Source Antiwar.com
Posted in USAComments Off on TRAITOROUS HOUSE DEMOCRATS COLLUDE TO FREE ZIONIST SPY
Posted on 26 October 2010.
by crescentandcross
Netanyahu’s tour of the top-security Shayetet 13 base on the coast near Haifa was a show of defiance against international censure of the raid on the converted cruise liner Mavi Marmara.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with Israeli naval commandos who participated in a deadly raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla last May, in Atlit naval base, northern Israel, Oct. 26 2010 |
Photo by: AP |
It followed testimony on Sunday from Israel’s military chief, who told a state-appointed inquest into the operation that the commandos had come under pistol, knife and cudgel
attacks while boarding and fired 308 live bullets in response.
Activists from the Mavi Marmara have confirmed they resisted the Israeli boarding party but denied provoking lethal violence.
Netanyahu said the May 31 raid on the Turkish-flagged vessel, one of six ships trying to run Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, had been “crucial, essential, important and legal”.
“Gaza has turned into an Iranian terror base,” he said, referring to the Palestinian territory controlled by Hamas Islamists, in a speech to around 200 members of the unit.
He heaped praise on the commandos, saying they had acted “courageously, morally and with restraint”.
The night-time interception on Mediterranean high seas and the ensuing bloodshed strained Israel’s once-close ties with Turkey, which has demanded an apology and compensation.
A United Nations probe last month condemned the attack as unlawful and said it resulted in violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. UN jurists also said the Gaza blockade had caused a humanitarian crisis and was unlawful.
‘I salute you’
Flotilla 13 commandos had been equipped with riot-dispersal gear but quickly switched to live fire during deck brawls with dozens of activists. The ship had ignored Israeli calls to stop.
Two commandos were shot and wounded and another five suffered other injuries, the navy said. In addition to the nine Turkish dead, 24 activists were hurt, many of them by gunfire.
“You acted against those who came to kill you and tried to kill you,” said Netanyahu. “There is no one better than you. I salute you.”
He then met some of the commandos who took part in the raid, shaking their hands on a prow-shaped veranda overlooking the craggy bay at their Atlit base. They were shadowed by bodyguards and, out to sea, a squad of commandos in a speed boat.
Bristling at Turkish and other foreign fury over the Mavi Marmara raid yet wary of international war crimes suits, Israel set up its own inquiry to help prepare its submission for a separate probe under U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon.
Interim findings from that inquest, under retired Supreme Court justice Jacob Turkel, are due out in mid-November and the final report by early 2011, a spokesman said. Another internal investigation by an Israeli ex-general is already complete.
Turkey withdrew its ambassador from Israel and cancelled joint military exercises in protest at the Mavi Marmara raid and has dismissed the Israeli inquiries as insufficient.
source–Haaretz.com
Posted in PoliticsComments Off on NETANYAHU ‘SALUTES’ GESTAPO COMMANDOS WHO RAIDED GAZA FLOTILLA
Posted on 26 October 2010.
Palestine: Lament for the Revolution
London Review of Books
Diary
Nowadays, when Palestinian activists in their twenties and thirties
meet up with veterans of the Palestinian struggle, they show an
unexpected thoughtfulness towards the older, revolutionary generation,
to which I belong. This is nothing like the courtesy extended as a
matter of course to older people in our part of the world: it is more
intimate and more poignant. What brings us together is always the need
to discuss the options before us, and to see if a plan can be made.
Everyone argues, laughs, shouts and tells black jokes. But whenever a
proper discussion begins, the suddenly lowered voices of our
frustrated young people, many of them at the heart of the fierce
protests on university campuses and in rights campaigns elsewhere,
have the same tone I used to hear in the voices of our young ambulance
workers in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s: an elegiac gentleness
towards the hopelessly wounded, towards those who were already beyond
repair.
The way Palestinians see things, the fragmentation of the body politic
– externally engineered, and increasingly internally driven – has now
been achieved. This summer, even the liberal Israeli press began to
notice that the key people in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority’s
capital in the West Bank, no longer discuss strategies of liberation
but rather the huge business deals that prey on the public
imagination. Every institution or overarching structure that once
united Palestinians has now crumbled and been swept away. The gulf
between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah, between
Palestinians inside Palestine and the millions of refugees outside it,
between city and village, town and refugee camp, now seems
unbridgeable. The elites are tiny and the numbers of the dispossessed
and the disenfranchised increase every day. There is, at this moment,
no single body able to claim legitimately to represent all
Palestinians; no body able to set out a collective policy or national
programme of liberation. There is no plan.
The feeling of paralysis doesn’t only affect the Palestinians. It is
found too among the hundreds of international institutions and less
formal groups involved in the thriving carpet-bagging industry of the
Middle East Peace Process. The US, the UN, the EU, their special
envoys and fact-finding commissions, their human rights monitors,
lawyers and NGOs, the policy think tanks, the growing legion of
international humanitarian agencies, the dialogue groups and peace
groups, all came to the same conclusion shortly after the start of the
second Intifada in the autumn of 2000. Over the last decade, these
bodies have produced thousands of institutional memos, governmental
reports, official démarches, human rights briefings, summaries,
analyses, legal inquiries into war crimes and human rights abuses,
academic books and articles. And they have pretty much nailed it:
Palestinians are enduring the entrenched effects not only of a
military occupation, but of a colonial regime that practises
apartheid.
The predicament is understood and widely accepted, yet Palestinians
and non-Palestinians appear equally baffled. Protest and denunciation
have achieved very little. How are we to respond in a way that will
allow us to prevail? The vocabulary required to form a policy is
entirely absent both nationally and internationally. Palestinians are
currently trapped in a historical moment that – as the contemporary
world sees it – belongs to the past. The language the situation
demands had life only inside an ideology which has now disappeared.
Everyone else has moved on. In a world whose intellectual framework is
derived from university courses in postcolonial or cultural studies,
from the discourse of post-nationalism, or human rights, or global
governance, from post-conflict and security literature, the
Palestinians are stuck fast in historical amber. They can’t move on,
and the language that could assist them to do so is as extinct as
Aramaic. No one cares any longer for talk of liberation: in fact,
people flinch at the sound of it – it is unfashionable, embarrassing,
reactionary even to speak of revolution today. Twenty-first-century
eyes read revolutionary engagement as the first stage on the road to
the guillotine or the Gulag. Advanced now well beyond the epic and
heroic stages of its history, the West views its own revolutionary
roots through the decadent backward gaze of Carl Schmitt. Seen through
that prism, Palestinians remain stubbornly – one could almost say,
wilfully – in the anti-colonial, revolutionary phase of their history.
So the questions debated by Palestinians are the same now as they ever
were: how to organise, how to mobilise, how to unify? There remains a
constant sense of emergency, but Palestinians with long memories agree
that we are at a nadir in our history of resistance. The only sign of
forward movement lies in the tide of revulsion at Israel’s belligerent
policies, which Palestinian civil society organisations have
channelled into a vivid and well-organised campaign of solidarity
through boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
Exactly 50 years ago, Palestinians were at a similar stage of social
and political fragmentation brought about by defeat and dispossession
and the anomie that followed the Nakba of 1948. Without a country or
the protection of a sovereign state, they were confronting, on the one
hand, Israel, and on the other, sundry Arab regimes: between them they
controlled every aspect of Palestinians’ social and civic lives as
well as their physical space. They lived deep in the dust and disease
of tent cities, without personal papers or property. In 1955, a young
Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani, moved to Kuwait from Syria,
where he had been a teacher at a school set up for refugees by the UN,
after himself being expelled from Palestine with his family in 1948.
One of his people’s most perceptive chroniclers, he described their
mood in his diary: ‘The only thing we know is that tomorrow will be no
better than today, and that we are waiting on the shore, yearning, for
a boat that will not come. We are sentenced to be separated from
everything – except from our own destruction.’
But what appeared to Kanafani to be the collective end was in fact its
extraordinary beginning. By the end of the decade, the revolution had
found a language and a form. For the first time in a century of
rebellions and uprisings against foreign rule, Palestinians could
mount a collective challenge to international, Israeli and Arab
coercion, and unify sufficiently to represent themselves. Even a
cursory study of the history of revolutions over the last 300 years
reveals three elements essential to their origins. First, a plethora
of revolutionary pamphlets, declarations and discussions issuing from
different factions together begin to shape a shared understanding of
the injustices that have to be overturned. A call to arms requires a
convincing appraisal of the balance of forces if enough people are to
be persuaded to embark on such a risky enterprise. The history of
Palestinian attempts to achieve freedom would give anyone pause: two
generations who tried lie buried in the cemeteries of more than two
dozen countries.
Second, it is revolutionaries who make revolutions, and not the other
way around. During the national mobilisation of the 1960s and 1970s,
some joined the party, others the movement, but most simply joined the
Palestinian revolution. It was taken for granted that one belonged to
one of the parties, which were themselves embedded in the broader
national liberation movement under the umbrella of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation, a formal institution set up in 1964 by Arab
states, which was captured from the Palestinian elite by the
resistance groups a few years later. Empowered by becoming part of a
fast-moving popular revolution, Palestinians – exiled, scattered and
defeated as they were – achieved the two elusive things they have
constantly sought: representation and unity.
If you raise the painful subject of this earlier time among
Palestinians today, the usual effect is to revive the over-theoretical
debate about when exactly the revolution died. (A discussion of its
strengths and weaknesses would be more useful.) Some say it ended
after Black September in Jordan in 1970; others that it ended in 1975
at the start of the Lebanese civil war. The majority see Israel’s
invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which brought about the comprehensive
destruction of the PLO’s infrastructure, as having killed it off. The
communiqués and declarations issued during the first Intifada, which
took place in the occupied Palestinian territories between 1987 and
1993, were expressed in the language of revolution, but everyone
agrees that it was all over by 1991, when the Madrid peace process was
accepted on such unequal terms. That entire period of Palestinian
history has fallen into disrepute for a number of reasons – not least
having to watch its ghoulish remains driving around in official cars
in Ramallah or posing at the White House – so the benefits are never
assessed, or potentially useful lessons drawn.
Unity and representation are the common goods Palestinians must
realise in order to advance their cause, and these clearly can’t be
achieved via any of the options currently being suggested to us: not
the distribution of the PA’s power between Hamas and Fatah (since the
only representative institutional structure for all Palestinians is
the Palestinian National Council, the parliament-in-exile of the PLO);
not a US-sponsored peace process; and not the plan for Palestinian
statehood proposed by the prime minister, Salam Fayyad, according to
which the institutions of an independent state will be built in the
face of a still expanding military occupation. Already by the 1970s,
thanks to its fluid institutional architecture, the revolution was
able to overcome national borders, protect its independence from the
Arab regimes and convey its demands to the solidarity movements who
supported it and exerted pressure on its behalf. Other national
liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s – the FLN, ANC, Swapo, the
Sandinistas – had to operate with their leaders underground and in
exile, developing their strategy outside the country while the
population remained rooted in the land they hoped to liberate. For
Palestinians, whose national politics were undone in an instant over a
single year in 1948, it took the concerted actions of tens of
thousands of cadres across the region to hold the people together
while at the same time putting sufficient pressure on those
governments, both Western and Arab, that would have preferred to see
us capitulate to Israel. The mood of that short period, as I remember
it, was profoundly popular and democratic: pluralist, multi-party,
universalist, secular and highly progressive. Palestinians who dared
not join in – businessmen, academics, the money-grubbing classes –
were carried along in its wake, and obeyed its mandate. Today we could
not be further from that fleeting moment of unity the revolution once
afforded.
The experience of revolutionary life is difficult to describe. It is
as much metaphysical as imaginative, combining urgency,
purposefulness, seriousness and hard work, with a near celebratory
sense of adventure and overriding optimism – a sort of carnival
atmosphere of citizens’ rule. Key to its success is that this
heightened state is consciously and collectively maintained by tens of
thousands of people at the same time. If you get tired for a few hours
or days, you know others are holding the ring.
The third, counterintuitive feature of revolutions is that they are
usually launched by astonishingly small groups of individuals. The
Palestinian revolution was no exception. Young Palestinians today,
caught in the grind of their daily struggle, feel unable to make
contact with their own past: its stories are like fairytales, out of
their reach. The appropriate model for the emergence of the
Palestinian movement of the 1960s and 1970s isn’t the Leninist
vanguard party but the revolutions that established democracies in
19th-century Europe, where the acts of a few were matched, and then
rapidly overtaken, by an entire nation, all of whose members
considered themselves leaders. No one here waits around for
instructions.
What usually goes unmentioned in the history books is the dangerous
and seemingly interminable slog that is required to build up to any
revolution’s launch: it may take years, even decades, once the match
is lit, for it to ignite a mobilisation large enough to create a truly
national initiative.
One of the individuals who still keeps the revolutionary spirit alive
in these bleak times phoned me this week, and this time I rang him
back. (Often I can’t face talking to him because his situation is so
terrible.) Ziyad was a key activist in the first Intifada when he was
a student at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank, and for the last 20
years he has dedicated his life in Gaza to what is commonly known as
‘mobilising from below’. Ziyad is, or was, head of the Rafah refugee
camp’s popular committee, the local elected body, legendary now for
its history of civic resistance to Israeli rule. Ziyad is like an
artist, restlessly exploring ways to preserve people’s humanity amid
the oppression and misery of southern Gaza. His cool eye and steady
nerve, together with a seemingly inexhaustible affection for others,
have kept him from turning away in despair at the things he has seen.
At the height of the war on Gaza, he managed to create and sustain the
only committee that included all the factions, with Fatah members
working alongside Hamas, or vice versa. Members of other committees
that had previously tried this (including his own) had been kneecapped
for their pains.
Ziyad spent much of last year in prison in Gaza, and, as it turned out
when I returned his call, some of this year’s Ramadan as well. ‘Oh
no!’ I said, ‘What happened this time?’ He said that he’d been trying
to organise in the elementary schools. This struck me as one of the
funniest things I had heard in a long time: Ziyad laughed, too, when
he began telling me about it. He had tried to organise a prize-giving
in the camp for some of the students, but the current administration
in Gaza didn’t like the idea at all. ‘I am not selecting children from
Hamas families or Fatah families,’ he said, ‘just those who had done
well in school. I had to try something!’
What the administration in Gaza does not like, Ziyad said, is the idea
of movement, of freedom, of opening things up from below, of bringing
people together for any common purpose at all. I told him I had spoken
to Adnan in Beirut only that morning, and that the story was no
different there: Adnan has been forced to stay at home for months now,
unable to move. Until last year, he had worked closely with another
old friend of mine, Kamal Medhat, a child of the revolution who was
not so different from Ziyad in his determination to go it alone while
carrying everyone with him.
Just over a year ago Kamal was assassinated by a car bomb in south
Lebanon. He had been trying to urge people forward towards national
unity, and to attack the political corruption then entrenched in the
refugee camps: these two objectives, it soon became clear, were
intertwined. He was making a very successful job of it, for he brought
formidable experience to the task. Already a legend as a young man,
Kamal was responsible for, among many other things, the security of
the leadership when the revolution was centred in Beirut, and attempts
against it took place on an almost daily basis. An obituary in the
Arab press noted that ‘he constantly criticised Arafat, who would
laugh.’ This was true: Kamal could be brutally honest, but he made
everyone in the room feel happy, taking and giving endless orders,
joking, and being especially encouraging to young cadres, though also
quite tough. I witnessed at least a dozen acts of bravery by Kamal in
the 1970s and early 1980s. After the PLO leadership was evacuated to
Tunis in 1982, he returned to Lebanon to help lift the military siege
of the Palestinian refugee camps by the Syrians and their proxies. In
the 1990s, in disagreement with the leadership’s negotiating strategy,
he absented himself from public life, studying for a doctorate in
international law, staying very quiet. We lost track of each other
until a few years ago, when he burst back onto the scene in Lebanon,
unchanged and undefeated, now the second in command at the PLO embassy that had finally been re-established there.
I went to his funeral; we all walked the familiar path to the
Palestinian cemetery, accompanied by thousands of refugees, clapping
and singing and shouting revolutionary slogans. After the 40 days of
mourning I returned to Beirut, where the traditional memorial meeting
was convened at the Unesco palace. The hall was packed with
Palestinians from the refugee camps across Lebanon, and black and
white images of the handsome Kamal at different stages of his life
succeeded one another on a screen behind the stage. Most of the
Palestinian leaders were at an urgent meeting in Amman, and couldn’t
attend. The eerie pockets of silence at various moments throughout the
ceremony were bound up, it seemed to me, with the implications of his
death (don’t organise, don’t push, don’t try to change things for the
better). Something felt as if it was about to give.
His family, with whom I was staying, had asked me to speak about him,
as Kamal had been an early teacher of mine. Afterwards, in the foyer,
a stream of young people came up to me. They wanted me to know exactly
what he had meant to them: ‘Kamal was the only one who spoke up for
us’; ‘Kamal listened to us, he stood with us’; ‘He fought for us’; ‘He
encouraged us.’ One after another, they told me stories of what he
did. Each had recognised his revolutionary spirit, I thought, as I
watched them wander away afterwards into the streets of Beirut.
[Karma Nabulsi, a fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford and tutor in
politics, was a representative of the PLO in Lebanon, Tunis and the
UK.]
Posted in Middle EastComments Off on DOROTHY ONLINE NEWSLETTER
Posted on 26 October 2010.
What Wikileaks should cause; rage at our criminal leaders
25 Oct 2010 Wow. The kind of column that most Western newspapers would never run. But here’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in yesterday’s Independent on the justified and burning rage caused by Wikileaks:
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ABC offers nice PR for complicit Israeli car firm Better Place
25 Oct 2010 This is quite an achievement. A story on ABC radio today about Israeli electric car company Better Place that completely ignores any mention of its operations in the occupied, Palestinian territories and involvement of former members of the IDF suspected of war crimes. |
Baltzer speaks on Palestinian rights
25 Oct 2010 I spent time last week here in Sydney with visiting American Jewish writer and activist Anna Baltzer, a passionate advocate for the Palestinian cause; quiet, determined and strongly calling for BDS and a one-state solution. She was interviewed tonight on ABC PM Radio:
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Saddam taught them well (and we knew)
25 Oct 2010 Let’s face it. Australia and Britain are also likely to have blood on their hands, handing over suspected terrorists (aka insurgents) to Iraqi forces:
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Privatising wars is cosy for all concerned (except dead civilians)
25 Oct 2010 The sickness of relying on private contractors to fight our wars is only getting worse. Western governments can’t get enough of companies operating without direct responsibility to them. What’s a few recorded murders discussed during the annual shareholder meeting? Pratap Chatterjee writes in the Guardian that the Wikileaks Iraq logs show how out of control the problem has become:
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Mapping every Iraqi death (officially recorded)
24 Oct 2010
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How the MSM loves to smear Assange
24 Oct 2010 Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on the establishment media’s constant and obsessive campaign to discredit Julian Assange. Shooting the messenger is an old tactic but now corporate journalists are joining in:
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The Wikileaks story step by step
24 Oct 2010 Al-Jazeera comprehensively covers the Wikileaks Iraq dump. The Pentagon, Julian Assange and Iraqi politicians are all canvassed:
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Posted in Middle EastComments Off on A.LOEWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER
Posted on 26 October 2010.
By Jesse Bacon
When the specifics of Israel’s siege of Gaza came to light, it appeared almost random in its insanity and cruelty. The famous example is the prohibiting of pasta while allowing rice, all the while claiming this was somehow ensuring Israel’s security.
Well wonder no longer. Through the heroic efforts of Gisha, whose work we feature regularly here on The Only Democracy?, the actual policy has been released. It turns out there is a detailed series of charts and formulae that look like someone attempted to translate the lectures of Glenn Beck into public policy. In the driest of terms, it represents a calculus of human misery, equations of despair that add up to the starvation of Gazans and a protracted conflict.
“Policy of Deliberate Reduction”The documents reveal that the state approved “a policy of deliberate reduction” for basic goods in the Gaza Strip (section h.4, page 5*). Thus, for example, Israel restricted the supply of fuel needed for the power plant, disrupting the supply of electricity and water.The state set a “lower warning line” (section g.2, page 5) to give advance warning of expected shortages in a particular item, but at the same time approved ignoring that warning, if the good in question was subject to a policy of “deliberate reduction“. Moreover, the state set an “upper red line” above which even basic humanitarian items could be blocked, even if they were in demand (section g.1, page 5). The state claimed in a cover letter to Gisha that in practice, it had not authorized reduction of “basic goods” below the “lower warning line”, but it did not define what these “basic goods” were (page 2).
So, the lower red line is to tell Israel that its policies were working as designed to cause shortages, thus allowing them to “ignore” the warnings. Even at the upper limit, Israel could keep denying goods if it saw fit to do so. I am reminded of one of those thermometers used to measure fundraising, only here the goal is deprivation not development.
“Luxuries” denied for Gaza Strip residentsIn violation of international law, which allows Israel to restrict the passage of goods only for concrete security reasons, the decision whether to permit or prohibit an item was also based on “the good’s public perception” and “whether it is viewed as a luxury” (section c.b, page 16).In other words, items characterized as “luxury” items would be banned – even if they posed no security threat, and even if they were needed. Thus, items such as chocolate and paper were not on the “permitted” list. In addition, officials were to consider “sensitivity to the needs of the international community”.
Secret List of GoodsThe procedures determine that the list of permitted goods “will not be released to those not specified!!” (emphasis in original) (section j, page 17), ignoring the fact that without transparency, merchants in Gaza could not know what they were permitted to purchase.The list itemized permitted goods only. Items not on the list – cumin, for example – would require a special procedure for approval, irrespective of any security consideration, at the end of which it would be decided whether to let it in or not.
Ban on Reconstructing GazaAlthough government officials have claimed that they will permit the rehabilitation of Gaza, the documents reveal that Israel treated rehabilitation and development of the Gaza Strip as a negative factor in determining whether to allow an item to enter; goods “of a rehabilitative character” required special permission (section g, page 16). Thus, international organizations and Western governments did not receive permits to transfer building materials into Gaza for schools and homes.
Calculation of product inventoryThe documents contain a series of formulas created by the Defense Ministry to compute product inventory (pages 8-10). The calculations are presumed to allow COGAT to measure what is called the “length of breath” (section i, page 8). The formula states that if you divide the inventory in the Strip by the daily consumption needs of residents, you will get the number of days it will take for residents of Gaza to run out of that basic product, or in other words, until their “length of breath” will run out.
According to Gisha Director Sari Bashi: “Instead of considering security concerns, on the one hand, and the rights and needs of civilians living in Gaza, on the other, Israel banned glucose for biscuits and the fuel needed for regular supply of electricity – paralyzing normal life in Gaza and impairing the moral character of the State of Israel. I am sorry to say that major elements of this policy are still in place“.
The data[on availability of items] will be collected in the economy division, once a week, on Tuesday, and a calculation compiled of products transferred, then added to existing inventories, and then consumed amounts will be deducted according to the models.
F.# After the calculation is performed, a draft of inventory estimates will be prepared…[and] the following data will be checked:
# 1. Upper level warning – in case inventory of one of the short shelf life products is over 21 days or long shelf life product inventory is over 80 days.
# 2. Lower level warning – in case inventory of one of the short shelf life products is under 4 days or long shelf life product inventory is under 20 days.
# 3. Shortage – in case inventory of one of the short shelf life products is under 2 days or long shelf life product inventory is under 5 days.
H. In case inventory of one or more products reached a ‘level of warning,’ the following actions will be taken:
1. Xxxx will verify the information with leading Palestinian merchants.
2. Xxxx will perform mathematical evaluation of the model to verify the data.
3. In case of an upper level warning, the issue will be brought up for discussion and update for a decision on policy of entering the # relevant product.
4.! In case of a lower level warning an update will be transferred, and Gaza DCO will take action to facilitate transferring the relevant product, unless it is an intentional policy of reduction. [ed., italics mine]
5. In case of shortage, the same actions as of ʻlower level warningʻ will be taken. In case it is an intentional policy of reduction, decision makers will be presented with the consequences of shortage of the relevant product.
One wonders what warning the decision makers would be presented with: would they be warned that preventing entrance of a piece of medical equipment would cause the death of children?
Or that the categorization of milk, or hummus or any number of staples of the Palestinian diet as “superfluous” might exacerbate the already existent malnutrition among children?
Or that a shortage of fuel and hence water outages would cause women not to be able to cook properly or families to observe hygienic practices. What type of discussion do you think happened among the decision makers when they were ‘warned’ about these red lines?
Posted in PoliticsComments Off on THE MATHEMATICS OF STRANGULATION OF GAZA
Posted on 26 October 2010.
(M) 07889650544
Posted in UKComments Off on GODSIFF MP: OPPOSE MURDOCH EMPIRE
Posted on 26 October 2010.
Posted in Middle EastComments Off on WELCOME TO ISRAEL, THE LAND OF BODY SNATCHERS & DRUG MULES
Posted on 26 October 2010.
Posted in Middle EastComments Off on LIFE IN PALESTINIAN REFUGEE CAMPS