“Perhaps you will also say that only some Jews are involved in this crime, that I should hold ‘Israel’ or ‘the Zionists’ responsible. But do you ask me to say that only some Spanish, or some British, or some Americans, or some Belgians committed genocides?

Perhaps you will now ask me to do this, but if I hadn’t said that ‘the Jews’ were trying to wipe out the Palestinians you would probably have been quite happy with my generalisations.

For we recognise that although not even a fraction of British people, for instance, were directly involved in the genocides of the nineteenth century, and clearly those who were born after those atrocities could not have been directly involved, yet we admit that this is a stain on our national consciousness which affects all of us, in so far as we identify as being British.” [emphasis in original]

Clan/Family Histories
- MacDonald/Donald/MacDonnell

The largest of the Highland clans, the Gaelic first name “Domnuill” was anglicised to “Donald”. The original Donald was a grandson of the mighty King Somerled who drove out the Vikings in the 12th century. Somerled’s mother was Norse and his father was descended from the kings of Dalriada, according to clan history. The family was founded in Islay and extended their territory to the mainland. Donald’s great-grandson, “Good” John of Islay, became known as Lord of the Isles and later holders of the title became powerful enough to challenge the king of Scotland. The Lord of the Isles had its own parliament at Finlaggan on Islay. Eventually, the Lord of the Isles was defeated in 1493 by King James IV and the various branches of the clan evolved under their own chieftains. The main branches were Clan Donald of Sleat (in Skye), Clanranald (in Moidart, Glengarry, Lochaber and Glencoe). The Glengarry line adopted the spelling MacDonnell. The MacDonells of Keppoch were descended from Alastair, third son of John, first Lord of the Isles. Their lands were on the mainland in Lochaber; they were sometimes known as Clan Ranald of Lochaber. The last clan battle in the Highlands took place between MacDonell of Keppoch and Mackintosh of Mackintosh in Lochaber in 1688.

The Clanranald MacDonalds were involved in both the 1715 (the clan chief was killed at the Battle of Sheriffmuir) and 1745 Jacobite Uprisings. Bonnie Prince Charlie landed in Clanranald territory in 1745.

Many MacDonalds emigrated to North America and other parts of the world in the 18th and 19th century. 300 MacDonalds from Clanranald emigrated to Prince Edward Island in 1790 and MacDonnells of Glengarry settled in some numbers in Glengarry County, Ontario.

MacDonald was the most frequently registered “mac” name in Scotland – it was the 26th most frequent surname at the General Register Office in 1995.

The motto of MacDonald of MacDonald is “Per mare per terras” (By sea and by land). The MacDonalds of Clanranald and MacDonalds of Sleat have the motto “My hope is constant in thee” and the MacDonnells of Glengarry have the motto “Cragan an Fhithich” (The rock of the raven).

As befits a large and powerful clan, the septs or sub-branches under the protection of the MacDonalds are many. The list provided by the Standing Council of Scottish Chiefs include Alexander, Allan, Allanson, Balloch, Beath, Begg, Bowie, Burk, Colson, Connall, Connell, Coull, Coulson, Crombie, Crum, Daniels, Donaldson, Domillson, Galt, Gilbride, Gill, Gorrie, Gowan, Gowrie, Hawthorn, Hewitson, Hewitt, Howison, Hudson, Hughson, Hutchenson, Hutcheson, Hutchinson, Hutchison, Isles, Jeffrey, Kean, Keene, Kellie, Kinnell, Leitch, Macallan, Macbeth, MacBride, MacBurie, MacCall, MacCash, MacCaul, MacCluskie, MacColl, MacConnell, MacCoish, MacCook, MacCosram, MacCrain, MacCrindle, MacCririe, MacCruithein, MacCuag, MacCuish, MacCutcheon, MacDaniell, MacDrain, MacEachan, MacElfrish, MacElheran, MacGeachie, MacGeachen, MacGill, MacGillivantie, MacGilp, MacGorrie, MacGoun, MacGowan, MacGown, MacHendry, MacHugh, MacHutcheon, MacIan, MacIlriach, MacIlrevie, MacIlvride, MacIlwraith, MacIsaac, MacKeachan, MacKean, MacKechnie, MacKellachie, MacKellaig, MacKellock, MacKechan, MacKiggan, MacKillop, MacKinnell, MacKissock, MacLardie, MacLarty, MacLaverty, MacMurrick, MacO’Shannaig, MacPhillip, MacQuistan, MacRaith, MacRorie, MacRory, MacRuer, MacRurie, MacShannachan, MacSorley, MacSporran, MacSwan, MacSween, MacVarish, MacWhannell, Mark, Martin, May, Murdoch, Murdoson, Murphy, Norie, O’Drain, O’Shaig, O’Shannachan, O’Shammaig, Park, Paton, Philipson, Purcell, Reoch, Revie, Riach, Ronald, Ronaldson, Rorison, Sanderson, Shannon, Sorely, Sporran, Whannell, Wheelan, Wilkie, Wilkinson.

Perhaps you would like to listen to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, latterly Britain’s Ambassdor to the UN, to learn some salient facts about Hamas and which go a long way to dispel some of the myths that have been put about by the entity that you represent.

He follows the pipsqueak Blair, the grandly named Quartet Envoy.

The interview took place on BBC Radio 4 Today this morning.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7823000/7823746.stm

Iran is exerting heavy pressure on Hamas not to accept the Egyptian proposal for a cease-fire with Israel, an Egyptian government official said on Sunday.
The official told The Jerusalem Post by phone that two senior Iranian officials who visited Damascus recently warned Hamas leaders against accepting the proposal.

His remarks came as Hamas representatives met in Cairo with Egyptian Intelligence Chief Gen. Omar Suleiman and his aides to discuss ways of ending the fighting in the Gaza Strip.

The Hamas representatives reiterated their opposition to a cease-fire that did not include the reopening of all the border crossings into the Gaza Strip, Hamas spokesmen said on Sunday.

Egypt sees progress in ceasefire talks with Hamas
The spokesmen said Hamas voiced its strong opposition to the idea of deploying an international force inside the Gaza Strip.

The Egyptian official said that the two Iranian emissaries, Ali Larijani, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, and Said Jalili of the Iranian Intelligence Service, met in the Syrian capital with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal and Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Ramadan Shallah.

“As soon as the Iranians heard about the Egyptian cease-fire initiative, they dispatched the two officials to Damascus on an urgent mission to warn the Palestinians against accepting it,” the Egyptian government official told the Post.

“The Iranians threatened to stop weapons supplies and funding to the Palestinian factions if they agreed to a cease-fire with Israel. The Iranians want to fight Israel and the US indirectly. They are doing this through Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon”.

The official pointed out that the Iranians were applying “double standards” regarding the current conflict – on the one hand, they encouraged Iranian men to volunteer to fight alongside Hamas; on the other hand, Iran’s spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, told the volunteers that they would not be permitted to join the fight against Israel.

“The Iranians never fired one bullet at Israel,” he said. “But now they are trying to appear as if they are participating in the war against Israel. The leaders of Teheran don’t care about the innocent civilians who are being killed in the Gaza Strip”.

The Egyptian official accused Iran of “encouraging” Hamas to continue firing rockets at Israel with the hope that this would trigger a war that would divert attention from Iran’s nuclear plans.

“This conflict serves the interests of the Iranians,” he said. “They are satisfied because the violence in the Gaza Strip has diverted attention from their nuclear ambitions. The Iranians are also hoping to use the Palestinian issue as a ‘powerful card’ in future talks with the Americans.

“They want to show that they have control over Hamas and many Palestinians”.

Karam Jaber, editor of the semi-official Egyptian weekly Roz Al-Youssef magazine, said that Hamas was caught between the Syrian anvil and the Iranian hammer. The Iranians, he said, prevented Hamas from negotiating a cease-fire with Israel, while the Syrians were blackmailing and intimidating the Hamas leaders in Damascus.

“History won’t forget to mention that Hamas had inflicted death and destruction on the Palestinians,” he said. “We hope that Hamas has learned the lesson and realizes that it has been fighting a war on behalf of others. We hope the Hamas leaders will realize that they are fighting a destructive war on behalf of the Iranians and Syrians”.

Egyptian political analyst Magdi Khalil said he shared the view of the Palestinian Authority and Egypt that Hamas was responsible for the war in the Gaza Strip. “Ever since Hamas seized control over the Gaza Strip in 2007, they turned the area into hell,” he said. “They imposed restrictions on the people there and even prevented them from performing the pilgrimage to Mecca”.

The analyst said that the head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service was right when he recently described Hamas as a group of gangsters. “Hamas and its masters in Damascus and Teheran want to spread chaos in Egypt,” he said. “They want to solve the problem of the Gaza Strip by handing the area over to Egypt. They want to create a homeland for the Palestinians in Sinai”.

He said that Hamas was not only jeopardizing Egypt’s national security, but had also destroyed the Palestinians’ dream of statehood. “By endorsing the Iranian agenda, Hamas has brought the Iranians to Egypt’s eastern border,” he said. “Hamas has also copied Hizbullah’s policy of entering into pointless adventures

The dilemma here was about the clarity of wording. What began as “The Jews of Israel” was amended to “Many Israeli Jews.” It’s still off. Here is a sentence:

In Nazi Germany MANY people participated in the Nazi movement and while SOME spoke out against and/or resisted MOST just went along as good German citizens.

Most.

If we’re shooting for clarity, this is the more honest and accurate word.

The same can be argued — it’s painfully clear — about the US anti-war movement. I wouldn’t be so cynical (though that’s the space in which I often live) to call these dissenters “stooges”, and I understand, Max, that’s not necessarily your own conclusion. Still, though, I’ve long felt that the types of protest we’ve been accustomed to here in the US since the ’60s — be it opposition to war protests or labor protests — have indeed become useless and more often serve the interests of power by sustaining the illusion that we live in a liberal democracy that tolerates opposition. And the reason is these protests don’t seriously challenge the institutional roots that are the basis of the injustices in question.

Personally, I think that acts of protest in Israel — especially acts by Israeli refuseniks — are far more significant than protests here in the US. Israeli Jews, for the most part, are a people weened from cradle to grave on a diet of mythologies about their role in the region, and a perverse (and inverted) psychology of victimhood vis-a-vis the Arabs that is lent credibility (in their minds) by the occasional acts of Palestinian resistance that manages to reach them within the Green Line or the illegal settlements (e.g. suicide bombings, the relatively rare Qassam rocket that manages to hit its target, etc). To be clear, I’m talking about the Israeli population generally, not their civilian and military leaders who clearly know that the Palestinian rocket attack justification for their war on Gaza is complete bullshit, and that the real motives are territorial expansion, fear that the Palestinian “peace offensive” was actually working and that international pressure for a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict would therefore follow, among others. Anyway, in the context of Israeli society, where a culture of unity against an “outside” enemy strongly prevails, expectations and demands of conformity run high, and protests or expressions of sympathy for the Palestinians (such as those of more honest journalists like Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, etc) elicit howls of betrayal and the real possibility of violent reprisal by Israeli “patriots”.

The same doesn’t exist for the US, despite 9-11 — a rare incident in US history, still by far the most secure nation on the planet. It’s just much safer to hold rallies or protests in the US. As long as protesters can go back to living their safe and relatively privileged lives, nothing of import is seriously threatened. Most Americans hear about protests and just shrug their shoulders if they even give protests and their meaning a passing thought at all. I often see many would-be protesters talk of and treat protests as a cute and fun social thing to do. We have opportunists like Medea Benjamin get arrested for show, after first getting a protest permit and announcing to the cops her intent to get arrested — knowing she’ll be kicked loose the next morning, which hardly strikes fear in the powers-that-be. Instead, the few times protesters really threaten to shut things down and go to a higher level of direct action, the “leaders” of the “movement” work to shut them down out of a bullshit need to look respectable and not “alienate” the larger public, and nothing changes. Something that more successful movements of the past never went along with.

Until Americans are really ready to get out of their (enormous) comfort zones and really challenge power and privilege beyond meaningless marches . . . there’s not much to hope for. For the Palestinians, or us.

– Sunil

{The online campaigns call for a boycott of several major U.S.-based companies like McDonalds, the coffee chain Starbucks, Pizza Hut and cigarette maker Phillip Morris and others.}

http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/01/11/63968.html

am i mistaken in my assumption that ? all ‘jews’ shun these weighty matters?
of course, i am daring to guess that Kim is using the word “clarity” generally and specifically about the sentence that he had just emended.
not a single ‘jew’ had to date, as far as i know, demanded that an alleged israeli war criminal face ICC.
this statement is for me adequate and accurate.
as i said ‘jews’ know more about what ‘jews’ say and think; so, let’s obtain clarity also on this. thnx

Josh is right that clarity is important. I have amended the sentence.

you’ve written an excellent article; there was certainly no assumption on this end that you were generalizing all Jews, and which you substantiated in the remainder of your piece. Thanks most for including the incredible video footage.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I propose that Huwaida Arraf be awarded the Nobel Peace laureate for 2009. I know it’s early, but that was the most unselfish act of bravery I’ve ever seen. I find myself rather speechless.

Nonetheless, “It makes one wonder: does that mantra only apply to crimes against Jews and not by Jews?” Of course, Israel is permitted/encouraged to use the same rationale as its US ally.

And to think, as Maxwell Black linked in his post, Jews are congregating on hilltops to watch the war unfold as if it were a sporting event; calling plays, reacting with enthusiasm to explosions, rooting for their army that’s finally doing something to prove that Israel is not weak. A sick bunch of f***ers for sure.

Dark days friends, these are some dark days indeed.

Thanks Kim.
Best to all.

1200 fatah palestinians killed by hamas palestinians june 2007 is ok muslims killing muslims

30,000 palestinians killed by jordan 1970 is ok muslims killing muslims

20,000 killed by assad in syria is ok muslims killing muslims

400,ooo dead in darfur is ok muslims killing muslims

2,000,000 dead in iran-iraq war is ok muslims killing muslims

Power structures have learned how to deal with such groups. A cynic might even conclude that such groups are really stooges for the power structure, providing one side that says “all Israeli Jews are not for this murderous war…just some…it is the military/government policies, not us…peace loving Jews.”

But at bottom the killing is never ending. That is not to say, voices aren’t important, wherever they may come from, but they are ever so marginal. Power does not care one iota about marches or chanting, or professors. These represent the powerless and so can be easily ignored.

Israel now roams the Middle East with complete impunity against, resolutions, against morality against the people of the world who have no power to stop them.

The answer to this dilemma is in the problem/question: what can really stop the Israeli parsitic monster? (Cerainly not some kind of call to read the Old Testament).

Further I have two Jewish friends, members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign here in the UK and they are both extremely fervent activists in the cause.

Well, then call it poor wording on your part. Regardless of what you address later in your piece, there simply are not many ways to interpret the following:

“The Jews of Israel do not even heed their own holocaust mantra of ‘Never forget.’”

You are safe not to include Palestinians in Israel in your above comment, so why not be just as cautious when talking about Jews in the country? True, no group is monolithic, so why do you write as if Israeli Jews are in your opening paragraph?

Why am I even splitting hairs over this? Because your lead statement portrays all Jews as supporting the war, which one could interpret as meaning that all Jews in Israel are Zionists. It’s simply inaccurate, and it makes us an easy target for those idiots who are quick to toss the “antisemite” label around.

As for “substantial dissent”, a Jan. 1 poll in Haaretz showed that 20% of Israelis wanted a truce to be negotiated as soon as possible. Unfortunately there wasn’t a question asking if they wanted the incursion to end at once. But I’d still call this number substantial, and I’d imagine that percentage is even higher today.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051852.html

The war on Lebanon in 2006 came to an end as public opinion in Israel turned against it. My hope is the same will happen now, as pressure from within the country seems to matter much more than any UN resolution.