Unprecedented: master’s thesis on Jewish white privilege and Israel attacked in Canadian legislature
By Cecilie Surasky | MuzzleWatch | December 10 2010
Canadian grad student, Jewish anti-Zionist activist, and descendant of Holocaust survivors Jenny Peto is breaking new ground with her University of Toronto master’s thesis The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education, though perhaps not in the way she intended.
The Canadian National Post reports:
It has provoked intense debate online, in academia and even the political realm. Progressive Conservative MPP Steve Clark raised it in the legislature Tuesday in response to sharp criticism in the Jewish community, calling it “shockingly anti-Semitic.” Citizenship and immigration minister Eric Hoskins likewise condemned the thesis in the legislature saying he was “greatly disturbed and, in fact, disgusted,” when he read media coverage about it.
These attacks (by some if not many who haven’t actually read it) on a master’s thesis, one that has already been through an academic review no less, are unprecedented. Also from The National Post:
Michiel Horn, a York University history professor and author of Academic Freedom in Canada: A History: “I know not of a single case where a master’s or a phD paper has been subject of discussion in the legislature of any province in Canada,” he said.
You can read Jenny Peto’s thesis yourself by downloading it here. Her abstract states:
This paper focuses on issues of Jewish identity, whiteness and victimhood within hegemonic Holocaust education. I argue that today, Jewish people of European descent enjoy white privilege and are among the most socio-economically advantaged groups in the West. Despite this privilege, the organized Jewish community makes claims about Jewish victimhood that are widely accepted within that community and within popular discourse in the West. I propose that these claims to victimhood are no longer based in a reality of oppression, but continue to be propagated because a victimized Jewish identity can produce certain effects that are beneficial to the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state. I focus on two related Holocaust education projects – the March of the Living and the March of Remembrance and Hope – to show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state.
I myself can’t wait to read it. There’s not a lot here that those seriously familiar with these Jewish institutions and Israeli history and politics could really argue with. For too long, the central organizing principle of much of institutional Jewry has been fear, which has been essential in, among other things, enabling an unaccountable Israel. And few programs more dramatically reflect this than the March of the Living which inflicts a proxy Holocaust trauma on Jewish teenagers (without proper context and support, so I hear from friends who have gone) as an essential right of passage into Jewishness.
To the young N. American Ashkenazi Jews especially who can’t help but notice that Jews as a whole occupy places of real economic and racial privilege in their communities, the messages of perpetual victimhood (and the implied privileges that might go with it, as in the case with the free pass that Israel tends to get) just don’t compute.
I’d imagine that in addition to her own experience, Peto had plenty to draw on from work and discussions happening in academic environments these days regarding Holocaust studies, Israeli politics, white privilege and so on. Is it possible that Peto’s crime is to have thought too complexly –in an academic setting.
Israeli Troops Kidnap Former Palestinian Minister in Jenin
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – December 11, 2010
Palestinian sources reported Friday that Israeli soldiers kidnapped former Minister of Detainees, Wasfy Qabha, while heading to visit his family in Barta’a village, near the northern West Bank city of Jenin. He was moved to an Israeli hospital later on due to a sharp increase in his blood sugar level.
Fuad Al Khoffash, head of the Ahrar Center for Detainees Studies and Human Rights, stated that, under an illegal Israeli military order, Qabha is not allowed into his own village, but was allowed into the village last week after his father died.
The Israeli Authorities granted him forty days, but on Friday morning Qabha was stopped at a military roadblock at the entrance of his village and the soldiers kidnapped him.
Due to his health condition, he was moved to Al Khodeira hospital, inside the 1948 territories, and a decision for his arrest was issued by the army.
His wife told the Ahrar Center that soldiers, manning the Barta’a roadblock, detained him for two hours and ordered her to leave the area.
He is currently at the Khodeira hospital, and his family was officially notified that he is “under arrest”.
Al Khuffash stated that Qabha was imprisoned by Israel for a total of seven years, and that several months ago he was released from an Israeli detention facility after spending a three-year sentence.
There are eleven elected legislators and ministers currently imprisoned by Israel.
Al Khuffash voiced an appeal to human groups and the International Red Cross to intervene and ensure the release of Qabha, especially due to his health condition.
UN concerned over illegal exile of Jerusalem lawmakers
Palestine Information Center – 11/12/2010
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM– UN special coordinator for the Mideast peace process Robert Serry expressed concern on Saturday over illegal Israeli court rulings to exile Arab MP Mohammed Abu Tir and other public officials from the occupied city of Jerusalem.
The court has been unjustly holding Abu Tir in detention since March 6 on grounds of illegally residing in the city of Jerusalem according to Israeli regulations.
Serry, reporting Israeli violations in Jerusalem and occupied territories, defended the right of Arab lawmakers from Jerusalem to remain in the city they were born in, calling on the Israeli government to refrain from taking any proactive steps against them.
Jerusalem MPs and one former minister, who have been sitting in at the Red Cross headquarters in Jerusalem for the 163rd straight day to protest Israeli threats to exile them, received a delegation from the UN for the fourth time during their camp-out to discuss the UN’s instability in living up to its responsibilities towards the occupied lands and their inhabitants, a failure that has caused tensions in the city to flare and encouraged Israel to increasingly break international law.
Among the delegates were Deputy Special Coordinator Maxwell, Director of Political Affairs Samer Abu Jabara, and former Director of Regional Affairs Anwar Al-Darkazalli.
The UN delegation assigned liability to Palestine’s de facto government chaired by Mahmoud Abbas in demanding the immediate convening of a UN Security Council session in coordination with the Arab League to adopt a resolution forcing Israel to back down on the ruling to exile the group of Palestinian lawmakers from Jerusalem.
WikiLeaks: Advancing an Israeli Agenda?
By Maidhc Ó Cathail | Intifada Palestine | December 11th, 2010
Like 9/11, WikiLeaks has been singularly good for Israel.
Asked on the night of September 11, 2001 what the terrorist attacks meant for U.S.-Israel relations, Benjamin Netanyahu, the then former prime minister, tactlessly but accurately replied, “It’s very good.” And on the day after WikiLeaks’ publication of U.S. diplomatic cables, Netanyahu “strode” into a press conference at the Israeli Journalists Association, looking “undoubtedly delighted” with the group’s latest embarrassment of U.S. President Barack Obama.
“Thanks to WikiLeaks,” Aluf Benn wrote in Haaretz, “there is now no fear Washington will exert heavy pressure on Israel to freeze settlement construction or to accelerate negotiations on a withdrawal from the territories.” Instead, also courtesy of WikiLeaks, the world’s attention had been shifted exactly where a “vindicated” Netanyahu wanted it – toward Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons programme.
“Our region has been hostage to a narrative that is the result of 60 years of propaganda, which paints Israel as the greatest threat,” Netanyahu told the assembled journalists. “In reality leaders understand that that view is bankrupt. For the first time in history there is agreement that Iran is the threat.” While there is considerable dispute about the extent to which Arab leaders share Netanyahu’s understanding of “the Iranian threat,” the Arab public overwhelmingly considers Israel to be a far greater threat.
Nevertheless, according to Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, Julian Assange “has shattered the accepted dogma on the understanding in the Middle East in the 21st century.” WikiLeaks, crowed Shavit, “proved” that the Israeli occupation and colonisation of Palestine was not the main cause of instability in the Middle East. Instead, the secret cables “revealed” that “the entire Arab world” is concerned about “one problem only — Iran, Iran, Iran.” Thus, Shavit concluded, the only way to bring peace to the region was to deal with “Iran first.”
Strangely, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seems to accept the Israeli vision of “war is peace” in the Middle East. In an interview with Time magazine, Assange singled out Netanyahu as an example of a world leader who believed the publication of Arab leaders’ provocative privately expressed comments “will lead to some kind of increase in the peace process in the Middle East and particularly in relation to Iran.”
Even more puzzling, Assange had an op-ed piece in Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian, in which he quoted something the media mogul had written in 1958: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.” In choosing another pro-Israel apologist as a model of transparency, is it possible that Assange is ignorant of the key role played by Murdoch’s media empire in propagating the lies that led the New York Times to dub the war in Iraq “Mr. Murdoch’s War”?
Assange seems equally oblivious to the significant contribution made by the New York Times itself to the war whose conduct he now claims to oppose. On September 8, 2002, the paper of record led with a front-page story by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which falsely claimed that Saddam Hussein was seeking to buy aluminium tubes as part of its “worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.” As Michael Massing later wrote, “In the following months, the tubes would become a key prop in the administration’s case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it.” Chosen by Assange to publish its leaked documents because it is one of “the best newspapers in the world for investigative research,” the pro-Israel Times is now busily spinning the leaks to push America into an equally unnecessary but even more disastrous war with Iran.
Given that the WikiLeaks revelations have been such an unexpected “diplomatic coup” for Israel, its American lobby appears to be strangely divided over the issue. On one side, there are those like David Frum, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Michael Ledeen who delight in being able henceforth to cloak their incessant Iran warmongering behind a specious Arab cover. “Those who suggest that it’s some ‘Israel lobby’ or Jewish cabal that is driving the confrontation with Iran” should be embarrassed by the leaks, writes Frum. “WikiLeaks confirms that the region’s Arab governments express even more anxiety than Israel about the Iranian nuclear weapons program.”
Meanwhile, the most virulent attacks on WikiLeaks have come from some of Israel’s staunchest supporters. William Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, wants Congress to enable Obama to “Whack WikiLeaks.” Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, appear only too willing to oblige. Both senators have called for the prosecution of Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act. Feinstein is also working with Senator Charles Schumer on media legislation that would allow the prosecution of organizations like WikiLeaks.
How do we reconcile the Israel lobby’s apparently schizophrenic reaction to WikiLeaks? Could it be that Julian Assange has killed two birds for Israel with one document dump?
Thanks to WikiLeaks, the well-publicised remarks of a few Arab leaders provide much-needed cover for pro-Israelis as they relentlessly press America to whack Iran. At the same time, the disclosure of U.S. diplomatic secrets has given the likes of Joe Lieberman another excuse to “kill the internet” — to prevent Americans from ever finding out how they got into such a mess in the Middle East.
But just like 9/11, no matter how much WikiLeaks has benefited Israel, most observers still seem loath to consider the Tel Aviv connection.
Maidhc Ó Cathail writes extensively on U.S. foreign policy and the Middle East.
Latest Israeli bombing plunges Gaza into darkness
Rami Almeghari, The Electronic Intifada, 10 December 2010
Air strikes by Israeli warplanes at dawn on Thursday caused serious damage to the Gaza Strip’s only power plant, plunging the territory — which already suffers from frequent outages — into darkness.
Media reports said the air strikes hit two sites belonging to Hamas near the Gaza power plant in Moghraqa village, central Gaza.
Engineer Darar Abu Sisi, director of operations for the Gaza plant, told The Electronic Intifada that at 2:47am an Israeli air attack on a Hamas site near the power plant scattered rocks and debris into the air. A rock crashed into the a current transformer and voltage transformer in a substation, causing the unit to shut down.
The damage forced the plant to reduce production from its usual 65 megawatts daily to about 35 megawatts, Abu Sisi said, far short of current needs. Unless the damage is repaired it may lead to even longer outages than the power cuts people in Gaza already live with.
“I believe that the Gaza power company has been able to coordinate with the Israeli side and we hope that this time they will be able to bring the needed spare part through Israeli land crossings, which are closed of course because of the Israeli siege,” Abu Sisi told The Electronic Intifada.
Even before Thursday’s bombing, Gaza residents face prolonged power outages of six to eight hours per day, adding to the severe hardships caused by the prolonged Israeli siege that prevents people and goods from moving freely in and out of Gaza. Abu Sisi estimated that the outages would increase to eight to ten hours per day.
The power shortages cripple daily life and the already devastated economy, and effect everything from students having no light to study, to households having no power for daily needs, and badly affect hospitals, sanitation and water supply systems.
Another effect is severe noise and air pollution from ubiquitous gasoline-powered generators that people use to cope with the shortages. In 2009 alone, 75 persons died in Gaza from hazardous handling of generators.
In 2006, Israel bombed and severely damaged the power plant’s three turbines which supplies about a third of the electricity used by Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. Since the 2006 bombing, Israel has further crippled electricity supplies by severely limiting the transfer of spare parts and fuel into Gaza.
According to the UN-commissioned Goldstone report into Israel’s winter 2008-09 attack on Gaza, approximately half of Gaza’s electricity supply came from Israel, seven percent from Egypt and a third from the Gaza power plant, leaving a deficit of about eight percent. The electricity deficit reached up to 41 percent at times due to Israeli fuel restrictions, according to other UN sources cited by the Goldstone report.
With no end in sight to the Israeli siege, Thursday’s bombing has just made the lives of Gaza’s population, half of them children, even darker as the longest nights of winter approach.
Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.
Time for Nuclear Savings Bonds?
The Nuclear War Reserve
By ROBERT ALVAREZ | CounterPunch | December 10, 2010
Although it’s been 20 years since the Cold War ended, the U.S. is still holding on to a grossly oversized nuclear arsenal – most of which are no longer needed by the military. Thanks to Hans Kristensen at the Federation of America Scientists, I’ve learned that 70 percent of the America’s warheads are not being deployed and that more than 40 percent has been discarded by the military. Some 2,500 nuclear warheads are currently deployed, with a comparable number held in the “war reserve,” and 3,500 are awaiting elimination. The “war reserve” is needed as a hedge just in case Russia decides to rekindle the nuclear arms race – a sacrosanct U.S. policy based on the logic that the winner of a nuclear war is the one with the most left over. The current U.S. nuclear arsenal has a destructive power about 400 times greater than the explosives used by all combatants during World War II.
The current backlog of retired nuclear warheads will take 15 years to eliminate. My children might live long enough to see the existing stockpile of discarded weapons disappear. This is because the Obama administration plans to curb nuclear warhead dismantlement spending by 50 percent over the next five years. If the New START treaty is approved, nearly 80% of U.S. nuclear warheads will not be deployed with as many as 5,000 warheads waiting to be eliminated. According to Kristensen and his colleague Robert S. Norris at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the current rate of weapons dismantlement is what it was in the 1950s during the height of the Cold War.
But, if proponents of increased nuclear spending, led by Senator John Kyl (R-AZ), have their way, our great-grandchildren will find America still bristling with nuclear arms. While most of the government stands to see budget cuts, in an effort to garner Kyl’s support for the New START treaty, spending by the Obama administration to maintain the nuclear arsenal and to refurbish the nuclear weapons complex will increase next year by18 percent.
The spending logic of these numbers seems simple. The more nuclear warheads we have sitting around, the more money can be spent on delivery systems, baby-sitting bombs, while trying to make more. Since World War II, America has spent about $5.6 trillion to make and stockpile them – creating a powerful nuclear entitlement culture that commands two thirds of the U.S. Energy department’s budget.
According to Steve Schwartz of the James Martin Center on Non-Proliferation, the U.S. Spent about $54 billion in 2009 on nuclear weapons and their delivery systems (bombers, ground and submarine missile launchers). If you include these expenses, each nuclear warhead costs about $6.3 million per year to keep around.
Wonder why America can’t seem to keep up with nations like Germany and China when it comes to an advanced energy policy? Perhaps it’s because the Energy department spends 10 times more on nuclear weapons than energy conservation.
The National Nuclear Security Agency within DOE estimates it will need about $85 billion over the next ten years and about $168 billion over twenty years to maintain the nuclear arsenal and refurbish the U.S. weapons complex. This does not include the additional $100 billion estimated for the weapons delivery systems in the Defense department. Given that the Obama administration sees no need to further tax the wealthy and that hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be borrowed from China for nuclear weapons, consideration might be given to issuing new “Nuclear Savings Bonds” to help pay for all of this. I’ve created a prototype of what they might look like.
Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary from 1993 to 1999. www.ips-dc.org
Wikileaks: A Big Dangerous US Government Con Job
By F. William Engdahl | Global Research | December 10, 2010
The story on the surface makes for a script for a new Oliver Stone Hollywood thriller. A 39-year old Australian hacker holds the President of the United States and his State Department hostage to a gigantic cyber “leak,” unless the President leaves Julian Assange and his Wikileaks free to release hundreds of thousands of pages of sensitive US Government memos. A closer look at the details, so far carefully leaked by the most ultra-establishment of international media such as the New York Times, reveals a clear agenda. That agenda coincidentally serves to buttress the agenda of US geopolitics around the world from Iran to Russia to North Korea. The Wikileaks is a big and dangerous US intelligence Con Job which will likely be used to police the Internet.
It is almost too perfectly-scripted to be true. A discontented 22-year old US Army soldier on duty in Baghdad, Bradley Manning, a low-grade US Army intelligence analyst, described as a loner, a gay in the military, a disgruntled “computer geek,” sifts through classified information at Forward Operating Base Hammer. He decides to secretly download US State Department email communications from the entire world over a period of eight months for hours a day, onto his blank CDs while pretending to be listening to Lady Gaga. In addition to diplomatic cables, Manning is believed to have provided WikiLeaks with helicopter gun camera video of an errant US attack in Baghdad on unarmed journalists, and with war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Manning then is supposed to have tracked down a notorious former US computer hacker to get his 250,000 pages of classified US State Department cables out in the Internet for the whole world to see. He allegedly told the US hacker that the documents he had contained “incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, DC.” The hacker turned him in to US authorities so the story goes. Manning is now incommunicado since months in US military confinement so we cannot ask him, conveniently. The Pentagon routinely hires the best hackers to design their security systems.
Then the plot thickens. The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him as he seems to be on the run from Interpol, not for leaking classified information, but for allegedly having consensual sex with two Swedish women who later decided it was rape.
He selects as exclusive newspapers to decide what is to be leaked the New York Times which did such service in promoting faked propaganda against Saddam that led to the Iraqi war, the London Guardian and Der Spiegel. Assange claims he had no time to sift through so many pages so handed them to the trusted editors of the establishment media for them to decide what should be released. Very “anti-establishment” that. The New York Times even assigned one of its top people, David E. Sanger, to control the release of the Wikileaks material. Sanger is no establishment outsider. He sits as a member of the elite Council on Foreign Relations as well as the Aspen Institute Strategy Group together with the likes of Condi Rice, former Defense Secretary William Perry, former CIA head John Deutch, former State Department Deputy Secretary and now World Bank head Robert Zoellick among others.
Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view.
Not so secret cables…
The latest sensational Wikileaks documents allegedly from the US State Department embassies around the world to Washington are definitely not as Hillary Clinton claimed “an attack on America’s foreign policy interests that have endangered innocent people.” And they do not amount to what the Italian foreign minister, called the “September 11 of world diplomacy.” The British government calls them a threat to national security and an aide to Canada’s Prime Minister calls on the CIA to assassinate Assange, as does kooky would-be US Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
Most important, the 250,000 cables are not “top secret” as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of “secret” document,[1] and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, “confidential”, while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret.[2]
Most of the revelations so far have been unspectacular. In Germany the revelations led to the removal of a prominent young FDP politician close to Guido Westerwelle who apparently liked to talk too much to his counterpart at the US Embassy. The revelations about Russian politics, that a US Embassy official refers to Putin and Medvedev as “Batman and Robin,” tells more about the cultural level of current US State Department personnel than it does about internal Russian politics.
But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.” They claim North Korea, with China’s granting of free passage to Korean ships despite US State Department pleas, sends dangerous missiles to Iran. Saudi Arabia’s ailing King Abdullah reportedly called Iran’s President a Hitler.
Excuse to police the Internet?
What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken.
The process of policing the Web was well underway before the current leaks scandal. In 2009 Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller and Republican Olympia Snowe introduced the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill “would allow the president to ‘declare a cyber-security emergency’ relating to ‘non-governmental’ computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat.” We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.
The US Department of Homeland Security, an agency created in the political hysteria following 9/11/2001 that has been compared to the Gestapo, has already begun policing the Internet. They are quietly seizing and shutting down internet websites (web domains) without due process or a proper trial. DHS simply seizes web domains that it wants to and posts an ominous “Department of Justice” logo on the web site. See an example at http://torrent-finder.com. Over 75 websites were seized and shut in a recent week. Right now, their focus is websites that they claim “violate copyrights,” yet the torrent-finder.com website that was seized by DHS contained no copyrighted content whatsoever. It was merely a search engine website that linked to destinations where people could access copyrighted content. Step by careful step freedom of speech can be taken away. Then what?
Notes
1. BBCNews, Siprnet: Where the leaked cables came from, 29 November, 2010, accessed in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11863618
2. Ken Dilanian, Inside job: Stolen diplomatic cables show U.S. challenge of stopping authorized users, Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2010, accessed in http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sc-dc-1130-hackers-20101129,0,6716809.story
Former European Leaders: Sanction Israel over Settlement Building
Press TV – December 10, 2010
A group of former European leaders have called for tough sanctions against Israel in response to Tel Aviv’s failure to stop settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian land.
Criticizing the European Union’s existing policy toward Israel, in a letter sent to European governments and EU institutions on Monday, former heads of states, ministers and heads of European organizations said Israel must be made to feel “the consequences” and face “a price tag” for breaking international law by expanding its Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
They have also urged European countries to recognize a free and independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with East al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital.
“EU will not recognize any changes to the June 1967 boundaries, and clarify that a Palestinian state should be in sovereign control over territory equivalent to 100 percent of the territory occupied in 1967, including its capital in East Jerusalem (al-Quds),” the letter asked EU foreign ministers to declare to Israel.
The ex-leaders, including the former EU foreign affairs chief, Javier Solana and former German President Richard von Weizsacker, have asked EU foreign ministers to give Israel an ultimatum that if it does not end occupation and continues violating international law by April 2011, the EU will seek an end to the US-brokered negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in favor of a United Nation solution.
“Time is fast running out, Israel’s continuation of settlement activity… poses an existential threat to the prospects of establishing a sovereign, contiguous and viable Palestinian state,” the letter warned.
The ex-leaders have also urged the European Union to link its informal freeze on an upgrade in EU-Israel diplomatic relations to a settlement freeze, block imports of products made in the illegal settlements but labeled as made in Israel, and force Tel Aviv to pay for the majority of the aid required by the Palestinians, the EUobserver website reported on Friday.
They have also asked the bloc to send a high-level delegation to East al-Quds to back Palestinian claims and reclassify EU support for Palestine as “nation building” instead of “institution building.”
The signatories also include former Italian prime ministers Romano Prodi and Giuliano Amato, ex-German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, former president of Ireland Mary Robinson, ex- Spanish PM Felipe Gonzalez and Norway’s Thorvald Stoltenberg and 10 former ministers and two former EU commissioners.
Israel occupied the West Bank, including East al-Quds, during the Six Day War in 1967 and has settled around 500,000 Jews in the occupied area. Constructing settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal under international law.
Palestinians believe that expansion of Jewish settlements on their occupied lands will make the establishment of a Palestinian state impossible.
Wall Street bonuses cashed in for sex, food and art
RT | December 9, 2010
If the impressionist artist were to illustrate something of today’s New York City, it just might be moneybags.
Amid the lackluster American economic climate, Christies Auction House is seeing sunny days, with more than 600-million dollars worth of impressionist and modern art sold this year.
“Since 2008, we have seen an increasing return of confidence to the art market,” said Conor Jordan, of Christies New York.
New York has once again, become one of the Christies premier selling sites.Just as Wall Street’s wealthy and powerful, are back to indulging.
Pampering at the La Prairie Spa at the Ritz Carlton, involves wearing decadent hors d’ oeuvres. A 90-minute skin caviar facial costs more than $300 and 3.4 ounces of La Prairie’s Skin Caviar Luxe Cream sells for $710.
“This time of year, a lot of our business comes from corporate gift certificates,” said Spa Manager, Sandra Sadowski.
As corporate America is banking record breaking profits this year, it may be no coincidence that business at Wempe Jewelers has spiked. The $158,000 dollar price tag of some luxury watches exceeds the average annual income of three US households combined.
“We’re expecting a very busy time. The busiest time of the year,” said Raik Kraise, Wempe manager.
Busyness boosted perhaps by big bonuses coming mainly from one street, Wall Street, a symbol of the finance industry, the financial collapse and record breaking compensation that will reportedly reach $144 billion dollars this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, 2010 bonuses will be up 4 percent from last year’s record haul.
If anyone would know about business, it would be those who work at Rick’s Cabaret. At the New York Gentlemen’s Club, happiness bares lots of skin and beauty, but it doesn’t come free.
“For an evening, six, seven eight thousand dollars, 10-thousand dollars, it’s hard not to have a good time when you’re surrounded by nearly naked women,” said Rick’s Cabaret Communications Manager, Allan Priaulx.
Female entertainers working at Rick’s said they are continuing to benefit from a boom in business following Wall Street’s rebound.
“These guys are getting much-deserved bonuses.They want to celebrate the bonuses and party and have a great time,” said Randi Newton, an entertainer at Rick’s Cabaret.
From sex cravings, to food cravings, some of Wall Street’s cats have gotten fat by forking up $175 for a 10-ounce Kobe beef hamburger.
“We still sell a handful of them every month. A good handful,” Heather Tierney, co-owner of Wall Street Burger Shoppe said.
On Main Street where more than 15-million Americans are officially unemployed, the US Poverty Population reached nearly 44 million, a 50-year high.
Ironically, that figure marks New York City’s most expensive residential sale this year. A seven-floor, 5th Avenue mansion was purchased for $44 million dollars. This, as more than two million homes have been swallowed up by foreclosure in 2010.
In this so-called rebounding US economy, purveyors of all things luxury are, in fact, resurging. All while the majority of Americans are left wondering when life will finally begin looking as pretty as the painting.
Mike Norman, the chief economist at John Thomas Financial explained there is an expanding gap between the rich and poor in America.
“The resources of the government have been directed almost completely towards one sector of the economy, that’s been the financial, that’s been the huge beneficiary when most working people, and by far, the rest of the economy has been left to flounder,” Norman commented. “It’s very disturbing.”
He said the US now ranks near the bottom of global income inequality lists, and it is a direct result of US government policies.
The failed policies transcend American party politics, he argued, both Republicans and Democrats continue to support the financial sector at the expense of all others. … Full article and video report
Israel’s Racist Rabbis: ‘Hate the Gentile’
By Jonathan Cook – Palestine Chronicle – December 9, 2010
Jews must not rent homes to ‘gentiles’. That was the religious decree issued this week by at least 50 of Israel’s leading rabbis, many of them employed by the state as municipal religious leaders. Jews should first warn, then “ostracise” fellow Jews who fail to heed the directive, the rabbis declared.
The decree is the latest in a wave of racist pronouncements from some of Israel’s most influential rabbis.
In October, Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, delivered a ruling, signed by 17 other rabbis in the city, telling Jewish residents not to sell or rent property to members of the country’s Palestinian Arab minority, who make up a fifth of the population.
His followers turned words into deeds by attacking Arab students in the city and threatening to burn down the homes of Jewish landlords renting to the students.
Similar edicts have recently been backed by dozens of rabbis in Tel Aviv and nearby Bnei Brak, a suburb of 150,000 mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have threatened to “expose” any Jews who rent to “foreigners” — in this case, a reference to migrant workers and African refugees who are crowded into neglected neighbourhoods in the centre of the country.
After many weeks of silence on these declarations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was finally forced to issue a condemnation yesterday, describing the rabbis’ call as undemocratic and contradicting the bible, which, he said, called for Jews to “love the stranger”.
Nonetheless, racism in Israel is increasingly enjoying high-level sanction among the most influential sectors of the religious establishment.
The latest ruling was signed by Shlomo Aviner, a spiritual leader of Israel’s national-religious camp; Yosef Elyashiv, a senior ultra-Orthodox rabbi; and Avigdor Neventzal, rabbi of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Its sentiments have also been echoed by Ovadia Yosef, a former chief rabbi of Israel and the spiritual leader of Shas, an important political and religious party in Mr Netanyahu’s government. “Selling to [non-Jews], even for a lot of money, is not allowed. We won’t let them take control of us here,” Mr Yosef said recently.
Two months ago, Mr Yosef explained the logic behind his views and those of like-minded rabbis.
“Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us.” Explaining why God allowed non-Jews long lives, he added: “Imagine that your donkey would die, you’d lose your income. [The donkey] is your servant. … That’s why he [the gentile] gets a long life, to work well for the Jew.”
Mr Yosef’s remarks against “gentiles” were greeted with respectful silence by Israeli officials and most of the media. It was left to the United States government and the New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to issue rebukes. Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s head, accused the rabbi of advancing “hateful and divisive ideas”.
The rabbis’ use of theology to support racial discrimination is being applied to more than just housing.
This summer, Yosef Elitzur and Yitzhak Shapira, who head an influential seminary in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, published The King’s Torah, a 230-page guide to how Jews should treat non-Jews.
The two rabbis concluded that Jews were obligated to kill anyone who posed a danger, immediate or potential, to the Jewish people, and implied that all Palestinians were to be considered a threat. On these grounds, the pair justified killing Palestinian civilians and even their babies.
Last month Mr Shapira also backed the use of Palestinians as human shields, a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and a practice that Israel’s supreme court has outlawed.
The King’s Torah, far from being condemned by moderate rabbis, has been greeted with a general silence and enthusiastic support from a number of notable religious leaders.
Arik Ascherman, head of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, said the growing extremism of the the Orthodox religious establishment in Israel reflected the increasingly right-wing atmosphere in Israel that made the expression of ultra-nationalist views permissible.
In the current climate, he said, moderate rabbis were reluctant to speak out against their colleagues. Many of these rabbis belong to the Conservative or Reform streams of Judaism, which are not officially recognised in Israel.
“The religious sanction being given to the political right by these rabbis is dangerous. It makes their opinions seem more acceptable,” he said.
That is being reflected in public surveys, in which many Israeli Jews express support for anti-Arab views. A poll by the Israeli Democracy Institute published last week showed that 46 per cent of the country’s Jews did not want to live near Arab citizens, and 39 per cent felt the same about foreign workers.
Even more, 53 per cent, wanted Arab citizens to be encouraged to leave Israel and half believed Arabs should not have equal rights with Jews. Among the religious public, racist sentiments were more popular.
Israeli prosecutors, meanwhile, have turned a blind eye to the refusal of several prominent endorsers of The King’s Torah to obey a summons calling them for investigation. “Our holy Torah is not a subject for investigation or trial by flesh and blood,” the rabbis said.
In all, the rabbinical establishment is growing increasingly bold in promoting its vision of a Jewish state run according to holy law, according to Zvi Barel, a commentator with the daily newspaper Haaretz.
“They and their supporters are transforming zealous fundamentalism and the shameful The King’s Torah into the mainstream,” Mr Barel wrote recently.
The general trend towards extremism has not happened by chance, said Sefi Rachelevsky, a prominent Israeli writer critical of the Orthodox rabbinate. Israel’s public coffers pay the salaries of some of the most extremist rabbis, and the education system regularly falls under the political control of religious parties like Shas.
Mr Shapira, who advocates killing non-Jewish babies, receives large sums from the education ministry for his yeshiva — a seminary where he spreads his message of hate. Religious students also receive extra subsidies unavailable to normal students to encourage their attendance at such yeshivas.
The rabbis exert their influence on the youngest and most impressionable too. When the new school year started in September, 52 per cent of Jewish children in first grade attended a strictly religious school.
Pupils in some of the most religious schools, Mr Rachlevsky pointed out, are taught that Jews sit above nature, which comprises four categories: “inanimate”, “vegetable”, “animal” and “speakers” — or non-Jews, who are considered no more than talking animals.
– Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.jkcook.net. (A version of this article originally appeared in The National – www.thenational.ae – published in Abu Dhabi.)
Israel to demolish electric infrastructure near Hebron
Ma’an – 09/12/2010
HEBRON — Israeli authorities delivered demolition orders Thursday for electric transformers and powerlines in a Palestinian community south of Hebron, a local official said.
Local Popular Committee chairman Azmi Ash-Sheiyukhi said Israeli officials handed the orders to Muhammad Al-Adrah, the head of the village council of Rifaya and Ad-Deirat.
The orders call for the demolition and removal of a transformer and power lines that provide electricity to 800 people in the two remote villages near Yatta.
He said Israeli officials had previously authorized the construction of electric infrastructure to provide power to 400 Rifaya residents, while residents of Ad-Deirat had paid out of pocket for the construction of the transformer.
He also said residents planned to mount a legal challenge to the demolition orders, which he called “illegitimate and illegal.”
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Does Kevin Barrett Seek to “Absolve Islam of a Terrible Crime”?
The Kevin Barrett-Chomsky Dispute in Historical Perspective – Last part of the series titled “9/11 and the Zionist Question”
By Prof. Tony Hall | American Herald Tribune | August 28, 2016
Amidst his litany of condemnations, Jonathan Kay reserves some of his most vicious and vitriolic attacks for Kevin Barrett. For instance Kay harshly criticizes Dr. Barrett’s published E-Mail exchange in 2008 with Prof. Chomsky. In that exchange Barrett castigates Chomsky for not going to the roots of the event that “doubled the military budget overnight, stripped Americans of their liberties and destroyed their Constitution.” The original misrepresentations of 9/11, argues Barrett, led to further “false flag attacks to trigger wars, authoritarianism and genocide.”
In Among The Truthers Kay tries to defend Chomsky against Barrett’s alleged “personal obsession” with “vilifying” the MIT academic. Kay objects particularly to Barrett’s “final salvo” in the published exchange where the Wisconsin public intellectual accuses Prof. Chomsky of having “done more to keep the 9/11 blood libel alive, and cause the murder of more than a million Muslims than any other single person.” … continue
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