Author: Dave

Glasgow University Student Occupation

glasgow universiy student occupation

Glasgow University students have entered into an occupation and have a facebook group and blog for keeping track of events.

Glasgow University students have entered into occupation

We are currently occupying the top floor of the Computer Science building in solidarity with the Gazan people, and in protest to the war crimes committed by the state of Israel against the Palestinian people, the University’s complicity in this via links to the arms trade, and the BBC’s refusal to show the DEC appeal.
If you want to join the occupation, or show your support outside, the Computer Science building is located behind the Queen Margaret Union, and opposite the Boyd Orr building.
In Solidarity,
The Occupying Students of Glasgow University

Kahane won

Gideon Levy in the Haaretz:

Rabbi Meir Kahane can rest in peace: His doctrine has won. Twenty years after his Knesset list was disqualified and 18 years after he was murdered, Kahanism has become legitimate in public discourse. If there is something that typifies Israel’s current murky, hollow election campaign, which ends the day after tomorrow, it is the transformation of racism and nationalism into accepted values.
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Israeli ‘Justice’ for Cameraman James Miller

180px-james_miller_bbcThe family of James Miller, a UK journalist murdered by the IDF, have accepted damages of £1.5 million saying it was as close to an admission of guilt from Israel as they were ever likely to get.  The military said the officer involved would be disciplined for breaking the rules of engagement and also for changing his account of the incident but he was exonerated.

Another British family had a similarly unpleasant experience of Israeli “justice” when their son, Tom Hurndall,  was murdered by the IDF in Gaza.   Mr Hurndall’s father described a “culture of impunity” saying “they just lied continuously … it was a case of them shooting civilians and then making up a story. And they were not used to being challenged.”

It is within this culture of impunity that an Israel officer murdered in cold blood a Palestinian girl, Iman al-Hams, aged 13, shooting her 17 times, and afterwards commented that he was right to kill her and would have killed her even if she was three years old. A military investigation by the officer responsible for the Gaza strip subsequently concluded that the captain had “not acted unethically”.

After complaints of a cover up, the military police did get involved and the killer was  charged with illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and other relatively minor infractions.  He was later found not guilty.

Needless to say Iman’s family and other Palestinian families like them will never see justice or £1.5 million in compensation.

Israel has paid £1.5m in damages to the family of James Miller, the British cameraman shot by an Israeli soldier while filming a documentary in Gaza in 2003.

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Shoe hurled at Israeli ambassador

Before long shoes will be banned as a security threat by ever-paranoid Israeli Ambassadors giving lectures … and dodging war crimes arrests.

A woman has thrown a shoe at the Israeli ambassador to Sweden as he was giving a lecture on Israel’s forthcoming elections.

The shoe hit Benny Dagan in the chest during a seminar held at the University of Stockholm on Wednesday, a local police official said.

Ylva Kornheffer, a board member of the Stockholm Association of Foreign Affairs, the student association which organised the seminar, said she was “sitting in the front row and suddenly a shoe was flying over my head”.

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Strathclyde Student Occupation in Pictures

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Further to our previous post there has been positive feedback from the occupation, a facebook group has been set up as well as a wordpress blog.

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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

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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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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