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eattherich
04-16-2008, 04:24 PM
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/DataFiles/Cache/TempImgs/2008/1/images_News_2008_04_15_sabra-shatila_300_0.jpg


I strongly believe that Jews around the world, including those in Israel , ought to be constantly reminded of the evil crimes committed in Palestine under their collective name, as well as understand the close ideological similarity between Nazism and Zionism.

This, I believe, is a legitimate tool to get Jews, especially those who still value justice and honesty, to reconsider their identification and infatuation with this evil entity and its equally nefarious ideology and actions.

Jews all around the world simply can’t love Israel and support its wanton criminality against the Palestinian people while at the same time continuing to lecture the world about the evils of Nazism. Moral consistency is absolutely paramount.

Supporting oppression and racism is often as bad as practicing oppression and racism. Indeed, oppression such as occupation can’t persist for a long time without the material and moral support and backing by people who may often look nice and speak softly. Many of the supporters of Apartheid in South Africa and Nazism in Germany also looked very nice and spoke softly, not knowing (or knowing) that they were tacitly backing evil, racist criminals committing ghastly crimes against humanity.

Zionism (the central embodiment of which is the apartheid Israeli state) is evil because of its racist evil ideology and criminal actions and behaviour in Palestine .

Zionism has declared all Jews a distinct ethnicity, just as the Nazis had declared all Germans a distinct ethnicity.

Both Zionism and Nazism strove to build a ‘state’ that would be ‘redeemed’ through violent purification (in the case of Nazi Germany) and ‘an Iron wall’ (in the case of Zionist Israel).

In both instances, ethnic cleansing was the main tool used to obliterate the ‘inferiors,’ the ‘water carriers and wood hewers’ in order to create ‘German-only’ settlements in Europe and ‘Jewish-only’ settlements in Palestine .

In all honesty, there are no fundamental differences between Jewish national socialism (Zionism) and German national socialism (Nazism). The Nazis preached the ‘Master Race’ to justify Nazism while Zionists adopted the ancient myth of the ‘Chosen People’ to justify Zionism.

Moreover, we can’t really ignore the absolute similarity between the Zionist ethnic conquest of Palestine and the implanting therein of ‘Jewish settlers’ at the expense of the native Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and the Nazi drive for ‘Lebensraum’ in Poland and the importation of ‘Aryans’ at the expense of the indigenous population.

Yes, there in Europe , the Nazis sought to steal the Sudetenland and here in Palestine , the Zionists are stealing the West Bank . The arguments are the same, the lies are the same and the means are nearly identical.

We need to highlight these similarities and the ‘common ground’ between Zionism and Nazism, irrespective of how many people will be upset by these comparisons. The truth is always a paramount value in itself.

There is no doubt that the Third Reich committed monstrous crimes against helpless Jews far greater than those committed by Israel against the equally helpless Palestinians. Yes, we all know about Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Treblinka and the other detention camps where many Jews, mainly non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, perished at the hands of the Nazi exterminators.

However, let us ask ourselves the following question: Were the Nazis ‘Nazi’ only because they created and used gas chambers to incinerate their Jewish and non-Jewish victims? Would the Nazis have been less evil and therefore ‘less Nazi’ if they had annihilated their victims by way of bullets instead of ovens, or by starving them to death as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians? Besides, if Jews had the right to call the “Exodus Ship” a floating Auschwitz, why is it wrong for the Palestinians to describe as “Nazi” the ongoing extirpation of an entire people from their ancestral homeland? Do Jew have an exclusive right to call their critics and enemies “Nazi” while others, e.g. the Palestinians, don’t have a similar right to call Israeli crimes and criminals “Nazi”?

Besides, should we refrain from using the Nazi epithets to describe the racist criminals of our time, wherever they happen to be and regardless of what religion they adhere to, until and unless they start using gas chambers to exterminate their victims?

More to the point, by what logic are Israel and its supporters using the Second World War (a cruel war in which a few million Jews as well as nearly 50 million non-Jews perished) as a justification and cover-up to dispossess, dehumanize and ethnically cleanse the indigenous Palestinian people?

Well, Israel could theoretically annihilate most Palestinians with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or simply through a sustained campaign of massive artillery bombardment and air bombing. Would such an act make Israelis less ‘Nazi’?

I want to ask those who might rave and rant against me the following question: At what point should we start calling Israel ‘Nazi’? When the number of its victims reaches one million? Two million? Or perhaps six million? Or when the Zionists start introducing Zyklon B to kill us? Or when 90% of Palestinians are packed into detention camps, surrounded by 8-meter high concrete walls fitted with watchtowers that are manned by trigger-happy Zionist Gestapo?

I know some Zionist apologists will be prompted, almost instinctively, to argue that, unlike Israel , the Third Reich had devised a plan, a final solution, to exterminate all Jews in Europe and the world.

Well, regardless of the historical authenticity of such a claim, I would challenge the Zionists and their supporters and apologists to prove that Israel doesn’t harbour a final solution for the Palestinians.

Isn’t the brutal extirpation of virtually an entire people from their historical motherland tantamount to a kind of final solution? Isn’t ethnic cleansing a form of a final solution? How about the continuing starvation, encirclement and hounding of the Palestinians? Besides, is there a fundamental difference between attempting to destroy an entire people pursuant a plan and attempting to destroy them without a plan? Wouldn’t the ultimate outcome be the same?

Don’t invoke the calumny of terror. We know and you know and the whole world knows that words like ‘terror,’ ‘terrorists,’ ‘axis of evil’ and ‘enemies of freedom’ are all ideological terms used tendentiously by the powerful and the arrogant, such as Israel and the United States, to justify their own true terror against the weak and the oppressed. Even Satan himself would call his enemies terrorists.

In the final analysis, ‘terror’ is the poor man’s war against the powerful and the arrogant, and ‘war’ is the strong man’s terror against the weak and the oppressed.

Yes, the scope of the Nazi Holocaust is greater than that of the criminal Zionist occupation of Palestine . But the mentality, the psychology, the malice, the hatefulness and especially the sheer evil intent in both cases are certainly not that far apart from each other.

There is no doubt in my mind that Israel would have exterminated, or at least tried to exterminate, the Palestinian people a long time ago had the ‘objective circumstances’ been available. Needless to say ‘objective circumstances’ here could mean a huge international event (for example, a nuclear war, a global national disaster, or a gigantic event of some sort) that would divert or shift international attention from such a genocidal feat.

It is true that Israel would prefer to ‘solve the problem’ without a campaign of mass murder and mass terror, like bullying and terrorizing the Palestinians, or the vast majority of them, into leaving their ancestral homeland.

However, there is no doubt that Israel would contemplate resorting to the ‘worst scenario’ in case the Palestinians clung to their homeland and remained steadfast in their homes and towns and villages.

In 2001, a few days after the 9/11 events in the US , then Israeli Defence Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer bragged about how the international media’s preoccupation with events in the US enabled Israel to kill more Palestinians in the West Bank without being censured by the international community.

Similarly, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told students at Bar Ilan University in 1989 that “ Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstration in China (the Tiananmen Square events) where world attention was focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsion among the Arabs of the territories.”

Even today, Israeli leaders say brazenly that they wish to wake up to see all of us dead.

Indeed, the Palestinian national demise has always been and continues to be Zionism’s ultimate goal, this is why Zionism doesn’t really recognize our very existence as a people, and when it does or is forced to do so under the pressure of reality, it insists that Palestine is Jordan and that Amman , not Jerusalem , is the capital of Palestine .

In addition, there is no doubt that the daily acts of murder, terror, humiliation and savagery which ordinary Palestinians are routinely subjected to at the hands of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers manning checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the occupied territories are comparable in many aspects to the same acts of humiliation and terror Jews and non-Jews had to endure in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Nazis imprinted serial numbers on the forearms of Jewish internees, and the Israelis have done the same to the Palestinians.

The Nazis treated Jews as mere numbers rather than human beings, and the Israelis have done the same with the Palestinians.

The Gestapo savaged, brutalized and starved Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to break their collective will, and Israel has been doing the same to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank .

The Nazis practiced all kinds of sadistic behavior with Jews, like for example, forcing Jewish musicians to play music for Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers, and the Israelis have done the same in the West Bank at the checkpoints.

I don’t know if Jews were forced to drink German soldiers’ urine as Israeli border policemen on several occasions have forced their Palestinian victims to do.

During the years of the two Intifadas (uprisings), I travelled throughout the West Bank , passing through Israeli army checkpoints and roadblocks. There, I saw the extent to which Israeli soldiers, many of them grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, behave bestially towards helpless Palestinians.

I saw soldiers murder innocent people on the spot for no genuine reason. I saw soldiers force young Palestinians to strip naked and stand for hours under heavy rain. I saw soldiers relaxed and enjoying the pain and suffering inflicted on thousands of Palestinians, passengers and motorists, whose only ‘fault’ was that of being Palestinian and weak.

I saw face to face the obscene sadistic acts practiced by Jews against their helpless victims. This behavior is not played out in isolated incidents. This is the norm, not the exception.

The Nazi-like occupation of Palestine by Israel is not the act of a few Israeli Jews. It is not even the act of the military establishment alone. It is the collective act of a morally desensitized society that has nearly lost its humanity and succumbed to a collective psychosis that is not unlike the moral blindness that struck the German people more than sixty years ago.

Today, most Jews are more or less either enthusiastically supportive or silent and apathetic about the atrocities being perpetrated in their name in Gaza , the West Bank and Lebanon .

In fact, I would exaggerate little by saying that many, probably a majority, of Israeli Jews are even enjoying and benefiting from the occupation.

In some ways, Palestinians have fared far worse than Hitler’s victims; for the Palestinian tragedy is ongoing and Palestinians, unlike Jews, who still receive compensation for losses dating back sixty years, receive no reparations for lost personal property, not even an acknowledgment from their tormenters of any responsibility for their dispossession.

Sixty years ago Zionists demolished 438 Palestinian villages and poisoned or destroyed wells to ensure that their rightful owners would not return. Today, Zionists keep on behaving more or less along the same traditions, demolishing homes, destroying farms, and narrowing people’s horizons, all with the goal of making them emigrate.

Today in every junior high school in America , students read Anne Frank, while in every high school Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is requisite reading. This is the man who says brazenly that he readily identifies with Israeli crimes and that he couldn’t bring himself to say bad things about Israel .

The victims of the first Kristallnacht enjoy the world’s approbation and sympathy, while at the same time having succeeded in demonizing an entire people, for whom Kristallnacht still remains a night without end.

But, unlike the German national socialists, Jewish national socialists are falsifying history and reality to justify their crimes against humanity. The Holocaust narrative, which has been elevated to the status of a religion, allows Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, to invoke the mantra ‘Never Again’ while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Judeo-Nazi terrorists at Deir Yassin.

It is sad, really sad, that most Jews are now finding themselves in the shoes of their former oppressors, knowingly and consciously.

On August 23, 1947 , nearly one year before Israel’s birth, Harry Truman wrote the following to Eleanor Roosevelt, apparently in the wake of another Jewish atrocity in Palestine :

“I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

Today, in light of Israel ’s Nazi-like behavior in Palestine , it is difficult to view Truman’s prophetic words with indifference. In fact, it is a moral obligation of the first order to oppose Zionism with the same vigour and same determination the world demonstrated in the face of Nazism.

Some Jews, out of ignorance or tribal loyalty or both, insist that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitism. Well, if oppression and racism are consistent with being Jewish, then, yes, the world will be obliged to be anti-Jewish in a certain sense. Indeed, if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, then anti-Semitism itself becomes a moral obligation upon all conscientious people, as Michael Neumann, Professor of Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario , Canada , so eloquently argues.

“Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately, making Palestine unliveable for Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. And the purpose here is not to attain security, as Israeli propagandists and hasbara spinners would want us to believe. The real purpose is the extinction of a people, the Palestinian people.

“And Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate the Palestinians with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder, gentler (creeping) genocide that portrays the perpetrators as victims and the victims as terrorists.”

“It is amply clearly that Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan , to perish in civil war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against a well-armed Communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far, but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few hours.”

I frankly don’t believe that the Zionists are morally fit to lecture the world even on the evils of Nazism, and the reason for this lies not only in Zionism’s Nazi-like crimes against the Palestinian people and other peoples in the Middle East . It goes much further than that.

Zionism cooperated and collaborated with Nazism, not necessarily to save Jews, as the paragons of lies would claim, but rather to fulfil Zionism and Zionist statehood. And in order to expedite the evil goal, the Zionists quietly consented to the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have been saved and sent to other parts of the world, especially North America .

In 1949, the Israeli intelligence employed Walter Rauff, an SS officer who is believed to have been responsible for the murder of at least 100,000 people and was wanted by the Allies as a war criminal. Israel, instead of bringing him to justice it paid him for his services and helped him escape to South America . Rauff, who had devised a plan to destroy Jews in Palestine, was by no means the only Nazi criminal employed by Israel.

Yes, it is wrong to blame each and every Jew on earth for the crimes of Israel . However, Jews can make a difference if they wish to, by speaking up against Israeli criminality and racism.

http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2008/0 ... egitimate/ (http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/why-zionism-nazism-comparisons-are-legitimate/)

Mary TF
04-17-2008, 08:45 AM
Link added on edit: I do still read articles here, this one from me supports ETR's topic:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/15/8294/<http>



Published on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 by The Gaurdian/UK
Area C Strikes Fear Into The Heart of Palestinians As Homes Are Destroyed
by Rory McCarthy

In the end it came down to a single-page letter, written in Hebrew and Arabic and hand-delivered by an Israeli army officer who knocked at the front door. The letter spelt the imminent destruction of the whitewashed three-storey home and small, tree-lined garden that Bassam Suleiman spent so long saving for and then built with his family a decade ago.

It was a final demolition order, with instructions to evacuate the house within three days.0415 04 1

If Suleiman was in any doubt about the Israeli military’s intentions he had only to look outside his back door where large piles of rubble and broken concrete mark the remains of the seven of his neighbours’ houses that were demolished in the same way last year.

“How would you feel when you’ve spent 20 years finishing your life’s project?” said Suleiman, 38, a teacher. He began moving his furniture out after the letter, from the civil administration of Judea and Samaria, the defence ministry department responsible for the Israeli-occupied West Bank, came on January 31. Now there are just a couple of plastic chairs in his front room and in the hallway the carpets are rolled up and ready to be moved. Clothes are piled on the floor and the shelves are empty, save for a stack of documents charting the story of the impending demolition. His brother, Husam, has already left the ground floor flat but the new washing machine and fridge stand still wrapped in plastic. Suleiman, his wife and two children wait for the bulldozers.

“Everything I did in my life was for what’s now inside this house and now it’s going to be destroyed,” said Suleiman. “It’s very hard for me to find somewhere else to live.”

The Israeli authorities argue that Suleiman’s house was built in a part of the West Bank known as area C, a designation from the era of the Oslo Accords which means Israel has full military and administrative control. In order to build, a Palestinian must apply for a permit from the Israeli authorities. If there is no permit - as in Suleiman’s case - the building is liable for demolition.

Illegal

Area C covers 60% of the West Bank, home to around 70,000 Palestinians. It is also the area in which most Jewish settlements, all illegal under international law, are built. Compelling statistical evidence shows that while it is extremely hard for Palestinians to obtain building permits, settlements continue to grow rapidly.

Research by the Israeli group Peace Now found that 94% of Palestinian permit applications for Area C building were refused between 2000 and September 2007. Only 91 permits were granted to Palestinians, but 18,472 housing units were built in Jewish settlements. As a result of demolition orders 1,663 Palestinian buildings were demolished, against only 199 in the settlements. “The denial of permits for Palestinians on such a large scale raises the fear that there is a specific policy by the authorities to encourage a ’silent transfer’ of the Palestinian population from area C,” Peace Now said.

This year there has been a marked increase in demolitions. There were 138 demolitions between January and March, most in area C, compared with 29 in the last three months of 2007, according to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This year 400 Palestinians have been displaced as a result. At a time of a renewed peace process to create an independent Palestinian state, the reality in the West Bank is that Jewish settlements are growing and demolitions of Palestinian homes are on the increase.

The problems of the village of Far’un, south of Tulkarm, are complicated by the vast West Bank barrier, which here runs away from the 1949 ceasefire line that divides Israel and the Palestinian territories. The wide, steel fence, which passes just a few dozen metres from Suleiman’s home, cuts off the village from a slice of its agricultural land and underground water reserves and has turned this area into a dangerous no-go zone: in December 2006, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl playing nearby was shot dead by an Israeli soldier.

Suleiman’s house and that of his neighbour Emad Hassahsi, which has also received a demolition order, were built before the barrier arrived, in an area they were told - and they have letters that appear to support their claim - was area B, in which Palestinians have administrative control and therefore somewhere they thought they could safely build. Only later did the Israeli military announce it was in fact area C. There are similar disputes about the exact delineation of the different areas elsewhere the West Bank.

Israel’s civil administration offered no explanation for the rise in demolitions but told the Guardian: “The procedures that are carried out before the materialisation of a demolition order include: issuance of an order to cease building that is usually issued in the early stages of the construction of foundations; numerous deliberations at the high planning and zoning committee and of course an open door to the supreme court of justice. These procedures are valid for both Palestinians and Israelis alike.” It said the buildings demolished in Far’un were “built illegally without the required licences”.

One effect of the strict planning curbs is to limit the growth of Palestinian villages. “If you look at the way the Israelis are enforcing planning and construction regulations you see they are being enforced in a one-sided way,” said Avi Berg, research director of the leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which has worked on the Far’un case.

Settlement growth continues apace despite the fact that the current peace talks are based on the US Road Map, under which Israel is required to freeze settlement activity. In another report, Peace Now said that since the talks began at Annapolis last November, Israel was still building 500 homes in West Bank settlements and had issued tenders for 750 homes in East Jerusalem settlements. Reports suggest another 1,400 homes will be built in two settlements in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank.

The Israeli government defends the continued settlement construction particularly in the major settlements which it calls “population centres”, saying it will not build new settlements or expropriate more land. “In the population centres and in Jerusalem the reality on the ground will not be the same in the future as it is today,” Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said last month. “There will be more additional building as part of the reality of life and this is something that was explained …”

Not all the cases of demolition involve homes. In January, Israeli forces uprooted 3,200 trees, destroyed water cisterns and stone terraces in fields near Beit Ula, close to Hebron, in the southern West Bank. Again this was in area C. The civil administration said the demolition was an “enforcement activity” carried out after legal warnings.

But in this case the target was a €64,000 (£51,000) project from the European commission which began two years ago to provide a livelihood for the villagers, several of whom also put their own money into the planting.

“It was a tragedy for us,” said Sami al-Adam, 46, a farmer who had put in 45,000 shekels. “They’re tearing me out by my roots. They want to destroy Palestinian farmers psychologically and economically.”

© 2008 The Guardian
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35 Comments so far

1.
Jim Glover April 15th, 2008 11:25 am

What can one say…. it is Israel that should have to apply for licenses from the Palestinians.

Even though there is no insentive for any change now, It will be interesting to see what Jimmy Carter says when he comes back.
2.
mirf59 April 15th, 2008 11:36 am

This is really disgusting in a mind-numbing sort of way.

I don’t know how anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty and moral integrity can fail to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians.

This is genocide, carried out slowly using legal documents. It is reminiscent of the latter stages of pushing the Native Americans off ancestral land here in the States.

I mean, how can anyone support this activity? The UN should have a peace-keeping Army throughout Israel ready to seize and melt the bulldozers.

It’s really tragic. The greatest irony is this is being perpetrated by a people that should understand very well what it is like to be on the receiving end.

One would think such an experience would have led to some measure of understanding and a yearning for humane treatment of the underclass the world over.

Apparently not.

The typical excuse is Palestine lost the war. Yes, but we don’t continue to punish the losers in war for 40-50 years after the peace agreement. Using the small reactionary violence of Paelstinians who are being crushed as an excuse is a joke that cannot seriously be embraced by a responsible person of faith or reason.
3.
pax4all April 15th, 2008 11:49 am

Might makes right, and the US supplies the might. Without financial support from the US, first in tax-deductible donations and later in direct government aid, Israel would not have been viable.
4.
forextrader April 15th, 2008 12:39 pm

If “Israel” reserves the right to destroy private Palestinian property, then the Palestinians have every right to to fire rockets into “Israel” and destroy Zionist ill-gotten property. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
5.
Ragdoll April 15th, 2008 12:47 pm

It is called population transfer! Population transfer is completely illegal under international law! The evil genius is in the way Israel is slowly but surely taking over all of Palestine, not piling all the population into trucks and dumping them at some frontier in a few weeks. That wouldn;t make nice looking headlines. No their trick is not to make the headlines at all, with a little help from a largely complicit US media, little by little, another parcel seized here, a zoning limit moved there, a few “terrorists” shot down from the sky to keep the fear going, newborns dead in childbirth because of hours of delays at the checkpoints. So they go on endlessly day by day, destroying homes, killing people, imprisoning thousands without charges or hearings, dumping toxic sewage from their “naturally growing settlements” onto Palestinian vineyards utterly destroying those, hacking down olive trees by the thousands to prevent harvests or uprooting the finer ones to sell on the black market in Israel to decorate gardens. It is unimaginable that this horror goes on but thankfully Jimmy Carter trhying to do something fair and honest. Heaven knows the Palestinians deserve their sovereign country and to be left alone by Israel to live their lives in peace!
6.
curmudgeon99 April 15th, 2008 1:07 pm

Just look at the green zone in Baghdad - and the upcoming ‘demo’ neighborhoods in Sadr city. We will be doing the same tactic ourselves.

Americans just do not understand the size of each of the illegal settlements (usually a footprint 1-1/2 miles by 1 mile), They are densely packed 3-5 story Condos usually. They sit on top of hills to command the terrain.

The memory of Rachel Corrie should be better remembered by Americans. She died in a vain attempt to stop this wanton inhumane crime against humanity that is carried out daily by the oxymoronically named Israel Defense Forces. Our society will NOT even allow a play about her bravery be performed in public without cries of anti-semitism.

Remember the USS Liberty!!!
7.
minitru April 15th, 2008 1:10 pm

Jim Glover: “It will be interesting to see what Jimmy Carter says….”

I have just heard on Democracy Now that Israel has refused to allow Carter to enter the Gaza Strip! Of course a man who received the Nobel Peace Prize, a man with some moral authority who had the audacity to write a book about the cruel apartheid policy in the occupied territories must not be seen with Hamas leaders, since this would undermine the carefully crafted spin intended to dehumanize and demonize Hamas…. (an organization Israel originally encouraged, to create an opponent for Fatah…)

What legal right does Israel actually have to prohibit anybody from going to Gaza? Wasn´t their “withdrawal” from Gaza (with its shattered economy only a liability) in 2005 supposed to give control of the area to the Palestinians? But of course, this was just the official line to get rid of the responsibility for Gaza and turn it into an open-air prison… the real intentions are described here: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=8529
Excellent analysis is also available from Robert Fisk (links on DN website)

How long will this go on? Why do the Palestinians have to pay the price for the crimes of Nazi Germany? (Notwithstanding the fact that zionism started long before the Holocaust …)

How much longer will we watch as helpless bystanders how the Human and Political rights of the Palestinians are being trampled on? The smear campaigns against Carter (as a result of his book “Peace, not Apartheid”) and other critcs of the Israeli government will they never stop? Can the label “anti-semitism” - used indiscriminately as an immunization against justified criticism - really stop us from demanding justice for the Palestinian people who have already “lost” 80% of their land?

I am sure many US citizens do not want to support the criminal and racist Israeli government with their tax-dollars (for “military aid”)but as Noam Chomsky has pointed out repeatedly… politics (in a business-run society) is concerned with the demands of the people who really matter… (Wall Street, arms industry, Big Business,investors, governments who serve their interests, etc. apparently neither we nor the Palestinians belong to this category…)

mirf59: “The greatest irony is this is being perpetrated by a people that should understand very well what it is like to be on the receiving end.”

I agree. The unbearable thing is, that a country (state)
which has created a sort of global monopoly on being the eternal VICTIM (instrumentalizing the unspeakable crimes of the Holocaust, committed 60 years ago)thus implying that we shall never be able to see them as PERPETRATORS of crimes based on racism (treating the Palestinians as “Untermenschen”, as racially inferior to Jews)…..
- used terrorism (during the British Mandate)to get rid of the (legal)”occupiers” and 2 of the top “terrorists” later became prime ministers….(Begin and Shamir)
- a state, whose first political action was ethnic cleansing (in 1948 hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed and their inhabitants killed or driven out, about 750.000 people became refugees) http://www.alnakba.org/chronology/chronology.htm
- stripped the Palestinians of all political and human rights in order to expand its territory on their land, (ignoring countless UN-resolutions) dehumanized their legitimate resistance, which after decades of deception and brutal repression turned to violence as a form of ultimate despair: suicide bombings (even carried out by teenagers…)

The situation in Gaza is now worse than the Jewish ghettoes ever have been…. and the media silence is deafening….
8.
Treefrog April 15th, 2008 1:18 pm

Area C is happening all over the world, including the good ole USA. I have to say though, the Israeli have perfected the this system of genocide.
9.
whatfools April 15th, 2008 2:45 pm

Saint Thomas Aquinas was surely correct when he wrote, centurys ago, that these people were charactorized by “crulty and avorice.” They have only grown worse over the ages.
10.
notgoingalong April 15th, 2008 3:10 pm

Remember this, the precedent is sit. And that goes for all the illegal occupation units on the West Bank. They must be scraped to rubble, and back of native soil.

As for those there, they are illegals and the world knows it!

It is not anti-semitic, it is anti-fascism and anti-imperialism, to oppose these wanton criminal conspiracies they try to hide in formal process. It is a continuum of Zionist conquest and nothing more, and nothing less.

Ugly, racism, and will not be discussed on radio, TV, or on capital hill.

It does bring to mind a great, not classical song, by

Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel -
‘The Sounds of Silence’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhdGkZ6Fngw

And of course that of Martin King at the Riverside Church in his seminale declaration of war against war:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... ex=0&hl=en (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6638248874926727966&q=MLK+at+Riverside+church+anti+war+speech&total=4&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0&hl=en)

Those are both 3 minute videos and say more than has been written today by all of us. That is the power of the revolutionary and the artist. And the media just gives us buffoons and propagandist for hire. But, nothing for the heart and soul. Just grotesque news and reactionary analysis.

Bob Dylan had some lines too. Look-up Masters of War, or maybe he does not hear where he was in his youth, he was coming from. OK, I will go get it…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muQRIUVd6Aw

I know you already care, or you would not have read the article on been on this site in the first place. So, allow me to remind us, that we must speak up and not just “suck it up” in silence!
11.
mikk April 15th, 2008 4:07 pm

It makes you wonder if even someone like ex president Carter, would after a decade or so of hitting his head against a brick wall, come to understand a desire to use more “forceful” methods to right such injustice?
12.
Treefrog April 15th, 2008 4:17 pm

First come the economic sanctions, then it is the sound of bulldozers…first your neighbor and then you.
13.
ricg April 15th, 2008 4:25 pm

Israel - the new Nazi state. If it talks like a duck, walks like a duck, and acts like a Nazi, it’s not a damn duck. As for the United States, we’re getting there.
14.
iammyself April 15th, 2008 4:54 pm

“Even though there is no insentive for any change now, It will be interesting to see what Jimmy Carter says when he comes back.”

You don’t have to wait, just read Carter’s book, Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid. Nothing has changed.
15.
johnycanuck April 15th, 2008 5:10 pm

careful now..these are “god’s chosen people”..

anyone who questions anything the Israelites do is immediately branded as anti-semitic.

If any other country in the world were to do what Israel is doing, there would be a screaming so loud.. oh wait the US is doing that right now.. dam we are screwed…
16.
gde April 15th, 2008 5:41 pm

I notice the pro-Zionist faction is silent so far in the comment section. I suspect it is because they do not want to be disturbed by the ugly parts of “facts on the ground”, and did not read it.
17.
eileenfleming April 15th, 2008 5:56 pm

Since 1967, Israel has demolished over 18,000 Palestinian homes without compensation or justification!

On April 3, 2008, the Associated Press in Jerusalem reported, “An Israeli wrecking crew knocked down Shadi Hamdan’s home in an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem in just a couple of hours, reducing the upholsterer’s savings to a pile of gray rubble…Since 2004, Israel has leveled more than 300 homes in Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, citing a lack of building permits. However, critics say the permits are virtually impossible to obtain and consider the demolitions part of a decades-old policy to limit Palestinian population growth in the disputed city.” [1]

“Were Israelis and Palestinians to have an equal chance to get a building permit … it wouldn’t be a human rights issue. It’s a human rights issue because it’s intentional and purposeful housing discrimination.”- Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights

The Hamdan home was first demolished by Israel in 2005 but volunteers rebuilt it last July. “Former Jerusalem city council member Meir Margalit, one of Hamdan’s supporters, said his group won’t be deterred and plans to rebuild again.” [2]

The AP failed to report that Meir’s group is ICAHD/ Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, a non-violent civil do something group opposed to the occupation of Palestine and which resists by standing up to the bulldozers that demolish and then rebuilding what Israel had destroyed.

The AP also failed to report the on site arrest of Prof. Jeff Halper, American Israeli, Founder and Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. Jeff was arrested once again for trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home.

“In a telephone interview with Adnkronos International (AKI), Halper, said that the Israeli occupation Jerusalem municipality had carried out the demolition…”As Israelis, we are privileged,” he told AKI. “They (police) are not going to shoot us if we resist the demolition, but if a Palestinian had done it, they would have certainly shot him.” [3]

While in Jerusalem on July 16, 2007, this American civilian journalist witnessed twenty five ICAHD volunteers; internationals, Israelis and Palestinians who become a community upon the rocky barren land of the Hamdan clan as they broke ground and laid the foundation. The ICAHD crew was intent upon handing the keys of the once again rebuilt home over to Hassan Yussef Hamdan and his family within two weeks. That mission was accomplished on schedule.

The land has legally been owned by the Hamdan clan -with the deeds filled out in Hassan Yussef’s great-grandfather’s name- during the Ottoman Empire.

The oldest son, Mohammed’s grandmother, Um Mohammad addressed the media on ICAHD’s summer kick off commitment to rebuild 300 of the -so far 18,000 Palestinian homes the Israeli government has destroyed- and which have resulted in creating 18,000 homeless families who legally own their land but are denied the right to build upon it.

The diminutive woman’s Arabic was translated into English by Nadia another ICAHD volunteer, while the foundation of the house was being laid, “We own twenty-five pieces of land, twenty-five meters is one piece. After building our home here, we received papers demanding we demolish our own home. We got a lawyer in Tel Aviv, and after paying $10,000.00 she did nothing. The soldiers came under our window and we hired another lawyer and had to pay 70,000 shekels within two hours to hold off the soldiers. The soldiers came back two more times, after more negotiations the soldiers came back a third time and destroyed our home.”

ICAHD spokesmen, Meir Margalit admitted, “We are here because we are embarrassed and ashamed of our government. A decent person cannot handle what this government puts innocent people through. We are doing this for both sides; for the innocent families and to keep the moral values of Judaism alive.”

According to international law, the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids home demolitions in occupied territories and demands that the occupiers maintain the status quo and not pilfer the resources of the indigenous population.

But once again, in the ‘Holy’ Land, a crane-mounted jackhammer tore down another home; the Hamdan’s home that had broken ground on July 16, 2007.

On that day of a beginning again, American Israeli, Aviva Joseph spoke, “We are here building on the 9th day of Av, the day the Jewish Temple was destroyed…I was born in Chile into an Orthodox Zionist home. Both my parents are Holocaust survivors. When I was ten I use to go to Bethlehem, but after the first intifada, things began closing down; physical walls and psychological walls. I lived in Gilo, some call it a settlement, some a neighborhood and I lived in a small box with my own myth. Now I live in California and things you see from there you can’t see here and other things you must come here to see what cannot be seen anywhere else. I love Israel but until I began listening to the voices of the marginalized did I see I was living my own myth. The work is not just in the head, but in the heart; opening both sides to a new paradigm with compassion. It must be like hydrogen and oxygen the sides coming together; who could have thought that would make water?”

Ashraf Abu Moch, Israeli Palestinian and ICAHD Volunteer is famous for saying, “We all need a psychiatrist, but we cannot afford one, so we do activism.”

It was in December 2005, that I first met Jeff Halper in his ICAHD office on Ben Yehuda Street, in West Jerusalem next door to the Burger King.

Jeff is from Hibbing, Minnesota and knew Bob Dylan when he was still Zimmerman. Jeff smiled when he told me, “It was during the Vietnam years that I told my grandmother that I was moving to Israel and she replied, ‘That is no place for a nice Jewish boy!’

Jeff continued, “Israel has no constitution but has a Declaration of Independence which promised that Israel would abide by conditions and UN resolutions. They have not fulfilled the agreement which was the basis of their independence.”

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel was signed May 14, 1948 the day the British Mandate over Palestine expired. The USA recognized Israel that very night and the USSR three days later. The Declaration affirms that the state of Israel:

“Will be based on freedom, justice, and peace as envisioned by the prophets of Israel: it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion…and will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, education and culture: it will safeguard the Holy places of all religions, and it will be faithful to the principals of the Charter of the United Nations.”

Jeff also spoke during December 2005’s Holy Land Trust’s Celebrating Nonviolent Resistance Conference, in Bethlehem.

Members of Hamas attended but Israel denied entry to Ghandian activists from India and many internationals for having histories of speaking up for human rights for Palestinians.

Jeff informed the conference crowd, “We really are only but actors in a play. When we wake up to that, and become an active participant in the human drama and pursue justice, things must change because injustice is unsustainable…One out of three Israeli children lives below the poverty line. It’s probably about 80% for Palestinians. Jews are like everyone else, those who have been abused grow up to be abusers. Things here have been turned on their head: its victim mentality and denial about the occupation. Once Israelis accept the fact that they are occupiers they will have to admit their State Terrorism.”

During other interviews and conferences Jeff said, “It was at the time when the Oslo peace plan collapsed and the occupation reasserted itself. Many Israeli peace activists began asking Palestinians what the best way to engage with each other was and the answer was blowing in the wind: ‘STOP the home demolitions!’

“Since 1967 the Israeli government has destroyed over 18,000 Palestinian homes. 95% of the cases have nothing to do with security. All these homes are on Palestinian private property. The Israeli government will not grant permits for them to build on their own land, and in reality are quietly transferring the Palestinians administratively from the land. They make conditions so intolerable that the Palestinians give up and leave and this is exactly what they are after. Not only do the Palestinians receive no warning when their homes are to be destroyed they are fined $1,500.00!

“I’ll get a call at 5 AM from a Palestinian telling me the bulldozers have arrived and we activists go out and engage in civil disobedience by standing up to the bulldozers. We also raise funds to rebuild these homes right where they had been before.

“The reasons for the demolitions are: for The Wall, to establish illegal settlements, build roads and because the Israeli government wants to keep Palestinians confined to the islands [areas A and B] in the West Bank and so Palestinian land remain under the control of the Israeli government.”

“When you incorporate occupied territories, highways, settlements and use resources it is all illegal according to the Fourth Geneva Convention which states the status quo must be retained so that negotiations can happen. Unilateral actions are illegal. The occupying power is responsible for those under its control.

“Tony Blair said 70% of all the conflicts in the world can be traced back to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. What gives us hope is that as this conflict worsens maybe Europe will figure out that American policies are against their interests and intervene…This conflict impacts the global community and especially everyone in the USA.

“If we do fix this conflict it would be a tremendous step forward in global reconciliation…This whole issue is based on Human Rights and it is a global issue requiring global intervention.

“It has been said that the Israelis do not love this land, they just want to possess it. There have been three stages to make this occupation permanent. The first was to establish the facts on the ground; the settlements. There are ½ million Israeli’s and four million Palestinians here. They have been forced into Bantustan; truncated mini states; prison states. It is apartheid and Bush and Hillary are both willing collaborators.

“Israel is not a democracy, it is an ethnocracy: full rights to Jews, but not Palestinians.

“In 1977, Sharon came in with a mandate, money and resources to make the Israeli presence in the West Bank irreversible. The second stage began in April 2004 when America approved the Apartheid/Convergence/Realignment Plan and eight settlement blocs. This is just like South Africa! The Bush Sharon letter exchange guaranteed that the USA considers the settlements non-negotiable. The Convergence Plan and The Wall create the borders and that is what defines Bantustans. Congress ratified the Bush plan and only Senator Byrd of West Virginia voted no and nine House Representatives.

“Israel has set up a matrix of control; a thick web of settlements guaranteed to make the occupation permanent by establishing facts on the ground. Israel denies there is an occupation, so everything is reduced to terrorism. It is our job to insist upon the human rights issue, for occupied people have International Law on their side.”

I asked Jeff if the settlements were in actuality colonies; meaning foreigners had invaded and set up residence in another’s territory. He agreed and added that, “When Jerusalem was controlled by Jordan, the East side was 6 sq. km. Since 1967, Israel has added 64 km. The West side was 38 sq. km until ‘67 and is now 108 sq. km’s. Israel plans to develop 17 settlements. Israeli policy is to maintain a 72% Jewish and 28% Arab population. Palestinians cannot get building permits to build upon their legally owned land. The Arab land has been re-zoned as green space, and the green space will be re-zoned for the settlements. Every single Palestinian home in Jerusalem has a demolition order. The entire West Bank has been zoned as agricultural land by Israel, and that will also be re-zoned again for more settlements.”

Orwellian doublespeak has also been employed in the USA government and media to turn the illegal colonies: for all the settlements are considered illegal according to International Law, into “neighborhoods”.

Linking the settlements in a ring around the Old City of Jerusalem, the Eastern Ring Road has bridges for Israelis but Palestinians are denied access and must drive through sewage and tunnels. During an ICAHD bus tour, I rode past acres of olive trees that had been chopped off by the Israeli army, on our way to another repeatedly built house; The Beit Arabiya Peace House.

On the way, Jeff said, “I don’t just have a political problem with this Judiaization of the Old City, it is ecologically and environmentally offensive.”

I add it also is spiritually impoverished. The raping and pillaging of what is claimed holy ground refutes and denies the biblical meaning of dominion. The ancients understood dominion meant to nurture, love and protect and the destruction of Palestinian homes, the stealing and destroying of their legal property, is an abomination unto God and crime against humanity.

The Beit Arabiya Peace House, is at the crossroads of Areas A, B and C and has been demolished and rebuilt at least four times by now. The owner received his fifth demolition order in 2006.

Beit Arabiya is the name of the home of the Arabiya family with seven children. Their home has been rebuilt by the efforts of ICAHD and the JCHR/Jurist Center for Human Rights, a Palestinian NGO focused on legal advocacy for Palestinians in the Jerusalem area.

The home has become a meeting place for Israelis, Palestinian and International peace activists and is the cornerstone and intersecting point of Areas A, B, and C.

The smallest of the three is Area A, which is under Palestinian authority. Areas B and C are under Israeli control.

Since 1967 over 18,000 Palestinian families in the occupied territories have been left homeless due to home demolitions.

According to Jeff Halper, the reasons for these home demolitions are purely political:

To confine the 3 ½ million residents of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza into small, crowded, impoverished and disconnected enclaves; BANTUSTANS is the African word!

Upon the wall of the Beit Arabyia home was a mural donated by the North American Workers Against the USA occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The mural depicts Rachel Corrie, the American who was run over by a Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza when she stood up to defend the home of a pharmacist with five children. Also depicted is a the pregnant Palestinian woman of ten who too was run over by a Caterpillar in Gaza. The angelic images of the two women float above a depiction of a USA made Caterpillar bulldozer tipped to one side and flanked by tanks and weapons of destruction. On both sides of the weapons of destruction are many people. A railroad track reminds the viewer that prior to 1948, Jews and Palestinians once worked together in peaceful solidarity to build a railroad.

The Arabyia home/Peace Center is the cornerstone of the village of Anata and the Shufat refugee camp, in the very area where the prophet Jeremiah in the 6th century B.C. critiqued the violent conflicts in the Mid East, which were already old news: “I hear violence and destruction in the city, sickness and wounds are all I see.” [Jeremiah 6:7]

Mohammad Alatar, film producer of “The Ironwall” addressed our group after we broke bread and ate a typical Palestinian feast prepared by the Arabiya family:

“I am a Muslim Palestinian American and when my son asked me who my hero was I took three days to think about it. I told him my hero is Jesus, because he took a stand and he died for it. What really needs to be done is for the churches to be like Jesus; to challenge the Israeli occupation and address the apartheid practices as moral issues. Even if every church divested and boycotted Israel it would not harm Israel. After the USA and Russia, Israel is the third largest arms exporter in the world. It is a moral issue that the churches must address.”

In 2005, Jeff told me that every time he is arrested and sentenced to community service for his ICAHD actions, he tells “the judge I am serving the community but they just don’t get it!…The Israeli government simply does not want to take responsibility and the USA government ignores the situation.

“Look, Christ was all about justice and love. Jesus was no magician and his message has been lost by Christian Zionists who want Armageddon. They have taken Jesus’ teachings and turned them into a travesty by justifying the occupation.

“Do you know why Israel does not want to become America’s 51st state? Because then they would only have two senators!”

1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080403/ap_ ... emolitions (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080403/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_house_demolitions)

2. IBID
3. http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=1&id=1639

Other Sources:
“Memoirs of a Nice Irish-American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory” by eileen fleming

Eileen Fleming, Reporter and Editor WAWA:
http://www.wearewideawake.org/
Author “Keep Hope Alive” and “Memoirs of a Nice Irish American ‘Girl’s’ Life in Occupied Territory”
Producer “30 Minutes With Vanunu” and “13 Minutes with Vanunu”
18.
Ahuramazda April 15th, 2008 6:00 pm

This picture represents Jewish compassion at its finest!
19.
Earl Simmins April 15th, 2008 7:48 pm

what I know is that the territory the Israel was settled as a country belongs to the Palestina, so the Palestinians are the ones who should have the control of the area, but not!!! what type of living is this ? destroying homes because they can do it? whom are you? also was the land of Jesus, at least they should be respectful!!! let them live in peace Jewish people!!! an you will live in peace.
20.
citizen1 April 15th, 2008 10:12 pm

Israeli Nazis at work.
21.
Tsunami April 15th, 2008 10:12 pm

RE: to Mirf59:
“This is genocide, carried out slowly using legal documents. It is reminiscent of the latter stages of pushing the Native Americans off ancestral land here in the States.”

And I bet the USA is the only other country supporting it.
22.
Takamine2002 April 15th, 2008 10:21 pm

… and this wonderful news as the Jews (rightfully) remember the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto. The irony is that no one acknowledges the parallels between that abomination against humanity perpetrated against the Jews and the present day treatment BY the Israelis OF another, the Gazan Palestinians. Hey - so it’s just human nature, right? And religion? Holiness? The average Shabat prayers? “do unto others”? “love they neighbour as thyself”? all simply bollocks. Let’s face it - we’re all as tribal as we were the day we jumped out of the trees. It’s all about “them” and “us” and the only good “them” is a dead “them”. Shalom.
23.
Tsunami April 15th, 2008 10:41 pm

The US should bow, repent, and apologize for labeling the Al-Qiada org. as terrorists. Israel and the USA make Bin Laden and the org. look like “Saints.”
24.
Dump Bush April 15th, 2008 10:57 pm

Israel won the territories in three wars and gave them back after two, twice! - but the Palestinians continued to attack Israel from these lands using mortars, rockets and invasions - kidnapping or killing Israeli soldiers on Israeli land.
Had they not done so Israel would not need the buffer from attack these lands represent.
The truth is that these are the spoils of war, and Israel has every right to keep them, especially in order to protect itself from attacks by the Palestinians.

The Palestinians could already have had their own country if Arafat hadn’t walked away from the meeting in Camp David, but it seems all that interested the Palestinians was killing Israelis and destroying Israel.
25.
Dump Bush April 15th, 2008 11:03 pm

Victims of Palestinian Violence and Terrorism since September 2000
1,157 people have been killed by Palestinian violence and terrorism since September 2000.
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-%20 ... ism%20sinc (http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-%20Obstacle%20to%20Peace/Palestinian%20terror%20since%202000/Victims%20of%20Palestinian%20Violence%20and%20Terrorism%20sinc)
26.
medusa April 15th, 2008 11:06 pm

Tsunami - no it’s not, and that’s the problem. The EU is completely cowardly in following the obscene US policies. The other Middle East nations have their own deals and don’t want to support Palestinians for fear of losing those deals - with the US and the EU. The Palestinians really are abandoned by the whole world. I hope and pray Carter can start something. As long as Israel denies that it is doing what it is doing, no one can get a handle on a discussion, and in the meantime, they build their “facts on the ground”.

Ahuramazda, what fools, treefrog I think you can criticise a nation’s actions all you want as long as you don’t start attacking the personal character ofits citizens. The evil that you watch unfold unimpeded in Israel is a result of unbridled power, weaponry and licence, not of some monolithic Jewish character flaw.

There’s an excellent article by Uri Avnery at Counterpunch.org today. Go read it. He is frank and open in his criticisms of Israeli expansionism. He is not the only Jew to be so outspoken in his opposition. And he is an activist, along with many other Jews, Israeli and non-, in the battle to build real democracy, real peace in Israel-Palestine.

You have to separate the strands of your emotions - are you angry at the Israeli mis-treatment of Palestine and Palestinians, or are you angry at Jews, no matter what they do or don’t do?

Big difference!
27.
mcbuhh April 15th, 2008 11:53 pm

A while back there was a CD story about ELF members trying to demolish model homes in a new McMansion community. For this type of activity they are called terrorists. (Note: No one lived in these homes.)

Let us write our representatives asking them, for the same reason, to declare Israel a terrorist organization or demand of them to tell us why such a discrepancy is justified.
28.
Truth_Forward April 16th, 2008 12:19 am

Think the media stifles dissent about Israel? Try being a opponent to Israeli policies at your local synagogue. Comments are sure to fly (behind your back of course)and you’ll notice a sudden drop in the number of invites to temple gatherings. The Rabbi will tell you “Leave politics at the temple door” as he hands you a brochure for a joint Jewish/Christian Zionist trip to Israel. I feel it’s worth the Workmen’s Circle dues just to connect with Jews who feel the same way as me.
29.
Southern Cross April 16th, 2008 12:53 am

These things happen because the US government has given Israel a blank cheque to practise apatheid and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian’s. And they do so because American politicians are terrified of the Israel Lobby Group who will destroy the career of any politician brave enough to expose Israel’s culpability. Come on American’s - it is time to expose these blackmailers who hold your government ransom.
30.
Therzal April 16th, 2008 4:27 am

31.
iammyself April 16th, 2008 8:01 am

Is there nothing in the Talmud about shaming one’s opponent and then rubbing his nose in it?

Where is Solomon when the Jews need him?
32.
Peaceseeker67 April 16th, 2008 9:26 am

To add more information. I recently received the following e-mail regarding another atrocity that the Israeli government is committing. Anyone who makes the claim that the Israeli government is doing this to “protect” its people is a liar. There can be NO justification for this act.

15 April 2008

On 7 April the Israeli High Court granted the Israeli military an indefinite delay to provide full justification for the closure of the Hebron Girls and Boys schools and orphanages as well as other properties owned by the Islamic Charitable Society (ICS).

On 11 April, CPTer Alwyn Knight and translator, Rasheed Rasheed, went to the Hebron Girls School and Orphanage to take photos for a web site. Two Israeli soldiers had entered the sewing workshop of the school at 10:30 that morning, taking photos of the inventory, looking at the sewing machines and other equipment. Hundreds of beautifully sewn coats and dresses are hung there as well as other sewn items on the shelves. The soldiers also visited the Al Huda Shopping Mall where there was an exhibition of the students’ sewing. The soldiers told the students their exhibit had to be removed by Sunday, 13 April.

The soldiers told the school staff the orphans should leave the orphanage on Friday, 11 April but could return on Sunday, 13 April. It is usual for the children to leave from Friday to Sunday every two weeks from Friday to Sunday to visit relatives.

On 11 April, CPTer JoAnne Lingle and Mary Anne Grady-Flores, friend of the team, with translator, Rasheed, visited the Al Shar’iyah Girls School and Orphanage. The orphanage was empty, the children having left to stay with relatives for the weekend. They observed the sewing workshop where the soldiers had been. The door was not sealed shut and it appeared that nothing had been disturbed or taken by the soldiers the previous day.

From there, they went to the Al Huda Shopping Mall. Since it was after noon prayers on Friday, the shops were closed. None of the doors were sealed shut.

At the Golden Medal Supermarket and the Rahma Bakery, both stores on the street level of a 30 apartment building owned by the ISC, the shopkeepers said that four soldiers were there that day, 11 April and told them their shops must be vacated by Sunday, 13 April. Two of the soldiers were officers, one being the Hebron Deputy Military commander. The soldiers took photos inside the shops and outside the building.

Monday night, 14 April, soldiers entered the Rahma Bakery and took all the display cases, refrigerators, fixtures, equipment and most of the inventory, leaving an oven that they wrecked. Upstairs the soldiers destroyed heating ducts. This bakery provided bread for the orphanages.
33.
mikepeters April 16th, 2008 10:02 am

Peacekeeper67; After the Israelis Stole everything of value, destroyed what was left-

Did they not leave and SMEAR THEIR EXCREMENT over the ruins they left behind? This is the usual and well documented practice of these HUMAN FILTH.

God Help The Poor Palestinians; They Have Been Tortured For So Long.
34.
mikepeters April 16th, 2008 10:39 am

On a better note; J Street; A new Israel lobby/pac of prominent Jewish academics et al promoting peace in Palestine-Israel by supporting American politicans with Money who support Peace.

Go J Street. Peace yesterday. Please.
35.
greatbear215 April 16th, 2008 4:07 pm

Israel needs to be taken to the World Court and charged for her offenses. If this is not done; then there is no justice anywhere. For years now, Israel has committed acts of genocide against the Palestinians. The world has stood by Israel, and remained silent. Silence is complicity.

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