Stanley Cohen and the HAMAS card pt 1

“You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my mother and father, kill my brothers, bomb my country, starve us all and humiliate us all. But am to blame: I shot a rocket back”

Noam Chomsky writing about and old man holding a placard after the assault on Gaza in 2008-9

 

The HAMAS card…the last desperate joker in the deck which is supposed to stop all conversation over Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinian people especially in Gaza.
Do not play this card with Jewish lawyer, New Yorker Stanley Cohen.

 

Virtually nobody outside of Israel  accepts the illiterate US envoy to the UN Nikki Haley claim that the massacre of 62 innocents during the Great Return march on the Gaza /Israel border was “measured and proportionate”.

 
Cohen mocks the threat of burning kites,waving flags and slingshot”weapons of mass destruction.”

 

 

The 62 deaths and hundreds of crippled protesters are nothing. Israel could have—and had every right to—kill 500 children in laser guided missiles as it did in 2014…so this was a kinder, gentler warning. Apparently, Palestinians “should give thanks that Israel merely wanted to set a tone with a controlled atrocity,” Cohen writes—and this:

 
And, predictably, when other excuses have collapsed to the honest lens of public transparency, the Hamas card is once again played with almost sneering contempt for the world’s ability to pierce the half-truths that fly, each day, alongside the Star of David cast throughout the occupied skyline that is Palestine.
What about proportionality, Mr.Cohen?

 
“You excuse an unchecked attack by the 16th most powerful military force of our time, with thousands of tanks, aircraft and combat ships, with a multibillion dollar yearly military budget, upon a largely tattered urban enclave armed with little more than the determination and spirit of its long embattled people.It works.It has for decades.

 

Now Mr Cohen unlike Rosie Dimanno, Yair Rosenberg et al has been to Gaza, knows Hamas intimately, has actually as a lawyer–and obviously a “self-hating Jew”– represented Hamas. Some, he says are close personal friends.how can this be  isn’t HAMAS the incarnation of Hitler, maybe Stalin?

 

The HAMAS card

 
“I have spent literally thousands of hours meeting with movement leaders in prisons, at conferences, in Palestine and elsewhere. These are virtuous, dedicated, nationalists who seek not power for the sake of it or personal profit but have long stood among those who have fought against overwhelming odds and violence to lead the way toward a Palestinian home built of the marrow of freedom, justice and equality.

 
Contrary to the Israeli and Western effort to reduce Hamas to a collective of essentially unschooled or unsophisticated foreign born so-called Islamists, nothing could be further from the truth. Hamas is a movement born of Palestine, composed of Palestinians who were raised on the very streets where the blood of their people and families, has been lost to the occupation terror imposed by Israel.  For the many who suffer from a now decade old blockade of Gaza–with its lack of food, water, medicine and mobility–Hamas and their families have known the same isolation and paid a like price.

 

 

 

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CBC chickens out on Gaza

History has chosen us to be the sharp edge of the bayonet of fighting the terrorist enemy ‘from Gaza’ which curses, defames and abuses the God of Israel’s battles. we will do everything to live up to the mission and wipe out the enemy and remove the threat from the Nation of Israel.”

Ofer Winter, Givati brigade, Israel Defense Force

I see Gaza as a manmade intentional hell for what Israel considers nonhumans.”
Richard Cohen film maker
“Massive denial on a grand scale, as exists in Israel, which not only fogs consciousness and numbs moral intuition…..Israel is now built on a gigantic lie.”

Eva Illouz Israeli professor of sociology,
Haaretz, (Nov. 11, 2015)

Israel’s Dahiya doctrine: The use of overwhelming and disproportionate force, its goal is to decimate the targeted area, turning life back to the Stone Age so that the population is too preoccupied with making ends meet to care about the struggle for freedom.

Once again the CBC blew it on things Israel.

 

 
Sunday the host Michael Enright plucked out of nowhere a Jewish writer named Yair Rosenberg who writes for the American Jewish journal The Tablet. They guy was terrible, feigning some sympathy for Gazans all the while tossing out the crudest stereotype of HAMAS. It was cringe inducing.

 
Enright had to struggle to even get this Zionist to admit to some idea of disproportionate response.You kill 64 people brandishing burning tires and kites and never suffer a scratch —there’s something wrong with this picture. But not for Rosenberg. He stickhandles, bobs and weaves and then genuflects to, yeah Gaza is a terrible place—but these HAMAS—again the equivalent of the Nazi Wehrmacht, They are really evil people bent on Israel’s destruction.

 
The guy was a minor leaguer, the best that Enright could come up with. And if you are opining on Gaza or Israel, you must be Jewish
Now I believe the host of CBC’s Sunday edition is a very good broadcaster but on things Jewish he’s pure CBC. Do not get to close to the flame of blaming Israel for the indescribable suffering of Gaza or you will have the Zionist thought police come after you and you don’t want that.
One should ask oneself: was this guy Rosenberg a good choice in the first place when there are people, especially Jews who can spell out what’s really happening in this circle of hell. Hence the use of the aforementioned Rosenberg

 

Sara Roy
Did the CBC with all its resources and talent never hear of Sara Roy, the brilliant senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Now there’s a woman with bona fides, a stunning academic, an expert whose life work has been on its dedevelopment and whose books include Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development. Besides her steely-eyed academic bent Roy brings to the table her Jewish history, 100 family members lost in the Nazi holocaust and universal Jewish values of compassion and respect for humanity. Her more than 30 years of analysis, research and witness, her commitment to accuracy has never turned into ideology or Jewish chauvinism and tribalism.

 

 

Sara Roy’s values she maintains is directly linked to her holocaust background.She begins with her understanding of the essential humanity of all people. She speaks and writes as a child of those whose lives were extinguished, whose futures were taken away and whose histories were silenced.Meet the brutalized people of Gaza.

 
For her Benjamin Netanyahu nazifies all Palestinians, transforms them into the demonic other engaged in the same process of Jewish extermination of as the nazis before them.
Many Jews, Roy says, or those who write about Palestine fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the people they write about either out of ignorance, fear or racism. Within the Jewish community especially it has always been unacceptable to claim that Palestinians are like us,that they possess an essential humanity and must be included within our moral boundaries. As one Israeli friend of mine says “The one thing Israelis totally refuse to do or are incapable of doing is placing themselves in the shoes of Palestinians.

 

Just listen to this woman for yourself:

Here is the expert on HAMAS insisting on its nonviolent community building, its unrecognized potential for moderation accommodation and change. Sara Roy is a realist, never gilding the lily. She writes about the internecine quarrel between Fatah and HAMAS. She sees the abuse of religion as an abusive tool however sees a people driven to madness, despair. She is asked by Gazans “Why is Gaza being punished in so heartless a manner, and what does Israel truly hope to gain by it?

 

If the Israelis were thinking clearly, one person said, ‘everyone could benefit. All they must do is give us a window to live a normal life and all these extremist groups would disappear. Hamas would disappear. The community must deal with … these groups, not IDF tanks and planes.

 

Apparently as the world yawns and as a malevolent US leadership blesses this catastrophe, the Dahiya doctrine is still in place and an unprecedented human, physical and psychological disaster proceeds apace.

 

The state of Israel has reached its nadir in its treatment of Gaza. Sara Roy well describes it:

We as a people have become a force of extremism, of chaos and disorder, trying to plow an unruly sea-addicted to death and cruelty, intoxicated, with one ambition: to mock the pauper.

 

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Here comes HAMAS pt 2

“There is a taboo on telling the truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel.  Only when this truth is out can any of us be free.”
Edward Said

 

The use of the word HAMAS is now to end all discussions about Israel’Palestine.HAMAS  is the bogeyman come to steal your children, to destroy Israel. Nonsense HAMAS is a legitimate resistance movement struggling valiantly to resist land theft, and 70 years of occupation.

HAMAS was created by Israel to mitigate  PLO influence among Palestinians.Well, it didn’t quite turn out that way.HAMAS realized  that the secular dance with Israel,the phony OSLO accords only deepened the immiseration of the Palestinian people and stifled their aspiration for statehood.

 

Often Israelis would blatantly admit all this. Mati Steinberg of the Shin Bet noting the asymmetric balance of power stated after Oslo,”We have decisive influence on the course of events.” In other words, take it or leave it.”You have one choice surrender to Israel’s dictates or rise up against the dictates at all costs.”

 

A  proud people with international law on their side refused to capitulate. We have seen the price.Operation Cast Lead 2008,1398 dead,450 children and women,  Pillar of Defence 2012 174 Palestinians, 107 of whom were civilians and then this massacre of 2014, Operation Protective Edge 

 

 

HAMAS became the voice of the unheard. Driven at first by militant Islam it kept alive the internationally accepted guarantee of right of the oppressed to resist injustice—the Israeli theft of  land and most importantly the insistence on Resolution 194 on the Question of Palestine, which “resolves that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return…” Never accepted by Israel.
The incredible resistance led by HAMAS is profoundly moving.

After the second intifada 2000, hundreds of Israelis were killed by suicide bombers. Nobody can justify this. On the other side, why did the world and Israel the brutal occupier ask no question as to why somebody would immolate himself in the name of a cause? Is there something in Palestinian DNA? Hardly. The answer is total despair, absolute hopelessness. This is Violence 2., a response to the fundamental  primary violence of the state with all its firepower. This  overwhelming Israeli cruelty has  persisted  for decades hidden from us. Violence  2 is then followed by Violence 3: massive Israeli vengeance like the above.

 

Jenin 2002

After the second Intifada 2002, Israel lost its mind and flattened Nablus and Jenin.The brutality in Jenin was savagery at its worst executed by the notorious Arab-hater Ariel Sharon. Four hundred ninety-seven Palestinians were killed and 1,447 wounded. 23 Israelis were killed. Apache helicopters firing missiles in a crowded urban area. Appalling treatment by ‘the most moral army in the world.”

 

General Moshe Ya’alon organized the response to the intifada, stated,” Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness, they are a defeated people.”

 

Hardly. Three military offenses on this hemmed in, defenseless,  densely populated prison  with no army, air force or navy, with pathetic rockets called “firecrackers” by Norman Finklestein, has not resulted in HAMAS”s surrender to overwhelming state terror.To many global observers HAMAS is a brave patriotic group legally elected to defend the dignity of a besieged people. Again and again they have made proposals to end this horrific conflict–all rejected. HAMAS is not the problem, Israel is.

Leibowitz Warning

 

In 1992 the brilliant Israeli Orthodox scholar  Yeshayahu Leibowitz wrote an essay called The Territories. His prediction has come true namely that this cruel occupation “will effect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole.

 

Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we must rule.

 

Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions.  After a few years there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers.  The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police.  A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. 

 

 The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel.  The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other.  

 

There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.

 

The “army of occupation” degenerate as ever continues to prove Leibowitz right. HAMAS is not the problem.

 

Here comes HAMAS! pt 1

People often wonder why Israelis in a supposed democratic state tolerate such cruel behaviour and for so long against the original indigenous of Palestine.

 

Israel as Haaretz writer Gideon Levy has so often said is the most brainwashed country in the world, fed a steady diet of lies by spin masters in Israel and apologist tribalists in the diaspora. Here’s Dan Futterman the Program Director for Israel for the Moriah Fund, with some hard questions for you. Excerpted from Haaretz

Here’s what we see on Israeli news: tens of thousands of Palestinians milling about, burning tires to create a thick, black spiraling smokescreen to obscure the view of our soldiers, including the snipers.

Among the Gazans trying to breach the fence we are told there are armed terrorist cells with missions to kidnap soldiers or blow up Israelis, which suggests that live fire is justified.

So we think we know that the protest is violent, coordinated, and meant to lead to a dangerous large-scale incursion into Israel. And we become amateur tacticians, justifiers and apologists, quickly agreeing that the fence must not be breached at any price, as if we know what we’re talking about.

We are also told that Hamas needs martyrs, and does not mind getting Palestinians killed, or even wants more dead Palestinians, because this provides effective imagery, and dovetails with the stories we tell ourselves about their use of suicide attackers.

 

 

The latest “get out of jail card” used in Israel is HAMAS —now that anti-Semitism ( “You hate Israel because it’s Jewish”) and the holocaust (Jews suffered grievously under Nazism and as former Israeli PM said “after the holocaust Jews can do anything,” no longer work. Just mention this Palestinian resistance movement crammed into Gaza with no army, navy, air force and the argument is over. It is as if HAMAS is the equivalent to the Wehrmacht. As Bill Murray often said on SNl, “I have to laugh.”It is always HAMAS—even supposedly intelligent people use this ridiculous justification for massacre after massacre

 

 

Gazans wanted peace they would not have elected Hamas, or would have overthrown them by now – has become a self-serving mantra, more deeply embedded from one war to the next… We slough off any responsibility for the misery of Gazans, including the deaths of the last six weeks.

 

Bravo Dan Futterman

 

Out of exhaustion, complicity or alienation, we increasingly defer to the endless spin of our arrogant leaders. We’ve stopped asking ethical questions about our responsibility for the death and despair in Gaza

 

 

 

Bari Weiss, Bill Maher Israel apologists

 

“Oh no not Bari Weiss” I groaned when I turned on Bill Maher’s show last night.

 

Yes there she was again a brazen apologist for Israel, given prime time to spout her inane and uninformed opinions.

 

A decade ago while a sophomore at Columbia, Weiss was part of an attack on Joseph Massad a professor in the Middle Eastern studies department.she hid her rabid Zionism behind a faux group called Columbians for Academic Freedom better known as These Arabs Should Shut up.

 

 

She and her cohorts didn’t get far with this one.

 

On April 6, 2005 a committee at Columbia University formed to investigate complaints that pro-Israel Jewish students were harassed by pro-Palestinian professors found “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.”

 

Now Weiss is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times apparently hired to add diversity. The noted investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald in a piece on the The Intercept summed up her one note samba this way:

 

 

Bari Weiss is a caricature of all of the op-ed page’s longest-standing, worst attributes. Her relatively short career as a writer and activist has been overwhelmingly devoted to one issue: a defense of the Israeli government and a corresponding smear campaign against its critics.

Her targets have tended overwhelmingly to be Muslim and/or Arab, often in the context of campus politics. She has already used her NYT space to endorse the disgusting and false Haim Saban-created smear campaign against the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Congress, writing: “Recall that only a few months ago, Keith Ellison, a man with a long history of defending and working with anti-Semites, was almost made leader of the Democratic National Committee.”

Greenwald went on:

 

Hiring her didn’t add an iota of viewpoint diversity…her devotion to Israel is the North Star of Weiss’s worldview and journalism was best demonstrated by Weiss’s own description of her career. At a 2012 Conference of the American Zionist Movement, Weiss She explained that she “got involved in journalism through activism” — specifically, activism against Arab and Muslim professors at Columbia whom she accused of bullying Jewish and Israeli students.

 

Well, she and Maher whose mother is Jewish and has shown again and again his ignorance about Israel/Palestine, did not disappoint. The Daily Beast summed up their shameless performance

Bill Maher and Bari Weiss Cruelly Blame Palestinians for Gaza Massacre

 

 

Weiss then came up with this ahistorical howler about the  the Gazan march of return

 

They intentionally moved up the day so that it would coincide with the day of the embassy move so that we would all be disgusted and heartbroken when we saw this horrible split-screen of Ivanka Trump, looking like she was at a country club, next to poor, desperate people dying in Gaza.”

 

No understanding of history at all.

 

What Gazans wanted to show to the world was: Look on May 15th, this is 70 years since we were dispossessed of our land. International law insists we have the right of return.

 

The world has slowly digested this fact but Maher and Weiss are still mired in ignorance.

 

In early January Maher was firmly put in his place when on his show Michelle Goldberg a new York Times columnist who actually took time to find out what the hell was happening in Palestine and then didtched her Zionism, told him he was full of crap in no unbcertain terms:

 

Come on. You should go and see what’s happening in the West Bank. If you look at the settlements, if you look at the facts on the ground. The fact that you have instead of a contiguous land mass you increasingly have these little cantons. And if you look at the way that Palestinians — most Palestinians alive today were not born during any of these wars and so the idea that their lives should be blighted because of them. Look at what Americans have to do when they go through a TSA checkpoint. They completely lose their shit. And if you imagine doing that for two hours every single day …”

 

Bari Weiss, always welcome…Glenn Greenwald and Michelle Goldberg, not so much.

 

Acknowledging Israel’s original Sin

In true professorial mode,clear and concise, the great Israeli historian Ilan Pappé now teaching in England relfects on the centrality of the Nakba and Israel’s brutal ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian homeland and its failure to acknowledge this event.

 

 

It has taken the world 70 years to catch up to this massive injustice but the day of reckoning is at hand. Will Israel do the right thing, admit its “original sin” and begin to creat a true democracy or continue to deny the undeniable. Here is Pappé’s reflection.

 
On Monda May 14 the Trump administration broke with more than 70 years of official US policy and the position of the international community by moving its embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As if to rub salt in their wounds, it was be inaugurated the day before Palestinians commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nakba (the Catastrophe), when nearly a million Palestinians were displaced and became refugees during Israel’s establishment. In Israel, the Nakba is not only ignored, it is outright denied or even justified. Yet if there is to be peace in this region – and I think it is possible – it begins with acknowledging the Nakba, understanding it, and working to reverse it.

 

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, which saw the transformation of half of Palestine’s population into stateless refugees, is not a mere historic event: it has persisted unabated until today.  Since 1967, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were either expelled from or denied re-entry when they traveled outside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, inside Israel’s recognized borders, its policy of “Judaizing” the south and north of the country often result in a quiet transfer of Palestinians through expropriation of land and demolition of villages, as is occurring in Umm al-Hiran today, where an entire Palestinian community is being destroyed so a town for Jewish Israelis can be built in its place.

 

Today more than six million Palestinians are homeless due to the 1948 Nakba and its subsequent chapters. Failing to acknowledge their rights will not only lead to continued instability in the region but also prevents any lasting peace. By recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, President Trump is encouraging Israel to accelerate its dispossession of Palestinians in the city and elsewhere.

 
Only by revisiting the events of 1948 can one understand the essence of the conflict in Israel and Palestine, as well as the reasons for the failure to solve it. Even if there are still today, despite the clear archival evidence, people who refuse to acknowledge Israel’s responsibility for the catastrophe – the demolition of half of Palestine’s towns and villages and the exodus of 750,000 people – no one denies that the refugees were not allowed to return (in clear violation of the UN decisions and the international law).

 
The reasons for the expulsion and for the refusal to allow repatriation are the same. From the very onset of the Zionist project in Palestine, the main obstacle for the establishment of the Jewish state was the native population of Palestine. This still remains the problem for Israelis who regard themselves as Zionists, whether they are liberals, socialists or nationalists. The various political groups in Israel differ on the tactics of how to overcome the demographic reality of an Arab Palestinian country. They nonetheless concur on viewing the native Palestinians as a demographic existential threat simply because they are not Jewish.

 
The Palestinian leadership since the 1980s was willing to compromise on the territorial configuration of Israel, but could never, and will never, lend its consent to the overall Judaization of its homeland. Israeli laws that forbid Palestinians in Israel from commemorating the Nakba, Israeli demands that the Palestinians agree to recognize Israel as a “Jewish State,” – despite the fact that more than 20% of its population is Palestinian – are an insult added to an injury.  Israel is an established fact, but so are the circumstances of its establishment on the ruins of Palestine. For Palestinians territorial compromise does not include a license for a global amnesia or the acceptance of Israeli historical fabrications.

 

 
Young palestinians striking pair of messages:  a solution for Palestine has to include all Palestinians and cover all historical Palestine, and it has to rectify the worst consequence of the Nakba by implementing the Right of Return.

American peacemakers, whether cynical or genuine in their efforts, have consistently failed to understand the essence of the conflict in Palestine. If they ever want to solve it, they need to revisit the dispossession of Palestinians that occurred in 1948 and understand its significance and the fact that 70 years later, Israel continues to systematically displace Palestinians from their homes.

 

 
With the collapse of the two-state solution, addressing the Nakba and events of 1948 should become the focus of a peace agenda. This is the original sin of the conflict in Israel/Palestine and it must be dealt with in an honest and just manner if we are ever to move forward.

 
And we should let this young generation lead us on that path. For them, rectifying what happened in 1948 and subsequently is an issue of human and civil rights and not of retribution, and their vision of the future is of a place where normal human life can be resumed, where it was denied for the last seventy years.
 

Catonsville 50 years Ago Today

50 Years Ago Today: Catonsville 9 Burned Draft Papers with Homemade Napalm to Protest Vietnam War

 

 

Fifty years ago today, on May 17, 1968, in the Baltimore suburb of Catonsville, Maryland, a group of Catholic priests and laypeople stood around a small fire that they had made, praying and singing. They had gone into the local draft board office and taken 378 draft records for the young men in the 1-A category, who were most likely to get drafted to go to war in Vietnam. They set fire to the draft records using homemade napalm, made from gasoline and laundry soap, to symbolize the U.S. military’s use of napalm on Vietnamese civilians. They became known as the Catonsville Nine. Video of the act of civil disobedience was seen around the world. Democracy Now  turns to the 2012 documentary Hit & Stay, which chronicles  the stories of the activists, including Fathers Phil and Dan Berrigan.

 

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We make our prayer in the name of that God whose name is peace and decency and unity and love. We unite in taking our matches, approaching the fire. We’re all part of this.

 

 

GEORGE MISCHE: While people throughout the world, and especially Vietnam now, are suffering from napalm, that these files are also napalmed, to show that these lives can fall on the same fate as the Vietnamese.

 

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: Amen.

 

DAVID DARST: Napalm, which was made from information and from a formula in the United States Special Forces handbook published by the School of Special Warfare of the United States. We all had a hand in making the napalm that was used here today.

 
JIM HARNEY: Napalm is a very old weapon. It goes back to the Byzantines. But it really came to public attention during the war in Vietnam, in the pictures of napalmed people. So that was the kind of quintessential symbol of the war: We were burning babies, literally, in Vietnam. So that’s why we wanted to come up with something symbolic and also something that would really destroy the files.

 

TOM MELVILLE: Our church has failed to act officially, and we feel that, as individuals, we’re going to have to speak out in the name of Catholicism and Christianity. And we hope our action to inspire other people who have Christian principles or a faith similar to Christianity will act accordingly, too, to stop the terrible destruction that America is wreaking on the whole world.

 

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We regret very much, I think all of us, the inconvenience and even the suffering that we’ve brought to these clerks here.

 

FATHER PHIL BERRIGAN: We sincerely hope we didn’t injure anyone.

 

PRIESTS: Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.

 

FATHER DANIEL BERRIGAN: We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power. We have chosen to be branded as peace criminals by war criminals.

 
AMY GOODMAN: The Catonsville Nine were prosecuted and, in 1970, given prison sentences of up to three years behind bars. Earlier this month, a ceremony was held in Catonsville, Maryland, to mark the unveiling of a new historical marker to commemorate the action.

 

 

Frida Berigan daughter of Phil and liz McAlister with children

Gaza fence that separates the brave from the cowardly

 

Israel for all its blindness and racism permits Haaretz to publish—and ignore. This fine newspaper read by 4% of Israelis employs two outstanding Israeli journalists committed to truth-telling, Gideon Levy and Amira Hass.

 

 

In Canada we never see their articles featured probably because newspapers are on life support and fear the Israel-firsters threat of a boycott. the same can be said of political parties though the NDP finally rid of the pro-Zionist Mulcair has shown some courage of late.

 

Here in the article below Amira Hass, the daughter of a survivor of Bergen-Belsen pours scorn on the leadership of her country. Also for the first time in my reading, she points out that Israel’s economy is “a startup nation of manufacturers and profiteers and exporters of weapons” as well as a global trainer of police forces penning up of humans.

 

As Amnesty International reports, Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S.

 

 

Alex Vitale an expert on policing at Brooklyn College points out:

 

The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism — all of which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police departments,” he added. “They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.”

 

The end result of this training according to David Friedman of the Anti Defamation League is “they come back Zionists.”
Amira Hass

In the Gaza Strip the border fence separates the brave from the cowardly. It separates those armed with empty hands, kites and burning tires from a military power and its soldiers. It separates detainees serving a life sentence from their wardens.

 

 

The desperate courage demonstrated by tens of thousands of citizens of Gaza over the past few weeks in general and on Monday in particular hints at the energies, the talents, the dreams, the creativity and the vitality of the inhabitants of this strip of land — who has been subjected to a 27-year policy of closure and siege aimed at suffocating and crushing them. That policy has not been a total success, but it’s proved successful enough that so many people are willing to commit suicide with open eyes. In their death they are bequeathing to their friends and families the hope that someone there, in the world beyond the fences, will become alarmed and will finally understand.

 

 

The arrogant cowardice demonstrated by the well-protected soldiers and commanders – when I began writing these lines on Monday they had already taken the lives of 18 human beings – is Israel’s real calling card. Because what is cowardice if not the decision to kill masses of unarmed detainees who are demonstrating against their prolonged imprisonment?

 

Journalists report that four of those killed by Israeli fire are commanders in the Palestinian security lookout posts. In that case, every Israeli soldier in every one of the hundreds of lookout posts in the West Bank and around the Gaza Strip should also be doomed…

 

At the moment of writing these lines the number of Palestinian dead has already reached 37, including two minors. How many soldiers were required to kill dozens and to wound hundreds with live fire?

Despite the clear Israeli warnings, and the signals that the army intended to kill and wound indiscriminately, tens of thousands of residents of the Strip attended the demonstration. They did so even though they knew that the hospitals in the Gaza Strip are incapable of treating the hundreds and perhaps thousands of additional wounded, and that more than ever, the snipers’ bullets wound and destroy tissue and bones and muscles to the point of permanent disability. This is a desperate demonstration of courage, addressed to the nations of the world and to Europe in particular, which to their shame enabled Israel, which they consider democratic, to turn the Palestinian enclave into this terrible prison facility.

 

 

Despite the pleas of Israeli and international human rights organizations and of this newspaper that the IDF desist from the policy of slaughtering the demonstrators, despite their warnings that shooting unarmed civilians contradicts international law and will only add fuel to the fire — the army did as it pleased. Under the command of Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, the IDF lawyers always say that we are the supreme interpreters of international law, because after all, U.S. President Donald Trump is on our side.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Lieberman and Eisenkot gave the orders, and the commanders and soldiers are only obeying them. But in that sense we’re a democracy: Behind Netanyahu, Lieberman and Eisenkot stands most of the Jewish Israeli public, which gives them its full support. No fact and no demonstration will convince that majority that those who are jailed without trial are rebelling against their imprisonment. The warden is asserting his supremacy.

 

 

In that sense we are also a startup nation of manufacturers and profiteers and exporters of weapons, who make a living from the availability of the human laboratories on which we constantly test and develop our profitable and popular products for killing. And now, on Tuesday evening, we reach the last line and the number of dead is 61.

 



Trump’s bizarre pastors

 

Here they are insults to Christianity, purveyors of hate and stupidity

Step up Robert Jeffress, introduced to radio by Amy Goodman

 

 

An anti-gay, pro-Trump pastor of the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas, Pastor Robert Jeffress, was chosen by the Trump administration to lead the prayer at the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Pastor Jeffress has a history of making hateful comments against Muslims, Jews, Catholics, Mormons, the LGBTQ community. This is just a few of the statements he’s made over the years.

 

DONALD TRUMP: Where is Pastor Jeffress? He’s around here someplace. What a good guy! Where is he? Well, come here. I love this guy!

 

PASTOR ROBERT JEFFRESS: Here’s the deep, dark, dirty secret of Islam. It is a religion that promotes pedophilia, sex with children. … Mormonism is not Christianity. It has always been considered a cult by the mainstream of Christianity.

 

ANDERSON COOPER: Hindus and Buddhists, Islam—cults?

 
PASTOR ROBERT JEFFRESS: Yes, absolutely. … Muhammad was nothing but a bloodthirsty warlord who beheaded 600 Jews who would not follow him into battle.

 

IMAM MOHAMMAD ALI ELAHI: That is not true.

 

PASTOR ROBERT JEFFRESS: Islam is wrong! It is a heresy from the pit of hell. Mormonism is wrong. It is a heresy from the pit of hell. Judaism, you know, you can’t be saved, being a Jew and Catholicism represents the genius of Satan

 

and Obama?

 

In 2014, Jeffress wrote a book arguing that Obama was paving the way for the coming of the Antichrist, if not the Antichrist himself. He’s cast Trump as a kind of modern-day King Cyrus: chosen by God as an unlikely leader.

 

and John Hagee, a bizarre end timer who believe that the Jewish people are going to burn in Hell for all of eternity unless they abandon Judaism and convert to Christianity. This guy is to serious theology as Popeye is to Plato. You simply can not believe the nonsense he promotes like the Blood Moon Prophecy, an end-of-times theory that lunar eclipses are a sign that the world is on the brink of destruction and that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is near.

 

To have these two “Christians” present at the unveiling of an embassy is to both invite ridicule and debase Christianity.
I

The death toll in Gaza is rising

Today is unfolding as a horrifying and tragic day in Palestine. The Israeli military has opened fire on Gaza protesters as the U.S. and Israeli governments prepare to mark the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Today has been the deadliest day in Gaza since the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014.

 

filess from JVP and Mondoweiss

 

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health (as of 14:30 GMT):
◦ 43 killed, including 5 minors and 1 paramedic
◦ 1,960 injured – including 200 minors, 11 journalists
◦ 28 in critical condition and 71 in serious condition
◦ 918 shot by Israeli soldiers using live Israeli ammunition.

Meanwhile the US Embassy officially opened in Jerusalem: a cynical, dangerous celebration of annexation.
This is the Nakba (“catastrophe”) happening before our very eyes. All of it – the Embassy move; the very fact that 2 million people in Gaza, mostly refugees, live in essentially unlivable conditions; the sniper attacks on unarmed demonstrators and journalists.
It’s not just a 70th year anniversary: Palestinian human rights are being trampled at this very moment. Palestinians are being killed for defending those rights, as we speak.
It took a visiting New York Times reporter from Cairo to finally tell some truths about Israel’s ongoing massacre of Palestinian demonstrators inside Gaza. Meanwhile, the paper’s Israel correspondents continue to distort and whitewash.

 

 

Declan Walsh came over from Egypt into Gaza ahead of today’s massive demonstrations, expecting “an uneventful evening” on Saturday. Instead, distant Israeli snipers, “barely visible in their fortified perches,” opened fire at a group of Palestinian women right in front of him, and then shot again, hitting one of them, Alaa Asawafiri, in the stomach. Her brother told Walsh: “She wasn’t holding a stone. So what’s the excuse for shooting her?” Walsh checked with the Israeli army mouthpiece, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus: “In a text message he said he could not find any trace of the shooting.”

 

Multiply Declan Walsh’s eyewitness account by 42 and you have the death toll so far today, with another astounding 2,000 wounded. Once again, not a single Israeli has suffered as much as a scratch.

 

Let our government know that this  is totally unacceptable

 

justin.trudeau@parl.gc.ca