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.
On a more depressing note, my efforts to drum up some interest in doing fundraising work has had a cold reception. The fact is I’ve only contacted ten people, but out of everyone I know, these are the people that I was most expecting to respond enthusiastically. And when I say cold reception, I mean I wasn’t even acknowledged. My email was delivered into an electronic black hole.
I’m actually not too astonished that this is happening. One of the key driving principles in mobilizing people to do any kind of community work is social networks. Over the past few years I’ve allowed my connections to atrophy and in doing so I have lost much of my social leverage. I’m going to have to fix that, but it will take a little time, and it is definitely something that needs to cook on a slow fire.
In the meantime, I need to move forward with my work one way or another. I have a couple of options. First, I can work on a very small scale starting out and slowly let the work gather momentum, eventually people will come around. The second option is to cast a truly wide net in soliciting help. Contact a hundred people I don’t know through some arab/pro-palestinian mailing list and hope that a handful of people offer some geniune help. The third option is to start out by contacting other organization that have done work to help out the Palestinian cause before and figure out ways we can do something together.
I’ll consider the pros and cons of these different options and hopefully have some resolution by the end of the week.
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.’
So the Academic Boycott against Israel that was being debated in Britain has been voted on and passed. A number of British ministers were quick to express dismay over the vote, but that’s expected. I am very happy about this vote. The boycott efforts, whether they be academic, economic, cutural, or anything else, are greatly important. Israel is a moral anomaly, and as such it needs to be isolated from the rest of the world in every possible fashion. Good job guys.
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…
Recently I’ve been lamenting the lack of Palestinian art and music in the last decade and a half. That is, until I came across this wonderful Arabic redition of ‘You Are Beautiful’ on Kabobfest.
So I sat with a couple of people tonight and we went though a mini brainstorming session as to what would be good ways to fundraise for the Palestinian people at this time. We came up with a lot of good ideas, and some not so good ones (one proposal was to entrap wealthy arab-americans in “compromising” situations and blackmail them with some pictures). I still like that idea, but the consensus was that it was logistically difficult.
One interesting idea that came up was to throw a large and hopefully very profitable Arabic party, and have all the proceeds go to a Palestinian charity. The idea was a little hard to swallow at first. The Palestinian crisis is a somber issue and throwing a party where people are dancing and having fun feels strange and somehow sacrilegious. But after overcoming the initial hesitation, we realized that it is an idea worth exploring. The way I see it is people are going to go out, have fun and spend their money one way or another. Why not give them the opportunity to shake their asses, watch me shake mine (which is definitely something worth paying for), and have all the money go to something that will make them feel good? This is not unprecedented, people throw charity balls all the time and they do it for good reason: it generates a lot of money.
The idea is still really undercooked and I’ve yet to get the input of a lot of people. I’m going to try to get a bunch of people together sometime over the next week or so and see if we can explore this idea as well as some of the other ones that we had hastily drafted.
Still, Party For Palestine has a cool ring to it, and I for one would be standing in line to buy the tickets.
-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!
Yesterday House Resolution HR4681 was passed with a vote of 361 to 37. If you want to know how your member of congress voted, you can find out at the Washinton Post Voting Record. Please consider taking some action, here is the ADC Action Alert.
Congress, and the rabid pack of AIPAC dogs that drafted this bill, feel that the Palestinians are in a weakened state and can use this as an opportunity to advance the most criminal and the most ruthless of policies. The goal is to set the Palestinians back decades in their struggle and in doing so enable Israel to finalize its plans to eliminate all Palestinian rights.
I actually don’t care about this bill. I don’t care about what congress wants to do. The US government is an accomplice in the crimes being committed against the Palestinian people and trying to appeal to these assholes is useless.
US foreign policy needs to be circumvented. Aid to Palestinians needs to flow despite the suffocation being imposed. The voice of the Palestinians needs to be heard with or without a PA office in the US (it’s not like they were that effective anyways). The diaspora needs to start shouldering the responsibility that they have ignored for too long. The Palestinians need immediate aid, and so everyone need to start organizing to provide to get them the money and the medicine that they need so desperately. Doing this serves an additional purpose of communicating to the US government, AIPAC and the Israelis that the Palestinians are not alone. It reinforces the strength of the Palestinians both in tangible terms and in terms of their morale.
From this point forward my primary mission is to organize a fundraiser to benefit various Palestinian charities. I will keep you updated on my progress. It would be great if an effort such as this can be coordinated across multiple cities around the country and around the world.
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.