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Nariman and Ahed Tamimi: Icons of Palestinian Resilience

By Bassem Tamimi | MEMO | March 20, 2018

The incarceration of the two most important women in my life, my wife Nariman and daughter Ahed, is not an extraordinary or exceptional case. On the contrary, Palestinians have continued to endure such atrocious behaviour from Israel as an occupying power since the Nakba of 1948. Perhaps my family represents a model of Palestinians in general, and women specifically, who suffer from inhumane practices on a daily basis.

While families in the Middle East and elsewhere celebrate Mother’s Day, my heart aches for my late mother who passed away about three years ago. She died after suffering from a severe illness, while also still grieving the murder of my sister Bassema. About 25 years ago, my sister was brutally beaten to death by a group of Israeli settlers at the entrance of an Israeli court while waiting to see her detained son. During this painful period, I also went through one of the most difficult and life-threatening periods of my life. While incarcerated in an Israeli prison, I sustained a brain hemorrhage that led to a coma, which left me incapacitated for a long period. The day I was released from Israeli prison, my sister was buried; a devastating time for me and my family. While the Palestinian people continue to suffer from this indefinite occupation, it feels as if these devastating days are a never-ending part of our everyday lives.

Such is the case as my wife and daughter continue to be imprisoned by the Israelis. In the early morning hours of 19 December, 2017, over 30 Israeli soldiers invaded my home and imprisoned my 16-year-old daughter, Ahed. The soldiers declared my village a closed military zone and sealed off all entrances and exits. With more than 12 military jeeps, they fired teargas and detonated sound bombs – they came to terrorize my child and family. Ahed was strong, resilient and calm. While sitting chained in an Israeli military jeep, she called, “Don’t worry, I am strong”. Yes, my child will continue to be strong and resilient and perhaps that is why many people idolize her, while others fear her strength.

Prior to the arrest, some Israeli groups launched a vicious campaign against her because she stood tall against Israeli intimidation and brutality. When my wife Nariman attempted to visit her at the Israeli interrogation centre, she was also arrested. Today, these two strong women await justice and freedom.

I should not be surprised by Ahed’s perseverance, strength, and rejection of the occupation. When she was a small child she asked me what ‘occupation’ means. “Fear,” I said. Despite Ahed’s gentle and warm personality, she grew up knowing how to face that fear and to be strong in the face of it. She stood strong against an armed solider and all that he represented in this illegal occupation. All she did was to unwaveringly say no, in her words and actions, to the occupation.

Despite Ahed’s youth, she stood strong and proud against intimidation and threats during her interrogation by the Israeli military. They tried to break her will, but my child won. In a letter sent through her lawyer, Ahed said, “What happened was expected, and when I remember why I am in Israeli prison, my will becomes stronger. This cause deserves a great deal. We have endured difficulties and we will overcome, as I was taught by my parents. The encouragement and enthusiasm I have received has made me immensely happy, however, I hope that the rest of the Palestinian prisoners receive the same support as I have.”

No doubt, I am a proud father, a father of a girl that has become an icon of popular and peaceful resistance. However, my heart is full of sadness and anger as my child is robbed of her childhood.

Despite my family’s long history of peaceful resistance and demonstrations, and both myself and Nariman’s numerous arrests by the Israelis, I cannot hide the fact that I am in distress and fear for Ahed’s future—perhaps because this is her first experience in Israeli prisons and her first time away from home.

Since 2010, Nariman has participated in hundreds of peaceful demonstration organized in our village against the Israeli occupation. Our home was raided hundred times and Nariman was arrested three times—but this did not deter her from continuing her struggle against the occupation. During the course of demonstrations, she rescued countless Palestinian youth who sustained injuries and attacks by the Israeli military. Yet, she was not able to rescue her own brother who was brutally killed by the Israeli military in 2012. Nariman captured the Israeli attacks on video that day, but did not know that she was in fact filming the death of her own brother. Planting the seeds of resilience in Ahed and my children, Nariman continues to be a role model to women everywhere.

The Palestinian people continue to endure hardship and dispossession, from the time of the Nakba in 1948 until today, both at the hands of the Israeli occupying authorities, as well as the terror of illegal Israeli settlers. Palestinians worldwide, whether living under occupation, in the refugee camps, or elsewhere in exile—continue to live a daily Nakba. We in An Nabi Saleh village represent every Palestinian family who continues to endure Israeli policies of disenfranchisement, a policy that deprives Palestinians of the basic human right to live free. Despite these inhuman and illegal policies and practices against our families, and especially against women in particular, Palestinian women have persisted in their fight. In An Nabi Saleh, women and girls are leaders, and their role in peaceful demonstrations is vital, and are considered role models for many women here in Palestine and abroad.

While the Israelis chose Mother’s Day to prosecute Nariman and Ahed, my family, village, and Palestinians worldwide await the day when they, and all political prisoners, are released from Israeli prison. I would like to extend my family’s sincere gratitude to all those who have supported my wife and daughter, especially human rights organizations.

I am a proud husband and father. I am proud of all the women and mothers of Palestine who, with their strength and determination, have taught us to be fearless. I am proud that today, my child’s beautiful face has become a universal symbol of steadfastness, resistance and anti-injustice – like the iconic image of Che Guevara.

March 21, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian teen Ahed Tamimi to be sentenced to 8 months in Israeli prison

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – March 21, 2018

Ahed Tamimi, 17-year-old activist from Nabi Saleh whose case has received widespread global attention, will be sentenced to eight months in Israeli prison following a plea bargain on 21 March at Ofer military court, Palestinian media have reported. The plea bargain will involve a modified indictment with four items instead of the 12 that were originally included in the indictment, under which she was threatened with imprisonment for up to 10 years.

In the revised indictment, Ahed is accused of obstructing and assaulting an occupation soldier as part of the famous incident in which she slapped an occupation soldier on her family’s land, demanding he leave. Other charges of “incitement” and allegations related to political speech were excluded from the new indictment, as were five other incidents in which she was accused of assaulting occupation forces when they invaded her village, Nabi Saleh.

Ahed’s mother, Nariman, is also imprisoned and facing similar charges relating to the action on 15 December, in which Ahed confronted an Israeli occupation soldier invading her village alongside her cousin, Nour. Nariman Tamimi livestreamed the confrontation on Facebook in a video that soon went viral, expressing Palestinians’ commitment to resist occupation. Ahed and her family are leaders in the grassroots indigenous land defense movement in Nabi Saleh, confronting the illegal settlement of Halamish and occupation soldiers who have confiscated the village’s spring and lands.

The vast majority of all military court cases in occupied Palestine end in plea bargains. Palestinian prisoners are forced into plea bargains with threats of lengthy sentences that pose an all-too-real danger, especially with the inflated charges and lengthy indictments proffered against Palestinians. Over 99 percent of all military court cases end with a conviction, and lengthy sentences have become a norm, even for many children. Plea bargains are forced on Palestinians by a colonial “court” system that is only designed to suppress their resistance and isolate organizers and leaders from the Palestinian people.

The sentence comes only days after the Israeli military appeals court ruled on 19 March that Ahed’s trial must be held behind closed doors and away from public view. Ahed and her lawyer, Gabi Lasky, are rejecting the closed trial, especially as the case has helped to shine an international light on Israeli practices against Palestinian prisoners, especially Palestinian children targeted for arrest and persecution. Ahed’s case has helped to highlight the ongoing, systematic practice of the military imprisonment and trial of hundreds of Palestinian children each year.

While the Israeli court justified its order for a closed trial with language about the protection of minors, the Israeli army videotaped and widely distributed footage of Ahed’s arrest and leading Israeli politicians have publicly demanded she spend the rest of her life in prison. The village of Nabi Saleh has been subjected to repeated raids and attacks and the imprisonment of yet more children of the extended Tamimi family.

Over 1.5 million people have signed a global petition to demand Ahed’s freedom and thousands of people around the world have participated in hundreds of events and actions to demand her release and that of the over 6,100 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli jails, including over 350 Palestinian children. The struggle to free Palestinian prisoners and build solidarity for their struggle must be continued and intensified; the global action was critical in maintaining a high profile for Ahed’s case, and every Palestinian prisoner also deserves this attention, solidarity and struggle.

Free Ahed Tamimi! Free all Palestinian prisoners!

March 21, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel admits to launching military attack on Syria in 2007, warns region of more

Press TV – March 21, 2018

Israel has formally admitted that it had attacked and destroyed a site in eastern Syria back in 2007, warning the region of more such assaults.

The announcement by the Israeli military through declassified documents came on Wednesday about “Operation Out of the Box” against what Israel claims to be a nuclear reactor in Syria’s eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr.

For over 10 years, the Israeli military had prohibited discussions about the already well-known and widely reported secret.

The new declassified materials included photographs and cockpit video said to show the moment that an airstrike targeted Syria’s Al-Kubar facility.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the Mossad confirmed the existence of the Syrian site in March 2007. In the months that followed, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tried to pressure former US President George W. Bush to attack the site.

In July 2007, after Bush refused Israel’s demands, Olmert convened his security cabinet, which ultimately concluded that the alleged reactor had to be destroyed.

Before midnight on September 5, 2007, four F-15 jets and four F-16 warplanes entered the Syrian airspace via Turkey, dropping nearly 17 tons of bombs on the facility.

On Wednesday, the Israeli minister for military affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, said the 2007 strike was a message to Israel’s enemies.

He claimed, “The motivation of our enemies has increased in recent years, but the strength of our army, our air force and our intelligence capabilities have increased compared with the capabilities we had in 2007.”

Syria, a signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has always dismissed reports that the site was a nuclear reactor. Damascus said that the destroyed complex was a military site under construction.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad vehemently denied that his country had built a nuclear reactor in violation of its commitments under the NPT and to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In 2017, Syria’s Permanent Representative at the UN Bashar al-Ja’afari lashed out at the Security Council and the IAEA for their failure to denounce Israel’s blatant military attack in 2007, noting that Israel refused to cooperate with the IAEA in investigating the possible contamination caused by the Israeli rockets and the materials used to destroy the site.

Israel is believed to be the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East with more than 200 undeclared nuclear warheads. Tel Aviv has rejected global calls to join the NPT and does not allow international inspectors to observe its controversial nuclear program.

Syria has on numerous occasions slammed the Western countries for supplying Israel with nuclear materials in a blatant violation of the NPT and even helping it to keep its nuclear activities secret.

There has been a sharp hike in Israeli acts of aggression against Syria since 2011, when the Arab country plunged into a foreign-backed crisis targeting the government in Damascus.

Israel has, ever since, launched military attacks on targets in Syria in an apparent attempt to prop up terrorist groups that have been suffering heavy defeats on the battlefield with Syrian government forces, who are fighting to liberate the countries from the clutches of foreign-backed militant groups.

The latest such attacks took place on February 20, when Israeli warplanes bombed a Syrian army facility in central Syria. The Syrian military hit at least one Israeli F-16 returning from the bombing raid.

On several occasions, the Syrian army has confiscated Israeli-made arms and military equipment from militants fighting pro-Damascus forces. Israel has also been providing medical treatment to the extremist militants wounded in Syria.

March 21, 2018 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Apartheid Israel

By Jonathon Cook | AMEU | 2018 – Volume 51

North from Nazareth’s city limits, a mile or so as the crow flies, is an agricultural community by the name of Tzipori – Hebrew for “bird.” It is a place I visit regularly, often alongside groups of    activists wanting to learn more about the political situation of the Palestinian minority living in Israel.

Tzipori helps to shed light on the core historic, legal and administrative principles underpinning a Jewish state, ones that reveal it to be firmly in a tradition of non-democratic political systems that can best be described as apartheid in nature.

More than a decade ago, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter      incurred the wrath of Israel’s partisans in America by suggesting that Israeli rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories was comparable to apartheid. While his bestseller book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” broke a taboo, in many ways it added to the confusion surrounding discussions of Israel. Since then, others, including John Kerry, when U.S. secretary of state, and former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, have warned that Israeli rule in the occupied territories is in danger of metamorphosing into “apartheid” – though the moment of transformation, in their eyes, never quite seems to arrive.

It has been left to knowledgeable observers, such as South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to point out that the situation for Palestinians under occupation is, in fact, worse than that suffered by blacks in the former South Africa. In Tutu’s view, Palestinians under occupation suffer from something more extreme than apartheid – what we might term “apartheid-plus.”

There is a notable difference between the two cases that hints at the nature of that “plus.” Even at the height of apartheid, South Africa’s white population understood that it needed, and depended on, the labor of the black majority population. Israel, on the other hand, has a far more antagonistic relationship to Palestinians in the occupied territories. They are viewed as an unwelcome, surplus population that serves as a demographic obstacle to the political realization of a Greater Israel. The severe economic and military pressures Israel imposes on these Palestinians are designed to engineer their incremental displacement, a slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

Not surprisingly, Israel’s supporters have been keen to restrict the use of the term “apartheid” to South Africa, as though a political system allocating key resources on a strictly racial or ethnic basis has only ever occurred in one place and at one time. It is often forgotten that the crime of apartheid is defined in international law, as part of the 2002 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court at The Hague. An apartheid system, the statute says, is “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” In short, apartheid is a political system, or structure, that assigns rights and privileges based on racial criteria.

This definition, it will be argued in this essay, describes the political regime not only in the occupied territories – where things are actually even worse – but in Israel itself, where Jewish citizens enjoy institutional privileges over the 1.8 million Palestinians who have formal Israeli citizenship. These Palestinians are the remnants of the Palestinian people who were mostly dispersed by the 1948 war that established a Jewish state on the ruins of their homeland. These Palestinian citizens comprise about a fifth of Israel’s population.

Although it is generally understood that they suffer discrimination, the assumption even of many scholars is that their treatment in no way undermines Israel’s status as a western-style liberal democracy. Most minorities in the west – for example, blacks and Hispanics in the U.S., Asians in the U.K., Turks in Germany, and Africans in France – face widespread prejudice and discrimination. Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian minority, it is claimed, is no different.

This is to profoundly misunderstand the kind of state Israel is, and how it relates to all Palestinians, whether they are under occupation or Israeli citizens. The discrimination faced by Palestinians in Israel is not illegal, informal, unofficial, or improvised. It is systematic, institutional, structural and extensively codified, satisfying very precisely the definition of apartheid in international law and echoing the key features of South African apartheid.

It was for this reason that the United Nations’ Economic Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) published a report in 2017 concluding that Israel had “established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole,” including its Palestinian citizens. Under severe pressure from Israel and the U.S. , however, that report was quickly retracted, but the reality of apartheid in Israeli law and practice persists.

This argument is far more controversial than the one made by President Carter. His position suggests that Israel developed a discrete system of apartheid after the occupation began in 1967 – a kind of “add-on” apartheid to democratic Israel. On this view, were Israel to end the occupation, the apartheid regime in the territories could be amputated like a gangrenous limb. But if Israel’s treatment of its own Palestinian citizens fits the definition of apartheid, then it implies something far more problematic. It suggests that Jewish privilege is inherent in the Israeli polity established by the Zionist movement in 1948, that a Jewish state is apartheid-like by its nature, and that dismantling the occupation would do nothing to end Israel’s status as an apartheid state.

Citizenship Inequality

Tzipori was founded by Romanian and Bulgarian Jews in 1949 as a moshav, a socialist agricultural collective similar to the kibbutz. It specialized in dairy production, though most of its 1,000 inhabitants long ago abandoned socialism, as well as farming; today they work in offices in nearby cities such as Haifa, Tiberias and Afula.

Tzipori’s Hebrew name alludes to a much older Roman city called Sephoris, the remains of which are included in a national park that abuts the moshav. Separating the moshav from ancient Sephoris is a large pine forest, concealing yet more rubble, in some places barely distinguishable from the archeological debris of the national park. But these ruins are much more recent. They are the remnants of a Palestinian community of some 5,000 souls known as Saffuriya. The village was wiped out in 1948 during the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe” – how Palestinians describe the loss of their homeland and its replacement with a Jewish state.

The Palestinians of Saffuriya – an Arabized version of “Sephoris” – were expelled by Israel and their homes razed. The destruction of Saffuriya was far from an isolated incident. More than 500 Palestinian villages were ethnically cleansed in a similar fashion during the Nakba, and the ruins of the homes invariably covered with trees. Today, all Saffuriya’s former residents live in exile – most outside Israel’s borders, in camps in Lebanon. But a proportion live close by in Nazareth, the only Palestinian city in what became Israel to survive the Nakba. In fact, according to some estimates, as much as 40 percent of Nazareth’s current population is descended from Saffuriya’s refugees, living in its own neighborhood of Nazareth called Safafri.

Nowadays, when observers refer to Palestinians, they usually think of those living in the territories Israel occupied in 1967: the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.  Increasingly, observers (and peace processes) overlook two other significant groups.  The first are the Palestinian refugees who ended up beyond the borders of partitioned Palestine; the second are the 20 percent of Palestinians, some 150,000, who managed to remain on their land.  This figure was far higher than intended by Israel’s founders.

It included 30,000 in Nazareth – both the original inhabitants and refugees like those from Saffuriya who sought sanctuary in the city during the Nakba – who avoided being expelled. They did so only because of a mistake. The commander who led the attack on Nazareth, a Canadian Jew called Ben Dunkelman, disobeyed an order to empty the city of its inhabitants. One can guess why: given the high profile of Nazareth as a center of Christianity, and coming in the immediate wake of the war crimes trials of Nazis at Nuremberg, Dunkelman presumably feared that one day he might end up in the dock too.

There were other, unforeseen reasons why Palestinians either remained inside or were brought into the new state of Israel. Under pressure from the Vatican, a significant number of Palestinian Christians – maybe 10,000 – were allowed to return after the fighting finished. A further 35,000 Palestinians were administratively moved into Israel in 1949, after the Nakba had ended, when Israel struck a deal with Jordan to redraw the ceasefire lines – to Israel’s territorial, but not demographic, advantage. And finally, in a far less technologically sophisticated age, many refugees who had been expelled outside Israel’s borders managed to slip back hoping to return to villages like Saffuriya. When they found their homes destroyed, they “blended” into surviving Palestinian communities like Nazareth, effectively disappearing from the Israeli authorities’ view.

In fact, it was this last trend that initiated a process that belatedly led to citizenship for the Palestinians still in Israel. The priority for Israeli officials was to prevent any return for the 750,000 Palestinians they had ethnically cleansed so successfully. That was the only way to ensure the preservation of a permanent and incontrovertible Jewish majority. And to that end, Palestinians in surviving communities like Nazareth needed to be marked out – “branded,” to use a cattle-ranching metaphor. That way, any “infiltrators,” as Israel termed refugees who tried to return home, could be immediately identified and expelled again. This “branding” exercise began with the issuing of residency permits to Palestinians in communities like Nazareth. But as Israel sought greater international legitimacy, it belatedly agreed to convert this residency into citizenship.

It did so through the Citizenship Law of 1952, four years after Israel’s creation. Citizenship for Palestinians in Israel was a concession made extremely reluctantly and only because it served Israel’s larger demographic purposes. Certainly, it was not proof, as is often assumed, of Israel’s democratic credentials. The Citizenship Law is better understood as an anti-citizenship law: its primary goal was to strip any Palestinians outside the new borders – the vast majority after the ethnic cleansing of 1948 – of a right ever to return to their homeland.

Two years before the Citizenship Law, Israel passed the more famous Law of Return.  This law effectively opened the door to all Jews around the world to immigrate to Israel, automatically entitling them to citizenship.

Anyone familiar with modern U.S. history will have heard of the Supreme Court decision of 1954 in the famous civil rights case Brown v. Board of Education. The judges ruled that the creation of separate public schools for white and black pupils was unconstitutional, on the grounds that “separate is inherently unequal.” It was an important legal principle that would strike a decisive blow against Jim Crow, the Deep South’s version of apartheid.

If separate is inherently unequal, Israel’s segregated structure of citizenship is the most profound form of inequality imaginable. Citizenship is sometimes referred to as the “foundational right” offered by states because so many other basic rights typically depend on it: from suffrage to residency and welfare. By separating citizenship rights on an ethnic basis, creating Jewish citizens with one law and Palestinian citizens with another, Israel institutionalized legal apartheid at the bedrock level. Adalah, a legal rights group for Palestinians in Israel, has compiled an online database listing Israeli laws that explicitly discriminate based on ethnicity. The Law of Return and the Citizenship Law are the most significant, but there are nearly 70 more of them.

Marriage Inequality

Ben Gurion was prepared to award the remnants of the Palestinians in Israel this degraded version of citizenship because he assumed this population would pose no threat to his new Jewish state. He expected these Palestinian citizens – or what Israel prefers to term generically “Israeli Arabs” – to be swamped by the arrival of waves of Jewish immigrants like those that settled Tzipori. Ben Gurion badly miscalculated. The far higher birth rate of Palestinian citizens meant they continue to comprise a fifth of Israel’s population.

Palestinian citizens have maintained this numerical proportion, despite Israel’s strenuous efforts to gerrymander its population. The Law of Return encourages – with free flights, financial gifts, interest-free loans and grants – any Jew in the world to come to Israel and instantly receive citizenship. More than three million Jews have taken up the offer.

The Citizenship Law, on the other hand, effectively closed the door after 1952 on the ability of Palestinians to gain citizenship. In fact, since then there has been only one way for a non-Jew to naturalize and that is by marrying an Israeli citizen, either a Jew or Palestinian. This exception is allowed only because a few dozen non-Jews qualify each year, posing no threat to Israel’s Jewish majority.

In practice, Palestinians outside Israel have always been disqualified from using this route to citizenship, even if they marry a Palestinian citizen of Israel, as became increasingly common after Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine in 1967. During the Oslo years, when Palestinians in Israel launched a legal challenge to force Israel to uphold the naturalization of their spouses from the occupied territories, the government hurriedly responded by passing in 2003 the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. It denied Palestinians the right to qualify for Israeli residency or citizenship under the marriage provision. In effect, it banned marriage across the Green Line formally separating Palestinians in Israel from Palestinians under occupation. The measure revealed that Israel was prepared to violate yet another fundamental right – to fall in love and marry the person of one’s choice – to preserve its Jewishness.

Nationality Inequality

Most citizens of the United States correctly assume that their citizenship and nationality are synonymous: “American” or “U.S.”

But the same is not true for Israelis.  Israel classifies its citizens as holding different “nationalities.”  This requires rejecting a common Israeli nationality and instead separating citizens into supposed ethnic or religious categories. Israel has recognized more than 130 nationalities to deal with anomalous cases, myself included. After I married my wife from Nazareth, I entered a lengthy, complex and hostile naturalization process. I am now an Israeli citizen, but my nationality is identified as “British.” The vast majority of Israeli citizens, on the other hand, hold one of two official nationalities: Jewish or Arab. The Israeli Supreme Court has twice upheld the idea that these nationalities are separate from – and superior to – citizenship.

This complex system of separate nationalities is not some arcane, eccentric practice: it is central to Israel’s version of apartheid. It is the means by which Israel can both institutionalize a separation in rights and obscure this state-sanctioned segregation from the view of outsiders. It allows Israel to offer different rights to different citizens depending on whether they are Jews or Palestinians, but in a way that avoids too obvious a comparison with apartheid South Africa. Here is how.

All citizens, whatever their ethnicity, enjoy “citizenship rights.” In this regard, Israel looks – at least superficially – much like a western liberal democracy. Examples of citizenship rights include health care, welfare payments, the domestic allocation of water, and education – although, as we shall see, the picture is usually far more complex than it first appears. In reality, Israel has managed covertly to subvert even these citizenship rights.

Consider medical care. Although all citizens are entitled to equal health provision, hospitals and major medical services are almost always located in Jewish communities, and difficult for Palestinian citizens to access given the lack of transport connections between Palestinian and Jewish communities. Palestinian citizens in remote communities  are denied access to basic medical services. And recently it emerged that Israeli hospitals were secretly segregating Jewish and Palestinian women in maternity clinics. Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh, a Palestinian physician in Israel, documents these and many other problems with health care in his book “A Doctor in Galilee.”

More significantly, Israel also recognizes “national rights,” and reserves them almost exclusively for the Jewish population. National rights are treated as superior to citizenship rights. So if there is a conflict between a Jew’s national right and a Palestinian’s individual citizenship right, the national right must be given priority by officials and the courts. In this context, Israel’s rightwing justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, observed in February 2018 that Israel should ensure “equal rights to all citizens but not equal national rights.” She added: “Israel is a Jewish state. It isn’t a state of all its nations.”

The simplest illustration of how this hierarchy of rights works can be found in Israel’s citizenship laws. The Law of Return establishes a national right for all Jews to gain instant citizenship – as well as the many other rights that derive from citizenship. The Citizenship Law, on the other hand, creates only an individual citizenship right for non-Jews, not a national one. Palestinian citizens can pass their citizenship “downwards” to their offspring but cannot extend it “outwards,” as a Jew can, to members of their extended family – in their case, Palestinians who were made refugees in 1948. My wife has relatives who were exiled by the Nakba in Jordan. But with only an individual right to citizenship, she cannot bring any of them back to their homes now in Israel.

This distinction is equally vital in understanding how Israel allocates key material resources, such as water and land.  Let us consider land.  Israel has “nationalized” almost all of its territory – 93 percent. Palestinian communities in Israel have been able to hold on to less than 3 percent of their land – mostly the built-up areas of their towns and villages – after waves of confiscation by the state stripped them of at least 70 percent of their holdings.

It is not unprecedented in western democracies for the state to be a major land owner, even if Israel’s total holdings are far more extensive than other states. But Israel has successfully masked what this “nationalization” of land actually means. Given that there is no recognized Israeli nationality, Israel does not hold the land on behalf of its citizens – as would be the case elsewhere. It does not even manage the land on behalf of Jewish citizens of Israel. Instead the land is held in trust for the Jewish people around the globe, whether they are citizens or not, and whether they want to be part of Israel or not.

In practice, Jews who buy homes in Israel effectively get long-term leases on their property from a government body known as the Israel Lands Authority. The state regards them as protecting or guarding the land on behalf of Jews collectively around the world. Who are they guarding it from? From the original owners. Most of these lands, like those in Tzipori, have been either seized from Palestinian refugees or confiscated from Palestinian citizens.

Legal Inequality

The political geographer Oren Yiftachel is among the growing number of Israeli scholars who reject the classification of Israel as a liberal democracy, or in fact any kind of democracy. He describes Israel as an “ethnocracy,” a hybrid state that creates a democratic façade, especially for the dominant ethnic group, to conceal its essential, non-democratic structure. In describing Israel’s ethnocracy, Yiftachel provides a complex hierarchy of citizenship in which non-Jews are at the very bottom.

It is notable that Israel lacks a constitution, instead creating 11 Basic Laws that approximate a constitution. The most liberal component of this legislation, passed in 1992 and titled Freedom and Human Dignity, is sometimes referred to as Israel’s Bill of Rights. However, it explicitly fails to enshrine in law a principle of equality. Instead, the law emphasizes Israel’s existence as a “Jewish and democratic state” – an oxymoron that is rarely examined by Israelis.

A former Supreme Court judge, Meir Shamgar, famously claimed that Israel – as the nation-state of the Jewish people – was no less democratic than France, as the nation-state of the French people. And yet, while it is clear how one might naturalize to become French, the only route to becoming Jewish is religious conversion. “Jewish” and “French” are clearly not similar conceptions of citizenship.

Netanyahu’s government has been trying to draft a 12th Basic Law. Its title is revealing: it declares Israel as “the Nation-State of the Jewish People.”  Not the state of Israeli citizens, or even of Israeli Jews, but of all Jews around the world, including those Jews who are not Israeli citizens and have no interest in becoming citizens. This is a reminder of the very peculiar nature of a Jewish state, one that breaks with the conception of a civic citizenship on which liberal democracies are premised. Israel’s ethnic idea of nationality  is closely derived from the ugly ethnic or racial ideas of citizenship that dominated Europe a century ago. Those exclusive, aggressive conceptions of peoplehood led to two devastating world wars, as well as providing the ideological justification for a wave of anti-semitism that swept Europe and culminated in the Holocaust.

Further, if all Jewish “nationals” in the world are treated as citizens of Israel – real or potential ones – what does that make Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens, including my wife and two children? It seems that Israel regards them effectively as guest workers or resident aliens, tolerated so long as their presence does not threaten the state’s Jewishness.  Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s justice minister, implicitly acknowledged this problem during a debate on the proposed Nation-State Basic Law in February. She said Israel could not afford to respect universal human rights: “There is a place to maintain a Jewish majority even at the price of violation of rights.”

The hierarchy of citizenship Yiftachel notes is helpful because it allows us to understand that Israeli citizenship is the exact opposite of the level playing field of formal rights one would expect to find in a liberal democracy.  Another key piece of legislation, the Absentee Property Law of 1950, stripped all Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war of their right to any property they had owned before the Nakba. Everything was seized – land, crops, buildings, vehicles, farm implements, bank accounts – and became the property of Israel, passed on to Jewish institutions or Jewish citizens in violation of international law.

The Absentee Property Law applied equally to Palestinian citizens, such as those from Saffuriya who ended up in Nazareth, as it did to Palestinian refugees outside Israel’s recognized borders. In fact, as many as one in four Palestinian citizens are reckoned to have been internally displaced by the 1948 war. In the Orwellian terminology of the Absentee Property Law, these refugees are classified as “present absentees” – present in Israel, but absent from their former homes. Despite their citizenship, such Palestinians have no more rights to return home, or reclaim other property, than refugees in camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

Residential Segregation

Although Tzipori was built on land confiscated from Palestinians – some of them Israeli citizens living close by in Nazareth – not one of its 300 or so homes, or its dozen farms, is owned by a Palestinian citizen. In fact, no Palestinian citizen of Israel has ever been allowed to live or even rent a home in Tzipori, seven decades after Israel’s creation.

Tzipori is far from unique. There are some 700 similar rural communities, known in Israel as cooperative communities. Each is, and is intended to be, exclusively Jewish, denying Palestinian citizens of Israel the right to live in them. These rural communities control much of the 93 percent of land that has been “nationalized,” effectively ensuring it remains off-limits to the fifth of Israel’s population that is non-Jewish.

How is this system of ethnic residential segregation enforced? Most cooperative communities like Tzipori administer a vetting procedure through an “admissions committee,” comprising officials from quasi-governmental entities such as the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund and the World Zionist Organization, which are there to represent the interests of world Jewry, not Israeli citizens. These organizations, effectively interest groups that enjoy a special, protected status as agents of the Israeli state, are themselves a gross violation of the principles of a liberal democracy. The state, for example, has awarded the Jewish National Fund, whose charter obligates it to discriminate in favor of Jews, ownership of 13 percent of Israeli territory. A Jew from Brooklyn has more rights to land in Israel than a Palestinian citizen.

For most of Israel’s history, there was little need to conceal what the admissions committees were doing. No one noticed. If a Palestinian from Nazareth had applied to live in Tzipori, the admissions committee would simply have rejected the applicant on the grounds that they were an “Arab.”  But this very effective mechanism for keeping Palestinian citizens off most of their historic homeland hit a crisis two decades ago when the case of the Kaadan family began working its way through Israel’s court system.

Adel Kaadan lived in a very poor Palestinian community called Baqa al-Ghabiyya, south of Nazareth and quite literally a stone’s throw from the West Bank. Kaadan had a good job as a senior nurse in nearby Hadera hospital, where he regularly treated Jewish patients and had on occasion, he told me when I interviewed him in the early 2000s, helped to save Israeli soldiers’ lives. He assumed this should entitle him to live in a Jewish community. Kaadan struck me as stubborn as he was naïve – a combination of personality traits that had got him this far and ended up causing Israel a great deal of legal and reputational trouble.

Determined to give his three young daughters the best opportunities he could manage, Kaadan had built the family an impressive villa in Baqa al-Ghabiyya. While I sat having coffee with him, one of his daughters played the piano with a proficiency that suggested she had a private tutor. But Kaadan was deeply dissatisfied with his lot. His home was grand and beautiful, but Baqa was not. As soon as the family stepped outside their home, they had to wade into the reality of Palestinian life in Israel. Kaadan was proof that it was possible for some Palestinian citizens, if they were determined and lucky enough to surmount the many obstacles placed in their way, to enjoy personal success, but they could not so easily escape the collective poverty of their surroundings.

Like many other Palestinian citizens, Kaadan was trapped by yet another piece of legislation: the Planning and Building Law of 1965. It advanced a core aim of Zionism: “Judaizing” as much land as possible. It achieved this in two main ways. First, communities in Israel were only recognized by the state if they were listed in the Planning Law. Although nearly 200 Palestinian communities had survived the Nakba, the law recognized just 120 or them.

The most problematic communities, from Israel’s point of view, were the dispersed Bedouin villages located among the remote, dusty hills of the semi-desert Negev, or Naqab, in Israel’s south. The Negev was Israel’s biggest land reserve, comprising 60 percent of the country’s territory. Its vast, inaccessible spaces had made it the preferred location for secretive military bases and Israel’s nuclear program. Israel wanted the Bedouin off their historic lands, and the Planning Law was the ideal way to evict them – by de-recognizing their villages.

Today the inhabitants of dozens of “unrecognized villages” – home to nearly a tenth of the Palestinian population in Israel – are invisible to the state, except when it comes to the enforcement of planning regulations. The villagers live without state-provided electricity, water, roads and communications. Any homes they build instantly receive demolition orders, forcing many to live in tents or tin shacks. Israel’s aim is to force the Bedouin to abandon their pastoral way of life and traditions, and relocate to overcrowded, state-built townships, which are the poorest communities in Israel by some margin.

In addition to creating the unrecognized villages, the Planning and Building Law of 1965  ensures ghetto-like conditions for recognized Palestinian communities too. It creates residential segregation by confining the vast majority of Palestinian citizens to the 120 Palestinian communities in Israel that are officially listed for them, and then tightly limits their room for growth and development. Even in the case of Palestinian citizens living in a handful of so-called “mixed cities” – Palestinian cities that were largely “Judaized” after the Nakba – they have been forced into their own discrete neighborhoods, on the margins of urban life.

The Planning Law also drew a series of blue lines around all the communities in Israel, determining their expansion area. Jewish communities were awarded significant land reserves, while the blue lines around Palestinian communities were invariably drawn close to the built-up area half a century ago. Although Israel’s Palestinian population has grown seven or eight-fold since, its expansion space has barely changed, leading to massive overcrowding. This problem is exacerbated by Israel’s failure to build a single new Palestinian community since 1948.

Like the other 120 surviving Palestinian communities in Israel, Baqa had been starved of resources: land, infrastructure and services. There were no parks or green areas where the Kaadan children could play. Outside their villa, there were no sidewalks, and during heavy rains untreated sewage rose out of the inadequate drains to wash over their shoes. Israel had confiscated all Baqa’s land for future development, so houses were crowded around them on all sides, often built without planning permits, which were in any case impossible to obtain. Illegal hook-ups for electricity blotted the view even further. With poor refuse collection services, the families often burnt their rubbish in nearby dumpsters.

Adel Kaadan had set his eyes on living somewhere better – and that meant moving to a Jewish community. When Israel began selling building plots in Katzir, a small Jewish cooperative community located on part on Baqa’s confiscated land, Kaadan submitted his application. When it was rejected because he was an “Arab,” he turned to the courts.

In 2000, the Kaadans’ case arrived at the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court. Aharon Barak, the court’s president who heard the petition, was the most liberal and respected judge in Israel’s history. But the Kaadans’ case was undoubtedly the most unwelcome he ever adjudicated. It placed an ardent Zionist like him in an impossible situation.

On one hand, there was no practice in Israel more clearly apartheid-like than the ethnic-based residential exclusion enforced by the admissions committees. It was simply not something Barak could afford to be seen upholding. After all, he was a regular lecturer at Yale and Harvard law schools, where he was feted, and had often been cited by liberal counterparts on the U.S. Supreme Court as a major influence on their judicial activism.

But while he could not be seen ruling in favor of  Katzir, at the same time he dared not rule in the Kaadans’ favor either. Such a decision would undermine the core rationale of a Zionist Jewish state: the Judaization of as much territory as possible. It would create a legal precedent that would throw open the doors to other Palestinian citizens, allowing them also to move into these hundreds of Jewish-only communities.

Barak understood that much else hung on the principle of residential separation. Primary and secondary education are also  segregated – and largely justified on the basis of residential separation. Jewish children go to Hebrew-language schools in Jewish areas; Palestinian children in Israel go to Arabic-language schools in Palestinian communities. (There are only a handful of private bilingual schools in Israel.)

This separation ensures that educational resources are prioritized for Jewish citizens. Arab schools are massively underfunded and their curriculum tightly controlled by the authorities, as exemplified by the 2011 Nakba Law.  It threatens public funding for any school or institution that teaches about the key moment in modern Palestinian history. Additionally, teaching posts in Arab schools have historically been dictated by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, to create spies in classrooms and common-rooms.

A side-benefit for Israel of separation in residency and education is that Palestinian and Jewish citizens have almost no chances to meet until they reach adulthood, when their characters have been formed. It is easy to fear the Other when you have no experience of him. The success of this segregation may be measured in intermarriages between Jewish and Palestinian citizens. In the year 2011, when the Israeli authorities last issued statistics, there were only 19 such marriages, or 0.03 percent. Israeli Jews openly oppose such marriages as “miscegenation.”

In fact, Israel is so opposed to intermarriages, that it prohibits such marriages from being conducted inside Israel.  Mixed couples are forced to travel abroad and marry there — typically in Cyprus — and apply for the marriage to be recognized on their return.  Notably, the 1973 United Nations Convention on Apartheid lists measures prohibiting mixed marriages as a crime of apartheid.

Residential separation has also allowed Israel to ensure Jewish communities are far wealthier and better provided with services than Palestinian ones. Although all citizens are taxed on their income, public-subsidized building programs are overwhelmingly directed at providing homes for Jewish families in Jewish areas. Over seven decades, hundreds of Jewish communities have been built by the state, with ready-made roads, sidewalks and public parks, with homes automatically connected to water, electricity and sewage grids. All these communities are built on “state land” – in most cases, lands taken from Palestinian refugees and Palestinian citizens.

By contrast, not one new Arab community has been established in that time. And the 120 recognized Palestinian communities have been largely left to sink or swim on their own. After waves of confiscation by the state, they are on the remnants of private Palestinian land. Having helped to subsidize housing and building programs for millions of Jewish immigrants, Palestinian communities have mostly had to raise their own money to install basic infrastructure, including water and sewage systems.

Meanwhile, segregated zoning areas and separate planning committees allow Israel to enforce much tougher regulations on Palestinian communities, to deny building permits and to carry out demolition orders. Some 30,000 homes are reported to be illegally built in the Galilee, almost all of them in Palestinian communities.

Similarly, most of the state’s budget for local authorities, as well as business investment, is channeled towards Jewish communities rather than Palestinian ones. This is where industrial areas and factories are built, to ensure greater employment opportunities for Jewish citizens and to top up Jewish communities’ municipal coffers with business rates.

Meanwhile, a central government “balancing grant” – intended to help the poorest local authorities by redistributing income tax in their favor – is skewed too. Even though Palestinian communities are uniformly the poorest in Israel, they typically receive a third of the balancing grant received by Jewish communities.

Residential segregation has also allowed Israel to create hundreds of “national priority areas” (NPAs), which receive preferential government budgets, including extra funding to allow for long school days. Israeli officials have refused to divulge even to the courts what criteria are used to establish these priority areas, but it is clearly not based on socio-economic considerations. Of 557 NPAs receiving extra school funding, only four tiny Palestinian communities were among their number. The assumption is that they were included only to avoid accusations that the NPAs were designed solely to help Jews.

Israel has similarly used residential segregation to ensure that priority zoning for tourism chiefly benefits Jewish communities. That has required careful engineering, given that much of the tourism to Israel is Christian pilgrimage. In the north, the main pilgrimage destination is Nazareth and its Basilica of the Annunciation, where the Angel Gabriel reputedly told Mary she was carrying the son of God. But Israel avoided making the city a center for tourism, fearing it would be doubly harmful: the income from the influx of pilgrims would make Nazareth financially independent; and a prolonged stay by tourists in the city would risk exposing them to the Palestinian narrative.

Instead the north’s tourism priority zone was established in nearby Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, a once-Palestinian city that was ethnically cleansed during the Nakba and is now a Jewish city. For decades investors have been encouraged to build hotels and tourist facilities in Tiberias, ensuring that most coachloads of pilgrims only pass through Nazareth, making a brief hour-long stop to visit the Basilica.

Although Nazareth was very belatedly awarded tourism priority status in the late 1990s – in time for the Pope’s visit for the millennium – little has changed in practice. The city is so starved of land that there is almost no room for hotels. Those that have been built are mostly located in the city’s outer limits, where pilgrims are unlikely to be exposed to Palestinian residents.

Public transport links have also privileged Jewish communities over Palestinian ones. The national bus company Egged – the main provider of public transport in Israel – has established an elaborate network of bus connections between Jewish areas, ensuring that Jewish citizens are integrated into the economy. They can easily and cheaply reach the main cities, factories and industrial zones. Egged buses, however, rarely enter Palestinian communities, depriving their residents of employment opportunities. This, combined with the lack of daycare services for young children, explains why Palestinian women in Israel have long had one of the lowest employment rates in the Arab world, at below 20 percent.

Palestinian communities have felt discrimination in the provision of security and protection too. Last November the government admitted there was woefully inadequate provision of public shelters in Palestinian communities, even in schools, against missile attacks and earthquakes. Officials have apparently balked at the large expense of providing shelters, and the problem of freeing up land in Palestinian communities to establish them. Similarly, Israel has been loath to establish police stations in Palestinian communities, leading to an explosion of crime there. In December Palestinian legislator Yousef Jabareen pointed out that there had been 381 shootings in his hometown of Umm al-Fahm in 2017, but only one indictment. He said the town’s inhabitants had become “hostages in the hands of a small group of criminals.”

In all these different ways, Israel has ensured Palestinian communities remain substantially poorer than Jewish communities. A study in December 2017 found that the richest communities in Israel – all Jewish ones – received nearly four times more welfare spending from the government than the poorest communities – Palestinian ones. A month earlier, the Bank of Israel reported that Palestinian citizens had only 2 percent of all mortgages, in a sign of how difficult it is for them to secure loans, and they had to pay higher interest charges on the loans.

Among the 35 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Israel has the highest poverty rate. This is largely because of poverty rates among Palestinian citizens, augmented by the self-inflicted poverty of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community, most of whose men refuse to work, preferring religious studies. In evidence of how Israel has skewed welfare spending to benefit poor Jews like the ultra-Orthodox, rather than Palestinian citizens, only a fifth of Jewish children live below the poverty line compared to two-thirds of Palestinian children in Israel.

Back at the Supreme Court, Aharon Barak was still grappling with the conflicting burden of Zionist history and the expectations of American law schools.  The judge  understood he needed to fudge a ruling.  He had to appear to be siding with the Kaadan family without actually ruling in their favor and thereby creating a legal precedent that would let other Palestinian families follow in their path. So he ordered Katzir to rethink its decision.

The Jewish community did so, but not in a way that helped Barak.  Katzir responded that they were no longer rejecting the Kaadans because they were Arab, but because they were “socially unsuitable.”  Barak knew that would not wash at Yale or Harvard – it too obviously sounded like code for “Arab.”  He ordered Katzir to come back with a different decision regarding the Kaadans.

The case and a few others like it dragged on over the next several years, with the court reluctant to make a precedent-setting decision. Quietly, behind the scenes, Adel Kaadan finally received a plot of land from Katzir. Unnerved, cooperative communities across the Galilee started to pass local bylaws – insisting on a “social suitability” criterion for applicants – to pre-empt any decision by the Supreme Court in favor of the Palestinian families banging at their doors.

By 2011, it looked as if the Supreme Court was running out of options and would have to rule on the legality of the admissions committees. At that point, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu stepped in to help out the court. There was no statutory basis for the admissions committees; they were simply an administrative practice observed by all these hundreds of Jewish-only cooperative communities.  The Netanyahu government, therefore, pushed through an Admissions Committee Law that year. It finally put the committees on a statutory footing, but also made them embarrassingly visible for the first time.

As the parliament backed the legislation, reports in the western media labeled it an “apartheid law” – conveniently ignoring the fact that this had been standard practice in Israel for more than six decades.

A petition from the legal group Adalah against the new law reached the Supreme Court in 2014. Barak had by this time retired. But in line with his aversion to issuing a ruling that might challenge the racist underpinnings of Israel as a Jewish state, the judges continued not to make a decision. They argued that the law was too new for the court to determine what effect the admissions committees would have in practice – or in the language of the judges, they declined to act because the law was not yet “ripe” for adjudication. The ripeness argument was hard to swallow given that the effect of the admissions committees in enforcing residential apartheid after so many decades was only too apparent.

Even so, the legal challenge launched by the Kaadans left many in the Israeli leadership worried. In February 2018, referring to the case, the justice minister Ayelet Shaked averred that in “the argument over whether it’s all right for a Jewish community to, by definition, be only Jewish, I want the answer to be, ‘Yes, it’s all right’.”

Two Modes of Apartheid

It is time to address more specifically the nature of the apartheid regime Israel has created – and how it mirrors the essence of South Africa’s apartheid without precisely replicating it.

Close to the forest planted over the ruins of the Palestinian homes of Saffuriya is a two-storey stone structure, an Israeli flag fluttering atop its roof. It is the only Palestinian home not razed in 1948. Later, it was inhabited by Jewish immigrants, and today serves as a small guest house known as Tzipori Village. Its main customers are Israeli Jews from the crowded, urban center of the country looking for a weekend break in the countryside.

Scholars have distinguished between two modes of South African apartheid. The first was what they term “trivial” or “petty” apartheid, though “visible” apartheid conveys more precisely the kind of segregation in question. This was the sort of segregation that was noticed by any visitor: separate park benches, buses, restaurants, toilets, and so on. Israel has been careful to avoid in so far as it can this visible kind of segregation, aware that this is what most people think of as “apartheid.”  It has done so, even though, as we have seen, life in Israel is highly segregated for Jewish and Palestinian citizens. Residence is almost always segregated, as is primary and secondary education and much of the economy. But shopping malls, restaurants and toilets are not separate for Jewish and Palestinian citizens.

The same scholars refer to “grand” or “resource” apartheid, which they consider to have been far more integral to apartheid South Africa’s political project. This is segregation in relation to the state’s key material resources, such as land, water and mineral wealth. Israel has been similarly careful to segregate the main material resources to preserve them for the Jewish majority alone. It does this through the establishment of hundreds of exclusively Jewish communities like Tzipori. As noted previously, almost all of Israel’s territory has been locked up in these cooperative communities. And in line with its Zionist sloganeering about making the desert bloom, Israel has also restricted the commercial exploitation of water to agricultural communities like the kibbutz and moshav. It has provided subsidized water to these Jewish-only communities – and denied it to Palestinian communities – by treating the commercial use of water as a national right for Jews alone.

A thought experiment using Tzipori Village guest house neatly illustrates how Israel practices apartheid but in a way that only marginally differs from the South African variety. Had this bed and breakfast been located in a white community in South Africa, no black citizen would have been allowed to stay in it even for a night, and even if the owner himself had not been racist. South African law would have forbidden it. But in Israel any citizen can stay in Tzipori Village, Jew and Palestinian alike. Although the owner may be racist and reject Palestinian citizens, nothing in the law allows him to do so.

But – and this is crucial – Tzipori’s admissions committee would never allow a Palestinian citizen to buy the guest house or any home in the moshav, or even rent a home there. The right a Palestinian citizen has to spend a night in Tzipori Village is “trivial” or “petty” when compared to Israel’s sweeping exclusion of all Palestinian citizens from almost all the country’s territory. That is the point the scholars of South African apartheid highlight in distinguishing between the two modes of apartheid. In this sense, Israel’s apartheid may not be identical to South Africa’s, but it is a close relative or cousin.

This difference is also apparent in Israel’s treatment of suffrage. The fact that all Israeli citizens – Jews and Palestinians – have the vote and elect their own representatives is often cited by Israel’s supporters as proof both that Israel is a normal democratic country and cannot therefore be an apartheid state. There are, however, obvious problems with this claim.

We can make sense of the difference by again examining South Africa. The reason South African apartheid took the form it did was because a white minority determined to preserve its privileges faced off against a large black majority. It could not afford to give them the vote because any semblance of democracy would have turned power over to the black population and ended apartheid.

Israel, on the other hand, managed to radically alter its demographic fortunes by expelling the vast majority of Palestinians in 1948. This was the equivalent of gerrymandering the electoral constituency of the new Jewish state on a vast, national scale. The exclusion of most Palestinians from their homeland through the Citizenship Law, and the open door for Jews to come to Israel provided by the Law of Return, ensured Israel could tailor-make a “Jewish ethnocracy” in perpetuity.

The Israeli-Palestinian political scientist Asad Ghanem has described the Palestinian vote as “purely symbolic” – and one can understand why by considering Israel’s first two decades, when Palestinian citizens were living under a military government. Then, they faced greater restrictions on their movement than Palestinians in the West Bank  today. It would be impossible even for Israel’s keenest supporters to describe Israel as a democracy for its Palestinian citizens during this period, when they were under martial law. And yet Palestinians in Israel were awarded the vote in time for Israel’s first general election in 1949 and voted throughout the military government period. In other words, the vote may be a necessary condition for a democratic system but it is far from a sufficient one.

In fact, in Israel’s highly tribal political system, Jews are encouraged to believe they must vote only for Jewish Zionist parties, ones that uphold the apartheid system we have just analyzed. That has left Palestinian citizens with no choice but to vote for contending Palestinian parties. The one major Jewish-Arab party, the Communists, was in Israel’s earliest years a significant political force among Israeli Jews. Today, they comprise a tiny fraction of its supporters, with Palestinian citizens dominating the party.

With politics so tribal, it has been easy to prevent Palestinians from gaining even the most limited access to power. Israel’s highly proportional electoral system has led to myriad small parties in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. All the Jewish parties have at various times participated in government in what are effectively rainbow coalitions. But the Palestinian parties have never been invited into an Israeli government, or had any significant impact on the legislative process. Israel’s political system may allow Palestinian citizens to vote, but they have zero political influence. This is why Israel can afford the generosity of allowing them to vote, knowing it will never disturb a tyrannical Jewish-majority rule.

Palestinian parliament member Ahmed Tibi has expressed it this way: “Israel is a democratic state for Jewish citizens, and a Jewish state for Arab citizens.”

‘Subversive’ Call for Equality

But increasingly any Palestinian presence in the Knesset is seen as too much by Israel’s Jewish parties. When the Oslo process was initiated in the late 1990s, the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships agreed that Israel’s Palestinian citizens should remain part of Israel in any future two-state arrangement. In response, Palestinian citizens began to take their Israeli citizenship seriously for the first time. A new party, Balad, was established by a philosophy professor, Azmi Bishara, who campaigned on a platform that Israel must stop being a Jewish state and become a “state of all its citizens” – a liberal democracy where all citizens would enjoy equal rights.

This campaign was soon picked up by all the Palestinian political parties, and led to a series of documents – including the most important, the Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel – demanding major reforms that would turn Israel into either “a state of its citizens” or a “consensual democracy.”

The Israeli leadership was so discomfited by these campaigns that in 2006 the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, held a meeting with the Shin Bet. Unlike usual meetings of the secret police, this discussion was widely publicized. The Israeli media reported that Shin Bet regarded the so-called Future Vision documents as “subversion” and warned that they would use any means, including non-democratic ones, to defeat any campaign for equal rights.

A year later, when Bishara – the figurehead of this movement – was out of the country on a lecture tour, it was announced that he would be put on trial for treason should he return. It was alleged that he had helped Hizbullah during Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon – a claim even the Israeli newspaper Haaretz dismissed as preposterous. Bishara stayed away. Effectively, the government and Shin Bet had declared war on demands to democratize Israel. As a result, most Palestinian politicians turned the volume down on their demands for political reform.

However, their continuing presence in the Knesset – especially as a succession of governments under Netanyahu has grown ever-more rightwing – has enraged more and more Jewish legislators. For years, the main Jewish parties have used their control of the Central Elections Committee to try to prevent leading Palestinian politicians from standing in parliamentary elections. However, the Supreme Court has – by ever-narrower margins – repeatedly overturned the CEC’s decisions.

Avigdor Lieberman, the Soviet-born Israeli defense minister who has been leading the attack on Palestinian legislators, managed to push through a Threshold Law in 2014 that raised the electoral threshold to a level that would be impossible for any of the three major Palestinian parties to surmount. But in a major surprise, these very different parties – representing Communist, Islamic and democratic-nationalist streams – put aside their differences to create a Joint List. In a prime example of unintended consequences, the 2015 election resulted in the Joint List becoming the third largest party in the Knesset.

For a brief while, and to great consternation in Israel, it looked as if the List might become the official opposition, entitling Palestinian legislators both to gain access to security briefings and to head sensitive Knesset committees.

The pressure to get rid of the Palestinian parties has continued to intensify. In 2016 the Knesset passed another law – initially called the Zoabi Law, and later renamed the Expulsion Law – that allows a three-quarters parliamentary majority to expel any legislator, not because they committed a crime or  misdeed but because the other legislators do not like their political views. The law’s original name indicated that the prime target for expulsion was Haneen Zoabi, who is now the most prominent member of Bishara’s Balad party.

According to commentators, it will be impossible to raise the three-quarters majority needed to approve such an expulsion. But in a time of war, or during one of the intermittent major attacks on Gaza, it seems probable that such a majority can be marshaled against outspoken critics of Israel – and supporters of a state of all its citizens – like Zoabi.

In fact, it only requires the expulsion of one member of the Joint List and the other members will be placed in an untenable position with their voters. They will be in the Knesset only because the Jewish Zionist legislators have chosen not to expel them – yet. This is why the Haaretz newspaper referred to the Expulsion Law as the first step in the “ethnic cleansing of the Knesset.”

As Israeli officials seem increasingly determined to abolish even the last formal elements of democracy in Israel, the country’s Palestinian leaders are finding themselves with limited options. Their only hope is to bring wider attention to the substantial democratic deficit in the Israeli polity.

In February, responding to the government’s moves to legislate a Basic Law on “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” Knesset member Yousef Jabareen submitted an alternative Basic Law. It was titled “Israel, a Democratic, Egalitarian, and Multi-cultural State.” In any western state, such a law would be axiomatic and redundant. In Israel, the measure stood no chance of gaining support in the Knesset except from Palestinian legislators.

Jabareen admitted in an interview that the bill would be unlikely to secure backing even from the five members of Meretz, by far the most leftwing Jewish party in the parliament. Optimistically, he observed: “I want to hope that Meretz will be among them [supporters]. I have shared with Meretz a draft of the bill, but I have not asked them at this stage to join, in order to give them time to mull things over.”

There could hardly be a more ringing indictment of Israeli society than the almost certain futility of seeking a Jewish legislator in the Knesset willing to support legislation for tolerance and equality.

March 20, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel has accelerated its annexation of the West Bank from a slow creep to a run

By Jonathon Cook | The National | March 18, 2018

Seemingly unrelated events all point to a tectonic shift in which Israel has begun preparing the ground to annex the occupied Palestinian territories.

Last week, during an address to students in New York, Israel’s education minister Naftali Bennett publicly disavowed even the notion of a Palestinian state. “We are done with that,” he said. “They have a Palestinian state in Gaza.”

Later in Washington, Mr Bennett, who heads Israel’s settler movement, said Israel would manage the fallout from annexing the West Bank, just as it had with its annexation of the Syrian Golan in 1980.

International opposition would dissipate, he said. “After two months it fades away and 20 years later and 40 years later, [the territory is] still ours.”

Back home, Israel has proven such words are not hollow.

The parliament passed a law last month that brings three academic institutions, including Ariel University, all located in illegal West Bank settlements, under the authority of Israel’s Higher Education Council. Until now, they were overseen by a military body.

The move marks a symbolic and legal sea change. Israel has effectively expanded its civilian sovereignty into the West Bank. It is a covert but tangible first step towards annexation.

In a sign of how the idea of annexation is now entirely mainstream, Israeli university heads mutely accepted the change, even though it exposes them both to intensified action from the growing international boycott (BDS) movement and potentially to European sanctions on scientific co-operation.

Additional bills extending Israeli law to the settlements are in the pipeline. In fact, far-right justice minister Ayelet Shaked has insisted that those drafting new legislation indicate how it can also be applied in the West Bank.

According to Peace Now, she and Israeli law chiefs are devising new pretexts to seize Palestinian territory. She has called the separation between Israel and the occupied territories required by international law “an injustice that has lasted 50 years”.

After the higher education law passed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his party Israel would “act intelligently” to extend unnoticed its sovereignty into the West Bank. “This is a process with historic consequences,” he said.

That accords with a vote by his Likud party’s central committee in December that unanimously backed annexation.

The government is already working on legislation to bring some West Bank settlements under Jerusalem municipal control – annexation via the back door. This month officials gave themselves additional powers to expel Palestinians from Jerusalem for “disloyalty”.

Yousef Jabareen, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, warned that Israel had accelerated its annexation programme from “creeping to running”.

Notably, Mr Netanyahu has said the government’s plans are being co-ordinated with the Trump administration. It was a statement he later retracted under pressure.

But all evidence suggests that Washington is fully on board, so long as annexation is done by stealth.

The US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a long-time donor to the settlements, told Israel’s Channel 10 TV recently: “The settlers aren’t going anywhere”. Settler leader Yaakov Katz, meanwhile, thanked Donald Trump for a dramatic surge in settlement growth over the past year. Figures show one in 10 Israeli Jews is now a settler. He called the White House team “people who really like us, love us”, adding that the settlers were “changing the map”.

The US is preparing to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, not only pre-empting a final-status issue but tearing out the beating heart from a Palestinian state.

The thrust of US strategy is so well-known to Palestinian leaders – and in lockstep with Israel – that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is said to have refused to even look at the peace plan recently submitted to him.

Reports suggest it will award Israel all of Jerusalem as its capital. The Palestinians will be forced to accept outlying villages as their own capital, as well as a land “corridor” to let them pray at Al Aqsa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

As the stronger side, Israel will be left to determine the fate of the settlements and its borders – a recipe for it to carry on with slow-motion annexation.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat has warned that Mr Trump’s “ultimate deal” will limit a Palestinian state to Gaza and scraps of the West Bank – much as Mr Bennett prophesied in New York.

Which explains why last week the White House hosted a meeting of European and Arab states to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

US officials have warned the Palestinian leadership, who stayed away, that a final deal will be settled over their heads if necessary. This time the US peace plan is not up for negotiation; it is primed for implementation.

With a Palestinian “state” effectively restricted to Gaza, the humanitarian catastrophe there – one the United Nations has warned will make the enclave uninhabitable in a few years – needs to be urgently addressed.

But the White House summit also sidelined the UN refugee agency UNRWA, which deals with Gaza’s humanitarian situation. The Israeli right hates UNRWA because its presence complicates annexation of the West Bank. And with Fatah and Hamas still at loggerheads, it alone serves to unify the West Bank and Gaza.

That is why the Trump administration recently cut US funding to UNRWA – the bulk of its budget. The White House’s implicit goal is to find a new means to manage Gaza’s misery.

What is needed now is someone to arm-twist the Palestinians. Mike Pompeo’s move from the CIA to State Department, Mr Trump may hope, will produce the strongman needed to bulldoze the Palestinians into submission.

March 19, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestine: The Camps and the Colonies

By Tim Anderson | American Herald Tribune | March 18, 2018

As Apartheid Israel proceeds with its ethnic cleansing of Palestine, financed and armed by the imperial powers, Palestine’s camps and Israel’s colonies (‘settlements’) remain the focus of much day to day colonial violence.

There is no need to waste too much time over the character of Israel. The Adalah group within Israel, for example, has documented more than 65 laws that make Israel a racist state (Adalah 2017). The most recent authoritative report from the UN, by US lawyers Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley (2017), makes it clear that Israel is indeed an ‘apartheid state’ and, therefore, a crime against humanity. They conclude that “the situation in Israel-Palestine constitutes an unmet obligation of the organized international community to resolve a conflict partially generated by its own actions”.

Meantime, people in the camps maintain a strong community spirit, which drives them to resist; while fanaticism and self-interest amongst the often immigrant new colonists encourages them to make regular forays destroying Palestinian crops and trees, and participate in seizures of nearby Palestinian lands.

The camps all date from the years after ‘The Catastrophe’ of 1948, when Jewish colonists got the green light to take over a large part of the ‘British Mandate’ of Palestine. Camp families are mostly those evicted from their lands by that violent event. The ‘colonies’, for their part, represent steady incursions into West Bank lands, after the 1967 war.

Israelis and Jewish populations today are encouraged to believe that, in the colonial manner, military conquest entitles Israel to Arab lands. The Zionist state illegally occupies Lebanese and Syrian, as well as Palestinian lands.

On a recent visit to Palestine’s West Bank I had the opportunity to observe the camps and the colonies. First of all, it is obvious that the Israeli state pretends to own it all. At the border Israeli officials do not even want to acknowledge that outsiders might be entering ‘Palestine’; nor do they want to hear that anyone might want to visit Ramallah, Nablus or Hebron, the major Palestinian cities. The mere mention of these names incurs suspicion. The Palestinian Authority itself – established in 1994 and recognised by at least 40 governments as a fledgling state – so far only functions as a municipality under Israeli control.

Zionist storm troops make regular raids on any part of the Palestinian territory, but particularly the camps, most often to make arrests, mostly of young men. Raids are also signals of Zionist power and are sometimes even used just as training exercises. Ali, a young man in Dehaisheh camp, now part of the southern suburbs of Bethlehem, told me the history of this camp.

Dehaisheh was created in 1950, to house the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by ‘1948 Israel’. They did not resettle, as they imagined they would be going back soon. They kept their house and land title deeds and keys. A UN agency later helped them build mostly 3 x 3 metre concrete box-dwellings. After the 1967 war, when Israeli troops took control of the West Bank, these camps were policed heavily. They were seen as hotbeds of resistance and were denied access to books (which they had to hide, and often bury) as well as to normal freedoms of movement and association.

The camp communities remain distinct to those of the municipality and the village. Ali says that for three generations they have had ‘no privacy and no property’. They had no individual titles to land. In their little box houses, which could only expand upwards, those next door could hear everything, from the bathroom to intimate moments.

Yet these conditions also meant that camp communities developed a strong collective spirit, with little crime and no voting, instead common consensus agreements. That spirit reinforced their resistance to the colonists. The presence of these strong values was confirmed to me by Naji and Amal, experienced Palestinian activists who do not live in the camps.

The camps contain various groups and political parties but, in Deheisheh, they kicked out religious sectarians, such as those of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israelis were already skillfully fomenting divisions between Muslims, Christians, Druze and Bedouins.

Around 2016 a new Israeli commander (‘Captain Nidal’) began a wave of terror on the southern West Bank camps. He told them that instead of killing youth he would ‘teach them a lesson’ they would not forget. From there began a wave of ‘knee-capping’ (shooting in the knee, to cripple), which has been widely reported (Hamayel 2016; Hass 2016; Ashly 2017). ‘Ali’ told me that over 200 young men in the camps have been crippled in this way.

Dehaisheh youth began a library/reading group, but that came to an abrupt end, Ali says, when 22 year old Raed al Salhi was shot dead (Benoist 2017) and 9 others were imprisoned.

By contrast, there is a strange air of normality in Arab cities like Ramallah, in the middle of a countryside of fences, walls and storm troops. Unlike Jerusalem, which is a heavily policed ‘mixed’ zone, life in Ramallah goes on with little day to day Israeli presence. Yet they come at night. There has been widespread international coverage of the arrest of young Ahed Tamimi, and many of her family members in Ramallah; but such arrests are an everyday occurrence, affecting thousands of families.

Each major Palestinian city these days encompasses a few ‘camps’ and is surrounded by several colonies, mostly on the surrounding hill tops. The entire West Bank is fractured with these colonies and their no-go zones, roads and fences.

People hear a lot about the recent separation wall, which annexes all of what was supposed to be the ‘international city’ of Jerusalem to ‘1948 Israel’. Yet there are also dozens of walls throughout the West Bank, protecting the colonies, their associated army bases, linked lands and feeder roads. These colonies also line the Jordan River and indeed all perimeter areas of the West Bank. There are more kilometres of walls and fences protecting colonies throughout the West Bank than there are in the infamous separation wall.

An impressive sign on the outskirts of Ramallah declares, in Hebrew, Arabic and English: ‘This Road leads To Area ‘A’ Under the Palestinian Authority The Entrance For Israeli Citizens Is Forbidden, Dangerous To Your Lives And Is Against The Israeli Law’ [exact punctuation]. This is all a show of deference, of course.

Israeli troops make regular night-time raids on all Palestinian cities and towns. But special attention is paid to the camps. Troops raided Balata camp, just south of Nablus, the day before I visited Nablus. They killed a young local man in custody, the day I arrived in Jericho. Elsewhere the resistance sniped at Israeli troops, as the Zionist government announced plans to criminalise criticism of the Israeli military.

Ali says heavily armed Israeli troops invade Dehaisheh about two times every week. Nevertheless this camp remains strong and cohesive. When Israeli lawyers offered Ali some money to buy his family land in ‘1948 Israel’, he refused. It is not just the land, he said; it is about culture and identity.

Israel sometimes recognises historic Palestinian land title, but often does not. Land is seized in a variety of ways. It can be bought, compulsorily acquired for infrastructure such as separation walls and roads or simply taken without notice. Amal’s family land on the outskirts of Ramallah was seized without notice, for the perimeter land and fences of a new colony outside Ramallah. Land is also stolen through punitive demolitions. In a peculiarly colonial form of collective punishment, homes and lands are taken from the families of those convicted of resistance activities.

Ali wants international support, but resents western aid agencies which come to Palestine, pretending to help communities with their own ideas of ‘empowerment’. He recalls a young European woman preaching to experienced Palestinian mothers about ‘how to be a good mother’. Some of the women laughed, finding it hard to believe. ‘We are not helpless victims, we are people with a strong culture’, Ali said.

Ethnic cleansing has advanced substantially in recent decades, despite the withdrawal from Gaza and Israel’s 2006 defeat in south Lebanon at the hands of Hezbollah. To that extent some limits have been imposed, by the Resistance, on the expansion of ‘Greater Israel’. Israel would have annexed large parts of southern Lebanon by now, were it not for Hezbollah.

However the West Bank is under serious threat. In the late 1960s the plan of Yigal Allon called for annexation of 40% of the West Bank, and control of the Jordan River (Reinhart 2006: 51). Israel’s Labor Party broadly backed that idea, in contrast to the extreme right which has always wanted it all. Now Israel controls about 60% of the West Bank, choking it with walls and fences. The territory is almost cut in half. One consequence of this expanded ethnic cleansing has been to mark a definitive end to any ‘two state solution’.

Endnotes

Adalah (2017) ‘The Discriminatory Laws Database’, 25 September, online: https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771

Ali (2018) interview with this writer at Dehaisheh camp (Bethlehem), Occupied Palestine, February [‘Ali’ is a pseudonym, to protect him from Israeli reprisals. The Israeli parliament is currently trying to pass a law which would criminalise criticism of the Zionist military. Already such criticism serves as grounds for interrogation and possible imprisonment.]

Amal (2018) interviews with this writer at Ramallah, Occupied Palestine, February

Ashly, Jacyln (2017) ‘How Israel is disabling Palestinian teenagers’, Al Jazeera, 21 September, online: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/israel-disabling-palestinian-teenagers-170911085127509.html

Benoist, Chloé (2017) ‘Raed al-Salhi, another Palestinian life of promise snuffed out by Israel’, Middle East Eye, 8 September, online: http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/life-and-death-raed-young-palestinian-big-plans-861499040

Falk, Richard and Virginia Tilley (2017) Palestine – Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture; East Jerusalem Vol. 22, Issue 2/3, 191-196; also available here: https://counter-hegemonic-studies.net/israeli-apartheid/

Hamayel, Mohammad (2016) ‘Israeli military practice kneecapping against Palestinians’, Press TV, 29 August, online: http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2016/08/29/482147/Israeli-military-kneecapping-Palestinians

Hass, Amira (2016) ‘Is the IDF Conducting a Kneecapping Campaign in the West Bank?’, Haaretz, 27 August, online: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/is-the-idf-conducting-a-kneecapping-campaign-in-the-west-bank-1.5429695

Naji (2018) interview with this writer at Bethlehem, Occupied Palestine, February

Reinhart, Tania (2006) The Road Map to Nowhere, Verso, London

Dr. Tim Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney. He researches and writes on development, human rights and self-determination in the Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. He has published dozens of articles and chapters in academic journals and books, as well as essays in a range of online journals. His work includes the areas of agriculture and food security, health systems, regional integration and international cooperation.

March 18, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Iran official warns Europe against playing US-Israeli game

Press TV – March 17, 2018

A senior Iranian official has warned European countries against playing into the hands of the United States and the Israeli regime as European signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal propose fresh sanctions against Tehran under the pressure of Washington.

“Defense capabilities, particularly the missile program, of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which have a deterrent nature, will firmly be continued based on national security necessities,” Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani said in a meeting with Oman’s Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi in Tehran on Saturday.

“Political and media propaganda will have no impact on their development,” he added.

Britain, France and Germany have proposed new EU sanctions on Iran over its missile program and its regional role, a confidential document said on Friday.

The joint paper was sent to the EU capitals to sound out support for such sanctions as they would need the backing of all 28 member states of the bloc, Reuters quoted two people familiar with the matter as saying.

The proposal is allegedly part of an EU strategy to appease US President Donald Trump and preserve the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Tehran and the P5+1 group of countries in 2015 amid constant US threats to withdraw from it.

Shamkhani said US failure to fulfill its obligations and its illegal approach to the JCPOA as well as Europe’s passivity with regard to Washington’s approaches clearly show that regional countries need to focus on finding a solution to the ongoing issues and crises in the region by themselves.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will give a proper and due response to the US constant violations of its commitments under the JCPOA and will accept no change, interpretation or new measure that would limit the JCPOA,” the SNSC secretary said.

His comments came a day after Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned the US against the “painful mistake” of pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement.

“Considering what has been envisaged in the JCPOA in the field of research and development and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s continued measures to develop its peaceful nuclear capability, if the US makes the mistake of exiting the JCPOA, it will definitely be a painful mistake for the Americans,” Zarif told reporters.

Elsewhere in his comments, Shamkhani said growing deep relations between Iran and Oman had led to consensus on regional issues.

“The development of constructive and all-out relations with neighbors based on common interests is the top priority of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s foreign policy,” he added.

The senior Iranian official lashed out at certain regional countries for adopting “a hasty and arrogant attitude and statements” which have posed serious challenges to the handling of regional crises.

He expressed his concern about the killing of Yemeni women and children in airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as the catastrophic conditions of the oppressed Yemeni people.

“The shared view of Iran and Oman on the Yemeni crisis is based on putting an immediate end to war, establishing ceasefire, lifting the blockade, dispatching humanitarian aid and holding Yemeni-Yemeni dialogue to form new political structures based on the Yemeni people’s demands and vote,” Shamkhani pointed out.

He emphasized that the Yemeni crisis cannot be settled through military approaches and urged a political initiative in this regard.

About 14,000 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabia’s military campaign against Yemen in March 2015. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country’s infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

The United Nations says a record 22.2 million people are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.

The UN Security Council on March 15 warned about the worsening humanitarian situation in war-battered Yemen, stating the status quo is having a “devastating” impact on the lives of civilians in the impoverished Arab country.

“The Security Council expresses its grave concern at the continued deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Yemen, and the devastating humanitarian impact of the conflict on civilians,” it said in a statement.

Oman urges dialogue instead of military approaches

The Omani foreign minister, for his part, criticized military approaches to regional issues and urged the path of dialogue and understanding instead.

He added that Oman regards Iran as a trustworthy neighboring country and commended the Islamic Republic’s role in establishing stability and security in the region.

Bin Alawi arrived in Tehran Friday night on a two-day visit to hold talks with senior Iranian officials about mutual and regional issues.

Iran rejects speculations about bin Alawi’s visit

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qassemi on Saturday rejected speculation about a link between the Omani minister’s visit to Tehran and US Defense Secretary James Mattis’s recent travel to Muscat and said bin Alawi’s trip was taking place with the purpose of strengthening mutual relations.

“Although Oman has very good relations with many countries in the world, Mr. Yusuf bin Alawi’s trip to Tehran has nothing to do with Mattis’s visit to this country,” Qassemi said.

He strongly rejected any link between bin Alawi’s visit to Tehran and US policies on the JCPOA.

The Iranian spokesperson said, “Iran and Oman are cooperating with each other on a wide range of issues and the two sides seek to use the two countries’ existing capacities to further deepen economic, commercial, banking and financial cooperation.”

March 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia meddling in Lebanon’s affairs, pitting people against each other: Hezbollah official

Deputy Chairman of Hezbollah’s Executive Council Sheikh Nabil Qaouq (Photo by al-Manar television network)
Press TV – March 17, 2018

A senior official of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement has accused Saudi officials of interfering in Lebanon’s domestic affairs and pitting people from various walks of life against each other.

“Saudi Arabia’s latest interference in Lebanon’s internal affairs is embodied in meddling in the country’s upcoming parliamentary elections. Saudi interventions are pitting the Lebanese against each other, and creating divisions and political tensions among them,” Deputy Chairman of Hezbollah’s Executive Council Sheikh Nabil Qaouq said on Saturday.

He added, “Saudi Arabia wishes to change Lebanon’s political equations through interfering in the elections, collecting information about composition of future electoral lists and supporting candidates that could challenge Hezbollah.”

Commenting on the ongoing military drills between the US and Israeli armies in the southern areas of occupied Palestinian territories, the senior Hezbollah official pointed out that “the maneuver officially documents Israel’s recognition of the fact that Hezbollah can reach the depth of Israel, and that Israel has no ability to confront the resistance movement’ rockets.”

He stressed that Hezbollah is now the main obstacle to Israel’s expansionist policies in the Middle East region.

On October 30 last year, Saudi Minister of State for Persian Gulf Affairs Thamer al-Sabhan issued threats against Lebanon’s government as well as Iran and Hezbollah via Twitter, stating that the movement needed to be “toppled” in Lebanon.

The Saudi minister also warned in an interview with Lebanese MTV television station that there would be “astonishing” developments to “oust” Hezbollah.

He also said that Saudi Arabia would deal with Lebanon’s government as a hostile administration because of Hezbollah’s power-sharing role in it.

On November 4, 2017, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation in a televised statement from Saudi Arabia, citing many reasons, including the security situation in Lebanon, for his sudden decision. He also said that he sensed a plot being hatched against his life.

He returned to Beirut on November 21. All political factions in Lebanon had called on him to return back home.

Top Lebanese officials and senior politicians close to Hariri had earlier said that he had been forced to resign, and that Saudi authorities were holding him captive.

Lebanese President Michel Aoun had also refused to accept Hariri’s resignation.

March 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | , , , , | Leave a comment

Good Wishes for Nowruz

Iranians Prepare to Celebrate the Persian New Year, Netanyahu Is Sounding the Drums of War

By Miko Peled | American Herald Tribune | March 17, 2108

As millions of Iranians prepare to celebrate the Persian new year, Nowruz, we should extend our wishes for peace and prosperity to our Iranian brothers and sisters. However, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu is once again sounding the drums of war and his target is once again Iran. It seems that when the going gets tough Netanyahu goes for Iran. He has done it several times in the past and most recently during his latest visit to Washington, DC. Netanyahu – arguably in an effort to divert attention from his impending indictment – insisted that “Iran, Iran, Iran” is a threat. And although all who visit Iran talk about the richness of its culture, the beauty of its landscapes and the kindness of its people, according to Netanyahu “Darkness is descending on our region,” and that darkness is caused by Iran. “Iran,” a country that has never attacked or occupied anyone, “is building an aggressive empire” which includes, “Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen” and “more to come.”

It is no coincidence that Netanyahu specifically mentioned Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen. The message that he sends is clear: the destruction of Iraq and Syria must go on because of Iran; the destabilization of Lebanon and the demonizing of Hezbollah must go on, the genocide in Gaza too will go on, not because of Zionist genocidal tendencies but because of Iranian influence and finally, in a message of support to Mohammad Bin Salman, Netanyahu gave his blessing to the ongoing Saudi bombing in Yemen. It so happens that during his recent visit to the UK, Bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia just sealed a deal to receive billions of pounds worth of weapons to be used in the ongoing slaughter in Yemen. Netanyahu explained that these are the arms of the “Iranian empire” and even though the lion’s share of the killing in the Middle East is done by the US, Israel and their cronies, Iran is the problem. “More to come” Netanyahu added presumably as a threat that Israel is keeping open the possibility that still other countries may see destruction.

Though he did not mention it specifically, at the center of Netanyahu’s speech is the new vision for the Middle East- sewn together by Israel, The United States and the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman. What has been named “The Deal of the Century” in English and Safkat El Kurn in Arabic (the Arabic name being less ambitious as it means the deal of the decade) is a vision of an “open” and “moderate” Saudi Arabia which like Jordan and Egypt will have diplomatic relations with Israel ignoring the Palestinian people’s struggle against Zionist oppression. In return Saudi Arabia will be permitted to continue its own genocide in Yemen and receive Western support in its ongoing feud with Iran. It will also be spared, like Egypt and Jordan, “Israel’s longtime peace partners,” the lectures on human rights violations. Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are all reactionary dictatorships with leaders who have no regard for human rights and who sold their Palestinian brothers in return for billions of dollars. The message for Arab regimes is clear – collaborate with Israel and the West and you will be allowed to oppress your people and line your pockets with cash, or stand with the Palestinians and find yourself in ruins like Iraq and Syria or under constant threat like Iran. Clearly, Mohammad Bin Salman made his choice clear.

“The force behind so much of what is bad is this radical tyranny in Tehran. If I have a message for you today, it’s a very simple one: We must stop Iran. We will stop Iran.”

Stop Iran from doing what? Stop Iran from supporting the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Stop Iran from calling to remove the racist Zionist regime from Palestine and to allow for a democracy to emerge. How is Iran a dangerous radical tyranny more than Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia? The difference is that the latter are happy to collaborate with Israel.

Netanyahu is accustomed to receiving political gifts from the U.S. and particularly from Donald Trump. These are gifts that solidify his power at home, and this time he received the following: “The President has also made it clear that if the fatal flaws of the nuclear deal are not fixed, he will walk away from the deal and restore sanctions.” The United States walking away from the Iran agreement will suit Israel fine, and will show Bin Salman that when it comes to the US, Israel can deliver. While other Israeli politicians run around the like children, with few achievements to show Netanyahu is a serious player on national and international issues.

The troubling partnership between Bin Salman, Netanyahu and Trump (through his son-in-law Jared Kushner) will inevitably crash and burn. Both Bin Salman and Netanyahu represent regimes that have no legitimacy and the Kushner-Trump foreign policy is founded on Zionist mythology and grand ambitions that disregard the will of the people of the region. It is an irony that Netanyahu could not resist calling Iran dishonest, “I warned that Iran’s regime had repeatedly lied to the international community, that it could not be trusted,” and then add the biggest lie of them all, “Israel remains committed to achieving peace with all our neighbors, including the Palestinians.”

Hard as it may be to believe, Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran has nothing to do with Iran and it has nothing to do with any real or perceived threat by Iran. Netanyahu discovered that Iran is a perfect target to use each time he needs a smoke screen. As Palestinians die a slow agonizing death due to his policies, thirsty for water, desperate for urgent medical care and fighting for their freedom, killed in the streets and held in Israeli torture chambers, Netanyahu the magician is terrifying the world with a smoke screen intended to turning the world’s attention to a threat that does not exist. Still, one may safely assume some seventy-five million Iranians are concerned for their country and their lives.

As Nowruz approaches, I wish all Iranians inner strength, peace, prosperity and Nowruz Mobarak.

Miko Peled is a writer and human rights activist. He is an international speaker and the author of “The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine”.

March 17, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hamas denounces Abbas’s accusations regarding Gaza explosion

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum
Palestine Information Center – March 13, 2018

GAZA – The Hamas movement on Tuesday slammed the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s statements in which he held Hamas responsible for the explosion that targeted the Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah in Gaza.

The Movement stressed that what happened was a crime and an attempt to harm the reconciliation.

Hamas’s spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a press statement that his Movement strongly condemns the attack on Hamdallah’s convoy in Gaza, affirming that this crime is a thinly veiled attempt to undermine the reconciliation efforts and harm Gaza’s security.

Barhoum slammed the “ready accusations” made by Abbas and called on Gaza’s Ministry of Interior to open an urgent investigation into the crime to hold its perpetrators accountable.

Hamdallah’s convoy was targeted by a blast shortly after it arrived in the Gaza Strip through Beit Hanoun (Erez) checkpoint. No injuries were reported.

Gaza’s Ministry of Interior said that Hamdallah resumed his mission scheduled for Tuesday and affirmed that security services are investigating the incident.

March 13, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

Three Years after Guilt-Trip Ambush: Germany to Enhance Societal Destabilization on Path to Self-Destruction

By D. E. Steil  |  Aletho News | March 13, 2018

I – Introduction – Merkel to continue leadership that has thus far been a colossal failure in numerous instances

Tomorrow Angela Merkel is expected to be elected in the Bundestag to a fourth term as Germany’s federal chancellor, a position she has continuously held for over a dozen years. Below is an analysis of the current political situation in Germany, which has been dominated by the ongoing migration crisis. This report contains details about specific events during the past few years, especially in 2015, which led to a crisis condition. Sufficient background information plus thirty links are contained for the reader to understand important developments in a proper context. The impact of certain flawed elements of German society, its media organizations, the political party landscape, the judicial structure, and popular sentiment, which, through their interactions, contribute to an ongoing erosion of community and increasing strife, are highlighted with specific examples. Some of the facts included here are being presented for the first time in English, though most people in Germany have also been completely unaware of them. The report is subdivided into 18 different sections to delineate various interrelated themes and facilitate legibility.

Often a contemporary joke, not unlike a political cartoon drawing, succinctly encapsulates poignant realities and may elicit mirth. Have you heard the latest one, about a particular type of dog encountering a rare bird?

Question: What type of creature do you get when you cross-breed a poodle on a leash with a parrot in a birdcage?

Answer: A German Supporter of Merkel, even if only implicitly. (Cumulatively, that’s a majority of adult Germans).

On Sunday, March 4, 2018, it was announced that a majority of nearly two thirds of the voting members of Germany’s oldest political party, the Social Democrats (SPD), gave permission for its party leaders to proceed with a coalition agreement they had negotiated a few weeks ago with party representatives of the Christian Democratic Union (SDU), headed by Angela Merkel, and the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), headed by Horst Seehoferfor more for than ten years until his resignation earlier today, after which he moves to Berlin to take on the position of Minister of the Interior. This means that Germany will finally form a majority government nearly half a year after federal elections were held last September. These three parties had already constituted the previous coalition government for four years, though with a more substantial majority of seats than is the case now. Based on the parameters of the new coalition agreement, which party leaders of CDU and CSU have already ratified without a popular vote of its registered party members, one thing is certain: Societal destabilization – triggered in the summer of 2015 by a historically unprecedented influx of illegal migration to Germany upon Merkel’s open-ended invitation, which has not been rescinded so that it continues at a rate of a few hundred newcomers on a daily basis – will be significantly exacerbated.

The previous Merkel coalition government has been a colossal failure, not only regarding the all-important migration crisis but also in its dealing with the euro currency crisis, the lingering European banking crisis, the Greek bankruptcy crisis, the governmental spying scandal, the Ukrainian government coup, the diesel emission fraud scandal, a breakdown in diplomatic and commercial relations with Russia, the supply and preparedness scandal in the German military, increasing impoverishment of many among the older generation (Altersarmut) receiving meager pensions, critical urban housing shortages brought on by a combination of negligent planning, speculative foreign investment in urban real estate, and demand by migrants from eastern Europe and beyond, who have chosen to live in high density population centers, which have resulted in skyrocketing property and rental prices. No matter what the critical issues have been, actual solutions were not provided; the specific situations remain unresolved, they were either made worse or deferred. For instance, to highlight that general affluence is purely a myth, it was recently announced by a European statistical agency that the acute risk of becoming poor due to unemployment was over 70% in Germany, significantly higher than in any of the 28 countries of the EU. Though Germany’s labor agency claims a low unemployment rate, such figures are artificial, as they are known to be in the US too. It is remarkable that Merkel still remains sufficiently popular with a substantial portion of the population so that rival politicians have not dared to oust her from office, even though it must be evident by now that she actually dislikes her country – and its flag – to such an extent that she is allowing the gradual deterioration of social cohesion to progress, yet the population appears to oblivious. Like sheep or cattle, millions of people are eagerly or just blindly following her into the abyss.

II – Forced immigration and social stratification are unfair to citizens because they induce alienation and conflict

For many centuries societies built fortified walls around their settlements to keep out unwanted invaders. Even today dwellers build fences or walls, with gates, around their homes, and it is a common feature of entrance doors to come with locks. Social progress brought on the concept of the nation state, which was based on basic commonalities and affinities of the people they represented, same language, related ethnicities or a common heritage such as religious beliefs. Until recently external borders in European countries had border crossings or checkpoints, as continues to be the case in most countries in the world. Maintaining open borders was subjected to negotiated treaties and agreements among countries with a similar social structure and political values, premised on external borders continuing to be subject to rigid controls. This system worked rather well until 2015, in which year the system broke down, through malicious subterfuge and ultimately, the egregious and illegal decision by Merkel, as will be explained below, with the complicity of party colleagues and the media. Millions of foreign people (with different ethnicities, different languages, different customs, different religions, from economically underdeveloped societies) have been resettled, purportedly temporarily, but in reality with the repeatedly professed intent to somehow permanently “integrate” them into the indigenous population. From many decades of social experiments already conducted elsewhere, it should be understood what the consequences of such a large-scale resettlement effort will likely be.

It must be noted that this new German “experiment”, which is preordained to fail calamitously – as have previous German social experiments last century that were attempted under some flavor of “Humanism”, as described by Yuval Noah Harari  – is in clear violation of the preamble and spirit of the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949:

The parties to this treaty… are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.

This acknowledges the very basic right of a society or country to maintain and preserve such cultural commonalities. Contrary to what the treaty stipulates, the common heritage and civilization of the German people, who are being invaded, is not being safeguarded at all but being intentionally destroyed over time through the demographic effects that will ensue. Though such basic societal aspects have been instinctively understood for centuries, it has been established beyond dispute by Robert D. Putnam, a social researcher at Harvard University, that mixing newcomers into a society results in mutual distrust. A sense of social cohesion gets replaced by increasing stratification, conflict, societal corrosion. This must certainly be evident to anyone who has ever visited such cities as New York, London, and Paris, among the larger centers where such phenomena are constantly on display. The migration processes leading to these phenomena came about by enacting certain laws that allowed such migration to occur.

What forces or impulses led to the drafting, introducing, and lobbying for such legislation is equally well documented but is rarely discussed in the popular media, if at all. Triggered by their paranoia, Jewish elites living in the galut, sought to become more visibly inconspicuous in their respective environments. They were concerned about their safety from collective historical experiences of expulsion, of which there had been many. Rarely reflecting honestly exactly what about their conduct or behavior might have prompted such animosities, they reflexively blamed their host population, which limited the remedies they would consider. By altering the ethnic and racial make-up of modern western societies in North America and Western Europe, their fear factor is decreased because they can more easily blend in with the indigenous population with whom they share more similarities, genetically and culturally, than, say, migrants who have come from sub-Saharan Africa or East Asiatic regions. With regard to the US situation in Europe, this has been very well documented by psychology researcher Kevin MacDonald (Jewish Involvement in Shaping American Immigration Policy, 1881–1965: A Historical Review). With regard to the situation in Sweden, Barbara Lerner Spectre, who had moved from Wisconsin to Israel to Stockholm, has been rather candid about acknowledging this too, in videos that went viral a few years ago. With regard to the situation in Germany, Jewish leaders have played a significant role too, most explicitly in May 2015, through psychological coercion (guilt-tripping), as is documented farther below in Section IX.

III – A combination of lacking freedom of speech and tight media control effectively enhances social conformity

The legislative period prior to last September’s parliamentary election had been a disaster for the common people in Germany, though the powerful television and print media, who shape the cognitive framework of the majority of the population, have been very successful in covering up this fact, through distorted reporting, lies of omission, and other tricks that generate a result that is known under the generic term “fake news”. In Germany critical intellectuals refer to them as the “lying press” (Lügenpresse). The degree of uniformity they display when reporting on the critical issues concerning the country has been even tighter in Germany than what has been in evidence by the US media in its nearly universal support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election season and thereafter. The German media, which lack the healthy and thriving alternative Internet media landscape evident in the US, tend to be even more ideologically driven than the US corporate media. Unlike in the US, German journalists do not make a pretense of being unbiased, for they see it as their duty to project a selective and slanted interpretation of actual events or developments (Deutungshoheit) and incidentally also function as a type of thought police (Gedankenpolizei) by vilifying those whose views might stray too far from permitted opinion. In Germany, as nearly everywhere else, freedom to publicly express any opinion is not constitutionally guaranteed, as is the case in the US. Under the fuzzy pretext of cherishing human “dignity” as a paramount value, certain paragraphs in the German penal code forbid anybody to publicly insult or disparage others too strongly (Beleidigung), which in the US might be an actionable civil matter under libel and slander laws. Criminalizing such kinds of opinion fosters superficial politeness, lest some influencial individual, whose feelings were allegedly hurt, files a criminal complaint to investigate the matter. An incidental effect is that powerful crooks and liars are less likely to be strongly criticized. In the absence of freedoms of speech that Americans take for granted, the level of social conformity and acquiescence, to whatever standards of thought the media set, increases. The higher one’s social standing, correlating strongly with educational level, the farther down one could fall upon stepping out of line with an unpopular opinion, due to an effect known as public shaming, that can be achieved through negative media reinforcement. This leads to the paradoxical situation, witnessed in US towns with top universities, namely that very well educated people often publicly project themselves as ignoramuses by professing opinions on social issues that they ought to know are contrived. Such attitudes are a reflection of the cognitive dissonance they develop as a consequence of political correctness overload, as they learn what they dare not mention openly. In Germany and Sweden the traditional media have been very effective in maintaining this behavioral control mechanism while incrementally yet constantly narrowing the scope of opinions that will avoid possible ostracism.

IV – Manipulating public perceptions by obfuscating basic facts and lying with false and misleading terminology

As was revealed late 2014 in a book by a former journalist, turned to whistleblower, Udo Ulfkotte, formerly employed by Germany’s preferred newspaper read by top level decision makers, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, prominent and influential journalists in Germany are “bought” (Gekaufte Journalisten) to serve special interest groups and also collaborate with the CIA, which tells them what to write. Though this admission is hardly shocking, given the power of the press, it is nonetheless helpful for prior presumptions to have been confirmed by a person, who was part of this practice, to then come clean and publicly apologize for his own involvement before  his death, last year. A concrete example from the German media’s methods of “perception management” – the contemporary term for what used to be referred to as “thought control” or “mind control” or simply “brainwashing” – has been the persistent use of the word Flüchtlinge (i.e. refugees, more precisely “those who are fleeing”) when referring to the assortment of migrants who have arrived overland in Bavaria by way of Austria and other countries farther south before that, either from Africa or the Middle East. According to Germany’s own basic law, as well as international treaties and agreements, by the time the migrants arrive at Germany’s border they have relinquished any possible refugee status that may have obtained elsewhere, based on strict criteria. Therefore, they have no legal right whatsoever to apply for – much less receive – asylum in Germany. An orderly procedure to deal with their presence would involve refusing them entry or immediately deporting them if they had already crossed the border. Repeatedly using this particular word and its derivations in that manner, for instance “refugee crisis” (Migrationskrise), is simply a bold lie and a tacit insult at least to Austria, because the implication, if the word were used correctly, would have to be that these migrants had all incurred individual political persecution by the Austrian government, from which jurisdiction they were compelled to taking flight, as it were. Yet both Austria and Sweden had actually taken in a higher percentage of alien migrants, relative to their respective populations, than has Germany. Using this term also entails a degree of arrogance because it tacitly suggests some moral superiority or high-minded benevolence on the part of Germany for providing refuge to those economic migrants who have come so far. On a psychological level, this makes those people who are perpetually burdened by self-hatred and unearned guilt, to feel a little better. In practice, this misleading term has also been used by the media to even pertain to those migrants whose asylum requests were rejected, and whose continued residency is simply “tolerated” (geduldet) by the local governments instead of being deported.

V – Falsely invoking “humanitarian” reasons as a pretense for a historically unprecedented and criminal decision

As Europeans have witnessed, the established legal premises and procedures for dealing with a mass influx into Germany, by migrants who are not members of the European Union (EU), had been unilaterally abandoned by Merkel in early September 2015, with no prior consultations with members of her own government. This unilateral action constituted a major crime. It was done under a false guise simply by invoking the magic word “humanitarian”, a useful lie that somehow causes people’s brains to lock up, causing any rational or critical thinking to be automatically aborted by the population. Practice has shown that it is possible to trick a people into accepting the most reprehensible acts, including waging war and killing hundreds of thousands of people, so long as these crimes are summarily packaged as somehow being humanitarian. The assertion “We had to destroy the village [Ben Tre] to save it” from the era of the Vietnam war is an example of such a purportedly humanitarian gesture, as was the US bombing campaign against Serbia a few decades thereafter. However, Merkel did not just accept a few trains filled with migrants coming from Hungary through Vienna as a special exception, she subsequently went on to publicly invite any and all migrants to come to Germany and receive an enthusiastic public welcome (Willkommenskultur). They were primarily young males, of whom many had previously been ‘Islamist’ mercenaries driven out by the Syrian troops. This was likely the most ominous and stupid decision yet made this century, which has led to a completely novel situation, unprecedented in human history. As will be explained in detail below in Section IX, there is plenty of evidence that this was definitely not an ad hoc response to an unforeseen emergency situation, as the media have deceptively portrayed it to have been, but the consequence of an orchestrated destabilization campaign, one of the various modes of asymmetric warfare, planned months ahead of time, which not only high officials but even the general public had been warned about, months before, as being imminent unless appropriate counter-measures would be adopted. Though even the alternative media have neglected to do so, due to a lack of information, it is possible, within a contextual chronology of events in the first half of 2015, to trace back the origin of Merkel’s commitment to break the laws on a grand scale – also to have the Bavarian minister to go along with it – and thereby permanently alter the future demographics of the population within Germany, possibly even in other countries. Her determination to betray her country and its population was triggered by listening to a fateful speech given in early May 2015 north of Munich, at a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp by US troops.

VI – The symbiosis between the authoritarian and elite “leftist” Green Party and Merkel’s shifting policy positions

Nowadays a substantial proportion of German journalists sympathize with the Green Party, which during its inception a few decades ago primarily promoted their desired legalization of pederasty (for which they have apologized only decades later) and the banning of nuclear power generation plants, which is in the process of being implemented. They were very supportive of so-called “humanitarian bombings” in the Balkans, solar and wind power, and more recently, taking cues from the Obama regime, have been obsessed with advocating or promoting divisive cultural Marxist issues (gender identity, homosexual marriage, ethnic multiculturalism through unchecked mass migration, political correctness, global warming alarmism, open borders, self-hatred, abolishing national sovereignty, opposing free speech, and fighting vocally against “the right”). The Green Party is most popular among school teachers and petty bureaucrats, who enjoy special privileges in German society, students and people who got university degrees in sociology, psychology, journalism, political science, and pedagogy. Given the fact that they are German, those seven political parties that were elected to the Bundestag last September have an authoritarian bent, but the Green Party is the most authoritarian of them all, which is not surprising since their roots lie in the doctrinaire “New Left” movement that derived from the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Their leading functionaries are the most eager to dictate what the behavior of everybody else ought to be, yet are most zealous in filing criminal complaints because they felt personally insulted by some criticism or crude remark. Most memorable is their proposal, a few years ago, to force cafeterias to serve veggie burgers at least once a week because eating beef consumed more resources. Since they do not object to economic neo-liberalism, they have become an important pillar of contemporary “One World” Globalism of open borders. Accordingly, their support among those who might consider themselves “working class” laborers in the industrial and service sectors is miniscule.

As one might expect, a party with such a dubious pedigree as the Green Party is characterized by hypocrisy and internal contradictions. For instance, while its leadership professes to be strongly “anti-fascist”, representatives have no problems with Germany maintaining close relations with such quintessentially fascist regimes that are currently in power in Israel, Ukraine, Turkey, and China. Though the word “Green” refers to environmentalism, the consequences of their advocacy has harmed the environment. The Green Party strongholds are primarily in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, which is headed by a Green Party member. The mayors of the university towns of Tübingen and Freiburg are from the Green Party. Only in two of nearly three hundred voting districts did the Green Party exceed a vote of 20% – in Freiburg, with their strongest showing at 21.2%, and in one of the central districts in Berlin. The mayor of the capital city, Stuttgart, is also from the Green Party. Stuttgart happens to be a bastion of the automotive industry. Daimler, the maker of Mercedes cars, Porsche, manufacturer of sporty vehicles, both have their headquarters, respective museums, and some manufacturing facilities in Stuttgart, as does Bosch, the largest automotive supplier. In part due to its topography, Stuttgart residents continue to suffer some of Germany’s worst air pollution. In their zeal to limit carbon dioxide emissions, as if they were toxic, the Green Party has wound up promoting diesel vehicles simply because they are slightly more efficient than gasoline engines, while ignoring the far more serious health effects of carbon particulate matter and harmful nitrogen oxides coming from diesel combustion, as if people were not already aware of this fact from the serious incidences of smog experienced in Tokyo and Los Angeles forty years ago. Suddenly, however, anyone who drives a diesel car is a sucker (one third of registered cars in Germany have diesel motors), since a few days ago Germany’s top administrative court ruled that city administrators are permitted to ban diesel cars due to their obligation to curtail excessive air pollution, at least two thirds of which is caused by diesel vehicles. Thirdly, in a most incredible exercise in self-deception, self-righteous adherents of the German Green Party tout the coexistence of radical feminism with misogynist practices of men from Asian and African societies because “it’s part of their culture”. Though such antithetical concepts are not subject to debate, some people are beginning to wonder, resulting in a loss of support for this party, which used to have a much stronger following a decade ago. Since the professed desire by politicians for unspecified cultural integration is a delusion, the only way to synthesize such opposing concepts is to support the creation of parallel societies (Parallelgesellschaften), essentially ghettos, or “no-go” zones where police do not venture into. From a class analysis perspective, elitists do not regard such a development as a problem because they have the resources to live in more affluent enclaves and send their children to private schools, while the less financially endowed sectors of society are left to deal with reduced employment and housing opportunities, high crime, and other manifestations of social ferment.

In the federal election last September (with over 76% participation rate) the Green Party received less than nine percent of the total vote. That was less than those who voted for the Left Party (proponents of the traditional economic Marxism; their legacy comes from the near-totalitarian East German society, though they now also support unconstrained mass migration) as well as those who voted for the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which appeals mainly to managers, bankers, physicians, entrepreneurs, attorneys, affluent and wealthy individuals. It would be fair to say that the majority of tax dodgers and evaders have a strong political affinity toward the FDP. Generally, this party is the least authoritarian of the seven parties.

What is important to understand is that during the course of more than a dozen years as Germany’s chancellor, Merkel has continuously drifted toward adopting positions that have been traditionally dear to the Green Party. Thereby, she has effectively become the Green Party’s “secret” leader, or top ally. So as not to be eclipsed by her shifting, the Green party has advocated more extremist and self-destructive positions. These views were not necessarily shared by the vast majority of the population but passively tolerated. In principle, most Green Party voters can be considered to be Merkel supporters because they take pride in her having gravitated toward their side. If they had been too far apart the Green Party would not have been willing to engage in lengthy coalition talks after the election to form a coalition government under Merkel’s leadership. The same could be said of the FDP, which joined with the Green Party to engage in these negotiations, which ultimately failed. Those who voted for the FDP did so in the hopes of influencing certain liberal economic policies and were comfortable in having some of these accents being implemented under a Merkel leadership.

VI – The new leader of the Free Democratic Party missed a rare opportunity to oust Merkel on election night

A few hours after the September election results became evident, the SPD announced that they would not join another coalition under Merkel. At that point the relatively new leader of the FDP, Christian Lindner, could have easily announced that, almost likewise, while the FDP was not opposed to joining a coalition with her party, he would only entertain this prospect under a different personal leadership, that is, not with Merkel. Such a firm statement would have surely led to Merkel’s inevitable resignation, arising from internal pressure. Four years earlier the FDP had missed the 5% threshold to remain in the Bundestag and had re-emerged that evening with over 10% of votes. Had Lindner not been so cautious (some might say spineless), Merkel could have been ousted from her domineering role on election night because the only realistic alternative would have forced her into a minority government, which is not uncommon in Nordic and western European countries. Such a constellation requires hard work – true leadership – by patching together temporary coalitions, depending what the specific issues happen to be. However, Merkel is apparently too lazy, clumsy, and vain to pursue such an endeavor. Moreover, she is too obsessed with wanting to maintain full control and has ruled out leading a minority government.

VII – Social Democratic Party leaders obsessed with preferring Israeli interests to those concerns of its core voters

As Merkel’s junior partner in the past government, the SPD received only slightly more than one fifth of the popular vote last September. Due to this collapse in popularity, compared to their standing only a decade ago, the leader until a few weeks ago, Martin Schulz, said on election night that the reason for not intending to enter into another coalition with Merkel’s Union parties (one, CSU, representing Bavaria, the other, CDU, everywhere else) was a need to re-group and regain a distinct profile, which could better be cultivated in the opposition. Yet, just as Merkel was completely detached from reality after more than a decade as chancellor, beholden to Globalists, media elites, and corporate executives, so also was Martin Schulz, a top-level EU commissar from Brussels, and former alcoholic, who may have never awakened from what appeared to be a perpetual utopian delirium. If an outsider might think that Merkel was completely nuts, this guy seemed to be a certified lunatic. For a person wanting to become the next German chancellor, his particular hobby-horse issues were rather peculiar and definitely contrary to the interests of the party’s core clientele:

– Abolishing nation states and their associated sovereignty within the EU; consequently Germany would merely be yet another region among many others with a centralized (Soviet totalitarian style) Europe;

– A longstanding position that “for me, the new Germany exists only in order to ensure the existence of the State of Israel and the Jewish people”, which he basically reiterated in the only – bland and stale – election debate with Merkel last year;

– After negotiation agreements for a coalition of Green Party and FDP with Merkel had broken down, he expropriated an ongoing Green Party obsession, namely to permit endless chain migration from the MENA region, specifically those related to migrants whose asylum requests had been rejected in Germany and had received temporary (subsidiary) protection but were technically subject to forced repatriation in the very near future. Some politicians associated with Merkel’s alliance parties were already demanding these deportations occur without any further delay yet Schulz and his colleagues demanded that these individuals, subject to deportation, should be allowed instead to bring their family members to Germany too, and so on, which would mean they would all be allowed to remain in Germany forever.

Interestingly, for weeks earlier this year the German media regularly reported that reaching an agreement on the issue of allowing family members of these migrants subject to deportation to join them in Germany, thus completely nullifying the prospect of implementing these repatriations back to their home countries, was a contentious issue and appeared to be the major stumbling block toward achieving a comprehensive agreement, yet never were the SPD functionaries ever called upon to provide a cogent rationale for insisting so staunchly on such a counterproductive demand that was clearly not in the interest of the German people, since, as was shown earlier in this report, enticing and accommodating even more people from foreign cultures, who will likely never assimilate, is not only an unnecessary drain on the budget and a strain on public infrastructure, especially housing, it results in higher crime rates and distrust between newcomers and the indigenous population. Social cohesion, such as it exists, is replaced by increasing stratification, conflict and corrosion. Obviously this conspicuous failure by the media to elicit an explanation by the SPD – and the Green Party before that – to justify their stance was because the true reason would have been a huge embarrassment, another taboo theme that dare not be publicly explained. The best that these supporters of unrestrained migration could deliver was an unconvincing cliché reference to this being the moral or “Christian” thing to do, as if though these cynical politicians were suddenly pretending to be virtuous and benevolent spokespersons for the Catholic and Protestant religious establishments, both of which have become so mentally corrupted that they now indulge in and propagate a most pernicious form of pathological altruism.

Their rationale for enhancing societal destabilization is not rooted in any religious epiphany but derives from the fact that the SPD has jumped onto the bandwagon to please Israeli and Jewish interests, specifically merging or synthesizing the long term goals of the Israeli Oded Yinon Plan, published in 1982, to enable Zionist expansion by destroying its Arab neighbor countries, the desired implementation of which served as the inspiration for the attacks on the World Trade towers to provoke US led wars on Israel’s behalf, with the intended realization of an expanded Coudenhove-Kalergi “Plan” – or vision – published in 1925, according to which the indigenous European populations would universally intermarry with Black Africans and transform themselves over time to a new type of mixed race, to be ruled over by a spiritual nobility of Jews. By destroying Syria and causing a depopulation of its inhabitants, Israel could eventually take over more of this territory with only slight resistance at an opportune moment, while at the same time resettling much of the population in Europe would cause its desired destabilization and weakening, ultimately destroying its culture. While it is understandable that supporting such a fantastical endeavor must sound wonderful to Zionist Jews, the eagerness with which European leaders would want to actively facilitate such a development is quite appalling, an indicator of a treasonous or mentally deranged frame of mind.

VIII – Merkel concedes to adopt even more extremist positions on migration to maintain power in a new coalition

The result of the negotiations on allowing family members of those individuals subject to deportation from Germany to join them and resettle in Germany, presumptively in perpetuity, was a rather fuzzy formulation with numerous contingencies and loopholes, so that all parties then claimed their own public stance had prevailed while the other side had conceded. In reality, the SPD had prevailed on this issue, so the door will soon be open to additional mass migration, along with generous financing for it, though it is impossible to foresee just how significant it will turn out to be in the longer term. This concession by Merkel, with the CDU giving up the finance ministry to the SPD, while the SPD gives up the economics ministry to the CDU, was characterized by a political cartoon on the cover of Germany’s largest newsweekly magazine as a big sellout – a huge exaggeration that was surely intended to sway the vote by the SPD party to endorse the coalition deal. With regard to a second dispute during the negotiations, very dear to a majority of the population, namely modifying the medical insurance scheme in such a manner that the dual track structure (the privileged few, affluent people and public bureaucrats, get preferred treatment while everybody else gets regular treatment) would eventually be abolished and transformed to a more equitable construct, the SPD simply caved in; they accepted that a commission would be formed to study the issue – everyone familiar with government knows what that means. The message is clear: Health insurance issues, of concern to the general public, are subsidiary to debased elites of a party preceded by the adjective “Social” in a quest to placate Israel, while parties whose names are preceded by the adjective “Christian” endorse an accelerated tendency for the society to become more Islamic. Applied Orwellian terminology has been on full display. In reality, of course, not just Merkel but the German political leadership despises the common population, even if they are of the same ethnicity. In general, to put it abstractly, the government would prefer its people to die as soon as possible upon having served their usefulness as laborers and consumers, to avoid paying them pensions from public funds upon their retirement. This attitude explains why the German government raised the retirement age to 67 a few years ago and why in Europe only Germany, along with Bulgaria, still permits billboard advertising for cigarettes, which tend to target young women, who still have a higher statistical life expectancy. It is surely just a matter of time until the pharmaceutical opium epidemic will also hit Germany, so that various people may be compelled to prematurely end their misery pursuant to maintaining their dignity. A few days after the agreement was reached and subjected to SPD party member votes, Schulz resigned his position after he came under criticism. He now has no functionary role in the SPD.

IX – A chronology of key milestones that led to the mass invasion of migrants and Islamic jihadists into Europe

In order to contradict the common misconception that the unpleasant invasion of Germany through mass migration came as a sudden surprise and could not possibly have been anticipated in the scope that occurred, so that authorities would have been unprepared to avert it in any case, a few informative milestones preceding this ominous development are presented below, with attendant commentary or analysis:

In October 2010 a widely discussed book, by an SPD member and high official of the German Federal Bank, Thilo Sarazin, with the provocative title “Germany Abolishes Itself” (Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab), led to him being reviled by the media and forced to resign his position. He predicted and warned about the emerging problems of migration and development of parallel societies from foreign cultures and their detrimental effects on social cohesion. Heavily footnoted and rationally argued, his thesis was hard to contradict, so instead of engaging with the issues raised, the media vilified him personally as a “racist”, misrepresented his assertions, or constructed straw-man allegations that were easy to refute.

In October 2014 public concern about creeping societal transformation in Germany due to “Islamic” radicalization, of larger segments of the migrant population and their descendents, a reality already in evidence in such European cities as London, Birmingham, Paris, Marseille, Brussels, and Malmö, among others, led to weekly Monday evening protest marches through Dresden, by a patriotic group under the name PEGIDA, to express their dissatisfaction about such an ominous trend also taking hold in Germany. Without addressing their published points of concern, the thousands of marchers were summarily denounced by the media as “Nazis” or “xenophobes” or “radical right-wingers”.

In early January 2015, just a few days after a shooting attack in the offices of a Charlie Hebdo publication in Paris, a Bavarian offshoot of PEGIDA announced plans to demonstrate in Munich. In response, the city government and local media demanded a huge public turnout for a counter-demonstration. This constituted a spectacular 180° reversal, a true display of extreme hypocrisy, according to the double standard principle of Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi: Just a few days before top politicians from all over, including Merkel, had congregated to march in a staged parade in Paris (“We are Charlie”) to express solidarity for the right of a publication to criticize Islam – including depicting the mythical prophet Mohammad as a cartoon character – yet a planned march in Munich, in which people also wished to express dissatisfaction with creeping Islamic tendencies in the Occident, not unlike Charlie Hebdo had projected, was characterized as evil. Other German cities, including Cologne, also saw mass demonstrations that month, counteracting the feared popular acclaim of an emerging PEGIDA movement by supporting what they were against. Professing the desire to welcome any and all refugees from anywhere came more as a reactionary response to the PEGIDA challenge, which the German media had vilified as Neo-Nazi, than as an expression of wanting to be invaded by migrants, but expressing a derivative sentiment by being against a group that was against something (anti-anti) was hardly a compelling inspiration to motivate people to march out in the cold weather. Some of the huge and professionally done banners being carried should have made it obvious to onlookers that some group with deep pockets was operating behind the scenes to pay for this. By this time “Refugees Welcome” signs displayed by protesters were becoming ubiquitous. Images of these types of demonstrations were later leveraged or amplified by spreading them on the Internet. Credulous individuals were made to feel they had a duty to recite these slogans to prove they were “tolerant”, while impoverished individuals around the world who saw such images may have easily gotten the impression they would be loved if they migrated over to Germany. It is unclear how many people were actually paid by non-governmental organizations to show up. In any case, Germans tend to be extremely easy to manipulate into being politically correct simply by guilt-tripping and using a few trigger words. For many years a most infantile and therefore very effective slogan, “Fight Against the Right” (Kampf gegen Rechts), had been cultivated, initially by the SPD led government to target narrow groups, before Merkel rose to power, but expanded in scope thereafter, so all that was necessary to incite the population against some group was merely for the media or some politician to assert (no evidence needed) that this or that organization met this loose criterion of being “Right”. As was demonstrated more than sixty years ago by the famous conformity experiments by Solomon Asch, there is a tendency by a large segment of any society to knowingly contort their publicly expressed opinion to conform to some imagined norm. However, this phenomenon of submissive conformity is much more strongly in evidence amid Germans than in other European societies, though perhaps not quite as much as in some East Asian cultures. This serious behavioral weakness was basically a major factor that contributed to the strong support that Adolf Hitler enjoyed in the 1930s, and it appears that Germans have not learned enough from history. The social conditioning is being deployed by propagandists to have the German public reflexively repeating nonsensical slogans or lies, like a parrot, against their own interest. Of course, the specific ideological content being promoted now is different from what was prevalent eighty years ago, but this is secondary. What matters most is whatever sentiment is being established and reinforced as the standard for others to conform to. Though it may be a conjectural proposition, it seems very plausible that the Green Party “leftist” who blindly parrots the media cues today, if transformed back through time into a propaganda setting that prevailed eight decades ago, would have analogously wanted to conform to what was popular back then.

In mid February 2015 British and Italian media reported that the terror militia organization ISIS (organized and operated by Israel; financed and ideologically trained by Saudi Arabia to embrace Wahhabism, a puritanical flavor of Sunni Islam; and supplied with offensive weaponry by the US), which was operating mainly within Syria and Libya, would be sending half a million migrants to Europe as part of a psychological warfare effort to create chaos and would embed its own fighters, who would pose as migrants. From the Daily Mail:

ISIS threatens to send 500,000 migrants to Europe as a ‘psychological weapon’

“… letters from jihadists show plans to hide terrorists among refugees”

In early March 2015, an explicit threat was made by the Greek defense and foreign ministries in the wake of ongoing disputes between the Greek government versus the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank (the Troika). However, this Troika constellation was a fancy way of providing cover to publicly conceal the heart of the conflict, which was between the Greek government and Deutsche Bank, which had speculated on Greek bond price developments and was on the verge of losing significant money, possibly leading to bankruptcy, if Greece would be unable to make good on their debt. Due to options bets by other banks, additional financial institutions would also be adversely impacted. Greece was put under painful austerity supervision to make binding commitments in return for being lent more money, which they in turn would pay back to Deutsche Bank for the Greek bonds they held. Throughout this dispute the German finance minister in particular was regarded to have behaved very arrogantly toward Greece. From the Telegraph:

Greece’s defence minister threatens to send migrants including jihadists to Western Europe

“Greece will unleash a ‘wave of millions of economic migrants’ and jihadists on Europe unless the eurozone backs down on austerity demands, the country’s defence and foreign ministers have threatened.”

The most convenient way for migrants to pass into central Europe was through Greece, past Salonika, then farther to the north toward Macedonia. It appears that Germany didn’t take the threat so seriously. It is obvious that government ministers making threats of this nature must at least have already known that they were in a position to follow through, which implies a degree of prior cooperation with non-governmental organizations and Turkey to facilitate such a “wave of millions of economic migrants”. In other words, the basic organizational structure to follow through was already in place by then. With regard to the mention of “jihadists” joining in with the migrants, this term may sound abstract but one must have surely been aware of what type of people were being referred to. Mainly mercenaries, their occupation as rag-tag fighters entailed such activities as riding around the back of Japanese pickup trucks and indiscriminately spraying high caliber ammunition from belts through the smoking hot barrels of heavy machine guns mounted to them on tripods, operating shoulder-held missile launchers aimed at tanks, feeding mortars or grenade launchers whose explosives landed inside villages, shooting assault rifles with high capacity banana clips in urban combat scenarios, occasionally singing religious songs of jihad, engaging in the massacres of sickly village elders, learning how to make improvised bombs at a “workshop” in the desert, gang raping teenage girls and young women, stealing archeological artifacts and selling them to middlemen, occasionally decapitating their conquered enemies with a sharpened blade, stacking their heads atop a wall for public display to show off how tough they are and send the message “don’t mess with us”. As these murderous jihadists were being dislodged from their occupational positions by the Syrian army attempting to slowly regain territorial control, they could either fight to their deaths or drop their weapons and make a getaway to some other region far away, mingle with other members of a displaced population, likely they would be unwelcome in Turkey where they might be found out, maybe trim their beards and get a haircut, head out farther away for new adventures, toward central Europe to re-group with comrades already living there; rumor had it that Sweden and Germany were being overly generous – “refugees welcome” and all that, no questions asked – free housing with running water.

On a rainy weekend in early May 2015 the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, born in Haifa during the 1950s, gave a prepared speech at the former Dachau concentration camp near Munich to commemorate its liberation by US forces 70 years earlier, just a few days before Germany’s surrender. In attendance were chancellor Merkel and Bavarian minister Seehofer sitting next to each other. His speech featured vituperative comments against the PEGIDA movement, along with the usual well-known complaints one would imagine at such an event, including references to their standard atrocity narrative. One of the key passages was the following, in which He doth commanded:

“Germany has foisted so much disaster upon the world. It stands so deeply indebted to so many countries – we are the last country that can afford to reject refugees and those who are persecuted!”

This particular passage was subsequently amplified by the newspaper Die Welt, as follows: “Germany Must Not be Allowed to Reject Any Refugees”. The event was significant inasmuch as Dachau was Germany’s first concentration camp and because Merkel had previously not attended such a commemoration elsewhere that year. There was virtually no coverage in the US media, and the aforementioned cryptic command pertaining to the orchestrated deluge of migrants, including jihadists, was not cited by any of the two English language publications that reported on the event through the Internet. In writing about the ceremony, The Times of Israel cited the following assertion made by Merkel later that day in her weekly podcast message:

“We Germans have a particular responsibility here to handle what we [sic] perpetrated in the period of National Socialism attentively, sensitively and also knowledgeably”.

If the translation is correct, then Merkel has apparently accepted the dubious concept of collective and inherited guilt that may be transferred to subsequent generations of Germans and imposes an unearned burden upon them. The faulty logic seems to be: Because a few of Germany’s ancestors ran concentration camps more than seven decades ago, that now obliges Germany’s current generation to now accept and pamper militant jihadists and impoverished migrants, as well as their eventual descendents, for life. Such a proposition is irrational and unacceptable and should be firmly rejected rather than embracing it. This date was surely one of the most significant milestones in the ongoing mass migration crisis. The causality between Schuster’s commands that day and Merkel and Seehofer’s utter disregard for the law from September 2015 onward right until this day, is beyond question because Merkel herself had cited the rationale of Germany’s past as a justifications for not controlling the country’s border crossings and repeatedly refusing to set an upper limit on the number of migrants that Germany would be willing to take in annually. It is for this stubborn stance that her fiercest critics have characterized her as a traitor of the people (Volksverräter). By contrast, Seeohofer repeatedly postured publicly about the need to set a limit, thereby consenting to ignoring the laws, but it soon became apparent that he was just puffing hot air (Dampfplauderer). For this his Bavarian CSU party lost much support in the election, and as a consequence he will not be heading the party in this year’s regional election in Bavaria. Instead, he will be the minister of the Interior in the cabinet of Merkel’s new coalition government.

Early June 2015, a month after Merkel seems to have made a private commitment to never automatically reject any migrants coming to Germany, contrary to what the law stipulates, she hosted the G7 Summit in southern Bavaria at the base of the Alps. Like an obedient poodle, Merkel is eager to please her nominal Globalist masters, in this case Obama, who in reality was himself just a puppet figurehead. As a reward for her obsequiousness she got countless puff pieces in the media that stroked her ego. The media put her on a pedestal and crafted a light personality cult, so how could she ever even think about disappointing their increasing expectations? Though Merkel has no children, the German media have referred to her as “Mommy” (Mutti) to concoct the impression that she cared so much about the German people, which is contradictory to reality. She had invited numerous leaders of African countries to also make an appearance at the summit conference the next day. (Might they have been encouraged to empty their jails and send the freed prisoners north, to board flimsy boats to Europe and then be accepted by Germany?) A few days later the annual Bilderberg meeting took place only a few miles away in Tyrol, near Innsbruck, where the migrant issue was one of numerous agenda items. The impending “Operation Deluge”, as one might call it, must certainly have been a topic of private conversation by insiders, according to their Chatham House rules.

By early September 2015 the Ayn Rand Institute, based in Irvine, California, had registered – and was operating – a German language web site in India. The web site specialized in providing encouragement and organizational tips on how to smuggle migrants into Germany inside the personal vehicles of Germans coming back from vacations, particularly from Italy. A professionally produced video on their web site presented such illegal activities as morally heroic. Another video featured a Black African in the back seat of a car, asserting that all borders should be open (one world) and that anybody had a human right to go anywhere they wanted. On September 2, 2015 a little Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, whose parents were trying to get to Canada, was found drowned and washed ashore at a Turkish beach. Photos of his lifeless body appeared on the front pages of nearly all major newspapers because this mishap provided them a perfect opportunity to sentimentalize the developing migration crisis while detracting from the fact that it was being actively orchestrated by various organizations behind the scenes. Normally publishing such pictures of corpses would be considered in bad taste and therefore newspapers would refrain from publishing them. The fact that nearly every newspaper published some version of him, shot from all angles by the same Turkish photographer, including even one of his face visible with open eye, cannot be a mere coincidence and points toward prior coordination. The media exploited this mishap in order to soften up the public into viewing the entire migration phenomenon in an emotional manner. By focusing on the dead toddler they were able to detract from the mass exodus of murderous jihadists escaping toward Europe from their eroding military positions before the Syrian army closed in on them. A couple of days later, on September 4, a group of migrants had set out from the Budapest train station to walk toward Austria on the highway because train traffic between Budapest and Vienna had been discontinued. The migrants could have sought refugee status in Hungary or in other countries along the way before that but were determined to reach Germany instead because international organizations working behind the scenes had steered them in that direction. Operating on a Friday night in the immediate emotional wake of the images of Alan Kurdi, Merkel arranged to have numerous trains filled with migrants to come to Munich directly from Hungary through Vienna. From September 5 onward, the deluge was unstoppable. A detailed chronology of what happened during those two days is available at Zeit Online:

The Night Germany Lost Control – “What happened on September 4, 2015? What intentions, failures and misunderstandings led to a situation in which hundreds of thousands of refugees came to Germany?”

Though the hordes of migrants – at least four fifth of which were young men traveling alone – began arriving at Munich’s main train station on Saturday morning, even though the public could not possibly have known or anticipated just 12 hours earlier that Merkel would be illegally arranging a mass transfer of many thousands of migrants in the middle of the night, there “just happened to be” a huge “spontaneous” welcoming crowd of do-gooders already in place, with banners and stuffed animals available for the few children – which the photographers and cameramen focused on, to convey a selectively distorted impression to the public. The sentiment being conveyed was something to the effect of: “Hey look, we’re such wonderful people”. (In Munich over 17% voted for the Green Party last September to make it the city’s second strongest party.) Anybody who would want to deny that this whole episode in Munich was not a meticulously orchestrated ambush operation must surely be a hard-core coincidence theorist! It would have been interesting to know which organization was primarily involved in the welcoming ceremony and how much per hour these mysterious do-gooders (mobs on demand) were getting paid, but local media know not to report on such details in case they bothered to inquire. Those working at the top level of this sophisticated transfer operation from Syria to Munich must have been amused by Merkel’s subservient compliance. Hundreds of Covert Islamic Jihadist Escapees Receive Enthusiastic Welcome at Munich Train Station might have been an appropriate headline to present.

X – Speculation about a possible Nobel Peace Prize award to create the perception that Merkel acted honorably

One must wonder whether the planners had promised to use their influence to propose Merkel for getting the Nobel Peace Prize just a month later. In any case, in following up after the floodgates had already been open for a few weeks, the media in Germany and elsewhere reinforced the notion that her fateful decision had been the bold and correct thing to do by suggesting that she was the favorite to win this prize. Only hours before the official award announcement, the Telegraph wrote:

Speculation is mounting that Angela Merkel will win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her handling of the European refugee crisis and the war in Ukraine…

The German Chancellor has emerged as the firm favourite for the 2015 peace prize, the winner of which will be announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday.

Mrs Merkel was the favourite in late betting on Thursday night…

Over the years the Norwegian Nobel Committee had come under criticism and ridicule for having made dubious choices by having conferred this prestigious award to assorted war criminals. In an attempt to recover from their reputation it would have been folly to announce that yet another public criminal would be publicly honored.

XI – Efforts by other European countries to curtail steady migration flow as Merkel prolongs her open invitation

Many of the jihadists continued onward toward Copenhagen, from where they took a train across the water to Malmö in Sweden. Early January 2016 Swedish authorities were compelled to implement border controls for traffic coming from Denmark for the first time in over sixty years to stem the migration flow. Since Merkel had been publicly encouraging anyone in need to come to Germany, which in turn created new waves of migration, including from poor regions in the Balkans, it was up to other leaders to finally take the initiative to curtail this flow. On February 24, 2016 the Austrian foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, now chancellor, arranged a high-level conference in Vienna. He invited 18 leaders, including interior and foreign ministers, from six countries: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, and Slovenia. The purpose was to coordinate border management between these countries. Explicitly not invited were Merkel or representatives from Greece, clearly a diplomatic snub to the two countries most responsible for having encouraged this mess. Merkel expressed disappointment that the migration flow would be curtailed.

XII – Extreme displays of arrogance by Merkel and EU Commissars trying to force other countries to accept migrants

The height of German arrogance nowadays, coming from Merkel and president of the European Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, began soon thereafter, when they and other top EU bureaucrats repeatedly demanded that countries in Eastern Europe be required to take in substantial numbers of these migrants, which she had invited in and accepted illegally, even though neither the migrants wanted to resettle in these countries nor did these countries want to accept them. Media constantly and deceptively use the word “integrate”, as if though it were possible for these mainly Islamic migrants to ever be fully integrated into these respective Slavic societies, or, for that matter also Germany or elsewhere in Europe. Merkel says these countries need to take in “their fair share” and “show solidarity”, which really means they are now being coerced to be complicit in her illegal activity and sheer stupidity. The leaders of these European continue to refuse this outrageous demand. The Austrian chancellor, Kurz, took their side in December 2017, shortly after he took office. The matter has been deferred for a few more months. In July 2018 Austria will have the European rotating presidency until the end of the year, so Kurz will host numerous high-level European conferences. If Merkel and Juncker continue their arrogant stance to force illegal migration onto all the other countries too through a redistribution scheme, future conflict will be assured. Not only will Merkel then likely be reviled all over Europe, as she already is in Greece and Russia, by extension Germans in general may be strongly disliked too when they go abroad.

XIII – Emerging signs of public animosity to Merkel now countered by Antifa goons on her behalf in Hamburg

In a few days Merkel is expected to be reelected to become the chancellor for a fourth four-year term. Any leader heading a state after so many years in office has basically lost contact with the public. Merkel may enjoy ongoing popularity among most Germans, but many strongly dislike her. During the election campaign last year she was frequently jeered loudly at public squares where she appeared and called a traitor. Only a few days prior to the election, during the Oktoberfest, she was jeered so loudly at Munich’s main square that her speech could no longer be heard, despite heavy amplification through loudspeakers. Some demonstrators had even brought along plastic horns, vuvuzelas, used to make noise during soccer matches in South Africa, Brazil, and Iberia. Videos with audio of this public square rejection of Merkel went viral. Some leaders whose terms are not constitutionally limited may convince themselves of their own indispensability and usually do not know when to quit or ignore warning signals, as appears to be the case with Merkel, who has received numerous polite but explicit hints in the European media during the past six months, that her time is up. History has repeatedly shown the possible consequences of such stubbornness. Leaders wound up being ousted through parliamentary intrigue to force their resignation, perhaps they were sent into exile, but sometimes this process of removal occurred violently. In contemporary times, mobs of common people no longer oust their rulers by force but instead provide the collective message of popular resentment. While such messages have already been expressed, they do not represent the majority mood, yet the dynamics of political trends are hard to predict. Long suppressed sentiments tend to erupt suddenly, without warning, like some surprise volcanic eruptions or urban riots. There will then be a tendency for such expressions to be suppressed, in hopes of counteracting the likelihood of spreading.

An interesting example of how public resentment can spread almost like wildfire was demonstrated a few weeks ago in Hamburg. In late January Uta Ogilvies, a Mom who was fed up with Merkel during the ongoing coalition negotiations at the time, walked in the center of Hamburg one evening alone, holding a simple sign saying “Merkel Must Go” (Merkel muss weg). This is the stationary equivalent of a group of demonstrators parading and chanting “hay-hay, hoe-hoe, whatever it is has got to go”. Exactly one week later there were about sixty demonstrators who had come out to support her. One week after that the number had doubled to 120, she claims. Then the hooded Antifa affiliated agitators started to show up. They found out where she lives, and somebody threw paint through her window at home into her kid’s room. Last week, Hamburg’s newspaper reported 350 demonstrators showing up to protest against Merkel, with roughly a thousand counter-demonstrators. Understanding that the event is potentially volatile, the police have been showing up in force too, including with armored water cannons. Counter-demonstrators have been able to mobilizing in the usual way, by crying “wolf”, claiming that opponents of Merkel are “right-wingers” or worse. Yesterday a city official attempted to intimidate those wanting to demonstrate against Merkel by asserting that they should be aware of their commonality with right wing extremists. These developments underscore that Merkel is no longer considered as “conservative” but has become the new darling of the “left”. More importantly, it shows that Merkel now has lumpen thugs of black clad street fighters who will reliably come out to counter those who would openly support her resignation. Hitler had his notorious Brown-Shirts (Braunhemden), derived from Mussolini’s Black-Shirts, and now Merkel has her Antifa Black-Hoods. Nobody can predict with any certainty how rapidly or severely future conflict will escalate. The still localized phenomenon of hooded goon squads could spread from Hamburg to other cities.

XIV – New waves of mass migration by organized transfers of Africans on ships directly to Hamburg easily possible

Other things could be happening in Hamburg this year too. Some experts have warned that there are millions of migrants in Africa, but only a small portion of them, almost exclusively young males, manage to arrive in Italy, either a few dozen by inflatable raft or a few hundred at a time by wooden boat, yet it is not difficult to imagine a new scenario, especially in light of Italian general elections on March 4, 2018, the results of which makes it more likely that the Italian navy will no longer graciously accept these African migrants and will send them back instead of processing them in Italy and then distributing them. Of the more than a hundred cruise liners owned or operated by one or the other Israeli mogul, at some point an overhaul or refurbishing is necessary at the dry dock. Hamburg and other shipyards in northern Germany have dry docks. In the summer of 1980 Fidel Castro opened his jails and freed all he prisoners, who took boats to southern Florida. Officials in some African countries would be glad to release their violent male prisoners if a Big Sugar Daddy would guarantee their transfer out of the country. Packed tightly, a big multi-level cruise liner could transport between ten to twenty thousand people, they could be filled up and embark from such places as Lagos, Monrovia, and Dakar. Then all of a sudden, in the middle of the night, the ships have quietly arrived in the port of Hamburg, and thousands of young African males have arrived on land and are hungry, truly a humanitarian crisis, some will surely need medical care. They all apply for asylum because they have been unfairly “persecuted”, they will claim. Having arrived by ship from Africa, they cannot be sent back, as would have to be the case if they had come to Bavaria from Austria and Merkel decided to follow the law. Hamburgers are so open and welcoming; they are used to seeing African sailors roaming about town. Roughly half of Hamburgers voted either for the Green Party or the SPD or the Left Party; all of these parties want not just more migrants, but the newly arrived young African men must then also be allowed to bring their entire families and clans, ad infinitum, and if citizens should object then Merkel’s Black-Hoods will mobilize to show up. That such a scenario has not yet occurred is not so much because nobody would dare to make it happen, but more likely because simply threatening to do so – words like blackmail or extortion come to mind – can achieve other benefits to those who have the connections to organize such an operation.

XV – None of Germany’s seven Bundestag parties offer the winning mix of positions on economic and social issues

Of the seven political parties represented in Germany’s current parliament (Bundestag), all but two of them have either accepted or embraced continued mass migration into Germany of impoverished individuals. The FDP would like to see selective migration of qualified people with useful skills according to the Canadian model. Only Alternative for Germany (AfD), a new party, rejects migration from outside Europe due to issues of cultural incompatibility. US President Donald Trump recently reflected this position when he reportedly complained that so many immigrants are coming from “shithole” countries instead of from advanced countries like Norway. After many decades of social engineering and economic policy experiments, it has been empirically proven that maintaining a viable and affluent social state for the benefit of public well-being is incompatible with mass immigration, though so many people whose perspective is ideologically driven are in denial about this. Furthermore, the economic neo-liberalism flavor of capitalism being pursued today (Chicago School, Milton Friedman) ever since it was initially adopted under Margaret Thatcher, then implemented in numerous other countries, results in high levels of wealth inequality, which is also a destabilizing force in the long run. With rampant speculation in an expanded financial sector at the expense of taxpayers after bailouts and decreasing disposable income of an increasingly greater part of the population, due to low wages or higher unemployment in conjunction with inflated rental and real estate prices, declining economic wellbeing for the broad public becomes inevitable. Though the Left Party rejects the adverse excesses of economic neo-liberalism and advocates the type of social market capitalism that was successful in Germany under Willy Brandt in the early 1970s, but also in Scandinavia, yet was abandoned by the SPD under Chancellor Schroeder, on the other hand the Left Party completely neutralizes and discredits itself by embracing open borders and unlimited migration because the former policy cannot work if you also entertain the latter. Only one prominent and increasingly popular politician from the Left Party, who regularly appears on the political talk show circuit, seems to have understood this. For having strayed from the self-contradictory Left Party position, Sahra Wagenknecht, was punished at a Left Party Congress in 2016 by receiving a creamy pie shoved in her face by a fellow “leftist”, yet an attempt to dethrone her from leadership ranks has failed.

Additionally, an important prerequisite for democracy to work well is for the population to be both well educated and well informed, in an environment that respects free speech that allows a variety of opinions and ideas, so they are encouraged to participate in the process and make well-informed decisions when voting, as opposed to having their perceptions and perspectives manipulated by carefully crafted lies. Most importantly, the legal framework must be sophisticated to enhance fairness and discourage as well as punish corruption. However, none of the parties in Germany even state these basic ideals as worthwhile to pursue and attain. Any party exclusively pursuing such goals has the potential to achieve an absolute majority because a society based on such basic premises is one that most citizens would want to be a part of. Since the AfD is still new and ridiculed in the press as an opportunistic one-trick pony capitalizing on public resentment of Merkel’s open border policy, it has not yet developed a full spectrum of policy advocacy, so it could attain the first-mover advantage by embracing sensible positions because it would not entail back-tracking or having to reverse themselves, as other parties would have to do. At least theoretically, they could become Germany’s strongest party in four years, as they already are in Saxony.

XVI – Numerous significant flaws in Germany’s antiquated and corrupted judicial system impede basic fairness

To highlight one key element of a well functioning society, cited above, that is not so well known about, even within Germany, namely its judicial system, it needs to pointed out that important criteria by which to evaluate such a system are how well it is structured with regard to its laws and its procedural rules, as well as how accessible it is for the general public, as opposed to just affluent individuals and corporations. The German system fails on all these aspects. It should be understood and acknowledged that it is extremely flawed – primitive and inherently (structurally) corrupt, a complete sham. It lacks the most elementary elements that are taken for granted in the US legal system. Its inadequacies prevent the functioning of reliable justice and a fair society. For instance, to be specific by citing at least ten structural peculiarities: This antiquated and byzantine system has numerous different court venues (Criminal, Administrative, Labor, Family, Commerce, Social, Youth, Agriculture, etc.) with differing procedural regulation, judicial proceedings are not recorded, there is no jury, class action suits are not permitted, appellate levels require representation by attorneys, whose mandatory fees are strictly regulated, pro bono public representation is uncommon, contingency fees are a novelty and uncommon, court fees are excessive and a severe impediment to seeking redress, requests for waivers of fees and legal representation when bringing a complaint in civil cases are subject to a much higher standard (hard evidence of favorable outcome, to be decided by – and routinely rejected – by the same judge who would then take the case) than they are elsewhere in Europe (showing that a suit is neither malicious nor frivolous), and especially incomprehensible, a first level appellate judge may decree that his or her decision may not be subject to a higher level appeal, and any attempt at circumventing such a stipulation is practically impossible; if a dispute is not considered potentially relevant or instructive for a wide domain of other people that could be potentially affected but simply too specific or individual, then accepting an appeal can be ignored.  These flaws make it very easy for judges to deviate from other norms that should be followed, without taking accountability for failing to follow guidelines. Basic rules of deductive logical reasoning need not be followed because truth or evidence are deemed subjective, exculpatory evidence can be ignored if the judges decide not to take note of it in the record. Even the basic constitutional guarantee, to have relevant arguments heard and addressed, is routinely ignored if a judge did not deem it relevant.

Though these numerous flaws are known among practicing attorneys, who themselves are often frustrated by the corrupt system they have chosen to operate in, they have an interest in allowing things to remain as they are. Since public calls for comprehensive judicial reform of this system come not even from the academic realm, it is fair to conclude that this must be another of various German taboos, such as advocating for free speech. Within this wider judicial milieu of judges, attorneys, and law professors there exists a conspiracy of silence to not rock the boat, for which, if they had a conscience, they ought to be ashamed of for doing nothing and thus perpetuating a very flawed system. In order to make the point, that if even in a very high profile case, subject to coverage by international reporters, a panel of judges fails to provide justice and conducts a show trial instead, transparent foe all to see, one can safely assume that such a corrupt practice is completely routine in such cases that enjoy no public scrutiny at all, highlighting a specific instance from the John Demjanjuk trial, that took place in Munich over the course of a few years, is very instructive.

XVII – The Demjanjuk show trial and its shameful perversion of justice proves needs for reforms that remain taboo

John Demjanjuk has been falsely accused in a show trial in Israel for allegedly having been “Ivan the Terible” at the Treblinka concentration camp and was sentenced to death in 1988, but this verdict was overturned five years later after new evidence cast reasonable doubt on his culpability. This did not deter zealous prosecutors with an axe to grind, so in the summer of 2009 he was deported from Cleveland to Munich to stand trial for allegedly having been accessory to murder in Sobibor on nearly 28 thousand counts. These charges were based on testimony of dubious credibility and purported evidence, an ID card that was deemed to have most likely been forged. Demjanjuk had denied having been a guard in Sobibor and his presence there was never proved. Essentially, the court required proof of a negative proposition, which is a logical impossibility unless one can prove an alternative proposition that is mutually exclusive of the first. This is the principle of being guilty as charged by default unless and until one can prove innocence, a violation of basic principles in US jurisprudence. Aside from that, alone the charge that he was present at Sobibor automatically entailed the presumption, without any need for this to be proved, that he was an accessory to so many murders. Cited in Wikipedia:

An 11 August 2010, Esquire magazine article written and researched by Scott Raab questioned the whole idea of Demjanjuk’s trial, crime, and punishment, pointing out many of the absurdities of this particular case, stating specifically “Worse, Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Page through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you’ll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene.

Leaving aside the question of whether Demjanjuk had been in Sobibor or not and assuming for the sake of argument that he had been there, though in this case he would have been a prisoner too, though functioning involuntarily as a guard with a weapon, the prosecution basically reasoned that it was incumbent on him to flee. On March 16, 2010 the court heard expert testimony from Dieter Pohl, an expert at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University, Institute for Contemporary History, as was widely reported at the time in the international media covering the trial, including from Cleveland, Demjanjuks’ former home. A particular finding presented orally in court by Pohl was essentially of an exculpatory nature:

Pohl said that some Trawniki men did successfully escape, but conceded that if they had fled with their weapons and were recaptured, they faced certain execution.

As Pohl had asserted this, the defense attorney submitted a motion to the court to have that particular passage by Pohl be submitted into the record. It was close to lunchtime so the chief judge said that the court would adjourn and announce the decision after the recess. After the recess the full court denied the motion to take official note of that evidence, so it was not included in the record. Thus, anybody following the proceedings knew what the court itself refused to acknowledge.

More than a year later Demjanjuk was sentenced anyway. His appeal was pending when he died. From Wikipedia:

Christiaan F. Rüter, Professor of Law and expert on NS trials in Germany, who researched the subject at the University of Amsterdam for 40 years, expressed reservations against the commencement of proceedings stating that to him “it is a complete mystery, how anyone who knows the German jurisdiction up to now, would be able to assume that Demjanjuk could be sentenced based on the given evidence.

It was understood by everyone that the facts and evidence were irrelevant to the court. So much for the concept of “human dignity” if authorities determine that somebody does not deserve it for reasons of political expediency. This set an important precedent and sent the signal to judges that they will surely get away with perversion of justice (Rechsbeugung), which is technically a criminal offense in Germany, though a judge will virtually never gets indicted for it, much less prosecuted and convicted. Nobody who was initially hoping to enjoy some kind of hateful revenge could have been placated by the verdict since it was evident that the proceedings were a complete farce. From Wikipedia:

Yoram Sheftel, the lawyer who represented Demjanjuk during the Israel trial in the 1980s, criticized the German court for conducting a show trial. “There was a shameful farce here”, he said. “Certainly the German court did not believe its own ruling.” “Nothing has changed since then”, he said. “Even during the trial in Germany, there was not one person who testified that Demjanjuk was Ivan from Sobibor, by virtue that he was seen there, and as such the conviction is a farce.”

Months ago one of the high profile leaders of the AfD party was accused of having asserted in an e-mail to somebody that the German legal system was corrupt, which she subsequently denied she had written, though she did not deny the system was corrupt. When looking at the slick web site of the AfD, it is apparent that the party takes absolutely no position on the need to reform Germany’s legal system. The issue remains outside the bounds of legitimate criticism or discussion.

XVIII – Summary – Germany has not yet matured to engender trust; Merkel’s legacy will incur infamy and shame

It should be evident from the serious shortcomings within its society, alluded to above, that, as a whole, Germany has not matured sufficiently for its neighboring countries to feel comfortable if it were no longer under supervision through its ongoing de facto occupation. Its leadership has failed to live up to the ambitious desire to become a model nation, and a majority of its citizens have been led astray. It is up to Germans themselves to continue on their self-destructive path or otherwise attain the sophistication that engenders lasting trust and respect from peers and adversaries alike. Surely, once the younger generations recognize the long-term societal damage that will have been caused by and blamed on Merkel’s decisions and policies – the adverse effects from which they may themselves be suffering and coping with – then they may covertly be ashamed for the rest of their lives because the disaster unfolded while they could have actively insinuated themselves to challenge these policies rather than being indifferent or passively acquiescent. In recognizing this situation and taking a pivotal turn away from the current course, before it is too late, Germans may still avert future disaster if they change course under a new leadership.

March 13, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment