Protest Israel’s detention of Palestinian writer Ahmad Qatamesh
By Maureen Clare Murphy – The Electronic Intifada – 08/03/2011
The Palestinian human rights group Addameer issued an appeal today urging supporters to take action on the administrative detention of Palestinian political scientist and writer Ahmad Qatamesh.
Qatamesh has been held in administrative detention after he was arrested on 21 April in the middle of the night. Hanin Ahmad Qatamesh, the detained writer’s daughter, described in an article for The Electronic Intifada how Israeli soldiers invaded their family home in Ramallah. Hanin and other relatives in the home were held hostage as Israeli soldiers demanded the surrender of Ahmad, who was not at home at the time. The Electronic Intifada also interviewed Qatamesh’s wife, Suha Barghouti, a well-known human rights defender.
The full action appeal from Addameer follows:
As part of its recently launched Prisoners at Risk campaign, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association demands the immediate release of Ahmad Qatamish, a well-known political scientist and writer currently held without charge or trial by Israel. The duration of his administrative detention has been set at 4 months, due to expire on 2 September 2011.
Addameer believes that the arrest and detention of Ahmad Qatamish has all the hallmarks of arbitrary detention and is aimed at silencing this prolific writer for his unbridled criticism of the Israeli occupation. Ahmad was arrested on 21 April 2011 in the middle of the night following a raid on his house whilst he was away, in which his wife, daughter, and two other relatives – including a 14-year-old girl – were held hostage by Israeli troops in order to compel him to surrender himself. Since then there has been a catalogue of serious errors and malpractice by the Israeli authorities. Ahmad was held for 13 days – during which time he was interrogated for only 10 minutes – before being informed on 3 May that he would be placed in administrative detention; despite the fact that both he and his lawyer had been told by the Military Court that he would be released that very day. Ahmad’s original administrative detention order was found to be flawed and had to be re-written twice, and even now the order is based on the vague accusation that he is an active member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – a charge he has consistently and vehemently denied. As the order is based on a secret file which is not accessible to Ahmad or his lawyer, it is impossible for Ahmad to know how to defend himself against any possible charges.
This is not the first time Ahmad has been placed in administrative detention. In the 1990s, he was held for five-and-a-half years without charge or trial, making him one of the longest held administrative detainees in Israeli prisons. For more information about Ahmad’s case, you can read his profile here and follow updates on his detention on facebook.
The Prisoners at Risk campaign aims to highlight cases which raise grave concern and require urgent action. Without international pressure, there is the real risk that Ahmad’s administrative detention order will be renewed again in September. You can help stop this from happening by joining our campaign and doing one of the following:
– Use our template letter to the Israeli authorities to call for Ahmad’s immediate and unconditional release;
– Write to your own government and representatives to call on them to pressure Israel to release Ahmad (if you are a EU citizen, you can use our template letter to members of the European Parliament);
– Organize a vigil or a demonstration to call for Ahmad’s release;
– Write to Ahmad in prison (postal address: Ofer Prison, Givat Zeev, P.O. Box 3007, via Israel);
Statement by the Employees of the Libyan Broadcasting Authority
Uruknet | August 3, 2011
On 30 July 2011, NATO hit broadcasting facilities of the Libyan al-Jamahiriya state television. According to the TV station, three people were killed and 15 injured during the attack.
NATO said it aimed to degrade Gaddafi’s “use of satellite television as a means to intimidate the Libyan people and incite acts of violence against them”. The original title of its press statement was “NATO silences Gaddafi’s terror broadcasts”. The strike apparently failed to disrupt the television service.
Here’s the official statement of the Libyan state television in response to the attacks:
Statement by the Employees of the Libyan Broadcasting Authority
30 Jul 2011
In an act of international terrorism and in violation of UNSC resolutions, NATO targeted facilities of the Libyan Broadcasting Authority in the early hours of this morning. 3 of our colleagues were murdered and 15 injured while performing their professional duty as Libyan journalists.
NATO admitted the crime citing “silencing Gaddafi’s propaganda machine” as a justification for such a murderous act.
We are the employees of the official Libyan TV. We are not a military target, we are not commanders in the army and we do not pose threat to civilians. We are performing our job as journalists representing what we wholeheartedly believe is the reality of NATO’s aggression and the violence in Libya.
We have the right to work in a safe environment protected by national and international law. The fact that we work for the Libyan government or represent anit-NATO, anti-armed gangs views does not make us a legitimate target for NATO’s rockets.
As journalists, we demand that we get full protection from the international community and ask our brothers in the profession from all around the world to stand against such attacks targeting media personnel.
Foreign journalists in Tripoli, Reporters without Borders and human rights organisations: we appeal to you to make your moral and professional stand clear on this issue.
We are hopeful that your media organisation will help us highlight this important issue and come out in support of our just cause.
Thank you.
Muhammad Ahmed Mukhtar, Abdelwanis Sulaiman Elsayed, Abdelwahid Muhammad Ali
CIA and FBI Tried to Get U.S. Lawyer to Betray Arab Clients
By Sherwood Ross – Blacklisted News – July 29, 2011
Federal agents from the FBI and CIA/FBI Joint Terrorist Task Force tried to get a distinguished international lawyer to inform on his Arab and Muslim clients in violation of their Constitutional rights to attorney-client privilege, this reporter has learned. When the lawyer refused, he said the FBI placed him on a “terrorist watch list.”
Law professor Francis Boyle gave a chilling account of how, in the summer of 2004, two agents showed up at his office (at the University of Illinois, Champaign,) “unannounced, misrepresented who they were and what they were about to my secretary, gained access to my office, interrogated me for about one hour, and repeatedly tried to get me to become their informant on my Arab and Muslim clients.”
“This would have violated their (clients) Constitutional rights and my ethical obligations as an Attorney,” Boyle explained. “I refused. So they put me on all of the United States government’s ‘terrorist watch’ lists.”
Boyle said his own lawyer found “there are about five or six different terrorist watch lists, and as far as he could determine, I am on all of them.” Despite a legal appeal to get his name removed, Boyle said, “I will remain on all of these terrorist watch lists for the rest of my life or until the two Agencies who put me on there remove my name, which is highly unlikely.”
“Whatever people might think about lawyers, we are the canary-birds of democracy. When the government goes after your lawyer soon they will be going after you,” Boyle warned. “Indeed,” he added, “the government goes after your lawyer in order to get to you, which is what happened to me. This is what the so-called ‘war against terrorism’ is really all about. It is a war against the United States Constitution.”
Boyle is a leading American professor and practitioner of international law. He holds doctorates in both law (cum laude) and Political Science from Harvard and has more than two decades of experience representing pacifist anti-war resisters, suspects in the so-called “War on Terror” and foreign governments such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is the author of numerous books, including “Protesting Power,” (Rowman & Littlefield), “Biowarfare and Terrorism,”(Clarity) and “Destroying World Order”(Clarity).
Writing of the attorney-client privilege, the American Bar Association has defined it as “the right of clients to refuse to disclose confidential communications with their lawyers, or to allow their lawyers to disclose them.” It further states the privilege “is viewed as fundamental to preserve the constitutionally based right to effective assistance of legal counsel, in that lawyers cannot function effectively on behalf of their clients without the ability communicate with them in confidence.”
The attempt by the government to destroy the Constitutional right of privileged communication between lawyer and client began in earnest after 9/11 when the Justice Department initiated a wave of such illegal actions. According to an article in Criminal Justice Magazine, Summer, 2002, “Immediately following the September 11 terrorist attacks, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a controversial order that permits the government to monitor all communications between a client and an attorney when there is ‘reasonable suspicion’ to ‘believe that a particular inmate may use communications with attorneys or their agents to further or facilitate acts of violence or terrorism.” That order “raises a wide range of constitutional concerns under the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments,” authors Paul Rice and Benjamin Saul wrote.
As if to mock the very concept of attorney-client privilege, military interrogators at Guantanamo prison posed as “lawyers” to trick illegally held suspects into providing them with information, according to a report in The Catholic Worker newspaper.
And Newsday, the Long Island, N.Y., daily, reported a wholesale invasion of lawyer-client privilege, as when lawyers at Guantanamo are forced to turn over their interview notes to guards, who send them on to the Pentagon facility in Virginia that is the only place lawyers can go to write their motions and where the Pentagon attempts to edit out detainees’ claims of mistreatment from the public record. What’s more, Newsday reported, “The military has set up a system that delays legal correspondence (between lawyers and prisoners) for weeks,” adding that “Detainees have alleged that interrogators have tried to turn them against their lawyers.”
According to Newsday, guards and interrogators peruse prisoners’ private legal papers and warn them that prisoners who have lawyers will wait longer to get out! Tom Wilner, a lawyer for 12 Kuwaiti detainees, said an interrogator asked one of his clients, “Did you know your lawyers are Jews?”
The U.S. government is “not only trying to deny counsel to the prisoners, but is actively trying to remove Guantanamo from any scrutiny, legal or otherwise” as well as “marginalizing the lawyers representing the prisoners,” The Catholic Worker said.
Placing attorney Boyle on the Terrorist Watch List is a form of punishment that is being ever more widely applied. According to “USA Today” the list grew from 288,000 names in 2005 to 1-million in March, 2009, according to an article of March 10th of that year. “People put on the watch list… can be blocked from flying, stopped at borders or subjected to other scrutiny,” reporter Peter Eisler wrote.
The attorney-client privilege is the oldest such privilege enshrined in Anglo-Saxon law and was commonly respected even under the British crown during the reign of Queen Elizabeth 1. That it is being flouted by the U.S. government today when a constitutional lawyer occupies the White House represents an incredible stain on what remains of the fabric of American democracy.
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Sherwood Ross can be reached at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
Ufree condemns new indictment filed against mayor’s daughter
Palestine Information Center – 30/07/2011
OSLO — The European network to support the Palestinian prisoners (Ufree) has condemned Israel’s continued detention of the 17-year-old daughter of the mayor of Al-Beira near the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The statement comes as the Israeli military prosecutor has placed new charges against her and signs of torture inside the prison have surfaced on her person.
The girl Bushra al-Tawil has been in Israeli custody for 25 days so far. She was abducted in a raid on her family’s home.
Ufree said that Israel was deliberately complicating releasing Tawil in a bid to bargain over her or use her to extort her father Mayor Jamal al-Tawil in a political game.
Israeli occupation forces had arrested Jamal al-Tawil as well as his wife on several occasions.
The Israeli Ofer military court ruled Thursday for the release of Tawil as no condemning evidence had been presented against her. But the military prosecutor quickly intervened and introduced an entirely new indictment against her. It also ordered that she be kept in detention and appear before another judge.
Ufree said that by keeping her detained after she was ruled a free girl; the Ofer court gave the prosecutor a fresh chance to present a new indictment against her, as the initial indictment had not been backed by evidence.
Since imprisoned, Tawil has experienced extreme physical pain, Ufree said quoting sources from her family. She was also tied up in awkward positions during the investigation process. Her family said that she appeared to have been suffering from fatigue and health problems when they last saw her bound in the courthouse.
Ufree said it will begin contacting international rights groups in an effort to unify efforts being made to support Tawil. It is also planning on preparing a document on Tawil to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council on Monday.
Israeli Army Attacks Dutch Music Orchestra with Tear Gas
PNN – 29.07.11
Nablus – The Dutch street orchestra ‘Fanfare van de Eerste Liefdesnacht’ (the First Night of Love Brass Band) from Amsterdam was attacked with tear gas today by the Israeli army during their performance in the Palestinian village Kufr Qadum near Nablus, northern West Bank.
The bands tour of Palestine is designed to be interactive, working with children from a refugee camp in the east of Bethlehem and having them play along with the band and dancing in the streets together.
The musicians were confronted with tens of soldiers who shot tear gas cannisters from behind their military jeeps during the musical performance. They then found themselves surrounded with snipers. Several members of the band were injured and suffered from tear gas inhalation.
Kufr Qadum is a village near Nablus that has suffered in recent years from radical jewish settlers who have attacked the villagers, cut down olive trees and set fire to fields. The roads that lead to the village are often blocked by Israeli military checkpoints.
The Dutch music orchestra has travelled around the West Bank for a duration of two weeks to perform in towns, villages and refugee camps. The band consists of 25 musicians with different musical instruments. They were invited by the town council of Kufr Qadum to perform in the village.
See the Dutch band performing ‘Unadikum’ at Yabous Festival in East Jerusalem:
Israeli soldiers attack Palestinian journalist
Ma’an – 30/07/2011
RAMALLAH — Palestinian photojournalist Moheeb Al-Barghouthi was beaten by Israeli soldiers Friday covering a demonstration in the Nabi Saleh village near Ramallah.
Al-Barghouthi, who works for the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, suffered head injuries and sustained bruises across his body in the attack.
He said soldiers destroyed his camera and confiscated some of his equipment.
The journalist said the soldiers accused him of “misrepresenting” the image of Israeli forces. They left him bleeding and handcuffed on the ground in intense heat for several hours, he added.
Al-Barghouthi was treated at hospital in Ramallah for light injuries.
Israel’s military responded in a statement that “the Palestinian in question was detained for violating a closed military area order. The man was questioned and released an hour later.”
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate condemned the attack and expressed “grave concern” for the welfare of Palestinian media workers.
Israel’s War On Theater
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | July 27, 2011
Freedom Theater, Jenin
Not content to wage war on armed militants (of whom there are very few these days in the West Bank), earlier today the famed special forces of the Israeli army staged a daring raid on Jenin’s Freedom Theater. In a bold tactical stroke, they woke up a night watchman at 3:30AM by throwing hunks of concrete at the theater entrance. They then strip searched him and made him afraid for his life. Those bold national heroes then arrested a Theater board member and abused the theater general manager, a British citizen. When he called the Israeli civil administration, which has sometimes been known to intercede in the most egregious situations, they hung up on him.
I can’t figure out what’s so dangerous about the Theater’s work. Perhaps the performances of Orwell’s Animal Farm in France? Or The Magic Flute? Is there a message of subversion and a call for insurrection I missed in them? Or perhaps they didn’t like the message of support for the Gaza flotilla on its website?
Given that the founder of Freedom Theater, Juliano Mer-Khamis was assassinated outside the venue a few months ago, this comes as a brutish insult from the Israeli authorities. First the Occupation criminalizes resistance through violence. Then resistance through non-violence. Then they criminalize art and expression.
Everyday Israelis believe that somehow these acts of oppression are located far from them. What they don’t understand is that this rot infects from the outside and works its way in. There will come a time, and not very long, when they’ll criminalize artistic expression inside Israel and Israeli Jewish theater managers will be arrested for expressing themselves. That is, if Israeli cultural institutions haven’t become so co-opted that they no longer offer an alternative to the prevailing nationalist consensus.
Israel angry with Iceland as well
Iceland Accused Of Anti-Semitism
The Right Perspective | July 24, 2011
Iceland’s support for Palestinian statehood at the UN is part of a long history of anti-Semitism in the island nation, according to an Israeli-born political activist who heads a political think tank.
“Relations between the two countries under the present left-wing government of Iceland are plainly bad,” writes Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) Chairman, Manfred Gerstenfeld in a July 18 editorial published in Ynet News.
Gerstenfeld notes that when Icelandic Foreign Minister Ossur Skarphedinsson announced his country’s support for a Palestinian state during the early part of July, he did so after a trip to Gaza that “studiously avoided any diplomatic contact with Israel.” During his trip, the FM also called on Israel to end its blockade of Gaza. Adding to the insult, MP Birgitta Jonsdottir “was the first parliamentarian of any country to visit participants of the failed second Gaza flotilla” shortly before Skarphedinsson’s trip.
This is not the first diplomatic slight Skarphedinsson has given Israel, Gerstenfeld notes. “At the previous UN General Assembly, Iceland’s foreign minister spoke out against Israel,” he writes. “When FM Lieberman wrote to him on this issue, Skarphedinsson did not answer. He did not even confirm receipt of Lieberman’s letter.”
Another example of diplomatic disrespect came when “Skarphedinsson also ordered Icelandic diplomats to remain in the hall while Iranian President Ahmadinejad spoke at the Durban review conference in Geneva in 2009. Diplomats from almost all other European countries left,” claims Gerstenfeld.
The Jewish activist claims Iceland’s current political attitude towards Israel falls in line with what he says is an “unimpressive history” the country has towards Jews.
“Few Jews live in the country,” Gerstenfeld writes, adding that “in the past, there have only been Jewish communities established at times when there were either British or American troops stationed in Iceland with a substantial number of Jewish soldiers among them.”
Gerstenfeld goes on to say that “Iceland’s anti-Semitic history” includes clergyman Hallgrimur Pétursson, whose hyms he wrote in 1625 mention Jews more than 50 times, “yet only for their ‘perfidy, falseness, wickedness and other malice’”; rejection of Jewish refugees during the 1930s; granting refugee status to Estonian war criminal Evald Mikson, who changed his name to Eðvalds Hinrikssonar, in the 1980s; and granting citizenship to “the rabid anti-Semite of Jewish ancestry,” chess champion Bobby Fischer in 2005.
The op-ed has opened a soul-searching discussion about the issue of anti-Semitism in Iceland. “What makes me angry is the arrogance and condescension he [Gerstenfeld]‘s displaying towards the Icelandic nation,” Katharina Hauptmann wrote in a rebuttal written on the Iceland Review website this Sunday. “In his little pamphlet he discredits and belittles my adopted home in a patronizing and mean way.”
Hauptmann goes on to give the right perspective on Gerstenfeld’s tainted view – first by mocking his “smug comment” about Iceland “gaining major publicity” with the economic crash of 2008 and volcano eruption of 2010, then knocking down his argument that because “few Jews live in Iceland” and that “there is only one ‘expert on the country’s attitude toward Jews’ in Iceland” that the country as a whole is anti-Semitic.
“Iceland is a nation of 320 000 people – just to remind you – how many experts on Jews and Anti-Semitism must one have?,” Hauptmann asks in her piece.
While noting that “many Icelanders are quite xenophobic and there is quite a lot of room for improvement” based on her own personal experiences as a foreigner living there, Hauptmann notes that “it almost seems as if he [Gerstenfeld] wants people to be anti-Semitic. What a pity.”
“To conclude, Mr. Gerstenfeld’s so called “opinion piece” is nothing but a patronizing, paranoid and polemic piece of propaganda that is unfair and offensive to the people of Iceland.
“The fact that the Icelandic government may have issues with Israel’s treatment of Palestine has nothing at all to do with anti-Semitism.”
Background:
Israel is hunting down International Solidarity supporters
PNN – 23.07.11
Bethlehem – Sami Awad, director of Holy Land Trust, a local NGO that works in developing nonviolent resistance in Palestine, warned on Saturday that Israel is targeting international supporters of Palestinians and is attempting to illegalize their work.
Awad’s statement came after Israel deported five French solidarity activists to Jordan on Friday. A group of French activists were crossing an Israeli military checkpoint between Jenin and Tulkarem, soldiers then detained the five and arrested them. The French activists were later taken to a military detention facility before they were deported to Jordan.
During an interview with PNN, Awad said that Israel is taking advantage of the silence policy some countries implement towards Israel’s crimes against those international activists. Awad warned that the Israeli targeted deportation and denied entry campaign will soon include international human rights and aid NGOs working in the region.
According to Awad Israel’s crackdown on international solidarity activists comes due to the fact that military leaders in Israel have realized the impact solidarity campaigns have on the political situation.
Awad added that the best way to counter the Israeli policies is legal actions. He wondered how legal deporting five internationals without trail is.
The Method in Netanyahu’s Madness
Israel Rules Out Non-Violence
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | July 18th, 2011
It was an Arab legislator who made the most telling comment to the Israeli parliament last week as it passed the boycott law, which outlaws calls to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied territories. Ahmed Tibi asked: “What is a peace activist or Palestinian allowed to do to oppose the occupation? Is there anything you agree to?”
The boycott law is the latest in a series of ever-more draconian laws being introduced by the far-right. The legislation’s goal is to intimidate those Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians, who have yet to bow down before the majority-rule mob.
Look out in the coming days and weeks for a bill to block the work of Israeli human rights organisations trying to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories from abuses by the Israeli army and settlers; and a draft law investing a parliamentary committee, headed by the far-right, with the power to veto appointments to the supreme court. The court is the only, and already enfeebled, bulwark against the right’s absolute ascendancy.
The boycott law, backed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, marks a watershed in this legislative assault in two respects.
First, it knocks out the keystone of any democratic system: the right to free speech. The new law makes it illegal for Israelis and Palestinians to advocate a non-violent political programme — boycott — to counter the ever-growing power of the half a million Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land.
As the Israeli commentator Gideon Levy observed, the floodgates are now open: “Tomorrow it will be forbidden to call for an end to the occupation [or for] brotherhood between Jews and Arabs.”
Equally of concern is that the law creates a new type of civil, rather than criminal, offence. The state will not be initiating prosecutions. Instead, the job of enforcing the boycott law is being outsourced to the settlers and their lawyers. Anyone backing a boycott can be sued for compensation by the settlers themselves, who — again uniquely — need not prove they suffered actual harm.
Under this law, opponents of the occupation will not even be dignified with jail sentences and the chance to become prisoners of conscience. Rather, they will be quietly bankrupted in private actions, their assets seized either to cover legal costs or as punitive damages.
Human rights lawyers point out that there is no law like this anywhere in the democratic world. Even Eyal Yinon, the naturally conservative legal adviser to the parliament, assessed the law’s aim as stopping a “discussion that has been at the heart of political debate in Israel for more than 40 years”. But more than half of Israelis back it, with only 31 per cent opposed.
The delusional, self-pitying world view that spawned the boycott law was neatly illustrated this month in a short video “ad” that is supported, and possibly financed, by Israel’s hasbara, or propaganda, ministry. Fittingly, it is set in a psychiatrist’s office.
A young, traumatised woman deciphers the images concealed in the famous Rorschach test. As she is shown the ink-splodges, her panic and anger grow. Gradually, we come to realise, she represents vulnerable modern Israel, abandoned by friends and still in profound shock at the attack on her navy’s commandos by the “terrorist” passengers aboard last year’s aid flotilla to Gaza.
Immune to reality — that the ships were trying to break Israel’s punitive siege of Gaza, that the commandos illegally boarded the ships in international waters, and that they shot dead nine activists execution-style — Miss Israel tearfully recounts that the world is “forever trying to torment and harm [us] for no reason”. Finally she storms out, saying: “What do you want – for [Israel] to disappear off the map?”
The video — released under the banner “Stop the provocation against Israel” — was part of a campaign to discredit the recent follow-up flotilla from Greece. The aid mission was abandoned after Greek authorities, under Israeli pressure, refused to let the convoy sail for Gaza.
Israel’s siege mentality asserted itself again days later as international activists staged another show of solidarity — this one nicknamed the “flytilla”. Hundreds tried to fly to Israel on the same day, declaring their intention to travel to the West Bank. The goal was to highlight that Israel both controls and severely restricts access to the occupied territories and to Palestinians.
Proving precisely the protesters’ point, Israel threatened airlines with retaliation if they carried the activists and it massed hundreds of soldiers at Ben Gurion airport to greet arrivals. Some 150 peaceful protesters who reached Israel were arrested moments after landing.
Echoing the deranged sentiments of the woman in the video, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, denounced the various flotillas as “denying Israel’s right to exist” and a threat to its security.
In reality, however, the surge in flotilla activity reflects not an attack on Israel but a growing appreciation by international groups that Israel is successfully sealing off from the world the small areas of the occupied territories left to Palestinians. The flotillas are a rebellion against the Palestinians’ rapid ghettoisation.
Although Netanyahu’s comments sound delusional, there may be a method to the madness of measures like the boycott law and the hysterical overreaction to the flotillas.
These initiatives, as Tibi points out, leave no room for non-violent opposition to the occupation. Arundhati Roy, the award-winning Indian writer, has noted that non-violence is essentially “a piece of theatre. [It] needs an audience. What can you do when you have no audience?”
Netanyahu and the Israeli right understand this point. They are carefully dismantling every platform on which dissident Israelis, Palestinians and international activists hope to stage their protests. They are making it impossible to organise joint peaceful and non-violent resistance, whether in the form of boycotts or solidarity visits. The only way being left open is violence.
Is this what the Israeli right wants, believing both that it will confirm to Israelis’ their paranoid fantasies as well as offering a justification to the world for entrenching the occupation?
Netanyahu appears to believe that, by generating the very terror he claims to be trying to defeat, he can safeguard the legitimacy of the Jewish state — and destroy any hope of a Palestinian state being created.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He won this year’s Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
Mexico Provokes Israel with Historical Question
Al-Manar – July 11, 2011
Amid Israel’s uninterrupted efforts to manipulate history and conceal historical events, the entity has started interfering in the educational system of some countries.
Israel caused internal trouble in Mexico over a national geography exam question about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Zionist website Ynetnews reported that “a geography question was raised focusing on the economic reasons for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It included the following answers: “The Jewish community used biased and racist methods against the Arab population when the State of Israel was founded”, and “Israel uses its military superiority to control borders, roads, airspace and maritime space.”
The Israeli community in Mexico was outraged, considering that the exam questions were biased against Israel. As a result, Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon raised the issue with his Mexican counterpart, urging Mexico’s Education Ministry to present an official apology.
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Book Review
Shattered Dreams: The HPV Vaccine Exposed (2019)
By Christina England – 30 Q&As – Book Review & Summary
Lies are Unbekoming | September 4, 2026
… Gardasil received FDA fast-track approval in 2006, Cervarix followed in 2009, and Gardasil 9 was approved in December 2014 with more than double the aluminium adjuvant content of the original. The commercial context is specific. Merck was about to lose patent protection on Zocor and faced $18 billion in Vioxx injury claims from a cardiovascular drug the company had marketed while suppressing its own data showing a five-times increase in heart attacks. Analysts projected the global HPV vaccine market at $4 billion by 2011, contingent on government-funded national programs for teenage girls. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act had already granted manufacturers complete liability immunity. By 2013, Japan had withdrawn its HPV vaccine recommendation after cataloguing severe adverse reactions in hundreds of girls. No Western government followed. The establishment position across the UK, US, Australia, and most of Europe held, and still holds, that the vaccines are safe and effective, that reported injuries are coincidental, and that cervical cancer prevention justifies the program. The book was published into this position, not against a vacuum.
Shattered Dreams sits alongside Mary Holland’s The HPV Vaccine On Trial and Viera Scheibner’s foundational vaccination work as part of the documented record on what has been done to a generation of teenage girls under the banner of cancer prevention. The full summary unpacks three specific findings: that Merck used the aluminium adjuvant itself as the “placebo” control in 92.5% of trial subjects, making it structurally impossible to detect excess reactions from the adjuvant; that Dr. Sin Hang Lee found HPV DNA fragments bound to aluminium in every one of sixteen Gardasil samples tested, and in the blood and spleen of a New Zealand girl six months after her third dose; and that in every country with high vaccination coverage, including Australia, the UK, Norway, and Sweden, cervical cancer rates have stopped declining and started rising specifically in the vaccinated cohort. Martínez-Lavín’s 2017 calculation puts the number needed to seriously harm with Gardasil 9 at 140, and the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one case at 1,757. Thirteen young women are seriously harmed for every one who benefits. The vaccine was approved on the basis of trials that could not detect what the trials were supposed to detect, and it is still being given to twelve-year-olds today. … Read full review
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