Madonna and slaveowners

Netanyahu and wife Sara , PM of Israel, Palestinians not in the picture .

Protest the TIFF Celebration of Tel aviv

The Toronto Film Festival is hosting a special program curated by Cameroon Baily celebrating the city of Tel Aviv. After failing to convince the festival that assisting Israel’s “brand Israel” propaganda and whitewashing campaign was wrong, John Greyson withdrew his film “Covered” from the festival and made it available on-line instead.

Greyson’s protest soon spread to include an impressive list of artists and writers, and finally made through the dumbed-down media filter thanks to the signatures of Jane Fonda (Yes, the same Fonda who in 1982 cheered the IDF slaughter in Beirut, about which it might have been said, where the penitent stand the righteous cannot stand, if only an apology for that shameful performance were forthcoming) and Danny Glover. Their letter is here. Greyson wrote his own letter to the festival organizers emphasizing that his

protest isn't against the films or filmmakers you've chosen. I've seen brilliant works of Israeli and Palestinian cinema at past TIFFs, and will again in coming years. My protest is against the Spotlight itself, and the smug business-as-usual aura it promotes of a "vibrant metropolis [and] dynamic young city... commemorating its centennial"

Greyson's letter is worth reading in full. Greyson focuses on the unholy use of culture and art in the service of whitewashing Israel’s image after the recent massacre in Gaza.

In the Canadian Jewish News, Israeli Consul General Amir Gissin described how this Spotlight is the culmination of his year-long Brand Israel campaign, which includes bus/radio/TV ads, the ROM's notorious Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, and "a major Israeli presence at next year¹s Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand." Gissen said Toronto was chosen as a test-city for Brand Israel by Israel's Foreign Ministry, and thanked Astral, MIJO and Canwest for donating the million-dollar budget. (Astral is of course a long-time TIFF sponsor, and Canwest owners' Asper Foundation donated $500,000 to TIFF). "We've got a real product to sell to Canadians... The lessons learned from Toronto will inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said."

The curator, Baily, responded in an open letter with a palpable deer-in-the-headlights quality, assuring us that “There was no pressure from any outside source,” as if the fact that no pressure was needed to enlist him in the service of these powerful interests and their whitewashing campaign is an excuse, rather than more evidence of his careerist spinelessness. With Jane Fonda and Danny Glover signing, this letter probably has the highest public profile of any BDS action so far. Not surprisingly, the smear machine is in full gear. Rabbi Hier, the racist, anti African-American, anti-Palestinian, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, is quoted in almost every report. The most widely circulated example of “journalism” comes from the celebrity press, with TMZ misquoting the boycott letter as saying that Tel Aviv was built on "thousands of destroyed Palestinian villages." But don’t be worried; misquoting a statement critical of Israel will never get a journalist in trouble.

The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid, operating from Toronto, calls for action and has a sample letter that you are kindly invited to customize and send to the festival organizers. PACBI issued its own statement, explaining why, even without any connection to “Brand Israel,” celebrating Tel Aviv today is testimony of incredible moral obtuseness.

To celebrate Tel Aviv or any Israeli city for that matter is indefensible, particularly after this year's lethal assault on Gaza, while Israel continues building its illegal Apartheid wall and settlements and extends its network of checkpoints that suffocate the Palestinian population. Most recently, in the Israeli war of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinian civilians were massacred by Israel's indiscriminate bombing, condemned by UN experts and leading human rights organizations as war crimes. This assault left over 1,440 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom 431 were children, and injured another 5,380. The 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and partially destroyed scores of schools, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. This came after 18 months of an ongoing, crippling Israeli siege of Gaza, a severe form of collective punishment described by UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights as "a prelude to genocide."

Such a celebration at this time, therefore, can only be seen by Palestinians and supporters of a just peace around the world as an act of complicity in whitewashing Israel's war crimes and other grave violations of international law. It is a cynical and immoral politicization of the TIFF. (PACBI, read the full statement)

Write your own letter and ask others to write as well. Tomorrow I’ll hopefully add a few more things on Tel-Aviv’s ethnically cleansed memory.

Equating nazis and zionists continued.....

There was a bit of a ruck recently between anti-fascists and the English Defence League. Now where might a fascist group get the idea to call itself a "defence league"? Answer on this postcard:



From the Daily Mail

MAJOR victory: Norway divests from Elbit

The Norwegian government has decided to pull all of its investments from Israeli arms firm Elbit as a result of it involvement in the construction of the West Bank separation fence, the Norwegian Finance Minister announced on Thursday

Kristin Halvorsen, speaking at a Oslo press conference, said that the decision was based on the recommendation of Norway's Ministry ofFinance council on ethics, whose role is to ensure that governmentinvestments abroad meet ethical guidelines.

"We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law," Halvorsen was quoted as saying in a Norwatch report.

Elbit manufactures the monitoring system installed on several parts of the West Bank separation fence.

The recommendation submitted by the Ministry of Finance council on ethics stated that it considered "the fund's investment in Elbit to constitute an unacceptable risk of complicity in serious violations of fundamental ethical norms."

The council is thus explicitly referring to a 2004 International Court of Justice ruling, stating that the separation fence represented a breach of international law.

Palestinian as well as Israeli anti-occupation groups, aided by Norwegian leftists, have all protested extensively against Norwegian involvement in companies involved in West Bank development and construction over last two years, which have seen an increase in Norway's investment in Israeli firms.

Norway's pension fund is invested in 41 different Israeli companies.

A research project by the Coalition of Women for Peace called "Who profits from the occupation" found that almost two thirds of those firms are involved in West Bank construction and development. (Amira Haas, Haaretz)

Zionism = Racism?

All of a sudden, we can say "racism." A shock wave has struck complacent Israeli society. A few dozen Ethiopian children were not accepted to religious schools in Petah Tikva. That is truly terrible, everyone tsked-tsked at the heart-rending picture of Aschalo Sama, a boy without a school. Even President Shimon Peres expressed shock. Everyone is permitted to be shocked; it is politically correct.

Oh, how beautiful we are, how enlightened we seem to ourselves. Look how we fight racism, undaunted and uncompromising. And yet, in a twinkling, this shame will be forgotten, and we will be left with the many other manifestations of society's racism, to which we remain sleepily indifferent.

That's the way we are. From time to time, when the sewage overflows, and the stink spreads everywhere and we can no longer hold our noses, we all cry out against injustice until, once again, the cover is closed. The water underneath continues to froth and stink, but it will be covered and repressed.

It is difficult to know, for example, how many self-righteous and tsking parents would have agreed to register their children in a class with a majority of children of Ethiopian origin. And how many would rent an apartment to an Arab student? But far be it for them to count that as racism. And how many parents are shocked by the nightly selection at the clubs where their adolescent children go for a good time? Routinely, young "others" are excluded - Ethiopians, Arabs, Druze, and sometimes Mizrahim, too. Foreigners are barred for having dark skin, and no protest is heard.

Every day security guards check people entering Ben-Gurion International Airport on whether their accent sounds Arab, and no one complains. That is not racism. It's how we have organized for ourselves an ethical code of double and triple moral standards. We fight against a few manifestations and close our eyes to other, far worse, examples.

The case of the Petah Tikva pupils is the tip of the racism iceberg. Children engender special feelings; shameful revelations about the school system will always yield a scandal. But the very week the country was in a huff over the Ethiopians, Nir Hasson reported in Haaretz that Jerusalem invests NIS 577 a year in a pupil from East Jerusalem and NIS 2,372 in a pupil from West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child's ethnicity. That does not count here as racism. Neither does the fact that East Jerusalem lacks about 1,000 classrooms, only because its residents are Palestinian. No one howls against these revelations, no one is infuriated by them, including the president, who fights against racism.

Now that we can use the term "racism," the time has come to admit our society is absolutely racist, that all its components are racist. The legal system, for example, is no less tainted than Petah Tikva's Morasha school. In many cases there is one law for a Jew and another for an Arab. The Bank of Israel, a state institution no less than the Morasha school, with 900 employees, has always been "clean" of Arab employees except sometimes one or two. Some 70,000 Israeli citizens, all Arab of course, are living in unrecognized villages, without electricity or running water, without an access road and sometimes without a school. Why? Because they are Arabs. Every week at soccer matches we hear racist epithets and chants, the kind teams in Europe are severely penalized for. Here, the referees do not even bother reporting them.

The latest incident occurred last week at the Doha Stadium in Sakhnin in a match between Bnei Sakhnin and Beitar Jerusalem.

And we have said nothing yet about the attitude toward foreign workers, the occupation (the greatest racist curse) nor about the attitude toward Mizrahim since the founding of the state. The list is long and shameful.

When the children of Petah Tikva have all found schools to attend , even though their skin is black, society will not stop being racist. It will return very quickly to business as usual and self-satisfaction. See how there was racism here, we fought it and it disappeared without a trace.(Gideon Levy, Haaretz)

I think we can reach a verdict.

Museum of Israel's ethnic cleansing

Genocidaires rarely build monuments or museums for their victims and Israel is no exception. But there could be a museum that says it all about the zionist approach to the natives of Palestine only it has already been built and not by Israel. Here's Jonathan Cook in the UAE's The National:

The walls have been freshly plastered and painted white, the sculpted stone window frames are filled with frosted glass and the builders are hanging spotlights from the ceiling.

The municipality of Beersheva, the capital of southern Israel, is racing to put the finishing touches to repairs of the city’s long-neglected and unused Great Mosque, built more than 100 years ago by the Ottoman rulers of what was then Palestine.

But, over the protests of Beersheva’s thousands-strong community of Muslims, the Jewish-run municipality is not planning to restore the city’s only mosque to its former glory as a place of worship. It wants to convert it into a museum.

The building’s fate now rests with the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule in the coming months on whether to give the go-ahead to the municipality or insist on the mosque’s return to local Islamic authorities from whom it was confiscated 61 years ago.

Muslim campaigners, however, are not hopeful. After seven years of foot-dragging by the judges, they fear the court will not risk setting a precedent that might force the return of dozens of other Islamic holy places seized decades ago by Israel.

“There is so much paranoia from the government, the municipality and the courts about Muslims using this mosque again,” said Nuri al Uqbi, a 67-year-old Bedouin activist in Beersheva. “It was built with money raised from the local Bedouin and we should have the right to pray in it.”......

.........

Following Israel’s establishment in 1948, when Beersheva was emptied of its Palestinian population, the mosque’s status as a holy place was ignored, and officials approved its use first as a prison and then for the exhibition of archaeological finds.....

.....

Other buildings, including mosques in Tiberias and Beit Shean, have been the target of repeated arson attacks. The famous Hasan Bek mosque in Tel Aviv is regularly vandalised and was desecrated in 2005 when a pig’s head bearing the name of the Prophet was thrown into its yard.

Two historic Galilee mosques that are still standing, at Ghabsiyya and Hittin, have been left to fall into ruin surrounded by fences and razor wire. The latter was built by Saladin in the 12th century to celebrate the defeat of the Crusaders.

In Palestinian villages now re-invented as Jewish communities, such as at Ein Hod and Caesariya, mosques have been refurbished as bars or restaurants. In at least four cases, mosques have been converted into synagogues. And Jewish farming communities sometimes use remote holy places as animal pens or warehouses.

In the case of the Beersheva mosque, the court tried to settle the dispute three years ago by urging the parties to reach a compromise. It has suggested that the building be converted into an Islamic heritage centre where no prayer would take place or that it become a coexistence centre.

Both sides rejected the offers.

Adalah discovered in 2004, two years after it launched its petition, that the municipality had secretly issued a tender to convert the mosque into a museum. The court ruled the renovations could go ahead but only if they were restricted to protecting the structure.

A visit last month revealed that the municipality had ignored the injunction and was close to completing the mosque’s refurbishment as a museum.

A museum of what exactly?

Israel trolls for Jews

The Prime Minister's Office and the Jewish Agency unveiled an aggressive advertisement campaign for the Masa project which is designed to strengthen Jewish identity among youths in the Diaspora and their bonds to Israel.
One video clip likens Jews who marry outside of the religion to missing persons, with fake notices and pictures which drive home the point.

As part of the campaign, similar "missing person" notices will be plastered on walls around the country.

(Turn on captions if you need)
Masa hopes the campaign will spur the public to commit to the cause of preventing marriage to non-Jews, which Jewish Agency officials believe is tantamount to a "strategic national threat."
According to figures compiled by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, over 50 percent of Jews in the Diaspora marry a non-Jewish partner.

Studies show that Jews who participate in extensive programs in Israel deepen their Jewish identity and strengthen their bond to the country. Most of them marry Jews and send their children to Jewish schools and become politically and socially active on behalf of Israel-related causes. Some of them even immigrate to Israel.

The head of the campaign, Motti Scharf, compared assimilation to the critical water shortage. "Even though this is an existential problem, the public in Israel is displaying apathy towards it because the process is slow and not dramatic, out of sight," he said. "The time has come to put the issue on the table." (Haaretz)

Will the World Court give Amira justice?

THE HAGUE — A 15-year-old Palestinian girl who says Israeli troops killed her father and two siblings in Gaza in January, sought justice from the International Criminal Court on Monday.

"I am here to lodge a complaint against the occupying army," Amira Alqerem told journalists in The Hague, seven months after her family was killed in an early-morning assault in the Tal Al Hawa neighbourhood that also left her severely injured.

"I hope this complaint will succeed because it is the truth," the soft-spoken teenager said, seated next to her lawyer on his way to the ICC to file the complaint with the office of the prosecutor.

In her court filing, Alqerem says her 67-year-old father Fathi, 16-year-old-sister Ismat, and 14-year-old brother Ala, were killed by Israeli army fire in the early hours of January 14.

The three children were awoken by an explosion to find their father's body, covered in blood, next to a crater near their house, the document claims.

Ismat and Ala went off to seek help, but were killed in another explosion. Amira, who had stayed behind with her dead father, was hit in the right leg.

"This was a crime against humanity, that is why we brought it to the ICC," said her lawyer Gilles Devers, who claims the attacks were aimed at civilians.

"Israeli politicians and military leaders must be held responsible."

Israel's 22-day offensive on Islamist Hamas-controlledb Gaza left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead before ceasefire took effect on January 18.

ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo announced in February he had begun a "preliminary analysis" of alleged crimes committed by Israel during the Gaza offensive. (AFP)

Here's from an older item about the horror story of Amira:

On Wednesday, 14 January 2009, at around 5:00pm, 14-year-old Amira was on the first floor of her home in Tel al-Hawa in southern Gaza City. She was with her father, brother Ala (13) and sister Ismat (15) when Israeli tanks entered their neighbourhood: “We were very scared,” recalls Amira.

At approximately 6:30pm, Amira’s father, who is the muezzin (person who leads the call to prayer) for the mosque next door left the house to call the Isha (night) prayer. He quickly returned home, and shortly after put the children to bed amidst the sound of nearby shelling and gunfire.

Amira recounts that her father told her and her siblings that he was going to look out the front door of the house to see what is happening. “Sleep and do not be afraid,” he told them. The children fell asleep, but awoke screaming at the sound of a loud explosion just outside their house.

They jumped out of bed and ran to the front door of the house. Amira exited the house first and as she ran several metres beyond the front door, she recalls sensing that she had stepped on a person and froze where she stood. She looked behind her and saw her father lying on the ground and bleeding heavily by their front door. Amira and her siblings, Ala and Ismat, knelt down around their father as they screamed and cried in fear. “Please God, don't let my father die" Amira repeated as she sat on the ground next to him.

Amira’s brother and sister told her to stay with their father while they went to get an ambulance. Her brother and sister had already run several metres when Amira heard the sound of another explosion. At that moment, she reports feeling her right leg divide into two parts. Amira screamed out in pain and her brother and sister ran back to help her. Amira’s brother tried to move her leg but could not. So Ala and Ismat set off again to find an ambulance, telling Amira not to be afraid. Amira watched them run down the street until they rounded a corner and moved out of sight. She could no longer see her siblings but she could hear their voices shouting, “Ambulance! Ambulance! Please help us.” Moments later, Amira heard the sound of yet another explosion and saw heavy smoke rising from the area where her siblings had gone. She could no longer hear their voices.

Amira sat by her father, pleading with him to wake up but he did not move. She grew afraid when she heard the sound of tanks approaching and crawled back inside her house through the front door. She convinced herself that her father would wake up and follow her inside so she deliberately left the front door open for him. Inside the house, she crawled to the balcony overlooking the street. Moments later, she heard yet another explosion and saw smoke rising from the area where her father was lying. When the smoke cleared, she saw that her father’s legs had been torn from his body. At this point she says, “I knew he was dead.” Exhausted, and numbed by the pain from her right leg, Amira fell asleep on the balcony, waking up to daylight the following morning (Thursday).

Cold and thirsty, Amira struggled into the kitchen to drink some water. As she pulled herself up to stand on her left leg, she fainted and fell to the ground. Amira regained consciousness some time later and was then able to pull herself up to the kitchen sink to drink water from the tap. Afterwards, she crawled outside to where her father’s body lay to retrieve his mobile phone from his pocket. She wanted to give the phone to her father’s cousin who lived about 500 metres away so he could inform her father’s contacts that he had been killed. She dragged herself to his house and knocked on the door, but no one answered.

Amira then covered herself with a nylon sack she found on the ground and with the leaves hanging from a nearby tree in order to stay warm. She remained in this location until the next morning, falling in and out of consciousness throughout the night. She recalls being afraid of the sound of barking dogs, tanks and shellfire. She reported saying to herself “My father will protect me,” each time she felt afraid.

By morning light (Friday), Amira saw that there was a hole in the wall surrounding the nearby house of a journalist she knew well because her older sister had befriended his daughter. Weak and dehydrated, Amira crawled through the hole into the garden and then inside the house in search of water. She found a room with many mattresses and blankets and also a bottle of water from which she drank.

"I crawled and grabbed the bottle of water and quickly began drinking. The water was delicious. I then slept on a mattress and covered myself with a blanket because I was very cold. I could see a helicopter from the shattered window of the room".

"I slept and woke up several times. [...] Once, I crawled into the bathroom and filled the bottle with water from the tap. While crawling back to the room, I saw a jar full of pickled olives thrown on the floor of the kitchen. For sure it was for stock purposes. We used to store pickled olives until they became edible for the year ahead. I grabbed the jar and tried to open it because I was starving, but I failed. I left it there and crawled back to the room. I lay down on the mattress and covered myself. I reckon it was Saturday. I slowly began drinking from the bottle. I did not want to waste water because I did not feel able to go back and fill it".

More than 60 hours after her ordeal began, Amira was finally discovered when the journalist who owns the house returned and discovered her lying in the room. He had earlier evacuated his family to another location in fear of the imminent arrival of Israeli forces in the neighbourhood. When the journalist asked Amira how she arrived at his home, she responded, “I’m wounded uncle. I’m sorry I entered your house without your permission. I was hesitant to do so, but I did not know any place else to go. Please forgive me.”

Amira was rushed to Shifa Hospital where she underwent immediate surgery to fuse the shattered bones in her right leg. She suffered significant blood loss and required a blood transfusion as a life-saving measure. Four days later, Amira underwent further surgery to rehabilitate her leg.

Amira was placed under the care of a group of French doctors who wanted to send her to France for further treatment to ensure she does not suffer the loss of her lower limb. On 22 January and again on 23 January, Amira, accompanied by her aunt, was taken via ambulance to Rafah crossing to enter Egypt. Both times, they were denied entry by Egyptian officials who shouted abuse at them, accusing them of lying about the extent of Amira’s injury.

As of 5 February 2009, Amira is still in Gaza awaiting permission to enter Egypt via Rafah crossing in order to receive continuing medical treatment abroad. Efforts by delegations of international doctors are ongoing to coordinate and obtain the proper permits for her exit. Amira is exhibiting signs of psychological stress as a result of the trauma she experienced and further delays in her treatment will only set back her recovery. (DCI-Palestine)

Amira is among the lucky. More than 300 children were murdered by the Israeli army in January. The role of justice is to make the victim whole. But nothing this court or any court can do will make Amira and others like her whole. With love and care she will hopefully be able to function and thrive. But those sixty hours will never leave her, and she will never be whole.

What courts can and should do is hang the people who are responsible to what happened to Amira. That won't make her whole, but it might protect others from similar fates.

Even the bosses don't like Bibi

I was at some leftist meeting a while back when a guy described the Financial Times as the "paper where the bosses tell each other the truth". This distinguished it from the mainstream of course. Well it seems the bosses don't like Netanyahu. The headline Netanyahu’s peace is a cynical evasion is a bit of a clue. But leaving the personalisation aside, I hadn't realised the extent to which Oslo had worked to the benefit of zionism and to the detriment of the Palestinians.

Ok, let's take a little look at what amounts to the "cynical evasion":

Mr Obama has chosen as his battleground the Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land, all of them illegal under international law. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” the president said. Washington has called for a total freeze, including on the so-called “natural growth” that has enabled the settlements to expand exponentially. Mr Netanyahu, in London and due to see George Mitchell, the president’s special representative, wants to talk economics. This is a cynical evasion.

Ok, and now the Oslo balance sheet:

In 1992-96, at the height of the peace process, Israel alone reaped a peace dividend, without having to conclude a peace. Diplomatic recognition of Israel doubled, from 85 to 161 countries, leading to doubled exports and a sixfold increase in foreign investment. During the same period, per capita income in the occupied territories fell by 37 per cent while the number of settlers increased by 50 per cent. Economic development deals in facts; Mr Netanyahu deals in cosmetics.

And it's Likud that denounces, renounces and reneges on Oslo. There's just no pleasing the zios but the FT really doesn't like Netanyahu and has a few other goes culminating in this:

In his last administration, Mr Netanyahu turned the drive for peace into pure process: piling up unresolved disputes to be parked in “final status” negotiations he never intended to begin. Under US pressure he has changed tactics – but the aim is exactly the same.

So the FT doesn't like Bibi which is why some on the left quite like him or at least prefer him to his predecessors. He's harder for the media to ignore.

But returning to the theme rather than the personality, if Oslo was bad for the Palestinians and anti-Oslo is bad for the Palestinians might the bosses wake up to the fact that the problem is neither Bibi nor Oslo but zionism? Might they? They've certainly come close in this article.

Filmakers plan to withdraw from Toronto Film Festival to protest Tel Aviv celebration

Several Canadian filmmakers plan to withdraw their movies from next month's Toronto International Film Festival to protest a weeklong cinematic homage to Tel Aviv...The Tel Aviv-centric week launches the Toronto Festival's new City to City event and is intended to celebrate Tel Aviv's centennial.

According to the protesting artists, including culture critic Naomi Klein and director John Greyson, the problem is not the official participation of Israeli films at the festival but the character of the forum in which they will be screened...In a letter sent to the Toronto festival administration, Greyson wrote that the protest was not against Israeli films or filmmakers chosen for the festival.

He expressed admiration for film work by Israelis shown at previous festivals and said that he would attend Israeli films in the future. Rather, he wrote, his protest was about the "spotlight" itself, the business-as-usual atmosphere advanced by the choice of Tel Aviv as a young, dynamic metropolis, in a celebration free of confrontation with less pleasant parts of Israel, such as what he termed the "brutal occupation." Greyson questioned whether an uncritical celebration at this time might be compared to having held such affairs in 1991 in South Africa, or in 1963 in Montgomery, Alabama.

Israeli director Udi Aloni is supporting the Canadian protest and is calling on Israeli artists to take the same steps.
...According to Aloni, Israeli artists need to rethink their participation in the festival. "Wherever they appear they must decide if they are representatives of the Foreign Ministry or of an uncompromising opposition to occupation and racism in Israel," he said. "Israeli directors don't have to be defensive and ask 'Why are they attacking us?' but say to the Canadian directors: 'We're with you on this. We don't represent [Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman; we represent the opposition.' There are only two options. It's no longer possible to shoot and cry."

In a letter addressed to Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky, makers of "The Bubble," Aloni asked them: "Are Israeli artists Lieberman's new foreign service cadets?" (Haaretz, 29 August 2009)

Glorious bastards

Tarantino recent contribution to human heritage, which I haven't seen, and must admit probably won't see, certainly won't pay to see, is grabbing attention. It is, as I read, a fantasy about Jews violently taking their revenge from Nazis. To be sure, such Jews certainly existed, and no apology is needed. For example, a Jewish terrorist's, Herschel Greenspan, assassination of a German diplomat was the excuse for Kristallnacht. The Nazis used it to stoke righteous anger and advance their assault on German Jews. This is a pattern of state strategy that students of the Israeli occupation would be familiar with, as Israel uses Palestinian terrorism in similar ways. But this is another story.

Anyway, the film excites Jewish U.S. commentators, and although Tarantino pretends the film has nothing to do with current realities, the fantasy immediately translates into not very bright thoughts about Israel. Jeffrey Goldberg felt all psyched up and ready to settle in Jordan, whereas the ever dull MJ Rosenberg grasped the opportunity to justify the necessity of a Jewish state with a fantasy of Israel participating WW-II and bombing Germany. As I pointed out over there, had Israel been established a decade earlier, it is uncertain on which side of WW-II it would have fought, if at all. That drove him to over the edge.

It seems to me that the film, for all its pretense, is essentially a 300 for liberals, allowing those who imagine themselves urbane and sophisticated to enjoy the same uncomplicated sense of righteous violence and masculinity liberated from feminist "oppression" that the hoi polloi experience in the typical action movie. The introduction of the Jewish themes (as well as Tarantino's name) elevates the film from the mildly disreputable category of entertainment, whereas the Nazis, not a real political phenomenon but a token of pure, fantastic evil, merely function as a device that frees the genteel consciousness from the guilt of enjoying the pleasures of fascism. This is yet another reason to remember (as I also explained here) that the fundamental problem with calling people Nazis is not that it "demonizes" them, but that it assumes that Nazis were demonic. The category of the demonic, not the wrong labeling of Zionists or Arabs or anybody else with this category, is the door through which fascism is kosherized.

But let's get back to uncomplicated Jewish violence. As Weiss notes above, Nazis are no longer among us. The Jewish commentators who saw the film immediately performed the obvious displacement, onto Israel and Palestinians. Unfortunately, finding Israelis with such a "healthy" and uncomplicated attitude towards violence is easier that I would prefer. If Tarantino were honest and had an ounce of courage, he would have made the film about that. Because, for the subject of a high production values snuff movie, few things beat the real adventurers, for example, of one Meir Har-Tzion, about whose murderous exploits I first learned from a devoted fan of his who was a teacher in my high school. By the way, it is possible that the film is about that, but perhaps I read too much into the fact that Tarantino's heroine shares a name with Har-Tzion's sister. With this in mind, here is Har-Tzion's death-porn, quoted from his memoir, published in Israel in 1969.

The wide, dry riverbed glitters in the moonlight. We advance, carefully, along the mountain slope. Several houses can be seen. Bushes and shrubbery sway in the breeze, casting their shadows on the ground. In the distance we can see three lights and hear the sounds of Arab music coming out of the homes immersed in darkness. We split up into three groups of four men each. Two groups make their way to the immense refugee camp to the south of our position. The other group marches towards the lonely house in the flat area north of Wadi Gaza. We march forward, trampling over green fields, wading through water canals as the moon bathes us in its scintillating light. Soon, however, the silence will be shattered by bullets, explosions, and the screams of those who are now sleeping peacefully. We advance quickly and enter one of the houses "Mann Haatha?" (Arabic for "Who's there?")

We leap towards the voices. Fearing and trembling, two Arabs are standing up against the wall of the building. They try to escape. I open fire. An ear piercing scream fills the air. One man falls to the ground, while his friend continues to run. Now we must act we have no time to lose. We make our way from house to house as the Arabs scramble about in confusion. Machine guns rattle, their noise mixed with a terrible howling. We reach the main thoroughfare of the camp. The mob of fleeing Arabs grows larger. The other group attacks from the opposite direction. The thunder of hand grenades echoes in the distance. We receive an order to retreat. The attack has come to an end.

On the following morning, the headlines will read: "The refugee camp of Al-Burj near Gaza was attacked. The camp has been serving as a base for infiltrators into Israeli territory. 'Twenty people were killed and another twenty were wounded."

.. . . A telephone line blocks our way. We cut it and continue. A narrow path leads along the slope of a hill. The column marches forward in silence. Stop! A few rocks roll down the hill. I catch sight of a man surveying the silence. I cock my rifle. Gibly crawls over to me, "Har, for God's sake, a knife!!" His clenched teeth glitter in the dark and his whole body is tight, his mind alert, "For God's sake," . . . I put my tommy down and unsheath my machete. We crawl towards the lone figure as he begins to sing a trilled Arab tune. Soon the singing will turn into a death moan. I am shaking, every muscle in my body is tense. This is my first experience with this type of weapon. Will I be able to do it?

We draw closer. There he stands, only a few meters in front of us. We leap. Gibly grabs him and I plunge the knife deep into his back. The blood pours over his striped cotton shirt. With not a second to lose, I react instinctively and stab him again. The body groans, struggles and then becomes quiet and still. (Quoted in Livia Rokach, Israel's sacred terrorism)

This is the historical content of the fantasy, the new Jewish masculinity that enthralls MJ Rosenberg and Jeffrey Goldberg.

Ken Loach's cultural revolution

There a remarkably stupid and dishonest article in Comment is free trying to insulate Israel from boycott calls. It's by executive director of Melbourne International Film Festival, Richard Moore. Headed Censorship has no place in film, you get a taste of how silly the article is going to be from the sub-title: Chinese efforts to censor our festival overshadowed Ken Loach's equally insidious attempt to prevent sponsorship from Israel. So China, you know that great big powerful Asian state, is comparable to Ken Loach and not only that but China seeking to stop film output is the same as Ken Loach suggesting that it is wrong to take money from the racist war criminals of the State of Israel.

Here's another taste from the article itself:

Politics will always walk hand in hand with film, and with film festivals, but at the core of every festival, from Melbourne to Montreal, is the independence and integrity of the programme: it is a festival's primary asset and part of an inviolate bond of trust between a festival and its audience. To allow the personal politics of one filmmaker to proscribe a festival position would not only open a veritable floodgate, but also goes against the grain of what festivals stand for. Not that I felt the need to justify ourselves but in my response to Loach, explaining why Melbourne's film festival would not comply with his demands, I reminded him that it had had a long interest in the Middle East and has programmed many films about the Israel-Palestinian question – most, if not all, sympathetic to the Palestinians.

Loach's reply was:

Film festivals will reflect many points of view, which are often radical and progressive. It is also true that there are many brutal regimes and many governments, including our own, which have committed war crimes. But the cultural boycott called for by the Palestinians means that remaining sympathetic but detached observers is no longer an option.

In other words, everyone has been given a royal dispensation from Loach to commit war crimes bar the Israelis.

No they haven't, they just don't have lots of representative groups of their victims calling for a boycott.

Why can't Israel's apologists be honest? There have been honest opponents of the boycott but clearly this Richard Moore chap isn't one of them. Ken Loach has simply said that funding from Israel should be rejected or he will withdraw his own work from the festival. Withdrawing ones own work is hardly censorship and nor is rejecting funding from racist war criminals.

I believe comments are still open

Levy on "Organ Harvesting"

Too many of our friends around here do not understand the power of truth. They don't understand that the reason Israel needs to drown criticism with endless amounts of cash is because they have no case that can be honestly defended. They see how apologists for Israel can get away with gross lies thanks to their media power, wealth and connections and draw the conclusion that truth doesn't matter. Better try to shout louder than the other side. This is short sighted.

Having truth on your side is a powerful asset. Having money and connections on your side is a different kind of powerful asset. In order to win, each side of a battle tries to move the battlefield to where it has the advantage. A naval power would prefer to fight at sea, whereas a guerrilla force would rather fight in deep forests or urban neighborhoods. Those who have night vision equipment prefer to fight at night, not because fighting at night is inherently better but because it gives them an advantage.

Since truth and fact is against them, Israeli apologists lie all the time. Their preferred battlefield is one in which truth is irrelevant. In a match of public relations prowess, one lying hack against another, they will always win, because they have more, better trained and better paid lying hacks. Put Mark Regev against Comical Ali, and the outcome is a foregone conclusion. The least outcome would be a bewildered listener who knows not whom to trust, or a disgusted viewer who says "a pox on both your houses". And these are not bad outcome at all for Israel. They are however bad outcomes for Palestinians who need actual solidarity, not just indifference and neutrality.

But put Marc Regev against a Palestinian mother from Rafeh, and it's nock-out in 20 seconds.

The people who peddle the recent Swedish bull don't see the terrain of the battle over public opinion. They think they can win by playing the game Israel wants them to play, the trading of unsubstantiated claims. The name of this strategy is shooting yourself in the foot.

Here's Gideon Levy, making a similar point.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman should have sent a big bouquet to Donald Bostrom, the Swedish photographer and journalist who wrote the article claiming that the Israel Defense Forces harvested organs from dead Palestinians. And the Foreign Ministry should write a letter of thanks to the editors of his paper, Aftonbladet. It has been a long time since such a propaganda asset has fallen into the hands of the friends of the occupation. It has been a long time since such damage has been caused to people seriously attempting to document its horrors.

The bizarre Swedish report led to a no-less-bizarre Israeli response. Bad and irresponsible journalism crossed paths with bad and irresponsible diplomacy. Instead of simply denying the report, Lieberman, true to form, acted like a bully... However, the article's damage to the fight against the occupation cannot be ignored.

Serious journalism's task is to document, investigate and prove - not to call on others to investigate, as the Swedish tabloid did. One may, for example, accuse the Swedish reporter of a crime, writing that he rapes little boys or girls, all based on suspicions and rumors, and call on the Swedish police to investigate. That's what the reporter did with his claims of trafficking in Palestinian organs.

There were cases in which the organs of Palestinians who had been killed were harvested without permission, something the Institute of Forensic Medicine has done to others in Israel, for research purposes. But it's a long way from that to suspicion of trafficking in organs based only on the fact that in 1992 a dead Palestinian was found whose organs had been removed and his body sewn back up. And 17 years later a few Jews were arrested on suspicion of trafficking in human organs. That's not professional journalism, that's cheap and harmful journalism.

The Israeli occupation is ugly enough without the contribution of Nordic fairy tales. Its wrongs are abominable even without exaggerations and inventions. We, a small group of Israeli journalists trying to document the occupation, always knew that we must not publish an unfounded report. One mistake and the whole journalistic enterprise would fall into the hands of official propaganda, which automatically denies all suspicions and is just waiting for a mistake....

Over the years, the IDF has killed thousands of innocent civilians, among them women and children. The Shin Bet security service has tortured hundreds of people under interrogation, sometimes to death. Israel prevents food and medicine from reaching Gaza. Sick people are extorted by the Shin Bet to become collaborators in return for medical treatment. Thousands of homes in the territories have been demolished for nothing. Dozens of people have been killed by special units when they could have been arrested instead. Thousands of detainees have sat in jail for months or years without trial. Is that not enough to draw a reliable portrait of the occupation? Is that not shocking enough? (Haaretz)

Not Lenin on Lockerbie

I started a post on that Megrahi chap who was convicted of the Lockerbie bombing in a "Scottish" court in Holland. I was saying how I thought that he was being released because the powers that be think he didn't do it and that the original trial (very original by honest accounts) was a farce. Well the post dragged and I ended up deleting it. Thankfully, Lenin over at the Tomb had the same problem as me but he at least did a little reading on the subject:

I'm glad I didn't have to recapitulate the details of the ridiculous trial and conviction of Megrahi, whose release has stimulated an awful lot of hypocritical outrage. Socialist Worker has done the job for me - see here, here, here and here. You can also see my previous posts touching on this topic here, here and here.

But watch this space....

Why Stephen Walt doesn't support B.D.S.

Stephen Walt, who bravely co-authored a bad book about the Jewish Lobby, explains why he doesn't support B.D.S.

I might add that I don't support the "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement" myself. This is partly because I'm uncomfortable with even mild forms of collective punishment and partly because, like Gordon himself, I do worry about the double-standard issue (i.e., if you think it's ok to boycott Israel, why not China or Burma or any number of other countries?). And I'm especially leery of efforts to interfere with academic exchanges, because I don't like anything that interferes with free speech or obstructs the free flow of ideas. (Foreign Policy)

Let's begin with the first point, "collective punishment." Smearing a non-violent strategy of moral pressure coupled with relatively mild pressure on commerce with the terms reserved for high war crimes and crimes against humanity in international law is reprehensible and speaks to Walt's discredit. But let's put that aside. B.D.S. is not "punishment." Punishment is concerned with past behavior whereas BDS is a form of pressure to compel change. Is the avowed "realist" Walt really against the use of coercion in international affairs (which would be of necessity always collective)? Of course not. When pushed, he claims that his "realist" position is descriptive and amoral. It merely describes how states behave. That is patently not however how he writes. Every one of his paragraphs expresses an implicit or explicit prescription for a judicious and prudent statecraft that uses both carrots and sticks to secure "the national interest." Walt is not in principle opposed to war, invasion, occupation, international sanctions, covert operations, etc., all actions that impose a lot more collective harm than BDS, even though he tends to want more stringent criteria for when to use them than most. For example, while Walt has criticized sanctions against Iran on strategic grounds, he has never said he was against them on moral grounds, as "collective punishment." Note that sanctions against Iran are far from "mild forms of collective punishment." Even existing sanctions are causing significant harm, up to aviation disasters because of lack of spare parts, effectively killing Iranian civilians. B.D.S. does not even gets close to that level of harm. If it did, the deadliness of Israeli policies (e.g. in Gaza) combined with the more democratic political system (for Jews) would suggest a far more compelling case for harming Israelis than is the case for harming Iranians.

But then, that assumes that Walt is opposed to exerting pressure on Israel. That would be wrong. Walt conditionally supports pressure, even up to cutting off aid, which would mean a loss of $500 per Israeli citizen, a less mild form of "collective punishment" than anything currently possible within the B.D.S. framework in the U.S.

A few words about the other pathetic quibbles. Double standards? What double standards? Who said it is not O.K. to boycott Burma or China, or the U.S. for that matter? Boycott is a hostile but non-violent strategy, and its morality should be judged by general principles like every other hostile action of its sort. Is justice served or dis-served? How wrong and harmful is the behavior it seeks to change? Is the harm it causes less than harm it seeks to end? Are less harmful options available? Do the people who ask for it have legitimacy? What is the likelihood of success? etc. (All these questions and more are in fact answered explicitly by the campaign (see PACBI and BDS). the strategy of B.D.S. is not specific to Israel. In fact, the campaign against Israel was modeled after South Africa, and hopefully future campaigns in other places will model themselves after Palestine. Furthermore, remember we are cautioned here about "double standards" by a scholar who explicitly rejects imposing demands for moral consistency on international relations.

Academic freedom? Walt claims he is against anything that "obstructs the free flow of ideas"? I assume Walt is not opposed however to the copyright notice printed inside his latest book, which guarantees income to the book publisher (and sometimes even the author) at the price of restricting the free flow of ideas to those who can afford it. Nor does he, I assume, oppose tuition charges in universities. Does he oppose ethical rules on experiments with human subjects? You get the drift. The free flow of ideas is a good thing. But there are many good things, and sometimes they clash and some balance must be sought. A free Palestine, where Palestinian children can freely go to school and learn, is also a good thing. The free flow of people, even people without too many ideas, between Tulkarem and Jenin, is also a good thing. Furthermore, B.D.S. does not call for boycotting Israeli ideas or academics. It calls for breaking relations with Israeli institutions complicit in the oppression of Palestinians. That would include all Israeli universities. Such a boycott may make the flow of ideas marginally slower in some cases, but is it a major limitation? Is co-writing a grant application with an Israeli department or participating in a panel hosted in Israel that much more important than forcing Israel to respect human rights? I guess for some people it is.

Given the flippancy and inconsistency of his arguments, one has to ask: why does Walt really feel compelled to distance himself from the Palestinian B.D.S. on "moral grounds", when he supports in principle far more harmful strategies, including against Israel?

I can only guess. What distinguishes B.D.S. from U.S. sanctions against Iran or pressure on Israel is not the severity of the harm it seeks to inflict but the nature of the agent and the logic of action. B.D.S. is a Palestinian led liberation strategy that seeks solidarity from Americans on moral grounds. As a liberation strategy, B.D.S. seeks to serve the Palestinian cause of liberty, self-determination and rights. When U.S. citizens support B.D.S., they effectively participate in international relations (which Walt affectionately calls IR), independently from their state and as one non-state actor supporting another. By further acting based on moral concerns and solidarity with a grassroots liberation movement, they mess up the neat world of states, ruled by elites, pursuing their interests. One can put it flippantly by saying that B.D.S. undermines Walt's favorite model of IR. But this is far more than a model. It is an ideology of a foreign policy mandarinat. Statecraft, as Walt likes to repeat, not only is but should be an amoral and rough business conducted by calculating strategists in the service of state power. Injecting morality and grassroots concerns into it only messes things up.

Where does that leaves Palestinians? At the mercy of the U.S. policy establishment. As Walt sees it, it serves U.S. interests to make life somewhat better for Palestinians by pressuring Israel to accept a "two state solution" that is better than a Bantustan, although Walt doesn't clarify how much better (his support for the U.S. training of PA thugs suggests that his vision is of a U.S. sponsored autocratic police state like Jordan and Egypt). Of course, Walt's position is not yet consensus among the U.S. foreign policy mandarinat. It is still just one position on a spectrum regarding what the U.S. national interest in the Middle East is, so even getting as much as that is far from a done deal. Whatever the final deal is, however, the only track Walt supports is the one that goes through Washington and serves Washington's interests. When Palestinians chose an alternative track, seeking to mobilize international solidarity through appeal to the world's conscience rather than to the interest of the superpower, Walt suddenly remembers transparently fake "moral" concerns which he raises in order to undermine them. That is the same Walt that advocates a very permissive wide berth for morality in policy since "international politics can be a brutal business."

There is a consistency to Walt's position. First come the interests of the U.S. policy establishment (and the unacknowledged corporate/capitalist interests that this establishment defines as "the national interest"), then come the interests of the U.S. mandarinat, including its academics. Then come the interests of Jewish Israelis (namely, "a Jewish state"), and finally, if there is still room, the interests of Palestinians--even then, only that potential elite Palestinian formation willing to serve as a U.S. client.

Given the sick (and I mean that quite literally) environment he comes from, Walt's willingness to defy some conventional wisdom regarding Israel is refreshing. That does justify a measure of respect as long as we remember he is graded on a curve.

Organ theft Israel?

I know it doesn't make sense but organ theft israel was my google search. I heard the rumours about the Israelis farming internal organs from their Palestinian victims but I assumed (actually I was told) that it was Israeli misinformation to wrongfoot the oppo. Well now I've been sent the original article by the Swedish journo, Donald Boström, who has sparked off such a furore over the matter and to my untrained eye it looks like there's a case for Israel to answer - not that Israel ever answers cases:

In the summer of 1992, Ehud Olmert, then minister of health, tried to address the issue of organ shortage by launching a big campaign aimed at having the Israeli public register for post mortem organ donation. Half a million pamphlets were spread in local newspapers. Ehud Olmert himself was the first person to sign up. A couple of weeks later the Jerusalem Post reported that the campaign was a success. No fewer than 35,000 people had signed up. Prior to the campaign it would have been 500 in a normal month. In the same article, however, Judy Siegel, the reporter, wrote that the gap between supply and demand was still large. 500 people were in line for a kidney transplant, but only 124 transplants could be performed. Of 45 people in need of a new liver, only three could be operated on in Israel.

While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.

Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.

I was in the area at the time, working on a book. On several occasions I was approached by UN staff concerned about the developments. The persons contacting me said that organ theft definitely occurred but that they were prevented from doing anything about it. On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed. One example that I encountered on this eerie trip was the young stone-thrower Bilal Achmed Ghanan.

He then details the story of the young guy, Bilal Achmed Ghanan and makes what looks to me like a convincing case for the idea that he was killed and his internal organs taken.

But what's this in Electronic Intifada?

Bostrom's article lacks credibility for a number of reasons. In the opening paragraph he tells the story of Levy Rosenbaum, a Jewish man in New York linked to illegal trafficking in human organs with counterparts in Israel. While Rosenbaum has admitted to buying organs from destitute Israelis, until now there has been nothing outside Bostrom's article to suggest that this trade involved the organs of Palestinians killed by the Israeli army.

Rosenbaum has also admitted to being involved in the trade for the past ten years which is well after 1992, when Bostrom claims the organ theft may have occurred in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Other than Israel being involved, there is no evidence to make a direct link between these incidents. It is poor journalism on Bostrom's part to use a timely event and try to connect it to something that happened nearly two decades earlier without offering any evidence.

Bostrom also refers to Palestinians disappearing for days at a time and who have in many cases returned dead. This is known to have occurred before, especially Palestinians being arrested and taken to detention centers without the Israeli authorities bothering to inform the families. This is something that has been reported on and documented by numerous Palestinian human rights organizations. Israel may have even performed autopsies on the bodies without the families' consent, as Bostrom reports. He publishes a horrific photograph of one of these bodies alongside the article, but again, this is not proof that organs in that person's body were removed and sold, or given to Israelis in need, as the author implies.

One must also ask why this story was not covered in 1992, when Bostrom claims the organ theft occurred. It seems this would be a more appropriate time to expose such a story when bodies of those killed by Israel could have been autopsied to determine for a fact whether or not organs from those Palestinians killed by Israel were in fact removed. In the Press TV interview, Bostrom claimed that he did approach many Palestinian, Israeli and international organizations but none, minus the UN, heeded his call for further investigation. Yet, he only makes brief mention of this in the article and says the UN staff was prevented from doing anything about his findings.

Unlike Bostrom's reporting, when most Palestinian human rights organizations or other journalists have uncovered Israeli violations, they are sure to provide well-documented evidence to prove beyond a doubt that such violations were in fact committed. Even though Israel has made it very difficult for both Palestinian and international journalists and human rights workers to practice inside the West Bank and Gaza Strip, many have risked their lives to see that evidence of Israel's crimes is uncovered and reported.

Many such well-documented violations committed over recent decades include: willful killing of civilians, including children; torture; extrajudicial executions; depriving a civilian population of food and other necessities; blackmailing patients in need of medical care to try to turn them into informers; wanton and deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure; punitive home demolitions; and illegal use of restricted weapons against civilian targets, including white phosphorus and cluster bombs. The list of UN resolutions and international treaties violated by Israel is far too long to list here, although these violations have been carefully documented over many years by human rights organizations that have worked tirelessly for their enforcement.

I am not trying to argue here that Israel or some Israelis could never have trafficked stolen Palestinian organs. In a place like Palestine, however, where evidence of Israeli war crimes has never been difficult to find -- despite Israel's consistent efforts to block investigations -- those concerned with holding Israel accountable should not level allegations of such seriousness without producing some evidence.

Hmmm? He's right. Israel is making such a big deal out of this it threatens to overshadow its demonstrable atrocities. Israel is having a big whinge about how it's the "victim" of a "blood libel"....again. Now, the headline. Organ theft israel. I put the words into google and as I did it autofilled. I put in the word "organ" followed by the letter t and the word "theft" autofilled. As I finished the word "theft" myself the names of countries appeared. Organ theft brazil, mexico, china. No sign of Israel. Even when I put in the letter i for israel, the autofill was india and only india. Perhaps Israel doth protest too much. And perhaps an inquiry into this stolen organ business is indeed called for.

Partisan Leonard Cohen's "so long" to Amnesty

Amnesty International has withdrawn its support for Leonard Cohen's concert in Tel Aviv. Their reasoning, as Deborah Fink points out on the Just Peace UK list, is just a little bit "mealy mouthed" but this is a victory for BDS in spite of an Amnesty spokesman speaking, ridiculously, of Cohen's "well intentioned" efforts.

Here's the Jewish Chronicle:

Amnesty International says it has withdrawn its support from a concert in Israel because it did not receive sufficiently widespread support from Israelis and Palestinians.

Organisers of the Leonard Cohen concert, which sold out in a day and is due to take place in Tel Aviv next month, approached the US branch of the human rights charity to set up a fund which could distribute the profits of the concert to Israeli and Palestinian charities.

But Curt Goering, deputy director of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), said this week that it was forced to “cease involvement” after not enough support was shown.

He said: “Representatives of Leonard Cohen approached AIUSA for advice on setting up a fund, using the proceeds of the Tel Aviv concert to benefit Israeli and Palestinian human rights and civil society organisations working for reconciliation, tolerance and peace.

“AIUSA was pleased to offer what help it could, and from the beginning, made clear that its involvement in providing advice was premised on the requirement that there be widespread participation of Israeli and Palestinian groups. That widespread support appears not to have materialised at this point, and is why AIUSA has ceased its involvement.

“We regret this outcome, but still think Leonard Cohen’s efforts are well-intentioned and that the fund is a good initiative.”

I don't know if there's a timeline available on all this but when I first heard that Cohen was planning to entertain in Israel that was all I heard. All this nonsense about Cohen performing for "reconciliation, tolerance and peace" at the same time as ignoring representatives of most of Palestinian civil society together with international solidarity groups wasn't grafted on to the affair until the call for boycott came in.

And now Cohen is on his own until he and his manager can cobble together some face saving sham of a zionist "peace" group. I'm sure the Peres Centre for "Peace" is still right behind him.

Israel's clueless racists claim the right to commit genocide

Some 20 people protested Wednesday outside the American Embassy in Tel Aviv against US pressure on Israel to freeze settlement building. Some of the protesters were dressed as Native Americans in a reminder to the US authorities that their country did not exactly ask the natives where they could live or build.

The protestors carried signs emblazoned with slogans like "Three countries for three races" and "America, we understand you – understand us, too" and "Freeze building west of the Atlantic Ocean. Red-skinned American within 1492 border." (Ynet)

[the sign in Hebrew reads: "give us back Manhattan - the third holiest site for Native-Americans"]

Mubarak pays homage to his liege lord in Washington

I guess Obama's ecstatic demeanor is the result of hearing how $2 billion of U.S. monies every year are used to detain bloggers, arrest and torture political activists (as well as the merely unlucky) and suppress democracy. With the health reform in the U.S. falling under the knives of the insurance industry and his voters slowly realizing that he too is, as Isaiah once called Egypt, a "staff of this broken reed"--a description that is still fitting Egypt as well although in a different context--Obama might consider that Mubarak has much to teach him about keeping a disaffected public under the leash.

Not that we should be surprised:

Obama's choice to address Muslims around the world from a country run by a dictator has not only shown us that he is hypocritical when promoting democracy, but even worse - he has given Mubarak both the assurance and the green light to continue ruling. (Khouloud Khalife)

Inventing the Jews...again?

I don't know why this book's publication keeps re-appearing, in front of me anyway. I'm sure I read about it some time ago. We did a post on it back in March 2008 so why has someone emailed a link to the website http://inventionofthejewishpeople.com now? Ach, never mind, it's upset the zios (though why a movement whose apologists are so keen to deny that they are racists are so upset at the idea that the Jews of today might not be the direct descendants of people that inhabited Palestine in biblical times is beyond me) so it might be worth a post. Actually, I think it is the fact that the book may have recently been published for the first time in English that is news, or at least it was news last month.

Anyway, it's the book by Shlomo Sand called The Invention of the Jewish People and it or he contends that the story of the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine by the Romans 2,000 years ago is just that, a story. He contends that it didn't happen and that the story of it happening is played up to justify zionist claims to a state in Palestine for the world's Jews. As it happens, not having read the book I don't know if it contains anything that is new. As I said in the post on this over a year ago, the Magnes Zionist posted about how the Roman exile didn't actually happen. Maybe if that didn't happen perhaps Sand is saying what then actually did happen. But that too has been said before.

Hmm, this is getting distressing for me. I might have to buy the book.