Month: February 2009

Israeli Commander Cancels UK Tour

From the Muslim News:

London, (IRNA): The deputy commander of Israeli ground forces during the recent Gaza massacres has cancelled 20 speaking engagements during a planned tour of Britain, according to the Jewish organisers of his secret visit.

Colonel Geva Rapp was understood to have fled back to Israel fearing a citizens’ arrest for war crimes during his visit to Britain which was aimed to defend the slaughter of more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza to members of the country’s estimated 270,000 Jewish community.

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Dissent Ain’t Dead: Update on UK campus occupations

The following is an update of the previous post Dissent Ain’t Dead, adding new occupations and resources.  There have been two new occupations, today one at Manchester University and the other at Strathclyde University (an occupation involving two PULSE contributors).

Resources

Occupations

Irish civil society calls for boycott of Israel

The following letter was published in a full-page advertisement in The Irish Times on 31 January 2009:

The original ad, including signatures may be downloaded here. [PDF]

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed over 1,300 Palestinians, a third of them children. Thousands have been wounded. Many victims had been taking refuge in clearly marked UN facilities.

This assault came in the wake of years of economic blockade by Israel. This blockade, which is illegal under international humanitarian law, has destroyed the Gaza economy and condemned its population to poverty. According to a World Bank report last September, “98 percent of Gaza’s industrial operations are now inactive.”

The most recent attack on Gaza is only the latest phase in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and appropriation of their land.

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Life in Gaza is not ‘back to normal’

Amira Hass in the Haaretz:

GAZA – “Only aerial photographs of the Gaza Strip will make it possible to show and to comprehend the extent of the destruction,” a number of Western civilians said this week. They added: “But there isn’t a chance that Israel will allow anyone to come with a light plane and do aerial photography.”

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Sanctions on Al Jazeera’s Israel Operations

According to Haaretz:

The government will impose sanctions on Israel-based employees of the Al Jazeera network in response to the closure last month of the Israeli trade office in Qatar, which hosts and funds the network. Qatar had closed the office in opposition to Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Following the closure, the Foreign Ministry, in conjunction with the newly-formed national information directorate in the Prime Minister’s Office, considered declaring the station a hostile entity and closing its offices in Israel. After submitting the idea to legal review, however, concerns emerged it would not be permitted by the High Court of Justice.

Instead, it chose to limit the network’s activity in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. First, Israel will not renew the visas of Al Jazeera’s non-Israeli employees or grant visas to new employees. Second, station representatives will have reduced accessibility to government and military bodies, and will not be allowed into briefings or press conferences.

Israeli officials have recently criticized Qatar’s warming relations with Hamas and Iran. Foreign Ministry director-general Aharon Abramowitz told attendees at the Herzliya Conference on Monday that Qatar is moving toward a “radical axis.”

The supposed “democratic” Israeli government has little care for democratic principles, here trying to reduce press freedom. Clearly banning Western journalists from Gaza wasn’t enough to prevent images of Israeli acts of massacre being transmitted globally.  This is a problem for the Foreign Ministry and the propaganda outfit the national [dis-] information directorate and their solution is further unfreedom: try and ban those responsible, namely Al Jazeera.

Fear not as the BBC explains all:

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Israel May Escape War Crimes Charges

An interview with Phyllis Bennis, a fellow of both TNI and the Insitute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, on holding Israeli officials accountable for war crimes committed in Gaza.

IPS: What are the specific war crimes Israel is accused of committing?

PB: The Geneva Convention’s prohibitions against collective punishment, targeting civilians, and disproportionate military force were all violated, as was Geneva’s requirement that Israel provide medical care for the wounded. The use of sometimes-legal white phosphorous and DIME weapons was made illegal under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons by Israel’s decision to use them in densely-populated civilian neighbourhoods. Israel’s (and Egypt’s) denial of the Palestinian civilians’ right to flee to find refuge over Gaza’s borders may represent a newly-defined war crime.

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Sectarian Rabble-Rousing

Al-Ahram Weekly, the English language twin of the Arabic daily, is an Egyptian state organ. The Weekly has a broader range of opinion than the tame daily, and does often contain interesting articles. The great Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishara, for instance, can be found in the Weekly. Unfortunately, however, Egyptian regime nonsense concerning the Persian-Shia ‘threat’ is also fed into the mix. This article by Galal Nassar is a sad example. Below is my response to his piece:

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Jeremy Dear on the BBC and the DEC appeal

The general secretary of the National Union of Journalists Jeremy Dear has written a piece for Tribune criticising the BBC’s DEC decision.  Dear says he has received “emails from senior BBC journalists who say this decision makes the BBC look pro-Israeli and indifferent to the plight of 1.5 million Palestinian victims and those who say the BBC has breached its own rules on impartiality.”  He also makes some contentious observations on the BBC’s coverage of Israel’s assault and criticises the response from the anti-war movement:

This week, I witnessed protestors outside Broadcasting House chanting: “BBC hear us say, how many kids have you killed today?” Well, none. It is not true, as many anti-war groups have claimed, that the BBC has “capitulated to the Israeli lie machine”. There has been some excellent journalism during this conflict by BBC and other journalists, despite the Israeli ban on foreign reporters entering Gaza and the arrest and the killing of five Palestinian journalists.

And those who threaten a boycott of the BBC licence fee are mistaken. Those on the right have spent years trying to undermine BBC funding for their own political and commercial self-interest. We shouldn’t fall into the trap of destroying the BBC in the long term because of heartfelt, but short-term, anger at this decision.

Aldous Huxley: The Ultimate Revolution

Aldous huxleyAldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, rated number one in the List Muse Top 100 Fiction books list, here discusses influence, controlling the public mind and government.

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”  Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley, The Ultimate Revolution (44:17): MP3

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Beyond Occupation

Sydney Ideas: Sydney University, Australia. Oct 14th, 2008

Dr. Sara Roy, a senior Middle Eastern studies research scholar at Harvard University, discusses the economic impact of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and argues that Israel’s policies are aimed at keeping the territory impoverished and dependent. (via FORA.tv; thanks Iffit)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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