The Seven Laws of Noah
February 21st, 2010 § 3 Comments
In a recent post on Israel’s PR campaign, Tali Shapiro mentioned an article “about something called the “Jewish Values Lobby” trying to get employers in Zefed to force “Arab” (Palestinians don’t exist in NRG) workers to sign a statement, where they’ll keep the Seven Laws of Noah, as a prerequisite to their employment.”
Here’s more on that story, courtesy of a translated item from Maariv.
Do Arab workers in businesses in Tzefat and the surrounding area need to fulfill commandments from the Tanach? This is the opinion of activists from the “Jewish Values Lobby,” who are starting a campaign to persuade employers to ask their workers to sign a religious statement according to which they will undertake to observe the Seven Noachide Laws. These include prohibitions against eating parts of a live animal, serving idols, desecrating Hashem’s name, immorality, robbery, and violence.
This initiative, which is expected to take Israeli Arabs by storm, was officially launched today. Lobbyists will visit businesses in Tzefat and the surrounding communities, which employ hundreds of Arabs living nearby, and they will ask them to sign their employees on a commitment to observe the Seven Noachide Laws.
“I hereby sign that I will undertake to observe the Seven Noachide Laws and declare my faithfulness to the Jewish nation according to Jewish values,” it is written in the statement. “I know that if I am caught violating any one of these laws, my employer will be allowed to fire me with no prior notice nor compensation.”
The Jewish Values Lobby explained that this campaign does not contradict a directive from one of the Jewish leaders of the generation from two years ago against employing Arab workers in public places. “We recommend that people don’t employ Arab workers,” a spokesman from the lobby explained. “But unfortunately, there are many Jews who employ Arabs in their stores, so we decided to deal with reality.”
Rahimullah Yusufzai on the Taliban, Al-Qaida and the ‘Af-Pak’ theatre
February 21st, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Kudos to The Real News for giving its viewers an opportunity to listen to Rahimullah Yusufzai, the most respected authority on the politics of the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier. Yusufzai was also among our 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009.
Capture of leader will not weaken Taliban: Taliban is so strong now they have probably already replaced Baradar
2. Ghazal from Ghalib
February 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
translation by M. Shahid Alam
.
کہتے ہو نہ دینگے ہم دل اگر پڑا پایا
دل کہاں کہ گم کیجئے ‘ ہم نےمدُعا پایا
.
I can’t have it – you say – if you find my heart.
Once – it was mine. Now I know who has it.
Love is easily the best part of life. This pain
cures life’s itch: there is no cure for it.
She is coy & cunning, sweet – exacting too.
She is testing me when I do not know it.
The plain truth about my heart is this.
Every time I look for it, she says she has it.
My mentor likes to rub salt in my wounds.
Sir Tormentor, I ask, what is your reason for it?
.
.
After the riots: Where is the justice for Peru’s indigenous?
February 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Digging up an issue I have watched for some time, the IPS reported yesterday that justice is still elusive for the indigenous of the Peruvian Amazon. In June of last year, tribal opposition to the government’s trade liberalization policies erupted in rioting. Sixty people were killed in what has been described as the worst fighting Peru had seen in a decade and a revolution that should inspire the world.
While the Peruvian government was forced to hold off on FTA-mandated plans to open large swaths of tribal land to oil, mineral, and timber extraction, it has not been a total victory.
From the IPS report:
Although the technical investigations cleared two of the indigenous demonstrators accused in the murders of 12 policemen during a bloody June 2009 clash between native protesters and the security forces near the northern Amazon jungle town of Bagua, they are still behind bars.
Feliciano Cahuasa and Danny López have been in prison for over eight months, despite the fact that technical crime scene investigations showed that neither of them fired a single shot, and that they are thus innocent of the Jun. 5 killings of the police officers.
On the other hand, no police are in prison for the Jun. 5 shooting deaths of at least 10 indigenous protesters, which occurred when the police were ordered to clear their roadblock on the main highway near Bagua.
This comes on the heels of another report from Indian Country Today concerning the corruption of the official investigation into the riots.
So while the elusive “official story” is likely to pin quite a bit of blame on “foreign provocateurs” and shrug off the actions of law enforcement, we can at least remember Danny and Feliciano.
Artwork by Favianna Rodriguez.
Arabic Flash Cards Threaten US Security
February 20th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Nick George, a young physics student at Pomona College, was reportedly interrogated, handcuffed and held in a cell for 4 hours after trying to pass through US customs with Arabic flash cards! George’s flash cards included words like “graduate” and “funny.” He states that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official at the metal detector in the airport was intrigued when George answered that he thought that Osama Bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks. This was met with a ”Do you know what language Osama Bin Laden spoke?” Shortly after George was handcuffed and imprisoned while TSA officials poured over his flash cards looking for clues that could link George to international terrorism.
Friday Night Lights: American and Israeli human rights activists disrupt ballet performance in Vermont
February 20th, 2010 § 9 Comments
BURLINGTON, VT- Greetings from the Green Mountain State! I want to give a shout out to those who participated in a successful night of activism. Several activists leafleted 249 people attending last night’s Israeli Ballet performance at the Flynn Theater.
The leaflet asked “Would you like some information about Don Quixote and the Israel Ballet?” — which was an accurate presentation of last night’s performance. “Israel’s ‘Golden Helmet of Mambrino’ — which makes one invisible, thus capable of all actions — is slowly turning into Don Quixote’s version of it — a upside-down shaving bowl plopped on the head — incapable of nothing but making its wearer more obvious and actionable to the world. Brand Israel will continue to call forth increasing protests as audiences realize they are being used,” said author and activist Marc Estrin.
The headline said “A Modern Don Quixote.” Estrin said almost all ballet-goers accepted it, even those glancing at the opening before continuing into the theater. There are no trash cans inside the actual theater, so he assumes most flyers made it to people’s seats for reading before the show began. Estrin said one elderly man “came all the way out again to present us with a crumpled up ball with instructions to ‘shove this up your ass,’ but the other 249 copies all made it in.”
The other highlight was one Israeli and three Vermonters unfurled a banner during the performance. Check out the YouTube Vimeo below the fold!
Murder in Dubai: The Killers
February 19th, 2010 § 4 Comments
This video shows the pack of Israeli murderers preparing for the homicide and summarizes the rather impressive case constructed by the Dubai Police. Also, it appears that Robert Fisk’s speculations were correct: the Israelis have ensured the supine British government’s acquiescence by implicating it through a last minute notice about the murder. (thanks Rime)
J Street’s Really Big Problem
February 19th, 2010 § 1 Comment
In a February 16, 2010 address to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon inadvertently revealed his government’s core problem with the new American lobbying organization J Street.
Ayalon and other members of the Israeli government boycotted a J Street delegation shepherding members of the US Congress through Israel this week. Ayalon strongly condemned J Street: “They don’t present themselves as what they really are. They should not call themselves pro-Israeli.” J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami attributes this “spat” to an “inability of some in Israel and in the US to distinguish between criticism or disagreement with Israeli policy and outright hostility to the state itself.” J Street positions itself as a “pro-peace” and “pro-Israel” alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
However the Israeli government’s core problem with J-Street is far more profound. J Street’s main competition, AIPAC, was actually created by a former employee of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Isaiah L. Kenen, who set the existing standard for coordinating AIPAC’s lobbying with the needs of the Israeli government while repeatedly dodging DOJ foreign agent registration orders. The Conference of Presidents, which organizes AIPAC’s executive committee, actually works out of the same New York office as the World Zionist Organization – American Section (which itself is a shell corporation set up in the US after the Jewish Agency’s American Section, another quasi arm of the Israeli government, was shut down as a foreign agent in the early 1970’s ).
Prison decapitations contribute to security in Latin America
February 19th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Inmates' wives outside La Planta prison, Caracas. (Photo: Eduardo Fuentes)
The second paragraph of a January 27 article in Venezuelan daily El Universal entitled “Riot leaves at least 7 dead and 17 wounded in La Planta” announces that “a little after 9 this morning, inmates in the La Planta prison, mainly in cell blocks 1, 2 and 3, initiated a shootout. Meanwhile the National Guard responded with shots from above.” The fact that the Caracas prison inmates have obtained materials with which to initiate a shootout suggests that the National Guard, tasked with prison security, may have had more to do with the scene than simply responding from above—something additionally suggested by the reaction of prisoners’ wives outside the complex to the arrival of more troops:
More than 60 members of the National Guard deployed around the penitentiary with antiriot gear but the inmates’ wives would not permit them to enter the premises and instead threw rocks at [them] while screaming ‘Assassins of the people’ and ‘You will not go in.’”
Murder in Dubai
February 19th, 2010 § 14 Comments
Robert Fisk on the murder of a Palestinian by an Israeli death squad in Dubai. ‘Collusion’, he notes, ”The United Arab Emirates suspect – only suspect, mark you – that Europe’s “security collaboration” with Israel has crossed a line into illegality’. He quotes his UAE source saying: ‘the British passports are real. They are hologram pictures with the biometric stamp. They are not forged or fake. The names were really there. If you can fake a hologram or biometric stamp, what does this mean?’. Fisk adds: ‘He said that EU countries were cooperating with the UAE, including the UK. But “not one of the countries we have been speaking to has notified Interpol of the passports used in their name. Why not?”‘
While most of the named suspects are claiming that their identities were stolen, the mother of at least one murderer is less certain. She admitted to the Daily Telegraph that the photo of the suspect was ‘similar to her son’. This will not be the first time that agents of the notoriously incompetent Mossad have carried out murder using their own identities. They did so too when they killed the Moroccan waiter Ahmad Bouchiki in Lillehammer in front of his pregnant wife following the Munich incident believing him to be Ali Hassan Salameh. Six members of the team were arrested by the Norwegian police in Oslo, and one, Dan Aerbel, turned out to be claustrophobic who immediately started screaming and confessed not just to the murder but also to recent smuggling of nuclear material from Norway. In addition, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn reported, ‘they helpfully supplied safe-house addresses. Another just happened to have the key to a Paris apartment, where French authorities gathered up other keys to other apartments, unravelling the whole operation’.
However, if the identities were indeed stolen, then that raises more interesting questions. So this means Israel rewards the Zionist zealots who immigrate there to squat on land stolen from the Palestinians by stealing their identities in turn and turning them into murder suspects? But what have the states whose flags/passports were abused in this trans-national crime got to say about this? Adam Shatz writes:
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