Category: UK

Aid convoy enters Gaza Strip

Some good news for a change: after setting off from Manchester almost a month ago and travelling more than 8000km, the Viva Palestina aid convoy – led by George Galloway – finally reached Gaza this week.

George Galloway in Gaza

A British convoy carrying medical relief for the impoverished residents of the Gaza Strip has crossed into the territory from Egypt.

Gazans cheered and waved Palestinian flags as the convoy finally entered the territory through the Rafah border crossing on Monday, after being stranded on the  Egyptian side of the border for two days.

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UN report accuses Britain of condoning torture

A new report by UN Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin finds evidence of UK complicity in a wide range of grave human rights violations, including torture – the prohibition of which constitutes an “absolute and peremptory norm of international law.” The report is only the latest in a growing series of indictments against the criminal conduct of the British state.

Britain has been condemned in a highly critical United Nations report for breaching basic human rights and “trying to conceal illegal acts” in the fight against terrorism.

The report is sharply critical of British co-operation in the transfer of detainees to places where they are likely to be tortured as part of the US rendition programme.

The report accuses British intelligence officers of interviewing detainees held incommunicado in Pakistan in “so-called safe houses where they were being tortured”.

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War Comes Home to Britain

John Pilger describes “the erosion of liberal freedoms” as “symptomatic of an evolved criminal state.”

Freedom is being lost in Britain. The land of Magna Carta is now the land of secret gagging orders, secret trials and imprisonment. The government will soon know about every phone call, every email, every text message. Police can willfully shoot to death an innocent man, lie and expect to get away with it. Whole communities now fear the state. The foreign secretary routinely covers up allegations of torture; the justice secretary routinely prevents the release of critical cabinet minutes taken when Iraq was illegally invaded. The litany is cursory; there is much more.

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Science Museum Takes Political Stand – for Israel

More on the Zionist Federations PR operation “Israel Day of Science” designed to distract from Israel’s criminal behaviour by implanting a positive image of the state in those that it can.

It is ridiculous for the Science Museum to say it will not cancel the event because that would be taking a political stand.  Do they fail to see that holding an event that promotes Israel is a political stand too?

The Zionst Federation are not a neutral body interested in educating children about science.  They are interested in education children about, what they see as, a positive side to the Zionist state as a PR offensive attempting to control the public mind.  It’s perception management by a lobby group for a foreign criminal state and the Science Museum should not be a party to its manipulation.

The Science Museum, one of Britain’s most prestigious public institutions, was embroiled in a row last night after being accused of promoting Israeli universities whose research was used in the country’s military campaign in Gaza.

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Perils of Criticising Israel

This week the British Medical Journal has a feature on criticising Israel:

bmjIn 2004, the BMJ published an article criticising Israel, which provoked hundreds of hostile emails. Karl Sabbagh analyses responses sent directly to the editor and takes a broader look at what journalists and editors face when covering controversial issues. Michael O’Donnell thinks that the best way to blunt the effectiveness of orchestrated email campaigns is to expose them to public scrutiny. Jonathan Freedland suggests growing a thicker skin. And Mark Clarfield, a doctor at Sokora Hospital in Israel, is surprised at some of the responses to his blog on bmj.com.

Avoiding topics where medicine and politics collide is not an option for the BMJ, nor is this what our readers want, write editors Tony Delamothe and Fiona Godlee in an accompanying editorial. They decide to follow the advice of O’Donnell and Freedland and ignore future orchestrated email campaigns. And they suggest authors, editors, publishers, advertisers, and shareholders do the same.

The Israeli paper the Jerusalem Post has a summary of the debate in an article titled ‘British Medical Journal’ complains of ‘obscene’ attacks by pro-Israel lobby.

The following is Karl Sabbagh’s analysis the Perils of Criticising Israel.  I’ll post a review of Jonathan Freedlands response soon.

The BMJ’s acting editor received 1000 emails after the journal published an article criticising Israel in 2004. Karl Sabbagh examined them and is reminded of what happened when the magazine World Medicine criticised Israel 27 years ago

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Palestinian NGO seeks UK human rights justice

Al-Haq, a Palestinian NGO  with the help of the Gaza Legal Aid Fund (facebook), is to take UK Government officials to court over policy that assists Israel in its illegal activities in Gaza.

Al-Haq, an independent Palestinian non-governmental organisation will tomorrow, Tuesday 24 February 2009 begin historical legal proceedings against the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, David Milliband, Defence Secretary, John Hutton and Trade & Industry (now the Secretary of State for Business Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform), Peter Mandelson.

Al Haq are making an application for judicial review of a policy decision by the three Secretaries of State that they will not change their position with respect to the UK’s relations with Israel so that the UK Government is fully compliant with international law.
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Cancel ZF Propaganda Effort ‘Israel Day of Science’

On the 16th the following letter appeared in the Guardian calling on two UK science museums to cancel Israel’s Day of Science in light of the attack on Gaza.

Today a letter in defence was published by Clive Margolis.  He believes that Israel shouldn’t be accused of criminality “unless the facts have been put before a court of law and found to be true.” Clive should examine the verdict of the International Court of Justice which, in 2004, found Israeli colonisation of Occupied Palestinian Territory illegal:  “Recalling that the Security Council described Israel’s policy of establishing settlements in that territory as a ‘flagrant violation’ of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Court finds that those settlements have been established in breach of international law.”   The whole action in Gaza is a crime in defence of 60 years of illegal colonisation and occupation.  Not to mention that many of those refugees bombed in Gaza have been denied their right, enshrined in International human rights law and UN Resolution 194, to return to their homes in Israel from which they were ethnically cleansed in 1948.  The smaller war crimes he disputes are of lesser significance and I’m not sure what more evidence he needs than the photographs of White Phosphorus landing on civilians.

The Socialist Worker reports that the Stop the War Coalition and activists in the UCU union in Manchester are mobilising to stop this insulting event from happen at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (Mosi).  Could we be in for more occupations?

Science should not be used as a PR tool to gloss over the crimes of Apartheid Israel.

Quite extraordinarily, the Science Museum in London and the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry have both been made available (on 3 and 5 March respectively) for an event called “Israel Day of Science”. The museums argue they are not sponsoring the event, but have merely hired out their premises. This subtle distinction is unlikely to be appreciated by the many thousands of all ages and faiths who have repeatedly taken to the streets round the country to protest against Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

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The Independent’s Knee and Jerk

Hugo Chavez’s activities usually elicit a knee-jerk response from most of the British media. The title of the latest Independent’s leading article summarizes it well: “A perilous new twist in the Venezuelan revolution“.  Now consider, Venezuela conducts an open and fair referendum on the term limits on the president, and this is termed “perilous” and “… hope that, for the sake of the Venezuelan people, it does not end up dragging the country back into the mire of authoritarianism.”  Why should a referendum be construed as a peril? If anything a referendum is a bona fide democratic procedure and thus it should enhance the democratic nature of Venezuelan society.

The Independent’s editorial writers state: “The scrapping of term limits will do nothing to help build confidence in the rule of law. All free nations need firm checks on executive power. Developing nations like Venezuela need these checks just as much as richer countries.”  Why do they criticise a Venezuelan referendum meant to expand term limits while in the UK there are no term limits at all for Prime Ministers, and most other political offices?  Technically, in the UK, the same Prime Minister could cling on to power for decades, but, for some unspecified reason, it is only when Chavez seeks an extension of his term that there is a problem with it. And is the extension of president’s term really detrimental in Venezuela’s observance of “the rule of law”?  And when was the last time these same editorial writers pontificated about Hosni Mubarak’s investiture-for-life as Egypt’s decades-long president? The simple answer is: they haven’t done so. In the case of corrupt and dictatorial “presidents” who cling on to power for decades, e.g., Hosni Mubarak, or the autocratic monarchs of the Gulf States, the editorial writers are mostly silent.  It is clear that a double standard seems to apply.

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Whitehall devised torture policy for terror detainees

It has now been revealled that Miliband’s officials solicited a letter from the US state department to back up his claim that if the evidence [of 42 undisclosed US documents which might contain information on UK interrogation policy]  were disclosed, Washington might stop sharing intelligence with Britain.

A policy governing the interrogation of terrorism suspects in Pakistan that led to British citizens and residents being tortured was devised by MI5 lawyers and figures in government, according to evidence heard in court.
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Criminalising Resistance

Following yesterday’s article on the criminalisation of dissent by Seumas Milne in The Guardian (posted below), The Guardian today reveals that the Government’s new ‘counterterrorism’ strategy due next month called Contest 2 will define as ‘extremist’ anyone who believes in ‘armed resistance, anywhere in the world. This would include armed resistance by Palestinians against the Israeli military.’ It would also include those who ‘fail to condemn the killing of British soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.’

The gall of this plan is quite breathtaking. Not content merely with providing political and material support to Israel’s illegal occupation, not to mention launching illegal wars and occupations of its own, the British Government will now explicitly label all resistance to these illegal and unethical projects as ‘extremist’. 

This represents a shift from the misuse of anti-terrorist legislation to attack and smear organised resistance as violent or as being infilitrated by violent extremists, towards the active repression of citizens who oppose the policy or ideology of the British Government, apparently even pacifists.  A Whitehall source told BBC Panorama that Contest 2 is a “move away from just challenging violent extremism. We now believe that we should challenge people who are against democracy and state institutions “

And of course there is no suggestion that ‘Contest 2’ will cover those who support atrocities by the British or Israeli state.  Nothing extreme about massacring Arabs obviously.  And those who are “against demoracy”?  How about the EU’s response to the election of Hamas?