tammuz - Do you hope to smother your ideological opposition under mountains of essay and book excerpts, or do you plan to put forth original, well-supported thoughts ever?
It is not always about the erasure of history (it could indeed be about racism and double standards, about valuing the European more than the Arab, the Israeli more than the Palestinian, be it that the first happens to be colonial and the second indigenous) , nonetheless....
A second fundamental flaw in mainstream news reporting is the tendency to abstract particular episodes of violence from their wider historical, social and political context. Only rarely do media accounts mention key dimension of the conflict - be it Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian land, the daily brutality and dehumanisation of military occupation, systematic discrimination against Israeli Arabs, or the structural violence of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip.
These omissions in coverage closely mirror gaps in public knowledge. According to a 2011 survey, less than half of the British public are able to identify Israel as the occupying force. One in five is aware that “most UN resolutions have been directed against Israel”. And only 36 percent are aware that Israeli settlements and the Separation Wall in the West Bank are illegal under international law (whereas, interestingly, more than two thirds state correctly that Palestinian suicide bombs and rocket attacks are illegal). Across all such basic knowledge questions, the most common answer was “don’t know”.
Of course, the media are not solely to blame for this state of ignorance. How news coverage shapes public opinion is an immensely complex question. Nonetheless, traditional news media such as the BBC continue to be the main source of information about Israel-Palestine for most people. These numbers are therefore, at least in part, a testament to the profound failure of news organisations to communicate even the most basic realities of what is arguably the most mediatised conflict in the world.
This erasure of context and history is hugely consequential.
According to the Sunday Times poll, taken at the height of Israel’s bombing campaign when identification with Palestinians would presumably be at its highest, 27 percent of the British public stated their “sympathies lie more with Palestinians”. And, yes, this is almost twice the number of people who identify more closely with Israel. Crucially, however, four in ten said their sympathies lie with neither side.
Public opinion towards Israel-Palestine is indeed slowly shifting. But when abstracted from the root causes and causalities that determine the reality of the conflict on the ground—a reality which amounts to Israel’s piecemeal destruction of Palestinian nationhood—images of Palestinian suffering do not necessarily translate into large-scale support for the Palestinian cause. Presumably, this has something to do with the fact that a considerable section of the public believes Palestinians themselves are to blame for their own plight.
Correcting the narrative
None of this is to suggest that stories and images of suffering need not be told and shown. They are a necessary, if not sufficient, step towards the re-humanisation of Palestinian lives in our collective imaginary.
But “images”, writes Sontag, “cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers.” Israel may be losing the war of images but its preferred narrative still dominates mainstream media accounts of the conflict. This fundamental imbalance has prompted Britain’s leading media scholars to call on the BBC to host a televised debate about its own performance. Because as long as this deeply entrenched bias persists, the media will continue to bear a responsibility for the unfolding tragedy to which they bear witness.
For what is so often lost in the dominant media account is the Palestinian view of the war, a war that did not begin on July 8 but one that has been going on for decades, a war not confined to the Gaza Strip but the entire Palestinian people, and a war that will continue to diminish their lives even when the bombs temporarily stop falling and news cameras rolling.
São Paulo Biennial Curators Join Artists in Repudiating Israeli Sponsorship
The curators of the 31st São Paulo Biennial have supported the artists’ call on the organization to return Israeli sponsorship funds, a demand they believe “should also be a trigger to think about the funding sources of major cultural events.” Their stance, articulated in a three-paragraph statement sent to Hyperallergic earlier this evening (and reproduced below), endorses the broader strategy undertaken by the open letter the objecting artists released yesterday. That letter featured 55 signatories; the Biennial lists 68 participating artists and collectives.
We, the undersigned artists participating in the 31st Bienal have been suddenly confronted, just as the show is about to open, with the fact that the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo has accepted money from the Israeli state and that the Israeli Consulate logo appears in the Bienal pavilion and on its publications and website.
At a time in which the people of Gaza return to the rubble of their homes, destroyed by the Israeli military we do not feel it is acceptable to receive Israeli cultural sponsorship. In accepting this funding our artistic work displayed in the exhibition is undermined and implicitly used for whitewashing Israel’s on going aggressions and violation of international law and human rights. We reject Israel’s attempt to normalise itself within the context of a major international cultural event in Brazil.
With this statement, we appeal to the Fundação Bienal to refuse this funding and to take action on this matter before the opening of the exhibition.
So, in response to RIBA's call on the IUA to suspend Israel's architects' organization, what do they get, of course, lampooned with? Being called "anti-Semitic" of course. What else is there but this ugly self-bankrupting accusation that goes beyond blackmail to cloud over true anti-Semitism and its victims around the world. The more this anti-Semitic accusation is wielded as a weapon against justice, against truth, the more it becomes a case of "Peter cries Wolf".
JfJfP applauds the British architects’ organisation (RIBA) vote to call on the International Union of Architects (IUA) to suspend Israel’s architects’ organisation, the IAUA, for the central role it, and its members, play in creating the “facts on the ground” that have set in concrete Israel’s takeover of the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinian. This vote comes after repeated reminders by the UIA to the IAUA of its ethical policy, and five years of unheeded requests for the Israeli body to answer for itself.
The siting, design, landscaping, infrastructure and building of over 120 exclusive and segregated settlements and towns, housing half a million Jewish Israelis and not one Palestinian, could not have happened without the full complicity of the professional organisation of Israeli Architects, in contravention of international architects’ ethical standards and international law. The Settlements are illegal and constitute a war crime.
We are appalled at the editorial in the Jewish Chronicle headlined “Architects of Hate” which says that “Jews” are to be “banned from joining” the IUA: “Be in no doubt” it declaims “the Royal Institute of British Architects is now officially antisemitic. … “
The RIBA did not, as the JC claims, arbitrarily “single out” the Jewish state, or individual Jews, for censure. It called for the IUA “as the international guardian of professional and ethical standards in our profession, to suspend the membership of the Israeli Association of United Architects, until it acts to resist these illegal projects, and observes international law, and the UIA Accords ….”
No Jewish architect is to be censured or banned, nor is the Israeli architects’ union to be suspended for ever, or for being Jewish (or Israeli) but until it conforms with the same IUA standards that other countries’ associations are expected to meet.
The editorial accuses the RIBA of “Jew hatred” on the grounds of Israel’s claim to be “the Jewish state”. We do not accept that the State of Israel represents Judaism or speaks for the five-plus million Jews worldwide who do not live in Israel, or that Israel’s claim to be “the Jewish state” has any validity in international law, or that political action against those implicated in Israel’s abuses of human rights is anti-semitic.
Being unable to defend the IAUA you are reduced to howling “anti-semitism” and “Jew hatred”, to crying wolf, which devalues the most serious of principles.
The sea in Gaza on the first Friday since the end of the assault. As my Israeli friend who posted the picture on facebook says, "celebrate their spirit and share their humanity."
A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields.
Palestinian children in the Gaza and the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, are routinely denied registration of their birth and access to health care, decent schools and clean water, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said.
"Palestinian children arrested by (Israeli) military and police are systematically subject to degrading treatment, and often to acts of torture, are interrogated in Hebrew, a language they did not understand, and sign confessions in Hebrew in order to be released," it said in a report.
While Gazans mourn its victims of Israel's state terrorism, a spirit of triumph dominates as they write a new chapter in the Palestinian national liberation struggle
As Gaza drapes itself in mourning for its victims of Israel's state terrorism, a spirit of triumph and determination is dominating the war-stricken people, who are writing a new defining chapter in the Palestinian national liberation struggle.
Israel has, once again, unleashed its brutal war machine against the Gazan population with the blessings of "Israel's right to defend itself," coming from the Obama Administration and many European capitals, and evidently back-channel approval from some Arab capitals - rhetoric aside - in a bid to crush Hamas and bring in the more pliable Ramallah-based Abbas regime.
After the disappearance of the three Israelis in Hebron, there was a widespread miscalculation that it was time for Israel to settle account with Hamas, who had been coming out bruised and weakened, due to losing key regional allies, financial woes and dwindling popularity, resulting from its long years of bickering with Abbas' Palestinian Authority.
Yet, somehow in Gaza's shifting sands, drawing inferences based on illusive reality can only lead to deadly consequences that cold political analyses coming from air-conditioned offices rarely predict.
In Israel and many Western and Arab capitals, their worst fears seem to have turned into a bitter reality, as they watch the scenes of jubilant Gazans celebrating victory after surviving 51 days of death, Hiroshima-like destruction of property, tribulations and horrors rained down on their heads by Israeli occupation forces. Gazans are coming out in a show of pride and appreciation for the military successes their lightly-armed resistance fighters exhibited in the battlefield.
Israel's intention of this latest aggression on Gaza was to crush Hamas and restore confidence in its deterrence abilities. But this bungled aggression has only meant further erosion of Israel's deterrence capability and has shaken to the core its longstanding security formula. Neither Israel's "mowing the lawn" military strategy nor its "map of pain" succeeded in bringing the already besieged and beleaguered Palestinians to their knees begging for an Israeli ceasefire.
To the contrary, Israel's elite forces crumbled at Gaza's doorstep, and the Palestinian resistance succeeded in hitting deep in Israel proper. Israel's founding commanders must be turning in their graves, seeing thousands of Israelis in the south leaving en masse and millions of others in shelters. The situation in Israel is one of confusion, humiliation, finger pointing, and uncertainty about what the future holds for the Jewish State.
President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi's regime in Egypt, now Israel's close ally, was in no hurry to stop Israel's barbarity, in hopes that Israel would crush Hamas. It was clearly standing in the way of a ceasefire agreement, which can be seen as a victory for Hamas, an ideological branch of Sisi's much-hated Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi's administration saw that such victory would only embolden its formidable internal foes and hence destabilise the regime.
Whether the Palestinian negotiating delegation saw the concluded ceasefire understandings in Cairo as less than what Gazans had hoped for, or the best they could get is something beside the question, considering Israel's track record of reneging on past agreements and understandings whenever it saw fit, and given the silence and complicity of key Arab states and world powers over the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives and civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
Israel has made no secret of its new forged alliance with key Arab countries, and as David Hearst aptly pointed out in recent articles, fear is at the heart of this unholy Arab alliance with Israel forged by Palestinian blood.
After nearly choking off all Arab uprisings in the region, the silence of Arab leaders over Israel's brutalization of the Palestinians is driven by fear of a resurgence of political Islam and what Hamas' victory means for the wider Arab masses across the region.
In much of the Arab and Islamic world, Palestine continues to be the unifying central cause for the Arab and Muslim nation, al-Umma, regardless of their political and ideological leanings. As millions of Arabs and Muslims around the world see how Palestinian - mainly Hamas - fighters brought Israel and its army to a state of paralysis and humiliation, this may once again rejuvenate a spirit of revolution against conditions of injustice and oppression they themselves suffer from.
Palestinian proponents of a negotiated settlement with Israel under the terms of the Oslo accords are standing to lose the most from this latest Israeli onslaught on Gaza, especially after many have seen the efficacy of armed resistance in uniting Palestinians behind a national resistance program.
Palestinian popular support for the resistance is at its highest, and the current battle has again pointed to the futility of the so-called peace negotiations that produced nothing but more colonial settlements, ghettoization of Palestinian territories, deprivation and a consolidation of an Israeli system of domination and control.
While many Palestinians believe that the siege, injustice and occupation are not going to end soon, victory in the eyes of Gazans is the very act of resistance and steadfastness in the face of a brutal and murderous Israeli military occupation regime. It was a victory of Gaza's David over Israel's Goliath.
The consequences of this latest aggression on Gaza will place the Palestinian national struggle on a totally new platform for years to come. It depends now much more than ever on the Palestinian resistance factions across the political spectrum to rally support for the continued struggle against the Israeli occupation.
- Dr Mosheer Amer is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Linguistics at the English department of the Islamic University of Gaza.
"I always try and think of the psychology of the nation and the psychology of the people behind it, and I said it in 2009 during Cast Lead that Israel seemed to me to be like a teenager that's never been given any boundaries, that is endlessly indulged by its doting parents, the West, and has kind of become psychopath as a result.
But now, thinking about it, you could also say that Israel is now the Jimmy Savile of nation states, it clearly doesn't care about damaging the lives of children, it thinks that everybody else is in the wrong, and it is endlessly in the right.
And also it's a state that is endlessly again indulged by the power, by Western powers, by governments everywhere because they're frightened of it, frightened of it physically in some ways and of its kind of anger and of the power that it wields and its influence."
Well-orchestrated efforts to define criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism or to intimidate Students for Justice in Palestine have resulted in the extraordinary prosecution of the Irvine 11, students who peacefully protested the visit of the Israeli ambassador, or California Senate Resolution, HR 35, which effectively defines peaceful protests against Israeli policies as hateful, and hence prohibited, and is clearly an attempt to model legislation for other states. Israel is singled out most clearly by being the only country that cannot be criticized openly in the United States and on university campuses without serious repercussions.
This climate of orchestrated harassment of critics of Zionism, designed to intimidate and silence, bears no comparison with the no less orchestrated complaints by pro-Israel students on campuses that criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism. To concede that point would be to undermine the very foundations of the university, which must allow any belief and any political system, political or religious, and however deeply held, to be subjected to reasonable criticism.
The censorship that US academics and citizens face regarding criticism of Israel is negligible,however, compared to the daily regime of occupation and siege that denies Palestinian scholars the right to free movement and prevents them from attending classes, taking exams, or studying abroad on fellowships; that subjects universities to frequent and arbitrary closures, constituting collective punishment; or that willfully destroys academic institutions, like the American International School or the Islamic University of Gaza in 2009, which were destroyed along with some twenty other schools and colleges. If there has been anywhere a systematic denial of academic freedom to a whole population, rather than to specific individuals or to institutions, it is surely in Palestine under Israeli occupation.
...The point of the boycott is structural and is meant to challenge the state of exception through which Israel has escaped reprimand or penalty and has created conditions under which the rights of Palestinian scholars, academics, and students are routinely suppressed. In this context, it becomes a luxury for North American academics to appeal to a distinctly one-sided and restrictive version of the principles of academic freedom while accepting complicity in the denial of those rights to not just individuals but whole populations.
We would do well to remember the words of Howard Zinn in a lecture in South Africa during apartheid: “To me, academic freedom has always meant the right to insist that freedom be more than academic—that the university, because of its special claim to be a place for the pursuit of truth, be a place where we can challenge not only ideas but the institutions, the practices of society, measuring them against millennia-old ideals of equality and justice.”13 If academic freedom is, indeed, a universal value, not one restricted to a few who are privileged by geography and colonial histories, then the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel becomes, as South Africa was in the 1980s, a test case for our intellectual and moral consistency. If we or the AAUP refuse to endorse that call, then the commitment to academic freedom becomes vacuous and meaningless, an assertion of privilege and entitlement, not of fundamental values.
Palestinian education, like Palestinian culture and civil society, has been systematically targeted for destruction: it is no longer a matter of the infringement of the free speech of a few individuals but a case in which, in the time-honored manner of settler colonialism, a powerful and well-armed state seeks to extinguish the cultural life and identity of an indigenous people. Not only is the boycott movement the only practical possibility for Palestinian survival, its application is principled and defined in its scope and ends. No clearer case has existed for the extension of an academic boycott since the ANC made its similar call for boycott and divestment in the struggle against South African apartheid. To continue to duck what is increasingly one of the defining moral and political struggles of our time would be not merely inconsistent but intellectually and ethically bankrupt. The oldest US organization representing academics and scholars can do better than that, and it is time for it to do so. We must cease to make an exception of Israel. "
David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent book is Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity (Cambridge, 2011). Malini Johar Schueller is Professor of English at the University of Florida. Her most recent book is Locating R
Young girl with a Kalashnikov joins in jihadists' celebration of 'victory' over Israel - but Palestinian president says Hamas are to blame for loss of 2,000 lives
Palestinian President accused Hamas of needlessly extending war
Abbas said 'it was possible for us to avoid all' of the deaths in Gaza
Israel and Hamas reached truce on Tuesday, both sides declaring victory
Islamist fighters held a 'victory over Israel rally' in Gaza City today
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has accused Hamas of causing thousands of unnecessary deaths by fighting in Gaza for longer than was needed.
President Abbas said all casualties could have been avoided and blamed Hamas for needlessly extending the war with Israel.
His words came as hundreds of Palestinian Islamic militants took part in a rally celebrating the 'victory' over Israel, in Gaza City today.
Young children were seen brandishing weapons as fighters of Al-Quds brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist organisation Palestinian Islamic Jihad, marched in the streets.
Israel and Hamas militants fought for 50 days before reaching a truce on Tuesday, with both sides declaring a victory.
Abbas told Palestine TV in remarks broadcast Friday that 'it was possible for us to avoid all of that, 2,000 martyrs, 10,000 injured, 50,000 houses (damaged or destroyed).'
More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed, including hundreds of civilians. Seventy one people on the Israeli side, including six civilians, were killed.
Several Egyptian mediated cease-fire attempts failed. Hamas eventually accepted almost the same truce offered at the beginning.
Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority runs the West Bank, formed a unity government backed by Hamas earlier this year. Abbas questioned the future of that arrangement in the interview.
Egypt, which brokered the peace deal, has said that indirect talks between the two sides would resume within a month.
On Thursday, French President Francois Hollande told international diplomats that Europe could help oversee the destruction of tunnels used by Hamas militants and monitor the territory's border crossings with Israel and Egypt.
‘It is necessary to move toward an end to the blockade and a demilitarization of the territory,’ he said, indicating that international supervision could help pave the way for a return of Hamas' rival, the Palestinian Authority, to Gaza.
The French proposal, Hollande said, would ‘finally give the Palestinian Authority the means to respond to the humanitarian crisis and to begin reconstruction.’
Whether the sides are ready to accept external involvement is unclear.
Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry, said that the country is ready to consider any proposal but must be convinced that monitoring will work.
In Gaza, Hamad al-Rakeb, a Hamas spokesman, described Hollande's proposal as ‘mixing poison in the honey.’
Riyad Mansour, Abbas' ambassador to the United Nations, on Thursday welcomed the idea of international monitors as a ‘useful deterrent’ to more fighting.
He acknowledged, however, that disarming Hamas is ‘not realistic.’
Israel takes over vast Palestinian lands to build new settlement.
Biggest West Bank land appropriation (read "land grab") in 30 years, says Peace Now; settlers laud Netanyahu, Ya'alon, government.
I wonder what Abbas has to say about this? His spokesman so far said this, "this decision will lead to more instability. This will only inflame the situation after the war in Gaza.”
For those who are still sincerely wondering the root cause of the Palestinian resistance and increasing radicalization and hard lining of Hamas, I urge you to evaluate the content of this article. This is still happening regardless of UN rulings, US oppositions (mixed with good cop bad cop strategies) and obvious problems it causes. Israeli government has no qualms about stealing land from Palestinians no matter what and as if their birthright to appropriate someone else's land as if it's their own...
Why are you keep coming back and demanding an end to this thread? Have I ever asked anybody to end their thread or interest in their chosen subject even though I am not interested in many of them? I / we are not personally addressing any of you at this point. How do you find this appropriate and rightful to ask others to not be interested and keep quite on a subject they have an interest so much so they are risking defamation and other insults? Why it is so hard for you to not read this thread and ignore it? Is it really hurting your feelings that you have vehemently defended and found it appropriate the killing of children and innocent civilians and now you want those to be gone without a trace? What is hurting you? Are you so offended or your assumed hubristic superiority over other people threatened? Why are you chronically short sided to think that there is a truce and problems are gone?
Why are you so righteous?
Please leave this thread alone and go post on what is the difference between licensed architect and designer type of threads. That, seems like as far as your vocabulary is useful.
Israel's history = history of massacres
israel's presence = extinguishing that of Palestinians
From http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?eid=168507&cid=23&fromval=1&frid=23&seccatid=23&s1=1
200 Palestinian Bodies Found in Tel Aviv Mass GravesLocal Editor
It has been revealed that the remains of dozens of Palestinians killed during the Zionist war on Arabs in 1948 were found in six mass graves in the Jaffa district of Tel Aviv on Wednesday.
The graves were found when ground subsided as builders carried out renovation work in the area, an official at the Muslim cemetery there told AFP.
The bodies are believed to belong to the victims of a massacre carried out by right-wing Jewish militias in the former Arab district.
As-Safri newspaper reported that up to 200 bodies may be in the graves, with an unknown additional number in the other graves.
'The remains belong to people of different ages, including women, children and the elderly, some of which bear signs of violence,' Researcher and historian Mahmoud Obeid said.
Around 760,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in the war, many of them still living as refugees in Jordan.
Published Thursday 28/08/2014 (updated) 30/08/2014 09:44
(MaanImages)
JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli authorities on Thursday demolished six homes near Jerusalem, leaving 51 Palestinians homeless and bringing the year's total displaced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem up to 752.
A Ma'an reporter said that Israeli civil administration workers raided the Sheikh Anbar neighborhood in Zuayyim village without prior notice and demolished a number of structures belonging to the al-Saidi, al-Jahalin, and Abu al-Hawa families that authorities claimed were built without a permit.
The structures included five homes and three cattle sheds.
Khader al-Saidi, one of the newly-displaced residents, said that authorities demolished the homes with bulldozers without allowing the families to remove their possession.
This led to an exchange of insults and hand scuffles between residents and Israeli forces, he added.
Al-Saidi said that his family had lived in the area since the 1950s, and that they had bought the three dunam piece of land the structures were built on 10 years ago.
"Five years ago (the family) built residential structures and cattle-raising structures," in the area, he said, adding that civil administration bulldozers had destroyed the family's structures three times in the last two years.
Al-Saidi said that each structure was around 100 square meters, and that in total they house 38 people between them.
He added that the Israeli civil administration had handed a notice of demolition for a residential structure in the area belonging to his brother Muhammad, but his brother had traveled to Jordan on Wednesday to receive health treatment. It was not clear if they planned to demolish his home before the returned.
During the raid, bulldozers also razed a structure belonging to Ahmad Murshed Jahhalin, which was built in 1999 and housed 13 people. A sheep barn was also destroyed.
A cow shed belonging to Mahmoud Abu al-Hawa was also destroyed.
Israel has destroyed more than 377 Palestinian properties in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2014, displacing 752 people, according to UNOCHA.
Israel rarely grants Palestinians permits to build in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
It has demolished at least 27,000 Palestinian homes and structures since occupying the West Bank in 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
"...A careful observer will notice that it is Israel, not HAMAS, which share a similar mission and tactics with ISIS. Israel, like ISIS, is a borderless “State”. Their refusals to identify its borders allow Israel to continue to annex Arab lands in pursuit of a Jewish empire spanning from the Nile to the Euphrates. Not only is Israel sharing the imperial dream with ISIS, they also employ the same kind of bestial cruelty in pursuing the nefarious objectives."
"...2. Israel and the Islamic state both founded by terrorists
Israel was founded through violent and repulsive acts of terror by three groups called Irgun, Lehi and Haganah. The Irgun and Haganah believed that any means necessary to establish the Jewish State of Israel, including terrorism, was justifiable. They massacred unsuspecting and unarmed Palestinian villagers, destroyed Palestinian heritage sites and bombed the King David hotel which housed foreign diplomats. The founders of the Islamic State seem to have adopted exactly the same Haganah/Irgun strategy of systematic massacres of Iraqi villagers and killing of Westerners.
The King David Hotel after being bombed by the founders of Israel
HAMAS does not bomb hotels and loves meeting Western leaders as exemplified by their meeting with the former US president Jimmy Carter.
HAMAS leader Ismail Haniyeh meet the former US President Jimmy Carter.
3. Religion as the cover for terror
The Zionist terror groups invoked the Christian bible’s assertion that God pledged Israel to be inhabited exclusively by the Jews. They interpreted the bible to mean they must kill and maim in order to unite the world’s Jews under one Jewish state. This obsession with antiquated scriptures is exactly what drives ISIS. Like Haganah and Irgun, ISIS Believes that they are implementing God’s wish by restoring a caliphate so that the entire world’s Muslims can live under one Islamic state.
HAMAS’ manifesto describes religion as a source of guidance to individuals and they certainly do not exude the empire state of mind that is shared by ISIS and Israel.
4. Similar strategy and tactics.
The founders of Israel carried out callous and barbaric massacres of innocent Christians and Muslims. Entire villages were wiped out through a terror policy called “Leave or Die”. Thousands of Palestinian Christians and Muslims were forced to leave their homes and seek shelter on the mountains and deserts. The Islamic State is implementing that policy in word and with detailed accuracy as we see it on the Yazidi people and Iraqi Christians.Meanwhile “In Gaza, Christians are protected by Hamas” said Michel Sabah the 77 year old Latin Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem.
5. Jihad for Eretz Yisrael and Aliyah to the Caliphate.
It would be tragic to assume that the terrorists who are ravaging Iraq are Iraqi Muslims. They are mercenaries drawn from all over the world mainly in Europe. They left their countries and families behind to come and terrorise the long suffering people of Iraq. In the same vein, the founders of Israel were not Palestinian Jews at all but Eastern Europe slum dwellers and North Atlantic merchants. While they were terrorising the Palestinian people, their families were living in peace and safety in the West. Even today more than half of the members of the Israel Occupation forces that are pillaging Gaza are Western mercenaries. HAMAS fighters are Palestinian orphans and refugees. The State of Israel and the Islamic State were both established by mercenary terror groups."
Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan has been making infrequent appearances on CNN in the past few weeks, but today Wolf Blitzer really held his feet to the fire. At issue here was what Blitzer called “disturbing” comments Hamdan made on television saying that Jews use Christian blood to make matzoh, a charge generally referred to as blood libel.
Hamdan had said, “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians in order to mix their blood in their holy matzoh. This is not a figment of the imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact acknowledged by their own books and historical evidence.”
Blitzer confronted Hamdan over that remark today. Hamdan, repeatedly, refused to directly answer Blitzer’s question. Instead, he argued that the truly disgusting rhetoric is coming from the Israelis. Hamdan told Blitzer, “They are misusing the words. I’ve said on the same occasion that we don’t have problems with the Jews… I have Jewish friends who are supporting the Palestinian rights.”
At no point did Hamdan address those controversial remarks themselves. But what Blitzer noticed is that not once did Hamdan issue any kind of denial for uttering such “an awful, awful smear.”
Tammuz, this excerpt is particularly bad, and-- I'll say it-- is utterly anti-Semitic:
5. Jihad for Eretz Yisrael and Aliyah to the Caliphate.
It would be tragic to assume that the terrorists who are ravaging Iraq are Iraqi Muslims. They are mercenaries drawn from all over the world mainly in Europe. They left their countries and families behind to come and terrorise the long suffering people of Iraq. In the same vein, the founders of Israel were not Palestinian Jews at all but Eastern Europe slum dwellers and North Atlantic merchants. While they were terrorising the Palestinian people, their families were living in peace and safety in the West. Even today more than half of the members of the Israel Occupation forces that are pillaging Gaza are Western mercenaries. HAMAS fighters are Palestinian orphans and refugees. The State of Israel and the Islamic State were both established by mercenary terror groups."
* * *
What about Holocaust refugees who had nowhere else to go?
Firstly, I'm quoting an article for people's consideration here. I'm sure they've been inundated with thousands of sources claiming that Hamas is a "terrorist organization" and all that bullshit whereas , of course, a faction of the Palestinian resistance has the right to exist and fight against occupation and against the racist colonial policies of Israel.
Secondly, prove that the article is being anti-Semitic. Yes, they were slum dwellers, ghettos were slums and European hegemonc powers forced the Jews to live in slums. The true anti-Semites were those Europeans...not anyone who out that Jews were made to dwell in slums. Go bash the glorious tradition of anti-Semitism in Europe that not only created the Holocaust but also consequently created the Nakba and dispossession of the Palestinians. You have the wrong address; I am more Semite than a roomful of Ashkenazis celebrating barmitzvah. Yes, I agree the tern of "slum dweller" is not sympathetic but its not her or his fault - its the fault of someone who forces her or him to exist in slums.
As for the actual point which you sidestep altogether, yes there is a great similarity between what the early Jewish terrorist bandits (Stern, Irgun and Hagannah) did and what ISIS is doing and this has been noticed by many analysts within the Middle East. This is why the article -which doesn't really state something new- resonated with me. Unforunately, here, I am limited to English language sources - there is a great wealth of information available in Arabic.
Anyway, your deliberate strategy to obfuscating is ridiculous. And your demonization of Palestinian resistance factions is gaining lesser and lesser traction the more obvious and evident are the inhumanity and the sheer lack of the right to exist of this Israel colony.
As for the victims of Europe's savagery and racist within Europe, in order for Europe (and America) to feel better, is it necessary that another people, somewhere else, be dispossessed, thrown out of their country, be made into miserable refugees and for those that remain, be treated like undesirables and secondary subjects so that "anti-Semitism" be vanquished?
What sort of moronic logic is that? Only one based on yet another dehumanization of another group of people. Another "anti-Semitism". As long as Israel exists, anti-Semitism is well and alive, racism is well and alive and has its own country.
It's anti-Semitic because it tacitly overlooks the Holocaust. Re-quote:
5. Jihad for Eretz Yisrael and Aliyah to the Caliphate.
It would be tragic to assume that the terrorists who are ravaging Iraq are Iraqi Muslims. They are mercenaries drawn from all over the world mainly in Europe. They left their countries and families behind to come and terrorise the long suffering people of Iraq. In the same vein, the founders of Israel were not Palestinian Jews at all but Eastern Europe slum dwellers and North Atlantic merchants. While they were terrorising the Palestinian people, their families were living in peace and safety in the West. Even today more than half of the members of the Israel Occupation forces that are pillaging Gaza are Western mercenaries. HAMAS fighters are Palestinian orphans and refugees. The State of Israel and the Islamic State were both established by mercenary terror groups."
You're losing credibility and showing your true colors.
"One of the favourite tactics of supporters of Israel and Zionism is to accuse their opponents of ‘anti-Semitism’. This argument is advanced in an attempt to prevent criticism of Israel from being presented, or to attack the individual or group, that is defending Palestinian human rights.
Implicit in this criticism is the idea that all Jews, except a handful of ‘self haters’ support the Israeli state. Such an argument is inherently anti-Semitic, based as it is on the notion of a collective ethnic adherence to a particular political position. It also ascribes guilt for Israel’s crimes upon Jewish people collectively.
Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of “anti-semitism” has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article.
So absurd has the situation become that the allegation of anti-semitism is even made when Jews disagree among themselves. That is why the suggestion by Alvin Rosenfield that “anti-Zionism is the form that much of today’s anti-semitism takes” needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
One of the consequences of this abuse of the term “anti-semitism” is to devalue the currency. It renders it almost meaningless because people assume that allegations of anti-semitism are merely the last-ditch resort of those who are incapable of defending the Apartheid Wall that separates the people of the West Bank from their land, the bulldozing of civilian houses, the wanton destruction of olive groves and crops, to say nothing of the theft of their land.
Anti-semitism today is not a mainstream form of racism. It is asylum seekers, Muslims and black people who face stop-and-search, control orders and racial profiling, not Jewish people.
...Anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews for them being Jews, and only for being Jews, not for what they do or how they act as individuals, or act even as a group or part of a group. No group is above criticism for what they do. Especially when they ethnically cleanse populations, destroy 531 villages, massacre civilians, rape, illegally confiscate property without compensation to the deeded land owners, illegally confiscate bank accounts, bulldoze houses, use targeted assassinations to extra-judicially kill their political opponents, steal nuclear material,51 repeatedly invade neighbouring countries and impose since 1967 an illegal military occupation, and build “Jewish only settlements” and “Jewish only roads” in what the World Court, the United Nations, numerous human rights organizations and virtually every country in the World says is illegal activity.52
...Many anti-Semites, including many Nazis, were Zionists who wanted to expel the Jews from Europe and send them to Palestine.56 For example Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis Minister for the Eastern Territories was Hitler’s favourite theoretician. Rosenberg argued that ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’57 Rosenberg was fond of citing the Zionists’ own arguments that the Jews were a separate people. He took this as ‘a clear affirmation that all Jews were aliens in Germany…’ ‘Rosenberg’s argument that the Zionist movement could be utilized to promote the political, social and cultural segregation of Jews in Germany, as well as their emigration, was eventually transformed into policy by the Hitler regime after 1933.’58
... Zionism is a political ideology and is not the same thing as Judaism or being Jewish. They are very different. Judaism has existed for thousands of years as a religion. Political Zionism, as espoused by Herzl, has only existed since the 1890′s. Anti-Semitism has many similarities to Zionism as it is based on the separation of Jews and non-Jews. And many Zionists are in fact Anti-Semites and want to get rid of the Jews from their country and send them to Palestine.
It could be argued that Zionism and Anti-Semitism are the opposite sides of the same coin. As I have said before I want Jews to be safe in their countries of citizenship and all other countries. I also want the same for the Palestinians and every other people in the World."
The idea of Israel started way before the Holocaust and the infrastructure for the creation of Israel and indeed the process of "exporting" Europeans into Palestine started before the Holocaust and a large part of it was spearheaded by anti-Jewish colonial powers who wanted to get rid of Jews within Europe (the sentiment was not restricted to Hitler's Germany but extended throughout Europe in the form of the "Jewish Question").
So, anti-Semitism is not only limited to the Holocaust, there were also the Russian pogroms and a long history of suffering of the Jews at the hand of Europeans by means -bureaucratic, urban policy making, land usage, etc- that are not far from what the Israelis are doing now to Palestinians.
You're deliberately sidetracking and not explaining your obscure derivations and the only one showing their true colour is you by claiming that I am an anti-Semite where there is not only single expression of hatred towards the Jews whom I view to be the first victims of Zionism and, behind it, the racism and religious bigotry of Europe towards them - and especially in so concerns the puritanical Protestantism that later formed Evangelisms in the US.
I would hope that pro-Zionist Jews around the world and in Israel wake up to the fact that their ideology is a regressive pathological consequence of two 19th century great evils: anti-Semitism and colonialism. The idea that the Jewish person -seen within Europe as backward and Asiatic at the epoch- can only be elevated to a European civilized state of being by quitting Europe and colonizing Palestine, with the support of a Europe that wants them out as well, without the merest thought towards the consequential dispossession of its residents.
In other words, one may well interpret Zionism as the consequence, historically - not necessarily currently, what with it having turned into a blood curdling racist nationalism- of the European "self-hating Jew" . This also perfectly explains the antagonism it faced with the larger part of the Jewish religious establishments at its genesis and well after.
Zionism accepted, prior to everything, prior to incurring a racist nationality, the very premises of anti-Semitism: that the Jewish person was unclean, uncivilized...and that measures should be taken to civilize her or him through replicating a typical European undertaking seen to be as a pinnacle to civilization at that time: colonialism. As such, prior to attacking the Palestinians on a physical level and robbing them of their land, dignity, families, etc...Zionism robbed the Jewish people of their right to exist within Europe or Russia, equal to anyone, the right to not be represented as backwards and subhuman.
And what Zionism saw in the pre-Zionist Judaism it now projects onto Palestinians: subhuman, backwards, insufficient to be accepted as subjects in control of their destiny...but rather to be dealt with as objects to be removed and dismantled in order for this 'beacon of Western light' to shine on an Eastern land....where it is, from our perspective, a beacon of elimination and destruction.
This is what you wrote: "Zionism robbed the Jewish people of their right to exist within Europe or Russia, equal to anyone, the right to not be represented as backwards and subhuman."
I'm pretty sure that the nationalist regimes of those European countries and Russia eradicated those rights.
(Tammuz furiously Googling for articles analogizing Israel with fundamentalist Islam)
Do you read my posts or indeed the copied articles? If not, you have no right to criticize them. Stick to the content please and not to trying to be an asshole mocking someone else on archinect. Otherwise, I don't see what so "serious" about you.
And kindly, have enough respect for people who have suffered from real anti-Semitism and do not wield this accusation against anyone you want to be anti-Semitic. Wishful thinking does not make for a rationale plateau from which to deduce. I am not a Holocaust denier and neither does the article deny the Holocaust (there is no indication of that in the least - had there been, I would not quote it). I believe the Holocaust against Jews (and gypsies, and gay people, and people with mental handicaps,etc) happened and the Jewish people were subjected to great discrimination throughout European history. This is not a subject of dispute for me.
And read my above post; Zionism and the dispossession of another people could not have happened without being a pathological consequence of this racism and hatred.
The article says that the founders of Israel were "terrorising Palestinians" while their families were living "peacefully in the West."
Uh, no, their families were being shoved into gas chambers and then incinerated.
Yes, here I agree with you. You are right here. I missed that one. Kindly dismiss my support on that point - its not excusable to overlook what was happening.
Zionism held that Jews were strangers in other peoples’ lands and that anti-Semitism was the natural, if not justifiable, reaction to an alien presence among them. It was but a short step from this to an acceptance that anti-Semitic characteristics and caricatures of Jews were essentially correct. Indeed, the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is yet another irony, as historically, it was non-Jewish support of Zionism that was seen by Jews as anti-Semitic. What anti-Semites and leading Zionists said about Jews were almost indistinguishable. As A.B. Yehoshua, one of Israel’s foremost novelists, stated in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students: “Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.” And from Pinhas Felix Rosenbluth, a leading German Zionist, to Arthur Ruppin, head of the Jewish Agency, Zionists have not hesitated to employ anti-Semitic rhetoric to further their cause.
This is not so strange, because what one is talking about are in reality two entirely different forms of political philosophy with the same name — anti-Semitism. Contrary to received opinion, there is nothing in common between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Certainly the Zionist movement has deliberately confused the two, but the former is a form of anti-racism whereas the latter is a form of racism. There can be no blurring at the edges or overlap. One is either an anti-Semite or an anti-Zionist. One cannot be both.
Therefore, it is not surprising that today, with the growth of far right and neo-fascist parties in Europe, that almost without exception they are pro-Israel. Thus, the very people who criticize anti-Zionists and Palestinian supporters as anti-Semitic are rushing to hold the hands of Zionism’s far-right supporters.
you accept that jewish people in europe and russia faced antisemitism. they left those places because it sucks to face that kind of persecution. they went to the british mandate/ ottmon syria/ israel/ or whatever it was called at their particular time in history, because they had to go somewhere. i'm sure there were some people who went to that location for 'zionism,' and there were militant jewish organizations that promoted zionism, but you're conflating 'zionsim' with immigration.
not every 'white person' or 'european' or 'jewish person' or however you want to contextualize 'people' who moved to that area did so with the intent of killing other local communities. in fact, i'd say the militant refugees were probably in the significant minority.
are you trying to suggest if a jewish person moved to new york to escape antisemitism, that's all good an normal, but if they moved to the mideast, they're zionist murderers?
Many German and Austrian Jews tried to go to the United States but could not obtain the visas needed to enter. Even though news of the violent pogroms of November 1938 was widely reported, Americans remained reluctant to welcome Jewish refugees. In the midst of the Great Depression, many Americans believed that refugees would compete with them for jobs and overburden social programs set up to assist the needy.
Congress had set up immigration quotas in 1924 that limited the number of immigrants and discriminated against groups considered racially and ethnically undesirable. These quotas remained in place even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt, responding to mounting political pressure, called for an international conference to address the refugee problem.
In the summer of 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries met at the French resort of Evian. Roosevelt chose not to send a high-level official, such as the secretary of state, to Evian; instead, Myron C. Taylor, a businessman and close friend of Roosevelt's, represented the US at the conference. During the nine-day meeting, delegate after delegate rose to express sympathy for the refugees. But most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees.
Responding to Evian, the German government was able to state with great pleasure how "astounding" it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open the doors to them when "the opportunity offer[ed]."
Even efforts by some Americans to rescue children failed: the Wagner-Rogers bill, an effort to admit 20,000 endangered Jewish refugee children, was not supported by the Senate in 1939 and 1940. Widespread racial prejudices among Americans--including antisemitic attitudes held by the US State Department officials--played a part in the failure to admit more refugees.
No, the crazy logic is to build your perception of Israel on overlooking the consequential dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and overlooking each and every incident of Zionist terrorism committed against Palestinians going all the way to the terrorist European Jewish bandits created deliberately to instill terror within resident Palestinian communities and make them flee.
The crazy logic is to build on denying the continuing dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, their imprisonment within Gaza, the continuing theft by Israel of Palestinian land...and to bring out the reaction to all this, the self defense of Palestinians by Palestinians, as the exasperating source of the problem.
The crazy logic is to completely censor yourself against critically assessing Israel.
The crazy logic is to demonize the Palestinian resistance faction who have targeted predominantly military personnel belonging to a vastly superior armed forces protecting the further colonization of Palestinian properties with this racist colonial military force that targets predominantly civilian, a huge portion of which were kids.
The crazy logic is to build on denying truths that even Zionism concedes in the history of Zionist writings - that it is colonial, that it seeks to spirit away people who have resided, lived and owned their lands for generations, that if not by deception then by force, that it carries within it the germ of European racism towards Arabs- this is crazy bad logic, a logic neither based on the realities of the past or those of the present.
This is crazy, bad, blind logic...ie this is no logic at all.
as has been mentioned, this whole thread is just to ask archinect to boycott israel. there isn't a larger goal of actually trying to improve anything
tammuz, logic is logic. logic is not an emotial plea. logic is not agreeing with tammuz. logic is not zionist. not logic is something else. you like to read links right?
Eradication of Jews from the region? Have I ever stated that? Why do you even bring it up as a possibility? You're a disingenuous maverick who has her or his intention as feeding their malignant impressions onto others by way of your insidious questions. No, you're not a serious question. Stop posing as one; its clear where you're coming from. Tailor your questions to my presentation so far if you wish...when I found myself agreeing with you on a certain point, I did not hesitate in accepting your criticism on that specific point. However asking me whether I want to eradicate Jews from the region is in your mind - to be used as a cheap rhetorical device- not in mine.
It should have been clear to you that I am very far from looking at this topic from either a Jewish or anti-Jewish perspective. The dispossession of a people is the dispossession of a people. Israel is a racist colonial misadventure and this misadventure should end. There is no question in my mind about that. The Palestinians around the world should have the right to return and have the right to reside in Palestine and yes be compensated. People should live without discrimination on basis of religion. Being a Jew or a Muslim does not make anyone more or less important.
But my aim in this thread, as stated and as you, typically, sidestep, only in order to setup overtly obvious mine fields that don't relate to me, is to have Archinect boycott Israeli institutions and firms - a very reasonable and peaceful endeavor that worked well in ending the apartheid regime in South Africa and there is absolutely no reason why it wouldn't work here.
As Jewish survivors and descendents of survivors of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.
We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia.
Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to promote blatant falsehoods used to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of nearly 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.
We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
A Muslim woman covers the yellow star of her Jewish neighbour with her veil to protect her from prosecution. Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. [1941]
In the times of prosecution throughout the history, this has been the traditional relationship between Muslim and Jews up until Palestine.
-----
I find tammuz's posts unwaveringly humanist in their core (I am not the only one) and let's not call anybody anti semite casually. It is a huge accusation and anybody uses it casually (such as "in my book you are an anti semite") is using it irresponsibly.
Archinect, please boycott Israel (its about time!)
tammuz - Do you hope to smother your ideological opposition under mountains of essay and book excerpts, or do you plan to put forth original, well-supported thoughts ever?
t a m m u z tammuz is an Internet BOT
It is not always about the erasure of history (it could indeed be about racism and double standards, about valuing the European more than the Arab, the Israeli more than the Palestinian, be it that the first happens to be colonial and the second indigenous) , nonetheless....
From Images of Gaza and the erasure of history
Erasure of history
A second fundamental flaw in mainstream news reporting is the tendency to abstract particular episodes of violence from their wider historical, social and political context. Only rarely do media accounts mention key dimension of the conflict - be it Israel’s dispossession of Palestinian land, the daily brutality and dehumanisation of military occupation, systematic discrimination against Israeli Arabs, or the structural violence of Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip.
These omissions in coverage closely mirror gaps in public knowledge. According to a 2011 survey, less than half of the British public are able to identify Israel as the occupying force. One in five is aware that “most UN resolutions have been directed against Israel”. And only 36 percent are aware that Israeli settlements and the Separation Wall in the West Bank are illegal under international law (whereas, interestingly, more than two thirds state correctly that Palestinian suicide bombs and rocket attacks are illegal). Across all such basic knowledge questions, the most common answer was “don’t know”.
Of course, the media are not solely to blame for this state of ignorance. How news coverage shapes public opinion is an immensely complex question. Nonetheless, traditional news media such as the BBC continue to be the main source of information about Israel-Palestine for most people. These numbers are therefore, at least in part, a testament to the profound failure of news organisations to communicate even the most basic realities of what is arguably the most mediatised conflict in the world.
This erasure of context and history is hugely consequential.
According to the Sunday Times poll, taken at the height of Israel’s bombing campaign when identification with Palestinians would presumably be at its highest, 27 percent of the British public stated their “sympathies lie more with Palestinians”. And, yes, this is almost twice the number of people who identify more closely with Israel. Crucially, however, four in ten said their sympathies lie with neither side.
Public opinion towards Israel-Palestine is indeed slowly shifting. But when abstracted from the root causes and causalities that determine the reality of the conflict on the ground—a reality which amounts to Israel’s piecemeal destruction of Palestinian nationhood—images of Palestinian suffering do not necessarily translate into large-scale support for the Palestinian cause. Presumably, this has something to do with the fact that a considerable section of the public believes Palestinians themselves are to blame for their own plight.
Correcting the narrative
None of this is to suggest that stories and images of suffering need not be told and shown. They are a necessary, if not sufficient, step towards the re-humanisation of Palestinian lives in our collective imaginary.
But “images”, writes Sontag, “cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers.” Israel may be losing the war of images but its preferred narrative still dominates mainstream media accounts of the conflict. This fundamental imbalance has prompted Britain’s leading media scholars to call on the BBC to host a televised debate about its own performance. Because as long as this deeply entrenched bias persists, the media will continue to bear a responsibility for the unfolding tragedy to which they bear witness.
For what is so often lost in the dominant media account is the Palestinian view of the war, a war that did not begin on July 8 but one that has been going on for decades, a war not confined to the Gaza Strip but the entire Palestinian people, and a war that will continue to diminish their lives even when the bombs temporarily stop falling and news cameras rolling.
São Paulo Biennial Curators Join Artists in Repudiating Israeli Sponsorship
The curators of the 31st São Paulo Biennial have supported the artists’ call on the organization to return Israeli sponsorship funds, a demand they believe “should also be a trigger to think about the funding sources of major cultural events.” Their stance, articulated in a three-paragraph statement sent to Hyperallergic earlier this evening (and reproduced below), endorses the broader strategy undertaken by the open letter the objecting artists released yesterday. That letter featured 55 signatories; the Biennial lists 68 participating artists and collectives.
read more
Thanks Orhan. It comes in response to the below.
Open letter to the Fundacão Bienal Sao Paulo,
We, the undersigned artists participating in the 31st Bienal have been suddenly confronted, just as the show is about to open, with the fact that the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo has accepted money from the Israeli state and that the Israeli Consulate logo appears in the Bienal pavilion and on its publications and website.
At a time in which the people of Gaza return to the rubble of their homes, destroyed by the Israeli military we do not feel it is acceptable to receive Israeli cultural sponsorship. In accepting this funding our artistic work displayed in the exhibition is undermined and implicitly used for whitewashing Israel’s on going aggressions and violation of international law and human rights. We reject Israel’s attempt to normalise itself within the context of a major international cultural event in Brazil.
With this statement, we appeal to the Fundação Bienal to refuse this funding and to take action on this matter before the opening of the exhibition.
So, in response to RIBA's call on the IUA to suspend Israel's architects' organization, what do they get, of course, lampooned with? Being called "anti-Semitic" of course. What else is there but this ugly self-bankrupting accusation that goes beyond blackmail to cloud over true anti-Semitism and its victims around the world. The more this anti-Semitic accusation is wielded as a weapon against justice, against truth, the more it becomes a case of "Peter cries Wolf".
Jewish Chronicle called out on charge of RIBA antisemitism
The RIBA HQ in Portland Place, London
This posting has these items:
Statement from JfJfP
JfJfP applauds the British architects’ organisation (RIBA) vote to call on the International Union of Architects (IUA) to suspend Israel’s architects’ organisation, the IAUA, for the central role it, and its members, play in creating the “facts on the ground” that have set in concrete Israel’s takeover of the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinian. This vote comes after repeated reminders by the UIA to the IAUA of its ethical policy, and five years of unheeded requests for the Israeli body to answer for itself.
The siting, design, landscaping, infrastructure and building of over 120 exclusive and segregated settlements and towns, housing half a million Jewish Israelis and not one Palestinian, could not have happened without the full complicity of the professional organisation of Israeli Architects, in contravention of international architects’ ethical standards and international law. The Settlements are illegal and constitute a war crime.
We are appalled at the editorial in the Jewish Chronicle headlined “Architects of Hate” which says that “Jews” are to be “banned from joining” the IUA: “Be in no doubt” it declaims “the Royal Institute of British Architects is now officially antisemitic. … “
The RIBA did not, as the JC claims, arbitrarily “single out” the Jewish state, or individual Jews, for censure. It called for the IUA “as the international guardian of professional and ethical standards in our profession, to suspend the membership of the Israeli Association of United Architects, until it acts to resist these illegal projects, and observes international law, and the UIA Accords ….”
No Jewish architect is to be censured or banned, nor is the Israeli architects’ union to be suspended for ever, or for being Jewish (or Israeli) but until it conforms with the same IUA standards that other countries’ associations are expected to meet.
The editorial accuses the RIBA of “Jew hatred” on the grounds of Israel’s claim to be “the Jewish state”. We do not accept that the State of Israel represents Judaism or speaks for the five-plus million Jews worldwide who do not live in Israel, or that Israel’s claim to be “the Jewish state” has any validity in international law, or that political action against those implicated in Israel’s abuses of human rights is anti-semitic.
Being unable to defend the IAUA you are reduced to howling “anti-semitism” and “Jew hatred”, to crying wolf, which devalues the most serious of principles.
JfJfP Executive Committee.
The sea in Gaza on the first Friday since the end of the assault. As my Israeli friend who posted the picture on facebook says, "celebrate their spirit and share their humanity."
From Children describe torture in Israeli solitary confinement
The latest report from DCI-Palestine adds to a mountain of evidence about Israel’s systematic abuse and killings of Palestinian children, including earlier reports from DCI-Palestine, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Last December, the advocacy group the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) revealed that Israeli authorities had locked Palestinian children in outdoor cages during a severe winter storm.
From Palestinian children tortured, used as shields by Israel: U.N.
A United Nations human rights body accused Israeli forces on Thursday of mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields.
Palestinian children in the Gaza and the West Bank, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, are routinely denied registration of their birth and access to health care, decent schools and clean water, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child said.
"Palestinian children arrested by (Israeli) military and police are systematically subject to degrading treatment, and often to acts of torture, are interrogated in Hebrew, a language they did not understand, and sign confessions in Hebrew in order to be released," it said in a report.
In Gaza's shifting sands, resistance inevitably wins
#GazaUnderAttack
Author Info Wrap
Dr. Mosheer Amer
Friday 29 August 2014 19:30 BST
Topics:
GazaUnderAttack
Tags:
gaza, Israel, Ceasefire
0 comments
{C}
While Gazans mourn its victims of Israel's state terrorism, a spirit of triumph dominates as they write a new chapter in the Palestinian national liberation struggle
As Gaza drapes itself in mourning for its victims of Israel's state terrorism, a spirit of triumph and determination is dominating the war-stricken people, who are writing a new defining chapter in the Palestinian national liberation struggle.
Israel has, once again, unleashed its brutal war machine against the Gazan population with the blessings of "Israel's right to defend itself," coming from the Obama Administration and many European capitals, and evidently back-channel approval from some Arab capitals - rhetoric aside - in a bid to crush Hamas and bring in the more pliable Ramallah-based Abbas regime.
After the disappearance of the three Israelis in Hebron, there was a widespread miscalculation that it was time for Israel to settle account with Hamas, who had been coming out bruised and weakened, due to losing key regional allies, financial woes and dwindling popularity, resulting from its long years of bickering with Abbas' Palestinian Authority.
Yet, somehow in Gaza's shifting sands, drawing inferences based on illusive reality can only lead to deadly consequences that cold political analyses coming from air-conditioned offices rarely predict.
In Israel and many Western and Arab capitals, their worst fears seem to have turned into a bitter reality, as they watch the scenes of jubilant Gazans celebrating victory after surviving 51 days of death, Hiroshima-like destruction of property, tribulations and horrors rained down on their heads by Israeli occupation forces. Gazans are coming out in a show of pride and appreciation for the military successes their lightly-armed resistance fighters exhibited in the battlefield.
Israel's intention of this latest aggression on Gaza was to crush Hamas and restore confidence in its deterrence abilities. But this bungled aggression has only meant further erosion of Israel's deterrence capability and has shaken to the core its longstanding security formula. Neither Israel's "mowing the lawn" military strategy nor its "map of pain" succeeded in bringing the already besieged and beleaguered Palestinians to their knees begging for an Israeli ceasefire.
To the contrary, Israel's elite forces crumbled at Gaza's doorstep, and the Palestinian resistance succeeded in hitting deep in Israel proper. Israel's founding commanders must be turning in their graves, seeing thousands of Israelis in the south leaving en masse and millions of others in shelters. The situation in Israel is one of confusion, humiliation, finger pointing, and uncertainty about what the future holds for the Jewish State.
President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi's regime in Egypt, now Israel's close ally, was in no hurry to stop Israel's barbarity, in hopes that Israel would crush Hamas. It was clearly standing in the way of a ceasefire agreement, which can be seen as a victory for Hamas, an ideological branch of Sisi's much-hated Muslim Brotherhood. Sisi's administration saw that such victory would only embolden its formidable internal foes and hence destabilise the regime.
Whether the Palestinian negotiating delegation saw the concluded ceasefire understandings in Cairo as less than what Gazans had hoped for, or the best they could get is something beside the question, considering Israel's track record of reneging on past agreements and understandings whenever it saw fit, and given the silence and complicity of key Arab states and world powers over the systematic destruction of Palestinian lives and civilian infrastructure in Gaza.
Israel has made no secret of its new forged alliance with key Arab countries, and as David Hearst aptly pointed out in recent articles, fear is at the heart of this unholy Arab alliance with Israel forged by Palestinian blood.
After nearly choking off all Arab uprisings in the region, the silence of Arab leaders over Israel's brutalization of the Palestinians is driven by fear of a resurgence of political Islam and what Hamas' victory means for the wider Arab masses across the region.
In much of the Arab and Islamic world, Palestine continues to be the unifying central cause for the Arab and Muslim nation, al-Umma, regardless of their political and ideological leanings. As millions of Arabs and Muslims around the world see how Palestinian - mainly Hamas - fighters brought Israel and its army to a state of paralysis and humiliation, this may once again rejuvenate a spirit of revolution against conditions of injustice and oppression they themselves suffer from.
Palestinian proponents of a negotiated settlement with Israel under the terms of the Oslo accords are standing to lose the most from this latest Israeli onslaught on Gaza, especially after many have seen the efficacy of armed resistance in uniting Palestinians behind a national resistance program.
Palestinian popular support for the resistance is at its highest, and the current battle has again pointed to the futility of the so-called peace negotiations that produced nothing but more colonial settlements, ghettoization of Palestinian territories, deprivation and a consolidation of an Israeli system of domination and control.
While many Palestinians believe that the siege, injustice and occupation are not going to end soon, victory in the eyes of Gazans is the very act of resistance and steadfastness in the face of a brutal and murderous Israeli military occupation regime. It was a victory of Gaza's David over Israel's Goliath.
The consequences of this latest aggression on Gaza will place the Palestinian national struggle on a totally new platform for years to come. It depends now much more than ever on the Palestinian resistance factions across the political spectrum to rally support for the continued struggle against the Israeli occupation.
- Dr Mosheer Amer is Professor of Discourse Analysis & Linguistics at the English department of the Islamic University of Gaza.
- See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/gazas-shifting-sands-resistance-inevitably-wins-1544571116#sthash.RfMV7uIv.dpuf
I think you've made your point loud and clear by now. It's time to get off your soapbox and stop spamming this forum.
In this interview with CAABU, author, comedian and actor Alexis Sayle compares Israel to the serial rapist and abuser of children, Jimmy Savile:
"I always try and think of the psychology of the nation and the psychology of the people behind it, and I said it in 2009 during Cast Lead that Israel seemed to me to be like a teenager that's never been given any boundaries, that is endlessly indulged by its doting parents, the West, and has kind of become psychopath as a result.
But now, thinking about it, you could also say that Israel is now the Jimmy Savile of nation states, it clearly doesn't care about damaging the lives of children, it thinks that everybody else is in the wrong, and it is endlessly in the right.
And also it's a state that is endlessly again indulged by the power, by Western powers, by governments everywhere because they're frightened of it, frightened of it physically in some ways and of its kind of anger and of the power that it wields and its influence."
From The Israeli State of Exception and the Case for Academic Boycott David Lloyd and Malini Johar Schueller
Well-orchestrated efforts to define criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism
or to intimidate Students for Justice in Palestine have resulted in the extraordinary prosecution of the Irvine 11, students who peacefully protested the visit of the Israeli ambassador, or California Senate Resolution, HR 35, which effectively defines peaceful protests against Israeli policies as hateful, and hence prohibited, and is clearly an attempt to model legislation for other states. Israel is singled out most clearly by being the only country that cannot be criticized openly in the United States and on university campuses without serious repercussions.
This climate of orchestrated harassment of critics of Zionism, designed to intimidate and silence, bears no comparison with the no less orchestrated complaints by pro-Israel students on campuses that criticism of Israel is tantamount to anti-Semitism. To concede that point would be to undermine the very foundations of the university, which must allow any belief and any political system, political or religious, and however deeply held, to be subjected to reasonable
criticism.
The censorship that US academics and citizens face regarding criticism of Israel is negligible,however, compared to the daily regime of occupation and siege that denies Palestinian scholars the right to free movement and prevents them from attending classes, taking exams, or studying abroad on fellowships; that subjects universities to frequent and arbitrary closures, constituting collective punishment; or that willfully destroys academic institutions, like the American International School or the Islamic University of Gaza in 2009, which were destroyed along with some twenty other schools and colleges. If there has been anywhere a systematic denial of academic freedom to a whole population, rather than to specific individuals or to institutions, it is surely in Palestine under Israeli occupation.
...The point of the boycott is structural and is meant to challenge the state of exception
through which Israel has escaped reprimand or penalty and has created conditions under which the rights of Palestinian scholars, academics, and students are routinely suppressed. In this context, it becomes a luxury for North American academics to appeal to a distinctly one-sided and restrictive version of the principles of academic freedom while accepting complicity in the denial of those rights to not just individuals but whole populations.
We would do well to remember the words of Howard Zinn in a lecture in South Africa
during apartheid: “To me, academic freedom has always meant the right to insist that freedom be more than academic—that the university, because of its special claim to be a place for the pursuit of truth, be a place where we can challenge not only ideas but the institutions, the practices of society, measuring them against millennia-old ideals of equality and justice.”13 If academic freedom is, indeed, a universal value, not one restricted to a few who are privileged by geography and colonial histories, then the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel becomes, as South Africa was in the 1980s, a test case for our intellectual and moral consistency. If we or the AAUP refuse to endorse that call, then the commitment to academic freedom becomes vacuous and meaningless, an assertion of privilege and entitlement, not of fundamental values.
Palestinian education, like Palestinian culture and civil society, has been systematically targeted for destruction: it is no longer a matter of the infringement of the free speech of a few individuals but a case in which, in the time-honored manner of settler colonialism, a powerful and well-armed state seeks to extinguish the cultural life and identity of an indigenous people. Not only is the boycott movement the only practical possibility for
Palestinian survival, its application is principled and defined in its scope and ends. No clearer case has existed for the extension of an academic boycott since the ANC made its similar call for boycott and divestment in the struggle against South African apartheid. To continue to duck what is increasingly one of the defining moral and political struggles of our time would be not merely inconsistent but intellectually and ethically bankrupt. The oldest US organization representing academics and scholars can do better than that, and it is time for it to do so. We must cease to make an exception of Israel. "
David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His most
recent book is Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity (Cambridge, 2011). Malini Johar Schueller is
Professor of English at the University of Florida. Her most recent book is Locating R
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2737764/Palestinian-leader-say-Hamas-caused-prolonged-war.html
Young girl with a Kalashnikov joins in jihadists' celebration of 'victory' over Israel - but Palestinian president says Hamas are to blame for loss of 2,000 lives
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has accused Hamas of causing thousands of unnecessary deaths by fighting in Gaza for longer than was needed.
President Abbas said all casualties could have been avoided and blamed Hamas for needlessly extending the war with Israel.
His words came as hundreds of Palestinian Islamic militants took part in a rally celebrating the 'victory' over Israel, in Gaza City today.
Young children were seen brandishing weapons as fighters of Al-Quds brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamist organisation Palestinian Islamic Jihad, marched in the streets.
Israel and Hamas militants fought for 50 days before reaching a truce on Tuesday, with both sides declaring a victory.
Abbas told Palestine TV in remarks broadcast Friday that 'it was possible for us to avoid all of that, 2,000 martyrs, 10,000 injured, 50,000 houses (damaged or destroyed).'
More than 2,100 Palestinians were killed, including hundreds of civilians. Seventy one people on the Israeli side, including six civilians, were killed.
Several Egyptian mediated cease-fire attempts failed. Hamas eventually accepted almost the same truce offered at the beginning.
Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority runs the West Bank, formed a unity government backed by Hamas earlier this year. Abbas questioned the future of that arrangement in the interview.
Egypt, which brokered the peace deal, has said that indirect talks between the two sides would resume within a month.
On Thursday, French President Francois Hollande told international diplomats that Europe could help oversee the destruction of tunnels used by Hamas militants and monitor the territory's border crossings with Israel and Egypt.
‘It is necessary to move toward an end to the blockade and a demilitarization of the territory,’ he said, indicating that international supervision could help pave the way for a return of Hamas' rival, the Palestinian Authority, to Gaza.
The French proposal, Hollande said, would ‘finally give the Palestinian Authority the means to respond to the humanitarian crisis and to begin reconstruction.’
Whether the sides are ready to accept external involvement is unclear.
Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry, said that the country is ready to consider any proposal but must be convinced that monitoring will work.
In Gaza, Hamad al-Rakeb, a Hamas spokesman, described Hollande's proposal as ‘mixing poison in the honey.’
Riyad Mansour, Abbas' ambassador to the United Nations, on Thursday welcomed the idea of international monitors as a ‘useful deterrent’ to more fighting.
He acknowledged, however, that disarming Hamas is ‘not realistic.’
Biggest West Bank land appropriation (read "land grab") in 30 years, says Peace Now; settlers laud Netanyahu, Ya'alon, government.
I wonder what Abbas has to say about this? His spokesman so far said this, "this decision will lead to more instability. This will only inflame the situation after the war in Gaza.”
For those who are still sincerely wondering the root cause of the Palestinian resistance and increasing radicalization and hard lining of Hamas, I urge you to evaluate the content of this article. This is still happening regardless of UN rulings, US oppositions (mixed with good cop bad cop strategies) and obvious problems it causes. Israeli government has no qualms about stealing land from Palestinians no matter what and as if their birthright to appropriate someone else's land as if it's their own...
i think they've moved from gaza to the west bank.
Why are you keep coming back and demanding an end to this thread? Have I ever asked anybody to end their thread or interest in their chosen subject even though I am not interested in many of them? I / we are not personally addressing any of you at this point. How do you find this appropriate and rightful to ask others to not be interested and keep quite on a subject they have an interest so much so they are risking defamation and other insults? Why it is so hard for you to not read this thread and ignore it? Is it really hurting your feelings that you have vehemently defended and found it appropriate the killing of children and innocent civilians and now you want those to be gone without a trace? What is hurting you? Are you so offended or your assumed hubristic superiority over other people threatened? Why are you chronically short sided to think that there is a truce and problems are gone?
Why are you so righteous?
Please leave this thread alone and go post on what is the difference between licensed architect and designer type of threads. That, seems like as far as your vocabulary is useful.
Thank you.
Israel's history = history of massacres israel's presence = extinguishing that of Palestinians From http://www.almanar.com.lb/english/adetails.php?eid=168507&cid=23&fromval=1&frid=23&seccatid=23&s1=1 200 Palestinian Bodies Found in Tel Aviv Mass GravesLocal Editor It has been revealed that the remains of dozens of Palestinians killed during the Zionist war on Arabs in 1948 were found in six mass graves in the Jaffa district of Tel Aviv on Wednesday. The graves were found when ground subsided as builders carried out renovation work in the area, an official at the Muslim cemetery there told AFP. The bodies are believed to belong to the victims of a massacre carried out by right-wing Jewish militias in the former Arab district. As-Safri newspaper reported that up to 200 bodies may be in the graves, with an unknown additional number in the other graves. 'The remains belong to people of different ages, including women, children and the elderly, some of which bear signs of violence,' Researcher and historian Mahmoud Obeid said. Around 760,000 Palestinians were forced out of their homes in the war, many of them still living as refugees in Jordan.
Israeli home demolitions leave 51 homeless near Jerusalem
Published Thursday 28/08/2014 (updated) 30/08/2014 09:44
(MaanImages)
JERUSALEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli authorities on Thursday demolished six homes near Jerusalem, leaving 51 Palestinians homeless and bringing the year's total displaced in the West Bank and East Jerusalem up to 752.
A Ma'an reporter said that Israeli civil administration workers raided the Sheikh Anbar neighborhood in Zuayyim village without prior notice and demolished a number of structures belonging to the al-Saidi, al-Jahalin, and Abu al-Hawa families that authorities claimed were built without a permit.
The structures included five homes and three cattle sheds.
Khader al-Saidi, one of the newly-displaced residents, said that authorities demolished the homes with bulldozers without allowing the families to remove their possession.
This led to an exchange of insults and hand scuffles between residents and Israeli forces, he added.
Al-Saidi said that his family had lived in the area since the 1950s, and that they had bought the three dunam piece of land the structures were built on 10 years ago.
"Five years ago (the family) built residential structures and cattle-raising structures," in the area, he said, adding that civil administration bulldozers had destroyed the family's structures three times in the last two years.
Al-Saidi said that each structure was around 100 square meters, and that in total they house 38 people between them.
He added that the Israeli civil administration had handed a notice of demolition for a residential structure in the area belonging to his brother Muhammad, but his brother had traveled to Jordan on Wednesday to receive health treatment. It was not clear if they planned to demolish his home before the returned.
During the raid, bulldozers also razed a structure belonging to Ahmad Murshed Jahhalin, which was built in 1999 and housed 13 people. A sheep barn was also destroyed.
A cow shed belonging to Mahmoud Abu al-Hawa was also destroyed.
Israel has destroyed more than 377 Palestinian properties in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2014, displacing 752 people, according to UNOCHA.
Israel rarely grants Palestinians permits to build in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
It has demolished at least 27,000 Palestinian homes and structures since occupying the West Bank in 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
From Let’s compare Israel to the Islamic state.
"...A careful observer will notice that it is Israel, not HAMAS, which share a similar mission and tactics with ISIS. Israel, like ISIS, is a borderless “State”. Their refusals to identify its borders allow Israel to continue to annex Arab lands in pursuit of a Jewish empire spanning from the Nile to the Euphrates. Not only is Israel sharing the imperial dream with ISIS, they also employ the same kind of bestial cruelty in pursuing the nefarious objectives."
"...2. Israel and the Islamic state both founded by terrorists
Israel was founded through violent and repulsive acts of terror by three groups called Irgun, Lehi and Haganah. The Irgun and Haganah believed that any means necessary to establish the Jewish State of Israel, including terrorism, was justifiable. They massacred unsuspecting and unarmed Palestinian villagers, destroyed Palestinian heritage sites and bombed the King David hotel which housed foreign diplomats. The founders of the Islamic State seem to have adopted exactly the same Haganah/Irgun strategy of systematic massacres of Iraqi villagers and killing of Westerners.
The King David Hotel after being bombed by the founders of Israel
HAMAS does not bomb hotels and loves meeting Western leaders as exemplified by their meeting with the former US president Jimmy Carter.
HAMAS leader Ismail Haniyeh meet the former US President Jimmy Carter.
3. Religion as the cover for terror
The Zionist terror groups invoked the Christian bible’s assertion that God pledged Israel to be inhabited exclusively by the Jews. They interpreted the bible to mean they must kill and maim in order to unite the world’s Jews under one Jewish state. This obsession with antiquated scriptures is exactly what drives ISIS. Like Haganah and Irgun, ISIS Believes that they are implementing God’s wish by restoring a caliphate so that the entire world’s Muslims can live under one Islamic state.
HAMAS’ manifesto describes religion as a source of guidance to individuals and they certainly do not exude the empire state of mind that is shared by ISIS and Israel.
4. Similar strategy and tactics.
The founders of Israel carried out callous and barbaric massacres of innocent Christians and Muslims. Entire villages were wiped out through a terror policy called “Leave or Die”. Thousands of Palestinian Christians and Muslims were forced to leave their homes and seek shelter on the mountains and deserts. The Islamic State is implementing that policy in word and with detailed accuracy as we see it on the Yazidi people and Iraqi Christians.Meanwhile “In Gaza, Christians are protected by Hamas” said Michel Sabah the 77 year old Latin Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem.
5. Jihad for Eretz Yisrael and Aliyah to the Caliphate.
It would be tragic to assume that the terrorists who are ravaging Iraq are Iraqi Muslims. They are mercenaries drawn from all over the world mainly in Europe. They left their countries and families behind to come and terrorise the long suffering people of Iraq. In the same vein, the founders of Israel were not Palestinian Jews at all but Eastern Europe slum dwellers and North Atlantic merchants. While they were terrorising the Palestinian people, their families were living in peace and safety in the West. Even today more than half of the members of the Israel Occupation forces that are pillaging Gaza are Western mercenaries. HAMAS fighters are Palestinian orphans and refugees. The State of Israel and the Islamic State were both established by mercenary terror groups."
Tammuz, stop with this disgusting slander. You sound like a mouthpiece for Hamas.
Not unlike this guy: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/wolf-blitzer-confronts-hamas-spox-for-his-disturbing-blood-libel-remarks/
Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan has been making infrequent appearances on CNN in the past few weeks, but today Wolf Blitzer really held his feet to the fire. At issue here was what Blitzer called “disturbing” comments Hamdan made on television saying that Jews use Christian blood to make matzoh, a charge generally referred to as blood libel.
Hamdan had said, “We all remember how the Jews used to slaughter Christians in order to mix their blood in their holy matzoh. This is not a figment of the imagination or something taken from a film. It is a fact acknowledged by their own books and historical evidence.”
Blitzer confronted Hamdan over that remark today. Hamdan, repeatedly, refused to directly answer Blitzer’s question. Instead, he argued that the truly disgusting rhetoric is coming from the Israelis. Hamdan told Blitzer, “They are misusing the words. I’ve said on the same occasion that we don’t have problems with the Jews… I have Jewish friends who are supporting the Palestinian rights.”
At no point did Hamdan address those controversial remarks themselves. But what Blitzer noticed is that not once did Hamdan issue any kind of denial for uttering such “an awful, awful smear.”
Tammuz, this excerpt is particularly bad, and-- I'll say it-- is utterly anti-Semitic:
5. Jihad for Eretz Yisrael and Aliyah to the Caliphate.
It would be tragic to assume that the terrorists who are ravaging Iraq are Iraqi Muslims. They are mercenaries drawn from all over the world mainly in Europe. They left their countries and families behind to come and terrorise the long suffering people of Iraq. In the same vein, the founders of Israel were not Palestinian Jews at all but Eastern Europe slum dwellers and North Atlantic merchants. While they were terrorising the Palestinian people, their families were living in peace and safety in the West. Even today more than half of the members of the Israel Occupation forces that are pillaging Gaza are Western mercenaries. HAMAS fighters are Palestinian orphans and refugees. The State of Israel and the Islamic State were both established by mercenary terror groups."
* * *
What about Holocaust refugees who had nowhere else to go?
Serious Question;
Firstly, I'm quoting an article for people's consideration here. I'm sure they've been inundated with thousands of sources claiming that Hamas is a "terrorist organization" and all that bullshit whereas , of course, a faction of the Palestinian resistance has the right to exist and fight against occupation and against the racist colonial policies of Israel.
Secondly, prove that the article is being anti-Semitic. Yes, they were slum dwellers, ghettos were slums and European hegemonc powers forced the Jews to live in slums. The true anti-Semites were those Europeans...not anyone who out that Jews were made to dwell in slums. Go bash the glorious tradition of anti-Semitism in Europe that not only created the Holocaust but also consequently created the Nakba and dispossession of the Palestinians. You have the wrong address; I am more Semite than a roomful of Ashkenazis celebrating barmitzvah. Yes, I agree the tern of "slum dweller" is not sympathetic but its not her or his fault - its the fault of someone who forces her or him to exist in slums.
As for the actual point which you sidestep altogether, yes there is a great similarity between what the early Jewish terrorist bandits (Stern, Irgun and Hagannah) did and what ISIS is doing and this has been noticed by many analysts within the Middle East. This is why the article -which doesn't really state something new- resonated with me. Unforunately, here, I am limited to English language sources - there is a great wealth of information available in Arabic.
Anyway, your deliberate strategy to obfuscating is ridiculous. And your demonization of Palestinian resistance factions is gaining lesser and lesser traction the more obvious and evident are the inhumanity and the sheer lack of the right to exist of this Israel colony.
As for the victims of Europe's savagery and racist within Europe, in order for Europe (and America) to feel better, is it necessary that another people, somewhere else, be dispossessed, thrown out of their country, be made into miserable refugees and for those that remain, be treated like undesirables and secondary subjects so that "anti-Semitism" be vanquished?
What sort of moronic logic is that? Only one based on yet another dehumanization of another group of people. Another "anti-Semitism". As long as Israel exists, anti-Semitism is well and alive, racism is well and alive and has its own country.
Israel and Palestine, an animated introduction.
Jewish Voice for Peace
And, what do we expect of Zionist hooligans but moderation and pacifism?
I want to cut your throat’: Galloway beaten by pro-Israeli fanatic for Gaza views
It's anti-Semitic because it tacitly overlooks the Holocaust. Re-quote:
5. Jihad for Eretz Yisrael and Aliyah to the Caliphate.
It would be tragic to assume that the terrorists who are ravaging Iraq are Iraqi Muslims. They are mercenaries drawn from all over the world mainly in Europe. They left their countries and families behind to come and terrorise the long suffering people of Iraq. In the same vein, the founders of Israel were not Palestinian Jews at all but Eastern Europe slum dwellers and North Atlantic merchants. While they were terrorising the Palestinian people, their families were living in peace and safety in the West. Even today more than half of the members of the Israel Occupation forces that are pillaging Gaza are Western mercenaries. HAMAS fighters are Palestinian orphans and refugees. The State of Israel and the Islamic State were both established by mercenary terror groups."
You're losing credibility and showing your true colors.
From Zionism and Anti-Semitism
"One of the favourite tactics of supporters of Israel and Zionism is to accuse their opponents of ‘anti-Semitism’. This argument is advanced in an attempt to prevent criticism of Israel from being presented, or to attack the individual or group, that is defending Palestinian human rights.
Implicit in this criticism is the idea that all Jews, except a handful of ‘self haters’ support the Israeli state. Such an argument is inherently anti-Semitic, based as it is on the notion of a collective ethnic adherence to a particular political position. It also ascribes guilt for Israel’s crimes upon Jewish people collectively.
As Tony Greenstein has written in The Guardian,
Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of “anti-semitism” has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article.
So absurd has the situation become that the allegation of anti-semitism is even made when Jews disagree among themselves. That is why the suggestion by Alvin Rosenfield that “anti-Zionism is the form that much of today’s anti-semitism takes” needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.
One of the consequences of this abuse of the term “anti-semitism” is to devalue the currency. It renders it almost meaningless because people assume that allegations of anti-semitism are merely the last-ditch resort of those who are incapable of defending the Apartheid Wall that separates the people of the West Bank from their land, the bulldozing of civilian houses, the wanton destruction of olive groves and crops, to say nothing of the theft of their land.
Anti-semitism today is not a mainstream form of racism. It is asylum seekers, Muslims and black people who face stop-and-search, control orders and racial profiling, not Jewish people.
...Anti-Semitism is a hatred of Jews for them being Jews, and only for being Jews, not for what they do or how they act as individuals, or act even as a group or part of a group. No group is above criticism for what they do. Especially when they ethnically cleanse populations, destroy 531 villages, massacre civilians, rape, illegally confiscate property without compensation to the deeded land owners, illegally confiscate bank accounts, bulldoze houses, use targeted assassinations to extra-judicially kill their political opponents, steal nuclear material,51 repeatedly invade neighbouring countries and impose since 1967 an illegal military occupation, and build “Jewish only settlements” and “Jewish only roads” in what the World Court, the United Nations, numerous human rights organizations and virtually every country in the World says is illegal activity.52
...Many anti-Semites, including many Nazis, were Zionists who wanted to expel the Jews from Europe and send them to Palestine.56 For example Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis Minister for the Eastern Territories was Hitler’s favourite theoretician. Rosenberg argued that ‘Zionism must be vigorously supported in order to encourage a significant number of German Jews to leave for Palestine or other destinations.’57 Rosenberg was fond of citing the Zionists’ own arguments that the Jews were a separate people. He took this as ‘a clear affirmation that all Jews were aliens in Germany…’ ‘Rosenberg’s argument that the Zionist movement could be utilized to promote the political, social and cultural segregation of Jews in Germany, as well as their emigration, was eventually transformed into policy by the Hitler regime after 1933.’58
... Zionism is a political ideology and is not the same thing as Judaism or being Jewish. They are very different. Judaism has existed for thousands of years as a religion. Political Zionism, as espoused by Herzl, has only existed since the 1890′s. Anti-Semitism has many similarities to Zionism as it is based on the separation of Jews and non-Jews. And many Zionists are in fact Anti-Semites and want to get rid of the Jews from their country and send them to Palestine.
It could be argued that Zionism and Anti-Semitism are the opposite sides of the same coin. As I have said before I want Jews to be safe in their countries of citizenship and all other countries. I also want the same for the Palestinians and every other people in the World."
Holocaust deniers are per se anti-Semitic in my book! Sorry if you think otherwise.
Also, where have you ever proposed a workable solution to the conflict? What would you see as a positive resolution?
(Tammuz furiously Googling for articles analogizing Israel with fundamentalist Islam)
How does it deny the Holocaust?
The idea of Israel started way before the Holocaust and the infrastructure for the creation of Israel and indeed the process of "exporting" Europeans into Palestine started before the Holocaust and a large part of it was spearheaded by anti-Jewish colonial powers who wanted to get rid of Jews within Europe (the sentiment was not restricted to Hitler's Germany but extended throughout Europe in the form of the "Jewish Question").
So, anti-Semitism is not only limited to the Holocaust, there were also the Russian pogroms and a long history of suffering of the Jews at the hand of Europeans by means -bureaucratic, urban policy making, land usage, etc- that are not far from what the Israelis are doing now to Palestinians.
You're deliberately sidetracking and not explaining your obscure derivations and the only one showing their true colour is you by claiming that I am an anti-Semite where there is not only single expression of hatred towards the Jews whom I view to be the first victims of Zionism and, behind it, the racism and religious bigotry of Europe towards them - and especially in so concerns the puritanical Protestantism that later formed Evangelisms in the US.
I would hope that pro-Zionist Jews around the world and in Israel wake up to the fact that their ideology is a regressive pathological consequence of two 19th century great evils: anti-Semitism and colonialism. The idea that the Jewish person -seen within Europe as backward and Asiatic at the epoch- can only be elevated to a European civilized state of being by quitting Europe and colonizing Palestine, with the support of a Europe that wants them out as well, without the merest thought towards the consequential dispossession of its residents.
In other words, one may well interpret Zionism as the consequence, historically - not necessarily currently, what with it having turned into a blood curdling racist nationalism- of the European "self-hating Jew" . This also perfectly explains the antagonism it faced with the larger part of the Jewish religious establishments at its genesis and well after.
Zionism accepted, prior to everything, prior to incurring a racist nationality, the very premises of anti-Semitism: that the Jewish person was unclean, uncivilized...and that measures should be taken to civilize her or him through replicating a typical European undertaking seen to be as a pinnacle to civilization at that time: colonialism. As such, prior to attacking the Palestinians on a physical level and robbing them of their land, dignity, families, etc...Zionism robbed the Jewish people of their right to exist within Europe or Russia, equal to anyone, the right to not be represented as backwards and subhuman.
And what Zionism saw in the pre-Zionist Judaism it now projects onto Palestinians: subhuman, backwards, insufficient to be accepted as subjects in control of their destiny...but rather to be dealt with as objects to be removed and dismantled in order for this 'beacon of Western light' to shine on an Eastern land....where it is, from our perspective, a beacon of elimination and destruction.
The article says that the founders of Israel were "terrorising Palestinians" while their families were living "peacefully in the West."
Uh, no, their families were being shoved into gas chambers and then incinerated.
This is what you wrote: "Zionism robbed the Jewish people of their right to exist within Europe or Russia, equal to anyone, the right to not be represented as backwards and subhuman."
I'm pretty sure that the nationalist regimes of those European countries and Russia eradicated those rights.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005469
You're out of your mind.
Serious Question:
(Tammuz furiously Googling for articles analogizing Israel with fundamentalist Islam)
Do you read my posts or indeed the copied articles? If not, you have no right to criticize them. Stick to the content please and not to trying to be an asshole mocking someone else on archinect. Otherwise, I don't see what so "serious" about you.
And kindly, have enough respect for people who have suffered from real anti-Semitism and do not wield this accusation against anyone you want to be anti-Semitic. Wishful thinking does not make for a rationale plateau from which to deduce. I am not a Holocaust denier and neither does the article deny the Holocaust (there is no indication of that in the least - had there been, I would not quote it). I believe the Holocaust against Jews (and gypsies, and gay people, and people with mental handicaps,etc) happened and the Jewish people were subjected to great discrimination throughout European history. This is not a subject of dispute for me.
And read my above post; Zionism and the dispossession of another people could not have happened without being a pathological consequence of this racism and hatred.
Serious Question;
The article says that the founders of Israel were "terrorising Palestinians" while their families were living "peacefully in the West."
Uh, no, their families were being shoved into gas chambers and then incinerated.
Yes, here I agree with you. You are right here. I missed that one. Kindly dismiss my support on that point - its not excusable to overlook what was happening.
From Israel’s anti-Semitic friends
Zionism held that Jews were strangers in other peoples’ lands and that anti-Semitism was the natural, if not justifiable, reaction to an alien presence among them. It was but a short step from this to an acceptance that anti-Semitic characteristics and caricatures of Jews were essentially correct. Indeed, the conflation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism is yet another irony, as historically, it was non-Jewish support of Zionism that was seen by Jews as anti-Semitic. What anti-Semites and leading Zionists said about Jews were almost indistinguishable. As A.B. Yehoshua, one of Israel’s foremost novelists, stated in a lecture to the Union of Jewish Students: “Even today, in a perverse way, a real anti-Semite must be a Zionist.” And from Pinhas Felix Rosenbluth, a leading German Zionist, to Arthur Ruppin, head of the Jewish Agency, Zionists have not hesitated to employ anti-Semitic rhetoric to further their cause.
This is not so strange, because what one is talking about are in reality two entirely different forms of political philosophy with the same name — anti-Semitism. Contrary to received opinion, there is nothing in common between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Certainly the Zionist movement has deliberately confused the two, but the former is a form of anti-racism whereas the latter is a form of racism. There can be no blurring at the edges or overlap. One is either an anti-Semite or an anti-Zionist. One cannot be both.
Therefore, it is not surprising that today, with the growth of far right and neo-fascist parties in Europe, that almost without exception they are pro-Israel. Thus, the very people who criticize anti-Zionists and Palestinian supporters as anti-Semitic are rushing to hold the hands of Zionism’s far-right supporters.
that is crazy bad logic
you accept that jewish people in europe and russia faced antisemitism. they left those places because it sucks to face that kind of persecution. they went to the british mandate/ ottmon syria/ israel/ or whatever it was called at their particular time in history, because they had to go somewhere. i'm sure there were some people who went to that location for 'zionism,' and there were militant jewish organizations that promoted zionism, but you're conflating 'zionsim' with immigration.
not every 'white person' or 'european' or 'jewish person' or however you want to contextualize 'people' who moved to that area did so with the intent of killing other local communities. in fact, i'd say the militant refugees were probably in the significant minority.
are you trying to suggest if a jewish person moved to new york to escape antisemitism, that's all good an normal, but if they moved to the mideast, they're zionist murderers?
Thank you, curtkram. Just to add to what you've written about the conflation of militant Zionism with forced immigration/displacement:
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007698
Many German and Austrian Jews tried to go to the United States but could not obtain the visas needed to enter. Even though news of the violent pogroms of November 1938 was widely reported, Americans remained reluctant to welcome Jewish refugees. In the midst of the Great Depression, many Americans believed that refugees would compete with them for jobs and overburden social programs set up to assist the needy.
Congress had set up immigration quotas in 1924 that limited the number of immigrants and discriminated against groups considered racially and ethnically undesirable. These quotas remained in place even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt, responding to mounting political pressure, called for an international conference to address the refugee problem.
In the summer of 1938, delegates from thirty-two countries met at the French resort of Evian. Roosevelt chose not to send a high-level official, such as the secretary of state, to Evian; instead, Myron C. Taylor, a businessman and close friend of Roosevelt's, represented the US at the conference. During the nine-day meeting, delegate after delegate rose to express sympathy for the refugees. But most countries, including the United States and Britain, offered excuses for not letting in more refugees.
Responding to Evian, the German government was able to state with great pleasure how "astounding" it was that foreign countries criticized Germany for their treatment of the Jews, but none of them wanted to open the doors to them when "the opportunity offer[ed]."
Even efforts by some Americans to rescue children failed: the Wagner-Rogers bill, an effort to admit 20,000 endangered Jewish refugee children, was not supported by the Senate in 1939 and 1940. Widespread racial prejudices among Americans--including antisemitic attitudes held by the US State Department officials--played a part in the failure to admit more refugees.
No, the crazy logic is to build your perception of Israel on overlooking the consequential dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and overlooking each and every incident of Zionist terrorism committed against Palestinians going all the way to the terrorist European Jewish bandits created deliberately to instill terror within resident Palestinian communities and make them flee.
The crazy logic is to build on denying the continuing dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, their imprisonment within Gaza, the continuing theft by Israel of Palestinian land...and to bring out the reaction to all this, the self defense of Palestinians by Palestinians, as the exasperating source of the problem.
The crazy logic is to completely censor yourself against critically assessing Israel.
The crazy logic is to demonize the Palestinian resistance faction who have targeted predominantly military personnel belonging to a vastly superior armed forces protecting the further colonization of Palestinian properties with this racist colonial military force that targets predominantly civilian, a huge portion of which were kids.
The crazy logic is to build on denying truths that even Zionism concedes in the history of Zionist writings - that it is colonial, that it seeks to spirit away people who have resided, lived and owned their lands for generations, that if not by deception then by force, that it carries within it the germ of European racism towards Arabs- this is crazy bad logic, a logic neither based on the realities of the past or those of the present.
This is crazy, bad, blind logic...ie this is no logic at all.
What is your goal, Tammuz?
Serious Question, I'm concerned that you're not being that serious. The goal is eponymously clear.
I'm being totally serious -- do you want a one-state solution? Eradication of Jews from the region? Reparations? I want to know.
as has been mentioned, this whole thread is just to ask archinect to boycott israel. there isn't a larger goal of actually trying to improve anything
tammuz, logic is logic. logic is not an emotial plea. logic is not agreeing with tammuz. logic is not zionist. not logic is something else. you like to read links right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_logic
Eradication of Jews from the region? Have I ever stated that? Why do you even bring it up as a possibility? You're a disingenuous maverick who has her or his intention as feeding their malignant impressions onto others by way of your insidious questions. No, you're not a serious question. Stop posing as one; its clear where you're coming from. Tailor your questions to my presentation so far if you wish...when I found myself agreeing with you on a certain point, I did not hesitate in accepting your criticism on that specific point. However asking me whether I want to eradicate Jews from the region is in your mind - to be used as a cheap rhetorical device- not in mine.
It should have been clear to you that I am very far from looking at this topic from either a Jewish or anti-Jewish perspective. The dispossession of a people is the dispossession of a people. Israel is a racist colonial misadventure and this misadventure should end. There is no question in my mind about that. The Palestinians around the world should have the right to return and have the right to reside in Palestine and yes be compensated. People should live without discrimination on basis of religion. Being a Jew or a Muslim does not make anyone more or less important.
But my aim in this thread, as stated and as you, typically, sidestep, only in order to setup overtly obvious mine fields that don't relate to me, is to have Archinect boycott Israeli institutions and firms - a very reasonable and peaceful endeavor that worked well in ending the apartheid regime in South Africa and there is absolutely no reason why it wouldn't work here.
THAT'S WHY I'M ASKING YOU TO ANSWER THE QUESTION!
WHAT IS A WORKABLE POLITICAL SOLUTION TO THE CONFLICT?
Capsing doesn't make you any more serious...
The use of Caps at the end of this article rings more honestly and humanely.
225 Jewish Survivors and Descendents of Survivors of Nazi Genocide Condemn the Massacre of Palestinians
As Jewish survivors and descendents of survivors of the Nazi genocide we unequivocally condemn the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine. We further condemn the United States for providing Israel with the funding to carry out the attack, and Western states more generally for using their diplomatic muscle to protect Israel from condemnation. Genocide begins with the silence of the world.
We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch. In Israel, politicians and pundits in The Times of Israel and The Jerusalem Post have called openly for genocide of Palestinians and right-wing Israelis are adopting Neo-Nazi insignia.
Furthermore, we are disgusted and outraged by Elie Wiesel’s abuse of our history in these pages to promote blatant falsehoods used to justify the unjustifiable: Israel’s wholesale effort to destroy Gaza and the murder of nearly 2,000 Palestinians, including many hundreds of children. Nothing can justify bombing UN shelters, homes, hospitals and universities. Nothing can justify depriving people of electricity and water.
We must raise our collective voices and use our collective power to bring about an end to all forms of racism, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. We call for an immediate end to the siege against and blockade of Gaza. We call for the full economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
A Muslim woman covers the yellow star of her Jewish neighbour with her veil to protect her from prosecution. Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. [1941]
In the times of prosecution throughout the history, this has been the traditional relationship between Muslim and Jews up until Palestine.
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I find tammuz's posts unwaveringly humanist in their core (I am not the only one) and let's not call anybody anti semite casually. It is a huge accusation and anybody uses it casually (such as "in my book you are an anti semite") is using it irresponsibly.
interesting
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