When Amnesty International launched a preemptive strike against Israel

It was yesterday actually because it was all about Land Day which is today.  See this from YNET, aka Yedioth Ahronot:

Amnesty International fears that Israeli forces could violently oppress Palestinian "Land Day" protests on Sunday 30 March and is calling the Israeli authorities to refrain from using unnecessary force.

According to Amnesty, amid plans demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the often lethal enforcement of military zones in Gaza, and forced evictions of Bedouin in the Negev  ‘Land Day’ demonstrations will protest ongoing policies as well as commemorate historical events.

"Israeli forces must not resort to unnecessary or excessive force as they so often have done in the past,” said Philip Luther, Director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Amnesty International.

“Israel’s authorities have failed to respect the right of Palestinians to exercise their right to freedom of peaceful assembly. Amnesty International’s researchers will be monitoring events on Sunday closely to examine whether the rights of demonstrators are respected,” said Luther.

Oh dear.  I'm old enough to remember when Amnesty International used to condemn human rights abuses after they occurred not before.  But of course Israel's human rights abuses are all too predictable.

Defend Max Watson, Jawad Botmeh and Steve Jefferys

I've got a personal interest in this case outlined as below on the GoPetition website:

Stop the Witch Hunt - Defend Max Jawad and Steve

Petition published by steve jawad max campaign on Feb 23, 2013

Petition Background (Preamble):

Three members of staff at Londonmet’s Working Lives Research Institute (WLRI) have been suspended from work in an attack on human rights, trade unions and academic freedom.

Professor Steve Jefferys, European employment relations academic, Director of Londonmet’s Faculty Advanced Institute for Research (FAIR) and head of WLRI, was suspended on Wednesday 20 February for ‘potential gross misconduct’. Five years previously, he had agreed that Jawad Botmeh should have the chance of going forward to be interviewed as a part-time casual administrative worker on a temporary three month contract in WLRI, when Jawad had a criminal record (he had served 13 years on a conspiracy charge).

Jawad Botmeh, after working for five years to the complete satisfaction of all staff and post-graduate students who worked with him, was overwhelmingly elected to the Board of Governors as one of two staff representatives. Two weeks later, on February 7 he was suspended.

Max Watson, a WLRI administrator who is also Chair of the Londonmet UNISON branch, was also suspended on February 7. Max had been recently singled out by the Vice-Chancellor in an all staff email because of UNISON’s opposition to the involvement of Capita in the university’s Business Process Review.

Steve, Jawad and Max have broken no university rules. They have all been entirely open and honest with the university. Professor Jefferys had the authority to make casual appointments. There were no procedures suggesting he should discriminate against former prisoners. Jawad had twice informed the university in writing of his earlier prison sentence and conviction and this evidence is on their files.

The WLRI was set up by Londonmet to undertake ‘academic, applied and socially-committed research and teaching emphasising equality and social justice into all aspects of working lives’. Now is the time for the university to be FAIR to the Institute and its staff.
These suspensions are an attack on the principles of staff rights and representation, on social justice and on academic freedom.

 You can sign here.

It was me under that rock

I was just tweeting my previous post and I realised that the whole business of Applebees sacking Chelsea Welch had gone viral.  I only knew about it because it came up in the sidebar of a Guardian article by Glenn Greenwald.

I said in my post minutes ago that the customer who got the server the sack should be named and shamed.

But see this from RL Stollar:

You’ve most likely heard about their most recent encounter with virality. But in case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s a brief summary:

A waitress at a St. Louis Applebee’s lost her job for posting online the receipt upon which a pastor had declined to leave a tip, with a snarky note saying she gave God 10 percent.

After her dinner on Jan. 25, Pastor Alois Bell crossed out the automatic 18 percent tip charged for parties of more than eight. “I give God 10% why do you get 18,” she wrote above her signature.

Employee Chelsea Welch — a colleague of the stiffed server — took a picture of the receipt and uploaded it to the online site Reddit. She subsequently lost her job, an Applebee’s spokesman confirmed to TheSmokingGun.com, for violating a customer’s privacy.

Yesterday on Fox 2 Now, the pastor issued a (sort of?) apology.

So Pastor Alois Bell it is then.  Named, but shamed?  She's thin skinned when it comes to embarrassment but has she any shame?

On the dismissal of Richard Falk by Human Rights Watch

Richard Falk, law professor and United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, was apparently sacked by Human Rights Watch from one of its advisory bodies following a witch-hunt campaign launch by UN Watch. UN Watch, trolling for more money from its secret donors, boasted of the “success” on its website.

After the UN Watch smear job was taken up as a whole by the French Jewish lobby association CRIF, Falk replied, and one can read his open letter on his blog. Regluar commenter here Deir Yassin left this informative post on Falk's blog that would help introduce the reader to this fabled organization. 

CRIF spend most of their time accusing even the slightest critique of Israel of being antisemitic. The list of French Jews that have been accused by them is endless, and you’re in good company: Etienne Balibar, Rony Brauman, Michel Warschawski, Eric Hazan….. Everytime there’s a documentary about Palestine or Israel on French national television, they send letters complaining about anti-semitism if it doesn’t start and end with the HaTikva and Am Israel chai. “Lorsque Sharon est venu en France, je lui ai dit qu’il doit absolument mettre en place un ministère de la Propagande, comme Goebbels” [when Sharon came to France, I told him that he must absolutely create a ministry of Propaganda, like Goebbels], Interview of Roger Cukierman, leader of CRIF, Haaretz, 26 september 2001.

UN Watch isn’t picky. It lists pretty much every speck of dirt it can find on Falk. A lot of it is ridiculous. Supposedly, Falk is a “Hamas supporter” on the strength on the opinion of some official of the Palestinian Authority. One would think that being shunned by a lemming of Quislings should be a badge of honor for anybody. PA officials are notorious for accusing anyone who calls them out on their subservience to Israel as “Hamas supporter.” An even more preposterous accusation is that Falk attempted to “downplay, reinterpret and justify” Khaled Meshaal‘s call “to destroy Israel.” Falk merely pointed out  that on Israel Hamas speaks through both sides of its mouth. Surely, that should be reassuring to Israel’s apologists. As the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is proving to whoever tends to forget, and as the ANC is proving no less in South Africa, massacring miners, some resistance organizations hold a big For Sale sign behind their raised fist.

Other accusations are flogging dead horses. Falk posted a cartoon with potential antisemitic notes. He was notified and promptly removed it. Raising the issue again is simply indecent and a measure of the people who are behind it. UN Watch in fact flogs this particular dead horse twice, recording separately the offense itself, and a second time that Falk was criticized for it by another UN official.

Other accusations are, while twisted, not as trivial. I have read enough of Falk’s musings to come to the conclusion that he often combines pointed analysis with a descent into whacky territory. Un Watch  accuses him, for example, of accusing Israel of “planning a 'Palestinian Holocaust.'” This is a barefaced lie. Here is what Falk wrote in 2007:

The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy.

In other words, in 2007 Falk accused Israel of intentionally creating “life endangering conditions” and suggested that this has the potential to deteriorate into genocide. One could debate. But it is undeniable that 1) a desire to see Palestinians gone (or indeed pretend they never existed) is inherent in the very logic of Zionist settler colonization, has been amply expressed by many Zionist leaders, not to mention football stadium crowds, and also amply documented by scholars. 2) the manufactured health conditions in Gaza have been and are at crisis level. And 3) things can get worse. Other genocides, for example, the Armenian one, followed similar paths from "endangering life" to full genocide.

But Falk didn’t end there. The article begins with a gratuitous comparison with and discussion of the Holocaust, which serves no discernible purpose at all except to highlight Falk's identity, weaken the argument and make the author look lacking in judgment. It then follows with an even wackier argument, typical unfortunately, that finds the potential international and US abetting of an Israeli genocide yet-to-happen “morally worse” than the corresponding complicity in other, actual 20^th century genocides. Leaving aside the Nazi holocaust and the shameful across-the-board refusal of Western countries to accept Jewish refugees (Switzerland even lobbied the Nazis to stamp J in Jewish passports, to better stop them at the border),  Falk forgets that the US armed and supported the perpetrators of genocide in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor. Falk mentions the genocide in Rwanda as an example of Western countries “doing nothing to  stop” genocide, while completely ignoring the serious and credible allegations that France played a role in the genocide. That France supported the genocidal government and trained its troops is beyond dispute.

What purpose does this rhetoric serve, why separate and create hierarchies, not to mentioned false hierarchies, between victims? Why is every wacky conspiracy theory about the US and Israel credible while known, documented Western involvement in other genocides is downplayed? Falk starts by reminding us that he is an American Jew. And while that makes his energetic commitment to supporting Palestinian rights both admirable and understandable, it is hard to find anything admirable in belittling other victims of genocide, as if the fact that the Tutsis for example weren’t massacred by Jews makes them less deserving in Falk’s eyes.

To be clear, it is illegitimate to complain, as Israel’s willing apologists often do, that Falk devotes himself only to Palestinian rights and is thus neglecting other victims of atrocities. Everyone has a right to choose one's engagements, and Falk’s Jewish identity is as legitimate a reason as any to focus one’s engagement on Palestine. But focusing one’s energies on Palestine and imagining fictional reasons why Western complicity in the Palestinian case is “morally worse” are two separate things. Human rights and liberation are not zero sum games. When victims are made to compete against each other, it is always at the benefit of maintaining some form of oppression. Accountability for one genocide only come at the expense of others when some victims turn their coats and join perpetrators. True, uncompromising resistance to oppression depends on the principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” That spirit is utterly negated when one starts selecting between worthier and less worthy victims. To falsely promote such competition between victims as Falk does comes at the expense of solidarity and is detrimental to all struggles of justice.

Falk’s walks on the wild side provide UN Watch enough ammunition, including his endorsement of 9/11 conspiracies and, of course, the boneheaded defense of his ignorant endorsement of Atzmon’s antisemitic “book.”  There is no point on defending Falk on these points (although they do not prove UN Watch allegations!). He is wacky and at times profoundly ignorant. But while that has to be conceded, it cannot be left at that.

First, so what? UN Watch has not uncovered a single paragraph in any of Falk’s copious professional work, including his UN reports about Israel, that does not meet the standards of required competence. We can be assured of that since if they had had anything they would have published it. They did throw the kitchen sink at him after all. The only accusations that (very partially) stick to him belong to his personal musings. That he is biased against Israel is neither here nor there. When you are charged with investigating human rights violations in an area, being biased against the government holding power in that area ought to be part of the job description. The only relevant question is the quality of Falk’s output; on that UN Watch is as silent as it is on Israel’s criminal record.

Apropos that, HRW fired Falk at the behest of one of the most corrupting and corrupt NGOs in the history of that three letter infamy. Had Falk supported Israel’s crimes, UN Watch would never have complained about his alleged antisemitism. Known antisemites are welcome guests in Israel and are even given VIP tours of the Knesset. I won’t be surprised to find out that antisemites are among those funding UN Watch. UN Watch went fishing in Falk’s off-the-job record because this is a wretched, anti-human, anti-freedom and anti-rights organization dedicated to witch-hunting critics of Israel.

What that all means is the Human Rights Watch fired one of its prominent legal advisers for its off-the-job personal opinions. That’s simply wrong, although I am afraid that it is a tough argument to make in a era when a US court justifies firing a dentist assistant for the crime of being “irresistible.” Human Right Watch fired Falk because it must please its wealthy donors. And the perspective of these donors is the one the dominates: all people are like fully-owned office furniture; rolling chairs are not supposed to have personal opinions that clash with the decor.

These are the times we live in, and it is worth considering that it isn't irrelevant to the question of human rights. People who don't respect our right to be human are probably not going to do a good job defending our human rights. If HRW really cared about human rights, as a principle, not just as a reason to ask for donations, it could have started with defending the human right of Richard Falk to be Richard Falk, a distinct human being, with a distinct personality, foibles and flaws, and even wacky conspiracies theories and other hang-ups that in no way impede his ability to provide HRW with good advice about human rights in Palestine, without having that as a reason for dismissal. But anyone who has been near an NGO office knows that I’m being utterly utopian.

Suffer little children

Here's a Guardian article detailing the "spiral of injustice" suffered by Palestinian children on account of racist rule by the State of Israel:

A belief that every Palestinian child is a potential terrorist may be leading to a "spiral of injustice" and breaches of international law in Israel's treatment of child detainees in military custody, a delegation of eminent British lawyers has concluded in an independent report backed by the Foreign Office.

The nine-strong delegation, led by the former high court judge Sir Stephen Sedley and including the UK's former attorney-general Lady Scotland, found that "undisputed facts" pointed to at least six violations of the UN convention on the rights of the child, to which Israel is a signatory. It was also in breach of the fourth Geneva convention in transferring child detainees from the West Bank to Israeli prisons, the delegation said.

Its report, Children in Military Custody, released on Tuesday, was based on a visit to Israel and the West Bank last September funded and facilitated by the Foreign Office and the British consulate in Jerusalem.

It makes 40 specific recommendations concerning the treatment of Palestinian child detainees.

The issue has come under increasing scrutiny by human rightsorganisations and visiting delegations over the past year. In January the Guardian highlighted the use of solitary confinement in a report on the experiences of children under the military justice system.

That's just a slice. The article goes into much detail, gives case studies and has a video.

Send letters to WaPo re: Olmert twaddle on settlements

The following is from a US-based media watchdog, July 17:

WRITE! For Justice, Human Rights and International Law in Palestine  

Today, a Washington Post op-ed by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert 'How to Achieve a Lasting Peace' (7/17) rebukes the Obama administration's call for an Israeli settlement freeze, endorses "natural growth" himself, and maintains the US focus on settlements "has the potential to greatly shake US-Israeli relations."  In the op-ed, Olmert characterizes the focus on a settlement freeze as a waste of time and a "non-priority issue."

Olmert argues that "settlement construction should be taken off the public agenda and moved to a discrete dialogue, as in the past" allowing the US and Israel to deal with the "essential issues" (i.e. those not concerning Israeli actions).  He emphasizes previous "understandings" with the Bush administation on settlement construction but refuses to accept responsibility for Israel's commitments under the road map (which explicitly rejected natural growth - see Kurtzer op-ed here), the Annapolis framework (see PLO Negotiations Affairs Department report link), or international law generally.

Rather than explain 'How to Achieve a Lasting Peace' as the misleading title suggests, Olmert simply blames Palestinians for rejecting a proposal at the end of his term which would have kept most of the settlers in the West Bank and otherwise fell short of Israel's international obligations -- the op-ed contains no mention of the Arab Peace Initiative which offers a comprehensive resolution to the conflict (see op-ed by Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa) or why the US and Israel rejected it.

Please WRITE! to the Washington Post letters [@] washpost.com, it is critical that we correct the record on Olmert's PR piece, which is sure to draw a heavy response. Be sure to keep letters under 150 words, and include your name, address and daytime phone number for verification purposes only.

UN Report: Humanitarian Impact of Israel's Wall Five Years Since ICJ Decision
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Irish tent solidarity with victims of Israeli home demolitions

From the Derry Journal:

'Tent City' in the Bog

Published Date: 14 July 2009
By Staff reporter

Dozens of anti-war activists from throughout the North West converged on Free Derry Corner yesterday to create their very own 'Tent City'.

The Derry action was just one of dozens of similar events held simultaneously in New York, Washington, Chicago, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, Spain, London, and Egypt on International Day against House Demolitions in Palestine.

It was organised in solidarity with hundreds of Palestinian families whose homes continue to be routinely demolished by the Israeli State.

The family-friendly day of action saw men, women and children gather together to pitch a tent in solidarity, as passing motorists beeped their car horns in support.

The temporary tent-dwellers were further encouraged by entertainment from Gawa Fusion, a Moroccan six-piece band, Bogside musician Declan McLaughlin and others.

See a whole lotta more pics at Irish Indymedia.

Hey ma, look what I did to an Arab & loaded onto You Tube

From Ha'aretz:

Border Policemen have filmed themselves abusing and humiliating Palestinians in videos they have posted on YouTube over the past year.

In one clip uploaded to the video sharing website an Arab youth is shown in arid terrain, slapping himself, while a voice is heard instructing him to say "I love you, Border Police," and "I will f**k you, Palestine," in Arabic. The victim is forced to respond to everything he is ordered to do, to the raucous laughter of the cameraman and his friends, all Border Policemen.

And they wonder why Ronaldo won't play Tel Aviv?

UPDATE: You Tube removed the video, but not before someone downloaded it. It's now reposted on Blip.tv.

Also: Ha'aretz Friday Magazine has published a longer article.

New exhaustive report: Israel is practising apartheid

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a study indicating that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The study is being posted for public debate on this website.

The interim report, which will form part of a discussion at an upcoming HSRC conference on the subject, titled Re-envisioning Israel/Palestine, on 13 and 14 June in Cape Town, serves as a document to be finalised later this year.

The HSRC commissioned an international team of scholars and practitioners of international public law from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Israel and the West Bank to conduct the study. The resulting 300-page draft, titled Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel's practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law, represents 15 months of research and constitutes an exhaustive review of Israel's practices in the OPT according to definitions of colonialism and apartheid provided by international law. The project was suggested originally by the January 2007 report by eminent South African jurist John Dugard, in his capacity as Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Human Rights Council, when he indicated that Israel practices had assumed characteristics of colonialism and apartheid.

You can download the report here:

Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid, Executive Summary [950KB] or Full Study [3.5MB]

Regarding colonialism, the team found that Israel's policy and practices violate the prohibition on colonialism which the international community developed in the 1960s in response to the great decolonisation struggles in Africa and Asia. Israel's policy is demonstrably to fragment the West Bank and annex part of it permanently to Israel, which is the hallmark of colonialism. Israel has appropriated land and water in the OPT, merged the Palestinian economy with Israel's economy, and imposed a system of domination over Palestinians to ensure their subjugation to these measures. Through these measures, Israel has denied the indigenous population the right to self-determination and indicated clear intention to assume sovereignty over portions of its land and natural resources. Permanent annexation of territory in this fashion is the hallmark of colonialism.

Regarding apartheid, the team found that Israel's laws and policies in the OPT fit the definition of apartheid in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Israeli law conveys privileges to Jewish settlers and disadvantages Palestinians in the same territory on the basis of their respective identities, which function in this case as racialised identities in the sense provided by international law. Israel's practices are corollary to five of the six 'inhuman acts' listed by the Convention. A policy of apartheid is especially indicated by Israel's demarcation of geographic ‘reserves' in the West Bank, to which Palestinian residence is confined and which Palestinians cannot leave without a permit. The system is very similar to the policy of ‘Grand Apartheid' in apartheid South Africa, in which black South Africans were confined to black homelands delineated by the South African government, while white South Africans enjoyed freedom of movement and full civil rights in the rest of the country.

The Executive Summary of the report says that the three pillars of apartheid in South Africa are all practiced by Israel in the OPT. In South Africa, the first pillar was to demarcate the population of South Africa into racial groups, and to accord superior rights, privileges and services to the white racial group. The second pillar was to segregate the population into different geographic areas, which were allocated by law to different racialgroups, and restrict passage by members of any group into the area allocated to other groups. And the third pillar was "a matrix of draconian ‘security' laws and policies that were employed to suppress any opposition to the regime and to reinforce the system of racial domination, by providing for administrative detention, torture, censorship, banning, and assassination."

The Report finds that Israeli practices in the OPT exhibit the same three 'pillars' of apartheid:

The first pillar "derives from Israeli laws and policies that establish Jewish identity for purposes of law and afford a preferential legal status and material benefits to Jews over non-Jews". The second pillar is reflected in "Israel's 'grand' policy to fragment the OPT [and] ensure that Palestinians remain confined to the reserves designated for them while Israeli Jews are prohibited from entering those reserves but enjoy freedom of movement throughout the rest of the Palestinian territory. This policy is evidenced by Israel's extensive appropriation of Palestinian land, which continues to shrink the territorial space available to Palestinians; the hermetic closure and isolation of the Gaza Strip from the rest of the OPT; the deliberate severing of East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank; and the appropriation and construction policies serving to carve up the West Bank into an intricate and well-serviced network of connected settlements for Jewish-Israelis and an archipelago of besieged and non-contiguous enclaves for Palestinians".

The third pillar is "Israel's invocation of 'security' to validate sweeping restrictions on Palestinian freedom of opinion, expression, assembly, association and movement [to] mask a true underlying intent to suppress dissent to its system of domination and thereby maintain control over Palestinians as a group."

The research team included scholars and international lawyers based at the HSRC, the School for Oriental and African Studies (London), the British Institute for International and Comparative Law, the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (Durban), the Adalah/Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and al-Haq/West Bank Affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. Consultation on the study's theory and method was provided by eminent jurists from South Africa, Israel and Europe.

The HSRC serves as the national social science council for South Africa. The Middle East Project of the HSRC is an independent two-year project to conduct analysis of Middle East politics relevant to South African foreign policy, funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Government of South Africa. The analysis in this report is entirely independent of the views or foreign policy of the Government of South Africa and does not represent an official position of the HSRC. It is intended purely as a scholarly resource for the South African government and civil society and the concerned international community.

For more information or interviews, contact: mep@hsrc.ac.za or +27-21-466-7924. (Human Sciences Research Council of
South Africa (HSRC))

Israel and Egypt murder black refugees together

An Egyptian security official says border police fatally shot an African migrant trying to cross into Israel on Tuesday. The official says police first fired a warning shot into the air as the man tried to get across the barbed wire border fence at dawn. When the migrant failed to stop, he was shot dead. The dead man did not have identification papers but was believed to be African. He was shot in the head, the sources said. The sources said a second man, a 20-year-old Eritrean, was shot in the back and was in a critical condition in a hospital in el-Arish in the north of Sinai peninsula.

An Egyptian security official says border police fatally shot an African migrant trying to cross into Israel on Tuesday. A routine Egyptian border patrol spotted the two men at dawn near the border with Israel and ordered them to stop, opening fire when they did not heed the warning, the sources added. Six African women were also arrested before they were able to reach the border fence.

Dozens of Africans have been killed by Egyptian guards in the past two years trying to get to Israel in search of jobs, drawing criticism from rights groups. However, the number of migrants killed at the border has dipped since last year, when at least 28 were killed. The latest incident is the second such case this year.

The killings on the border have been a concern in the past to the United States, which has expressed worries about rights issues in Egypt. U.S. President Barack Obama visits Egypt to deliver a speech to the Muslim world on Thursday. (Haaretz, June 2, 2009)

Let's recap.

• Egyptian police have rules of opening fire that includes shooting to kill at unarmed civilians trying to cross into Israel.
• In the last year and a half, 34 people lost their life this way.
• Israel has no complaints against these rules and the loss of life that results, despite the fact that the Egyptian police is effectively acting in these shootings as subcontractor for Israel.
• From unfathomable reasons, the dead people can be easily indentified as "African." Perhaps their skin color betrayed them but we wouldn't want to mention it.
• This open season on black African migrants and refugees, "causes concern." Not condemnation, not outrage, just "concern" in Washington. E.U. officials must be deeply envious.