Illegal South Africa kidney deals tied to Israel
Press TV – November 12, 2010
Netcare, the biggest health care provider in South Africa, has pleaded guilty to charges of performing illegal kidney transplant operations using Israeli-linked organ trafficking syndicate.
In return for charges being dropped against Netcare’s Chief Executive Richard Friedland, the firm acknowledged in a plea bargain that, “payments must have been made to the donors for their kidneys, and that certain of the kidney donors were minors at the time that their kidneys were removed.”
The suit follows a seven-year investigation into the illegal operations at St. Augustine’s Hospital in Durban in association with an Israeli-linked organ trafficking syndicate.
According to reports, while organs had originally been sourced from Israeli citizens, they were later obtained from poor Romanians and Brazilians at a lower cost.
According to prosecutors, the Israelis were paid about USD 20,000 for their kidneys, while the Brazilians and Romanians were paid an average of USD 6,000.
Other related reports surfaced regarding 25,000 Ukrainian children who had been brought to Israel over the past two years to be used by Israeli medical centers for their “spare parts.”
Additionally, the Israeli military was accused of stealing the organs of Palestinian prisoners.
The illegal operations in South Africa included the removal of organs from five children.
The healthcare firm was also forced to admit that, “certain employees participated in these illegalities, and [the hospital] wrongly benefited from the proceeds,” as five notable South African physicians were also indicted in the case.
The hospital has agreed to pay nearly 8 million rand (USD 1.1 million) in fines.
The charges account for 109 operations carried out at the hospital between 2001 and 2003.
Mass anti-government rallies held in Germany
Press TV – November 13, 2010
Protests against the German government’s austerity measures on June 17, 2010
Tens of thousands demonstrate in cities across Germany against government policies and social inequalities ahead of the ruling party’s national meeting.
A day before Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats party (CDU) meeting, nearly 100,000 Germans marched across the country in Stuttgart, Dortmund, Nuremberg and Erfurt.
“We don’t want a republic in which powerful interest groups decide the guidelines of politics with their money, their power and their influence,” Berthold Huber, head of Germany’s largest trade union IG Metall, told a crowd of protesters in Stuttgart.
The rallies were organized by the Confederation of German Trade Unions (DGB), which is demanding higher wages for workers and a mandatory minimum wage.
Demonstrators also protested at the introduction of the new pension age of 67, AFP reported.
During the annual CDU meeting, held between November 14-16 in Karlsruhe, delegates will most likely re-elect Merkel as the head of the party.
The coalition government currently shares power with the Free Democrats and has passed austerity measures and spending cuts during the country’s economic crisis.
Merkel’s government is now trailing behind the center-left Social Democrats and Greens in opinion polls, Reuters reported.
Last week, tens of thousands of environmental activists protested at the transport of radioactive waste from France to Germany in conjunction with the government’s recent decision to extend the life spans of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants.
Billionaire Launches Campaign to Slash Social Security
By Jane Slaughter – Labor Notes – 11/09/2010
Why does a billionaire want to take away your Social Security benefits?
Peter Peterson is 84 years old. He’s old enough to relax and enjoy the fruits of the years he was well paid for managing other rich people’s money. Why is he spending his fortune to convince politicians they should ruin the average guy’s retirement?
Today Peterson announced the next facet in his long campaign to hack Social Security, including a joke Presidential candidate named Hugh Jidette (“huge debt”) and a website called Owe No. His aim is to convince Congress to raise the retirement age, cut Social Security’s cost-of-living increases—and raise the payroll taxes we pay for Social Security and Medicare.
It wouldn’t matter what one cranky octogenarian billionaire had to say if he weren’t putting $6 million into ads, funding “expert” commissions, and spreading lies designed to panic the populace.
Maybe Peterson figures offense is better than defense—he’s got a lot to defend. He made his fortune as a hedge fund manager—that is, moving money around—so he ought to be living in fear. Someone might get the idea he and his buddies would be good folks to tax. It’s like Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, once said. Asked why he robbed banks, Sutton replied, “Because that’s where the money is.”
Peterson and pals are the ones George Bush gifted with big tax breaks that are set to expire December 31. Although he says his top priority is reducing the deficit, Peterson doesn’t want to cut that deficit by putting his own taxes back where they were in the 1990s.
It’s hard to get your head around how rich Peterson is, and how many rich people there are in this country. But here’s how to put their money in perspective, in relation to Social Security. If Congress decides to extend those tax cuts, for households making $250,000 or more (the top 2 percent of earners), the money the Treasury will lose would be enough to put Social Security in the black for 75 years–and raise benefits by 2 percent.
First They Took Your House
Meanwhile, we have a big chunk of near-retirees today who have barely seen their wages rise at all during their working lifetimes, the last 30 years. They couldn’t save a huge amount; what they saved they had in home equity. And that was wiped away by the financial shenanigans of Peter Peterson and his ilk. There are millions of potential retirees who will have next to nothing except Social Security if they’re ever able to retire. It wasn’t enough for Wall Street to rob us of our houses’ worth and what we had in 401(k)s. Now they want to take Social Security too.
Like I said, I don’t understand it. Is there no shuffleboard court where this man could spend his golden years?
A friend wrote to me today. He’s working his butt off to keep Congress from raising the retirement age and cut back Medicare. He said:
My mother was an LPN in a nursing home. The last few years that she worked, her back and legs ached so much that she literally had to crawl up the stairs to her bedroom at night. If someone told her that she would have to work three more years before retirement because hedge fund managers don’t want to pay the same percentage of their income towards Social Security as she did, she would tell you what to do.
A slew of organizations is organizing a Call-In Day to Congress November 30. That’s the day before President Obama’s deficit commission is set to release its recommendations for raising the retirement age. They’re saying “Owe No You Don’t”—the goal is to create a groundswell of outrage that will make the recommendations dead on arrival. Find out more at strengthensocialsecurity.org and see Labor Notes’ package of fact sheets and info.
Letter to British Liberal Democrats: protecting war criminals “just about lowest thing anyone could do”
Stuart Littlewood | Redress | 11 November 2010
Liberal Democrat leaders know perfectly well that under universal jurisdiction all states that are party to the Geneva Conventions are obliged to seek out and prosecute or extradite those suspected of grave breaches of the Conventions and bring them justice, regardless of nationality.
“Grave breaches” means willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and other serious violations of the laws of war, the sort of atrocities that have been (and still are) committed wholesale by Israelis against civilians in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and on the high seas.
In other words, for these vilest of criminals there should be no hiding place.
See also: Israel’s genocide of Gaza’s Palestinians
The British government shirks its solemn duty. Fortunately, the law at present allows private applications for arrest warrants.
However, your coalition partners, the Conservatives, 80 per cent of whom are claimed to be signed-up Friends of Israel, plan to interfere with our laws of arrest in order to protect those criminals they count among their friends. Apparently this will be done by ensuring that arrests for war crimes become strictly political decisions enabling the government of the day to pick’n’choose.
Foreign Secretary William Hague, a Friend of Israel since his schooldays, recently told the pro-Israel lobby:
We have had good discussions with Israeli ministers on universal jurisdiction where the last government left us with an appalling situation where a politician like Mrs [Tzipi] Livni could be threatened with arrest on coming to the UK… We have agreed in the coalition about putting it right, we will put it right through legislation that will be introduced… I phoned Mrs Livni amongst others to tell her about that and received a very warm welcome for our proposals.
You, the Liberal Democrats, have already agreed to this???
Has everyone forgotten that Tzipi Livni, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought mega-deaths and unimaginable destruction to Gaza’s civilians nearly two years ago?
Showing no remorse for the 1,400 dead (including 320 children and 109 women), the thousands horribly maimed and the hundreds of thousand made homeless, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of Operation Cast Lead, the murderous blitz she unleashed. Later at a conference in Tel Aviv she declared: “I would today take the same decisions.”
Many of you will recall how Israel violated the Egypt-brokered ceasefire to provoke a response that could then be used as an excuse to launch the onslaught Israel had been preparing for months.
You may also recall that in 2007, when Israel tightened the siege on Gaza, the prime minister’s adviser, Dov Weisglass, said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”. Documents just released under a Freedom of Information petition by Gisha, an Israeli law centre, reveal that Israel operated “a policy of deliberate reduction” of basic goods in the Gaza Strip.
The papers confirm that the siege was not for security reasons but to keep Gazans at near-starvation level in order to bring down Hamas, the people’s choice. Since around half the population are growing children, this inhuman act of collective punishment has meant that hundreds of thousands of youngsters are undernourished and permanently damaged.
Gisha’s director accuses Israel of “paralyzing normal life in Gaza”, and adds: “I am sorry to say that major elements of this policy are still in place.”
Israel’s current foreign minister, ex-bouncer Avigdor Lieberman, is a convicted child-beater and has been variously described as “a virulent racist” and “a certified gangster”. He directly violates international law by living in one of Israel’s illegal settlements. “If you liked Mussolini, if you were missing Stalin, you’ll love Lieberman,” a member of Israel’s Meretz party observed.
All the same, Hague wants him freely walking the streets of London with Livni and the rest of the world’s psychopaths.
Whatever happened to the Liberal Democrats’ pledge to “reject all prejudice and discrimination based upon race, colour, religion, etc…” and to “fight poverty, oppression, hunger, ignorance, disease and aggression wherever they occur and to promote the free movement of ideas, people, goods and services”? These fine promises are incorporated into the party’s constitution.
Only last year Nick Clegg, LibDem leader and now deputy prime minister in the coalition, was telling the Jewish Chronicle: “The very suggestion that I might explicitly or tacitly give cover for racism, I find politically abhorrent and personally deeply offensive.”
Who would have believed that any senior Liberal Democrat would support a move to undermine our justice system in order to make the UK a safe haven for blood-soaked foreign leaders whose policies and unspeakable crimes are alien to LibDem principles, disgusting to the British public and condemned by international law?
If we allow the warmongers to come and go as they please, civilized people will never be able to take back their world.
We read that Hague was sent away from Tel Aviv with a slap in the face the other day when the Israelis without warning suspended dialogue with Britain. As if that wasn’t embarrassment enough for such an ardent admirer, Hague now intends to humiliate us all by grovelling and tinkering with British law to appease them.
If Parliament passes measures to undermine the important principle enshrined in the Geneva Conventions and weaken the law to enable those wanted for crimes against humanity to evade arrest, wouldn’t that make the whole British nation an accessory to those crimes?
And please reflect on how nodding it through would be just about the lowest thing anyone could do.
Where is Everybody?
Election Money Flows in 2010, But Voters Stay Home
By BILLY WHARTON | CounterPunch | November 5, 2010
While all eyes were placed firmly on Tea Party electoral breakthroughs such as Rand Paul in Kentucky, other disturbing trends also developed behind the scenes of this round of elections. This was the first election since the Supreme Court decision that reversed the limits on corporate campaign donations by affirming corporate personhood. The money did certainly flow in 2010 and it served to shape the outcome of at least some of the elections. Ominous unnamed sources funded dozens of attack ads in contested races, Political Action Committee (PAC) funds flowed freely and the unions continued their failed strategy of footing the bill for the Democratic Party. The sheer scale of the spending combined with restrictive ballot access laws, served to further drown out independent candidates. Voters responded by staying home.
Money, Money, Money
Overall spending increased rapidly in 2010. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) reports that more than $4 billion, or the annual GDP of Mongolia, was spent on this election. The Supreme Court decision on corporate personhood seems to have had the biggest impact on outside spending. Outside spending relates to activities such as the purchases of election ads, making phone calls for candidates and other electoral activities on behalf of candidates. Spikes in outside spending normally occur during presidential years and then wane in by-elections. Until this year.
CRP tallies of outside spending show it surging in 2010 to nearly $300 million, a level equal to the heavily financed presidential election of 2008. In a reversal of 2008, Conservative concerns outspent Liberal ones by nearly two to one. Much of the Conservative money, some $32 million, was funneled through Chambers of Commerce in support of Republican candidates. Who did this spending is still unknown, as contributors evaded or delayed disclosure of their contributions.
One race that attracted serious money was the hotly contested Colorado Senate race in which Democrat Michael Bennet squeaked by Republican Ken Buck by less than 1% of the vote. Bennet spent more than $10 million on the race and received more than $1 million from a Democratic Party PAC. The outside spending was equally remarkable. Nearly $6 million was spent on advertisements opposing Bennet and another $2.4 million to support Buck. The total spending in this race amounted to around $34 million, a figure equal to the monthly GDP of Caribbean island-nation of Dominica.
Unions: The Definition of Insanity
Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity is useful when evaluating the role of unions in elections. Einstein understood insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If you think of the trade unions as people, they are in serious need of mental counseling. They keep on doing the same thing, supporting the Democrats, with the same results, working people get screwed. This time, the strategy of the union leadership was to do this same thing again, but on a much grander scale.
Union leaders took advantage of the new rules by avoiding the annoying formality of setting up a separate fund for campaign donations. This year they spent directly from member’s dues. And, boy did they spend. The Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees alone spent about $37 million in outside spending on electoral races. Union money flowed throughout the country with little affect on policy proposals – the Democrats are still firmly committed to budget cutting or in Washington-speak “restructuring entitlements.”
The folly of union electoral politics was most clearly on display in the race for Governor in New York State. Here, Democratic candidate Andrew Cuomo left the heavily union-financed Working Families Party (WFP) twisting in the wind for weeks. The WFP offered their endorsement, but Cuomo refused, thereby putting the group’s ballot line in jeopardy. Cuomo eventually relented, but forced WFP officials to sign off on his proposals to cut the state budget – including cutbacks on unionized public workers! With the WFP politically neutered, Cuomo went on an embarrassing media offensive against public employees unions targeting them for concessions. Though the WFP kept its ballot access, it sold its soul and with it the last progressive cover for the trade union’s suicidal Democratic Party insider strategy.
Unintended Consequences
Things did not work out exactly as planned on Tuesday. Though big-moneyed interests did manage to shape some outcomes, the trend toward self-financed mega-rich candidates took a hit. This is not entirely negative as long as the inane notion that fueled it – that these candidates were too rich to give in to special interests – dies along with it.
The CRP reports that only 1/5 of the 58 Federal level candidates who contributed at least $500,000 to their own campaigns achieved victory. The rest faced spectacularly expensive defeats. The poster-child for this reversal was Republican Senate Candidate in Connecticut Linda McMahon. McMahon coughed up more than $46 million in profits from her wrestling empire yet still came up empty.
While self-financed narcissists were going down in flames, there were also some small signs of grassroots resistance. In New York, thousands of disaffected progressives and independents found their way to Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins. Hawkins’ vote total of more than 57,000 surpassed previous Green efforts and secured permanent ballot access for the party. Simultaneously, in Ohio, Socialist Party USA candidate for Senate Dan LaBotz captured the attention of more than 27,000 voters. Though LaBotz and the Socialists were practically starting from scratch in the state, they managed to present socialist politics in a manner that drew some amount of attention. Both Hawkins and LaBotz bucked the money trends as they ran their campaigns on the cheap and got the most out of small individual contributions.
Where is Everybody?
Despite all the money spent. Despite all the attack commercials. Despite the unrelenting reports on 24/7 political news channels, the American people still did not turn out to vote. The United States Election Project reports that the average turn out was around 41%. Heavily contested races peaked out just above 50% while other states hovered around the high 30’s. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that turnout among African-American voters was far lower than the 2008 Presidential election. Overall, for the entire country, people just stayed home.
The explanation for all this is exceedingly simple. Save the moralistic homilies about the duty of people to vote. The American people get at least one part of the problem. There are no significant choices offered at the ballot box. There is a basic agreement between the Democrats and Republicans over issues ranging from budget cuts, to free trade, to military strategy and expenditures. No amount of well-financed public relations can effectively dress up this agreement as difference. The American voters know this, so they stay home.
The next step, of course, is to build that alternative. This process is likely to take place primarily outside of the electoral arena. With the Obama Deficit Commission preparing to issue a report in December that is widely expected to propose dramatic cutbacks in public programs such as Social Security and Medicare, there will be plenty of issues to organize around. Protest politics will come back to the US. Whether this reappearance will be represented in the electoral arena remains to be seen. Certainly, thanks to the Supreme Court decision on corporations, there will be powerful interests lining up to prevent such manifestations.
Billy Wharton is a writer and activist whose articles have appeared in the Washington Post, the NYC Indypendent, Spectrezine and In These Times. He can be reached at whartonbilly@gmail.com
Child Labour in Jordan Valley Settlements
By Dorien Vanden Boer – Palestine Monitor – 30 October 2010
Child labour is a serious problem in the Jordan valley. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found more than 7,000 children between five and 17 were working there in 2008, the highest concentration in the Palestinian Territories. That figure has risen since.
The statistics don’t tell the full story, as there is no data for many of the children working secretly in settlements. The lack of information makes the problem difficult to deal with at a political level, even if the will existed to affect change.
The legal age for workers in Palestine was recently increased from 14 to 16, but this change has not materialised on the ground. Settlers avoid this law by recruiting through subcontractors, so that they have no direct contracts with minors, who have no official employee status or rights. Nonetheless, settlers are fully aware that children are working on their fields.
In 2007, The Israeli Ministry of Trade and Industry extended the minimum wage law to include Palestinians employed in Jewish settlements, but no authority enforces it. While the legal minimum wage in Israel is $5.51 an hour, Palestinians in settlements earn $2 an hour or less. For a day of eight hours, with only a half hour break they receive around 55 to 60 shekels ($15-16). The child workers are not insured and are given no holidays or sick leave. They often work on dangerous construction sites that do not comply with Israeli health & safety regulations. When the frequent accidents occur they receive no protection from their employer and are simply cast out.
Youssef is the headmaster of the school in Fasayil. He tells me about his nephew who got badly injured after an accident with a tractor in one of the settlements. As he was not insured by his employer and nor was the tractor, he had no right to any compensation. His family received the 10,000 shekel hospital bill. Only through “the strong solidarity between families in the village,” were they were able to pay the hospital costs and avoid total impoverishment.
Although child labour is a large-scale problem in the occupied territories, little action is being taken by humanitarian groups. Iman Nijem, a programme manager of Save the Children UK, told us his NGO is the only one in Palestine working to address the problem. Their project is just a year old.
Iman feels the main reasons for the child labour epidemic relate to the occupation. In the Jordan Valley, movement restrictions are uniquely acute, as settlements comprise approximately 50% of its territory, in addition to closed military zones and ‘nature reserves’ that eat into Palestinian land. Water is also appropriated in vast quantities for use in settlements, leaving severely limited resources for Palestinian agriculture.
While Palestinian industry is handicapped and adults cannot earn a living, children are a solution. By sending them to work in the settlements they may earn a family enough to escape the worst ravages of poverty, although their cheap labour advances the expansion of the settlements which strangle the Palestinian population. It is short-term survival that causes long-term suffering.
Child labour in settlements is not confined to the Jordan Valley. Subcontractors in South Hebron were prosecuted this year for smuggling children at night to work in agriculture and construction for settlements. The employers themselves escaped criminal charges.
The legal system makes it easy to use child labour. In C areas, the Israeli military are the only law and are notoriously reluctant to prosecute Israeli settlers. The Ministry of Trade and Industry, which is responsible for the inspection of settlements in the West Bank, rarely does so, which it justifies by claiming a lack of resources.
Save the Children wants to develop a monitoring system for child labourers. Working together with the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs the organisation hopes to establish a system that supervises children to ensure they are not involved in hazardous work or dropping out of school. The system would include vocational training for the children and awareness programs for the parents. A similar programme in 2003 had to be stopped due to a lack of funding. It is hoped this new scheme may finally expose the shocking and consistent abuse of children.
Cut, Cut, Cut the Budget… Just Don’t Touch Israel
October 25, 2010 by Alex Kane
If the GOP’s electoral wins next week are enough to take over Congress, one thing they’ve pledged to do is “stop out-of-control spending,” as their “Pledge to America” policy blueprint says. But don’t even think about touching the over $3 billion in annual aid the United States gives to Israel.
Politico‘s Laura Rozen reports, via the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, that House Republican whip Eric Cantor “would propose separating U.S. aid to Israel from the foreign operations budget, which the GOP may vote to defund”:
Cantor, of Virginia, said he wants to protect funding for Israel should that situation arise.
“Part of the dilemma is that Israel has been put in the overall foreign aid looping,” he said when asked about the increasing tendency of Republicans in recent years to vote against foreign operations appropriations. “I’m hoping we can see some kind of separation in terms of tax dollars going to Israel.”
Cantor’s statement was a sign that the Republican leadership was ready to defer to the party’s right wing on this matter. Some on the GOP right have suggested including Israel aid in the defense budget, and a number of Tea Party-backed candidates have said they would vote against what is known in Congress as “foreign ops.”
The Republican Party (as well as some Democrats) wants to decrease Social Security benefits, among other austerity measures, in their effort to reduce government spending. But government funding of an illegal and racist occupation? Keep the cash flowing.
Californian Rabbi Rallies with British “Anti-Islam Group” outside Israel Embassy
Shifren at London Rally on Sunday
Al-Manar – 25/10/2010
In a declared hostility to Islam and in a show of support to the Zionist entity, an Orthodox California rabbi marched Sunday with an anti-Islam group in Britain outside the Israeli Embassy.
Rabbi Nachum Shifren, an ex-lifeguard known as the surfing rabbi, previously trained Israeli paratroopers and worked as a driver for Kach head Rabbi Meir Kahane.
He has spoken at Tea Party events saying he is a member of the group.
“I am coming to the UK to express my solidarity with the patriots in England who are on the front line in the war on jihad and stealth jihad,” Shifren told the Jewish Chronicle last week. “Multiculturalists have brought us to the brink, insisting on degrading our own cultures while pandering to forces of darkness that threaten to completely transform our societal foundations.”
The English Defense League (EDL) has said it wants to foster ties with the American Tea Party, a right-wing group that has taken anti-Muslim and anti-immigration stances, and the rally, at which Shifren spoke, was meant as a first step to show support for Israel.
Hate-filled Israeli rabbis incite violence against non-Jews
Vitriolic racism and hatred has become the Israeli norm
By Omar Radwan | MEMO | 22 October 2010
Israel appears to be awash with Jewish hate preachers. In the past, rabbis who issued racist edicts or offensive remarks about Palestinians or non-Jews were generally dismissed as radicals and extremists who were no more than a trifling annoyance to be ignored in the hope that they would simply go away. However, it is now clear that ignoring this problem has only made it worse. In the current climate in Israel, extremist hate preaching has apparently become the norm and it is being embraced, not just on the extreme political right but also by a disturbing number of Israelis in general, be they preachers, politicians, settlers or simply ordinary citizens. Hate-filled Israelis have become emboldened over the years by the knowledge that they can say and do almost anything without fear, knowing that they will not be condemned or, if they are, that nothing will come of it. That is due to the widespread support for their views across Israeli society as well as their religious leaders and the political elite.
What is particularly disturbing is that leading Israeli rabbis, who are meant to be the spiritual and moral guides of the Jewish people, are actually encouraging racism, physical violence and even the killing of Palestinians.
It is no longer shocking to read headlines such as “Leading rabbi encourages IDF soldiers to use Palestinian human shields“. This particular headline relates to Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, who taught his students that “according to true Jewish values, your lives come before those of the enemy, whether he is a soldier or a civilian under protection. Therefore, you are forbidden from endangering your own life for the sake of the enemy, not even for a civilian.” This sort of teaching, no doubt, goes some way towards explaining why the number of cases in which Palestinian children are being used as human shields by Israeli forces is increasing.
Vicious levels of discrimination against non-Jews have now escalated to the point that when Israelis of a more reasonable persuasion do something as simple as, for example, rent a property to an Arab, rabbis are now calling for them to be shunned and boycotted by their own Jewish communities. A recent report in Haaretz quoted a letter signed by a group of 18 prominent rabbis, including the Chief Rabbi of Safed, who wrote that renting properties to Arabs would deflate the value of Jewish homes and, “The neighbours and acquaintances [of a Jew who sells or rents to an Arab] must distance themselves from the Jew, refrain from doing business with him, deny him the right to read from the Torah, and similarly [ostracize] him until he goes back on this harmful deed”.
It is not just Muslims who are on the receiving end of this campaign of hatred; even Christians in the region have long been subjected to disturbing and widespread campaigns of abuse from Israeli Jews. “I hate to say it”, said Roman Catholic Father Massimo Pazzini of the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa, “but we’ve grown accustomed to this. Jewish religious fanatics spitting at Christian priests and nuns has become a tradition.”
The term “hate preacher” has often been used in the Western media about Muslims but it seems more appropriate to describe some of the Israeli rabbis for their recent statements and guidance.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
In the run-up to the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian “peace negotiations” Rabbi Ovadia Yosef wished that “all the nasty people who hate Israel, like Abu Mazen [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas], vanish from our world”. He went on to say, “May God strike them down with the plague along with all the nasty Palestinians who persecute Israel.”
Although his statement was immediately condemned by America it did not come as a surprise to people who were already familiar with his 2001 call for the annihilation of Arabs, at which point he also said it was forbidden to be merciful to them.
~
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro
In his controversial book The King’s Torah, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro sanctioned the murder by Jews of non-Jews, including babies and children, who may pose an actual or potential threat to Jews or to Israel.
“It is permissible to kill the Righteous among non-Jews even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” he wrote. “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments because we care about the commandments there is nothing wrong with the murder.”
This edict was seemingly made in response to the arrest of a Jewish terrorist who confessed to murdering two Palestinian shepherds in the West Bank, and was thus used to justify the killings.
According to a report by Khalid Amayreh in November 2009, “During the Israeli onslaught against Gaza earlier this year, Mordecahi Elyahu, one of the leading rabbinic figures in Israel, urged the army not to refrain from killing enemy children in order to save the lives of Israeli soldiers. He had even petitioned the Israeli government to carry out a series of carpet bombing of Palestinian population centres in Gaza. ‘If they don’t stop after we kill 100,’ said the rabbi, ‘then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after we kill a thousand, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop, we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to stop them’.”
According to Eliyahu’s obituary in the Daily Telegraph in June this year
Rabbi Eliyahu wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to say that, according to Jewish war ethics, an entire city (he referred to Gaza City) holds collective responsibility for the immoral behaviour of individuals.
Thus, he continued, there was no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians during a potential massive military offensive in Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket attacks. He ended his letter quoting from the Psalms: “I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them.”
He extended his hatred to those individuals worldwide who even show the slightest incidental support for Palestinians and said of the hundreds of thousands killed in 2004 by the Asian tsunami “those who died were paying for their governments’ support of the Palestinians.”
With statements such as these it is paradoxical Muslim preachers such as Dr Zakir Naik and Sheik Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, whose views are very moderate in comparison, are labelled as extremists. Although for years now Muslim leaders have (often undeservedly) been vilified as the most hate-filled preachers in the world, that title is now surely more deserved by Israeli rabbis such as those mentioned above.
By any means necessary, no matter how immoral, or corrupt.
It is strange for the spiritual leaders of a “chosen” people who stake their claim to the “holy” land use methods to achieve their goals that are decidedly “unholy”. One recent ruling by Rabbi Ari Schvat, for example, gave “his blessing to female agents of Israel’s foreign secret service, Mossad, who may be required to have sex with the enemy in so-called ‘honey-pot’ missions against terrorists.” While there is apparently no limit on Jewish men using sex in an effort to infiltrate the enemy, he did make a few remarks about Jewish female ‘honey-pots’ stating, “If it is necessary to use a married woman, it would be best [for] her husband to divorce her… After the [sex] act, he would be entitled to bring her back.” He also added, “Naturally, a job of that sort could be given to a woman who in any event is licentious in her ways.” So, not only are these rabbis genocidal, but sexist as well.
That such comments are not causing moral outrage amongst conservative Jews in Israel and, indeed, in Jewish communities worldwide, is worrying. The concept of a woman defiling herself and committing any act of lewdness or adultery is something alien to most religions but the fact that Jewish women are being given the green light by Israel’s rabbis to use such lascivious means to achieve the goals of Mossad demonstrates further that Israel really does not have any moral line across which it will not go.
The standard response to an article like this is to condemn it as “anti-Semitic”. That is neither the intention nor, it is contended, the result; the statements quoted have been issued or uttered by rabbis and well-publicised. Some may even be directly responsible for the subsequent killings of innocent Palestinian civilians. Instead of lining up to shoot the messenger, detractors should pause instead and really consider what these rabbis have said; and then decide whether reporting anti-Gentile statements made by rabbis really does qualify as anti-Semitism. There are many Jews and rabbis in congregations all over the world who are desperate for peace in the Holy Land and are striving to stand up for the common humanity of us all, regardless of our faith background.
According to New York-based Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, rabbis like those quoted above “do not and cannot represent Judaism or the Torah,” Indeed, Rabbi Weiss goes one step further: “The Zionist State of ‘Israel’, which is a rebellion against the Almighty, cannot represent the Torah or world Jewry true to the Torah.” Referring to Rabbi Ovadia Yusef in particular, Rabbi Weiss added: “This rabbi is a member of Sephardic Jewry, Jews from Arab countries. If he would only look back at his own community’s history, he would realize that Jews can, and did, live peacefully with Arabs, for many centuries. When Jews were persecuted, killed and expelled in other parts of the world, the Arab countries provided a safe haven and welcomed Jews with open arms. In Palestine as well, Jews enjoyed this hospitality when Palestinians and Jews co-existed in harmony for many generations, as is well-documented in Jewish books of that era. It was only Zionism, with its theft and oppression of the Palestinian people, that put an end to this co-existence.” (http://www.nkusa.org/activities/Statements/20100819.cfm)
Racism and extremist preachers must be challenged, not least when they ply their wares in volatile areas like the Holy Land, where words can and all too often lead to murderous acts. People of faith and good faith must stand up to incitement to hatred; it would be refreshing to hear more leading rabbis condemning the hate preachers in Israel. Their silence is deafening.
Major rabbi says non-Jews are donkeys, created to serve Jews
By Khalid Amayreh, in occupied East Jerusalem | The People’s Voice | October 18, 2010
A major Jewish religious figure in Israel has likened non-Jews to donkeys and beasts of burden, saying the main reason for their very existence is to serve Jews.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual mentor of the religious fundamentalist party, Shas, which represents Middle Eastern Jews, reportedly said during a Sabbath homily earlier this week that “the sole purpose of non-Jews is to serve Jews.”
Yosef is considered a major religious leader in Israel who enjoys the allegiance of hundreds of thousands of followers.
Shas is a chief coalition partner in the current Israeli government.
Yosef, also a former Chief Rabbi of Israel, was quoted by the right-wing newspaper, the Jerusalem Post, as saying that the basic function of a goy, a derogatory word for a gentile, was to serve Jews.
“Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel,” Yosef said in his weekly Saturday night sermon which was devoted to laws regarding actions non-Jews are permitted to perform on the Sabbath.
Yosef also reportedly said that the lives of non-Jews in Israel are preserved by God in order to prevent losses to Jews.
Yosef, widely considered a prominent Torah sage and authority on the interpretation of Talmud, a basic Jewish scripture, held a comparison between animals of burden and non-Jews.
“In Israel, death has no dominion over them…With gentiles, it will be like any person-They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money.
“This is his servant…That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.”
Yosef further elucidated his ideas about the servitude of gentiles to Jews, asking “why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap; and we will sit like an effendi and eat.”
“That is why gentiles were created.”
The concept of gentiles being infra-human beings or quasi-animals is well-established in Orthodox Judaism.
For example, rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement, a supremacist but influential Jewish sect, teach openly that at the spiritual level, non-Jews have the status of animals.
Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, was quoted as saying that the difference between a Jew and a gentile was greater and deeper than the difference between humans and animals.
“The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews — all of them in all different levels — is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
Some of Kook’s manifestly racist ideas are taught in the Talmudic college, Merkaz H’arav, in Jerusalem. The college is named after Kook.
In his book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, the late Israeli writer and intellectual Israel Shahak argued that whenever Orthodox rabbis use the word “human,” they normally didn’t refer to all humans, but only to Jews, since non-Jews are not considered humans according to Halacha of Jewish law.
A few years ago, a member of the Israeli Knesset, castigated Israeli soldiers for “treating human beings as if they were Arabs.” The Knesset member, Aryeh Eldad, was commenting on the evacuation by the Israeli army of a settler outpost in the West Bank.
Faced with the negative effect of certain Biblical and Talmudic teachings on inter-religious relations, some Christian leaders in Europe have called on the Jewish religious establishment to reform the traditional Halacha perceptions of non-Jews.
However, while the Reform and Conservative sects of Judaism, have related positively to such calls, most Orthodox Jews have totally rejected the calls, arguing that the Bible is God’s word which can’t be altered under any circumstances.
The Bible says that non-Jews living under Jewish rule must serve as “water carriers and wood hewers” for the master race.
In Joshua (9:27), we read ” That day, Joshua made the Gibeonites woodcutters and water carriers for the community and for the altar of the Lord at the Place the Lord would choose. And that is what they are to this days.”
Elsewhere in the Bible, Israelites are strongly urged to treat “strangers living in your midst” humanely “because you yourselves were strangers in Egypt.”
Britain hangs out “welcome” sign to war criminals
Stuart Littlewood | Redress | 19 October 2010
The UK is to become a safe haven for Israeli psychopaths while they continue their brutal military occupation, colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land, and carry on bombarding blockaded Gaza and executing or abducting anyone bringing humanitarian help
That’s the British government’s latest contribution to Middle East peace.
The Zionist entity’s Trojan Horse at the heart of our government – otherwise known as the Conservative Friends of Israel (FCI) – held a reception recently attended by our foreign secretary, William Hague.
Hague told the 400 guests:
We have had good discussions with Israeli ministers on universal jurisdiction where the last government left us with an appalling situation where a politician like Mrs Livni could be threatened with arrest on coming to the UK…
We have agreed in the coalition about putting it right; we will put it right through legislation that will be introduced… The justice secretary will bring into the House of Commons adding to legislation going through the House of Commons later this year and I phoned Mrs Livni amongst others to tell her about that and received a very warm welcome for our proposals.
Who can forget that Tzipi Livni, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought unspeakable death and destruction to Gaza’s civilians nearly two years ago?
And who’d have believed a British government minister would undermine our justice system in order to make the UK a safe haven for the likes of her?
Showing no remorse and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands, and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of Operation Cast Lead (the murderous blitz she had unleashed). And speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv’s Institute for Security Studies, she said: “I would today take the same decisions.”
Few of us would want to touch such a person with a barge-pole. But Hague is so smitten that he said it was “completely unacceptable” that someone like Tzipi Livni felt she couldn’t visit the UK. “We cannot have a position where Israeli politicians feel they cannot visit this country. The situation is unsatisfactory [and] indefensible. It is absolutely my intention to act speedily,” Hague said.
He even tried to make Livni’s monstrous crime look good by claiming, as reported on the CFI website, that “the immediate trigger for this crisis [the war on Gaza] was the barrage of hundreds of rocket attacks against Israel on the expiry of the ceasefire or truce”. It is well known that the ceasefire didn’t expire. It was deliberately breached by an Israeli raid into Gaza that killed several Palestinians with the intention of deliberately provoking a response that would re-ignite the violence and provide an excuse to launch Operation Cast Lead, which the Israelis had been preparing for months.
The foreign secretary concluded his talk to the CFI by encouraging stronger business links between Israel and Britain and saying he intended to visit Israel in coming weeks.
One of the delights awaiting Hague is a meeting with his opposite number, Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in an illegal squat on stolen Palestinian land and is a wanted criminal on that score alone. He is also pushing for 1.3 million Arabs currently living in Israel to be stripped of citizenship and forcibly transferred outside Israel’s future borders.
To that end Israel’s military and civil authorities have just finished an exercise rehearsing a crushing response to the riots this latest “ethnic cleansing” programme will inevitably cause.
Few individuals are more obnoxious than former club bouncer Lieberman, who is a convicted child-beater and described even in Israel as “a virulent racist” and “a certified gangster”. He is also reported to be under investigation for corruption. All the same, Hague wants him freely walking the streets of London with Livni. No doubt the media will soon be sprouting propaganda photos of Hague and Lieberman triumphantly shaking hands, smirking, embracing and doing whatever else two crazies do when they get together.
A masterclass in grovelling
The ” universal jurisdiction” fuss flared up again last year after Israeli top brass, including Ehud Barak, Livni and retired general Doron Almog, cancelled engagements in London for fear of being arrested. Israel complained bitterly. The then British foreign secretary, David Miliband, apologized and, according to a press report, “promised Lieberman to begin working immediately to change the UK laws that enable the issue of arrest warrants against Israeli officials accused of war crimes”.
Outraged members of the public were immediately asking who Miliband thought he was, grovelling in their name to Israeli thugs who had the temerity to whinge about the perfectly proper operation of British law, especially when the warrants were issued to answer well-founded charges.
Under universal jurisdiction all states that are party to the Geneva Conventions are under a binding obligation to seek out those suspected of having committed grave breaches of the Conventions and bring them, regardless of nationality, to justice. There should be no hiding place for those suspected of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Applications can be made to a court for private arrest warrants, and this has been happening because the government itself shirks its duty under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention and drags its feet until the bird has flown.
Livni bleated: “It’s about the entire State of Israel and our ability to go on working together against common threats.”
The threats Israel faces are caused by its racist expansion, land theft, general lawlessness and hateful attitude towards its neighbours, and by the nuclear threat Israel itself poses to others in the region and the Islamic world generally. To suggest we have anything in common is an insult.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office butted in with this arrogant statement: “We will not agree to a situation in which [former Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert, [Defense Minister] Ehud Barak and [opposition leader and former Foreign Minister] Tzipi Livni will be summoned to the bench. We utterly reject the absurdity that is happening in Britain.”
And the Israeli ambassador in London, Ron Prosor, had the cheek to chastise the British foreign secretary, telling him it was time the British government took action.
Miliband obligingly called the warrants intolerable and said he had asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Justice Minister Jack Straw to find an urgent solution.
Dancing to Tel Aviv’s tune
The solution is simple enough. If Israel wants talks in London they send people with clean hands. There should be no concessions, anyway, to a regime that shows such contempt for international law and normal codes of conduct.
Instead Brown, a patron of the Jewish National Fund, said Livni was “most welcome in Britain any time”, and our Ministers of the Crown are dancing to Tel Aviv’s tune. No moves were made by Labour in their last days in office, but it seems the incoming Conservatives and their Liberal-Democrat partners are planning to put the director of public prosecutions in charge of issuing arrest warrants. This turns what should be a strictly judicial process into a political one that keeps any warmongering child-killer our ministers happen to admire out of the clutches of the UK’s courts.
William Hague was recruited into the Conservative Friends of Israel at the worryingly tender age of 15.
In 2007, while shadow foreign secretary, he said: “We will always have strong economic and political ties with Israel. We will always be a friend of Israel.”
In 2008 he declared:
The unbroken thread of Conservative Party support for Israel that has run for nearly a century from the Balfour Declaration to the present day will continue. Although it will no doubt often be tested in the years ahead, it will remain constant, unbroken, and undiminished by the passage of time.
Hague told the Jewish Chronicle in an interview: “We don’t approve of expanding settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem because it makes the two-state solution more difficult.” Not because it’s a barbaric crime to dispossess Arabs of their lands, homes and livelihoods – he doesn’t approve because it’s a bit awkward politically.
“I’ve travelled across the country,” he continued. “I’ve stood on the Golan Heights and swam in the Sea of Galilee. I’ve stood on the part of the West Bank where you can see the Mediterranean, where you really understand Israel’s strategic fragility.”
If he had stood in the rubble of Gaza and seen the devastation to homes and infrastructure and visited the shattered schools and hospitals there – if he had stood in Bethlehem, imprisoned on all sides by the evil separation wall, and made his way on foot with Palestinian workers (those with permits) through the sinister steel barriers and holding pens of the Israeli checkpoint – a process that can take hours – before beginning the journey to Jerusalem, he might have understood how the Israeli jackboot chokes the life out of the Palestinian people.
Hague’s Zionist sympathies visibly ooze from every pore. Livni appears to have him eating out of her hand. If Parliament passes his measures to weaken powers of arrest in order to harbour those wanted for crimes against humanity, doesn’t that make the whole British nation an accessory to those crimes?
And before MPs approve such measures they should reflect on how it would be the lowest thing they could do.
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Lies are Unbekoming | January 25, 2026
The waiting room is clean. The receptionist is polite. The forms ask reasonable questions. Nothing in the physical environment suggests danger. The magazines are current. The hand sanitizer dispenser works. Someone has chosen calming colors for the walls.
A pregnant woman sits in a chair designed for her comfort. She has been told to be here. Not ordered—no one orders. Recommended. Strongly recommended. Everyone does this. Her mother did this. Her friends did this. The women in her prenatal group compare notes about their appointments the way they compare notes about nursery furniture. Which provider did you choose? What tests have you had? The questions assume the answers. The answers assume the questions.
She will be offered things today. Offered is the word used. The offers will come with information sheets that list risks and benefits in tabular form. She will sign consent documents. Everything will be voluntary in the legal sense. No one will hold her down. No one will threaten her. She will choose, and her choices will feel like choices, and she will leave feeling she has done the responsible thing.
What she will not feel is the weight of what has been arranged before she arrived. … continue
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