Comments on: Human Rights Abuses in Israel and Occupied Palestine

By: mary

mary — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:55:09 +0000

Thanks Mulga for responding to that little divertissement.

I have just been reading about a pro-Shalit demo outside Hadarim prison (where Marwan Barghouti is held incidentally) thus preventing Palestinians from visiting their relations who are probably being held in ‘administrative detention’ ie no charge or trial.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8505682.stm

Also read this morning that the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Pollard, says it’s ok to kill Palestinians!

UK’s Jewish Chronicle editor says extra-judicial murder is kosher (http://www.redress.cc/zionism/redress20100211)

By: jon s

jon s — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:02:59 +0000

Sorry, I’ve never heard of “concentration camp guard Shalit”. I was referring to the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit who was abducted into Gaza and has not been accorded POW status and rights. I’m sure that Shalit, his family and supporters would gladly agree to equalize the conditions of his imprisonment with those of the Palestinians held in Israel. The “price tag” of demanding hundreds of Palestinians in exchange for one Israeli was set by the Palestinian side.

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 04:38:34 +0000

jon the concentration camp guard Shalit is a prisoner-of-war. In contrast to the thousands of Palestinian prisoners of Israel, many kept in secret gaols unknown to the Red Cross etc , there is no evidence that he has been tortured.Israeli torture of Palestinians is ubiquitous, as attested by Amnesty,Human RightsWatch, B’tselem,the UN etc. Then there is Shalit’s luck in being Israeli. The Gazans need him as an exchange for their prisoners.In the usual Israeli fashion of narcissistic self-worship,the Israelis equate swapping hundreds of their Palestinian prisoners for one Jew as evidence of their illusory ‘morality’. In fact it just mirrors the racism and supremacism of people who see themselves as above the rest of humanity. And the Palestinian prisoners, despite the torture, are at least better off than the hundreds of victims of Israeli death-squads who raid Palestinian homes at dead of night, and kill their victims on the spot, as their allies the US does in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By: jon s

jon s — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 20:03:06 +0000

Mary, Perhaps you could provide an address for writing to abducted soldier Gilad Shalit. No? Unlike Ms Shalbi, Gilad Shalit has no known “postal address in prison”.
Eileen Fleming, I think Mr. Jaradat was referring to “martial law”, not “Marshall Law”.

By: jon s

jon s — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 17:47:40 +0000

A.B. Yehoshua had an article in today’s Haaretz:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1148788.html

By: Deadbeat

Deadbeat — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:49:37 +0000

Same here. Kudos to Mulga.

By: Maien

Maien — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:24:12 +0000

I agree with dan e . Thanks especially to Mulga for resoundingly and passionately demanding that the facts remain a part of the discourse. In this new world of instant commuication it’s not just the articles that matter. The conversations/comments are becoming just as important.

By: dan e

dan e — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:21:55 +0000

Hear hear! Mulga, you’re a real machine:) Really superb!

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:04:14 +0000

Jacob descends, naturally and reflexively, to the anti-Semite vilification. How quaint! For his information I am no ‘anti-Semite’. I am viscerally ‘anti-Judaic fascism’, and ‘anti-Zionist’,two different categories entirely. To be against someone, ie prejudiced towards them, solely on the basis of their membership of a certain group, religious, ethnic or cultural, is imbecilic and detestable. It is,of course, the very sin that the majority of Zionists, Israeli supremacists and their Sabbat Goy stooges are guilty of in their indiscriminate hatemongering against Palestininans, Arabs and Moslems. As far as I’m concerned it is plain that many Jews are fine and honourable people, inside Israel and without. One need only think of those brave and principled Israelis who oppose the brutal imprisonment and brutalisation of the Palestinians, and their decades of dispossession,murder, torture and humiliation. You, Jacob,are of the other type,as you make plain. As far as I am concerned Zionism is to the Jews as Nazism was to the Germans, although it is plainly not yet practised with the totalitarian intensity of Nazism. As for Judaism, I take it as I find it.I find all the monotheisms intellectually and spiritually unappealing, but the fundamentalist strain of Judaism, so prevalent in Israel, so clearly one of the driving forces of Zionist chauvinism and supremacism, really offends me. While I do not, and ought not, feel inclined to criticise the religious superstitions of others, that is only in the case where these religious beliefs do not impinge on the rights of others. The practice of fundamentalist Judaism in symbiotic league with Zionism, that has stolen the land of another people and brutalised them with exquisite, racist sadism, for decades, while vilifying and denigrating them around the world when they dare resist (even when they did not), is,however, in my opinion, a text-book example of religious wickedness, so I have every right, indeed a moral obligation, to criticise such racist and xenophobic savagery, and criticise the apologists for it, such as yourself.
Now, as to your mythical account of the circumstances that led to the Goldstone Report, it is, I believe, a text-book example of Zionism’s propaganda imperatives,ie cynical hypocrisy, narcissistic self-delusion and rank mendacity. The inmates of the Gaza concentration camp are, to great extent, the victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing during the Nakbah, continuing during the 1950s and again in 1967. While you whine about rockets fired at Israel, you cynically and typically omit that Hamas repressed such retaliatory attacks for six months prior to November2008,when your Chosen People,the Israelis, unilaterally broke the cease-fire. Even then Hamas offered a new cease-fire, but as Israel had spent months practising for urban warfare in the Negev, they weren’t interested. There followed the cowardly and brutal onslaught for which you are such an unctuous apologist. As Goldstone found, and as was attested by the Gazan victims, the UN, the Red Cross, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Medicines sans Frontieres, foreign doctors in Gazan hospitals and journalists in Gaza, and brave, honest and decent Israeli troops sickened by the atrocities they witnessed, Israeli troops committed numerous atrocities. Your assertions of Hamas hiding amongst civilians is an old Zionist lie, often disproved, but cynically and wickedly proffered every time Israel deliberately bombs a mosque, an hospital, a school or an ambulance. It is a reall bully-boy’s argument too, as Gaza is a crowded concentration camp, walled in by Israel and the fascist Egyptian Quisling despotism of Mubarrak, and Gazans had nowhere to flee, unlike people in Grozny, say, or Beirut. A real ‘turkey-shoot’ eh, Jacob? Just the venue for the Israelis to display their martial valour. I do hope it doesn’t lead you to contemplate having another go at Hezbollah. The Lebanese do not deserve another dose of cowardly Israeli murderousness and destructiveness, and Israel will get an even greater beating next time, I’m certain.
Returning to the detestable absurdity of your description of the events leading up to the cowardly assault on Gaza, you there expose a typically racist Zionist interpretation of events. As Zionists disinformationists, Jewish and Sabbat goyim alike, always do, you describe the rocket fire on Israel as if it occured in some sort of vacuum, as if poor, loveable, peaceful Israel, was attacked for no reason, by bloodthirsty savages living in luxury and comfort in their sea-side paradise. The erasure from history of the brutal siege of Gaza, that began in 2005, that has been pitilessly tightened ever since, and of the brutal Israeli bombing raids, shelling, death-squad incursions, and the particular savagery of the night-time supersonic overflights, designed to terrorise and which have inflicted such psychological terror and harm on children, would make Orwell’s Big Brother proud. The lackeys of Zionism’s Ministry of Truth do not bother to hide their racist contempt for Israel’s victims. While the comparative death-toll in those years was more than ten to one greater amongst Gazans than Israelis, for the Zionist and their Sabbat goy stooges, these are deaths and suffering amongst non-persons, untermenschen of no value. In this world-view, so typical of Western colonialists and racists, only the suffering of the white, European,Israeli ubermenschen counts. That this calculus is proclaimed with such cynical purpose, certain in the knowledge that it will never be questioned,let alone criticised in the Western media sewer, just illustrates how deeply Zionist racism has infected Western consciousness and discourse.

By: dan e

dan e — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:34:25 +0000

And yet still now more of these “Jacob” types keep popping up with the same old tired blah-blah. Well I’m glad there are people around with the patience to refute these zionist mealymouths in detail. To me it’s all so corny.

By: Eileen Fleming

Eileen Fleming — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:05:04 +0000

Thank you all for this conversation because I have just begun a You Tube series of weekly messages and my next message is RE: DEEP Interfaith Dialogue!

Part 1 is here: What You Need to Know so We Can Change the World
http://www.youtube.com/user/eileenfleming

RE: Addameer:

On January 5, 2006, during my 2nd of 7 trip’s to occupied Palestine, I traveled to the Ramallah Headquarters of ADDAMEER [Arabic for conscience] and met spokesman Ala Jaradat.

While chain smoking at his office desk and in a soft spoken voice he said:

“Since 1967, 650,000 to 700,000 Palestinians have been arrested and detained. That totals 20% of the total population and 80% of all adult Palestinian males have been arrested.

“Most of these arrests occur after midnight when large numbers of IDF storm into neighborhoods or refugee camps, horrifying everyone and arresting anyone 14 years or older. Sometimes they storm into business offices and arrest the breadwinners of the families without any charges.

“These arrests and detentions are based on military orders; we live under a kind of Marshall Law which rules every aspect of Palestinian life: where we live, our license plates that restrict our movement and limited voting rights. Under these military orders the Israeli government is free to hold anyone eight days without accusations or charges. They can hold anyone up to 180 days for interrogation and up to 60 days without benefit of a lawyer.

”The Israeli government never agreed to the Second Geneva Convention, the Knesset never ratified it, and when it comes to the Occupied Territories they totally ignore it. Israel is the only State that approved torture of detainees. I know there are dictators who use torture, but Israel is the only State that supported torture until 1999. That is when International, Israeli and Palestinian pressure groups forced the issue and Barack was confronted about it when he visited the United States.

“The IDF will round up and arrest family members and use threats against their relatives to force confessions. The interrogations lead to Military Trials which is theoretically like court with three Judges presiding but only one is required to have an education and a law degree is not at all necessary. The Military Commander appoints the translators, issues all orders, assigns the judges, and has total control. One appeal is allowed, but if the judges are settlers the Palestinian is in deep shit!

“Administrative Detentions are issued by the Military Commander for a period of six months and the reason is always labeled ‘Security’ and the charges can be renewed indefinitely. One Palestinian spent eight years under Administrative detention and hundreds have endured four or more years. Today fifty are being held for the past four years. They may be released for a day or two and then they are rearrested because they are social or political activists but reasons are not given by the Israeli government. …

By: mary

mary — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:35:07 +0000

If anyone here could spare the time to write to Hana who is in ‘Administative Detention’ in Hasharon prison, that would be most kind. Poor young woman. Her brother has been killed and her father and mother hassled and then she is humilated by the IDF thugs and imprisoned.

http://addameer.info/?p=1553

She is just one of thousands of course.

Here is how you can help Ms. Hana Shalabi:

• Send Hana letters of support to her postal address in prison
• Write to the Israeli government, military and legal authorities and demand that Hana be released immediately and that her administrative detention not be renewed.
• Write to your own elected representatives urging them to pressure Israel to release Hana and to put an end to Israel’s unlawful, arbitrary and cruel system of incarceration without trial.

For more information about administrative detention and Addameer’s Campaign to Stop Administrative Detention please visit the website.

By: Jacob

Jacob — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:35:43 +0000

Fleming should keep in mind that the term “democracy” is not found in the Magna Carta or in the Bill of Rights. But, it does not mean that those documents are not a clear expression of what democracy is.
The Israeli Declaration of Independence states that ALL citizens, regardless of their religion , gender or ethnic origin have the same rights.
In Israel, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are recognized religions and equally supported by the state.
In Israel, like in many other democratic nation-states, ethnos does not privilege demos.
Like many other nation-states Israel has a special relationship with its diaspora kinsmen. The Council of Europe established a committee of jurists known as the Venice Commission. In October 2001, the commission published its findings in the “Report on the Preferential Treatment of National Minorities by Their Kin State”. It states that relationship between a homeland and its diaspora kinsmen do not contravene international law. All this means that the Israeli Law of Return, which grants immediate citizenship to any Jew living abroad is in accord with the democratic norms. One can find laws granting special treatment to diaspora kinsmen in many countries, like Ireland, Greece, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary, Russia, Germany, Slovenia, Slovakia and others.
Jeff Halper, born in the US, chose to immigrate to Israel. Being part and parcel of the Jewish people he considered Israel his own state. The fact that he is able to organize and publish his harsh criticism of Israel, is a perfect demonstration of Israel’s democracy.
As for the Goldstone commission. It was established by the UN Human Rights Group, well known for its virulent anti-Israel
bias, which did nothing during the 8 years of Hamas rocket fire at Israeli villages and towns.
It is very important to keep in mind that the wording of the resolution establishing the fact-finding UN commission, prejudged the outcome of any investigation, by stating that violations of humanitarian law have been committed by Israel.
Israel was targeted and Goldstone delivered it.
Article 58 of the Geneva Convention states that the parties to the conflict shall to the maximum extent feasible:
Avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas; And article 28 states that the presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.
But Hamas locates its rocket manufacturing workshops in houses occupied by families, it stores arms and ammunition in private homes, it hides Grad rockets in mosques, it fires its rockets from densely populated areas. That was the main reason for the civilian casualties in Gaza.
Mulga’s post, a classic anti-Semitic screed, deserves nothing but scorn.

By: Mulga Mumblebrain

Mulga Mumblebrain — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:54:45 +0000

Eileen Fleming ought to remember that Israel’s supposed ‘..previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian life’ is an example of the tactic recommended by Adolph Hitler and pursued with tenacity by the Zionists for decades -the Big Lie. Every Israeli aggression has been marked by deliberate targeting of civilians, from the multiple massacres of the Nakbah, designed to terrorise the Palestinians into flight, up to the carnage in Gaza. The massacres at Qibya, Qana (twice), Sabra andShatilla, Gaza a number of times, Jenin, etc, etc were not accidents. They derive from core Judaic religious beliefs, that Jews are superior to all others and that the Judaic God approves of and in fact demands, the extinction of those who stand in the way of ‘his people’. After all, what are Purim with its 75,000 victims of Judaic vengeance and Passover with its killing of all first born, without mercy, but holy massacres.? Andwhat is the story of Amalek, condemned by the Judaic god to extermination, and recently used by one of Netanyahu’s thugs to refer to Iran, but the tale of a genocide foretold and devoutly anticipated by Judaic fundamentalists? The Yesha Council of Rabbis and Torah Sages, connected to the settler infestations in the Occupied Territories expressed it succinctly in 2006 during Israel’s campaign of mass murder of civilians and destruction of infrastructure in Lebanon. These clerico-fascist worthies declared that killing civilians in time of war was not just not prohibited under Judaic Law, it was a ‘mitzvah’ or good deed. There’s the truth of it, not some mealy-mouthed mendacity about Israeli military morality, a cynical hypocrisy if ever there was one.

By: Eileen Fleming

Eileen Fleming — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:06:35 +0000

TO JACOB and his ilk: Israel is NOT and Never was a Democracy!

In the May 28, 1993 edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, Ariel Sharon explained:

“The terms ‘democracy’ or ‘democratic’ are totally absent from the Declaration of Independence. This is not an accident. The intention of Zionism was not to bring democracy, needless to say. It was solely motivated by the creation in Eretz-Isrel of a Jewish state belonging to all the Jewish people and to the Jewish people alone. This is why any Jew of the Diaspora has the right to immigrate to Israel and to become a citizen of Israel.”

Jeff Halper, American Israeli, co-founder and coordinator of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and Professor of Anthropology, explains:

“An ethnocracy is the opposite of a democracy, although it might incorporate some elements of democracy such as universal citizenship and elections. It arises when one particular group-the Jews in Israel, the Russians in Russia, the Protestants in pre-1972 Northern Ireland, the whites in apartheid South Africa, the Shi’ite Muslims in Iran, the Malay in Malaysia and, if they had their way, the white Christian fundamentalists in the US-seize control of the government and armed forces in order to enforce a regime of exclusive privilege over other groups in what is in fact a multi-ethnic or multi-religious society. Ethnocracy, or ethno-nationalism, privileges ethnos over demos, whereby one’s ethnic affiliation, be it defined by race, descent, religion, language or national origin, takes precedence over citizenship in determining to whom a county actually ‘belongs.’-”An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel” Page 74

On February 3, 2010, “The Independent” reported that a high-ranking officer who served as a commander in last year’s assault on Gaza admitted that Israel’s army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives and that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as means and intentions: whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from unmanned drones and helicopters during Israel’s assault on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead.

Article 1975 of The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict Goldstone Report on Human Rights in Palestine to the international community recommends that the States who are parties to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 should start criminal investigations in national courts, using universal jurisdiction, where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and where ever warranted following investigation and alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with internationally recognized standards of justice.

AND that especially the Quartet, has the responsibility to ensure that respect for the rule of law, international law and human rights means for all sides in the conflict.

Learn More RE: Smoking Guns and Bulls-eyes: Israel rewrote the rules of War for Gaza @
http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1579&Itemid=230

By: Jacob

Jacob — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 09:26:58 +0000

Nobody can deny that there is discrimination in Israel against its Arab citizens. Knowing Israel’s history, this unfortunate fact is easily understandable. Many in Israel strive to abolish that discrimination and progress is being made. But such discrimination is found in many countries. From England (ask the Muslim Council of Britain) to France, and from Italy and Belgium to the Scandinavian countries.
But to claim, like Lendman does, that “since 1948, Israel denied its Arab citizens fundamental human and civil rights”
shows his extreme anti-Israel bias.
He ignores the fact that the Arab citizens of Israel have the right to vote and be elected. They have the right to have political parties and the right to free expression, as evidenced by the newspapers and books they publish. They have the right to educate their children in a separate framework, according to their own culture and language.
The Israeli parliament has 12 Arab members, one serves as a
deputy-speaker.
Lendman can find the Israeli Arabs in all ways of life. As lawyers and judges, all the way to the Supreme Court. As professors and students in all universities, as physicians and patients in all hospitals. In the police as policemen and high rank officers. Thousands of them volunteer and serve in the army.
And Israel’s democracy is no more “illusory” than the one in the US. The fact that the ACRI published its report is a proof that it remains the only democracy in the Middle East, to the great sorrow of Lendman…

By: Ismail Zayid

Ismail Zayid — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:01:11 +0000

This thorough, comprehensive and authentic report, by Stephen Lendman, devastates the myth of the so-called: “Israel, a free and democratic state.”

This report tells it as it is.