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Occupation profiteer Ahava soaks up EU science grants

By David Cronin – The Electronic Intifada – 08/05/2011

Not for the first time, the European Union is in denial about how it is subsidizing Israel’s crimes.

Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s commissioner for scientific research, recently acknowledged that the cosmetics-maker Ahava was allocated more than €1 million worth of innovation grants from the Union over a period stretching from 1998 to 2013. Giving even one cent to Ahava involves facilitating breaches of international law because of the firm’s unlawful activities in the West Bank.

As Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t appear to recognize this problem, she would be well-advised to read a report, issued in May, by the human rights organization B’Tselem. It highlights how Ahava is partly owned by two Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land: Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya. Both of those settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.

Responding to a parliamentary question, Geoghegan-Quinn effectively conceded that some of Ahava’s EU-funded research may have been undertaken in the West Bank. While Ahava is “formally established within the borders of the internationally recognized state of Israel”, she said, beneficiaries of EU grants are not required to carry out the related research in the place of establishment.

I would alert Geoghegan-Quinn to two salient facts:

  1. The rules covering EU science grants stipulate that projects which violate “fundamental ethical principles” are ineligible for funding. Carrying out research in one or more illegal settlements must surely violate such principles.
  2. Ahava may be able to give its offices in Holon or Airport City, industrial zones near Tel Aviv, as an address for its headquarters when applying for Euro-lolly. Yet its core manufacturing activities are conducted in Mitzpe Shalem. If Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t believe me on this, I urge her to take a trip to the settlement, where she will no doubt be given a warm welcome to Ahava’s official visitors’ centre.

There are other questions about why any of my tax euros should be going to a private cosmetics firm. A glance at Cordis, the EU’s database on its science grants, shows that in one of the projects concerned, Ahava has teamed up with the US Department of the Interior. The objective of this scheme is to assess what impact tiny toxins (nanoparticles, as boffins call them) can have on the environment.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I never had the impression that the Department of the Interior spent too much time worrying about trees and dolphins. So what is the real agenda here?

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Illegal Occupation | 1 Comment

Exactly How Big Is This So-Called Al Qaeda?

Sibel Edmonds | Boiling Frogs | August 5, 2011
tankcamel
Massive Perpetual Wars against Fantastical Terrorists

For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.

For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.

For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?

We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities.  We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:

Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.

Let’s first begin by engaging in a rational process of elimination, and take out the wars and targets that are not related to the 9/11 terrorists, the supposed Al-Qaeda. That will take out Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and also Libya and Gaddafi.

Next, we should take out Afghanistan as a terrorist nation state. Afghanistan has been under our occupation for almost ten years, and we have our puppet government installed there, and when it comes down to it, the Taliban does not equate to Al-Qaeda, it never did. The Taliban did not exercise terrorism in the United States or its Global territories.

We must also remove Pakistan as a terrorist country, thus a nation state target. If you remember, neither the quasi 9/11 Congressional Inquiry nor the quasi 9/11 Commission Report ever declared the Pakistani government/nation as terrorists or an Al-Qaeda member. Let us go with their official judgment. After all, haven’t we been giving Pakistan billions of dollars in US aid since 9/11 and continuing to date? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to on one hand categorize our drone war there as war against Pakistan as a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and on the other hand support and finance them? Exactly; that eliminates Pakistan as an Al-Qaeda nation-government. Are you with me so far? What does this leave us with?

Our war on Al-Qaeda terror does not include a single nation state or organized state military. No military infrastructure or headquarters. No trained army-navy-air force. No tanks, warplanes, nuclear warheads, drones. No intelligence institutions or landmarks. No communication satellites. No technology. No borders. No GDP…

The supposed Al Qaeda’s top leadership was declared by our government to be Osama Bin Laden, aka Al Qaeda Commander in Chief; a sickly old man who was hooked to a dialysis machine; who supposedly lived and hid in caves, and later, in a mud house located in a remote third world village with chickens and goats. A man who sustained himself and his family by periodically selling his wives jewelry or bartering milk from his goats for occasional lamb chops. All this according to our own government; coming out in bits and pieces, and of course, sometimes in a totally contradictory fashion.

The supposed Al-Qaeda network’s communication and intelligence sharing infrastructure, according to our government, was kept very simple to evade our trillion-dollar intelligence institutions. The Al-Qaeda commander-in-Chief wrote down notes and instructions. He then waited for the courier to come and pick it up. The old man courier would hop on a donkey and travel from a bigger town to the Commander-in-Chief’s mud house in a third world village. This sometimes took several days. He’d take the note, then hop on his donkey, and go back to the town where he’d meet another intermediary courier. The intermediary courier would take the note to a nondescript little house, climb up to the roof where he kept trained courier pigeons and hawks, and based on the importance of the communication given to him, he’d either choose a hawk or pigeon to send the intelligence to the next courier. The next one used couriers who traveled to the remote deserts by camels, and so on and so forth.

How about the sophistication of weapons-methods used by our target terrorists, the ominous Al Qaeda? We are talking about a dozen or so pocket knives priced at approximately $4 a piece (probably made in China), and of course if bought in bulk, for a total under $40. That for the supposed execution of the massive terror plot over here, in the world’s super power nation. As for other worldwide terror incidents that have been placed under the  ‘Al Qaeda Track Record,’  we are talking about rudimentary bomb-making ability paired up with ultra simple bombs created by ingredients such as fertilizer; we are talking a few loads of cow dung here; literally, that is.

What about the size of the manpower these terrorists, Al-Qaeda, possess? Interestingly no one in our government has ever touched upon any scientific or even commonsensical estimate as to the number of active-combative Al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, our government, through their stenographers in the media and their marketing arm in the Hollywood filmmaking industry, has succeeded in forming this public perception of a massive number of boogieman-Al Qaeda-terrorists out there who are actively and constantly planning and executing terror plots against the West.  Thus, to get a certain level of rational perception we must look at some factual indicators:

We have had this $3 trillion ‘War on Al Qaeda Terror’ for the last 10 years with nearly a quarter million military members, thousands and thousands of intelligence operatives and analysts, highly sophisticated and gigantic intelligence gathering tools (Think NSA, satellite technologies, wiretaps, spooks and snitches), mega rewards for turning in Al-Qaeda members …You’d think in ten years of these constant war and intelligence gathering operations we’d have tens of thousands of captured Al-Qaeda terrorists in our jails here and abroad. No?

Interestingly ‘No.’ Let’s take a look at the mother of all our captive top Al Qaeda terrorists detention center; Guantanamo Bay:

Since October 7, 2001, when began the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Of these, most have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries. The Department of Defense often referred to these prisoners as the “worst of the worst”, but a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants … GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Currently we have less than 200 detainees at Guantanamo most of whom have not been proven guilty of being ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’ Let’s be even more generous and count in those detained in other US military prisons like Bagram. Again, we are looking at 500 or so prisoners none of whom having ever been charged; none of whom legally found to be an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Now please put all these facts in perspective: Ten long years of continuous wars, trillions of dollars, 250,000 military personnel, billions of dollars worth of intelligence gathering institutions and capabilities, millions of dollars set in rewards for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a supposed network with supposed  Al Qaeda active terrorist members in very large numbers. Yet we have less than 1000 detained who have been accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists, and none ever proven to be an active Al Qaeda terrorist member.

Does this make sense to you? Does it make sense as far as the trillions of dollars you have been made to pay for this? What are we talking about here? A massive never-ending war against a fantastical network of technologically and militaristically dwarfed terrorists whose proven guilty members we haven’t been able to catch or kill.

Everyone is busy arguing whether we should cut or add a few billion dollars to the several trillion dollars war on Al Qaeda. People keep talking about which country we should be getting out of, or, how many more countries we should get into to fight against terrorist Al Qaeda. No one is asking what Al Qaeda is or who really these supposed Al Qaeda terrorists are. The question that never seems to come up is exactly how big is this Al Qaeda we are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting against. I mean no one.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | 2 Comments

US troops kill Iraqi child and policeman

Press TV – August 5, 2011

Local officials in Iraq have said that US troops in the country have killed an Iraqi child as well as a policeman in the Salahuddin province north of Baghdad.

Officials say the two were killed during an apparent mistaken raid.

Reports on further causalities remain sketchy so far, Press TV reported.

The US-led military invasion in Iraq that began in 2003 has so far led to over a million ‘violent deaths’ among Iraqi citizens, according to a study by the British polling group, Opinion Research Business (ORB).

Further, Washington continues to exert pressure on Baghdad to extend US military presence in Iraq.

Some reports have suggested that senior Iraqi politicians have agreed to negotiate a US military training mission in an effort to extend their stay in the country beyond the 2011 deadline despite a surging public opposition.

Washington, however, is obligated to withdraw its forces by the end of 2011 in line with the 2008 US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA).

The agreement also forced Washington to end its combat operations in Iraq in August 2010.

Despite American insistence that it no longer engages in combat operations in Iraq, there have been numerous reports of US troop engagements in military actions in the war-torn country.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | Leave a comment

3 Palestinians, including a child wounded in Israeli occupation airstrikes

Palestine Information Center – 05/08/2011

GAZA — Three Palestinians, including a child, were wounded in one of five airstrikes carried out by the Israeli occupation airforce at dawn Friday against various targets in the Gaza Strip.

Adham Abu Selmeyyah, spokesman for the emergency services in Gaza said in a statement on Friday morning that three Palestinians, including a child were wounded when an Israeli occupation airstrike targeted an open area in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.

He added that the three were taken to the Kamal Adwan hospital and that two of them lost lower limbs.

The Israeli occupation airforce carried out 4 other airstrikes against targets in the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in the central and southern Gaza Strip, but no casualties were reported.

Local sources told PIC correspondent that occupation aircraft fired two rockets at a chicken farm to the east of Deir al-Balah before targeting resistance training grounds to the west of the town.

Meanwhile, sources in Khan Younis said that occupation aircraft targeted a container used as mobile accommodation to the west of Asda’a Media City.

The sources added that occupation tanks fired artillery shells at agricultural fields to the east of Qara town, in Khan Younis district.

Abu Selmeyyah said in the statement that the airstrikes on Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah did not result in human casualties, adding that the air raids cause a lot of distress to the civilian population of the Gaza Strip.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Aletho News | Leave a comment

British secret policy on torture unveiled

Press TV – August 5, 2011

Secret British policy discloses intelligence officers could get information from tortured prisoners.

A top-secret document has confirmed that British intelligence officers were allowed to get information from detainees who were being illegally tortured overseas.

The British government has been part of the torture policy for almost a decade, trying to repress the document, making a series of false statements. The document showed how the UK government allowed MI6 and MI5 to be involved in torture and then cover up that involvement.

The interrogation policy, which is claimed to be sensitive and therefore cannot be made public at the government inquiry into the UK’s role in torture and rendition, instructed high-ranking intelligence officers to “weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer,” the document read.

A copy of the secret policy demonstrated that British ministers and intelligence officers worried that the revelation of the secret document would put public safety at risk, adding the disclosure would also damage the reputation of the UK agencies.

“If the possibility exists that information will be or has been obtained through the mistreatment of detainees, the negative consequences may include any potential adverse effects on national security if the fact of the agency seeking or accepting information in those circumstances were to be publicly revealed.

“For instance, it is possible that in some circumstances such a revelation could result in further radicalisation, leading to an increase in the threat from terrorism,” one section read.

Human rights groups and lawyers have strongly opposed the decision that the interrogation of policy document and other similar secret papers would not be made public at the inquiry into the country’s involvement in torture and rendition.

Ten human rights groups, including Liberty, Reprieve, and Amnesty International expressed their refusal to give evidence or participate in the hearings, as the inquiry does not have “credibility or transparency,” and it’s arrangements are “secretive, unfair and deeply flawed.”

The inquiry led by Sir Peter Gibson, a retired judge, would begin after police investigation into torture accusations are completed.

This is while that, there is no evidence that the UK intelligence was directly involved in torturing the prisoners, because the intelligence officers left jails when the torture sessions began and returned only after the prisoners were physically abused.

In the case of Zeeshan Siddiqui, a British national suspected of having links with al-Qaeda who was captured by Pakistani officials in 2005, Human Rights Watch revealed that Siddiqui “reported being repeatedly beaten, chained, injected with drugs and threatened with further torture and sexual abuse.” He insisted that after being tortured, British intelligence officers began his investigation.

Human Rights Watch also takes the case of Salahuddin Amin as an example. Amin, also a British citizen, accused of plotting attacks on UK targets, was “repeatedly tortured by Pakistan’s notorious Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and forced into a laundry list of false confessions”.

While he was being tortured he “was met by British intelligence officials on almost half a dozen occasions. He would be tortured, then forced back to his cell to do ‘homework,’ wherein he would provide a written confession at ISI instruction, then meet British interrogators the next day, who would ask questions on the same subjects. If the ISI felt his answers to the British agents were unsatisfactory, he would be told that he had embarrassed them ‘in front of our friends’ and be punished with further torture,” Amin said.

August 5, 2011 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. Terror State

Anthony Gregory | Lew Rockwell.com | August 3, 2011

Being a U.S. war criminal means never having to say sorry. Paul Tibbets, the man who flew the Enola Gay and destroyed Hiroshima, lived to the impressive age of 92 without publicly expressing guilt for what he had done. He had even reenacted his infamous mission at a 1976 Texas air show, complete with a mushroom cloud, and later said he never meant this to be offensive. In contrast, he called it a “damn big insult” when the Smithsonian planned an exhibit in 1995 showing some of the damage the bombing caused.

We might understand a man not coming to terms with his most important contribution to human history being such a destructive act. But what about the rest of the country?

It’s sickening that Americans even debate the atomic bombings, as they do every year in early August. Polls in recent years reveal overwhelming majorities of the American public accepting the acts as necessary.

Conservatives are much worse on this topic, although liberals surely don’t give it the weight it deserves. Trent Lott was taken to the woodshed for his comments in late 2002 about how Strom Thurmond would have been a better president than Truman. Lott and Thurmond both represent ugly strains in American politics, but no one dared question the assumption that Thurmond was obviously a less defensible candidate than Truman. Zora Neale Hurston, heroic author of the Harlem Renaissance, might have had a different take, as she astutely called Truman “a monster” and “the butcher of Asia.” Governmental segregation is terrible, but why is murdering hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians with as much thought as one would give to eradicating silverfish treated as simply a controversial policy decision in comparison?

Perhaps it is the appeal to necessity. We hear that the United States would have otherwise had to invade the Japanese mainland and so the bombings saved American lives. But saving U.S. soldiers wouldn’t justify killing Japanese children any more than saving Taliban soldiers would justify dropping bombs on American children. Targeting civilians to manipulate their government is the very definition of terrorism. Everyone was properly horrified by Anders Behring Breivik’s murder spree in Norway last month – killing innocents to alter diplomacy. Truman murdered a thousand times as many innocents on August 6, 1945, then again on August 9.

It doesn’t matter if Japan “started it,” either. Only individuals have rights, not nations. Unless you can prove that every single Japanese snuffed out at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was involved in the Pearl Harbor attack, the murderousness of the bombings is indisputable. Even the official history should doom Truman to a status of permanent condemnation. Besides being atrocious in themselves, the U.S. creation and deployment of the first nuclear weapons ushered in the seemingly endless era of global fear over nuclear war.

However, as it so happens, the official history is a lie. The U.S. provoked the Japanese to fire the first shot, as more and more historians have acknowledged. Although the attack on Pearl Harbor, a military base, was wrong, it was far less indefensible than the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s civilian populations.

As for the utilitarian calculus of “saving American lives,” historian Ralph Raico explains:

The propaganda that the atomic bombings saved lives was nothing but a public relations pitch contrived in retrospect. These were just gratuitous acts of mass terrorism. By August 1945, the Japanese were completely defeated, blockaded, starving. They were desperate to surrender. All they wanted was to keep their emperor, which was ultimately allowed anyway. The U.S. was insisting upon unconditional surrender, a purely despotic demand. Given what the Allies had done to the Central Powers, especially Germany, after the conditional surrender of World War I, it’s understandable that the Japanese resisted the totalitarian demand for unconditional surrender.

A 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukings were not decisive in ending the war. Most of the political and military brass agreed. “The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing,” said Dwight Eisenhower in a 1963 interview with Newsweek.

Another excuse we hear is the specter of Hitler getting the bomb first. This is a non sequitur. By the time the U.S. dropped the bombs, Germany was defeated and its nuclear program was revealed to be nothing in comparison to America’s. The U.S. had 180,000 people working for several years on the Manhattan Project. The Germans had a small group led by a few elite scientists, most of whom were flabbergasted on August 6, as they had doubted such bombs were even possible. Even if the Nazis had gotten the bomb – which they were very far from getting – it wouldn’t in any way justify killing innocent Japanese.

For more evidence suggesting that the Truman administration was out to draw Japanese blood for its own sake, or as a show of force for reasons of Realpolitik, consider the United States’s one-thousand-plane bombing of Tokyo on August 14, the largest bombing raid of the Pacific war, after Hirohito agreed to surrender and the Japanese state made it clear it wanted peace. The bombing of Nagasaki should be enough to know it was not all about genuinely stopping the war as painlessly as possible – why not wait more than three days for the surrender to come? But to strategically bomb Japan five days after the destruction Nagasaki, as Japan was in the process of waving the white flag? It’s hard to imagine a greater atrocity, or clearer evidence that the U.S. government was not out to secure peace, but instead to slaughter as many Japanese as it could before consolidating its power for the next global conflict.

The U.S. had, by the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, destroyed 67 Japanese cities by firebombing, in addition to helping the British destroy over a hundred cities in Germany. In this dramatic footage from The Fog of War, Robert McNamara describes the horror he helped unleash alongside General Curtis LeMay, with images of the destroyed Japanese cities and an indication of what it would have meant for comparably sized cities in the United States:

“Killing fifty to ninety percent of the people in 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional – in the minds of some people – to the objectives we were trying to achieve,” McNamara casually says. Indeed, this was clearly murderous, and Americans are probably the most resistant of all peoples to the truths of their government’s historical atrocities. It doesn’t hurt that the U.S. government has suppressed for years evidence such as film footage shot after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet even based on what has long been uncontroversial historical fact, we should all be disgusted and horrified by what the U.S. government did.

How would it have been if all those Germans and Japanese, instead of being burned to death from the sky, were corralled into camps and shot or gassed? Materially, it would have been the same. But Americans refuse to think of bombings as even in the same ballpark as other technologically expedient ways of exterminating people by the tens and hundreds of thousands. Why? Because the U.S. government has essentially monopolized terror bombing for nearly a century. No one wants to confront the reality of America’s crimes against humanity.

It would be one thing if Americans were in wide agreement that their government, like that of the Axis governments of World War II, had acted in a completely indefensible manner. But they’re not. The Allies were the white hats. Ignore the fact that the biggest belligerent on America’s side was Stalin’s Russia, whom the FDR and Truman administrations helped round up a million or two refugees to enslave and murder in the notorious undertaking known as Operation Keelhaul. We’re not supposed to think about that. World War II began with Pearl Harbor and it ended with D-Day and American sailors returning home to kiss their sweethearts who had kept America strong by working on assembly lines.

In the Korean war, another Truman project, the U.S. policy of shameful mass murder continued. According to historian Bruce Cumings, professor at the University of Chicago, millions of North Korean civilians were slaughtered by U.S. fire-bombings, chemical weapons and newly developed ordnance, some of which weighed in at 12,000 pounds. Eighteen out of 22 major cities were at least half destroyed. For a period in 1950, the US dropped about 800 tons of bombs on North Korea every day. Developed at the end of World War II, napalm got its real start in Korea. The US government also targeted civilian dams, causing massive flooding.

In Indochina, the U.S. slaughtered millions in a similar fashion. Millions of tons of explosives were dropped on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. These ghastly weapons are literally still killing people – tens of thousands have died since the war ended, and three farmers were killed just last week. Among the horrible effects of the bombing was the rise of Pol Pot’s regime, probably the worst in history on a per capita basis.

The U.S. has committed mass terrorism since, although not on quite the scale as in past generations. Back in the day the U.S. would drop tons of explosives, knowing that thousands would die in an instant. In today’s wars, it drops explosives and then pretends it didn’t mean to kill the many civilians who predictably die in such acts of violence. Only fifteen hundred bombs were used to attack Baghdad in March 2003. That’s what passes as progress. The naked murderousness of U.S. foreign policy, however, is still apparent. The bombings of water treatment facilities and sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s deliberately targeted the vulnerable Iraqi people. Once the type of atrocities the U.S. committed in World War II have been accepted as at the worst debatable tactics in diplomacy, anything goes.

American politicians would have us worry about Iran, a nation that hasn’t attacked another country in centuries, one day getting the bomb. There is no evidence that the Iranians are even seeking nuclear weapons. But even if they were, the U.S. has a much worse record in both warmongering and nuclear terror than Iran or any other country in modern times. It is more than hypocritical for the U.S. to pose as the leader of global peace and nuclear disarmament.

The hypocrisy and moral degeneracy in the mouths of America’s celebrated leaders should frighten us more than anything coming out of Iran or North Korea, especially given America’s capacity to kill and willingness to do it. Upon dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, President Truman called the bomb the “greatest achievement of organized science in history” and wondered aloud how “atomic power can become a powerful and forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace.” Nothing inverts good and evil, progress and regress, as much as the imperial state. In describing the perversion of morality in the history of U.S. wars, Orwell’s “war is peace” doesn’t cut it. “Exterminating civilians by the millions is the highest of all virtues” is perhaps a better tagline for the U.S. terror state.

August 4, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Video, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Veolia loses Ealing Council contract

Palestine Solidarity Campaign | August 3, 2011

In another victory for Palestinian rights, Ealing Council, in London , has failed to select Veolia for a comprehensive tender for its domestic refuse, street cleaning and parks maintenance contract. The contract is worth approx £300m in total over 15 years and one of Ealing Council’s largest single contracts. This is even more significant given the fact that Veolia had the previous parks maintenance contract.

Veolia remains involved in the building and future operation of a light-rail tramway linking Israel’s illegal settlements with West Jerusalem, facilitating Israel’s ‘grave breaches’ of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Veolia Transport Israel also runs two bus services serving the same function as the tramway: supporting and consolidating illegal settlements and tying them more closely into Israel.

Sarah Colborne, PSC Director, said: ‘Veolia’s loss of this contract, following its failure in a number of significant bids in Britain and internationally, is a clear sign that Veolia is paying a high price for its complicity in Israel’s occupation and violations of international law. West London PSC, together with other groups and individuals supporting Palestinian rights, wrote and met councillors from across the political spectrum and council officials, and submitted detailed factual and legal analysis. Veolia must realise that until it pulls out of all its activities serving Israel ’s illegal settlements, it will continue to be a target for the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Through BDS, those committed to peace and justice are sending a message – we don’t buy into Israel ’s violations of Palestinian rights’.

~

  1. In April 2010 the UN Human Rights Council declared the tramway and its operation to be illegal (A/HRC/RES/13/7 of 14 April 2010).  The resolution was passed 44 to 1, with the UK, France and all the EU members of the Council voting in favour.  The operation of the tramway is precisely what Veolia has a contract to do.
  2. Veolia is trying to sell its shares in the tramway.  But the deal would involve Veolia Transport Israel in providing technical assistance in running the tramway for 5 years.
  3. Through its subsidiary TMM, Veolia Transport Israel has also been operating the Tovlan landfill site in the occupied Jordan Valley for many years, supporting Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank by taking their refuse.  There has also been a report of Tovlan receiving refuse from Israel itself, the occupier dumping its rubbish on the occupied.  Veolia says that it is selling Tovlan to a local buyer and may have already done so, but far from ending Veolia’s complicity, the deal will compound it, for the intended sale is to Massu’a, the nearby illegal Israeli settlement.  Moreover Veolia will continue its involvement by providing the settlement with advice concerning Tovlan.

August 4, 2011 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism | 2 Comments

Jewish publication says Jews give half of Democratic money and a third of Republican money

By Philip Weiss | August 4, 2011

Nathan Guttman at Moment discusses “myths” about the Jewish vote and concedes my points: Jews really don’t swing any state except maybe Florida, and the reason politicians pander to Jews is because of the money we bring to the process. Just imagine if evangelical Christians were so important in the process; would we ever hear the end of it in the liberal press? Do evangelicals have political diversity– I bet they do. And speaking of diversity, where is ours? Guttman also says that Jews don’t vote on Israel, but states that it’s a “threshhold” issue, and so long as a politician supports aid to Israel and is against an imposed solution on Israel, he’s fine. I.e., the issue isn’t politicized in our process. Everyone’s for that or they can’t play. Guttman:

• Myth: Jews can tip a swing state.

Rarely. The 2000 elections helped establish the myth that Jewish voters hold the power to decide a tight race. As election officials scrutinized ballots in Florida, some seemed to see an elderly Jewish swing voter behind every hanging chad. Florida remains an important battleground, and given the divided political makeup of the state and its large Jewish population, Jewish sun birds really can make a difference. Ohio is also a state where Jewish voters could play a role in a close race, although so far they haven’t. But the vast majority of Jewish voters vote in states that aren’t really in play, like New York and California, and their vote will hardly be noticed.

• Myth: Jewish money bankrolls election campaigns.

Maybe. It is commonly believed that more than half of political donations to Democratic races and more than a third of those to Republican races come from Jewish donors. Again, there are no hard numbers here, but counting the Cohens and Goldmans on campaign disclosure lists can give a strong impression that Jews are heavily involved in political giving.

August 4, 2011 Posted by | Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Leave a comment

Eyewitness to Judaization (I saw a soldier strike a young boy for walking on a road for Jews)

By Matt Berkman | U.S. Middle East Project | August 4, 2011

Matt Berkman recently returned from a a two-week delegation to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories organized by Interfaith Peace-Builders. This is his account of what he saw.

JERUSALEM

Jerusalem effectively consists of two cities, one Jewish, one Arab. Whereas these cities were at one point geographically distinct—Jews living in West Jerusalem, Palestinians in East Jerusalem—the Palestinian half of the city has lately seen its ethnic homogeneity rent by the construction of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, a process ongoing since the city was conquered in 1967. These Jewish settlements—illegal under international law—are clean, affluent-looking housing complexes that are well serviced by the Greater Jerusalem municipality. The Palestinian neighborhoods whose physical and social contiguity the Jewish settlements fragment, on the other hand, are visibly under-serviced and neglected. Traveling through them, I found these areas to be overcrowded and littered with trash; the roads were unpaved, the schools few and derelict. A visual staple of the Arab neighborhoods was their black rooftop water tanks, used to offset the insufficient level of water pressure allotted them by the city.

The reason for the overcrowding in these neighborhoods is that it is nearly impossible for Palestinians to procure building permits anywhere in Jerusalem. Permits are arbitrarily denied or left indefinitely in bureaucratic limbo. Palestinian neighborhoods are also forbidden to expand beyond their present boundaries, which have been the same since 1967. The surrounding land (and this goes for all Arab villages and cities in Israel) was nationalized after 1948 and turned over to the dispensation of the Jewish National Fund, which does not sell or lease land to non-Jews. If a Palestinian family wants to expand their home or build a new one on a vacant lot, they must do so illegally, or not at all. If they build illegally, they risk having their homes demolished on short notice (often they are given ten minutes to vacate their possessions before the bulldozers arrive). That is why the landscape of East Jerusalem is riddled with the husks of demolished Arab homes. Jewish neighborhoods and settlements, on the other hand, have no problem purchasing land or receiving expedited permits.

This systematic discrimination, along with discrimination in the provision of municipal services, cannot be seen as other than a calculated policy of slow-motion ethnic cleansing. The goal is evidently to immiserate Arabs until they leave Jerusalem.

Although Israel formally annexed Jerusalem after 1967, the Palestinians that live there, unlike Palestinians residing within Israel’s internationally recognized borders, are not Israeli citizens. They have no citizenship. They are legally “residents” of Jerusalem, which entitles them to certain economic benefits like subsidized healthcare, but they cannot vote in Israel’s parliamentary elections nor do they have passports or other national identity documents. Traveling outside of Israel, except to the West Bank, is an arduous process for them that requires multiple authorizations. Moreover, their residency (and accompanying benefits) can be revoked if they are absent from Jerusalem for a period of three years. On our delegation, we heard reports of Arab Jerusalemites who have studied abroad only to come back and find that their right to live in the city of their birth has been revoked. The same goes for those caught residing in the suburbs beyond Jerusalem’s city limits, something Arab residents are often forced to do due to the overcrowding. The IDF launches periodic night raids in order to prove that these Palestinians are living outside the city, so that their residency can be revoked.

Although the notion of partitioning Jerusalem is likely defunct thanks to the proliferation of Jewish settlements, there do still remain small concentrations of Arab residents around the Old City that could potentially serve as a truncated Palestinian capital in the event of a two-state solution. For this reason, certain radical groups of settlers have been seizing or purchasing buildings in the heart of densely populated Arab neighborhoods in order to create a Jewish demographic foothold in these areas and, in this way, prevent partition. These settler dwellings are prominent for their Israeli flags and razor-wire ramparts. We saw several of them, and attended a weekly protest against one such cluster of settlements in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where using Ottoman-era documents of dubious authenticity a settler group recently secured the legal eviction of several Palestinian families that had been living in homes there since the 1950s. These houses were given to the families by the United Nations and the Jordanian government in compensation for homes in West Jerusalem from which they had been expelled by Zionist militias in 1948. Recently, however, an Israeli court ruled in favor of a settler group that claimed to hold the original deeds to these homes. The state then evicted the Palestinian residents and the settlers moved in. Needless to say, Israeli courts would never entertain the congruent notion that these same evicted Arabs could reclaim the West Jerusalem properties stolen from them in 1948.

GALILEE

The other day we traveled to the Galilee area, which is inside Israel proper. In the not too distant past, the Galilee was majority Arab. Today, due to the success of Judaization policies (which have their own ministry in Israel’s government, the “Ministry of Development of the Negev and Galilee”), the number of Jews in the Galilee has surpassed the number of Arabs. The same discrimination in land and services that I described above applies equally to the Galilee. While Arab-majority cities of the Galilee have indigenous mayors, which should theoretically make the degree of discrimination in municipal services lower, the cities’ budgets are in fact determined by Jewish-controlled “regional councils” in conjunction with relevant state ministries (education, industry, infrastructure). According to an advocacy organization we met with, Israel’s Arab community, which currently stands at 20% of the total population but has needs disproportionate to its size, receives no more than 5% of any given ministry’s annual budget, and often less.

What we saw in the Galilee, however, was far more disturbing than these statistics. Our group toured a number of “unrecognized villages”—Arab and Bedouin shantytowns that existed before 1948 but were never recognized by Israel following the creation of the state. Because they were not recognized (for reasons unspecified), their land was declared state land by the government and their homes were summarily bulldozed. Instead of emigrating, however, many villagers rebuilt their homes after each demolition, evidently using industrial detritus. The situation today is that these villagers (or what remains of them) live in corrugated iron shacks, up to fifteen in a house, without electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing. Because they are unrecognized, the state refuses to hook them up to the electricity grid or sewage system. Meanwhile, many of them are located within clear view of fully-serviced Israeli cities, some built just a few years ago on land that was originally theirs. One village we visited was almost fully encircled by the Russian-Jewish settlement of Karmiel. The villagers live literally feet from this affluent suburb of sparkling white high-rises but lack paved roads, sewage, electricity, and schools (the children must drive or walk to a nearby village to attend class). According to another civil society advocate, there are more than 40 such villages in Israel, all of them Arab, and all of them facing possible demolition. Most notable among these is the village of al-Araqib in the Negev, which has now been demolished more than 20 times.

BI’LIN

So far I have been discussing what happens within what Israel considers to be its legitimate borders (despite East Jerusalem’s status as an occupied territory under international law). But nearly identical strategies of Judaization are also being applied in the West Bank, which has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Our delegation spent a night in the village of Bi’lin, which on a clear night is within view of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but located across the Green Line that demarcates the pre-1967 border. Bi’lin is an agricultural village whose farmers rely on their thousand-year-old olive trees to make ends meet. However, in 2002, under the pretext of security, Israel erected a wall in the West Bank that cut the villagers off from most of their agricultural lands, effectively annexing them for the expansion of nearby Israeli settlements, which at the time of our visit were undergoing further construction. The olive trees in the path of the wall were uprooted.

For the last few years, the residents of Bi’lin have mounted weekly non-violent protests against the wall. These protests have been brutally suppressed by Israel’s military. According to videos we screened, it appears that protesters are routinely fired upon with high-velocity tear gas canisters, rubber-coated steel bullets, and live ammunition—all of which can be fatal. We toured the site of the protests and discovered shell casings, spent tear gas grenades and even live bullets littering the ground. One large patch of earth emitted a foul, fecal odor that was the product of Israel’s latest crowd-control method: spraying protesters with what our guides described as “sewage water.” The spray was last deployed a month ago and the stench remains to this day.

There are also midnight kidnappings and imprisonment of protest leaders and participants by the IDF, including children. The twenty-year -old son of the family I stayed with was abducted from his home by soldiers in the middle of the night, dragged to a nearby olive grove, and nearly beaten to death. His brother, Abdullah, was still on the lam after being targeted for abduction. The charge against them was arranging non-violent demonstrations. In addition, several protesters and innocent bystanders have been killed by Israeli soldiers in Bi’lin, including a woman who recently died of respiratory problems after inhaling tear gas and sewage water. Our group screened a video of a soldier firing a tear gas canister directly into the chest of a local protest leader name Bassem, killing him instantly. He was unarmed.

In 2007, an Israeli court ruled that the wall should be moved back 500 meters. That decision was implemented only last month. In the process of moving the wall, the IDF set fire to much of the land being returned to Bi’lin, destroying a number of olive trees. The ground there is visibly charred. Either way, the 500 meter alteration in the wall’s path has not ended the protests, which continue to demand the dismantling of the wall altogether.

There are several others villages like Bi’lin, where the wall annexes agricultural lands and aquifers for the use of nearby settlements. But there are also other cities that have it worse. Qalqiliya, for example, is a West Bank city of 60,000 inhabitants that is entirely encircled by the wall. Gates in the wall open twice a day for two hours; otherwise, its residents are imprisoned. In the area of East Jerusalem, the wall cuts off certain Arab suburbs that once formed an organic part of the city, disrupting family, labor, and religious ties. According to a former IDF soldier, the thousands of Palestinian laborers who penetrate the wall each week in search of work belies its security justification as a bulwark against suicide terrorism. Its only ostensible purpose is land theft.

HEBRON

We also visited Hebron. Hebron is unique among West Bank cities. It has an Arab population of 250,000, and a Jewish population of around 800 armed, highly ideological settlers that have underhandedly purchased or seized homes in the heart of the city. According to locals and the testimony of a former IDF soldier stationed in Hebron, these settlers perpetually antagonize and attack the Arab population. What is more, they do so with near impunity due to the fact that they are protected by 1,200 IDF soldiers whose orders are to arrest or kill any Palestinian that defends him/herself against settler assaults. The Palestinians know this and are forced to passively absorb all measure of abuse. To illustrate this, the soldier we spoke with told the following story. Responding to cries, he entered a marketplace one day to find several settler women violently beating the shopkeepers with rolling pins. When he demanded to know what they were doing, one of them replied, “What does it look like? We’re beating the Arabs.” The soldier surmised they were doing this in order to provoke a violent reaction from the shopkeepers, which would oblige him (the soldier) to shoot or arrest them.

During our visit I personally witnessed a soldier striking a young boy because he was walking on a road accessible only to Jews and internationals. Our group also saw the mesh canopy that overhangs the Arab marketplace located below the settler houses. The canopy had caught cinder blocks, metal chairs, garbage, eggs, knives, and other objects thrown by the settlers onto the Arabs below. One of the overhangs had been eaten away by battery acid poured from above, and we heard reports of settlers urinating out of their windows onto the marketplace. All this, it appears, takes place in full view of an IDF watchtower. The soldiers do nothing to prevent settler rampages. It’s not part of their orders. On the contrary, many of them are subservient to the settlers. We witnessed one settler command an IDF soldier to arrest our Arab guide for walking on a street where Arabs were forbidden. The soldier, who had been ignoring us hitherto, quickly began to oblige (luckily we eluded him).

In order to hear the widest variety of perspectives on the situation in Hebron, we also met with a spokesperson for the settler community, a man named David Wilder. Wilder described a situation in which Jews, not Arabs, were the party facing ethnic discrimination in Israel and the West Bank. Jews, he said, were confined to 3% of the city, both by agreement with the Palestinian Authority and by the disinclination of local Arabs to sell them property. (In fact, Israel’s security control of Hebron, a city with 800 Jews, ranges over 30% of the city, including its holiest site, the Cave of the Patriarchs). He described what he considered Arab incitement—including the practice of shooting off fireworks to celebrate high school graduations—and cited instances of terrorism directed against Jews in Hebron during the Second Intifada. He denied the existence of premeditated settler violence, describing any attacks on the local population as the work of undisciplined youth reacting to Arab provocations. (Shortly after this meeting, our guide Issa, a local activist, recalled David Wilder holding a loaded pistol to his head as he attempted to videotape a settler pogrom.)

SOUTH HEBRON HILLS

After our delegation concluded, I joined a small group of Israeli activists called Ta’ayyush (“Coexistence”) in the South Hebron Hills, where they gather each Saturday to assist the local population with reconstruction and agricultural projects (at its request). As a group of Israelis and internationals, Ta’ayyush’s very presence also provides these Palestinians with a measure of protection from violent settlers and apathetic military personnel who together conspire to make their lives unlivable.

Upon arrival, we split into two groups. The first was to accompany local shepherds who had lately been assaulted by settlers as they tried to bring their flocks to pasture. The purpose of this activity was not only to protect the shepherds, but also to document settler rampages that would otherwise be ignored by the military. The second group (my group) drove to the encampment of Bir al-Id to help an older man named Hajj Ismail and his family clear rocks and debris from the ruin of their demolished home. Following a fruitless court battle, the military had carried out its demolition order a month earlier on the typical grounds of “illegal construction.”

Hajj Ismail and his family are members of the most neglected substratum of Palestinian society. They are of a class referred to by village- and town-dwelling Palestinians as “cave people,” for the fact that many of them inhabit (and have from time immemorial) relatively well-provisioned caves in the South Hebron Hills. In recent times, however, population growth has forced families like Hajj Ismail’s to leave their caves and establish hilltop encampments like Bir al-Id, which are then declared illegal by the occupation authorities and slated for demolition. Meanwhile, these same authorities actively facilitate the creation of new Jewish settlement outposts in the area (allegedly “illegal” under Israeli law) by provisioning racist bands of Israeli “hilltop youth” with water, electricity and security. One such “illegal” outpost, whose power lines and massive cisterns strike a familiar contrast with the makeshift structures of Bir al-Id, was perched less a kilometer from Hajj Ismail’s ramshackle tent.

After a few hours the two groups reunited to perform a “direct action” at the illegal outpost of Bat Maon, from which settler attacks on Palestinian schoolchildren had recently originated. (According to an Italian NGO worker who has been accompanying the children to class for several months, settlers from Bat Maon had only days earlier beaten two American activists with lead pipes as they attempted to film these attacks.) Camcorders in hand, our group circumnavigated Bat Maon in hopes of drawing the military’s attention to what was going on there. We were immediately encircled by armored vehicles and asked to leave. One of our activists demanded to know why so many soldiers had been dispatched to quell Ta’ayyush’s nonviolent action while none had been tasked with investigating the recent stabbing of a Palestinian by a masked settler. Such attempts to shame the military, he later told me, had in the past succeeded in achieving marginal improvements in the conditions of the local Palestinians.

Driving back to Jerusalem, I asked one long-time member of Ta’ayyush, a mathematician named Danny, how many leftists of his stripe he thought existed in Israel today. He guessed a couple of hundred. (Israel’s Jewish population currently stands at 5.8 million.)

This, in part, is the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories as I have seen it and heard it described by those who live there. I leave it to the reader to draw from this testimony his/her own conclusions about the nature of the political system under which Israelis and Palestinians live, both within and beyond Israel’s recognized borders.

August 4, 2011 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | 1 Comment

Wall Gate # 300

| August 4, 2011

August 4, 2011 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, Video | 1 Comment

Protest Israel’s detention of Palestinian writer Ahmad Qatamesh

By Maureen Clare Murphy – The Electronic Intifada – 08/03/2011

The Palestinian human rights group Addameer issued an appeal today urging supporters to take action on the administrative detention of Palestinian political scientist and writer Ahmad Qatamesh.

Qatamesh has been held in administrative detention after he was arrested on 21 April in the middle of the night. Hanin Ahmad Qatamesh, the detained writer’s daughter, described in an article for The Electronic Intifada how Israeli soldiers invaded their family home in Ramallah. Hanin and other relatives in the home were held hostage as Israeli soldiers demanded the surrender of Ahmad, who was not at home at the time. The Electronic Intifada also interviewed Qatamesh’s wife, Suha Barghouti, a well-known human rights defender.

The full action appeal from Addameer follows:

As part of its recently launched Prisoners at Risk campaign, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association demands the immediate release of Ahmad Qatamish, a well-known political scientist and writer currently held without charge or trial by Israel. The duration of his administrative detention has been set at 4 months, due to expire on 2 September 2011.

Addameer believes that the arrest and detention of Ahmad Qatamish has all the hallmarks of arbitrary detention and is aimed at silencing this prolific writer for his unbridled criticism of the Israeli occupation. Ahmad was arrested on 21 April 2011 in the middle of the night following a raid on his house whilst he was away, in which his wife, daughter, and two other relatives – including a 14-year-old girl – were held hostage by Israeli troops in order to compel him to surrender himself. Since then there has been a catalogue of serious errors and malpractice by the Israeli authorities. Ahmad was held for 13 days – during which time he was interrogated for only 10 minutes – before being informed on 3 May that he would be placed in administrative detention; despite the fact that both he and his lawyer had been told by the Military Court that he would be released that very day. Ahmad’s original administrative detention order was found to be flawed and had to be re-written twice, and even now the order is based on the vague accusation that he is an active member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a charge he has consistently and vehemently denied. As the order is based on a secret file which is not accessible to Ahmad or his lawyer, it is impossible for Ahmad to know how to defend himself against any possible charges.

This is not the first time Ahmad has been placed in administrative detention. In the 1990s, he was held for five-and-a-half years without charge or trial, making him one of the longest held administrative detainees in Israeli prisons. For more information about Ahmad’s case, you can read his profile here and follow updates on his detention on facebook.

The Prisoners at Risk campaign aims to highlight cases which raise grave concern and require urgent action. Without international pressure, there is the real risk that Ahmad’s administrative detention order will be renewed again in September. You can help stop this from happening by joining our campaign and doing one of the following:

– Use our template letter to the Israeli authorities to call for Ahmad’s immediate and unconditional release;

– Write to your own government and representatives to call on them to pressure Israel to release Ahmad (if you are a EU citizen, you can use our template letter to members of the European Parliament);

– Organize a vigil or a demonstration to call for Ahmad’s release;

– Write to Ahmad in prison (postal address: Ofer Prison, Givat Zeev, P.O. Box 3007, via Israel);

August 4, 2011 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Solidarity and Activism | Leave a comment

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