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.
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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.
Thieves Planting Flags, Murderers Carrying Crosses
A book review of – King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
By Brian Hurrel | December 3, 2009
When reading Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost”, one is struck not only by the enormity of the crimes committed in the Belgian Congo, but also with the puzzling and somewhat uncomfortable realization that this should not be news. It seems incredible that such events could be relegated to the ash heap of forgotten history. In the case of Leopold’s Congo, the ash heap was more than metaphorical. Officials destroyed as much evidence as they could before the Congo was turned over the Belgian government, and according to Hochschild, “the furnaces burned for eight days, turning most of the Congo state records to ash and smoke in the sky over Brussels.”
English: “In The Rubber Coils. Scene – The Congo ‘Free’ State” Linley Sambourne depicts King Leopold II of Belgium as a snake entangling a congolese rubber collector. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
While there has been a growing acknowledgment over the past few decades of the whitewash given to much of Western history, there has also been much criticism of “revisionist history”. To acknowledge that ones country has blood on its hands in the past is seen as being unpatriotic or anti-Western. At best, such history is dismissed as “ancient” or simply lived by people who were “a product of their times”. It is difficult, however, to dismiss Leopold’s Congo as such. This is not “ancient history”. Those who participated are not far removed from today’s young generation, and were contemporaries of our grandparents and great grandparents. As for such men being products of their times, this is hard to reconcile with those living a generation or two after slavery ended in the United States, and more than a century after slavery had been outlawed in much of Europe.
And for what did these atrocities take place? What was the driving force behind such barbarism? Ivory at first, but what really turned the Congo into a slaughterhouse seems almost trivial when looked at in comparison to the murderous lengths undertaken to exploit the resource in question: Rubber. For this millions died and countless others were mutilated.
This is a good example of the laws of unintended consequences. Certainly Scotsman James Dunlop had no idea of the misery that would result from his invention of the pneumatic rubber tire. The Congo just happened to have the right resource at the right time in its abundant supply of rubber vines. “The industrial world rapidly developed an appetite not just for rubber tires, but for hoses, tubing, gaskets, and the like, and for rubber insulation for the telegraph, telephone, and electrical wiring now rapidly encompassing the globe. Suddenly factories could not get enough of the magical commodity…” As with oil in later decades, rubber, a resource that the world had little use or need for a few short years earlier, suddenly became essential to the economies of the industrialized world. Even if the Congo had had any chance of relatively benign treatment by the West, the rubber boom would have sealed its fate regardless. Also, Leopold, with undeniable business acumen, knew that cultivated rubber, from trees rather than vines, would eventually cause a drop in price when rubber plantations in South America and Asia reached maturity. In the meantime, he decided to squeeze the Congo for every last drop before this happened, and “voraciously demanded ever greater quantities of wild rubber from the Congo…”
One might have expected Leopold’s agents to pay Congolese natives a pittance to gather rubber, and still reap huge profits, but the reality was that human greed knew no bounds in the Congo. The natives were not paid at all. In fact, they were not even allowed to handle money. Instead they were forced to gather rubber by a variety of means, most of them violent or terroristic. In most cases, women and children were held hostage until the men met their rubber quotas. Those who resisted were simply killed. Even many who didn’t resist were killed for not meeting quotas. Others died of disease and starvation, especially those in detention. Some died in the dangerous job of harvesting the rubber vines high in the trees. Those caught cheating by cutting the vine open, which yielded more rubber but killed the vine, were killed as well.
In other cases, Force Publique forces simply rampaged through entire regions, wiping out villages and massacring men, women, and children alike without distinction. In many instances, to prove that they hadn’t wasted ammunition hunting, they were required to show a left hand to their commanders for every round of ammunition used. Uprisings, of which there were many, were dealt with quickly and severely. Huge areas were left depopulated through a combination of punitive massacres, terrified villagers abandoning the area, or communities that could not remain viable because the men spent so much time gathering rubber while their women and children were interned.
An English explorer at the time, crossing a huge 3,000 square mile area of the northeast Congo, was horrified at the “depopulated and devastated” wasteland he witnessed: “Every village has been burnt to the ground, and as I fled from the country I saw skeletons, skeletons everywhere; and such postures — what tales of horror they told!”
If any one object symbolized the brutal cruelty of the Congo State, it would be the chicotte. “…a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim’s bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more — not an uncommon punishment — were often fatal.” Chicotte beatings were meted out for every offense imaginable — and often for no offense at all or for something as trivial as native children laughing in the presence of a white man.
As for these Force Publique men enforcing Leopold’s will in the Congo, they were not soldiers or officers, at least not officially, but called, in rather bland corporate terminology, “agents”. Such a mild and businesslike title hardly fits someone having the power of life and death over virtually every native in his area of operations. Not only did these men have such power at their disposal, but were more than willing to use it. Some did so because it fit their notion of necessary discipline. Others used such fear and intimidation to increase their profits. And still others seemed cut from a different cloth — the kind of men who seemed to actually enjoy killing for its own sake. Among the most notorious of these was Captain Léon Rom, who displayed the severed heads of natives in his garden. He and several other Force Publique agents who went far beyond the bounds of an already cruel and brutal regime were the inspiration for “Mr. Kurtz” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Another, Léon Fiévez, was still clearly remembered in local oral histories some fifty years after the “rubber terror”. Said one local named Tswambi:
All the blacks saw this man as the Devil of the Equator… From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets… A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez’s] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a big net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river….Rubber caused these torments; that’s why we no longer want to hear its name spoken.
These were not aberrations. Nor were they were isolated instances of excess by a handful of agents. Such inhuman viciousness was widespread and accepted company policy. Few Europeans were ever held accountable for their actions in the Congo, and the few instances of punishment amounted to a show hearing and a slap on the wrist for those charged.
There is one man who is, if not ultimately responsible for the devastation of the Congo, the one person who set the stage for Leopold to carve out his personal African fiefdom, and he deserves mention: Henry Morton Stanley. Best known for finding Dr. David Livingstone, whom had been missing for years deep inside the continent, he was one of the most celebrated adventurers of his time, and even today most who have heard of him would simply say he was a great explorer. However, regardless of his feats in Africa, he held the people of that continent in utter contempt. He boasted about shooting anyone who got in the way of his expeditions, which were practically small armies tearing through the countryside. General Sherman, of American Civil War fame, likened Stanley’s journeys in Africa to his own scorched-earth march through the South. Explorer and writer Richard Burton noted that Stanley “shoots negroes as if they were monkeys.”
Much of what is “great” about Stanley comes straight from Stanley himself. There were few corroborating witnesses to many of his exploits, though by his own words it is clear that he, like many Europeans, saw native Africans as little more than beasts of burden rather than as participants in his expeditions. The native porter, a familiar icon when one thinks of African exploration, was not the healthy, well muscled black extra seen in countless Tarzan films, but a broken, suffering native driven like a team horse, often given inadequate food and rest, and often simply left on the side of the trail to die when he reached the end of his endurance.
The use and abuse of native porters, while not as graphically cruel as other excesses in the Congo, was nonetheless a brutal and destructive practice. Perhaps portage does not get the attention of other atrocities by its sheer “ordinariness”—in addition to being a relatively slow and subtle road to death, it was a practice simply accepted and expected in Africa. And as was the case in so many other aspects of exploitation in the Congo, porters were rarely paid employees selling their services, but forced labor with little choice in the matter. As just one example, “Of the three hundred porters conscripted … for a forced march of more than six hundred miles to set up a new post, not one returned. Stanley made extensive use of these men, and left a string of dead across half the continent. This in addition to those who were encountered and shot along the way—one imagines a native was just as likely to be shot approaching the expedition out of curiosity as he was with hostile intentions.
Admirers of Stanley would hardly think he could be compared to those who later raped and devastated the Congo, but it was men like Stanley who paved the way; not just by cutting out paths through the jungle, but by doing so with the mind-set that these lands were theirs for the taking and its inhabitants fit only to serve their ends, be it gold or glory—or ivory and rubber. Rather than being venerated, Stanley should be relegated to the ranks of those explorers and colonizers whom Peter S. Beagle invoked when he wrote “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers—thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses.”
“King Leopold’s Ghost” is a shocking, often gut-wrenching, and horrifying read. It is also a story that needs to be told, and more importantly, remembered.
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US to fund sale of F-35 jets to Israel
Press TV – October 8, 2010
Israel has signed a contract to ‘purchase’ 20 US-built and -funded F-35 stealth fighter jets, a deal the Tel Aviv regime boasts as “an event of great strategic and historic significance.”
Tel Aviv’s Defense Ministry Director General Udi Shani signed the agreement, worth nearly $3 billion, during a ceremony in New York on Thursday, Israeli daily Haaretz reports, noting that “the entire deal will be funded by the American military.”
According to the deal, Israel will receive the attack aircraft between 2015 and 2017, at a price of $96 million per plane, together with simulators and spare parts, with a total price tag of $2.75 billion. The deal also grants the Israeli regime the option of ordering 75 more jets.
“This is a significant day for maintaining Israel’s military superiority in the region, which will help us cope with challenges both near and far,” Shani said, quoted by the Israeli-based Ynet news website, after a signing ceremony.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also hailed the so-called ‘purchase’, saying it would significantly strengthen Israel’s military.
Israeli Knesset (parliament) and security establishment also gave their approval for the agreement despite “opposition” from a number of senior defense officials over the “high cost” of the deal.
The signing comes less than a month after Washington announced plans to sell Saudi Arabia 60 billion dollars’ worth of weapons and hardware, including 84 F-15 fighters.
US officials, ordinarily, obtain approval by the powerful Israeli lobby in Washington before signing any weapons deals with any Arab country. Despite apparent Israeli protests, all US arms sales to Arab nations are, in fact, preapproved by the Israelis.
Livni Tells UN to Mind its Own Business over Flotilla Probe
Al-Manar – 07/10/2010
Israeli Opposition leader Tzipi Livni on Wednesday accused the United Nations of intervening in Israel’s affairs through its probe into an Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla.
Livni told UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that his decision to appoint a panel to investigate the May 31 commando raid, which left nine pro-Palestinian activists martyred, was “unacceptable”.
“Any international intervention in military operations carried out by Israel is unacceptable, just as it would be unacceptable to any other country fighting terrorism,” Livni told Ban in a meeting at his office at the UN building in New York.
Israel has launched its own examination of the flotilla raid, which saw “navy commandos rappel onto the deck of the flagged aid boat ‘Mavi Marmara,’ where they clashed bloodily with Turkish activists.”
“Israel is investigating the events of the flotilla itself, and that is enough,” said Livni, who leads Kadima, the second largest party in Israel’s Knesset.
Livni also slammed the UN for hosting speeches by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“You must stop giving a platform to Ahmadinejad. His last speech at the UN was dangerous and showed that economic sanctions [against Iran] are not enough,” she told Ban. “There need to be added diplomatic sanctions that will prevent Iran’s leaders from gaining a platform for their extremist views.”
In his remarks to Livni, Ban focused on Israeli building in the occupied West Bank, reiterating UN pressure on Israel to re-impose a freeze on settlement construction. The prior freeze expired in late September, bringing to a near-standstill the new “peace talks” between Israel and the Palestinians.
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As Hillary Clinton kisses up to Henry Kissinger, RT looks at 4 of his most heinous acts
RT | September 3, 2016
… While Clinton retains the ultimate warmongering seal, RT examines some of Kissinger’s most memorable acts… Read full article
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