Blog For Palestine

As hundreds of innocent Lebanese and Palestinians civilians continue to be murdered, the San Francisco Gate took a little time today to mourn the death of an occupation soldier. I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to laugh or cry when I read something like this. The SF Gate took everything that is vile and evil about the conflict and asked us to sympathize with it.

The article relays the story of a young immigrant coming from the Ukraine five years ago to lead a better life in Israel (Oh Israel how generous you are by opening your arms to every person of the right religious identity while the indigenous people of the land languish in Refugee camps). About how he joined the army and volunteered to join units on the front lines (poor guy had a thirst, and the only thing that can quensh it was some Arab blood. About how he bravely fought and got killed while in the Lebanese village of Maroun El-Ras helping and injured comrade who was shot by the evil arabs. (I’m not sure why these violent arabs would do such a thing to lovely young soldiers especially after almost two weeks of the Israelis killing hundreds of innocent civilians and totally annihialating the Lebanon. You would think that the Israeli army would get better treatment when they invade)

Is the SF Gate actually serious. They actually dedicated an article to mourn a bloodthirsty, violent, racist, colonial soldier who was killed while in the midst of invading another country and while the rest of his army is on a murderous rampage.

-Tineen

Ali speaking about the conflict on KPFK.  Ali speaks with the moral outrage and the passion that is needed.  I am very disappointed by other arab-americans who are not capable of critisizing Israel’s barbarism fearing that they step out of line with the mainstream media.

A good article by Nigel Parry discussing the latest Israeli atrocities as it compares with the IDF’s Modus Operandi.  He reiterates my long standing belief that the Israeli army has a clear and systematic policy of killing Palestinian civilians.

In the latest of Israel’s strikes against the Palestinians the total ‘Collateral Damage’ for Hamadi Aman’s family is as follows:

“Aman’s 7-year-old son Muhand was killed; Naima, his wife, 27, was killed; his mother Hanan, 46, was killed. His three and a half year old daughter Mariya is lying in the pediatric intensive care unit at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, permanently paralyzed and on a respirator. Aman is not allowed to be with her. His youngest son, Muaman, 2, was lightly wounded by shrapnel in his back, and Aman himself was hit by shrapnel throughout his body. His uncle Nahed, 33, a father to two toddlers, is fully paralyzed and in critical condition at Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center.”

There is no phrase that I hate more than ‘collateral damage’. It is yet another example of how the language has been twisted in an attempt to obfuscate reality.  Collateral damage is today used to describe all murder of Palestinian civilians at the hands of the Israeli military. What seems to be missed by everyone is that when you perform a strike against a heavily populated residential area knowing full well that there is a high likelyhood of civilian deaths, that is an act of murder.

In Israel’s case the murder is premeditated and part of the fundamental Zionist campaign to erase the Palestinians from the land. The most disturbing evidence of this is the fact that while the overall ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths in the current Intifada sits around three to one, the ratio of Palestinian children killed versus Israeli children killed is around six to one. This disparity cannot be statistically or logically explained by anything except that the Israeli military are targetting Palestinian children. This policy was witnessed by journalist Chris Hedges in his ‘A Gaza Diary‘ which was published a few years ago.

This news goes largely unreported in US media, and it is truly sad that Haaertz does a better job at highlighting Israeli crimes that US newspapers.

-Tineen

I just wanted to link to a couple of articles that were on EI about the boycott campaign.

• Palestinians welcome UK vote for Israel academic boycott
• CUPE Ontario votes in Support of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Against Israeli Apartheid

I especially liked a portion of the first article regarding the ‘academic freedom’ argument made by those opposing academic boycott. ‘The persistence of academic boycott efforts proves that many academics in the UK and beyond do not buy the disingenuous claim that boycott of Israeli academic institutions conflicts with “academic freedom” … The … claim is at best hypocritical as it is based on the premise that only Israeli academic freedom counts. The fact that Israeli academic institutions themselves collude in various ways in their government’s grave violations of Palestinian human and political rights, which include the right to education, is lost on those making this claim.’

-Tineen

There is a mini-storm in Israel happening around some efforts in Britian to organize a very limited boycott of Israeli educational institutions who do not publicly renounce “apartheid and discrimination in education”. There is tremendous mobilization in Israel, in Britain, across Europe and in the US by all those that support Israel to stop the boycott from being voted on. Letters are flying all over the place, pressure is being applied, outrage is being expressed, and suprise suprise the anti-semitism card has been brought out in full force.

There are a few important lessons here that we need to take note of. First there is the very healthy Israeli attitude that there is no issue that is too small to fight. Looking at the limited scope of the boycott being planned, the Israeli reaction might seem completely out of proportion. The fact is they are right to react so fiercely. A boycott such as this sets a precedent, no matter how small, and that represents a slipperly slope. Once one group is willing to express their moral outrage at the occupation, racism, oppression of the Zionist state, then other might be empowered to do the same. When I was reading about this I thought back to the law suit that was brought in American courts against the Palestinian Authority by victims of suicide bombings in Israel. The dumbasses at the Palestinian Authority didn’t even bother to send a defense lawyer.

The second lesson lies in the sheer scale of the mobilization. As much as we would like to hope that the justice of our cause will enable individuals of conscious to hold their ground in the face of such opposition, as some point the stakes become too high. If the boycott doesn’t make it through, I don’t think it will be because those professors will have changed their minds and believed that the arguments being made by the pro-Israel camp are right. It will because they will have been cowed by the sheer mass of opposition. To be honest with you, I wouldn’t blame them, I’m not sure if I were in their shoes I would be able to deal with all that hate being spewed at me for a cause that doesn’t affect me directly.

The third lesson lies in the approach taken by the Israelis to argue against the boycott. It isn’t just a single refrain by everyone saying ‘this is wrong in principle’. There are a dozen arguments on the table. Some people are talking about why aren’t the boycotts being imposed on other countries, some people are saying that politics should be separate from academics, other are doing the anti-semitism thing, etc, etc… The point is that by diversify the arguments they are appealing to people with completely different sensibilities and more important they’re appealing to the differing sensibilities that we each have.

I really hope that the boycott makes it through. I really hope that despite all this effort that the pro-Zionist forces are going though that they fall flat on their face. But more than anything I hope that in the future there will be a lot of pro-Zionist blogs out there enumerating the lessons that can be extracted from the work that the pro-Palestinian activist are doing to push boycotts against Israel forward. That would be sweet…

-Tineen

Israel once again shows us what a great democracy and a free society it is. The courts found fit to deport a British human rights lawyer who is suing an IDF officer. In a somewhat related story the British Attorney General might be pursuing war crimes charges against IDF soldiers who intentionally shot two British citizens. It’s nice to see that the British have a little more spine than the Americans who have refused to do anything about the murder of Rachel Corrie.

[Amendment]
Note how a story in Reuters about the killing of the British citizens indicates that in one of the killings the Israeli soldier responsible was a bedioun Arab, while in the other case he was not identified as Jewish nor was his name given. The same thing happened when a Druze soldier was responsible for the murder of a Palestinian, every news story that came out went to pains to identify him as such. Just to make it clear, an Israeli soldier is an Israeli soldier, they are all criminals who are responsible for occupation, oppression and murder. The fact that the vast majority of these criminals happens to be Jewish should be irrelevant, nor is the fact that a few of these criminals are Druze or Bedioun relevant. The only time it will matter is if you are trying to put spin on the story… The media is garbage!

While the title of the story that appeared on canada.com might make it seem like the government in Iran is targetting Jews, the fact is the law, if in fact this story is true, would target all religious minorities not just Jews.  Aside from the fact that there are a lot of questions about the validity of the story, and the obvious spin employed when picking the title, there is a bigger question here.  Every Israeli citizen has their ethnicity marked on their identity cards.  Jewish citizens are identified as Jewish, Arabs are identified as Arabs, and so on.  A Jewish citizen at some point demanded that his ethnicity be identified as ‘Israeli’ and the courts refused.  The uproar is going to be generated from all corners, and everyone will condemn Iran for this.  I’m just wondering where the condemnation for Israel, which has employed the very same policies for 58 years, will come.

The level of hostility against the democratically elected Hamas government is being stepped up. This time around Mahmoud Abbas is leading the charge. ‘Abbas threatens to oust Hamas‘ The Aljazeera.net article quotes Abbas in a recent visit to Turkey proclaiming “The constitution gives me clear and definite authority to remove a government from power, but I don’t want to use this authority”. Well it’s nice to know that he won’t unleash an autocratic take over just yet. This really didn’t bother me since I would expect no less from a stooge such as Abbas. What is disgusting is that he lays the blame for the suffering of the Palestinians on Hamas’ doorstep saying that Hamas had to negotiate with Israel or the Palestinian people would be left to starve. Instead of facing up to the fact that his American patrons are spearheading this attempt to cripple the Palestinians he has simply adopted their stance of blaming the victims.

On a related note, the Jordanian governemnt, which never misses an opportunity to entertain me, have “uncovered” a plot by Hamas to target installations and people inside Jordan. This quote is awesome “‘Security interrogations with the detained suspects had proven they received instructions to execute operations from leaders of Hamas and specifically one of the military officials of Hamas currently based in Syria’ Nasser Joudeh, the government spokesman, told Reuters on Tuesday.” Do you think the Jordanian government gets a cookie from the American embassy for uncovering this plot. They even managed to get Syria in the mix, this deserves a really big cookie.

In the middle of all of this the Palestinian people are nearing a humanitarian catastrophe. Even worse all the parties involved seem to be more interested in using this fact as leverage for one thing or another instead of alleviating the suffering.