There is an important update in the Comment section.
Apparently she died of a cardiac arrest. I am sure however that the cardiac arrest may have been brought on by the stress of what was happening..
Marchers were given a very hard time by officials in Egypt.
Organizers of the Gaza Freedom March report the death of a French citizen (from injuries sustained at the hands of Egyptian security forces during a demonstration in the capital, Cairo.) The Part inItalics is not correct. Note comment at bottom for updateon incident
Marie Renee died in the Cairo Hospital. She was traveling with a French delegation of approximately 300 nationals, Ma’an news agency reported.
The French delegates had earlier been camped out on the grounds surrounding the French Embassy in Cairo, reportedly flanked by two lines of Egyptian police.
Hundreds of activists with the Gaza Freedom March are staging continued demonstrations and sit-ins in Cairo to protest the Egyptian government’s refusal to allow them to cross the border into the besieged Gaza Strip.
On Wednesday, Egyptian security allowed 84 of the 1,300 who registered to participate in the Freedom March into Gaza. All were traveling with the Codepink delegation, which organized two earlier trips into the blockaded Palestinian coastal sliver since the Israeli war on Gaza last year.
Another 1,200 activists from about 40 states remained in Cairo after Egypt refused entry for the group because of what they called the “sensitive situation” in the Palestinian territory.
The Gaza Freedom March activists were hoping to march into Gaza on the anniversary of Israel’s 22-day offensive on the territory as a sign of solidarity with its people, carrying with them aid and supplies.
Israel has continued to close all border crossings to the Gaza Strip for more than two years. The illegal Israeli imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip, which has steadily tightened since 2007, has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the coastal enclave.
Some 1.5 million people are being denied their basic rights, including Freedom of movement, and their rights to appropriate living conditions, work, health and education. Poverty and unemployment rates stand at approximately 80% and 60% respectively in the Gaza Strip.
Egypt with the Palestinian Authority’s blessings has sealed its borders with the Gaza Strip, effectively cutting off the coastal enclave from the rest of the world.
Arresting Peaceful Protesters
In Occupied Palestine
By Stephen Lendman
December 30, 2009
For decades, Israel has met peaceful Palestinian protesters disruptively with violence, arrests and at times unprovoked killings. It’s no surprise that targeting them and their leaders is now common practice in cities and villages like Jayyous and Bil’in.
On August 3, 200 Israeli soldiers raided five Bel’in homes at 3AM arresting eight Palestinians, including Mohammad Khatib, a leader of the Bel’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements. It’s part of Israel’s repressive routine – late night arrests and imprisonment without charges for indefinite periods. Khatib faces trial, but was released on August 17 on condition he report to a police station with a monitor each Friday until 5PM for its duration. He told supporters:
“The Israeli authorities are worried that the model of popular nonviolent resistance is spreading. They are targeting the popular committees to try to crush (them) but they cannot destroy the spirit of the demonstrations in Bil’in with the arrests of individuals. The whole village is part of the nonviolent resistance and the military would have to arrest (everyone) to stop us from protesting against the Occupation and the theft of our land. Even then, when we all come out of jail, we would continue our struggle.”
On September 22, Jayyous resident Mohammad Othman was arrested because of his “Stop the Wall Campaign” activism and efforts on behalf of dispossessed farmers. He’s now administratively detained without charge after a military court rejected the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association’s appeal on his behalf, citing “secret evidence” that he’s a “security threat in the area.”
On December 10, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, coordinator of Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against the Wall, was arrested after nine military vehicles surrounded his home, broke down his door at 2AM, then blindfolded and seized him from bed in the presence of his wife and children as part of the effort to break the spirit of Bil’in’s residents and their popular struggle against the Wall. Since June, Abu Rahmah is the thirty-first Bil’in activist arrested.
On December 22, an Ofer Prison Military Court indicted him on “incitement, stone-throwing, and possession of arms,” pertaining to tear gas canisters fired at demonstrators that he collected to display in his home.
His lawyer, Gaby Lasky said:
“The army shoots at unarmed demonstrators, and when they try to show the world the violence used against them by collecting (and) presenting the remnants, they are persecuted and prosecuted. What’s next? Charging protesters money for the bullets shot at them?”
On December 24, Archbishop Desmond Tutu called for his unconditional release, saying he met with him and Mohammad Khatib in August in Bil’in.
“We were impressed by their commitment to peaceful political action, and their success in challenging the wall that unjustly separates the people of Bel’in from their land and the olive trees. I call on Israeli officials to release Abu Rahmah immediately and unconditionally.”
He’s been a member of Bel’in’s Popular Committee since its 2004 inception, and after Wall construction began there in March 2005, participated in organizing regular actions and demonstrations to stop it. He also represented Bel’in around the world, and in June 2009 was in Montreal for its precedent-setting legal case against two Canadian companies illegally building settlements on its land.
In addition, he participated in a speaking tour, including in Germany to accept the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal for outstanding service toward the realization of human rights, awarded by the International League for Human Rights.
On December 16, Jamal Juma’ was arrested with no explanation. He was denied contact with a lawyer or his family, and is now imprisoned for his activism against the Wall and settlements. He’s a founding member of several Palestinian NGOs and civil society networks, and has been the coordinator for the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign since 2002. He’s also the highest profile arrest of leadership figures like himself. So far, he’s uncharged, yet may be held indefinitely along with hundreds of others.
According to B’Tselem, administrative detention is “without charge or trial, authorized by administrative order rather than by judicial decree.” Under international law, it’s legal only under rigid conditions, given how grievously it can harm due process and the way Israel uses it.
It’s purpose is to “prevent the danger posed to state security by a particular individual.” Yet Israel never defined it and blatantly abuses the process. At any time, hundreds of Palestinians are held in prolonged detention without charges or trial based on secret evidence unavailable to themselves or their counsel.
“Israel has therefore made a charade out of the entire system of procedural safeguards in both domestic and international law regarding the right to liberty and due process.”
On December 23, a Palestinian Centre for Human Rights press release condemned the above arrests and others like them. According to military order 1591, each one can last up to six months, then be indefinitely extended, often resulting in years imprisonment without charges or trial – a gross violation of fundamental international law.
“By detaining human rights activists for their nonviolent work in legal organizations, Israel is illegally widening the definition of state security in order to fit its motives, while infringing on fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of expression, which are protected under international law.”
Despite thirty-one arrests, Bil’in protests continue, and according to some it’s the Soweto, Derry, and Chiapas of Palestinian resistance, a model now spreading throughout the West Bank. On December 11, dozens withstood a hail of tear gas canisters to pull down a yellow gate regularly used by the IDF to harass and intimidate.
The web site bilin-village.org explains their struggle.
“Bil’in is a Palestinian village that is….fighting to safeguard its land, its olive trees, its resources….its liberty (and existence). By annexing close to 60% of (its) land for Israeli settlements and the (Separation Wall, Israel) is strangling the village. Every day it destroys a bit more, creating an open air prison for (its) inhabitants,” who refuse to stand by and let it happen.
Every Friday, along with Israeli and international activists, they demonstrate peacefully in front of the “work-site of shame,” despite IDF physical and psychological harassment, intimidation, violence, and arrests. Bil’in symbolizes Palestinian popular resistance against occupation, repression, harassment, mass arrests, imprisonment, torture, targeted killings, land seizures, and more.
It’s located several kilometers northeast of Ramallah. In 2004, its population numbered 1,800 on four square km of land, mostly suitable for agriculture, especially olive tree cultivation, but for how long its residents ask.
Bil’in and Saffa are boxed in on the west by eight Israeli settlements, comprising the Modi’in Illit block in the Ramallah Governship, occupying 10.6 square km that are expanding and seizing village lands. The Separation Wall takes more – about half of Bil’in’s four square km for two km of Wall with more planned for a new settlement, expansion of existing ones, and virtual imprisonment of Bil’in and Saffa residents by the Wall’s route when it’s completed. Thus, residents continue weekly protests to save their land, village, and futures.
Since 2006, they’ve also done grassroots organizing and held annual conferences on popular resistance for villagers, activists and academics to discuss effective tactics. In addition, legal actions were taken beginning in the winter of 2004. Three years later, the Israeli High Court ruled part of Modi’in illit’s construction illegal. It affected unfinished housing that couldn’t be completed until the Wall’s route was moved several hundred meters west. It meant returning 25% of Bel’in’s land to the village that never happened because the ruling wasn’t implemented, building continues, and so does do protests against it.
On Christmas day, villagers attempted to march to their stolen land dressed as Santa Claus carrying a Christmas tree decorated with tear gas canisters and percussion grenades regularly used against them. Assaulted by Israeli soldiers, they again suffered tear gas attacks, but planned further actions, including one held on December 29 supporting Abu Rahmad near Ofer Prison where he’s held.
On December 28, Stop the Wall “held its first West Bank-wide youth conference this month,” the result of two years of planning and organizing. Despite the above arrests and continued Israeli repression, two days of “fruitful discussions (were held) on grassroots resistance, boycott and the role of the youth in the national struggle” that won’t end until it succeeds.”
Commentaries in the Israeli Press
On December 23, Haaretz writer Amira Hass headlined, “Danger: Popular Struggle” saying Israel “found the true enemy who refused to whither away: The popular struggle against the occupation.”
As a result, in recent months, efforts to suppress it have increased against:
“Palestinians and Jewish Israelis unwilling to give up their right to resist….demographic separation and Jewish supremacy.” In turn, demonstrators have faced “live ammunition, late-night army raids and mass arrests,” mostly in Bil’in and Na’alin whose lands have been systematically stolen and their residents abused.
Yet resistance continues. Palestinians learned from past mistakes, including armed struggle, and are using more effective tactics to their advantage. As a result, Shin Bet and Military Intelligence are concerned. At a recent cabinet briefing, their leaders, Yuval Diskin (Shin Bet) and Amost Yadlin (Military Intelligence) said:
“The Palestinians want to continue and build a state from the bottom up….and force an agreement on Israel from above….The quiet security (situation) in the West Bank and the fact that the (Palestinian Authority) is acting against terror in an efficient manner has caused the international community to turn to Israel and demand progress.”
Its leaders also fear editorials like Haaretz’s December 25 one headlined, “War on Protest,” saying IDF tactics against protesters damage “Israel’s image as a free and democratic country, one that accords equal and tolerant treatment to all its citizens and residents.”
The commentary cites:
– “violent and disproportionate police” actions;
– IDF “insufferable harshness” in Bel’in and Na’alin;
– soldiers “firing live rounds at unarmed protesters who do not endanger the soldiers’ lives, in violation of the military advocate general’s orders;”
– “major arrest sweeps” targeting peaceful protesters; and
– “all this is happening at a time when the same law enforcement agencies are showing much more leniency and consideration to right-wingers protesting against the construction freeze in the settlements. There, no massive arrests have been made, and there has been less police violence.”
Haaretz called targeting Palestinian protesters reminiscent of “the darkest regimes…..(so much so that it) should disturb every Israeli, whether right-wing or left-wing – because this is about the very nature of the regime of the country in which we live.”
The paper stopped just short of calling Israel a nation where only Jews have rights. Yet Israeli Arabs have none, and Occupied Palestinians have been ruthlessly oppressed for decades. Yet when they resist, they’re called terrorists, charged with crimes they didn’t commit, or arrested and held administratively for months or even years under horrific conditions, including:
– solitary confinement in tiny windowless cells or in tents in extreme desert heat that becomes freezing cold in winter;
– no access to family members, proper food, or needed medical treatment, including for injuries, chronic illnesses, and essential life-saving cancer and other surgeries; nor are family or Red Cross medications allowed;
– torture and abuse against 85% of them according to B’Tselem;
– since 1967, over 700,000 Palestinians have been imprisoned, mostly men, amounting to about 40% of the male population, according to the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association; and
– hundreds of children (some as young as 12) and dozens of women as well, including in at least one secret interrogation facility; during the period September 2000 – August 2008, an estimated 6,700 children were incarcerated (and treated the same as adults), according to the Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs; since 1967, over 10,000 women were imprisoned; pregnant ones are forced to give birth in their cells and have their babies incarcerated with them for up to years.
Most Palestinians are political prisoners charged with offenses under Israeli military orders. About 1,500 of them govern the West Bank, 1,400 are for Gaza, and all broadly define “security” to include almost anything such as political expression. For example:
– under Military Order 101, it’s “forbidden to conduct a protest or march or meeting (involving 10 or more participants for political reasons) without permission of the Military Commander;”
– the same order prohibits the distribution of political articles, pictures, or other materials;
– under Military Order 938, “supporting a hostile organization (meaning any Israel so designates) by holding a flag or listening to a nationalist song (is considered) a hostile action;” and
– like America, Israel enacted a new “unlawful combatant” status that legalizes Arab detentions even without cause to hold them.
As a result, anyone may be arrested any time, anywhere, for any reason, without cause, and held indefinitely for years with no charges or trial. Although Israel is a signatory to the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions and numerous other international laws and covenants, it systematically breaches its responsibility and was found to have violated nearly every article covering the arrest, treatment, detention process, and even locations where detainees are held.
International humanitarian rights laws are clear and unequivocal. For Israeli officials, however, they apply to others, not themselves, so for decades Palestinians have been viciously oppressed, yet continue their heroic struggle against a rogue state run by savages, not responsible human beings.
Two very extensive reports on prisoners and the military system under which they are prosecuted. There is one report for adults and one about children who Israel has imprisoned. PA minister accuses Israel of neglecting prisoners’ health Stephen Lendman is correct in what he says. One lady was put in prison because she raised money for a kindergarten class. Sound ridiculous, well it’s true. Seems Israel has a lot of explaining to do and need to clean up their act. There is no logical reasoning behind anything they do or say. People must stop believing their lies.
U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.
Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.
The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted “an Asian intelligence source” – a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials – as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.
The story of the purported Iranian document prompted a new round of expressions of U.S. and European support for tougher sanctions against Iran and reminders of Israel’s threats to attack Iranian nuclear programme targets if diplomacy fails.
U.S. news media reporting has left the impression that U.S. intelligence analysts have not made up their mind about the document’s authenticity, although it has been widely reported that they have now had a full year to assess the issue.
Giraldi’s intelligence sources did not reveal all the reasons that led analysts to conclude that the purported Iran document had been fabricated by a foreign intelligence agency. But their suspicions of fraud were prompted in part by the source of the story, according to Giraldi.
“The Rupert Murdoch chain has been used extensively to publish false intelligence from the Israelis and occasionally from the British government,” Giraldi said.
The Times is part of a Murdoch publishing empire that includes the Sunday Times, Fox News and the New York Post. All Murdoch-owned news media report on Iran with an aggressively pro-Israeli slant.
The document itself also had a number of red flags suggesting possible or likely fraud.
The subject of the two-page document which the Times published in English translation would be highly classified under any state’s security system. Yet there is no confidentiality marking on the document, as can be seen from the photograph of the Farsi-language original published by the Times.
The absence of security markings has been cited by the Iranian ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, as evidence that the “alleged studies” documents, which were supposedly purloined from an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons-related programme early in this decade, are forgeries.
The document also lacks any information identifying either the issuing office or the intended recipients. The document refers cryptically to “the Centre”, “the Institute”, “the Committee”, and the “neutron group”.
The document’s extreme vagueness about the institutions does not appear to match the concreteness of the plans, which call for hiring eight individuals for different tasks for very specific numbers of hours for a four-year time frame.
Including security markings and such identifying information in a document increases the likelihood of errors that would give the fraud away.
The absence of any date on the document also conflicts with the specificity of much of the information. The Times reported that unidentified “foreign intelligence agencies” had dated the document to early 2007, but gave no reason for that judgment.
An obvious motive for suggesting the early 2007 date is that it would discredit the U.S. intelligence community’s November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iran had discontinued unidentified work on nuclear weapons and had not resumed it as of the time of the estimate.
Discrediting the NIE has been a major objective of the Israeli government for the past two years, and the British and French governments have supported the Israeli effort.
The biggest reason for suspecting that the document is a fraud is its obvious effort to suggest past Iranian experiments related to a neutron initiator. After proposing experiments on detecting pulsed neutrons, the document refers to “locations where such experiments used to be conducted”.
That reference plays to the widespread assumption, which has been embraced by the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Iran had carried out experiments with Polonium-210 in the late 1980s, indicating an interest in neutron initiators. The IAEA referred in reports from 2004 through 2007 to its belief that the experiment with Polonium-210 had potential relevance to making “a neutron initiator in some designs of nuclear weapons”.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political arm of the terrorist organisation Mujahedeen-e Khalq, claimed in February 2005 that Iran’s research with Polonium-210 was continuing and that it was now close to producing a neutron initiator for a nuclear weapon.
Sanger and Broad were so convinced that the Polonium-210 experiments proved Iran’s interest in a neutron initiator that they referred in their story on the leaked document to both the IAEA reports on the experiments in the late 1980s and the claim by NCRI of continuing Iranian work on such a nuclear trigger.
What Sanger and Broad failed to report, however, is that the IAEA has acknowledged that it was mistaken in its earlier assessment that the Polonium-210 experiments were related to a neutron initiator.
After seeing the complete documentation on the original project, including complete copies of the reactor logbook for the entire period, the IAEA concluded in its Feb. 22, 2008 report that Iran’s explanations that the Polonium-210 project was fundamental research with the eventual aim of possible application to radio isotope batteries was “consistent with the Agency’s findings and with other information available to it”.
The IAEA report said the issue of Polonium-210 – and thus the earlier suspicion of an Iranian interest in using it as a neutron initiator for a nuclear weapon – was now considered “no longer outstanding”.
New York Times reporters David Sanger and William J. Broad reported U.S. intelligence officials as saying the intelligence analysts “have yet to authenticate the document”. Sanger and Broad explained the failure to do so, however, as a result of excessive caution left over from the CIA’s having failed to brand as a fabrication the document purporting to show an Iraqi effort to buy uranium in Niger.
The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick dismissed the possibility that the document might be found to be fraudulent. “There is no way to establish the authenticity or original source of the document…,” wrote Warrick.
But the line that the intelligence community had authenticated it evidently reflected the Barack Obama administration’s desire to avoid undercutting a story that supports its efforts to get Russian and Chinese support for tougher sanctions against Iran.
This is not the first time that Giraldi has been tipped off by his intelligence sources on forged documents. Giraldi identified the individual or office responsible for creating the two most notorious forged documents in recent U.S. intelligence history.
In 2005, Giraldi identified Michael Ledeen, the extreme right-wing former consultant to the National Security Council and the Pentagon, as an author of the fabricated letter purporting to show Iraqi interest in purchasing uranium from Niger. That letter was used by the George W. Bush administration to bolster its false case that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons programme.
Giraldi also identified officials in the “Office of Special Plans” who worked under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith as having forged a letter purportedly written by Hussein’s intelligence director, Tahir Jalail Habbush al-Tikriti, to Hussein himself referring to an Iraqi intelligence operation to arrange for an unidentified shipment from Niger.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.
As many as 225,000 children in Haiti live and work as unpaid domestic servants, the first study to closely examine the issue concluded.
The existence of these arrangements are not new, but the scope is larger than previously thought, a new study by the Pan American Development Foundation found. The foundation conducted the largest field survey of human rights violations in Haiti.
Forced labour and rape, the new face of slavery in America
Figures from the State Department reveal that 17,500 people are trafficked into the US every year against their will or under false pretences, mainly to be used for sex or forced labour. Experts believe that, when cases of internal trafficking are added, the total number of victims could be up to five times larger. And increasing numbers of trafficked individuals are being transported thousands of miles from America’s coasts and into heartland states such as Ohio and Michigan.
Mexican authorities have freed 107 indigenous people who officials say were being held as slave laborers in a Mexico City factory disguised as a drug rehabilitation center.
Human trafficking in Israel rakes in more than USD billion a year, findings in annual parliamentary survey show
By Miri Hasson
Published: 03.23.05, 12:44 /Israel News
Thousands of women are being smuggled into Israel, creating a booming sex trade industry that rakes more than USD one billion a year, a parliamentary committee said on Wednesday.
The Parliamentary Inquiry Committee, headed by Knesset member Zehava Galon of the left-wing Yahad party, commissioned the report in an effort to combat the sex trade in Israel. Findings showed that some 3,000 and 5,000 women are smuggled to Israel annually and sold into the prostitution industry, where they are constantly subjected to violence and abuse.
The report, issued annually, said some 10,000 such women currently reside in about 300 to 400 brothels throughout the country. They are traded for about USD 8,000 – USD 10,000, the committee said.
The U.S. State Department ranks Israel in the second tier of human trafficking around the world, saying the Jewish State does not maintain minimal conditions regarding the issue but is working to improve them.
Israel passed a law in 2003 that would allow the state to confiscate the profits of traffickers, but watchdog groups say it is rarely enforced.
Most foreign prostitutes in Israel come from Ukraine, Moldova, Uzbekistan and Russia and many are smuggled in across the Egyptian border.
The committee found that the women work seven days a week for up to 18 hours every day and that out of the NIS 120 paid by customers, they are left with just NIS 20, while the rest of the money is passed on to their traders.
The prostitutes face constant threats of abuse and murder, the report said, and Israeli law does little to help them. Delays in trial dates and prolonged hearings force the women to remain exposed to violence for more than a year until they are called in to provide testimony, and courts rarely collect early testimonies, as permitted by law.
To help combat the problem, the committee recommended that the state prosecutor’s office refrain from making plea bargains with sex traders. It also advised to raise the threshold of punitive measures and pushed for financial compensation for sex trade victims. Source
A living hell
Thousands of sex slaves bought and sold each year face danger, threats, violence; run-aways dealt with quickly: one home in Moldavia firebombed; Tel Aviv exhibit explores ‘women as chattel’
By Miri Chason
Published: 03.18.05, / Israel News
TEL AVIV – Several dozen women have successfully escaped the grip of pimps that have turned their lives into a living hell. These women live in a secret shelter in Tel Aviv until they testify against their former pimps, then they are deported to their countries of origin.
Thursday, some of them went public as part of a new exhibition in Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station, sharing the harsh details of their experiences.
The exhibit, called “Over the Road”, focuses on the public’s approach to women as chattel. It is intended to be a harsh protest against the underground brothels that continue to flourish despite legislation banning them.
Thousands sold each year
The women say the exhibit is primarily intended to reach the customers of their former bosses – the individuals who keep the business rolling along.
Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of women, men and children are sold each year. In Israel, 1,000-3,000 women are sold annually, all for the sex industry.
Volunteers from the Center to Help Foreign Workers and the Clinic for the Fight Against Women Trafficking at Hebrew University have collected many testimonies of victims of women trafficking and documented the way in which they were brought to Israel.
Testimonies
K., from Russia, worked on Erlinger Street in Tel Aviv. She says her boss would “fine” his workers “for everything—if I asked to have
a shower between customers, if I went out without permission. At first we had enough food, but after a while it they said it was too expensive. We barely had enough soap—and during the dirtiest time of my life.”
N. says her pimp used the women for bartering. “If he wanted vegetables from the supermarket, he would ‘give’ one of the girls to a worker in exchange for the vegetables. He bartered us for food, jewelry and other things.”
Y., from Moldava, says she was forced into sado-masochism. “Customers would beat us. They had special instruments. They would drip hot wax all over my body and force me to do painful, degrading things. Of course they enjoyed it—they paid extra for it.”
One woman, also from Moldava, said she received no wages for her services. “(My boss) told me he bought me for 50,000 shekels, and that I had to ‘return’ the money (by working for free) before I could start to earn wages. They also made me pay 50 shekels a day for food and condoms”
Locked Door
N., from Ukraine, worked on Peretz Street in Tel Aviv, explains why women don’t run away. “We all dreamt of escaping, but they even managed to steal the dream from us after someone did leave. A week after she disappeared, her family’s home in Moldava was firebombed.”
She says they were given one rest day per month: the first day of their period. “The first day we could take off. The rest of the time I was having my period, I had to use a diaphragm to prevent bleeding. But I had to continue taking customers.”
Nowhere to run
“We had nowhere to run,” says H. from Ukraine. “The door was always locked, bars on the windows, and there was a closed-circuit TV in each room.
“And even if you managed to get out—where would you go? What would you do? Several customers were police officers, and other cops would check our visas and leave. So who would we have turned to for help? Source
Israels Sex slaves
Canadian Jewish Tribune reports on massive sex slave trade in Zionist entity
June 29 2007
Trafficking in women a worldwide epidemic, Malarek says
Up to – 10,000 trafficked women in Israel and more than 280 brothels in Tel Aviv alone
MONTREAL – Calling human trafficking one of the greatest human rights abuses of our time, Canadian journalist and social activist Victor Malarek addressed the Jewish community at a Montreal synagogue last Thursday.
Promoting a book he has written on the subject, Malarek said destitute Third World and Eastern European females as young as 12 are tricked into leaving their homelands with promises of wealth and prosperity in the West, as well as Israel. Instead, they are sold into the sex trade by organized crime, gangs, pimps and brothel owners.
“Newspaper ads from modelling and employment agencies promise exciting jobs, but the women are duped,” Malarek told the Jewish Tribune. “They must submit, or they are raped, beaten and tortured. There are between 5,000 and 10,000 trafficked women in Israel and more than 280 brothels in Tel Aviv alone. It is a human rights issue the Jewish community knows about. They have a voice and they must use it.”
The United Nations has cited human trafficking as an international crime generating more than US $12 billion worldwide. More than 800,000 people are trafficked annually, forced into prostitution and threatened with death should they attempt to escape the clutches of their captors. Canada is both a means of access to the United States, as well as a final destination for approximately 2,000 women each year.
“Governments should be held accountable,” said Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, who also addressed the crowd. “It is a very serious problem in Israel, and Canada has been inadequate in the protection of victims of trafficking. It is a global slave trade.”
As the previous federal justice minister, Cotler aided in the implementation of several bills addressing the protection of vulnerable individuals, yet he openly admitted there have never been any prosecutions made for human trafficking. He focused on raising the public’s awareness of trafficking as a method to prevent what he called the fastest rising criminal industry in the world today. Responding to an audience member’s question, he said the problem of mistakenly granting Canadian visas to people who should not obtain them is “an issue for the immigration department.”
As customers’ demands for slave trade workers who do not have HIV or AIDS increases, the age of victims proportionally decreases. UNICEF has determined that approximately 1.7 billion children are victimized annually. Ironically, Malarek didn’t realize the gravity of the situation until he personally witnessed how many young girls were trafficked into Kosovo to service troops sent by the United Nations.
“There is both national and international indifference,” said Malarek. “The public looks at the victims with apathy or scorn and foreign women are not the priority of most governments. Governments are complacent because the sex industry brings in money.”
Cotler noted that governments must work together in prosecuting oppressors while protecting their victims. He said the RCMP is part of an international trafficking unit that reflects cooperation among a number of governments. Human trafficking should be a priority on international policy-making agendas, he added, and complimented the United States on taking the lead in exercising what he called moral leadership.
“Most people don’t know how big this problem is,” said Larry Sakow, who attended the public event. “As a Jew, I am upset about the trafficking in Israel. It is surprising that Jews have gotten into it and are making money.”
Victor Malarek’s book, The Natashas: Inside the New Global Sex Trade, is currently available.
Sex slavery and Israel’s failure to fight the growing trade
Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women, according to the BBC.
November 29 2007
Israel has also been named as an offender in the annual U.S. State Department‘s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report, which condemned the Jewish state for not fully complying with the “minimum standards” to eliminate sex trafficking.
According to Canadian journalist and social activist Victor Malarek, “newspaper ads from modeling and employment agencies promise exciting jobs, but the women are duped… They must submit, or they are raped, beaten and tortured. There are between 5,000 and 10,000 trafficked women in Israel and more than 280 brothels in Tel Aviv alone. It is a human rights issue the Jewish community knows about. They have a voice and they must use it.”
With the promise of a job and better economic and social conditions, women are driven to slavery and sold in auctions that take place in nightclubs and bars. Afterwards they are pimped, beaten and isolated. Several trafficked women are subjected to degrading human auctions, where they are stripped, examined and sold for $8,000-$10,000.
“They sold me- just sold me!”
The BBC interviewed one of the trafficked women in Israel, who gave her name as Marina. She is now hiding in a small house in northern Israel because she is wanted by the Israeli authorities for being an illegal immigrant and by the criminal gangs who lured her to Israel to sell her into prostitution.
“When I was in the Ukraine, I had a difficult life,” said Marina, who came to Israel in 1999 at the age of 33 after answering a newspaper advertisement offering the opportunity to study abroad.
“I was taken to an apartment in Ashkelon, and other women there told me I was now in prostitution. I became hysterical, but a guy started hitting me and then others there raped me.
“I was then taken to a place where they sold me – just sold me!” she said, recalling how she was locked in a windowless basement for a month, drank water from a toilet and was deprived of food.
Although Marina managed to escape, she is still suffering from the physical and mental scars that she endured during her captivity.
Like Marina, several other women — most from the former Soviet republics — are trafficked into Israel legally on the false promise of jobs and better economic conditions. Recent figures show that from the beginning of the 1990s to the early years of 2000, an estimated 3,000 women a year were trafficked to Israel.
“Israel did absolutely nothing”
Although prostitution in Israel is legal, pimping and running a brothel are not. However, the law isn’t enforced, and several brothels masquerading as massage parlours, saunas and internet cafes could be seen on the streets.
In Tel Aviv’s Neve Shaanan district for instance, a brothel is located outside the local police station!
The absence of anti-trafficking laws in Israel means that such inhumane activity is unchecked.
“During the first 10 years of trafficking, Israel did absolutely nothing,” said Nomi Levenkron, of the Migrant Workers’ Hotline, an NGO which helps trafficked women and puts pressure on the state to act.
“Women were trafficked into Israel – the first case we uncovered was in 1992 – and not much really happened,” she said. “Occasionally traffickers were brought to trial, but the victims were arrested as well, they were forced to testify, and then they were deported.”
Rachel Benziman, the legal advisor to the non-profit Israeli Women’s network, agrees, explaining how difficult it is to find witnesses. “It’s not a problem of finding the right section in the criminal code. It is more a problem of finding the women who will testify”, Benziman said, according to Reuters.
What’s more shocking is that, since 1994, no single woman has testified against any trafficker. Many say this could be attributed to the fact that although women are the victims, trafficked women are the ones usually arrested as illegal immigrants, while the men who brought them to Israel, who are usually Israeli, are not.
“The supply of victims has not gone down”
According to NGOs, trafficking was made a crime in Israel in 2000, but the punishments were lenient and law enforcement was poor. Authorities only began to act after fierce criticism from the U.S. and the threat of sanctions. In an effort to fight sex slavery, Israel tightened its borders, launched investigations into suspected traffickers, and handed down stiff jail sentence to traffickers.
The opening of a shelter for trafficked women in north Tel Aviv in 2004 also marked a change in the way the state perceived the victims. There are some 30 women at the Maggan shelter – most from former Soviet states, but also five from China.
“When they come here they are in a bad condition,” said Rinat Davidovich, the shelter’s director. “Most have sexual diseases and some have hepatitis and even tuberculosis. They also have problems going to sleep because they remember what used to happen to them at night… It’s very hard and it’s a long procedure to start to help and treat them.”
Police say their actions have led to a significant drop in the number of women now being trafficked into Israel for sex – hundreds, rather than thousands, a year.
But campaigners say increased police activity had an adverse effect as traffickers have been forced to become more discreet, making the practice more difficult to detect.
“We’ve been keeping tabs on trends, in terms of, for instance, prices of exploitative services,” said Yedida Wolfe, of the Task Force on Human Trafficking.
“Those prices have not gone up, which leads us to believe that the supply of victims has not gone down.
“While government officials are saying that their efforts have drastically cut the number of victims in the country, the NGOs on the scene really don’t feel that’s true.” Source
Gaza offensive: Israeli war crimes are in little doubt
By Jonathan Cook
December 27 2009
NAZARETH
The debate reverberating in the human rights community one year after Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip is not about whether Israel committed war crimes during its attack last winter, but whether and how its political and military leaders can ever be brought to book.
The problems were highlighted this month when an arrest warrant was issued in Britain after action by activists for Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister during the war, after it was mistakenly believed she was visiting.
The British government responded with anger and promised to change the law to ensure future restrictions on the use of “universal jurisdiction” powers that grant British courts the power to try suspected foreign war criminals.
Human rights experts mostly agree that Israel extensively violated the rules of war during its three-week operation, known as Cast Lead. The consensus was formed early on, as organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch carried out investigations. Their findings were backed by testimonies from Israeli soldiers.
The organisations condemned Israel for using disproportionate force, deliberately targeting civilians, blocking access to medical services, using Palestinians as human shields, and employing controversial weapons, including white phosphorus and high-explosive shells, in civilian areas. Hamas, which rules Gaza, was also accused of war crimes, mostly for firing rockets into Israel.
The final blow to Israeli claims that no war crimes were committed was the appointment of a distinguished judge, Richard Goldstone, to head a United Nations fact-finding mission.
According to a current prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, who wished not to be named, the significance of the Goldstone report, published in September, lies in its conclusion that Israel’s leaders “planned and predetermined the grave violations [of international law] and human rights abuses” long before the attack on Gaza.
Mr Goldstone pointed to a spate of reports in the Israeli media that the army and cabinet held detailed discussions six months before the operation about the objectives to be realised and the strategy to be used.
In particular, The Hague prosecutor added, Mr Goldstone had highlighted the Israeli army’s premeditated implementation of the “Dahiya doctrine”, developed three years earlier during its war in Lebanon. This strategy justified laying waste to large swathes of Gaza infrastructure, supposedly because it offered support to Hamas, despite inevitable civilian casualties.
Almost 1,400 Gazans were killed during the operation, the vast majority of them non-combatants, including more than 400 women and children. In addition, more than 20,000 homes, as well as schools, mosques, food stores, factories and businesses, were damaged or destroyed in the Gaza Strip.
The Goldstone report said it was “particularly worrying” that Israel “viewed disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of many people [in Gaza] as a legitimate means to achieve not only military but also political goals”.
Israel’s justification for the assault – that it was in self-defence against Hamas rockets – has been rejected by many human rights experts.
A letter published last January in Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper by 30 leading international jurists called the attack a “war of aggression” – the “supreme international crime”, according to the principles laid down in 1950 by the Nuremberg tribunal into Nazi crimes.
Victor Kattan, an international law expert at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, said Operation Cast Lead could be defined as self-defence only if it had been sanctioned either by the UN Security Council or by Article 51 of the UN Charter. Neither applied. The attack also failed the tests of proportionality and necessity, he said.
There are still major questions among human rights experts about whether Israelis can be brought to trial. The most probable avenues are through an ad hoc tribunal of the International Criminal Court (ICC), or trials in one of a number of mainly European countries such as Britain, where local courts have universal jurisdiction.
However, Mr Kattan said both the ICC and most countries with universal jurisdiction would be reluctant to pursue a trial against an ally of the United States, or allow a precedent that might later be used against them. He said one opening for war crimes trials might be of Israelis with dual nationality, where they are also citizens of a state that had ratified the 1998 Rome Treaty, which established the international court. “They could be prosecuted by the ratifying state, and if that state failed to prosecute, then the ICC could take up the case.”
In September, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, told Newsweek, a US magazine, that he was considering investigating an Israeli lawyer, David Benjamin, who is also a South African citizen, after he gave an interview to the Bloomberg news agency admitting that his unit, the military advocate corps, had authorised “the targets that could be struck, war material – everything passed by us”. In particular, observers believe Mr Benajmin, a reserve soldier, may be liable to prosecution over his unit’s approval of the use of white phosphorus.
Israel’s political and defence establishments appear worried. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, has led a campaign of vilification of Mr Goldstone and refused to approve a public investigation into the army’s actions in Gaza, as Mr Goldstone has demanded.
Israel has set up a task force to deal with possible defences in war crimes trials, barred the local media from identifying senior officers, and approved aid packages for soldiers to fight arrest warrants.
The Israeli government has also sought to block funding, particularly from the European Union, for Israeli human rights groups that have been trying to bring war crimes to light.
According to Israeli law, if a Turk does wrong to a Jew in Turkey, he may be snatched, arrested, tried and punished in Israel. Turkey should introduce a symmetrical law, covering offences against Palestinians who otherwise are not protected by law.
Seems to me this should apply to those in Israel who commit crimes against others, especially war crimes , assassinations and terrorist activities such as car bombings or other bombings. They too should be snatched, arrested, tried and punished in another country. Their terrorist activities over the years do add up.
About NGO Monitor and organization that says it monitors Human rights groups like Amnesty International or Organizations like Breaking The Silence.
Their Office is located
1 Ben-Maimon Blvd
Jerusalem 92262
Israel
They represent no one, but Israel. Seems from what I read they have a lot of propaganda on the site.
This is their Mission statement. http://www.ngo-monitor.org/articles.php?type=about
Then we have this statement which is rather amusing considering Israeli lobby groups through out the world and how they do everything imaginable to influence Governments in favour of Israel. Seems they have a problem with Human Rights or other organizations that criticize Israel. http://www.ngo-monitor.org/digest_info.php?id=2748
NGO Index A to Z These are the groups they monitor
This organization reminds me of Honest Reporting which hounds the press. Or Camera. They all have one goal in mind to stop all criticism of Israel. They serve no other real purpose. It is just another Israeli Lobby group.
Lets face it Israel is guilty of war crimes.
They have broken numerous UN Resolutions and Ruling from the World Court.
They continually pretend to be the victim, but in fact are anything but the victim.
Israeli soldiers admit to deliberate killing of Gaza civilians
From March 20, 2009
The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.
The revelations, compiled by the head of an Israel military academy who declared that he was “shocked” at the findings, come as international rights groups are calling for independent inquiries into the conduct of both sides in the three-week Israeli offensive against Palestinian Islamists.
The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.
“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.
I gathered the graduate students of the course who fought in Gaza, to hear their impressions from the fighting. I wasn’t prepared for any of the stuff I heard there. I was shocked,” Mr Zamir said. “I think that the writing was on the wall, but we just didn’t want to see it, we didn’t want to face it.”
One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir, himself a deputy battalion commander in the reserves, that the army “fired a lot of rounds and killed a lot of people in order for us not to be injured or shot at.
“When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder. Each storey, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is this reasonable?”
The same unnamed NCO said that his commanding officer ordered soldiers on to a rooftop to shoot an old woman crossing a main street during the fighting, which a Palestinian rights groups said left 1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians.
“I don’t know whether she was suspicious, not suspicious, I don’t know her story,” the NCO said. “I do know that my officer sent people to the roof in order to take her out… It was cold-blooded murder.”
Another NCO recounted a military blunder that led to a mother and her two children being shot dead by an Israeli sniper. “We had taken over the house… and the family was released and told to go right. A mother and two children got confused and went left… The sniper on the roof wasn’t told that this was okay and that he shouldn’t shoot… you can say he just did what he was told… he was told not to let anyone approach the left flank and he shot at them.
“I don’t know whether he first shot at their feet or not, but he killed them,” the soldier said.
The soldiers’ accounts were submitted anonymously at a meeting at the academy around a month ago. The Israel army said that it had started an investigation, but that this was the first time it had heard such testimony, despite having debriefed troops itself.
Breaking The Silence, an organisation of former soldiers who gather witness accounts from troops in the Palestinian territories, said that its own investigation into Operation Cast Lead, as the war was known in Israel, had revealed a similar picture of the fighting.
“It’s definitely in line with what we are hearing,” said one of the researchers.
Another disturbing element reported by the soldiers was the role of military rabbis in distributing booklets that framed the fighting as a religious war. “All these articles had a clear message: we are the Jewish people, we have come to the land by miraculous means, and now we have to fight to remove the Gentiles who are getting in our way and preventing us from occupying the Holy Land… a great many soldiers had a feeling throughout this operation of a religious war,” said one soldier.
There were also accounts of soldiers being ordered to throw all the furniture out of Palestinians’ homes as they were taken over.
“We simply threw everything out the windows to make room and order. The entire contents of the house flew out the windows: refrigerator, plates, furniture. The order was to remove the entire contents of the house.”
This is not New behavior for Israel. Seems crime is their motto.
The Occupied West Bank Latroun Villages
The Occupied West Bank Latroun Villages
By Stephen Lendman
On June 6, 1967, when Israeli forces invaded Gaza and the West Bank, on the second day of the so-called Six-Day War (June 5 – 10, 1967), they entered three Palestinian villages in the Latroun salient – Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba, forcibly expelling the residents, numbering over 10,000 at the time. By the next day, most were gone while Israel began razing village lands and erasing their memory in an area well-known for its water resources and fertility, located northwest of Jerusalem along the Green Line. One soldier at the time explained that they:
“were told to take up positions around the approaches to the villages in order to prevent those villagers – who had heard the Israeli assurances over the radio that they could return to their homes in peace – from returning to their homes. The order was – shoot over their heads and tell them there is no access to the village,” even though Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 states:
“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.” Doing so is a “grave breach,” and those responsible are criminally liable.
Forty-two years later, their former homes gone and land expropriated, the survivors remain displaced, unable to return in violation of international law and Article 11 of UN Resolution 194:
“Resolv(ing) that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.”
Israel never complied even though its admission to the UN was conditional on accepting this and other relevant UN resolutions.
Established in 1979, Al-Haq is a Ramallah, West Bank-based independent Palestinian human rights NGO dedicated to protecting and promoting these rights and the rule of law in Occupied Palestine. In December 2007, it published a report still relevant titled, “Where Villages Stood: Israel’s Continuing Violations of International Law in Occupied Latroun, 1967 – 2007,” and dedicated it “To the people of Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba, and to all Palestinians who remain displaced from their homes, their villages, their land.”
Focusing on the Latroun villages, it highlights the plight of all Palestinians – denied their rights by forced displacements, prevented from returning, and in the Occupied Territories still living under an oppressive 42-year military occupation. Al Haq’s purpose was to document an international crime, disclose the policy behind it, provide victims the evidence they need to seek justice, and the world community ample reason to demand it. After 42 repressive years, Israel’s occupation “has acquired some of the (worst) characteristics of colonialism and apartheid” with no redress in sight to end it.
Following the Six-Day War, Israel expropriated 400 square km from displaced persons and refugees, and threatened Palestinians along the Green Line with more, especially in the three Latroun villages, targeted for annexation prior to the occupation by establishing irreversible “facts on the ground” when completed.
Al-Haq’s study uncovered official Israeli political and military documents and compiled firsthand accounts from interviews with former soldiers who participated in the operation and were willing to discuss it freely. Thankfully so because their truths must be told.
The Story of the Latroun Villages: Their Destruction and Displacement
In Israel’s 1948 “War of Independence,” the Old City of Jerusalem (in East Jerusalem) and Latroun salient were key targets fought hard for, lost, and thereafter “engrained in the collective psyche of the Israeli military.” As a result, Latroun remained a West Bank enclave along the Green Line, separated from Israel by a “No Man’s Land” buffer zone.
The Six-Day War achieved the earlier loss, erased a “bitter memory” according to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, and provided an opportunity for more land and its valuable resources by expelling Palestinian residents and denying their right to return.
From the start, no resistance was met because the Jordanian military withdrew the night before, knowing it would be outnumbered so prioritized its defense of Jerusalem. As a result, Palestinian residents began fleeing as soon as Israeli tanks approached, and those remaining were forcibly expelled, in many cases with no time to take essentials, including food and water for a 20 km walk to Ramallah (in intense heat), their only way to get there not knowing their fate, yet believing at the time they’d be allowed to return.
Unknown to them then:
expulsion meant permanent displacement;
Latroun was to be part of Israel and all traces of their former land destroyed, except in their collective memories;
village destruction was a punitive land grab accomplished by bulldozing and blasting with explosives, not the result of war; reportedly, some residents who remained were buried under their homes, a willful act of murder;
destruction was complete, including homes, schools, mosques, archaeological landmarks, a medical clinic, wells, an agricultural association, and a police station – everything leveled to Judaize it.
One participating soldier said it was “the blackest hour of my life. Things were done here which should not have been done, and I participated in an action that I shouldn’t have been part of.” Others felt the same way as they witnessed innocent civilians, including the sick and elderly, persecuted and displaced. Those too frail to leave were buried alive, an act too horrifying for some to bear.
Dr. Moussa Abu Ghosh remembered his cousin, Hasan Shukri, buried beneath his home:
He “was nineteen, an invalid, paralyzed from polio. They found his wheelchair outside and found his body underneath the house.” Others recalled similar incidents, but how many is unknown, perhaps dozens of civilians willfully murdered, guilty of being Arabs on land Israel wanted and took.
After the war, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol told Israeli ministers:
“For the first time since the establishment of the state, the security threat to Israel from the West Bank has been removed, and here I am reminded particularly of Latroun, which for us was a worry, as (in 1948) the territory in that area cost us much blood even though in the end it remained on the other side.”
No security threat existed, but Israel got its revenge and the territory it sought. The major Western media was silent, much like today, so most people accept the mythology of a beleaguered Israel surrounded by hostile Arabs, acting heroically in self-defense.
Israel’s Use of the Latroun Land
After the Six-Day War, Israeli Defence Forces and Defence Ministry Archive (IDFA) Military Organising Orders, June 1967 IDFA 901/2/281, section 4 stipulated that the GOC Central Command would be in charge of the area west of the Green Line, including Latroun, to secure it permanently for Israel. Judaizing followed in violation of international law, amounting to what former UN Special Human Rights Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, John Dugard, called:
a “form of colonialism of the kind declared to be a denial of fundamental human rights and contrary to the Charter of the United Nations as recalled in the General Assembly’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples.”
It “solemnly proclaims the necessity of bringing to a speedy and unconditional end (of) colonialism in all its forms and manifestations” because it’s fundamentally contrary to international law and the very notion of human rights.
Not for Israel, however, acting outside the law thereafter to colonize the Territories (focusing on the West Bank) and incorporate them into greater Israel, with borders yet to be determined because land seizures keep expanding them for new settlements and enlarging established ones.
In 1970, Mevo Horon was built on Beit Nouba land, initially for ideologically religious settlers in prefabricated buildings, now greatly expanded in more permanent form. “The settlement contains a Jewish religious school and it exploits the surrounding land, to which Palestinian access is banned, for agricultural purposes.” The entire settlement, of course, is built on Palestinian land, stolen to provide new homes for Jews.
Canada Park
In 1973, Bernard Bloomfield, president of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) of Canada, led a campaign to raise $15 million for a recreational park for Israelis. His vision was realized where Imwas and Yalo once stood:
“a proud tribute to Canada,” in his words, “and to the Canadian Jewish community whose vision and foresight helped transform a barren stretch of land into a major national recreational area for the people of Israel.”
Unmentioned was that it was on stolen, occupied land, the village names now erased, forgotten, and forbidden to be mentioned until the JNF and Civil Administration agreed under pressure, in March 2006, to erect two signs acknowledging its former existence. It was short-lived, however, as within weeks the signs were vandalized, uprooted and stolen to preserve the new name – Ayalon Park or Ayalon/Canada Park under the administration of the Canada JNF.
It’s a recreational area solely for Jews on former Palestinian land, where its former owners can’t enter. Canada’s JNF calls it “Israel’s Central Park.” Knowing their history, Palestinians are justifiably outraged.
The Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Railway
Israel Railways Ltd. is the independent state-owned company running the nation’s rail network, and since March 2003 began building a high-speed line connecting Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, via Modi’in. By early 2008, trains were to be operating between Tel Aviv and Modi’in Central Station, but the entire line to Jerusalem won’t be in service until 2016, according to current estimates.
The final portion from Modi’in to Jerusalem will go through Latroun between Canada Park, Mevo Horon, and Beit Sourik. As a result in May 2006, the Civil Administration issued military orders to seize Palestinian land, the way the Separation Wall is expropriating about 12% of the West Bank. The rail line is taking more.
Denying Latroun Residents Their Right to Return
Before the Six-Day War, Israel planned to expel Latroun residents and prevent their return, although at the time there was debate on how and whether to do it. On June 25, 1967, disagreement arose between the military and government ministers over whether destruction and displacement was justified and about how to deal with refugees post-conflict, mainly from Qalqiliya and Latroun. At issue was Israel’s image, a matter of less concern to the military that wanted full control over a strategic area, the position that finally prevailed.
In the end, a compromise let Qalqiliya residents return but not Latroun ones on the premise that showing some concern would be diplomatically beneficial. Former Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba residents in Jordan were forced to stay while a grossly inadequate resettlement proposal was offered others in the West Bank, one they never accepted.
Thereafter on October 23, 1967, Military Order No. 146 barred them from returning and declared Latroun a “closed area,” effectively confiscating their land and declaring that “persons using the road will not delay their travel nor will they leave the road” in order to prevent their return to Latroun. The order is still in force.
Nonetheless, village residents kept petitioning for their rights, each time without response, most recently in November 2007, but as time passes, the more embedded facts on the ground become.
Legal Analysis
Fourth Geneva Convention’s relevance affected Article 35 of Israel’s Military Proclamation No. 3 stating that its military courts “must apply (its) provisions….In case of conflict between this Order and the said Convention, the Convention shall prevail.” So why hasn’t it?
Because the ruling was subsequently reversed despite the international community’s firmness that it applies universally and Israel has no right to disregard it. In its 2004 ruling on the Separation Wall, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed this interpretation, and so did the 1907 Hague Regulations.
In addition, international humanitarian and human rights laws apply, according to the UN General Assembly, ICRC, and independent judicial bodies. “Israel’s claim that customary and conventional human rights laws do not apply to the OPT as the Palestinian population is not within its sovereign territory has been almost universally refuted.”
Forcible Transfer
Under Fourth Geneva’s Article 4, Latroun villagers were protected persons prohibited from being forcibly displaced, yet they were and prevented from returning.
This principle goes back to the 1863 Lieber Code that says “private citizens are no longer (to be) carried off to distant parts,” and the Hague Regulations state that “the practice of deporting persons was regarded at the beginning of (the 20th) century as having fallen into abeyance,” stopping just short of prohibition but inferring that interning or expelling civilians falls below minimal civilized standards and are hence unacceptable and effectively illegal.
Israel is bound under international law but disregards it nonetheless. Yet two weeks after the Six-Day War ended, serious cabinet debate considered compliance because keeping legitimate residents displaced served no military or security purpose. Nonetheless, Latroun ones lost everything, so for them the consequences were grim. Families were separated and unprotected, and accounts reported road side deaths from exhaustion and exposure.
The ICRC’s Appeals Chamber (ICTY) emphasized the link between prohibiting deportation, forced transfer, and residents’ right to their property stating:
The “protection interests underlying the prohibition against deportation include the right of the victim to stay in his or her home and community and the right not to be deprived of his or her property by being forcibly displaced to another location.” Latroun villagers lost everything. For some, including their lives.
Property Destruction and Appropriation
Article 23(g) of the 1907 Hague Regulations affirms a well-established international law principle that it’s “especially forbidden (to) destroy or seize the enemy’s property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war.” This applies to property owned privately, publicly, and by institutions related to religions, charities, education, and the arts and science.
According to Article 6(b) of the Nuremberg Charter:
War crimes include “violations of the laws or customs of war (including) plunder of private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”
Under Fourth Geneva’s Article 53:
“Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.”
These provisions apply to occupied territory, and thus relate to Israel’s wanton looting and destruction of Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba. No military necessity warranted it. After fighting ended and Israeli forces occupied the area, it was done solely to displace the residents and seize their land for Jews only use.
“That the villages were destroyed in the context of occupying forces exercising effective control over the area as opposed to in the course of battle between two armies is significant in rendering Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention applicable to all property destroyed in Latroun.”
Military Necessity
The 1868 Petersburg Declaration first recognized the principle, stating that:
“the only legitimate object which States should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces of the enemy.”
Thereafter, the concept was interpreted to mean acts of war must be warranted by “absolute military necessity.” An authoritative ICRC study also prohibits property destruction “unless required by imperative military necessity.”
The post-WWII Hostages Trial of Wilhelm List and Others (United States Military Tribunal, Nuremberg) established that the:
“destruction of property to be lawful must be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war…. Destruction as an end in itself is a violation of international law. There must be some reasonable connection between the destruction of property and the overcoming of the enemy forces.”
This was “patently not the case in Imwas, Yalo or Beit Nouba.” The IDF brazenly violated established international law. Fighting had ceased. There was no resistance. Those displaced were non-combatants, and the property destroyed served no military objective.
Collective Punishment
According to IDF chief of staff, Uzi Narkiss (1925 – 1997), destroying the Latroun villages was done for “revenge” after failure to capture the area in 1948. For Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (1915 – 1981), it was done “not as a result of battle, but of punitive action.” It led Israeli writer Amos Kenan (1927 – 2009) to question “this idiotic approach (of) collective punishment,” forbidden under Fourth Geneva’s Article 33 stating:
“No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.”
Destroying Latroun continued what began during Israel’s War of Independence that expelled about 800,000 Palestinians, slaughtered many others, and destroyed 531 villages, crops and agricultural land, and 11 urban neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and elsewhere.
After expelling 650 Palestinians on June 11, 1967, Israeli forces destroyed the entire Mughrabi Quarter of East Jerusalem’s Old City, and thereafter continued a state policy of displacement and demolition:
for punitive reasons;
to build and expand settlements;
establish military zones; and to
create public areas solely for Jews and tourism.
According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, an estimated 24,145 homes have been demolished in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza from 1967 – July 2009 – 4,247, according to the UN, during Operation Cast Lead alone.
Settlement Construction
All Israeli settlements are illegal under Article 49(6) unequivocally stating:
“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
However, according to Israeli authorities, this provision only prohibits “forcible” transferring of the occupying power’s population from its territory unrelated to “voluntary or induced migration.” Not so, however, as is clear and unequivocal. Again, Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 states:
“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”
In addition, the International Criminal Court (ICJ) affirmed that Article 49:
“prohibits not only deportations or forced transfers of population….but also any measures taken by an occupying Power in order to organize or encourage transfers of parts of its own population into the occupied territory.” As a result, “the Israeli settlements in the OPT (including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international law.”
They represent a calculated scheme to displace Palestinians and expropriate as much of their land as possible. From 1967 – 2007, Israel established 121 settlements, 106 outposts, and a dozen (de facto settlement) neighborhoods, now home to about 500,000 Jews. As of summer 2009, construction continues. No settlement freeze exists, and official state policy is to keep expanding them, seize all of East Jerusalem, and all valued West Bank land, expelling Palestinians in the process.
Grave Breaches and Individual Criminal Responsibility
The Nuremberg Tribunal established the principle of individual responsibility for committing international crimes directly or by “order(ing), solicit(ing) or induc(ing) the commission of such a crime (as well as) aid(ing), abet(ting) or otherwise assist(ing) in its commission.”
These are “grave breaches” under Fourth Geneva’s Article 147 and are considered among the most serious war crimes requiring “effective penal sanctions” against persons committing them or ordering them to be committed. As such, all High Contracting Parties are obligated to seek justice by arresting and bringing those responsible before a domestic or foreign court. In other words, for crimes this heinous and others as severe, the well-established universal jurisdiction principle applies.
For Imwas, Yalo and Beit Nouba, at issue are protected persons and property rights under Fourth Geneva and other long-standing international law provisions. As explained above, they’re unambiguous so parties in violation must be fully held accountable.
However, in prosecuting war crimes, it’s often challenging to establish a clear link between senior commanders and civilian authorities on the one hand and acts committed by their subordinates. Yet the highest authorities can be held responsible if they knew, should have known, and/or failed to take all necessary measures to assure no laws of war were broken.
“In the case of the Latroun villages, evidence of the direct responsibility and complicity of figures (at) the (highest levels of the) political and military leadership presents itself,” including the prime minister, members of his cabinet, IDF chief of staff, and his top commanders. They ordered and agreed to actions on the ground by a 10 – 3 cabinet vote.
In addition, “the forcible expulsion and continuing displacement of the Latroun residents was not a once-off occurrence, never to be repeated elsewhere in the OPT.” The policy continues unabated and is ongoing through home demolitions, land seizures, settlement expansions, daily harassment, house searches, arrests, killings, torture, cutting off water and power, restricting free movement, curtailing economic activity, denying farmers access to their land, and more in grave violation of international law.
The Right of Return
Besides being established under numerous UN Resolutions, including UN Resolution 194, Fourth Geneva’s Article 49 requires that persons forcibly displaced “shall be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.”
In addition, Principle 28 of the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement says it’s the:
“primary duty and responsibility (of combatants and/or occupiers) to establish conditions, as well as provide the means, which allow internally displaced persons to return voluntarily, in safety and with dignity, to their homes or places of habitual residence.”
Latroun villagers “hold an inalienable right to return to the OPT under instruments of international human right law….This right is held not only by those who fled to Jordan in 1967, but also their descendants, once they have maintained genuine links with the territory of origin.” In addition, those unable to return or whose homes have been destroyed, are legally entitled to compensation for their loss and suffering.
Corporate Responsibility
Businesses benefit prominently from the spoils of war and occupation, yet their responsibility has “yet to be clearly defined or regulated by international law.” However, “precedents….have arisen….primarily in the context of reparations for victims of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law.”
The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor’s finding is pertinent to Latroun and other occupied territories. It held that:
“Indonesian business companies, including State Owned Enterprises, and other international and multinational corporations and businesses (that) benefited from the occupation” must contribute to reparations to compensate East Timorese occupation victims.
According to the ICRC, international humanitarian law obligates states, soldiers, other armed groups, and corporations, whose activities were involved in a war or military occupation. In other words, war profiteering has a price, but who’ll enforce payment.
Conclusion
After 42 years of military occupation, Israeli policy remains defined by its:
lawlessness and belligerency;
ruthless incivility and suppression of human and civil rights;
“voracious desire” (for) permanent control over as much of the West Bank as possible, including East Jerusalem,”
refusal to seek an equitable durable peace; and
determination to fragment the population into powerless, servile, isolated cantons under an oppressive Kafkaesque “matrix of control.”
No easy solutions exist. None are proposed, nor will there be any from the top down. With their growing grassroots support, it’s for committed Palestinians to achieve their long-denied equity, justice and self-determination. That’s how change always comes.
Right of return for Palestinians denied but NUMBER OF JEWISH IMMIGRANTS (with no valid claim) UP BY 17% Immigration numbers rise
December 28, 2009
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The number of immigrants to Israel this year rose 17 percent over last year, posting the first increase in 10 years.
Some 16,244 people immigrated to Israel in 2009, compared to 13,859 last year, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel. The announcement was made Sunday by Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky and Immigration and Absorption Minister Sofa Landver.
Some 5,294 people immigrated from English-speaking countries in 2009, an increase of 17 percent over the 4,511 who immigrated the previous year.
The immigration figures do not include Ethiopian aliyah.
Thousands of Gentile victims to the barbarity of Jewish Communists were unearthed at the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, yet not a word about this genocide is ever breathed by the Jewish-controlled mainstream media in the US. Only Jews can be seen as victims — and never, ever as the perpetrator:
We spoke a few weeks ago about the mass murder of the leadership stratum of the Polish nation by the Soviet secret police in the Katyn Forest in April 1940. We discussed that genocidal atrocity in the light of the ongoing Jewish campaign to portray Jews as the principal victims of the Second World War and to collect reparations from the rest of the world today. A good deal of interest in that broadcast was expressed by listeners, many of whom had not been acquainted previously with the facts of the Katyn atrocity. Today I will explore this general subject further. I will tell you about the fate of the Ukrainian nation at the hands of the Soviet secret police.
In 1943 Germany was at war against the Soviet Union. Twenty-five years earlier, at the end of the First World War, when communist revolutionaries were attempting to take over Germany, Adolf Hitler had sworn to devote his life to fighting communism. He was only a corporal at the time, recuperating from his war wounds in a military hospital, but 15 years later, in 1933, he became chancellor of Germany, and in 1941 his army invaded the Soviet Union with the aim of destroying Soviet communism. The German Army pushed far into the Soviet empire and liberated all of Ukraine from the communists.
In May 1943 units of the German Army were stationed in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, a community of 100,000 persons in a primarily agricultural district. Ukrainian officials in Vinnitsa told the Germans that five years earlier the NKVD — the Soviet secret police, very similar to our FBI — had buried the bodies of a number of executed political prisoners in a city park. The Germans investigated, and within a month they had dug up 9,439 corpses from a number of mass graves in the park and a nearby orchard.
Unlike the Poles murdered in the Katyn Forest, all of these bodies found at Vinnitsa were those of civilians, most of them Ukrainian farmers or workers. The bodies of the men all had their hands tied behind their backs, like the Polish officers at Katyn. Although the men’s bodies were clothed, the bodies of a number of young women were naked. All of the victims had been shot in the back of the neck with a .22 caliber pistol, the trademark of the NKVD executioners.
The Germans called in an international team of forensic pathologists to examine the bodies and the mass graves. The international team, which included pathologists from Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as from several countries allied with Germany, examined 95 mass graves and conducted a number of autopsies.
Including the autopsies already performed by Ukrainian medical personnel in Vinnitsa, 1,670 of the corpses were examined in detail. The identities of 679 of them were established either through documents found in their clothes or through recognition by relatives, who flocked to Vinnitsa from the surrounding countryside when they heard that the graves had been uncovered.
The authorities estimated that in addition to the 9,439 bodies exhumed, there were another 3,000 still in unopened mass graves in the same area. The international team concluded that all of the victims had been killed about five years earlier — that is, in 1938. Relatives of the victims who were identified all testified that the victims had been arrested by the NKVD in 1937 and 1938. The relatives had been told that those arrested were “enemies of the people” and would be sent to Siberia for 10 years. None of the relatives had any idea what the reason was for the arrests and testified that those arrested had committed no crimes and were engaged in no political activity. As I said earlier, nearly all of the victims were farmers or workers, although there were a few priests and civil servants among them.
By interviewing a large number of people who had some knowledge of what had happened in Vinnitsa and the surrounding region in 1938, the Germans were able to piece together the following picture. In 1937 and 1938 gangs of the NKVD’s jackbooted thugs roamed the villages and towns of Ukraine, arresting people in a pattern that seemed almost random to observers. One victim’s wife reported that as the NKVD goons dragged her husband away they said only, “Hey, you dog! You’ve lived too long.” Other observers thought they saw a pattern. A Ukrainian who was renting a part of his house to a Jewish lawyer refused to sell the whole house to the Jew when he offered to buy it at an unreasonably low price. A few weeks later the Ukrainian homeowner was arrested by the NKVD. Another Ukrainian who had threatened to beat up a minor communist functionary who made a crude pass at his sister was arrested shortly thereafter. It seemed that many of the arrests were the settling of personal scores and that anyone who had crossed a Jew was especially likely to be arrested.
All of this was nothing new for Ukrainians. They had borne the brunt of the communization the Soviet Union for nearly two decades. Ukraine was primarily an agricultural nation, a nation of farmers and villagers, and as such was regarded with suspicion by the Jews and the urban rabble who filled the ranks of the Communist Party. The communists championed the urban workers, but they wasted no love on farmers and villagers, who tended to be too independent and self-sufficient for communist tastes.
During the civil war which followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Ukrainians wanted to opt out. Ukrainian nationalists wanted no part of the Soviet Union. In 1921 and 1922 the Red Army occupied Vinnitsa, and Ukrainians were butchered wholesale by the Reds in order to kill the Ukrainian nationalist spirit. The craving for Ukrainian independence nevertheless kept flaring up, and further massacres followed, notably in 1928.
Ukraine was the stronghold of the kulaks, the independent farmers and small landowners, always regarded with special hatred by the communist bosses. Stalin gave the job of exterminating the kulaks to his right-hand man in the Kremlin, Lazar Moiseivich Kaganovich, known later as the “Butcher of Ukraine.” Kaganovich, the most powerful Jew in the Soviet Union, supervised the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, beginning in 1929. To break the spirit of the kulaks, the Ukraine was subjected to an artificial famine. The NKVD and Red Army troops went from farm to farm, confiscating crops and livestock. The farmers were told that the food was needed for the workers in the cities. None was left for the farmers. And in 1933 and 1934 seven million Ukrainians died of starvation, while Kaganovich watched and gloated from the Kremlin.
Perhaps in 1937 and 1938 the bosses in the Kremlin simply thought that it was time to apply the lash to the Ukrainians again. In any event, the NKVD was given the task this time. The NKVD was even more Jewish than the rest of the Soviet communist apparatus.
The commissar of the NKVD until September 1936 had been the Jew Genrikh Yagoda, and he had staffed his instrument of terror and repression with Jews at every level. And those who were not Jews were the worst sort of Russian and Ukrainian rabble, the resentful louts and ne’er-do-wells who saw in communism a way to get even with their betters. In any event, the Ukrainians were fully aware of the preponderance of Jews in the secret police, and they suspected that there was a Jewish angle to the pattern of arrests in 1937 and 1938. And indeed, it did seem as if the Talmudic injunction to “kill the best of the Gentiles” were being followed, for those who were arrested seemed to be the most solid, the steadiest, the most reliable and irreproachable of the Ukrainians.
Thirty thousand were arrested in the Vinnitsa region alone, and most of these eventually were sent to the NKVD prison in the city of Vinnitsa. This prison had a normal capacity of 2,000 prisoners, but during 1937 and 1938 it was packed most of the time with more than 18,000 prisoners. Throughout much of 1938 a few dozen prisoners were taken from the prison each night and driven to a nearby NKVD motor pool area. There their hands were tied behind their backs and they were led, one at a time, a few hundred feet to a concrete slab in front of a garage. The slab was used for washing vehicles, and it had a drain at one side with an iron grating over it. Just as the prisoners reached the edge of the slab they were shot in the back of the neck, so that when they fell onto the concrete their blood would run into the drain. This was what the NKVD men jokingly called “mokrii rabota” — “wet work” — and they had had plenty of experience at “wet work.” A truck parked next to the slab kept its engine racing so that the noise of the engine would cover the sound of the shots. While the next prisoner was being led up, a couple of NKVD men would throw the corpse of the previous prisoner into the truck. When the night’s quota of victims had been murdered the truck would drive off with its load of corpses to the fenced-in park or to the nearby orchard, where new graves already were waiting. And this “wet work” went on night after night, month after month.
So why is this gruesome story important to us now? After all, this massacre of Ukrainians in Vinnitsa took place 60 years ago. I’ll tell you why it’s still important to us, aside from the fact that these Ukrainians were our people, our kinfolk, part of our race.
First, you might ask yourself why you have never before heard about Vinnitsa, and I’m sure that’s the case for about 99 per cent of our listeners. Of course, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about what happened at Vinnitsa, in the third volume of his Gulag Archipelago, but you’re not likely to find that in the rack at the checkout counter. And Ukrainians and Germans have written about it, although for the most part their writings have never been published in English, because publishers in this country understand that it would be Politically Incorrect to publish anything about Vinnitsa. Much better that people just forget about it.
Isn’t that odd, though, when we continually hear so much about Auschwitz? Isn’t it odd that when Jewish groups are using their political influence to have laws passed in a number of states requiring high school students to take courses about the so-called “Holocaust,” what happened at Katyn or at Vinnitsa is never mentioned in high school? The excuse given for requiring students to study the so-called “Holocaust” is that it was the greatest crime in history, and we should know about it so that we won’t repeat it. But then why shouldn’t we learn about Katyn and Vinnitsa and Dresden and a thousand other atrocities where our people were the victims, and so the lesson should be even more pertinent for us?
You know, I’m not trying to be cute about this. We all know the answers to these questions, but I just want you to think about their significance. To them, Auschwitz is important because Jews died there, and Vinnitsa is not important, because only Gentiles were killed there. The Jewish media bosses keep rubbing our noses in Auschwitz, because they want us to feel guilty, they want us to feel that we owe the Jews something for letting it happen. The Jewish media bosses never mention Vinnitsa because Jews were the guilty ones there. Besides, they make a lot of money by promoting the “Holocaust.” It’s certainly not going to help their profits to divide the attention and the sympathy of the American public between Auschwitz and Vinnitsa. And it’s certainly not going to help their effort to extort billions of dollars in “Holocaust” reparations from the Swiss and from everyone else to admit their own guilt at Katyn and Vinnitsa.
Think about it! If Poles controlled the news and entertainment media in America, we’d hear a great deal more about Katyn, I suspect. If Germans controlled our media we’d hear much more about the terror bombing of Dresden. And if Ukrainians controlled our media, every high school student would know about Vinnitsa. But it’s the Jews who control our media, and so all we hear about is Auschwitz: never even a whisper about Vinnitsa. That’s important. We ought to be concerned about that. We ought to be concerned whenever any part of our history is suppressed, is hidden from us. We ought to find out why. It might help us to make sure that what happened to us at Vinnitsa never happens to us again.
I’m sure that you’ve all heard the maxim that the best defense is a strong offense. Do you remember the persecution all through the 1980s of John Demjanjuk, the retired Cleveland auto worker whom the Jews accused of being “Ivan the Terrible”? John Demjanjuk* is a Ukrainian who came to America after the Second World War. In 1978 the Jews made a big hullabaloo about Demjanjuk being a guard in a German prison camp during the war, and the U.S. government obediently hauled him to court and stripped him of his citizenship. Then he was handed over to the Jews for crucifixion and deported to Israel. The mass media in America were full of sensational stories for 15 years about Ivan the Terrible and how the Ukrainians had helped the Germans persecute the poor, innocent Jews. Unfortunately, this strategy worked for the Jews. The Ukrainians kept their heads down instead of raising the issue of Vinnitsa. Of course, even if they had begun trying to tell Americans about Vinnitsa or about what Kaganovich had done to the Ukrainian kulaks, who would have heard them? Ukrainians don’t own the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, or U.S. News & World Report. The Jews own all of those media. And the Ukrainians don’t own Hollywood, so they can’t make movie dramas about Vinnitsa either, like Steven Spielberg does about the so-called “Holocaust.”
The crux of this matter is that the Jews have been getting away with presenting a grossly distorted version of history to us, a version in which they are the completely innocent victims, and our people, the Ukrainians and Poles and Germans are the bad guys who have been persecuting the poor Jews for no reason at all. They’ve been pumping out this propaganda in concert, consciously and deliberately, without a single major medium under their control deviating from their party line. And people try to tell me that, well, the Jews may control the media, but they don’t conspire with each other. Baloney!
And because they’ve been getting away with giving us a falsified version of history, they’ve been able to change America’s foreign and domestic policies in directions to suit themselves, to our enormous disadvantage. Everything which has happened in the Middle East, for example, since the Second World War is based on this false history.
More than that, everything that has happened in Europe since the murder of 12,000 Ukrainians at Vinnitsa in 1938 has been based on the Jews’ power to control what we learn about our history, about what is happening and has happened in the world around us. The U.S. government allied itself with the Soviet government in 1941 for the purpose of destroying Germany. The communists were presented to the American public as the good guys, as worthy allies, and the Germans were presented as the bad guys. And the American public bought that lie because they didn’t know about Vinnitsa or about a thousand other atrocities committed against our people by the communists.
When the Germans brought in the international commission to examine the graves in Vinnitsa in 1943, the Jew-controlled media kept the news from the American people, just the way they kept the news about the Katyn Forest genocide away from the American people. And because of this, there was no real opposition to turning half of Europe over to the communists at the end of the Second World War.
If Katyn and Vinnitsa had been publicized, so that every American voter knew in detail what the NKVD had done at Katyn and at Vinnitsa, the politicians in Washington never would have been able to get away with turning the Poles and the Hungarians and the Rumanians and the Bulgarians and the Croats and the Serbs and the Czechs and the Slovaks and the Baltic peoples and all of the Germans in the eastern part of Germany over to these communist butchers. The politicians in Washington got away with this not just because they were in the pockets of the Jews, but because the American people weren’t given the truth. And because we weren’t given the truth millions more of our people died at the hands of the NKVD after the war, and all of eastern Europe was plundered by the communists for 50 years, and there was a Korean War and a Vietnam War — which there wouldn’t have been if we hadn’t kept the communist empire alive because of our own ignorance, because of the lies we’d been told about what happened in Europe. We lost more than 100,000 of our best young men in the Korean and Vietnam wars alone.
So you see, it is important what the public is told. It is important that our people know the truth about our history, even about things which happened 60 years ago. And I intend to do everything I can to give them the truth.
Now I believe that you can understand why the Jews try so hard to keep me off the air, why they bring pressure against every radio station which carries American Dissident Voices. They are desperate to keep the American people in the dark about Vinnitsa and Katyn and their other crimes. And I am determined to tear down the curtain of silence and darkness and give truth and light to our people.
And there is some urgency about this, because the Jews are continuing to push for laws against what they call “hate speech” — which means any speech which contradicts their lies. They have succeeded in getting such laws passed in other countries. If I tried to make this broadcast in Canada or Britain, for example, the police would arrest me and shut down the station before I could finish. Let’s not let that happen in America.
The history no one is suppose to know. The other Holocasut we never heard about.
Under Stalin if you were Anti Semitic you were put to death.
The government of the USSR under Stalin murdered many of its own citizens and foreigners.These mass killings were carried out by the security organisations, such as the NKVD, and reached their peak in the Great Purge of 1937-38, when nearly 700,000 were executed by a shot to the base of the skull. Following the demise of the USSR in 1991, many of the killing and burial sites were uncovered. Some of the more notable mass graves include:
Bykivnia – containing an estimated 120,000 – 225,000 corpses.
Kurapaty – estimations range from 30,000 to 200,000 bodies found.
Butovo – over 20,000 confirmed killed.
Sandarmokh – over 9,000 bodies discovered
Many other killing fields have been discovered several as recently as 2002.In the areas near Kiev alone, there are mass graves in Uman’, Bila Tserkva, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr. Some were uncovered by the Germans during WWII; Katyn and Vinnitsa being the most infamous.
There is more.
The Great Famine-Genocide in Soviet Ukraine (Holodomor)
The man-made Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine may be receding into the ever more distant past, but 65 years after, its legacy remains. It’s one of those cataclysms that launched massive undercurrents with profound historical impact. Tragically, it’s also an event of cosmic magnitude that barely registered on world consciousness when it occurred and is scarcely remembered today.
Here’s what happened: In April 1929, Joseph Stalin ordered the first Five-Year Plan, in which he decreed that Soviet agriculture be collectivized by the end of 1933. For individual farmers that meant turning their land and livestock over to the state and becoming workers on giant collective farms.
Not surprisingly, there was widespread resistance, particularly in Ukraine.
The official press – in the Soviet Union there was no other kind – began denouncing reluctant landowners as “class enemies,” “rich kulaks exploiting the masses.” That set the stage for Stalin’s decree at the end of December 1929 to “liquidate the kulaks as a class.” In Ukraine, primarily a peasant society, that was just about everybody. The Russian heartland, with its age-old tradition of the “mir” or commune, had few independent farmers and therefore few “kulaks,” as Stalin defined them.
As voluntary collectivization stalled, Stalin turned up the heat with arrests, evictions and confiscations until finally in 1932 he unleashed an army of Communist Party activists who laid siege to thousands of Ukrainian villages, raiding homes, taking every grain of wheat, every scrap of food they could find.
Like many Ukrainian Americans, I’ve always seemed to have known about the Famine. I’m Catholic, but from time to time I would go to Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Cleveland, where I heard some memorable sermons delivered by the Rev. Kovalenko about what he had lived through as a boy in Poltava during the Famine. My hair would stand on end. I remember the passion and pain in the Rev. Kovalenko’s face, his sermon ending with a warning about the consequences of Godless atheism.
I no longer recall the words themselves, so instead let me quote Lev Kopelev’s anguished confession: “In the terrible spring of 1933, I saw people dying from hunger, I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant lifeless eyes. And corpses – corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of the old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkiv.
…” Kopelev was one of those, to quote his own words, who went “scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails.”
Fred Beal, an American Communist whose idealism brought him to work at the Kharkiv Tractor Plant in 1933, was a witness, not a participant. “I watched on the sidelines,” he wrote, “ashamed of being a party to the system that was murdering these innocent people … I had never dreamed that Communists could stoop so low as to round up hungry people, load them upon trucks or trains, and ship them to some wasteland in order that they might die there.
Yet it was a regular practice. I was witnessing myself how human beings were being tossed into the high trucks like sacks of wheat. Right there and then I was determined to make a complete break with the Stalin gang and return to the capitalist world.”
No one knows for sure how many people were murdered during that horrible year. As Nikita Khrushchev put it, “No one was keeping count.” Robert Conquest, the great historian of the Famine, estimates 7 million victims.
Astonishingly, the press, particularly in Britain and the United States, failed to report the story. No one was more remiss than Walter Duranty, The New York Times correspondent to the Soviet Union. In November 1932, when many people including those from the Ukrainian American community were spreading the alarm about the devastation in Ukraine, he assured his readers that “there is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.”
In August 1933, after millions had already died, he wrote that “any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”
The closest Duranty came to acknowledging Stalin’s genocidal policy was in a dispatch from March 30, 1933, when he wrote, “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” As far as Duranty was concerned that was okay because, “To put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer Prize for his series of dispatches from Russia, “especially the working out of the Five-Year Plan.”
Did Duranty know better? He sure did. In “The Harvest of Sorrow,” Dr. Conquest cites a September 30, 1933, dispatch from the British chargé d’affaires to Moscow: “Mr. Duranty thinks it quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.” Others reported a similar disconnect between what Duranty knew and what he reported.
So why did he do it? His book from 1937, “I Write As I Please,” offers a clue: “Am I wrong in believing that Stalin is the greatest living statesman?” Mass murderers can’t be statesmen, so Duranty decided there could be no Famine.
As far as I know, the Pulitzer Prize Committee has never moved to revoke Duranty’s prize and The New York Times has never publicly repudiated it or offered to return it.
The Western press is not the only institution that denied the existence of the Famine. So did the Soviet Union – obviously. For more than half a century, any mention of the Famine was punished with a long prison sentence.
Today in Ukraine, people know about the Famine, but it is largely a repressed memory. This affects the national psyche, permitting Communists to run for office without shame or remorse. Unfortunately, their influence on Ukraine’s economy is enormous, since the Communist Party constitutes the core of a parliamentary coalition that blocks legislation to dismantle the state-run farms, the Famine’s malignant legacy.
These bloated, bureaucratic structures provide the apparatchiks who run them with political patronage and allow them to divert agricultural resources to their own purposes. As a result, Ukraine gets little benefit from her greatest potential asset: agriculture.
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are ready to help Ukraine, with the United States poised to provide political backing, but reforms must be approved first, including the privatization of land.
Vice-President Al Gore delivered that message in Kyiv on July 22, and he was right to do so. There’s no point in subsidizing the collective farm system or other wasteful, inefficient Ukrainian institutions.
As for the majority of Ukrainians, they undoubtedly favor land reform, but this is a country where Communists have a 75-year head start on political organization. What the CPU lacks is the vision for a positive program; they only have the means to block change. This cannot be sustained forever.
Today, seven years after declaring independence, Ukraine’s problem is spiritual as much as it is political and economic. The country has to confront its past and come to terms with it, the Famine above all. That process has hardly begun.
For such a huge historical event, such an enormous crime as the Famine, surprisingly little scholarly and literary work has been done. Dr. Conquest, obviously, stands out. So does Jim Mace, who directed the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine, as well as Slavko Nowytski who produced the film “Harvest of Despair” and, of course, The Ukrainian Weekly. There’s a scattering of other books and materials, but little of recent vintage or mass circulation.
The New York Times could help enormously by acknowledging and fixing Walter Duranty’s mendacious work from 65 years ago. Nothing would help more, though, than having Verkhovna Rada approve the privatization of land.
I can’t think of a better monument to the victims of the Famine or a more fitting way of telling their descendants – the nation – we’re sorry.
Andrew Fedynsky is director of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, Ohio. Check out their website: http://www.umacleveland.org/
The Ukrainian Weekly, August 2, 1998, No. 31, Vol. LXVI, Roma Hadzewycz, Editor-in-chief, P. O. Box 280, Parsippany, New Jersey. Published by the Ukrainian National Association. http://www.ukrweekly.com/Archive/1998/319815.shtml
Check out the above website for their extensive collection of material on the Great Famine and subscribe to The Ukrainian Weekly. Source
All this was happening and then they became the Ally of the US, British and Canadian military in WWII.
The Invasion of Poland was a Soviet military operation that started without a formal declaration of war on 17 September 1939, during the early stages of World War II. Sixteen days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, the Soviet Union did so from the east. The invasion ended on 6 October 1939 with the division and annexing of the whole of the Second Polish Republic by Germany and the Soviet Union.
As a result of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers became prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. Many of them were executed; over 20,000 Polish military personnel and civilians perished in the Katyn massacre.
The Soviets often failed to honour the terms of surrender. In some cases, they promised Polish soldiers freedom after capitulation and then arrested them when they laid down their arms.Some Polish soldiers were murdered shortly after capture.
The USSR refused to allow Red Cross supervision of prisoners on the grounds that it had not signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on the Treatment of PoWs and did not recognise the Hague Convention. Thousands of the POW’s were Polish.
The execution of 25,700 Polish “nationalists and counter-revolutionaries” kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus became known as the Katyn massacre. which was blamed on Hilter. At the time even though it was Hitlers people who found the mass graves and brought in outsiders to do autopsy’s etc.
On 13 April 1990, the forty-seventh anniversary of the discovery of the mass graves, the USSR formally expressed “profound regret” and admitted Soviet secret police responsibility for the mass murders.
Katyn Forest Massacre A film from 1973
If they want to find more bodies they may be underr a pine tree forest.
People may think Hitler was bad but the US and the USSR were just as bad if not worse.
After the war millions in Germany were also starved. The US and the USSR used the same method to kill millions.The Morgenthau Plan was a shameful, horrific way to kill. No one was spared not even the children.
The US nor their Allies can ever hold their heads up and say they are better or more civilized then another country.
Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
Morgenthau was born into a prominent Jewish family in New York City, the son of Henry Morgenthau Sr., a real estate mogul and diplomat, and Josephine Sykes.
In office
January 1, 1934 – July 22, 1945
United States Secretary of the Treasury
WW II
1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945
Remeber the USSR murdered about 7 million in premeditated, genocidal man made, famine, of 1932-33 just previous to WW II. But that was OK with the Allies who condemned Germany.
So why didn’t any one help the 7 million Ukrainians that had been murdered and starved?
Gaza Freedom March URGENT UPDATE
December 21, 2009
We are determined to break the siege.
We all will continue to do whatever we can to make it happen.
Using the pretext of escalating tensions on the Gaza-Egypt border, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry informed us yesterday that the Rafah border will be closed over the coming weeks, into January. We responded that there is always tension at the border because of the siege, that we do not feel threatened, and that if there are any risks, they are risks we are willing to take. We also said that it was too late for over 1,300 delegates coming from over 42 countries to change their plans now. We both agreed to continue our exchanges.
Although we consider this as a setback, it is something we’ve encountered-and overcome–before. No delegation, large or small, that entered Gaza over the past 12 months has ever received a final OK before arriving at the Rafah border. Most delegations were discouraged from even heading out of Cairo to Rafah. Some had their buses stopped on the way. Some have been told outright that they could not go into Gaza. But after public and political pressure, the Egyptian government changed its position and let them pass.
Our efforts and plans will not be altered at this point. We have set out to break the siege of Gaza and march on December 31 against the Israeli blockade. We are continuing in the same direction.
Egyptian embassies and missions all over the world must hear from our supporters (by phone, fax and email)** over the coming crucial days, with a clear message: Let the international delegation enter Gaza and let the Gaza Freedom March proceed.
Contact the Palestine Division in Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cairo
Ahmed Azzam, tel +202-25749682 Email: ahmed.azzam@mfa.gov.eg
If you are in the U.S., contact the Egyptian Embassy, 202-895-5400 and ask for Omar Youssef or email omaryoussef@hotmail.com.
You signed on to support the the Gaza Freedom March, that was the first step. Now call the Egyptian embassy and ask your elected official to call on your behalf. Then, hit the streets and join a solidarity action in your community: www.gazafreedommarch.org/solidarity
Thank you for being part of a global movement.
The Gaza Freedom March Steering Committee
* * Sample text below:
I am writing/calling to express my full support for the December 31, 2009 Gaza Freedom March. I urge the Egyptian government to allow the 1,300 international delegates to enter the Gaza Strip through Egypt.
The aim of the march is to call on Israel to lift the siege. The delegates will also take in badly needed medical aid, as well as school supplies and winter jackets for the children of Gaza.
December 20 2009
Israel to seek another 1b euros Holocaust in reparations from Germany
By Moti Bassok
Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz will demand between 450 million to 1 billion euros in reparations from Germany on behalf of Jews forced into slave labor during the Holocaust, it emerged on Sunday.
Minister Steinitz will reportedly present German government with the demand on behalf of 30,000 Israeli survivors of forced labor in wartime ghettos, during a joint session scheduled to take place in early 2010 in Berlin.
Israeli officials estimate that according to a ghetto workers act passed by the German parliament in 2002, all of the 30,000 living forced labor survivors are entitled to a retroactive payment of approximately 15,000 euros each.
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However, Finance Ministry officials say that according to the German government’s calculations, the one-time payment is larger than that estimated by Israel, and reaches a total of 1 billion euros.
In addition to the one-time payment, the survivors are also entitled to a monthly allowance, which adds up to around 100 million euros a year.
In September, Germany’s top court dismissed a claim yesterday for the return of land seized by the Nazis from its Jewish owner in 1933.
Jewish businessman Adolf Sommerfeld, who owned nearly 80 percent of a company building a housing estate in the Berlin suburb of Kleinmachnow, was beaten up and shot at by Nazi thugs and fled Germany in 1933, the year the Nazis came to power.
The Nazis later sold the homes to their occupants, who are now the owners. Seizures of property from Jews continued through the 1930s, culminating in the Holocaust.
I don’t think Germany owes anyone anything any more. They have paid enough.
When will Israel compensate Palestinians for their stolen land and for the tramatic things that has happened to them.
When will they pay the children who’s parents have been murdered.
Israel should be paying the people it has victimized and continues to victimize not seeking more money from Germany who have paid quite enough already.
If Israel gets more money I find it very hard to beleive they would give it to victims anyway.
Israeli banks and institutions kept Nazi victims’ assets
By Jean Shaoul
23 August 2000
Evidence is emerging from an Israeli parliamentary committee and court action that some of the pillars of the Israeli financial establishment hung on to the assets of Jews who died under the Nazi regime and blocked attempts by the victims’ families to seek justice. The committee has recommended an independent audit of at least 12,000 dormant accounts and 5,000 safe deposit boxes at Bank Leumi.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist leaders actively sought investment to build up Zionist enterprises and settlements in what was then British-ruled Palestine. European Jews bought plots of land and opened bank accounts in Palestine as a way of contributing to the establishment of a Jewish homeland, preparing for their own or their families’ eventual emigration, and later, after Hitler took power, seeking a haven for their savings.
No one knows for certain how much was involved. It is believed that some $40 million was deposited in bank accounts and a similar amount invested in land, much of which would now be in prime locations in Haifa and Tel Aviv. Money and other valuables were kept in safe deposits whose whereabouts are unknown.
When the Second World War broke out, the British mandate government in Palestine seized the land and bank accounts held by Jews from countries under Nazi rule as enemy property. Most of the money was transferred back to London. Under the settlement with Israel in 1950 , the British government paid back just $1.4 million in compensation for the bank accounts and handed over records of the seized accounts and land to the Israeli government. While some restitution payments were reportedly made, the fate of other accounts and properties is unclear.
Shmuel Tsur, the Custodian-General at the Ministry of Justice who manages the unclaimed property, maintains that almost all the confiscated assets were either returned to their owners or handed over to his office. He estimates that 20 percent of the holdings, worth about $90 million, belonged to European Jews killed in the war. Of the list of unclaimed accounts and properties published by his office in 1997, fewer than 10 have been returned after claims to them were confirmed. He used this to justify his assertion that there was no reservoir of money or property hidden away, but was forced to admit under questioning by the parliamentary committee that he could not be sure that he had received full reports from the banks regarding all dormant accounts. “I start from the assumption that the bank reports are correct,” he said. He also acknowledged that successive Israeli governments sold many of the plots of land to cover taxes or expropriated them for development or military use.
Colette Avital, a member of Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s One Israel Party and chair of the parliamentary committee, said that for years there have been lists of property abandoned by its owners, including those who were believed to have perished in the Holocaust. She said the Custodian-General had 4,300 real estate assets, but other groups, such as the Jewish National Fund, also held properties but had refused to publish details until pressed by the hearings of the parliamentary committee. According to Avital, while the banks said they had passed all information about dormant accounts to the custodian-general she was sceptical that full details were given.
Avital presented one example of an account from 1940 in which 96,000 lira was deposited. At the time, she said, the money was enough to purchase two apartments on Rehov Allenby, one of the main streets in Tel Aviv. “After 60 years, the Custodian-General is offering to give back NIS [New Israeli Shekels] 285,” she said. The sum is equivalent to US$73.
Earlier this year, Bank Leumi published on its Internet site a list of accounts that had been inactive since 1955 or earlier. The Jewish National Fund, a land development agency, also published on its site a list of plots sold to Jews before the war that remain unclaimed. Last November, class action suits were brought on behalf of relatives of Holocaust victims against Bank Leumi and the privately owned Israel Land Development Company, set up by the Zionist movement to buy land in Palestine. The families are demanding full disclosure of the accounts and land bought by Jews who perished under the Nazis.
Holocaust survivors refrained from such a search for property for years and left the matter for the state to handle, she noted. Avital said that on the official level, bureaucratic inertia had prevented effective action to trace and return the unclaimed assets. “There was a lot of neglect and lack of sensitivity,” she said.
In a related development, an international panel investigating insurance policies held by Holocaust victims announced last April that it had the names of 19,000 people who were owed money.
For decades the issue of the lost accounts and assets generated little interest in Israel. Jewish survivors from Nazi Germany, who came to Palestine, and later Israel, devoted their energies to tracing their relatives and building a new society. As Dr. Yossi Katz, a professor at Bar Ilan University, and author of the recently published Forgotten Property, said, “In the early years of nation building and in subsequent decades, there were other priorities. Until the 1990s, the issue didn’t trouble the public. Other matters were seen as far more important, such as security and absorption of immigrants. It’s safe to assume that had the issue not come up recently in Europe, it would not have come up in Israel. There was a reluctance here to deal with the Holocaust in economic terms. It was inconceivable to turn the Holocaust into a material issue. A younger generation had to come along that was not directly linked to the Holocaust and could deal with it less sentimentally.”
That this new generation was prepared to take up the issue also denotes a generation that does not have the same blind faith in the Zionist dream of creating a safe haven for the Jewish people.
There has been extensive press coverage of the failure of the Swiss banks to reveal the existence of accounts belonging to Nazi victims. Edward Korman, an American judge, has just given his final approval to a $1.25 billion settlement and was highly critical of the way the Swiss banks behaved during the three-year audit to unearth records that might be linked to Nazi victims. Israel provided vocal support for this campaign, but has been remarkably reticent about its own record.
Eleazer Shafrir is a 76-year-old retired biochemistry professor. His father visited Poland in 1938 and was persuaded by the Zionist movement to invest in Palestine, but remain in Poland. He said, “Everyone knew that something was happening in Europe. He [his father] wanted to make aliya [emigrate] but he was convinced by the people in Jerusalem that it was much more important that he be there in Poland.” As a result, his father, a community leader, was one of the first to be rounded up by the Nazis when they invaded Poland and died in Auschwitz in 1940. Shafrir added, “This is not about money. I do not want to enrich myself. I think this is fundamental justice. What is painful is that we demanded from the Swiss and other nations the return of Jewish property and the return of Jewish art belonging to people who died in the Holocaust. But in our country, we cannot organise the return of property to survivors of people lost in the Holocaust.”
Israeli banks and the Israel Land Development Company have resisted opening up their records. As the victims’ lawyer Roland Roth argued, both the Israeli and Swiss banks are motivated by a desire to preserve their assets. “Every economic body has an interest in holding on to what it can,” he said.
Bank Leumi called account worthless, but Holocaust victim’s sons to get NIS 400,000
08/07/2008
By Anshel Pfeffer,
Michael Eisenbud was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Panevezys, Lithuania in 1936 when his father attended a Zionist doctors’ conference in Palestine and opened an account at the Anglo-Palestine Bank.
Dr. Chaim Ben Zion Eisenbud continued depositing funds into the account until World War II broke out. In 1941, after the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union and occupied Lithuania, Dr. Chaim Ben Zion Eisenbud was taken, together with 7,000 of his fellow Jews from Panevezys, outside the city and shot to death. His sons Michael and Eliezer escaped to the Soviet area and served in the Red Army.
In 1973 Eliezer Eisenbud immigrated to Israel and asked the bank by then Bank Leumi for the family’s account. Michael immigrated in 1979, and the brothers have been attempting to release the funds for three decades.
“The Bank Leumi officials were very polite,” says Michael. “They said the money was transferred to the Custodian General. There we were told that due to the lira’s devaluation the money was worth very little and wasn’t even worth issuing an inheritance order for.”
In 2005 the brothers appealed to the Knesset Inquiry Committee for the Location and Restitution of Assets of Holocaust Victims, chaired by MK Colette Avital. The committee passed the case on to the Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims Assets and in February the Eisnbuds received NIS 300,000 70 percent of the account’s value, according to the company.
“They said it was an advance but it’s not clear when we’ll get the rest,” Michael said. “In any case, at our age, I’m 85 it cannot make a difference to our lives. It’s a pity we didn’t have it when we first came and our economic situation was difficult.”
The Eisenbuds’ situation is good compared to that of thousands of other Holocaust heirs. Only 10 heirs have so far received money from the company, which began operating some 18 months ago. The company was set up to locate all assets bought or deposited in pre-WWII Palestine and transfer them to survivors and/or heirs of Holocaust victims.
On Monday the company’s executives updated the Knesset Control Committee of its activity. Until the end of June the company had located NIS 750 million worth of assets lands, homes, bank accounts, stocks and bonds held by the Custodian General, the Jewish National Fund, banks especially Bank Leumi and the Israel Museum, which has more than 1,000 objets d’art that belonged to Holocaust victims.
The company is continuing in its attempts to retrieve and locate more property and other assets, reportedly worth hundreds of millions of shekels.
The company posted on its Internet site the names of 66,000 Holocaust victims with assets in Israel. By the end of June, a total of 6,604 applications for the recovery of assets had had been filed. Only 105 applications have been approved; assets have been disbursed in about 10 of these cases.
The company says the law mandates a one-year waiting period between the publication of the list of assets (the first was issued in June 2007) and the disbursement of funds, so that all potential can apply.
Several MKs and Holocaust representatives of survivors’ organizations castigated the company for dragging its feet and for not using the retrieved assets to assist elderly and needy survivors.
Comapny chair Avraham Roth accused the JNF, the Custodian General and banks of refusing to release the money in their possession, in violation of the law.
The Custodian General’s representative said the delay was due to a tender to appoint four accountants’ firms to determine the assets’ precise value. The JNF spokeswoman said the JNF had transferred all the real estate owned by Holocaust victims to the company.Bank Leumi said the company had given it a list of 1,200 accounts worth a total of NIS 130 million.
“We checked, name by name, in our archives and in other archives. Some [account owners] aren’t Holocaust victims, others live in enemy countries. We gave them a detailed list of every name about three weeks ago,” the bank’s spokesman said.
Deep South calls in Iran to cure its health blues
In ground-breaking project, one of America’s poorest communities is turning to the Middle East to try to resolve its crisis
By Christina Lamb
December 20 2009
As Marie Pryor shuffles along a Mississippi roadside collecting discarded drink cans to sell for a few cents, her breath comes in short puffs caused by a congenital heart defect. The same condition caused her granddaughter’s death earlier this year.
The last place on earth she would look for help is Iran, a country widely regarded in America as the enemy. The US and Iran have not had diplomatic relations for 30 years and the two governments trade daily insults over Iran’s nuclear programme. Last week Tehran charged three American hikers with espionage after they apparently strayed across the border.
But with Congress acrimoniously debating the reform of health care, it is to Iran that one of America’s poorest communities is turning to try to resolve its own health crisis.
A US doctor and a development consultant visited Iran in May to study a primary health care system that has cut infant mortality by more than two-thirds since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
Then, in October, five top Iranian doctors, including a senior official at the health ministry in Tehran, were quietly brought to Mississippi to advise on how the system could be implemented there.
The Mississippi Delta has some of the worst health statistics in the country, including infant mortality rates for non-whites at Third World levels.
“It’s time to look for a new model,” said Dr Aaron Shirley, one of the state’s leading health campaigners.
“Forty years ago, when I was a resident at Jackson hospital, I was in charge of admitting sick babies and was astonished at all the children coming in from the delta with diarrhea, meningitis, pneumonia.
“After years of health research and expenditure of millions of dollars, nothing much has changed.”
As the House of Representatives and Senate weigh the cost of President Barack Obama’s health reforms, Shirley points out that good primary care prevents people from ending up in hospital in the first place.
Besides, nowhere is the need for reform more acute than in Mississippi. The southern state has the highest levels of child obesity, hypertension and teenage pregnancy in the US. More than 20% of its people have no health insurance.
Baptist Town, where Pryor lives, is typical. A rundown suburb of Greenwood, the collapse of the cotton industry has led to massive unemployment. The local stores are a pawn shop, Juanita’s Beauty Salon and Bail Bonding, and an office offering “payday and title loans”.
Pryor’s son Kenneth and daughter-in-law Lizzie, who live with her, are both out of work and their only daughter died from her heart condition at the age of 26. With no local clinics or transport, they go to the hospital’s accident and emergency department if they need a doctor.
The idea of looking for solutions in Iran emerged when James Miller, a consultant based in Mississippi, was called in to advise a rural hospital in financial difficulty. He was shocked to find that the state had the third highest medical expenditure per capita, but came last in terms of outcome.
Miller, managing director of Oxford International Development Group, remembered a conference in Europe where Iranian officials had explained how their country had revolutionized its health care system.
Facing shortages of money and trained doctors at the start of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980, the new government launched a system based on community “health houses”, each serving about 1,500 people.
Locals were trained as health workers known as behvarz, who would travel their area, dispensing advice about healthy eating, sanitation and contraception as well as monitoring blood pressure and conditions such as diabetes.
It was a stunning success, reducing child mortality rates by 69% and maternal mortality in rural areas from 300 per 100,000 births to 30. There are now 17,000 health houses in Iran, covering more than 90% of its rural population of 23m.
Miller contacted Shirley, who is seen as a community health pioneer in Mississippi and had recently converted a deserted shopping centre in Jackson into a “medical mall” for the poor.
“I thought if the Iranians could do it with a fraction of resources we have, then why shouldn’t we?” said Shirley.
An Iranian doctor helped them make contact with Shiraz University, which manages more than 1,000 health houses and trains health care workers.
Shirley and Miller visited Iran in May and were astonished to be welcomed with open arms. When they went to remote villages to see the health houses, the Iranians were equally amazed.
“They told us this is a miracle,” said Miller. “Not only were Americans coming here, but also they were learning from us rather than telling us what to do.”
One villager exclaimed: “We always knew rain fell down but never knew it could fall up.”
They signed an agreement with Shiraz University to form the Mississippi/Islamic Republic of Iran rural health project and applied to the US Treasury for a special licence for “Iranian transactions”.
The next step was to win over communities in Mississippi. They started with Greenwood, where Shirley had already been in talks about setting up a local clinic.
Community leaders were shocked when he advised using Iran as a model. “To be honest, I wasn’t overwhelmed with the idea of copying Iran,” said Larry Griggs, the local fire chief. “It’s not exactly one of the most favourable countries to the US.”
They also had to overcome the legacy of distrust between blacks in the American south and public health officials after a series of scandals over medical experiments. The most notorious was the Tuskegee experiment between 1932 and 1972, in which 399 impoverished, black, illiterate farmers were left to suffer from syphilis even though penicillin was available. More than 100 died.
To sell the Iranian idea, Miller promoted it as “a health care model just like the Beetle”, pointing out that the popular Volkswagen Beetle had been conceived by the Nazi regime to show “good things can come out of somewhere not very popular in the world right now”.
The Iranian experts who came to Mississippi included two of the programme’s architects, Dr Hossein Malekafzali, a former minister who is professor of public health at Tehran University, and Dr Kamal Shadpour, the initiative’s co-ordinator in the health ministry.
The Greenwood community was convinced and leased a defunct car showroom for $1 a month for the first Mississippi health house, which is due to open next month. Fifteen Delta communities have expressed interest and Harvard’s School of Public Health will monitor the project.
Paula Gutlove, deputy director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, a US think tank, said there was a positive shock value to using an Iranian model. “The exotic nature of working with Iran makes it intriguing to potential funders and sponsors,” she said.
The first candidates from the Mississippi Delta are expected to be trained as health assistants in Iran this spring. If it works, Shirley hopes to extend the programme to the rest of the US. “Just as Mississippi was ground zero in the civil rights movement, so it can be for health,” he said.
Nonetheless, the Iranian connection poses a problem. Knowing that many Americans might be outraged, they have not spoken about the project. Even the governor of Mississippi is unaware of it. “We’ve been deliberately working under the radar,” said Shirley.
The programme chimes with Obama’s policy of engagement and his support of so-called “smart diplomacy”, using links between scientists as a way of breaking down barriers between countries. Following his speech in Cairo last June, aimed at reaching out to the Islamic world, the president has appointed three science envoys who will head to the Middle East next month.
“The Iranians are a proud people with 5,000 years of history and huge contributions to science and medicine,” said a State Department official.
“A project like the Mississippi one is incredibly powerful as it appeals to that Iranian concept of history. It’s a great way to keep the door open between the two countries.”
Gutlove points out that similar meetings between American and Soviet scientists in the 1980s helped pave the way for the end of the cold war. “What we did in the 1980s created lasting relationships which cut across the divide,” she said.
“It’s a win-win project,” said Shirley. “Not only do we finally have a way of addressing disparities in Mississippi, but also building relations between peoples.”
Last year, Israel’s military budget amounted to $13.3 billion, so the US funding is a significant portion of their overall expenditure. The US formerly provided both military and civilian aid, but it has since been folded entirely into military aid, at Israel’s request.
The money is not a blank check, however. The US requires that Israel spend at least 75% of the money given in military aid with US military contractors, effectively using the foreign aid budget to subsidize domestic weapon-makers.
In addition to military aid, the US also provides $3.148 billion in loan guarantees to Israel, part of a Treasury Department program aimed at keep Israel’s debt manageable. Ironically, though the US budget is spiraling out of control and America’s own debt continues to rise, there was no serious debate of reducing aid to Israel.
CIA working with Palestinian Authority security agents
US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank.
Palestinian security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.
Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.
The relationship between the CIA and the two Palestinian agencies involved – Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) – is said by some western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the American agency appears to be supervising the Palestinians’ work.
One senior western official said: “The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services.” A diplomatic source added that US influence over the agencies was so great they could be considered “an advanced arm of the war on terror”.
While the CIA and the Palestinian Authority (PA) deny the US agency controls its Palestinian counterparts, neither denies that they interact closely in the West Bank. Details of that co-operation are emerging as some human rights organisations are beginning to question whether US intelligence agencies may be turning a blind eye to abusive interrogations conducted by other countries’ intelligence agencies with whom they are working. According to the Palestinian watchdog al-Haq, human rights in the West Bank and Gaza have “gravely deteriorated due to the spreading violations committed by Palestinian actors” this year.
Most of those held without trial and allegedly tortured in the West Bank have been supporters of Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in 2006 but is denounced as a terrorist organisation by the PA – which in turn is dominated by the rival Fatah political faction – and by the US and EU. In the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has been in control for more than two years, there have been reports of its forces detaining and torturing Fatah sympathisers in the same way.
Among the human rights organisations that have documented or complained about the mistreatment of detainees held by the PA in the West Bank are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, al-Haq and the Israeli watchdog B’Tselem. Even the PA’s human rights commission has expressed “deep concern” over the mistreatment of detainees.
The most common complaint is that detainees are severely beaten and subjected to a torture known as shabeh, during which they are shackled and forced to assume painful positions for long periods. There have also been reports of sleep deprivation, and of large numbers of detainees being crammed into small cells to prevent rest. Instead of being brought before civilian courts, almost all the detainees enter a system of military justice under which they need not be brought before a court for six months.
According to PA officials, between 400 and 500 Hamas sympathisers are held by the PSO and GI.
Some of the mistreatment has been so severe that at least three detainees have died in custody this year. The most recent was Haitham Amr, a 33-year-old nurse and Hamas supporter from Hebron who died four days after he was detained by GI officials last June. Extensive bruising around his kidneys suggested he had been beaten to death. Among those who died in GI custody last year was Majid al-Barghuti, 42, an imam at a village near Ramallah.
While there is no evidence that the CIA has been commissioning such mistreatment, human rights activists say it would end promptly if US pressure was brought to bear on the Palestinian authorities.
Shawan Jabarin, general director of al-Haq, said: “The Americans could stop it any time. All they would have to do is go to [prime minister] Salam Fayyad and tell him they were making it an issue.. Then they could deal with the specifics: they could tell him that detainees needed to be brought promptly before the courts.”
A diplomat in the region said “at the very least” US intelligence officers were aware of the torture and not doing enough to stop it. He added: “There are a number of questions for the US administration: what is their objective, what are their rules of engagement? Do they train the GI and PSO according to the manual which was established by the previous administration, including water-boarding? Are they in control, or are they just witnessing?”
Sa’id Abu-Ali, the PA’s interior minister, accepted detainees had been tortured and some had died, but said such abuses had not been official policy and steps were being taken to prevent them. He said such abuses “happen in every country in the world”. Abu-Ali sought initially to deny the CIA was “deeply involved” with the two Palestinian intelligence agencies responsible for the torture of Hamas sympathisers, but then conceded that links did exist. “There is a connection, but there is no supervision by the Americans,” he said. “It is solely a Palestinian affair. But the Americans help us.”
The CIA does not deny working with the PSO and GI in the West Bank, although it will not say what use it has made of intelligence extracted during the interrogation of Hamas supporters. But it denies turning what one official described as “a Nelson’s eye to abuse”.
The CIA’s spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, denied it played a supervisory role over the PSO or GI. “The notion that this agency somehow runs other intelligence services … is simply wrong,” he said. “The CIA … only supports, and is interested in, lawful methods that produce sound intelligence.”
Concern about detainee abuse is growing in the West Bank despite an effort by the international community to create Palestinian institutions that will guarantee greater security as a first step towards creating a Palestinian state. More than half of the PA’s $2.8bn (£1.66bn) budget came from international donors last year; more than a quarter was swallowed up by the ministry of the interior and national security. Human Rights Watch and al-Haq have said that in raising the security capacity of the PA, donor countries have a responsibility to ensure it observes international human rights standards.
At the heart of the international effort is the creation of the Palestinian national security force, a 7,500-strong gendarmerie trained by US, British, Canadian and Turkish army officers under the command of a US general, Keith Dayton. Many Palestinians blame Dayton for the mistreatment of Hamas sympathisers, although the general’s remit does not extend to either of the intelligence agencies responsible.
Some in Dayton’s team are said to have been warned by senior CIA officers that they should not attempt to interfere in the work of the PSO or GI. Privately, some of them are said to fear that the mistreatment of detainees, and the anger this is arousing among the population, may undermine their mission. One source said: “I know that Dayton and his crew are very concerned about what is happening in those detention centres because they know it can jeopardise their work.”
The CIA are the torture teachers. They seem to be doing what they always do, considering Obama said no more torture. I guess he lied.
I have great faith the CIA have helped immensely in the torture of
Hamas victims. I don’t believe the so called spokes person for the CIA. Not knowing what I know about the history of the CIA. They are in it up to their ears, as usual.
Torture is illegal under International Law.
At least Hamas was elected democratically and they are the ones being punished by the PA, Israel, the CIA and the rest of the world just sits idly by while they are also being tortured as well. US tax dollars hard at work.
Just more Guantanamo Bay slop.
So the US tortures, Israelis torture and now the Palestinian Authority also tortures.
Those citizens who pay for this in the US should be so proud their tax dollars go to a good cause. The Enablers are as bad as the ones who torture.
Aid should be for the hungry people of the world not for torture or weapons. Of course all the weapons that are purchased with the military aid are from US weapons manufactures. They make a fortune off the tax payers in the US who pay for it all. The enablers of wars around the world.
The US Gov uses tax payers money given to other countries to buy weapons from the US. Not profitable at all.
Not for the people who give their hard earned money in taxes just to profit the weapons dealers.
I bet those weapons manufactures give a whole lot of money to candidates at election time however. Nothing like getting business on silver platter given to you.
1263 – U.S. Foreign Economic and Military Aid by Major Recipient Country [Excel 74k] | [PDF 458k] Up to 2007 Source
In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets — it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions?
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count.
The Feb. 17, 2007, Energy Bulletin detailed the oil consumption just for the Pentagon’s aircraft, ships, ground vehicles and facilities that made it the single-largest oil consumer in the world. At the time, the U.S. Navy had 285 combat and support ships and around 4,000 operational aircraft. The U.S. Army had 28,000 armored vehicles, 140,000 High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles, more than 4,000 combat helicopters, several hundred fixed-wing aircraft and 187,493 fleet vehicles. Except for 80 nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which spread radioactive pollution, all their other vehicles run on oil.
Even according to rankings in the 2006 CIA World Factbook, only 35 countries (out of 210 in the world) consume more oil per day than the Pentagon.
The U.S. military officially uses 320,000 barrels of oil a day. However, this total does not include fuel consumed by contractors or fuel consumed in leased and privatized facilities. Nor does it include the enormous energy and resources used to produce and maintain their death-dealing equipment or the bombs, grenades or missiles they fire.
Steve Kretzmann, director of Oil Change International, reports: “The Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. … The war emits more than 60 percent of all countries. … This information is not readily available … because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.” (www.naomiklein.org, Dec. 10) Most scientists blame carbon dioxide emissions for greenhouse gases and climate change.
Bryan Farrell in his new book, “The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism,” says that “the greatest single assault on the environment, on all of us around the globe, comes from one agency … the Armed Forces of the United States.”
Just how did the Pentagon come to be exempt from climate agreements? At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision of signing that all of its military operations worldwide and all operations it participates in with the U.N. and/or NATO be completely exempted from measurement or reductions.
After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords.
In a May 18, 1998, article entitled “National security and military policy issues involved in the Kyoto treaty,” Dr. Jeffrey Salmon described the Pentagon’s position. He quotes then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s 1997 annual report to Congress: “DoD strongly recommends that the United States insist on a national security provision in the climate change Protocol now being negotiated.” (www.marshall.org)
According to Salmon, this national security provision was put forth in a draft calling for “complete military exemption from greenhouse gas emissions limits. The draft includes multilateral operations such as NATO- and U.N.-sanctioned activities, but it also includes actions related very broadly to national security, which would appear to comprehend all forms of unilateral military actions and training for such actions.”
Salmon also quoted Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, who headed the U.S. delegation in Kyoto . Eizenstat reported that “every requirement the Defense Department and uniformed military who were at Kyoto by my side said they wanted, they got. This is self-defense, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief.”
Although the U.S. had already received these assurances in the negotiations, the U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemption. Inter Press Service reported on May 21, 1998: “U.S. law makers, in the latest blow to international efforts to halt global warming, today exempted U.S. military operations from the Kyoto agreement which lays out binding commitments to reduce ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The House of Representatives passed an amendment to next year’s military authorization bill that ‘prohibits the restriction of armed forces under the Kyoto Protocol.’”
Today in Copenhagen the same agreements and guidelines on greenhouse gases still hold. Yet it is extremely difficult to find even a mention of this glaring omission.
According to environmental journalist Johanna Peace, military activities will continue to be exempt from an executive order signed by President Barack Obama that calls for federal agencies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Peace states, “The military accounts for a full 80 percent of the federal government’s energy demand.” (solveclimate.com, Sept. 1)
The blanket exclusion of the Pentagon’s global operations makes U.S. carbon dioxide emissions appear far less than they in fact are. Yet even without counting the Pentagon, the U.S. still has the world’s largest carbon dioxide emissions.
More than Emissions
Besides emitting carbon dioxide, U.S. military operations release other highly toxic and radioactive materials into the air, water and soil.
U.S. weapons made with depleted uranium have spread tens of thousands of pounds of microparticles of radioactive and highly toxic waste throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans.
The U.S. sells land mines and cluster bombs that are a major cause of delayed explosives, maiming and disabling especially peasant farmers and rural peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America . For example, Israel dropped more than 1 million U.S.-provided cluster bombs on Lebanon during its 2006 invasion.
The U.S. war in Vietnam left large areas so contaminated with the Agent Orange herbicide that today, more than 35 years later, dioxin contamination is 300 to 400 times higher than “safe” levels. Severe birth defects and high rates of cancer resulting from environmental contamination are continuing into a third generation.
The 1991 U.S. war in Iraq , followed by 13 years of starvation sanctions, the 2003 U.S. invasion and continuing occupation, has transformed the region — which has a 5,000-year history as a Middle East breadbasket — into an environmental catastrophe. Iraq ‘s arable and fertile land has become a desert wasteland where the slightest wind whips up a dust storm. A former food exporter, Iraq now imports 80 percent of its food. The Iraqi Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90 percent of the land has severe desertification.
Environmental War at Home
Moreover, the Defense Department has routinely resisted orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated U.S. bases. ( Washington Post, June 30, 2008) Pentagon military bases top the Superfund list of the most polluted places, as contaminants seep into drinking water aquifers and soil.
The Pentagon has also fought EPA efforts to set new pollution standards on two toxic chemicals widely found on military sites: perchlorate, found in propellant for rockets and missiles; and trichloroethylene, a degreaser for metal parts.
Trichloroethylene is the most widespread water contaminant in the country, seeping into aquifers across California , New York , Texas , Florida and elsewhere. More than 1,000 military sites in the U.S. are contaminated with the chemical. The poorest communities, especially communities of color, are the most severely impacted by this poisoning.
U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Southwest and on South Pacific islands has contaminated millions of areas of land and water with radiation. Mountains of radioactive and toxic uranium tailings have been left on Indigenous land in the Southwest. More than 1,000 uranium mines have been abandoned on Navajo reservations in Arizona and New Mexico .
Around the world, on past and still operating bases in Puerto Rico, the Philippines , South Korea , Vietnam , Laos , Cambodia , Japan , Nicaragua , Panama and the former Yugoslavia , rusting barrels of chemicals and solvents and millions of rounds of ammunition are criminally abandoned by the Pentagon.
The best way to dramatically clean up the environment is to shut down the Pentagon. What is needed to combat climate change is a thoroughgoing system change.
The US is the worst polluter on the planet, in war and their corporations.
The war machine must be ended.
Their polluting corporations must be brought under control.
At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen no once was there any mention of war pollution and it’s affects on the environment or the health hazards to people.
One of the major and morst devastaing things in the world and they neglected to consider it’s impact on the world as we know it.
I am horrifyingly disappointed their lack of concern in this area of disastrous type of pollution.
“Military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under U.S. law and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.”
That is just wrong! No special treatment for the war machine and it’s polluters. They leave a trail of DEATH behind them everywhere they go. A trail that continues to kill for years if not millions of years.
You bet, their words of hate have led to horrible murders, and it is all documented, talk about having blood on your hands.
By Tim King
December 18 2009
Those who believe right wing politics are under represented in today’s American media, may enjoy this video segment from MSNBC’s Keith Olberman.
Taking on the feral dogs of the talk show circuit, Olberman exposes Limbaugh and O’Reilly, and most of all the overtly racist Glenn Beck, for their ironically dangerous statements about unfair media bias.
In the case of each of these hardliner right wing abortion protesting talk show hosts, is a significant crime that took place on U.S. soil.
In one case three police officers died. The killer, Richard Poplawski, ambushed and killed three policmen outside Pittsbugn April 4th 2008.
He was clearly inspired by Beck, writing, that “He was ready for the sh*t to hit the fan, the end of the world as we know it because Obama is coming for my guns”, which had been Beck’s most used lines until last March.
Three cops, nice work Glenn Beck, you sure made America a great place with that one.
Poplawski also left a message on the Website StormFront, to what else but a Glenn Beck video.
Then there is James Atkinson, who entered Tennessee Church and killed two people over the apparent words of one of O’Reilly’s analysts.
He said at the time, “This is a symbolic killing, who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the House.”
I hear friends say they listen to Beck but that he’s harmless. I have never heard a bigger mistake. None of these right wing hardliners ever served in the military, I am sorry that they are so fully able to scare people into following them so well; it is a sad perspective for America.
Or maybe we’re all the exact same people who have always inhabited the earth, and maybe the majority of people who really get into these guys were actually Nazis in a former life, it would add up.
There is nothing more disgusting than a bunch of angry white men stirring other scared white men into a frenzy, it can be deadly for large groups of people when white people, like Adolph Hitler, get a firm hold on things.
Hitler, like these American talk show hosts, drove people with lies and fear. These men are liars, and they are the very worst kind.
As skeptics at the Copenhagen summit are demanding proof that climate change is man-made, a Russian think-tank has accused British researchers of manipulating Russian weather data which does not fit into alarmist theory.
World leaders are set to launch a last-ditch attempt to reach a consensus on the final day of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. But with much bickering between rich and poor nations during nearly two weeks of talks, many doubt a new deal will be agreed upon.
The rows have been over the amounts of carbon emission cuts and financial aid to help developing countries also make the cuts.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who is attending the conference, is expected to address delegates later on Friday.
Ahead of the trip to Copenhagen, he signed into law this week the Russian Climate Doctrine, a document outlining the estimated risks of global warming and Russian government’s planned measures to counter them.
It is planned to raise the energy efficiency of the Russian economy by 40 per cent by 2020. And to cut carbon emissions, Russia is going to raise the industrial efficiency of the economy, develop renewable and alternative energies, implement financial and tax policies to cut greenhouse gases, and sensibly approach the use of wood and the creation of sustainable forests.
Meanwhile, a new climate scandal is gaining momentum. The Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis (IEA) has accused the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research of the British Meteorology Office of only using statistics from weather stations in Russia that fitted its theory on global warming, and ignoring those that did not.
The British Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which was earlier involved in a scandal dubbed “Climategate” by some media, jointly run the climate database.
The Centre has recently made public part of the raw data used by HadCRUT, its joint research team with the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, in order to diffuse the recent row over leaked emails revealing a conspiracy by climatologists and politicians.
In a report this week, the IEA says the HadCRUT’s study of climate change ignored data from three quarters of the weather stations on the territory of Russia. This includes “more than 40% of the area,” which was not included, not due to missing data, but “for some other reasons.”
That means 40% of Russia’s territory is unrepresented in the world’s most important temperature record.
This cherry-picking and misrepresenting data is nothing new, according to those opposed to the summit in Copenhagen.
“There was the famous Hockey Stick diagram, produced by somebody called Mann, which purported to show that for the last thousand years temperature had been fairly steady, before suddenly going up very rapidly,” says climate skeptic Stuart Wheeler. “But it’s now been shown that any separate figures could be manipulated in the way Mann’s system did to produce a Hockey Stick diagram.”
Moreover, of the data available for the same location, the British researchers chose incomplete sets of temperature growth trends over complete ones that did not fit into the global warming model. Also, data from stations located in cities – which are always likely to be warmer due to waste heat generated by local industries and homes – were preferred over those in remote areas, the IEA says.
All in all, the institute evaluates the difference between the growth of average temperatures between 1870s and 1990s, based on all data available for Russia and those delivered by HadCRUT, as at least 0.64 degrees Celsius.
The report goes on to say that if similar practices, which the IEA bluntly calls “overstating the scale of the warming by HadCRUT”, were used in the selection of raw data from other regions of the world, global estimates for climate change should be seriously amended.
HadCRUT figures are being used by climatologists at the COP-15 international climate change conference currently underway in Copenhagen – but the new scandal surrounding climate change science does not seem to have distracted the carbon emissions summit. It is careening towards its closing moments, and the only topic under discussion there is whether or not any kind of meaningful deal will be signed.
But it is looking less and less likely, and some Russian skeptics suggest that is a good thing for the country.
“This scare-story kills two birds with one stone. It makes money and limits Russia’s presence on the European market,” says Konstantin Simonov, director of Russia’s National Energy Security Foundation. “The logic’s simple: global warming is the main threat facing the world, the main reason for global warming is carbon emission, and the main source of carbon emission is fossil fuels – oil and gas. And Russia is the leading exporter of oil and gas in Europe and in the world,” noted Simonov.
And not signing an agreement could also be a good thing for the rest of the world. Even the International Panel on Climate Change admits that a temperature rise of not more than 3% would increase world food production.
The Institute for Economic Analysis (IEA), in Moscow, issued a report Tuesday alleging that the Hadley Centre, when compiling its contribution to the Hadley-CRU Temperature (HadCRUT) surveys, used data from a select 25% of Russian weather stations.
The ones with the warmest temperatures, while ignoring the others which were cooler. Cities of course would be wamer due to pavement and multipule building which attack the sun and produce more heat.
Anyone who has ever been to a city on a hot day, will find if they drive even ten miles out of the city the temperature will drop considerably.
Even in smaller towns the temperature is also higher, then in a country setting.
I wonder if that was taken into consideration.
Seems they choose places with the highest temperature readings.
One has to wonder if this was what they did with data from other countries as well. I bet they did.
A 62 megabyte zip file, containing around 160 megabytes of emails, pdfs and other documents, has been confirmed as genuine by the head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, Dr. Phil Jones.
The most dangerous pollution of all is War Pollution.
The making and using of weapons is a crime to all of humanity.
During his speech to the 15th United Nations Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez slammed the “lack of political will” of the most powerful nations to take serious action to avert climate change, and called for systemic change to save the planet.
Chavez, who received a standing ovation for his speech, said the process in Copenhagen is “not democratic; it is not inclusive.” In particular, he criticised an attempt by rich countries to overturn the Kyoto Protocol. Doing so would eliminate differentiation between the obligations of rich and poor countries, treating countries from the Global North and South as equally responsible for climate change.
Outside in the streets of Copenhagen mass demonstrations calling for “climate justice” have been repressed by police using pepper spray and batons. More than 1000 people have been arrested.
The man makes a lot of good points. He is not the tyrant the Media makes him out to be. A pity a few countries walked out. Shame on them.
In this documentary by Martin Durkin, shortlisted for the “Best Documentary Award” at the 2008 Broadcast Awards, scientists and commentators argue that CO2 produced by human activity is not the main cause of climate change: A very good documentary. Do take time to watch it.The Great Global Warming Swindle
Olmert not welcome in Australia
By Frances Lewis writing from Melbourne, Australia,
December 17 2009
Olmert’s visit is protested in Melbourne. (Benjamin Solah)
The Australian government recently received former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and current Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom as part of the Australia Israel Leadership Forum. The forum was to strengthen the already close relationship between the two states. Shalom and Olmert were welcomed with a gala dinner in Melbourne’s ritzy Park Hyatt Hotel on 6 December 2009, attended by Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Given Olmert’s role as Prime Minister during the attacks on Gaza, he is seen by many as guilty of war crimes; it is perhaps no surprise that the Australian media seemed keen to bury the fact that Olmert was in the country and being welcomed by our government. Pro-Palestinian activists on the other hand were intent on holding him to account and letting him know he is not welcome here in our town.
Several groups, including Students for Palestine, Australians for Palestine, the Federation of Australian Muslim Students and Youth, and the Palestine Community Association, came together to organize against these war criminals. Around 200 persons attended a lively, loud and angry demonstration outside the Park Hyatt. We displayed a sample of items banned from entering Gaza due to the siege, to highlight the basic necessities that people in Gaza are denied. Speeches spoke of the apartheid nature of Israel and the reality of living under occupation. Melbourne-based pro-Palestinian hip hop group The Brothahood performed songs about life under occupation, and racism in Australia. We carried placards reading: “Silvan Shalom: Minister for Land Theft,” “Ehud Olmert: War Criminal,” and “Gillard Why do you support genocide?” We also took inspiration from the Iraqi shoe thrower Muntazer al-Zaidi and hurled shoes over the police line.
We publicly announced we were moving to a side entrance, which we found open and under-policed. Several of us then decided to enter the hotel. Police rushed in to break up the demonstration with pepper spray, something that has not happened at a demonstration in Australia for nearly a decade. At least three persons were taken to hospital for treatment. This unprecedented police response highlights the lengths the Australian state will go to defend their support for Israel.
As reported in The Jerusalem Post, at the dinner Gillard, supposedly of the left of the Australian Labor Party, ignored the protests and reaffirmed her support for Israel. “As I said during [the invasion of Gaza last winter], and I say again tonight, Australia supports Israel’s right to self-defense and its right to self-determination … Australia’s government was a champion for the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Our commitment to Israel’s security has not wavered since that time. It’s why we opposed the referral of the Goldstone report to the UN General Assembly.”
Australia’s support for war crimes, something the UN-sponsored and -endorsed Goldstone report found Israel committed, is what the protest was opposing. The protest was to show the world that there are people in Australia who oppose Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the increasing of illegal settlements and the construction of the apartheid wall; that there are people who want to see the right of self-determination for the Palestinians. We oppose our government’s continuing support of Israel in the face of these atrocities. A bit of pepper spray will not deter us — it is nothing in comparison to the horrors Palestinians face every day.
The Gaza Freedom March that will take place in Gaza on 31 December is an historic initiative to break the siege that has imprisoned the 1.5 million people who live there. Conceived in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and nonviolent resistance to injustice worldwide, the march will gather people from all over the world to march — hand in hand — with the people of Gaza to demand that the Israelis open the borders.[MORE] Find a March near you.
GREEDY lenders are exploiting struggling families by offering Christmas loans with crippling annual interest rates of 2,350 per cent.
Families hit by the credit crunch are turning to so-called payday loans because they cannot access extra money from high street banks.
National TV adverts for one loan firm hit screens last week just as Office of Fair Trading research revealed a worrying increase in expensive short-term borrowing. And last night there were calls for the Government to clamp down on the loan firms amid fears that thousands of families could be plunged into spiralling debt.
Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable said: “At a time when official interest rates are close to zero and inflation is very low or negative it is unbelievable that people are being charged thousands or hundreds of per cent in interest.
“Much of this can be attributed to the withdrawal of credit from struggling households who can no longer use banks and are being driven into these extreme and extortionate forms of credit.
“These findings by the Daily Express underline the need for the Government to match its rhetoric with firm action to regulate these extortionate credit markets.”
Payday loans typically charge interest at an Annual Percentage Rate of between 1,000 and 2,000 per cent. Borrowers usually pay £25 interest for every £100 cash advance which the lender redeems after 30 days via a post-dated cheque for the amount borrowed plus fees and interest.
Internet lender QuickQuid.co.uk is advertising its services this month on national and local TV channels including SkySportsNews, Dave, Channel 5 and MTV. It offers a typical APR of a staggering 2,356 per cent while another major internet lender, PayDayUK, says its typical APR is 1,737 per cent.
A person borrowing £1,000 at 2,356 per cent APR would end up paying back £3,824 over 12 months.
Damon Gibbons, chair of campaign group Debt on our Doorstep, called on the Government to impose a cap on payday loan interest rates.
“This is a market that needs to have a price cap in place. Typically, people become trapped in a dependent relationship one month to the next. They often have to borrow again to pay off the loans they’ve taken out and it becomes a spiral of indebtedness,” he warned. Payday loans were invented in America and launched in the UK just over a decade ago.
QuickQuid’s website advertises same-day cash advances up to £1,500 for existing customers and £400 for new customers in a service it describes as a “hassle-free solution” to household bills or short-term money needs.
Rival service Payday UK’s website offers loans from £80 to £750 payable within 48 hours. John Lamidey, chief executive of trade body the Consumer Finance Association which represents payday loan firms, said: “The APR isn’t the cost of the loan, the APR is the rate. What you have to look at is the cost of the credit – how much is it going to cost you and how much you will pay back.
“Typically, what you are looking at with a payday loan is £200 and one month later you might pay back £250. So you pay back one and a quarter times what you borrow.” He added that internet lenders’ fees tended to be higher than shop-based lenders’ fees because they needed to carry out rigorous expensive credit checks before handing over money.
A spokeswoman for watchdog Consumer Focus warned: “This is an area that needs a light really shining on it.”
And consumer group Which? said: “At the moment it looks as though they are preying on those people who can’t get borrowing elsewhere.”
December 8 2009 Lobby for Jewish values passes out fliers against hotels, restaurants putting up Christmas trees, other Christian symbols ahead of civil New Year, say businesses who do so risk losing kosher certification
By Ari Galhar
A new front for religious battles: Hotels and restaurants. The “Lobby for Jewish values” this week began operating against restaurants and hotels that plan to put up Christmas trees and other Christian symbols ahead of Christmas and the civil New Year.
According to the lobby’s Chairman, Ofer Cohen, they have received backing by the rabbis, “and we are even considering publishing the names of the businesses that put up Christian symbols ahead of the Christian holiday and call for a boycott against them.”
Fliers and ads distributed among the public read, “The people of Israel have given their soul over the years in order to maintain the values of the Torah of Israel and the Jewish identity.
“You should also continue to follow this path of the Jewish people’s tradition and not give in to the clownish atmosphere of the end of the civil year. And certainly not help those businesses that sell or put up the foolish symbols of Christianity.”
The Jerusalem Rabbinate also works each year to ensure restaurants and hotels receiving kosher certification from the Jerusalem Religious Council do not put up Christian symbols.
According to a senior official in the kashrut department, this is done each year consensually, but that businesses which do not meet this requirement may find their kashrut certificate revoked.
It should be noted that most of the hotels in Jerusalem and a significant part of the restaurants in the capital receive permanent kosher certification from the city’s religious council.
Seems a few have way too much time on their hands.
This is called bigotry, religious intolerance and a few other things…..
Well if the shoe were on the other foot I am sure this Jewish Lobby group would be screaming from the roof tops, anti Semitic.
This is anti Christian. Equally a bad thing. I see no difference what so ever.
You reap what you sow and this is the seed of hate.
So again another seed of hate has been sown, by a lobby group. I suppose they think they speak for all Jews. How self centered they are. In a world filled with numerous religions, this is just one example of religious intolerance. Soon they will be peddling their hate across the planet telling others what religious holidays they can celebrate.
We keep hearing that Israel is a democracy and fair minded towards others, but it seems that it again been proven to be untrue.
I would suggest to all, not to visit Israel. Seems Christians and those from other religions are not welcome. With so many other wonderful vacation spots in the world, seems a simple thing to do.
Empty hotels and restaurants might give a loud message.
In the world of business there are more non Jews in the world and they have the power to boycott any business that adheres to such a bigoted restriction.
If you criticize Israel however this is what one gets. A bombardment of hate mail.
I’m not a traitor. I’m a man with a conscience who did what he did out of a deep belief after much thought and many doubts. But I knew that I had to do it, that I had no choice…somebody had to do it…I contributed my share by making public what the public ought to know and they shut my mouth behind the prison walls. -Mordechai Vanunu
December 14, 2009
Mordechai Vanunu was released from Ashkelon prison to open air captivity in east Jerusalem on April 21, 2004 after 18 years-most all in solitary-on April 21, 2004.
In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu was clubbed, drugged, bound and kidnapped from Rome by the Mossad because he told the truth and provided the photographic proof of their clandestine 7 story underground WMD facility in the Negev.
In the case of Mordechai Vanunu, Americans and the World need to know that the restrictions that have held him captive in Jerusalem come from the Emergency Defense Regulations which were implemented by Britain against Palestinians and Jews after World War II.
After WW II, Attorney Yaccov Shapiro, who later became Israel’s Minister Of Justice, described the Emergency Defense Regulations as “unparalleled in any civilized country: there were no such laws in Nazi Germany.”
During one of my seven trips to Jerusalem since 2005, I asked Vanunu, “If the British Mandate has expired why not the British Mandate’s Emergency Defense Regulations?”
Vaunu replied, “The reason given is security but it is because Israel is not a democracy unless you are a Jew. This administration tells me I am not allowed to speak to foreigners, the Media, and the world. But I do because that is how I prove my true humanity to the world. My freedom of speech trial began January 25, 2006 for speaking to the media, the same day as the Palestinian elections…When I decided to expose Israel’s nuclear weapons I acted out of conscience and to warn the world to prevent a nuclear holocaust.”
In 1963, Peres was Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense when he met with President Kennedy at the White House. Kennedy told Peres, “You know that we follow very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region. This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason we monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?”
Peres replied, “I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first.”
In 2005, Vanunu told me, “President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’
“Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago.
“Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.
“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.
“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.”
On January 25, 2006, after nearly two years of speaking to hundreds of foreigners since his release from prison, Vanunu was convicted by the Jerusalem Magistrates Court of 15 violations of a military order that had prohibited him from talking to non-Israelis and because he attempted to “leave the state” by taking a cab from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to attend Christmas Eve mass at the Church of the Nativity in 2004. The original indictment included 22 different violations; Vanunu was charged with 19 and acquitted of four. He was acquitted of speaking to foreign nationals on the internet and via video and voice chats.
Just prior to the taping of “30 Minutes with Vanunu” on March 26, 2006, Vanunu told me, “Many journalists come here to the American Colony, from CNN and NY Times. They all want to cover my story, but their EDITORS say no…CNN wants to interview me; but they say they can’t do it because they don’t want problems with the Israeli censor. BBC is doing the same thing. Sixty Minutes from the United States from the beginning they wanted to do a program, but because of the censor situation they decide not to do it.”
On July 2, 2007, Israel sentenced Vanunu to six more months in jail for speaking to foreign media in 2004. On September 23, 2008, the Jerusalem District Court reduced Vanunu’s sentence to three months, “In light of (Vanunu’s) ailing health and the absence of claims that his actions put the country’s security in jeopardy.”
On June 14, 2009, Vanunu told me, “The Central Commander of the General Army testified in court that it is OK if I speak in public as long as I do not talk about nuclear weapons.”
Vanunu’s restrictions will be reviewed again by the Israeli High Court after Dec. 21, 2009. On July 6, 2009, the Supreme Court stated, “pending a review of his conduct, Vanunu will be able to ask for the restrictions to be lifted and be allowed to travel abroad…The state’s representative noted that six months may be too short a time period to determine a change in Vanunu’s behavior and that the state will reconsider the restrictions based not only on Vanunu’s behavior but a host of other considerations, including the time that had lapsed since he divulged state secrets to the British paper.” [1]
It will soon be twenty-four years since Vanunu “divulged state secrets” and as Vanunu told me, “All the secrets I had were published in 1989 in an important book, by [Nuclear Physicist] Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb: Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East.” [2]
Regarding Israeli behavior towards Vanunu, Americans need to know that in 1986, Israel kidnapped him from Rome but Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states: “No one shall he subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention”, including abduction of a person by agents of one state to another state.
Vanunu was charged with and convicted of treason and espionage. According to Section 99 of the Israeli Penal Code, treason is defined as “an act calculated to assist (an enemy) in time of war…delivering information with the intention that it fall into the hands of the enemy.”
Section 113 defines aggravated espionage as “deliver(ing) any secret information without being authorized to do so and with intent to impair the security of the state” and a sub-clause provides for a penalty of seven years for the unauthorized collection, preparation, recording or holding of secret information; if this is done with intent to impair the security of the state and then, the penalty is increased to 15 years.
Vanunu got 18 years and was also rendered defenseless when the court ruled that his motivations were not ideological and they refused to allow Vanunu’s own statements regarding his intentions to be considered in his defense.
A few days before Vanunu was lured from London to Rome, where he was clubbed, drugged and kidnapped by the Mossad, he spent three days being interviewed by Nuclear Physicist, Frank Barnaby.
Barnaby had been employed by the London Sunday Times to review the 57 photos Vanunu had obtained at various restricted locations in the Dimona and he also went to Jerusalem to provide expert testimony at Vanunu’s closed door trial.
Barnaby testified, “I found the fact that Vanunu was able to smuggle a camera and films into and out of Dimona and photograph highly sensitive areas in the establishment astonishing. I very vigorously cross-examined Vanunu, relentlessly asking the same questions in a number of different ways and at different times…I found Vanunu very straightforward about his motives for violating Israel’s secrecy laws he explained to me that he believed that both the Israeli and the world public had the right to know about the information he passed on. He seemed to me to be acting ideologically.
“Israel’s political leaders have, he said, consistently lied about Israel’s nuclear-weapons programme and he found this unacceptable in a democracy. The knowledge that Vanunu had about Isreal’s nuclear weapons, about the operations at Dimona, and about security at Dimona could not be of any use to anyone today. He left Dimona in October 1985 and the design of today’s Israeli nuclear weapons will have been considerably changed since then…Modern nuclear weapons bear little relationship to those of the mid-1980.”[3]
A total of 1,200 pages of transcript of that closed door trial have been released and Vanunu told the court: “I wanted to confirm what everyone knew, I didn’t want Israel to go on denying that it had nuclear weapons, and Shimon Peres to go on lying to (then US president) Ronald Reagan, saying that we didn’t have a nuclear arsenal. I also wanted controls to be placed on these weapons.” [4]
Defense witness and the Sunday Times journalist who broke Vanunu’s story, Peter Hounam, stated, “It is clear that, as far as Vanunu’s accusers are concerned, the trial is not only about whether this decision to reveal the secrets of Israel’s atom bomb amounted to treason and espionage, it is also about whether his decision to become a Christian was at the root of his alleged treachery”.
Hounam also testified that “We did not pay him money, but only covered his expenses… Money did not motivate him.” [5]
Sunday Times journalist Wendy Robbins wrote, “Mordechai never asked for nor received a single penny for his information… he blurted out the whole tale without first setting out any financial preconditions. Mordechai got nothing out of the whole episode. He never `sold’ Israel’s secrets — he told them.”
In the 80′s, Vanunu was transported to and from his closed door trial in a crash helmet, handcuffs and leg-irons, inside a van with blacked out windows that blasted noise to assure Vanunu would not communicate with journalists or supporters. During the court hearings, two Israeli security agents flanked him at all times in order to be able to cover his mouth if he began to reveal anything they deemed secret. The public, the press and all observers-even Amnesty International- were excluded from the hearings and the court’s judgment was censored before publication.
On January 25, 2006, the first day of a freedom of speech trial in Israel only two reporters from minor media showed up for Vanunu’s historic court case. Not one was in the court room on February 22, 2006, when it was revealed that Israel had gotten Microsoft to hand over all the details of Vanunu’s Hotmail account before a court order had been obtained by eluding that he was being charged for espionage.
Vanunu wrote, “Microsoft obeyed the orders and gave them all the details…three months before I was arrested and my computers were confiscated…it is strange to ask Microsoft to give this information before obtaining the court order to listen to my private conversations. It means they wanted to go through my emails in secret, or maybe, with the help of the secret services, the Shaback, Mossad…Sfard [Vanunu's attorney] proved that the police had misled the judges who gave the orders to arrest me: to search my room, to go through my email, to confiscate my computers and that they misled Microsoft to believe they are helping in a case of espionage. The State came to the court with two special secret Government orders; Hisaion [documents or information that are deemed confidential by the government and kept from the court, the defendant, and lawyers.] This allows the prosecution to keep documents related to my court hearing secret. One was from the Minister for Interior Security and one from the Minister of Defense.”
Americans need to know that Vanunu’s secretly taped police interrogations, his 2004 Christmas Eve arrest for “attempting to leave the country” when he attempted to celebrate his first Christmas out of prison at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the confiscation of his private property by thirty Israeli Forces that stormed into his room at St. George’s Cathedral in 2004, according to Vanunu had all “been done…under the false and misleading statements to the courts of ‘suspicion of espionage’, and yet they are not charging me with spy crimes… and the fact is that I have not committed any crimes.”
When Vanunu next faces the Israeli Supreme Court, the world will know more about Israeli democracy and Justice. Until then, learn more @ http://vanunu.com/ and see and hear Vanunu in 2005, 2006, 2008 video interviews freely streaming @ VANUNU ARCHIVES: http://wearewideawake.org/
Eileen Fleming, Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com Author of “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory” Producer “30 Minutes with Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”
Seem you get a lot of e-mail some of it being hate mail. I think all media who receives mountains of mail should keep it and publish it so the readers can see just what happens.
Enough with the hate and intimidation. All Israel wants to do is remove our Freedom of Speech and remove the Freedom of the Press. They want us all kept in the dark.
ST. LOUIS – Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.
With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.
Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family’s dinner table. That’s because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto’s patented genes.
Monsanto’s methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.
The company has used the agreements to spread its technology — giving some 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto’s genes in their separate strains of corn and soybean plants. But, the AP found, access to Monsanto’s genes comes at a cost, and with plenty of strings attached.
For example, one contract provision bans independent companies from breeding plants that contain both Monsanto’s genes and the genes of any of its competitors, unless Monsanto gives prior written permission — giving Monsanto the ability to effectively lock out competitors from inserting their patented traits into the vast share of U.S. crops that already contain Monsanto’s genes.
Monsanto’s business strategies and licensing agreements are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general, who are trying to determine if the practices violate U.S. antitrust laws. The practices also are at the heart of civil antitrust suits filed against Monsanto by its competitors, including a 2004 suit filed by Syngenta AG that was settled with an agreement and ongoing litigation filed this summer by DuPont in response to a Monsanto lawsuit.
The suburban St. Louis-based agricultural giant said it’s done nothing wrong.
“We do not believe there is any merit to allegations about our licensing agreement or the terms within,” said Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles. He said he couldn’t comment on many specific provisions of the agreements because they are confidential and the subject of ongoing litigation.
“Our approach to licensing (with) many companies is pro-competitive and has enabled literally hundreds of seed companies, including all of our major direct competitors, to offer thousands of new seed products to farmers,” he said.
The benefit of Monsanto’s technology for farmers has been undeniable, but some of its major competitors and smaller seed firms claim the company is using strong-arm tactics to further its control.
“We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,” said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades. “The upshot of that is that it’s tightening Monsanto’s control, and makes it possible for them to increase their prices long term. And we’ve seen this happening the last five years, and the end is not in sight.”
At issue is how much power one company can have over seeds, the foundation of the world’s food supply. Without stiff competition, Monsanto could raise its seed prices at will, which in turn could raise the cost of everything from animal feed to wheat bread and cookies.
The price of seeds is already rising. Monsanto increased some corn seed prices last year by 25 percent, with an additional 7 percent hike planned for corn seeds in 2010. Monsanto brand soybean seeds climbed 28 percent last year and will be flat or up 6 percent in 2010, said company spokeswoman Kelli Powers.
Monsanto’s broad use of licensing agreements has made its biotech traits among the most widely and rapidly adopted technologies in farming history. These days, when farmers buy bags of seed with obscure brand names like AgVenture or M-Pride Genetics, they are paying for Monsanto’s licensed products.
One of the numerous provisions in the licensing agreements is a ban on mixing genes — or “stacking” in industry lingo — that enhance Monsanto’s power.
One contract provision likely helped Monsanto buy 24 independent seed companies throughout the Farm Belt over the last few years: that corn seed agreement says that if a smaller company changes ownership, its inventory with Monsanto’s traits “shall be destroyed immediately.”
Another provision from contracts earlier this decade_ regarding rebates — also help explain Monsanto’s rapid growth as it rolled out new products.
One contract gave an independent seed company deep discounts if the company ensured that Monsanto’s products would make up 70 percent of its total corn seed inventory. In its 2004 lawsuit, Syngenta called the discounts part of Monsanto’s “scorched earth campaign” to keep Syngenta’s new traits out of the market.
Quarles said the discounts were used to entice seed companies to carry Monsanto products when the technology was new and farmers hadn’t yet used it. Now that the products are widespread, Monsanto has discontinued the discounts, he said.
The Monsanto contracts reviewed by the AP prohibit seed companies from discussing terms, and Monsanto has the right to cancel deals and wipe out the inventory of a business if the confidentiality clauses are violated.
Thomas Terral, chief executive officer of Terral Seed in Louisiana, said he recently rejected a Monsanto contract because it put too many restrictions on his business. But Terral refused to provide the unsigned contract to AP or even discuss its contents because he was afraid Monsanto would retaliate and cancel the rest of his agreements.
“I would be so tied up in what I was able to do that basically I would have no value to anybody else,” he said. “The only person I would have value to is Monsanto, and I would continue to pay them millions in fees.”
Independent seed company owners could drop their contracts with Monsanto and return to selling conventional seed, but they say it could be financially ruinous. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene has become the industry standard over the last decade, and small companies fear losing customers if they drop it. It also can take years of breeding and investment to mix Monsanto’s genes into a seed company’s product line, so dropping the genes can be costly.
Monsanto acknowledged that U.S. Department of Justice lawyers are seeking documents and interviewing company employees about its marketing practices. The DOJ wouldn’t comment.
A spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said the office is examining possible antitrust violations. Additionally, two sources familiar with an investigation in Texas said state Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office is considering the same issues. States have the authority to enforce federal antitrust law, and attorneys general are often involved in such cases.
Monsanto chairman and chief executive officer Hugh Grant told investment analysts during a conference call this fall that the price increases are justified by the productivity boost farmers get from the company’s seeds. Farmers and seed company owners agree that Monsanto’s technology has boosted yields and profits, saving farmers time they once spent weeding and money they once spent on pesticides.
But recent price hikes have still been tough to swallow on the farm.
“It’s just like I got hit with bad weather and got a poor yield. It just means I’ve got less in the bottom line,” said Markus Reinke, a corn and soybean farmer near Concordia, Mo. who took over his family’s farm in 1965. “They can charge because they can do it, and get away with it. And us farmers just complain, and shake our heads and go along with it.”
Any Justice Department case against Monsanto could break new ground in balancing a company’s right to control its patented products while protecting competitors’ right to free and open competition, said Kevin Arquit, former director of the Federal Trade Commission competition bureau and now a antitrust attorney with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York.
“These are very interesting issues, and not just for the companies, but for the Justice Department,” Arquit said. “They’re in an area where there is uncertainty in the law and there are consumer welfare implications and government policy implications for whatever the result is.”
Other seed companies have followed Monsanto’s lead by including restrictive clauses in their licensing agreements, but their products only penetrate smaller segments of the U.S. seed market. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene, on the other hand, is in such a wide array of crops that its licensing agreements can have a massive effect on the rules of the marketplace.
Monsanto was only a niche player in the seed business just 12 years ago. It rose to the top thanks to innovation by its scientists and aggressive use of patent law by its attorneys.
First came the science, when Monsanto in 1996 introduced the world’s first commercial strain of genetically engineered soybeans. The Roundup Ready plants were resistant to the herbicide, allowing farmers to spray Roundup whenever they wanted rather than wait until the soybeans had grown enough to withstand the chemical.
The company soon released other genetically altered crops, such as corn plants that produced a natural pesticide to ward off bugs. While Monsanto had blockbuster products, it didn’t yet have a big foothold in a seed industry made up of hundreds of companies that supplied farmers.
That’s where the legal innovations came in, as Monsanto became among the first to widely patent its genes and gain the right to strictly control how they were used. That control let it spread its technology through licensing agreements, while shaping the marketplace around them.
Back in the 1970s, public universities developed new traits for corn and soybean seeds that made them grow hardy and resist pests. Small seed companies got the traits cheaply and could blend them to breed superior crops without restriction. But the agreements give Monsanto control over mixing multiple biotech traits into crops.
The restrictions even apply to taxpayer-funded researchers.
Roger Boerma, a research professor at the University of Georgia, is developing specialized strains of soybeans that grow well in southeastern states, but his current research is tangled up in such restrictions from Monsanto and its competitors.
“It’s made one level of our life incredibly challenging and difficult,” Boerma said.
The rules also can restrict research. Boerma halted research on a line of new soybean plants that contain a trait from a Monsanto competitor when he learned that the trait was ineffective unless it could be mixed with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene.
Boerma said he hasn’t considered asking Monsanto’s permission to mix its traits with the competitor’s trait.
“I think the co-mingling of their trait technology with another company’s trait technology would likely be a serious problem for them,” he said.
Quarles pointed out that Monsanto has signed agreements with several companies allowing them to stack their traits with Monsanto’s. After Syngenta settled its lawsuit, for example, the companies struck a broad cross-licensing accord.
At the same time, Monsanto’s patent rights give it the authority to say how independent companies use its traits, Quarles said.
“Please also keep in mind that, as the (intellectual property developer), it is our right to determine who will obtain rights to our technology and for what purpose,” he said.
Monsanto’s provision requiring companies to destroy seeds containing Monsanto’s traits if a competitor buys them prohibited DuPont or other big firms from bidding against Monsanto when it snapped up two dozen smaller seed companies over the last five years, said David Boies, a lawyer representing DuPont who previously was a prosecutor on the federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.
Competitive bids from companies like DuPont could have made it far more expensive for Monsanto to bring the smaller companies into its fold. But that contract provision prevented bidding wars, according to DuPont.
“If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they’re not going to have anything, in effect, to sell,” Boies said. “It requires them to destroy things — destroy things they paid for — if they go competitive. That’s exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw.”
Quarles said some of the Monsanto contracts let companies sell their inventory for a period of time, rather than be required to destroy it. Seed companies also don’t have to pay royalty fees on the bags of seed they destroyed.
“Simply put, it was designed to facilitate early adoption of the technology,” he said.
Some independent seed company owners say they feel increasingly pinched as Monsanto cements its leadership in the industry.
“They have the capital, they have the resources, they own lots of companies, and buying more. We’re small town, they’re Wall Street,” said Bill Cook, co-owner of M-Pride Genetics seed company in Garden City, Mo., who also declined to discuss or provide the agreements. “It’s very difficult to compete in this environment against companies like Monsanto.
Aadel Suad first came to the planning and construction committee of the Misgav Local Council in 1997. Suad, an educator, was seeking a construction permit to build a home on a plot of land he owns in the community of Mitzpeh Kamon. The reply he got, from a senior official on the committee, was a memorable one.
“Don’t waste your time,” he reportedly told Suad. “We’ll keep you waiting for 30 years.”
For Suad it’s now been 12 years of fighting the committee’s red tape to build a home on his own land. The reason, as far as he and his family are concerned, is singular: The local council doesn’t want Arabs, with or without the legal amendments legalizing such objection that passed preliminary reading in the Knesset this week.
“We didn’t invade the plot and we didn’t take over the land,” Suad says. “My grandfather has been here since the Turks. We have a land registry document proving ownership of three acres.”
Suad’s plot is on the northern edge of the hilltop community, founded in 1979. In 1984, Suad’s land, along with others, was redefined as a development area rather than agricultural land. The land was divided into two plots. Suad and his family, who have been living in shacks on the site, were not informed.
“In 1990 we got a notice to pay capital gains taxes on the land, and they only told us about the changes when we asked for an explanation,” he says.
The plots were split between the family and the Israel Land Administration. Only one plot was owned by the family – half an acre, minus half a square meter owned by the ILA.
Having paid the tax, Suad asked for a written confirmation of the change. “This usually takes a couple of days,” he says. “They dragged it on for 8 months.” While repeatedly refusing to sell the land or swap it for a plot outside Kamon, Suad was told that his plot is jointly owned by the ILA, because of the 50 square centimeters.
“They asked me for a document stating the ILA was giving up their part in the plot,” Suad says. “It took the ILA another 4 years.”
In 2007, the planning committee finally gave the construction permit, under four conditions: Suad would promise to demolish his shack, the future house would be moved by some 12 meters, Suad would contribute a part of the land to public needs, and he himself would ensure the house is connected to all infrastructure. Suad agreed to everything, but then found that no sewage line extended to his land. His suggestion to install a cesspit was rejected, despite this being a common practice in the community.
“I even offered to pave the 150 meters of the road at my own expense,” Suad said. “We were supposed to meet about it on December 8, but then they told me the meeting was off.”
“It’s clear that the threat I heard in 1997 is coming true. They don’t want us here. But I’ll keep fighting until my children and I live on our private land,” he said.
The Misgav Local Council rejected the accusations. The council said Suad’s plot is located far from the other homes of the community and has no roads, sidewalks, lighting, water or sewer. All these would need to be connected through other plots, some of which are privately owned, the council said.
The council also said Suad’s construction permit was conditioned on coming up with a plan to connect the plot to infrastructure, which he failed to produce in sufficient detail, or to accompany it with permits.
Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian West Bank have vandalised a mosque, torching its library and spraying hate messages in Hebrew on the building.
The graffiti on the mosque bodes badly for settlers accepting a return to 1967 borders (AFP)
The attack blamed on hardline Jews on Friday may be linked to plans that seek to curb their illegal settlement activity on land taken from Palestinians.
Clashes erupted as villagers hurled stones at Israeli troops sent to investigate the incident at the mosque in the northern West Bank’s Yasuf village. The security forces responded with teargas.
One of the Hebrew language slogans sprayed on a wall read: “Get ready to pay the price.” Another read: “We will burn you all.”
Village councillors and Palestinian security officials blamed Israelis from a nearby settlement for the attack.
Settler anger
The area is home to some of the most hardline settlers who advocate a “price tag” policy under which they target Palestinians in retaliation for any Israeli government measure they see as threatening Jewish settlements.
The Israeli military said “it appears that the suspects wrote hate-filled messages in Hebrew in addition to burning bookshelves and a carpet.”
It assured the Palestinian Authority that it “views the incident gravely” and that security forces are working to locate the perpetrators, the statement said.
Last week, a house and three vehicles were set on fire in another village, also near the West Bank city of Nablus. The owner of the house told police he saw three Jewish settlers start the fires.
Settlers have expressed outrage over the government’s decision to impose a 10-month moratorium on new building permits for Israeli homes in the occupied West Bank, outside annexed Arab east Jerusalem.
Many settlers consider they have a God-given right to live in the biblical Land of Israel, which includes the West Bank.
WMD treaty violations and inspection refusal for biological, nuclear, chemical weapons. Iran? No, US
By Carl Herman
December 11, 2009
First, the length of a headline prevents me from including the damning introduction of treaty violation of torture, illegal war, use of depleted uranium, and refusal to make antipersonnel landmines illegal. Now, to substantiate the headline’s shocking and factual lead:
The last biological attack, anthrax in the US in 2001, was weaponized and supplied by a US military facility. The official suspect was reported as “committing suicide.” Richard Spertzel, head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom found the FBI’s conclusion as impossible. Other analyses (here, here, here) explain concurrent news that attempted to blame Iraq as the source, and speculate this was a false flag attack for the US to invade Iraq. Ultimately, other false reasons justified that unlawful war.
Ironically and hypocritically, the US filed an official report under BWC stating the US “belief” that Iran is “probably” developing biological weapons in sanctimonious language of the importance of BWC compliance.
The US is also in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for nuclear weapons and energy use. In the history of the treaty, the US has refused to negotiate for complete disarmament and verification per treaty terms and actively plans to use nuclear weapons, including first-strike use against “enemies” who may only become threats in the future. The US is also in violation for refusing Iran their right for nuclear energy development in every act but their empty rhetoric. The US aggresses against Iran, with official policy for nuclear weapons first-strike use having language specifically targeting Iran. This, despite all 16 US intelligence agencies in agreement there is no evidence of Iran developing nuclear weapons, and IAEA’s agreement there is no documented evidence with them either.
Finally, the US is in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). The deadline for complete elimination for these weapons passed in 2007; the US requested and received an extension until 2012. The US plans to not fulfill this treaty until 2023, and does not submit to full inspections. Only this last provision is defensible under treaty terms.
The US uses depleted uranium (DU) in its weapons; a War Crime, according to Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon’s depleted uranium project who commanded the US Department of Defense’s first Gulf war depleted uranium desert clean-up. Colonel Rokke, also a former professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University concluded:
There is a moral point to be made here. This war was about Iraq possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction — yet we are using weapons of mass destruction ourselves. Such double-standards are repellent.
Karen Parker, an attorney who presented her brief, “The illegality of DU weaponry” to the International Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, October 16 – 19, 2003, concluded the medical evidence of DU as a WMD is clear, convincing, and documented from the medical evidence requested by the UN (summary here). Parker concludes the UN has failed to act upon this evidence from political pressure of the US and other developed nations’ militaries who desire DU despite its clear violation of law as WMD.
And the US tortures (and here); including their own citizens. The US has a history of refusing International Red Cross inspections to verify compliance of international torture law.
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” – Martin Luther King in his speech: Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence
Analysis: The US has invaded and occupied the Middle Eastern countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, is bombing Pakistan, and aggresses toward war with Iran. These acts of war are all unlawful. The US employs Orwellian psychopathic rhetoric to threaten Iran from empty allegations of their “nuclear program” and needing to “fulfill their legal obligations” while hypocritically in murderous violation of their own from several treaties structured to protect humanity. You have to read these facts and analysis from non-corporate media sources, such as here, as corporate media will echo justification of current unlawful wars and propagandize for escalation and new wars.
Policy response: Gandhi and Martin Luther King advocated public understanding of the facts and non-cooperation with evil. I’m among hundreds who advocate:
Understand the laws of war. These were legislated after WW2 and are crystal-clear that only self-defense, in a narrow legal meaning, can justify war. This investment of your time takes less than an hour and empowers you to legally stand for ending these Wars of Aggression.
Refuse and end all orders and acts associated with these unlawful wars. Those involved with US military, government, and law enforcement have an oath to protect and defend the US Constitution. Unlawful acts only move forward with sufficient cooperation and public tolerance. Stop cooperating with the most vicious crime a nation can commit: war. Stop tolerating it.
Prosecute the war leaders for obvious violation of the letter and spirit of US war laws. You can only understand how these wars are specifically unlawful by investing the time to do so. Because the crimes are so broad and deep, I recommend Truth and Reconciliation (T&R) to exchange full truth and return of stolen US assets for non-prosecution. This is the most expeditious way to understand and end all unlawful and harmful acts. Those who reject T&R either by volunteering their name and/or responding when named are subject to prosecution after the window of T&R closes.
Below is a one-minute excerpt from the History Chanel’s coverage of the US anthrax attacks explaining that the attack was “an inside job.” Following is a 10-minute interview with Eric Nadler of Dead Silence to explain the case that the government’s reporting on the anthrax attack is false.
Please share this article with all who can benefit. If you appreciate my work, please subscribe by clicking under the article title (it’s free). Please use my archive of work to help build a brighter future.
One should practice what they preach. The
US and Israel both refuse inspectors in.
Both however condemn Iran, who has let inspectors in. Iran has complied with inspectors and had over 25 inspections.
Israel and the US are the ones who should be sanctioned for non compliance.
Seems to me the ones refusing inspectors in are the Real Criminals.
Now one has to ask how many NATO countries have been inspected?
If any? Or do International laws just apply to everyone else except them? If this is the case then the Laws are absolutely unfair.
If the Laws apply to one it must apply to all. No exceptions.
US Army goes shopping for Anthrax. Would you like that giftwrapped?
By Lucy Sherriff
September 26 2005
The US Army has asked companies to bid for contracts to produce large quantities of anthrax and equipment to produce other unnamed biological agents, according to New Scientist, but has not said what it needs the facilities for.
Alan Pearson, programme director for biological and chemical weapons at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington DC, says the contracts raise serious questions about the US’ commitment to the Biological Weapons Convention.
Anti-biological weapons campaigner Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project discovered the contracts, which were issued this year.
One contract specifies: “The company must have the ability and be willing to grow Bacillus anthracis Sterne strain at 1500-litre quantities.” Others call for a 3,000-litre production capacity for unnamed biological agents and sheep carcasses to investigate incineration of infected animals.
The non-virulent Sterne strain of the bacterium is the only one specified in any of the documents. It is not thought to be harmful to humans, and is used in vaccination. However, the same equipment could easily be put to use to grow spores of the lethal Ames strain, and it is this that has raised eyebrows.
Speaking to New Scientist, Hammond asked: “What would happen to the Biological Weapons Convention if other countries followed suit and built large biological production facilities at secretive military bases known for weapons testing?”
The tenders were issued by the US army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Dugway maintains that the contracts are still at the “pre-solicitation” phase, and that there is currently no Anthrax at the base.
Dugway has refused to elaborate on what it needs the anthrax for, and although there is no suggestion that the US intends to restart its biological weapons programme, Hammond argues that the military might want to use the agent to test biological weapons delivery systems, for threat assessment.
Ayman Abu Aita waches extracts from Sacha Baron Cohen’s new hit movie ‘Bruno’, in which Aitta says he was presented as a ‘terrorist’
A Palestinian shopkeeper portrayed as a terrorist in the film Bruno is suing Sacha Baron Cohen, US talk show host David Letterman and others in a £67.5 million defamation case.
The action filed by Ayman Abu Aita in US federal court seeks 110 million dollars in damages for libel and slander.
In the film, Cohen plays a gay Austrian fashion journalist trying to make it big in the US. To achieve worldwide fame, Bruno travels to the Middle East to make peace. He interviews Abu Aita, and a caption labels the Bethlehem shopkeeper as a member of the militant Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade.
Mr Abu Aita is suing CBS and Letterman’s company Worldwide Pants over an interview before the film’s release where the Late Show host and comedian Cohen discussed Bruno’s encounter with a “terrorist”.
In the interview, Cohen, 37, said he set up the meeting in the West Bank with the help of a CIA agent.
Cohen said he feared for his safety and interviewed the “terrorist” at a secret location chosen by Mr Abu Aita. A clip was then played on The Late Show with David Letterman.
According to the lawsuit, however, the interview with Mr Abu Aita took place at a hotel chosen by Cohen and located in a part of the West Bank that was under Israeli military control.
Film distributor NBC Universal and director Larry Charles are also named in the lawsuit.
A spokeswoman for Universal Studios declined to comment. Tom Keaney, a spokesman for David Letterman, also said he would not comment.
Cohen also faced multiple lawsuits after his earlier movie Borat including one for £18.4 million filed by residents of a remote Romanian village who said they were misled into thinking the project was a documentary about poverty. Most of the lawsuits were thrown out.
Mr Abu Aita is prominent businessman, a Christian and a “peace-loving person who abhors violence”, the latest lawsuit states.
Before the film, he “enjoyed a good reputation for honesty and a peaceable nature” in his community, his lawyers wrote.
They say any accusations or insinuations that he is or ever was associated with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, or any other terrorist activity, was “utterly false and untrue”.
Lawyer Joseph Drennan said mr Abu Aita was never offered a release to sign to appear in the film.
“This is an important lawsuit because it is about the dignity of a specific person. It is about his reputation, about his standing in the community,” Mr Drennan said.
“It addresses a very corrosive and calumnious slur against any young Palestinian who would be a political activist on the West Bank”, who would be called a “terrorist” because of his activism.
Hatem Abu Ahmad, Mr Abu Aita’s Arab-Israeli lawyer, said Cohen made millions “on the back of my client”.
The film drew disdain from the Israelis and Palestinians portrayed in a place Bruno calls Middle Earth.
Mr Drennan said he expected a hearing on Mr Abu Aita’s complaint in late January.
I hope he wins. Something like that could do a lot of damage to a person including getting him killed. Being called a terrorists is outrageous when you are a peaceful person. This borderlines a hate crime for profit.
Riots have broken out in Athens and Salonica during the first day of A. Grigoropoulos murder anniversary with police demonstrating extreme brutality leaving two people seriously wounded by a motorised charge on the Athens march.
Police brutality during the marches to comemmorate the first anniversary of Alexandros Grigoropoulos murder surpassed any limit today, in a coordinated operation of barbarity and crude violence against protesters across greece. Under socialist orders police violence has left dozens of people wounded.
In Athens the protest march called at 13:00 in Propylea was attacked by riot police forces before even starting. Protesters fought back erecting flaming barricades and forcing the police to retreat with use of rocks. Protesters also occupied the rectorial headquarters of the University of Athens in Propylea, lowering the greek flag and flying a black flag in its place. The march continued to Omonoia square where more clashes took place and several shops were destroyed -one consumed in flames. At Syntagma square motorised police forces (Delta team) charged the march from Ermou street. After the charge the Delta-team thugs dismounted and threw rocks at the protesters. As a cause of the police orgy in violence, an elderly member of the Worker’s Revolutionary Party-Trotskyist (EEK) has been reported to be in serious condition due to head injuries: Ms Koutsoumbou, a veteran prisoner of the anti-dictatorship struggle, was hit by a Delta force motorbike during the mounted charge on the crowd. According to Savas Michail, leading member of EEK and major radical philosopher, Ms Koutsoumbou is in intensive care having received far worse hits than during her tortures by the colonels’ junta. One more man has been hospitalised with serious injuries. At the time 60 people are reported detained.
In Salonica the 3,000 strong protest march turned violent when riot police attacked it without any provocation with tear gas and blast grenades. Clashes ensued along the main avenue of the city. The police surrounded some 200 protesters outside the Ministry of Macedonia and Thrace, but were liberated by the rest of the march. The previous night the police broke the university asylum in the Salonica Polytechnic arresting 8 people who the authorities claim had attacked the International Expo with molotov cocktails. The march in Salonica has not been concluded at the time of writing and the situation is particularly tense as the protesters are returning to the main avenue to protest against police brutality.
In Larissa the protest march proceeded through the main streets of the city smashing CCTV cameras, coming under attack by riot police forces. The protesters errected barricades and engaged the cops with stones and other projectiles.
There is little information about the course of the marches in other greek cities.
At the same time, the 21 people arrested in the anarchist social centre Resalto last night have been charged under the notorious anti-terrorist law for construction and distribution of explosives (beer bottles and two bottles of heating oil).
The protest marches for the 1st anniversary of Alexandros Grigoropoulos murder by police will continue on Monday, while at 21:00 on Sunday there will be a memorial demo at the spot of his shooting in Exarcheia.
Greece’s worst protests in decades, sparked by the shooting of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, have fed on simmering anger at high youth unemployment and the world economic crisis.
Activists in Greece demanded the interior minister’s resignation on Monday over the severe injury of a Pakistani man in an alleged police attack on asylum-seekers.
The 24-year-old Pakistani man has been in a coma since December 6 2008.
In October, another Pakistani asylum-seeker died after falling into the same riverbed while allegedly trying to avoid police.
A few weeks after the “departure”, in 1974, of the US-supported dictatorship in Greece, I was in the luxurious ground floor of the Bank of Greece where I was filling some forms to secure the necessary exchange for the purchase of a book from a US publisher. I was sitting at a long heavy table. It was early in the day, there were not many people in the huge ground floor and the two security policemen there came and sat at the other end of the table and started chatting. I was wearing a US-made sport jacket. They took me for a foreigner and started talking freely. The older (fat) one says: “So, Karamanlis came from Paris [after the dictatorship] and instead of giving us money, the asshole bought helmets and riot gear for us”. That, Karamanlis, was the uncle of the (rather rotund) present Karamanlis, the Prime Minister of Greece. Karamanlis, the uncle, is referred to as the “Ethnarch” [the "father" of the nation]. Actually, he was a US-chosen rightist proxy to administer Greece on behalf of the US in the early 1950s.
The problems in Greece stem fro US intervention and installing a Dictator. Does this sound to familiar.
Recently this has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. The US installed who they choose not who the people really want. Don’t kid yourselves to think those people were elected they were chosen.
The US with the help of Israel has been propping up Dictators around the world for years. They should leave the world alone. They create police states not democracy.The create wars for profit and to control the worlds resources.
The Global warming scam was to further deepen their control over the worlds resources including the farmers.
The Climate change scam was world wide. This was to create a world Government. Fortunately a Hacker retrieved E-mails from the scientists who were bought an paid for by those behind the Global Warming Hoax.
I like Lord Christopher Monckton read the draft copy of the Copenhagen “Proposed Treaty”. The link to it is in the above link.
It certainly left a lot to be desired. 90% of rules laws and regulations would be created after those world leaders signed it. The rules laws and policies are unknown and would be created by a select few. They would be creating yet another Bank like the World bank or IMF which both contributed to world pollution. They both also lead to extreme abuse of third world countries as did Free Trade Agreements that allow polluters to destroy the environment of all countries. Check my archives and the information is all there. They would be the world Dictators and Dictate what countries can or cannot do. They would create and enforce the laws. The warmongers being the countries that cause wars and pollution would be the Dictators of policy, new laws and enforcement.
The pollution left from these entities is horrendous. Mining companies are devastating many countries. Many countries have paramilitaries to control the innocent people living there as in Columbia Union members are murdered. Coca Cola is not a nice corporation.
All of the entities are set up to assure corporations cheap labour and the theft of natural resources. All for profit and control over regions.
We cannot believe everything we are told by our Governments. Many are bought and sold by outside forces. Main stream media is now owned by a select few who control what we are told.
Fox News for example is nothing but a propaganda spewing, hate mongering, misrepresentation of anything real. You will not get the truth about what is happening from them. Ex employees told us that. They will tell you what they want you to believe not necessarily the truth. If we should have anything removed from the planet is should be war pollution. It has long term affects and kills millions around the world. This of course was never touched in the Global warming scam. War Pollution is deadly to all of us. It is the cause of cancer and deformities etc on a massive scale. War Pollution is the deadliest type of pollution known to man. The mining, creation and use of the weapons is beyond outrageous. Not once did we hear anything about the elimination of this type of pollution.
Also in the past few years Israel has bee attempting with the help of the US to remove the freedoms of Canadians.
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.
The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.
The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.
The agreement, leaked to the Guardian, is a departure from the Kyoto protocol‘s principle that rich nations, which have emitted the bulk of the CO2, should take on firm and binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, while poorer nations were not compelled to act. The draft hands effective control of climate change finance to the World Bank; would abandon the Kyoto protocol – the only legally binding treaty that the world has on emissions reductions; and would make any money to help poor countries adapt to climate change dependent on them taking a range of actions.
The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as “a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks”.
A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries also seen by the Guardian shows deep unease over details of the text. In particular, it is understood to:
• Force developing countries to agree to specific emission cuts and measures that were not part of the original UN agreement;
• Divide poor countries further by creating a new category of developing countries called “the most vulnerable”;
• Weaken the UN’s role in handling climate finance;
• Not allow poor countries to emit more than 1.44 tonnes of carbon per person by 2050, while allowing rich countries to emit 2.67 tonnes.
Developing countries that have seen the text are understood to be furious that it is being promoted by rich countries without their knowledge and without discussion in the negotiations.
“It is being done in secret. Clearly the intention is to get [Barack] Obama and the leaders of other rich countries to muscle it through when they arrive next week. It effectively is the end of the UN process,” said one diplomat, who asked to remain nameless.
Antonio Hill, climate policy adviser for Oxfam International, said: “This is only a draft but it highlights the risk that when the big countries come together, the small ones get hurting. On every count the emission cuts need to be scaled up. It allows too many loopholes and does not suggest anything like the 40% cuts that science is saying is needed.”
Hill continued: “It proposes a green fund to be run by a board but the big risk is that it will run by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility [a partnership of 10 agencies including the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme] and not the UN. That would be a step backwards, and it tries to put constraints on developing countries when none were negotiated in earlier UN climate talks.”
The text was intended by Denmark and rich countries to be a working framework, which would be adapted by countries over the next week. It is particularly inflammatory because it sidelines the UN negotiating process and suggests that rich countries are desperate for world leaders to have a text to work from when they arrive next week.
Few numbers or figures are included in the text because these would be filled in later by world leaders. However, it seeks to hold temperature rises to 2C and mentions the sum of $10bn a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change from 2012-15.
Rich countries are the absolute worst offenders. Seems to me if anyone should clean up their act it would be the Rich countries.
They just want control over the Poor countries at any rate. That is what they have always been doing. Considering the entire thing is a hoax what else could it be. Control power and more profit from the poor.
More opening of markets to take control and privatize weak countries.
Some things just never change.
Global Warming Fraud: Somebody Needs to Go to Jail
By Alan Caruba Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The revelations that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) doctored the data supporting the global warming claims of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) means that EVERYTHING attributed to or based upon “global warming” is invalid.
It means the Kyoto Climate Protocols that nations agreed to on December 11, 1997 and which entered into force on February 16 2005, and all subsequent agreements based on “global warming” have no validity, scientifically or as the basis for public action by any nation, state, province, city or town.
It means that Al Gore’s pusillanimous “documentary” is a fraud along with just about every other statement uttered by any scientist, academician, or politician claiming that something, anything, should be done to avoid “global warming.”
There is no “global warming”, if by that discredited term, you mean a dramatic increase in the Earth’s temperature, the vast rising of ocean levels, the melting of the polar ice caps, and the thousands of other things attributed to a massive fraud orchestrated by the IPCC and a vast network of scientists and environmental groups that benefited from the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars they received in grants and other payments for their “research.”
Global warming, allegedly the result of rising levels of “greenhouse gas emissions”, primarily carbon dioxide (C02), underwrites the sale of “carbon credits” that industries, utilities, and other entities purchased for the “right” to use energy and as further revelations about the doctoring and virtual invention of false scientific data become known, it means those sales were a complete fraud.
It was never really a secret. You could have read about in “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know” and a dozen other books I can put my hand on this very moment. The only thing missing was the proverbial “smoking gun” and the revelations about the CRU now confirms what the “deniers” and “skeptics” kept saying.
It’s worth keeping in mind that in several Northeastern States, utilities were required by law to purchase these worthless carbon credits and spend millions, not on improvements to the electric grid, not on building more capacity to serve their customers, but on what is worthless paper. Someone needs to go to jail
The release of thousands of emails and other data, now believed to be the work of a conscious-stricken CRU insider, will as they are examined in detail reveal what has long been known to those actively opposing the “global warming” fraud. As Christopher Horner, the author of “Red Hot Lies”, recently noted, the CRU and its lead scientists refused for years to release the data which they alleged proved that “global warming” was happening.
This data and the periodic reports of the IPCC are the basis for the existence of the IPCC, the Kyoto Protocol, and the “cap-and-trade” legislation awaiting a vote in the U.S. Congress. Horner observed “After running out of excuses, in September CRU’s Phil Jones simply claimed that he had lost the data so, sorry, no one can check it.” Horner called it “implausible beyond comprehension.”
And yet the United States and the representatives of many other nations will gather in Copenhagen in December for yet another UN conference on climate change, the now preferred synonym for “global warming.” Basing any international treaty on climate change or global warming is an utterly deceitful act.
The IPCC conference is based on the original Kyoto Protocol and, since there is no global warming, and since the science supporting it has been revealed to be false and misleading, no action should be taken other to disband the IPCC entirely.
All U.S. laws and regulations based on the so-called “global warming” should be reexamined and exorcised from the Congressional Register and from all state bodies of law. Most certainly, “cap-and-trade” should be withdrawn from further consideration.
Beyond that, school books about the environment must now be reviewed to determine how much of their content is invalid as well.
The undoing of this fraud must begin and begin NOW!
Watch out, Al Gore. The glaciers will get you!” With that appended note, my friend, retired field geologist Jack Sauers, forwarded to me a report that should have been a lead item in every newspaper in the world. It was the news that the best-measured glacier in North America, the Nisqually on Mount Rainier, has been growing since 1931.
The Global warming hoax apparently was to sneak a one world Government by us all. It almost worked too. Thanks to a Hacker finding e-mails that will be put on hold for a bit. Now all we have to do is find out who payed of the Scientist to fuge the entire thing.
On October 14, Lord Christopher Monckton gave a presentation in St. Paul, MN on the subject of global warming. In this 4-minute excerpt from his speech, he issues a dire warning to all Americans regarding the United Nations Climate Change Treaty that is scheduled to be signed in Copenhagen in December 2009.
Seems the planet is cooling which could be attributed to Radiation. Much of which comes from War Pollution. Nuclear Winter maybe.
OTTAWA — The federal government released almost 200 pages of heavily censored documents about Afghanistan detainees on Wednesday, prompting critics to assert that the excessive secrecy highlights the need for a public inquiry.
“What we’ve seen from this government is a whole lot of redaction, in other words blacked out documents,” charged Paul Dewar, NDP foreign affairs critic. “It’s like reading tea leaves.”
Dewar produced his own document, obtained through an access to information request, showing that the government had blacked out a reference to torture in a 2006 report from its own Foreign Affairs bureaucrats on the state of human rights in Afghanistan.
The original, unedited, document, which was leaked to the media in 2007, concluded that “extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial are all too common.”
“This is precisely why Canadians can’t trust any documents with redactions from this government,” said Dewar.
The British Columbia Civil Liberties Association joined calls for a judicial inquiry. The association’s litigation director, Grace Pastine, said that the “heavily, heavily redacted” federal reports shed little light on what the government knew about allegations that Taliban insurgents were abused after Canadian troops handed the captives over to Afghan control.
The government released the documents Wednesday to a special House of Commons committee on Afghanistan, which requested them two weeks ago to support allegations from senior bureaucrat Richard Colvin that his superiors in Ottawa and Afghanistan turned a blind eye to his allegations in 2006 that detainees were tortured in Afghan jails.
Colleen Swords, who was an assistant deputy minister during Colvin’s 17-month stint in Afghanistan, refuted Colvin’s allegations that he persistently warned her and other government officials about torture. Colvin fingered Swords in particular, saying that she told him to use the phone instead of putting his concerns in writing.
Swords appeared before the committee one week after three military generals and a former deputy foreign minister, David Mulroney, dismissed Colvin’s allegations as untrue.
In Beijing, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters he has no intention of calling a public inquiry.
“The government of Canada has taken all necessary actions in all instances where there is proof of abuse of Afghan prisoners,” Harper said. “I think the opposition has nothing to do when it is talking about something that happened three years ago.”
As the government released its redacted documents, the head of the Military Police Complaints Commission, Peter Tinsley, permitted the release of material the government had provided to the commission, which is conducting a probe into the role of the military police in transferring detainees.
Tinsley concluded that the government has leaked so many of the documents to the media that the records should be publicly released to protect Colvin’s reputation from being impugned.
Colvin is one of almost two dozen witnesses who have been called to testify at the commission but the government has been trying to block them, citing national security concerns. The Commons committee began public hearings last month after the commission puts its probe on hold, saying it cannot proceed because it has been stonewalled by the government.
The newly released reports confirm Colvin’s contention that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the humanitarian organization responsible for monitoring the human-rights situation in Afghanistan, repeatedly raised red flags in 2006 over Canada handing over detainees without an adequate process in place to keep track of them.
One year later, in the spring of 2007, the government strengthened its transfer-of-prisoners arrangement with Afghanistan to ensure followup and prison monitoring.
Meanwhile, newly released documents show Red Cross officials complained in May and September 2006 that the Canadian military was refusing to provide basic information about Afghans it was holding captive, hampering the international organization’s efforts to keep track of prisoners.
The heavily censored records, released late Wednesday by the government, provide a glimpse into how federal bureaucrats and military officers, both in Ottawa and Afghanistan, were dealing with individuals being detained by Canadian troops in Kandahar.
“Because of inadequate information collection and occasional reporting delays, the (censored from documents) office is losing track of some Afghan detainees,” a May 26, 2006, e-mail sent by Colvin and circulated to various officials in Foreign Affairs and the Defence Department, pointed out.
“Efforts to resolve these problems to date have not been successful. (Organization name censored from document) ‘very much taken aback’ by the lack of co-operation from Cdn military in theatre.”
The e-mail was also sent to the office of then Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay.
The e-mail pointed out the Red Cross was concerned it was taking as long as two months before the Canadian military was providing notification that a person had been detained. “And a lot can happen in two months,” it added.
With files from David Akin and David Pugliese, Canwest News Service and Ottawa Citizen Video at the Source. Source
I smell a cover up. Harper is not to be trusted to many times he has gone behind Canadians backs to make backroom deals.
Like “The Canadian and Israel Public Security Agreement”
Want to know about Israels terrorist activities checkHERE.
It’s a rather long list including using Mossad using Canadian passports in an assasinsination attempt.
Harper is also trying to remove Freedom of Speech from Canadians.
So if any Canadians drop by or you know any please send them the link of the Post Below. There is a Petition as well as Gov. MP Contact info and information.
The Government has gone so far as to ban a British MP from entering Canada because he supported those in Gaza. Absolutely Appalling.
This must be addressed and soon. Seems the Harper Government is trying to Criminalize free speech at the urging of Israel.
Canada already has hate laws to protect people . Those laws are sufficient there is no need for any other laws. There is very little antisemitism in Canada. This legislation will be used to cover the crimes if Israel and prevent Canadians from speaking out against them. This is totally unnecessary.
When Israel violates Human Rights and Canadians who wish to, should have the Freedom to say so. Not only is it their right it is their obligation to speak out against oppression of any peoples in any country.
Defend Canadian Free Speech from Israel’s representatives who would criminalize it. Please sign Petition.
I advise also to Contact the Canadian Politicians Directly and let them know you want your free speech and not to bend to the will of the Israeli Lobby groups.
Canadians have the right to speak on behalf of those who are being persecuted no matter what country is at fault. Sign the petition and or let your representatives know, you will not tolerate your loss of Freedom of Speech.
Check the Archives for more stories they are segregated by month.
Just click on whatever month and it will bring up all the links to postings for the month. There is a lot of information there. If you don’t know about what is happening in Gaza or the West Bank at the hand of Israel get educated.
The things Canadians will never be allowed to talk about if they pass this legislation are many. Crimes against humanity are committed by Israel almost daily.
“The Canadian and Israel Public Security Agreement”,
British MP George Galloway barred from Canada under the Canada Israel “Public Security” Agreement
by Michel Chossudovsky
March 26, 2009
British MP George Galloway was refused entry to Canada on the pretext that he supported Hamas, which is categorized by the Canadian government as a “terrorist organization.”
Point of Interest before you finish reading. Hamas was Democratically elected Not a Terrorists group. They are a party just like Democrats, Liberal, Labour, NDP, Conservative or Republican etc.
Contrary to what has been reported in the media, this was not a unilateral decision by the government of Canada.
In all likelihood, the decision was taken in close consultation with Israel under the terms of a farreaching agreement on “public security” signed in Tel Aviv on March 23 2008. The ”Declaration of Intent” establishes a framework of bilateral cooperation between Canada and Israel in the area of “Public Security”. The agreement has not been the object of debate in the Canadian parliament, nor has it received media coverage.
Under the proposed agreement, the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada is in liason with his Israeli counterpart the Director General of Public Security for the Government of the State of Israel. Together they chair a joint Management Committee.
The terms reference of the Canada-Israel “Declaration” are extremely broad. They include issues of immigration and ethnic profiling, the management of borders, intelligence and the exchange of information, emergency preparedness, correctional services, prisons, law enforcement and counter-terrorism. The agreement allows for officials from the State of Israel, to play a role in Canadian “public security” including border security and immigration.
The important question is whether Israeli officials were present in Canada and whether they were assisting their Canadian counterparts with regard to the decision to bar George Galloway.
The article below provides detailed information on the nature of this Canadian-Israeli project.
Also see text of agreement in ANNEX, Michel Chossudovsky, March 26, 2009
The Canada-Israel “Public Security” Agreement
Ottawa & Tel Aviv collaborate in counter-terrorism & Homeland security
by Michel Chossudovsky
April 2, 2008
Canada and Israel have signed a far-reaching public security cooperation agreement.
The agreement, described as a “Partnership”, involves a “Declaration of Intent” by the two governments. The Declaration was signed in Tel Aviv on March 23:
“Today, the Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety Canada and Avi Dicter, Minister of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel, signed a Declaration of Intent to enhance cooperation in the area of public safety.
“The Government of Canada is committed to enhancing the security of Canadians – both through our actions at home and with our international partners.” said Minister Day. “Today’s declaration demonstrates the longstanding cooperation between Canada and Israel on public safety issues, and we welcome this increased cooperation in order to improve our countries’ capacity to protect our citizens.”
This declaration will allow Canada and Israel to better enhance cooperation in the areas of organized crime, emergency management, crime prevention, and other related public safety concerns. The declaration seeks to establish a more structured framework for the continued cooperation on public safety issues between Canada and Israel.
“The Declaration of Intent is an opportunity for Canada and Israel to strengthen their commitment to safeguarding their citizens and respective national interests from common threats,” said Minister Dicter.” ( http://www.ps-sp.gc.ca/app_support/xml/ps_news_e.xml)
Cheney Mission to the Middle East Shrouded in Secrecy
Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day was in Israel on the same day as Vice Cheney Dick Cheney.
Coincidentally, a US mission led by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was also in Israel on official business, as guest of Israel’s Minister of Public Security, Avi Dicter. There are no reports on Canada-US-Israeli consultations during these official visits. In all likelihood, officials from the respective departments/ministries of US Homeland Security, Israel’s Public Security and Canada’s Public Safety had meetings behind closed doors.
Terms of Reference of the Partnership
Israel’s Ministry of Public Security carries out public security, law enforcement activities. It is also in charge of the operation of Israel’s prisons, which are in large part used to detain Palestinians.
Canada’s Ministry of Public Safety, established in 2003, is a copy and paste version of US Homeland Security. Public Safety Canada has a close bilateral relationship with US Homeland Security.
Public Safety Canada works closely with several government agencies including the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA), The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Correctional Service Canada (CSC) and The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Officials from these agencies have no doubt been consulted regarding the terms of reference of the Israel-Canada declaration.
The terms reference of the Canada-Israel Declaration are extremely broad. They include issues of immigration and ethnic profiling, the management of borders, intelligence and the exchange of information, emergency preparedness, correctional services, prisons, law enforcement and counter-terrorism.
The Declaration of Intent involves the setting up of a close bilateral cooperation arrangement at the ministerial level. A management committee has been set up under the helm of the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada, and the Director General of Public Security of the State of Israel.
Senior Israeli and Canadian officials respectively from Israel’s Ministry of Public Security and from various Canadian federal departments and agencies (including the RCMP, CSIS and CBSA), which are under the jurisdiction of Stockwell Day’s ministry would carry out “an approved program of work”.
The programme would be implemented by a Senior Coordinator from each country, namely, the Assistant Deputy Minister (Strategic Policy) for Canada’s Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness and the Deputy Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Public Security of the State of Israel;
Nature of the Agreement
The agreement requires the two countries to “[b]uild on their shared commitment to facilitate and enhance cooperation to protect their respective countries’ population, assets and interests from common threats”.
What type of border security and control of immigrants is involved?
How does this impinge upon Canada’s immigration procedures?
The agreement appears to be built upon a much broader agreement between Canada and the US in the area of Homeland Security. However, it also replicates the pattern of a February 2006 agreement reached between US Homeland Security and Israel’s Ministry of Public Security
The Israel-Canada agreement has been in the pipeline since Israel’s Public Security Minister Avi Dicter’s October 2007 visit to the US and Canada. Avi Dicter met Stockwell Day last October in Toronto “with the intention on establishing cooperation on homeland security” and counter-terrorism.
Israel is not part of North America. Canada and Israel do not share a common border. So what is the underlying agenda?
Will Canada assist Israel in policing its border with Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories?
Conversely, will Israeli officials assist Canada in ethnic profiling of people (including biometric applications, which is mentioned in the agreement) who visit Canada from the Middle East?
Will Israeli officials have access to confidential files of Canadians?
What type of cooperation is envisaged in the areas of prisons and law enforcement? Interrogation techniques? Are Israeli consultants going to help us reorganize our correctional services?
The agreement would allow officials from the State of Israel, a country on record for its numerous human rights violations acts directed against the people of Palestine and Lebanon, to play a role in Canadian public security. In this regard, will Israeli officials assist the RCMP and CSIS in the profiling of Canadians citizens who are Muslims. This ethnic profiling is already applied at Canadian airports.
Will Israeli officials assist their Canadian counterparts in dealing with individuals and/or organizations in Canada involved in supporting the rights of Palestinians. Will Israeli officials assist their Canadian counterparts in the domestic “war on terrorism”, which in the post 9/11 period has led to numerous arbitrary detentions on trumped-up charges.
At the same time, the Declaration establishes a de facto complicit relationship whereby Canadian officials (RCMP, etc) would contribute to assisting Israel in its domestic police and border activities (e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and the West Bank), not under the auspices of the United Nations, but directly in cooperation with Israeli police and security officials.
In fact, Canada’s ”contribution” to the policing of Israel’s borders with Gaza and the West Bank is already part of a 300 million dollar aid package in support of the “peace process”. According to Public Safety Canada, ”a significant component [of the 300 million will be] devoted to security, including policing and public order capacity-building. This five year commitment will go towards the creation of a democratic, accountable, and viable Palestinian state that lives in peace and security alongside Israel.” (Marketwire, Ottawa, March 24, 2008)
Following his meeting with his counterpart Avi Dicter, Stockwell Day had meetings on the 24th of March in the West Bank with President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, where issues pertaining to Canada’s peace package, including police training and capacity building were discussed. ”I was pleased to meet with Palestinian Authority President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad to discuss public safety issues of mutual interest,” said Minister Day. Stockwell Day also visited a West Bank prison as well as a police training center in Jericho. (Ibid)
Under the Declaration of Intent, Canada cannot exercise “neutrality” with regard to the Palestinian process. Canada would act as a partner of Israel in all issues of public security in the occupied territories. Moreover, Canadian support channelled to the US-Israeli sponsored Palestinian regime of Mahmoud Abbas will be used to repress Hamas, which is the duly elected government. It will contribute to worsening the situation in the occupied territories.
Counter-terrorism and Homeland Security
The issue of “counter-terrorism” is not mentioned explicitly in the Declaration of Intent. The terms of reference, however, suggest that the “war on terrorism” is an integral part of the agreement.
In early February 2007, Minister Avi Dicter addressed the public security committee of the Canadian House of Commons: ”Iran is the largest terrorist state in the world” Dichter said. In his discussion with Canadian MPs, Dichter “laid out what he believes to be the guidelines for Canadian-Israeli security cooperation in the future, possibly similar to the agreement that the minister signed a day later in Washington DC.” (Jerusalem Post, 7 February 2007)
“The Canadian MPs echoed their American compatriots in addressing the former Shin Bet head as a world expert in the field of terror rather than as a visiting minister of a foreign government, asking him at one point what specific steps the parliament could take to prevent terror attacks on Canadian soil. In his answer, Dichter reiterated the importance of strengthening border security and use of proper investigative methods with suspects.” (ibid)
During a followup official visit of Israel’s Minister of Public Security Avi Dicter to Canada in late October 2007, meetings of Israeli and Canadian officials were held behind closed doors to discuss a blueprint for cooperation in the areas of homeland security and counter-terrorism. The meetings chaired by Stockwell Day were held in Toronto on October 29, 2007. A so-called “Arrangement Paper” was to be drafted with a view to defining “the actions of the competent structures at ministerial, central and subordinate/local levels for preventing and fighting home land securities issues”:
“The parties have agreed to intensify future cooperation by identifying ways of direct communication in order to maximize the exchange of information, technology and operational activity. For the same reason it has been agreed to accelerate negotiations for the signing of an Arrangement Paper between the two Ministries on cooperation in home land security and counter terrorism issues which falls within the responsibility of the respective Ministries.
…
Negotiations on the arrangement paper mentioned above will take place as necessary. The signing of the arrangement paper will be held on an occasion and place coordinated in advance between the Ministries.
The two Ministers agreed that by early November three work teams will be established in order to promote the cooperation between the two ministries on the following subjects: • Counterterrorism and Crime • Emergency preparedness • Border crossing security, focusing on biometric identification”
The “Arrangement paper” refers to the draft text of The Declaration of Intent, which was signed in Tel Aviv on March 23, 2008. The two governments chose to sign the agreement during a week of intense diplomatic activity in Tel Aviv, involving the concurrent visits of the Vice President of the US, the US Secretary of the Department Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and other senior officials.
The final text of the Declaration of Intent remains vague. “Counter-terroism” and the “Homeland” are not explicitly mentioned in the final text of the Declaration signed on March 23.
Legal Implications
The text of the Declaration of Intent states that “:{it] is not intended to create legally binding obligations, under either domestic or international law. Yet, at the outset, it violates several fundamental principles of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.”
The Canada-Israel Public Security agreement has barely been mentioned by the Canadian media.
It has not been the object of a debate in parliament. Why has this issue not been brought to the forefront of public debate? Why has the parliamentary opposition remained mum on the subject?
It should be forcefully challenged in Canada’s courts.
Public Safety Canada March 23, 2008
Declaration of Intent Between the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel
The Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel, declare their intent:
1. To prioritize and manage cooperation in the following areas within the responsibility of the Ministries:
1. Border management and security, including biometric applications;
2. Correctional services and prisons;
3. Crime prevention;
4. Critical infrastructure protection;
5. Emergency management;
6. Illegal immigration;
7. Law enforcement cooperation;
8. Money laundering;
9. Organized crime;
10. Terrorist financing; and
11. Trafficking in persons.
2. To achieve the following objectives:
1. Build on their shared commitment to facilitate and enhance cooperation to protect their respective countries’ population, assets and interests from common threats;
2. Integrate and coordinate of the identification, prioritization, and implementation of cooperative efforts between themselves in the area of public safety;
3. Manage the delivery of approved cooperative activities within the scope of this Declaration;
4. Establish of clear lines of communication and points of contact between themselves as part of an ongoing process of dialogue and partnership in pursuing common goals;
5. Share knowledge, experience, expertise, information, research, and best practices;
6. Identify and share public safety concerns on the basis of threats, risk assessments, priorities, vulnerabilities, and consequences; and
7. Facilitate technical exchange cooperation, including education, training, and exercises.
3. To establish a Management Committee that would:
1. Be comprised of the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada, and the Director General of Public Security for the Government of the State of Israel;
2. Meet annually and as needed to develop and approve a program of work, consistent with the scope and objectives of this Declaration, for that upcoming year;
3. Evaluate and approve progress and results of activities carried out under this Declaration from the previous year;
4. Identify officials from the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel and from the department and agencies for which the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada is responsible, to carry out, within specific timeframes, each of the items in the approved program of work;
5. Be supported by a Senior Coordinator, namely, the Assistant Deputy Minister (Strategic Policy) for the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada, and the Deputy Director General for the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel; and
6. Have the Senior Coordinators ensure the delivery of the approved program of work and recommend new activities for the Committee’s approval.
4. To bear respectively the costs that they each incur for performing, managing, and administering its activities under this Declaration;
5. To ensure the appropriate protection of all information, knowledge, expertise, etc. that is exchanged between them against any unauthorized access, alteration, publication, or dissemination; and
6. To protect any information, knowledge, expertise, etc. that is exchanged between them against disclosure to any third party with the same degree of care as they each exercise with their own information, knowledge, expertise, etc. of a similar nature;
It is understood that:
This Declaration is not intended to duplicate or supersede any existing arrangements between any departments and/or agencies of the Government of Canada and the Government of Israel; and
This Declaration is not intended to create legally binding obligations, under either domestic or international law.
Signed in duplicate at Tel Aviv, this 23rd day of March, 2008, which corresponds to the 16th day of Adar b’5768, in the English, French, and Hebrew languages with all texts being equally valid.
FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY AND EMERGENCY PREPAREDNESS OF CANADA
FOR THE MINISTRY OF PUBLIC SECURITY OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
Canada and Israel Sign Declaration to Cooperate on Public Safety
ISRAEL, March 23, 2008
Today, the Honourable Stockwell Day, Minister of Public Safety Canada and Avi Dicter, Minister of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel, signed a Declaration of Intent to enhance cooperation in the area of public safety.
“The Government of Canada is committed to enhancing the security of Canadians – both through our actions at home and with our international partners.” said Minister Day. “Today’s declaration demonstrates the longstanding cooperation between Canada and Israel on public safety issues, and we welcome this increased cooperation in order to improve our countries’ capacity to protect our citizens.”
This declaration will allow Canada and Israel to better enhance cooperation in the areas of organized crime, emergency management, crime prevention, and other related public safety concerns. The declaration seeks to establish a more structured framework for the continued cooperation on public safety issues between Canada and Israel.
“The Declaration of Intent is an opportunity for Canada and Israel to strengthen their commitment to safeguarding their citizens and respective national interests from common threats,” said Minister Dicter.
See Also:
Declaration of Intent Between the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel (added Below)
Information:
Mélisa Leclerc
Director of Communications
Office of the Honourable Stockwell Day
Minister of Public Safety
613-991-2863
Shani Banker
Press Secretary
Office of Avi Dicter
Minister of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel
972 2 50 6272094
Declaration of Intent Between the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel
The Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada and the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel, declare their intent:
To prioritize and manage cooperation in the following areas within the responsibility of the Ministries:
Border management and security, including biometric applications;
Correctional services and prisons;
Crime prevention;
Critical infrastructure protection;
Emergency management;
Illegal immigration;
Law enforcement cooperation;
Money laundering;
Organized crime;
Terrorist financing; and
Trafficking in persons.
To achieve the following objectives:
Build on their shared commitment to facilitate and enhance cooperation to protect their respective countries’ population, assets and interests from common threats;
Integrate and coordinate of the identification, prioritization, and implementation of cooperative efforts between themselves in the area of public safety;
Manage the delivery of approved cooperative activities within the scope of this Declaration;
Establish of clear lines of communication and points of contact between themselves as part of an ongoing process of dialogue and partnership in pursuing common goals;
Share knowledge, experience, expertise, information, research, and best practices;
Identify and share public safety concerns on the basis of threats, risk assessments, priorities, vulnerabilities, and consequences; and
Facilitate technical exchange cooperation, including education, training, and exercises.
To establish a Management Committee that would:
Be comprised of the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada, and the Director General of Public Security for the Government of the State of Israel;
Meet annually and as needed to develop and approve a program of work, consistent with the scope and objectives of this Declaration, for that upcoming year;
Evaluate and approve progress and results of activities carried out under this Declaration from the previous year;
Identify officials from the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel and from the department and agencies for which the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada is responsible, to carry out, within specific timeframes, each of the items in the approved program of work;
Be supported by a Senior Coordinator, namely, the Assistant Deputy Minister (Strategic Policy) for the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada, and the Deputy Director General for the Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel; and
Have the Senior Coordinators ensure the delivery of the approved program of work and recommend new activities for the Committee’s approval.
Tobear respectively the costs that they each incur for performing, managing, and administering its activities under this Declaration;
To ensure the appropriate protection of all information, knowledge, expertise, etc. that is exchanged between them against any unauthorized access, alteration, publication, or dissemination; and
To protect any information, knowledge, expertise, etc. that is exchanged between them against disclosure to any third party with the same degree of care as they each exercise with their own information, knowledge, expertise, etc. of a similar nature;
It is understood that:
This Declaration is not intended to duplicate or supersede any existing arrangements between any departments and/or agencies of the Government of Canada and the Government of Israel; and
This Declaration is not intended to create legally binding obligations, under either domestic or international law.
Signed in duplicate at Tel Aviv, this 23rd day of March, 2008, which corresponds to the 16th day of Adar b’5768, in the English, French, and Hebrew languages with all texts being equally valid.
For The Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness of Canada
For The Ministry of Public Security of the Government of the State of Israel
I am Guessing UK MP SIR Gerald Kaufman nor Goldstone or anyone from the United Nations who voted in favour of the UN Mission report would not be banned from entering Canada as well. That beyond lose of freedom of speech that is outrageous. I cannot even find the words to present my total disgust.
Absolutely shameful. It also against International Law to ban anyone of this caliber from Countries. They are not criminals but it seems the Canadian Government officials who did this are.
Video below. Of UK MP SIR Gerald Kaufman
“Israel was born out of Jewish Terrorism” Tzipi Livnis Father was a Terrorist” Astonishing claims in the House of Parliament. SIR Gerald Kaufman, the veteran Labour MP, yesterday compared the actions of Israeli troops in Gaza to the Nazis who forced his family to flee Poland.
During a Commons debate on the fighting in Gaza, he urged the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel.
Sir Gerald, who was brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said: “My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed.
“My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.”
He said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants “was the reply of the Nazi” and added: “I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.”
He accused the Israeli government of seeking “conquest” and added: “
They are not simply war criminals, they are fools.”
Let them take away your freedom of speech it also affects the press they will lose their freedom of speech as well. Then comes censoring where we can go on the web and it just goes on and on.
Canada keep your freedoms before you end up as a communist country.
That is the direction it is headed.
Canada making deals with Israel is not in the best interest of the Canadian Citizens.
Kiss your freedoms goodbye Canada. Sharing with Israel is sharing with terrorists.
What the Canadian Government has done is put Canadians in danger, not security.
I wonder how much money the Conservatives get at election time from Israeli Lobby Groups?I bet a bundle.
That is how they bought and sold the Government leaders in the UK and the US. Lured by money.
Instead of doing what is best for American people and those in the UK they do Israels bidding.
Why on earth would Canadians be so blind as to not see what is happening?
This is also how Israel gets secret classified information from other countries as well.
They will also find a way to have Israelis hired to work in the Government which is a conflict of interest.
This has been done in the US at a staggering rate. This is the beginning of infiltration into yet another country.
Soon Canadians will be living in a police state. Or you could be like those in Gaza. Either way you loose your freedom.
Already Harper has been making agreements that have not gone through normal parliamentary procedure.
Remember Stockwell Day is not really a Conservative. Reformer, Allience whatever if I remember correctly. Most of the conservatives are not really conservatives. It was taken over Remember. The conservative party is not really the conservative party like it use to be, not by a long shot.
Supporting Israel has put the US in extreme debt. Trillions in debt.
From the Jewish Voice for Peace Support the Goldstone Report Anyone from Any Country can sign.
Need to know how Israel treats their prisoners? It’s not pretty. They even torture children. There is information on it HERE and there are two very extensive reports one for Adults and one for Children. Just scroll down a bit to get to the links. Yes Canada you are in for an interesting future. Israel can teach you to torture.
We’re calling on activists around the globe to organize an action between December 27th through December 31st to send Obama, the US State Department and Congress a message to pressure the Israeli government to Lift the Siege on Gaza Now!
Is it anti-semitic to defend Palestinian human rights?
By Edward C. Corrigan, BA, MA, LL.B.
August 26 2009
(This article was submitted to The Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism http://www.cpcca.ca/home.htm )
All across Canada and in the United States, there is an organized campaign to suppress criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
The campaign is especially strong on university campuses where many voices have been raised in support of human rights for the Palestinians.
One such example is the attempt to suppress the Public Interest Research Group, founded by Ralph Nader, at the University of Ottawa for their support for Palestinian human rights.
Similar anti-Palestinian campaigns have occurred at many universities in Canada
including the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario and York University.
An attack against a student group that was sympathetic to the Palestinians occurred at the University of Western Ontario in 1982. The student group was refused official recognition because of its support for the Palestinians and for sponsoring Palestinian and Arab speakers. After this refusal a complaint was made to the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
After a long battle, and with the support of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and its General Counsel Alan Borovoy, and a supportive editorial in The Globe & Mail, the Ontario Human Rights Commission compelled the University Students Council at the University of Western Ontario to issue a statement of regret and to ratify the student group. The refusal was deemed discriminatory against Palestinians and persons associated with Palestinians. (See “The Palestinian Question at the University: The Case of Western Ontario,” American-Arab Affairs, Summer 1987, pp. 87-98.)
Despite this successful legal precedent at Western Ontario there have been many attacks against individuals and groups across Canada and the United States because of their support for human rights for Palestinians. Over the last few years there is a concerted attempt to suppress discussion of the Palestinian issue in North America.
There also is a campaign to punish those individuals who have spoken out in support of the Palestinians by cutting funding and by denying them tenure and even getting them terminated from their positions of employment.
Two well-known examples of firings are the campaigns that targeted Jewish professors’ Norman Finkelstein (author of many books on Israel and Zionism including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict, (Verso Press, New York, 1995) and Joel Kovel (author of Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine (Pluto Press: London, 2007)) for their attacks on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
Another tactic is to smear such individuals who have supported the Palestinians with allegations of anti-Semitism. One such individual was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu. A few complaints from the Jewish community led to the Noble Prize winner being banned from speaking on campus by the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Tutu was attacked because of statements he made criticizing Israeli policy toward the Palestinians that some Jewish individuals said were “anti Semitic.”
Marv Davidov, an adjunct professor with the Justice and Peace Studies program at the University of St. Thomas said:
“As a Jew who experienced real anti-Semitism as a child, I’m deeply disturbed that a man like Tutu could be labeled anti-Semitic and silenced like this,…
“I deeply resent the Israeli lobby trying to silence any criticism of its policy. It does a great disservice to Israel and to all Jews.”
After provoking a strong backlash against the decision, and a campaign lead by Jewish Voice for Peace in support of the Arch Bishop which produced more than 6,000 letters of protest, the University rescinded the ban.
Professor Bill Robinson was also a target of a similar campaign about alleged anti Semitism to get him fired at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Ultimately the University administration defended Robinson’s academic freedom and the right to express his opinions in his global politics class. Robinson, who is Jewish, distributed an email prepared by a pro-Palestinian Jewish activist that compared the Israeli attack on Gaza to the Nazi attack on the Warsaw Ghetto. In response to this attack, on Professor Robinson, more than 100 UCSB faculty members signed a petition asking the university to dismiss the charges against him. In addition, 16 university department chairs wrote letters to the University authorities asking them to dismiss the case against Robinson.
Sir Gerald Kaufman, one of the founders of Independent Jewish Voices in Britain, also used his position as a Member of Parliament in London, England to criticize Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Members of Kaufman’s family perished at the hands of the Nazis and in the Holocaust. As one of the U.K.’s harshest critics of Israeli policies, Kaufman routinely compared the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. (See for example, “We Cannot Allow These Murders to Go Unpunished: We can demand these homicidal Israeli soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes,” by Gerald Kaufman, The Independent, April 12, 2006).
This campaign to silence critics of Israel and to demonize supporters of the Palestinians is most disturbing and a violation of free speech, academic freedom and violation of Palestinian human rights.
It is also a violation of basic democratic rights when a government does it. For example, the recent cuts to the Canadian Arab Federation’s funding by Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney. The punitive action taken by Minister Kenney is a denial of the fundamental freedoms and rights which are guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Charter guarantees the right of free speech and freedom of conscience and protects the individual and organizations from government sanction.
This campaign is also an attack on the numerous dissenting Jews who support human rights for the Palestinians.
Canadian Jewish groups like Not in Our Name (NION) and Jewish Independent Voices (Canada) and their support for the Palestinians and their criticism of the “Jewish State,” are simply ignored. For political purposes they simply do not exist.
The mainstream media also rarely covers these alternative Jewish perspectives. However, there are rare exceptions and sometimes views critical of Zionism are published in the mainstream North American press. Here is one notable example:
“It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with “the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept.” For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.
Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to “push the hand of God”; and Marxist Jews — my grandparents among them — tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.
To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered.
Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.
For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel’s actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.
Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse.
The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.” (“Zionism is the problem: The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace,” by Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2009.)
Most of the rest of the World has a much more critical view of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and supports the right of Palestinians to self determination.
For example in one vote at the United Nations, held on December 19, 2006 on the Israeli Palestinian issue, the tally was 176 to five in favor of the Palestinians.
The countries that supported Israel were the United States, the Marshall Islands, Palau and Micronesia.
Five countries abstained. They were: Australia, Canada, Central African Republic, Nauru and Vanuatu.
The entire rest of the World voted in favor of the right of Palestinians to self-determination. However, to read the mainstream North American press you almost never hear of these one-sided votes.
All human beings are entitled to basic human rights. However, the well documented human rights violations of the Palestinians at the hands of the Israelis, by respected organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The International Red Cross, the United Nations, and even by Israeli organizations such as B’Tselem, Rabbis for Human Rights and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel and by many Israeli journalists, are attacked and buried under a barrage of criticism that they are biased, are unfair for singling out the Jewish State or are even anti-Semitic.
My own record as a lawyer representing refugee claims for Palestinians from the Occupied Territories made against Israel, is 28 positives to one negative or a 96.5% success rate.
However, in the eyes of the supporters of Israel this does not mean that there are serious human rights problems in the Occupied Territories.
Israel can do no wrong. It is the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada that is “anti-Semitic” and the Jewish members of the IRB who rendered positive decisions on Palestinian refugee claims made against Israel are “self-hating Jews.”
A Palestinian is simply an inhabitant or citizen of Palestine. There are Jewish, Christian, Muslim and non-believers who are Palestinian. The indigenous Palestinian Jews were opposed to the European Jewish settlers who were flooding into Palestine with the support of Great Britain. A Palestinian is simply a national designation like that of being Canadian or American.
There is no racial, ethnic or religious criteria for being a Palestinian. Only by right of birth, naturalization and descent that one becomes a Palestinian, just like in most other countries.
The Jewish State’s citizenship and Immigration process are unique in the World. To qualify as a “Jew” in “the Jewish state” one must meet a racial or ethnic criteria or in the alternative, a religious criterion.
The Jewish Law of Return grants almost immediate citizenship rights to Jews from anywhere in the World.
Palestinians who were born in the country and forcibly expelled are, for the most part, forbidden to return.
The Zionist state of Israel defines itself as “Jewish” and structures itself to advance the interests of Jews at the expense of non-Jews and especially against the indigenous Christian and Muslim Palestinian population.
In March 1919 United States Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to President Woodrow Wilson as he was departing for the Paris Peace Conference.
The petition was signed by 31 prominent American Jews. The signatories included Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ex-ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosendale, ex-attorney general of New York; Mayor L. H. Kampner of Galveston, Texas; E. M. Baker, from Cleveland and president of the Stock Exchange; R. H. Macy’s Jesse I. Straus; New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs; and Judge M. C. Sloss of San Francisco. Part of the petition read:
“….we protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World’s Peace Conference to establish. Whether the Jews be regarded as a “race” or as a “religion,” it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases.”
There is much controversy over what is Zionism and how to define the “Jewish State.” As Akiva Orr writes,
The Zionist movement and its State- ISRAEL, do not represent the Jewish people. They never did.
They represent a particular trend within the Jewish people, namely- the nationalist trend. To find out whether Israel is a Jewish State or a Zionist State one need only ask any religious Orthodox Jew anywhere. His answer will be unambiguous: a Jewish State must be ruled by Jewish religious law- “ Halakha”. Israel is not ruled by “Halakha” laws, but by secular laws. Therefore Israel is not a Jewish State. The fact that it provides refuge to Jews does not make it a Jewish State . . . Zionism and Judaism are different entities. They have contradictory qualities. (See http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=34734. Occupation Magazine, 25 July, 2009.)
The argument is often made that criticism of Israel, or more appropriately the self described “Jewish State,” the meaning of which is not defined, is anti-Semitic. The fact that many Jews have criticized Israel and Zionism is deemed irrelevant. These Jewish critics are attacked as “self-hating Jews.”
There is no rational basis for the argument that criticism of the State of Israel and the political ideology of Zionism is anti-Semitic. The logic for this view is obviously flawed.
For example it makes no sense to accuse an individual who criticizes Apartheid South Africa’s racist policies toward the blacks as evidence of racism toward Whites.
Or that criticism of the Nazi policy toward the Jews should not be allowed because it is evidence of racism against Germans.
Similarly if you criticize American policy toward the Iraq war and torture at Abu Ghraib Prison, or the Jim Crow laws that institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the southern states, that you are racist against Americans. This argument is obviously absurd and should not even need a response.
To quote one American Jewish academic on the comparison of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the racist Jim Crow laws in the United States: “I grew up as a white girl in the Jim Crow South and I have spent my adult life in the study of racism; what I see when I go to Palestine is Jim Crow on steroids.”( “A Jewish state – or Jewish values?,” by Tema Okun, Mondoweiss, 21 July, 2009).
It is a basic right to evaluate and to criticize a political ideology or political movement and to review and even criticize a state’s policies.
The argument should be evaluated on the merits and the truthfulness of the facts presented. It is also a right to present alternative facts and to have a debate.
However, when one side wants to avoid debate, divert the discussion or suppress the topic and launches personal attacks against their opponents, it is almost a certain proof that they are hiding some uncomfortable truths.
Dr. Joel Beinin in an article, “Silencing critics not way to Middle East peace,” published in the San Francisco Chronicle, on February 4, 2007, discussed the campaign to silence critics of Israeli policy.
Beinin is a professor of History at Stanford University and is Jewish. He is active with Jewish Voice for Peace. Here is what Beinin had to say about the campaign to attack critics of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
“Why discredit, defame and silence those with opposing viewpoints? I believe it is because the Zionist lobby knows it cannot win based on facts.
An honest discussion can only lead to one conclusion: The status quo in which Israel declares it alone has rights and intends to impose its will on the weaker Palestinians, stripping them permanently of their land, resources and rights, cannot lead to a lasting peace.
We need an open debate and the freedom to discuss uncomfortable facts and explore the full range of policy options. Only then can we adopt a foreign policy that serves American interests and one that could actually bring a just peace to Palestinians and Israelis.”
The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, as well as the massacres, rapes and illegal confiscation of Palestinian property, is well documented by Israeli historians.
These include Simcha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987); Benny Morris, The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-1949, (Cambridge University Press: New York, 1987); Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians (Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992); Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, Original Sins, (Olive Branch Press: New York, 1993); and Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, (Oneworld Publications: Oxford, 2006).
There are many more Israeli authorities that confirm the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1947-1949 and again in 1967. In fact it is still going on today in what some Israelis call the “slow motion ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians. (For example see “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” By Uri Avnery, Counter Punch, 09 October, 2003.)
If the Palestinians, or their supporters, complain about the well-documented facts surrounding the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, losing their property to which they had legal title to, losing their personal belongings and even their bank accounts, having 531 villages destroyed, losing their country and their right to a citizenship, and then not being allowed to return to their homes in contravention of international law; or complain about discriminatory policies of the Jewish National Fund or the discrimination involved in the Jewish Law of Return; or complain about the house demolitions, the more than 600 Israeli military check points in the West Bank, the 42 years of military Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the program of targeted assassinations, the well-documented cases of torture; and the imprisonment of more than 11,000 Palestinians including women and children, many held without charge under what is called Administrative Detention, or the recent slaughter in Gaza, that these complaints and to expose these facts is anti-Semitic!
The view that it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, or its actions, is pure and simple racism against Palestinians. The Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims have many legitimate reasons to criticize the policies and actions of “the Jewish State.” A state that aggressively, and repeatedly, attacks its neighbours and is slowly but systematically ethnically cleansing its non-Jewish population is not above criticism.
No state is above criticism. You should be very afraid of a political ideology that you must accept without question.
There is also much to criticize in the Arab world but it would be absurd to say that one cannot criticize the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for its treatment of women or its human rights record, because it is racist against Arabs or is anti-Muslim. A person who made such an argument would be laughed at. No one would take them or the argument seriously.
Yet this allegation of anti-Semitism is a frequent smear tactic that has been used against individuals who have publicly supported Palestinian human rights.
These individuals include former US President Jimmy Carter, Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Bertrand Russell, Mahatma Gandhi, Arnold Toynbee, George Orwell and many, many others who have expressed public support for the Palestinians. Most of the strongest critics of Zionism and Israel’s policies are Jewish.
The only Jewish member of Lloyd George’s cabinet when Great Britain first threw its weight behind Zionism in 1917, Sir Edwin Montagu, was adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. He attacked the Balfour Declaration and Zionism because he believed they were anti-Semitic. Montagu argued that Zionism and anti-Semitism were based on the same premise, namely that Jews and non-Jews could not co-exist.
Ironically, people like me who want Jews to remain in our society, be an important part of our community and be safe from discrimination and racism are diametrically opposed to the Zionist goal of ingathering all of the Jews to Palestine.
Zionists want to “save the Jews” because they are not safe in the diaspora and face the threat of persecution due to the intractable anti-Semitism that exists in non-Jewish societies. To quote one Zionist commentator,
“The Law [of Return] and the Clause and, for that matter Zionism and the Jewish State are necessary so long as the threat to our people continues; so long, in other words, as Diaspora exists…..So the Law of Return continues to be necessary for Jewish survival, to serve its essential function in Zionist theory and practice. The Law defines Israel’s Zionist mission, our state as protector and refuge for threatened Diaspora Jewry. (“Hands off the Law of Return!,” by David Turner, The Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2007)
Without the history of Christian anti-Semitism that has existed in Europe and the centuries of persecution of the European Jewish community political Zionism would be considered a deranged and absurd political philosophy. Without anti-Semitism Zionism has no legitimacy.
Sir Edwin Montagu was also afraid that a Jewish state would undermine the safety of Jews in other countries. It appears that this fear was realized in that the safety of the Arab Jewish community was undermined, to a large extent deliberately, so that they would be forced to immigrate to Palestine to strengthen the Jewish presence there.
Montagu’s opposition to Zionism and the Balfour Declaration was supported by the leading representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry at the time, the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in particular, by three prominent British Jews Claude Montefiore, David Alexander and Lucien Wolf.
Many Jews are anti-Zionist and opposed the settlement of Jews in Palestine.
In fact historically Zionism was not supported by the majority of Jews. In the process of creating the state of Israel the political Zionists destroyed Palestine and ethnically cleansed more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in order to create a demographic Jewish majority in their newly created “Jewish state.”
There is a very respected and honored Jewish tradition of opposition to injustice and human rights violations. There is no monolithic position for Jews when it comes to Israel and the Palestinian issue.
Below is a link for my article “Jewish Criticism of Zionism” which lists more than 160 Jewish critics of Zionism. This article lists many prominent Jewish intellectuals that are extremely critical of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians.
There is a long distinguished line of Jewish critics of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
This list includes Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Isaac Asimov, I.F. Stone, Norton Mezvinsky, Alfred Lilienthal, Silvain Levi, Eric Rouleau, Tony Judt, Sara Roy, Ronnie Kasrils, Eric Hobsbawn, Saul Landau, Noam Chomsky, Hans Kohen, Eric Fromm, Bruno Kreisky, Pierre Mendes France, Richard Falk, Harold Pinter (the Nobel prize winner for Literature), Philip Roth, Michael Selzer, Don Peretz, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rabbi Michael Lerner, actor Ed Asner and many other leading Jewish intellectuals and religious figures.
Isaac Asimov was one of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century and wrote on many topics. He expressed his views about Zionism in a number of pieces. One example is found in the second volume of his autobiography In Joy Still Felt. There, he tells of having dinner in 1959 with some friends and his wife. Asimov wrote:
“As usual, I found myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist and of not particularly valuing my Jewish heritage….I just think it is more important to be human and to have a human heritage; and I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.”
Asimov also commented on Zionism in a chapter titled “Anti-Semitism” in I. Asimov, his third autobiographical volume.
There, Asimov discussed how he was distressed by the capability of the historically oppressed (such as the Jews) to in turn become oppressors if given the chance.
Asimov wrote: “Right now, there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet at the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye.”
Tens of thousands of religious Jews today are adamantly opposed to Zionism including the orthodox Neturei Karta and the Satmar sects. Rabbi Yisroel Weiss is the international spokesman for Neturei Karta. Hundreds of thousands of religious Jews in Israel reject the secular political movement of Zionism which created “the Jewish State.”
There is an important book written by Dr. Yakov M. Rabkin, a professor of History at the University of Montreal. It is titled A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, (Zed Books: London, 2006).
This book examines Jewish religious opposition to Zionism and details the long history of religious opposition to Zionism as a political movement to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Rabkin describes present day Jewish religious anti-Zionism as follows:
“…the rejection of Zionism in the name of the Torah, in the name of Jewish tradition. Such rejection is all the more significant in that it can in no way be described as anti-Semitic, recent attempts to conflate any expression of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism notwithstanding.
At first glance this seems to be a paradox.
After all, the public almost automatically associates Jews and Israel. The press continues to refer to “the Jewish State.” Israeli politicians often speak “in the name of the Jewish people.”
Yet the Zionist movement and the creation of the State of Israel has caused one of the greatest schisms in Jewish history.
An overwhelming majority of those who defend and interpret the traditions of Judaism have, from the beginning, opposed what was to become a vision for a new society, a new concept of being Jewish, a program of massive immigration to the Holy land and the use of force to establish political hegemony there.” (Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, (Zed Books: London 2006), p. 2.)
Israel’s founders were in fact atheists who wanted to transform Judaism from being a religion into a secular national movement based on race or ethnicity. This explains why Jewish religious leaders were strongly opposed to secular Zionism. Theodore Herzl was seen as an anti-Semite due to his hostility to religious Jews.
In 1943, a group of 92 Reform rabbis, and many other prominent American Jews, created the American Council for Judaism with the express intent of combatting Zionism.
Included in the Council’s leadership were Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore; Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of the Sears, Roebuck & Company, who became president of the Council; Rabbi Elmer Berger who became its executive director; Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times; and Sidney Wallach of the American Jewish Committee.
An example of their views on Zionism is “Palestine,” a pamphlet published by the American Council for Judaism, 1944, p.7 [American Council for Judaism Records (1942-1968), American Jewish Archives. Cincinnati, OH] which stated as follows: “…the concept of a theocratic state is long past. It is an anachronism. The concept of a racial state— the Hitlerian concept— is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful global war in which we are involved.”
The American Council for Judaism was founded to expressly oppose Zionism.
It was created in response to a 1942 Zionist Conference in the US, which proposed the formation of a Jewish army in Palestine before the state was founded.
The Council send letters to various governments and officials expressing their objection to such a notion as a ‘religious’ state, especially since they believed that: “that Jewish nationalism tends to confuse our fellowman about our place and function in society and diverts our own attention from our historic role to live as a religious community wherever we may dwell.”(America Council for Judaism, Series A. Correspondence, Subseries 1: General, 1942-1953.)
Membership in the Council grew to more than 15,000. Its members were highly articulate and greatly angered the Zionist leadership, who wanted the American Jewish community to present a united front on the Palestine question.
The book, Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism 1942-1948, by Thomas A. Kolsky, (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1990) is a history of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism during the period just before the creation of the “Jewish State.”
After Israel’s spectacular success in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, however, a change in the policy towards Zionism occurred in the American Council for Judaism.
Anti-Zionist Jewish author Alfred Lilienthal has suggested that “Zionist infiltration” succeeded in “neutralizing” the Council. A separate organization was subsequently established in 1969 called American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ).
The new group, which was based in New York, continued the original anti-Zionist tradition of the American Council for Judaism. Rabbi Elmer Berger served as president of AJAZ and also editor of its publication the AJAZ Report until shortly before his death in 1996.
The American Council for Judaism is still in existence but has softened its strict anti-Zionist position but today it is non-Zionist and highly critical of the “Jewish State’s” policies toward the Palestinians.
Their publications frequently carry anti-Zionist Jewish criticism. Allan C. Brownfeld is the Editor of Issues, their quarterly newsletter and also editor of their “Special Interest Report.” Stephen L. Naman is President of the Council.
Adam Shatz, the literary editor of The Nation Magazine, has edited a book titled Prophet’s Outcast. The book contains essays written by 24 prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals which are very critical of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. A copy of my review in Middle East Policy can be found at the link below.
Another important book is The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent, edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin. It contains articles very critical of Israel’s policies, written by 27 prominent Israelis.
The Forward was written by a prominent Israeli author and journalist Tom Segev. The Introduction is written by Anthony Lewis, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, who worked at The New York Times between 1969 and 2001. Lewis is now the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia University. The link to my review is found below.
There are many Israeli critics of Zionism and anti-Zionist Jews in Israel where the conflict with the Palestinians is most apparent.
These include Avraham Burg, former head of the World Jewish Agency and former Speaker of the Knesset; Shulamit Aloni, a former Minister of Education;
Yossi Sarid a former Knesset member and past leader of Meretz; Uri Avnery former Knesset member and leader of Gush Shalom; the late Israel Shahak former Chair of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights; former General and Knessett Member Mattityahu Peled; Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem; Jeff Halper head of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions; Felica Langer, a well known human rights lawyer; Michael Warschawski, co-founder of the Alternative Information Center; University of Oxford historian Avi Shalim; Eitan Bronstein Chair of Zochrot, which means “Remember,” and works to remind Israelis about the Nakba or Palestinian catastrophe; the late linguist and journalist Tanya Reinhart; New Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe; Uri Davis, author of
Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed Books, 1987); Tikva Honig-Parnass, editor of Between the Lines; and journalists Gideon Levy, Amira Hass, A.B. Yehoshua, Yitzhak Laor, Akiva Eldar, Meron Rapoport, B. Michael and Gideon Spiro to name only a few of the many Israelis who are anti-Zionist, non-Zionist or extremely critical of Zionism and Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
There was an interesting book review published in Haaretz,on February 29, 2008, written by Tom Segev.
It was a review of a book titled, When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? (published by Resling in Hebrew). It is authored by Israeli historian Shlomo Zand (also spelled Sand). Prof. Zand teaches history at Tel Aviv University. The book became a best seller in Israel. Segev writes:
“…in one of the most fascinating and challenging books published here in a long time. There never was a Jewish people, only a Jewish religion, and the exile also never happened – hence there was no return. Zand rejects most of the stories of national-identity formation in the Bible, including the exodus from Egypt and, most satisfactorily, the horrors of the conquest under Joshua. It’s all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel, he asserts.”
This information and arguments have been around for a long time but it is interesting to see them published in one of Israel’s leading daily newspapers and presented in a book written by an Israeli historian. Here is how Segev summarizes the arguments in Zand’s book:
“According to Zand, the Romans did not generally exile whole nations, and most of the Jews were permitted to remain in the country. The number of those exiled was at most tens of thousands. When the country was conquered by the Arabs, many of the Jews converted to Islam and were assimilated among the conquerors. It follows that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews. Zand did not invent this thesis; 30 years before the Declaration of Independence, it was espoused by David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and others.
If the majority of the Jews were not exiled, how is it that so many of them reached almost every country on earth? Zand says they emigrated of their own volition or, if they were among those exiled to Babylon, remained there because they chose to. Contrary to conventional belief, the Jewish religion tried to induce members of other faiths to become Jews, which explains how there came to be millions of Jews in the world. As the Book of Esther, for example, notes, “And many of the people of the land became Jews; for the fear of the Jews fell upon them.”
Zand quotes from many existing studies, some of which were written in Israel but shunted out of the central discourse. He also describes at length the Jewish kingdom of Himyar in the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Jewish Berbers in North Africa. The community of Jews in Spain sprang from Arabs who became Jews and arrived with the forces that captured Spain from the Christians, and from European-born individuals who had also become Jews.
The first Jews of Ashkenaz (Germany) did not come from the Land of Israel and did not reach Eastern Europe from Germany, but became Jews in the Khazar Kingdom in the Caucasus. Zand explains the origins of Yiddish culture: it was not a Jewish import from Germany, but the result of the connection between the offspring of the Kuzari and Germans who traveled to the East, some of them as merchants.
We find, then, that the members of a variety of peoples and races, blond
and black, brown and yellow, became Jews in large numbers.
According to Zand, the Zionist need to devise for them a shared ethnicity and historical continuity produced a long series of inventions and fictions, along with an invocation of racist theses. Some were concocted in the minds of those who conceived the Zionist movement, while others were offered as the findings of genetic studies conducted in Israel.” (“An Invention Called ‘The Jewish People,’ By Tom Segev, Ha’aretz, February 29, 2008.)
It is somewhat ironic that issues and subjects that relate to the Palestinians and Zionism that are virtually taboo in North America are openly discussed in Israel.
These same subjects are much more openly discussed in Europe and in the rest of the World. (For example see, “New Israeli Scholars Face up to Israel’s Origins,” by Eric Rouleau and “Are the Jews an Invented People” by Eric Rouleau, Le Monde diplomatique, 10 May, 2008; and “A crisis in Judaism: For many Jews today, Israel is not a normal state – it is a cause or ideal, and therein lies the problem,” By Brian Klug, The Guardian, 15 January, 2009; “Israel’s war crimes,” By Richard Falk, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, March 2009; “Israel’s Lies,” By Henry Siegman, London Review of Books, 29 January, 2009).
Here is what noted financier, George Soros, writing in The New York Review of Books, on April 12, 2007, had to say on this the lack of debate in the United States on the Palestinian issue:
“The current policy is not even questioned in the United States. While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of our policies toward Israel is very muted indeed. The debate in Israel about Israeli policy is much more open and vigorous than in the United States. This is all the more remarkable because Palestine is the issue that more than any other currently divides the United States from Europe.”
. . .
For an example of the type of discussion that goes on in Israel is the following statement made by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: “For sixty years there has been discrimination against Arabs in Israel. This discrimination is deep-seated and intolerable.” Olmert made this statement while addressing a meeting of the Knesset committee that was investigating the lack of integration of Arab citizens in public service.” (see “PM slams ‘discrimination’ against Arabs,” By Elie Leshem and Jpost.com Staff, Jerusalem Post, Nov 12, 2008).
Another example is the current Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin (from the right-wing Likud Party) who called for a fundamental change in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel. He urged the founding of a “true partnership” between the two sectors, based on mutual respect, absolute equality and the addressing of “the special needs and unique character of each of the sides.”
The Speaker was reported to say all this in an address to be delivered at the president’s residence in Jerusalem on August 3rd, 2009. Quoting from Rivlin’s prepared speech which was released to the media:
“the establishment of Israel was accompanied by much pain and suffering and a real trauma for the Palestinians (in large part due to the shortsightedness of the Palestinian leadership). Many of Israel’s Arabs, which see themselves as part of the Palestinian population, feel the pain of their brothers across the green line – a pain they feel the state of Israel is responsible for.”
Many of them,” Rivlin says, “encounter racism and arrogance from Israel’s Jews; the inequality in the allocation of state funds also does not contribute to any extra love. (See “Knesset Speaker: Establishment of Israel caused Arabs real trauma,” By Haaretz Service, Haaretz, 3rd August, 2009.)
Can you ever imagine a top American or Canadian politician making statements like these, or a leading Canadian or American newspaper publishing an article like this one? If they did make statements like these what would be the reaction?
However, Rivlin still tried to focus the blame on the Palestinian leadership for the problems and does not fully acknowledge Israel’s part in the expulsions. These expulsions and massacres started before the official declaration of Israel’s Independence on May 14, 1948. And according to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe there were expulsions of the Palestinians from 30 villages after the War had ended in 1949.
Rivlin also does not address the land seizures from Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes but remained in Israel.
These individuals were considered Israeli citizens, but still lost all of their property. These individuals are called “present Absentees,” an Orwellian phrase if there ever was one.
Here is how one Israeli academic, Gabriel Piterberg, describes the phrase and how it relates to Israel: “How the founding myths of Israel dictated conceptual removal of Palestinians, during and after physical removal. The invention of ‘retroactive transfer’ and ‘present absentees’ as the glacial euphemisms of ethnic cleansing.” (See “Erasures,” by Gabriel Piterberg, New Left Review, July-August 2001.)
Nor does Rivlin acknowledge that most of the Zionist leadership wanted all of Palestine without its Arab population and this wish “miraculously” came true. Palestinian leadership, inept as it was, cannot be blamed for everything.
Another important book on this topic is Reframing Anti-Semitism:
Alternative Jewish Perspectives published by the Jewish Voice for Peace.
It contains articles written by 8 Jewish American writers. One of the articles is written by Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkley.
Her article is on the question of whether criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Her answer and article is titled: “No, Its Not Anti-Semitic.” The link to my review of the Jewish Voice for Peace book is found below.
Another book that examines Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s policies is Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon (Grove Press: New York, 2003).
Kushner is an award winning playwright and Solomon a staff writer at The Village Voice and a professor at Baruch College-City of New York. This book contains a collection of 53 prominent American Jewish writers’ critical analysis of Zionism and Israel’s policies.
This list includes such distinguished writers as Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Marc Ellis, Naomi Klein (actually a Canadian) and Rabbi Arthur Waskow among many others.
Another important book on Jewish criticism of Zionism and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (Verso: London, 2008).
It is edited by four prominent British academics, Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose and Barbara Rosenbaum. This book contains the highly critical writings of 27 Jewish academics and thinkers on the issues of the Occupation, Israel and Zionism.
There are a number of other anthologies and collections of writings from anti-Zionist Jews.
These include Zionism Reconsidered, edited by Michael Selzer, (The MacMillian Company: London, 1970); Zionism: The dream and the reality: A Jewish Critique, Gary V. Smith ed. (Barnes & Noble Books: New York, 1974); Jewish Critics of Zionism and The Stifling and Smearing of a Dissenter, by Moshe Menuhin, (Association of Arab University Graduates, 1976); Judaism or Zionism, EAFORD & AJAZ (American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism) eds., (Zed Books: London, 1986); The End of Zionism and the Liberation of the Jewish People, Eibie Weizfeld ed. (Clarity Press: Atlanta, 1989); Radicals, Rabbis, and Peacemakers: Conversations with Jews against the occupation, edited by Seth Faber (Common Courage Press, Monroe ME, 2005).
Faber’s book contains a series of interviews with leading American dissident Jews’ Noam Chomsky, Steve Quester, Joel Kovel, Norton Mezvinsky, Ora Wise, Norman Finkelstein, Phyllis Bennis, Adam Shapiro, Daniel Boyarin, Rabbi David Weiss, and includes a speech and an essay by Marc Ellis.
Mordecai Richler, the late esteemed Canadian author, wrote an article entitled “Israel marks 50th anniversary out of favor with many Jews,” Toronto Star, February 15, 1998.
Many other Canadian Jews are opposed to Zionism or are critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Many Canadian Jews were against the war on Gaza. These dissenters include academics and writers Judy Rebick, Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Rick Salutin, Bernard Avishai, Howard Skutel, Yakov Rabkin, Klaus Herrmann, Janet Weinroth, Judith Weisman, Michael Neumann, Alan Sears, Gabor Mate, Judy and Larry Haiven, Michael Mandel, Ursula Franklin, Abbie Bakan, Mordecai Briemberg, Eibie Weizfeld, Zalman Amit, Rabbi Reuben Slonim, pianist Anton Kuerti, Ralph Benmergui broadcaster and producer and Judy Deutsch head of Science for Peace to name but a few.
The Jewish Outlook Society, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, publishes Outlook.
They describe their magazine as, “An Independent, secular Jewish publication with a socialist-humanist perspective.” Carl Rosenberg is the Editor and Sylvia Friedman is the Managing Editor. Harold Berson is in charge of circulation. They have over 40 Jewish individuals, primarily living in Canada, who serve in various capacities with the organization and their publication.
Outlook takes a critical view of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians and frequently publishes Jewish anti-Zionist perspectives.
Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) (Canada) currently has more than 100 members.
Dylan Penner, Sid Shniad and Diana Ralph serves as coordinators for IJV. The Steering Committee is composed of 24 Canadian Jewish activists including Fabienne Presentey, Sandra Ruch, Andy Leher and Harry Shannon. The IJV is a member-led organization, with chapters in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, and Halifax.
Here is what Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) said, in their February 19, 2009 Press Release, about Stephen Harper Conservative government’s position on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and Minister Jason Kenney’s cutting off funding for English Second Language training programs run by the Canadian Arab Federation:
“We believe that Mr. Kenny [sic] and his Conservative government is threatening CAF’s funding because CAF stands for justice for Palestinian people and because it expresses principled criticism of oppressive Israeli policies.
As Jews, we affirm that criticizing Israeli policies is NOT anti-Semitic. Anti-Semitism refers to hostility and/or prejudice against Jews. Like any other government, Israel has obligations under international law.
To responsibly raise critical concerns about the discriminatory, illegal, and brutal policies of another government is an ethical imperative, which our government should support.
However, the Conservative government has gone further than any previous Canadian administration in endorsing illegal and brutal Israeli assaults on Palestinian and Lebanese people.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged complete allegiance with Israel and labels as “anti-Semitic” any criticism of Israeli actions (including the Gaza massacre, house demolitions, use of illegal phosphorous and DIME weapons against civilians, etc.).
As Jews, we believe this is a dishonest smoke-screen, a ploy to discredit principled calls for humanity, justice, and compliance with international law.”
There are hundreds, and probably thousands, of Jewish critics of Zionism and of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians who have published articles or written books on the subject. Yet many Zionists, and their supporters, claim that there is a monolithic Jewish position in support of Zionism, Israel and the occupation of Palestinian land.
This claim of near universal Jewish support for the Zionist state and its actions toward the Palestinians is so far from the truth that it is laughable.
One has only to open your eyes and review the written record to see that there is no Jewish consensus on these issues and a great deal of criticism and outright opposition to Zionism exists in Jewish intellectual and religious circles, both in the past and today.
Israel’s supporters shamelessly use the argument that to criticize Israel is anti-Semitic no matter what Israel does. This argument is almost entirely false and politically motivated. Not to tell the truth, or to suppress discussion, about what is going on in Palestine is racist and a crime against the Palestinian people and a crime of silence and indifference not unlike the one committed against Jews in the Second World War.
To quote George Soros on the use of anti-Semitism, a tactic he described “the most insidious argument,” to silence the political debate on Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
“…..Any politician who dares to expose AIPAC’s influence would incur its wrath; so very few can be expected to do so. It is up to the American Jewish community itself to rein in the organization that claims to represent it.
But this is not possible without first disposing of the most insidious argument put forward by the defenders of the current policies: that the critics of Israel’s policies of occupation, control, and repression on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and Gaza engender anti-Semitism.
The opposite is the case. One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs. Demolishing the wall of silence that has protected AIPAC would help lay them to rest. A debate within the Jewish community, instead of fomenting anti-Semitism, would only help diminish it.”
Billionaire George Soros can hardly be considered a leftist. He is also Jewish.
Here is what Ben Ehrenreich, the author of the novel “The Suitors,” wrote in the Los Angeles Times on the issue of criticism of Zionism being anti-Semitic.
“Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said.
It’s not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.”
Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.” (“Zionism is the problem: The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace,” by Ben Ehrenreich, Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2009.)
There is clearly a wide range of opinion on Zionism that exists within the Jewish community. This fact needs to be recognized. We also need to reject specious arguments and reject false allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. We need to fight for freedom of speech, academic freedom, critical inquiry and democratic debate, at all universities and colleges, in the media, in the halls of political power and all across North America. Individuals should be allowed to decide for themselves questions about Zionism and the Palestinians based on open debate, the facts and informed opinion not on suppression of debate, intimidation and censorship.
This article will appear in a forthcoming issue of Outlook magazine published by the Canadian Jewish Outlook Society.
New hearings for CPCCA scheduled for January 25th, February 1st & 8th 2010. Seems there are 150 witnesses below. Seems the Canadian press didn’t want anyone to know about them. The bill hasn’t been passed yet as Government was Prorogued. It didn’t resume until March of 2010. So be sure to let them know Freedom of speech is not something you will surrender. Canada does not have a problem with Antisemitism. Israel is not a part of Canada. They should not be dictating to Canadians what we can or cannot do. If anything they should clean up their Human Rights Violations, not telling Canadian we can’t talk about them. Human Rights Violations are everyone’s concern world wide..
Update: March 15, 2009
This statement was rejected by both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail (as an op-ed). Please help this important statement get into broad circulation – pass it on to your networks (faculty, community, MPs, university presidents, unions etc.). You may also wish to write to the Star and Globe editorials and express your dismay that they have chosen not to publish it.
Jewish Canadians Concerned About Suppression of Criticism of Israel
James Deutsch, M.D., Ph.D.
Judith Deutsch, M.S.W., R.S.W.
Miriam Garfinkle, M.D.
Over 150 Jewish Canadians signed a statement expressing their concerns about the campaign to suppress criticism of Israel that is being carried on within Canada.
The signatories include many prominent Canadians, including Ursula
Franklin O.C., Anton Kuerti O.C., Naomi Klein, Dr. Gabor Mate, and
professors Meyer Brownstone (recipient of Pearson Peace Medal), Natalie
Zemon Davis, Michael Neumann, and Judy Rebick. *
The signatories are particularly concerned that unfounded accusations of
anti-Semitism deflect attention from Israel’s accountability for what many
have called war crimes in Gaza. They state that B’nai Brith and the
Canadian Jewish Congress have led campaigns to silence criticism of Israel
on university campuses, in labor unions and in other groups. Immigration
Minister Jason Kenney and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff unquestioningly
echo the views of these particular Jewish organizations.
They strongly state that they are against all expressions of racism. While
firmly committed to resisting any form of prejudice against Jewish people,
their statement explicitly states that these spurious allegations of
anti-Semitism bring the anti-Communist terror of the 1950s vividly to mind.
The statement underlines the immeasurable suffering and injustice to the
Palestinian people due to the severe poverty, daily humiliations, and
military invasions inflicted by the State of Israel.
Statement: Jewish Canadians Concerned about Suppression of Criticism of
Israel
We are Jewish Canadians concerned about all expressions of racism,
anti-Semitism, and social injustice. We believe that the Holocaust legacy
“Never again” means never again for all peoples. It is a tragic turn of
history that the State of Israel, with its ideals of democracy and its dream
of being a safe haven for Jewish people, causes immeasurable suffering and
injustice to the Palestinian people.
We are appalled by recent attempts of prominent Jewish organizations and
leading Canadian politicians to silence protest against the State of Israel.
We are alarmed by the escalation of fear tactics. Charges that those
organizing Israel Apartheid Week or supporting an academic boycott of Israel
are anti-Semites promoting hatred bring the anti-Communist terror of the
1950s vividly to mind. We believe this serves to deflect attention from
Israel’s flagrant violations of international humanitarian law.
B’nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress have pressured university
presidents and administrations to silence debate and discussion specifically
regarding Palestine/Israel. In a full-page ad in a national newspaper,
B’nai Brith urged donors to withhold funds from universities because
“anti-Semitic hate fests” were being allowed on campuses. Immigration
Minister Jason Kenney and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff have echoed these
arguments. While university administrators have resisted demands to shut
down Israel Apartheid week, some Ontario university presidents have bowed to
this disinformation campaign by suspending and fining students, confiscating
posters, and infringing on free speech.
We do not believe that Israel acts in self-defense. Israel is the largest
recipient of US foreign aid, receiving $3 million/day. It has the fourth
strongest army in the world. Before the invasion of Gaza on 27 December
2008, Israel’s siege had already created a humanitarian catastrophe there,
with severe impoverishment, malnutrition, and destroyed infrastructure. It
is crucial that forums for discussion of Israel’s accountability to the
international community for what many have called war crimes be allowed to
proceed unrestricted by specious claims of anti-Semitism.
We recognize that anti-Semitism is a reality in Canada as elsewhere, and we
are fully committed to resisting any act of hatred against Jews. At the
same time, we condemn false charges of anti-Semitism against student
organizations, unions, and other groups and people exercising their
democratic right to freedom of speech and association regarding legitimate
criticism of the State of Israel.
Signatories:
Abigail Bakan
Adam Balsam
Sharon Baltman
Julia Barnett
Lainie Basman
Jody Berland
Sam Blatt
Geri Blinik
Anita Block
Elizabeth Block
Sheila Block
Hannah Briemberg
Mark Brill
Stephen Brot
Meyer Brownstone
Eliza Burroughs
Smadar Carmon
Gyda Chud
Charles P. Cohen
Nathalie Cohen
David Copeland
Natalie Zemon Davis
Eliza Deutsch
James Deutsch
Judith Deutsch
Abbe Edelson
Jack Etkin
Elle Flanders
Danielle Frank
Ursula Franklin
Dan Freeman-Maloy
Miriam Garfinkle
Alisa Gayle
Jack Gegenberg
Mark Golden
Brenda Goldstein
Sue Goldstein
Cy Gonick
Marnina Gonick
Rachel Gotthilf
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Howard S. Kaplan
Gilda Katz
Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta
Mira Khazzam
Bonnie Sher Klein
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Melvin Zimmerman
New maritime security law will deputize U.S. officers “in every part of Canada” during integrated operations
by Stuart Trew
On November 27, Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson tabled legislation that would transform designated U.S. police and security agents into peace officers equal to the RCMP “in every part of Canada” during joint maritime border operations. As if holding the RCMP accountable for its officers’ actions isn’t hard enough, nothing in the new legislation should make Canadians feel comfortable that any complaints against U.S. agents operating on Canadian territory will be dealt with swiftly or fairly.
Bill C-60, the Keeping Canadians Safe (Protecting Borders) Act, is being sold by Van Loan and Nicholson as a way to “strengthen cooperative bilateral policing efforts to stem the flow of cross-border criminal activity in shared waterways and further protect community safety and security in Canada.” It is the legislative face of a cross-border “Shiprider” agreement dreamed up by past governments under the now defunct Security and Prosperity Partnership and signed this May by Van Loan and U.S. Homeland Security czar Janet Napolitano.
But Bill C-60 will go further than coastal waters. Section 11 states:
In the course of an integrated cross-border operation, every designated officer is a peace officer in every part of Canada and has the same power to enforce an Act of Parliament as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (italics mine).
In the case of a complaint against a U.S. officer deemed a ‘designated officer’ by the RCMP commissioner, there doesn’t seem to be any way to guarantee a fair hearing because so much is left to the discretion of the force and the public safety minister. Even if you do end up with a full public hearing, there is every chance it will actually be private because of broadly worded exceptions:
23. (10) A hearing to inquire into a complaint must be held in public, except that the Commission may order the hearing or any part of the hearing to be held in private if it is of the opinion that during the course of the hearing any of the following information will likely be disclosed:
(a) information the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to be injurious to international relations, the defence of Canada or any state allied or associated with Canada or the detection, prevention or suppression of subversive or hostile activities;
(b) information the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to be injurious to law enforcement;… (italics mine in both cases)
The public hearing into the tasering of Robert Dziekanski was clearly injurious to law enforcement and has renewed calls for the Canadian government to reform the practice of police investigating themselves. Would the new joint maritime security bill rule out public hearings into taserings on the Great Lakes?
DETENTIONS AT SEA
What about accountability in the case of people arrested or detained in shared waters?
Under “detentions of persons,” Bill C-60 states that:
12. (1) The laws of Canada apply to any person detained or taken into custody within Canada in the course of an integrated cross-border operation.
(2) No person referred to in subsection (1) may be removed from Canada, except in accordance with the laws of Canada.
The laws of Canada apparently allowed Canada Border Services Agency officers to drive Algerian refugee claimant Benamar Benatta over the border into the United States in late 2001 where he spent the next five years in prison under conditions the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention called tantamount to torture. The RCMP was also happy to leave Maher Arar with U.S. security officers at JFK airport in New York, who quickly deported the Canadian citizen to torture in Syria and have yet to admit their mistake.
WHY DO WE NEED THIS BILL?
On top of the obvious questions raised above there’s the lack of any evidence from Van Loan, Nicholson or the Conservative government that we need to let U.S. security officers put around the Great Lakes, St. Lawrence Seaway and other shared sea and inland waters with the same powers as Canadian police officers. What was so wrong with the previous arrangement that we need extraordinary measures?
You can write to Ministers Nicholson (NichoR@parl.gc.ca) and Van Loan (VanLoP@parl.gc.ca) to get their version. You can also click here to find your MP’s contact information to let them know you expect them to ask these questions and more when Bill C-60 comes up for second reading in the House. We’ll keep you posted about when that might be.
