By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | July 31, 2010
It is not unusual for members of the diminishing upper middle class to drop $20,000 or $30,000 on a big wedding. But for celebrities this large sum wouldn’t cover the wedding dress or the flowers.
When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.
Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them. Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?
How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?
These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.
While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.
The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”
Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.
The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US–one in six of the population–were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.
US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.
Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps. The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.
The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.
And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.
Paul Craig Roberts was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva, released from police custody hours after being arrested for encouraging the killing of non-Jews.
By Chaim Levinson | Haaretz | July 27, 2010
Police released the head rabbi of a prominent yeshiva yesterday hours after arresting him for encouraging to kill non-Jews.
Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Hai Yeshiva and author of “The King’s Torah,” was arrested early yesterday morning at his home in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. His book describes how it is possible to kill non-Jews according to halakha (Jewish religious law ).
Detectives first carried out a search at the yeshiva, where they confiscated 30 copies of the book. The investigation and arrest were carried out on the orders of Deputy State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan.
The preface of the book, which was published in November, states that it is forbidden to kill non-Jews – but the book then apparently describes the context in which it is permitted to do so.
According to Shapira, it is permissible to kill a non-Jew who threatens Israel even if the person is classified as a Righteous Gentile. His book says that any gentile who supports war against Israel can also be killed.
Killing the children of a leader in order to pressure him, the rabbi continues, is also permissible. In general, according to the book, it is okay to kill children if they “stand in the way – children are often doing this.” “They stand in the way of rescue in their presence and they are doing this without wanting to,” he writes. “Nonetheless, killing them is allowed because their presence supports murder. There is justification in harming infants if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us. Under such circumstances the blow can be directed at them and not only by targeting adults.”
The daily Maariv’s report on the book was immediately followed by calls for Shapira’s arrest and a petition was filed with the High Court of Justice for a ban on the book’s distribution. The petition was rejected as premature.
The rabbi’s arrest has stirred angry responses on both the left and right. “The police did well to initiate an investigation,” attorney Lila Margalit of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said. “Incitement for racist violence seriously undermines human rights and it should not be ignored. However, it is not entirely clear whether the arrest was justified in this case.”
She added that the tendency in Israel is to “overuse” arrests, and in cases where there is no justification for it.
A spokesman for Yitzhar said: “Once more we are seeing rabbis being gagged and serious damage inflicted to their honor, along with the razing of homes in the settlements.”
By Philip Weiss on July 26, 2010
Maureen Dowd points out wisely that the Obama administration is too white. There are only two blacks in the administration, she says.
unlike Bill Clinton, who never needed help fathoming Southern black culture, Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience, ones who understand “the slave thing,” as a top black Democrat dryly puts it.
The first black president should expand beyond his campaign security blanket, the smug cordon of overprotective white guys surrounding him — a long political tradition underscored by Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 when she complained about the “smart-ass white boys” from Walter Mondale’s campaign who tried to boss her around.
That “smug cordon” that Dowd astutely describes is also a philosemitic one. Israel lobbyist Mitchell Bard points out all the Jews in the Obama administration.
David Axelrod (2009- ) Senior Advisor to the President; Jared Bernstein (2009- ) Chief Economist and Economic Policy Advisor to the Vice President; Rahm Emanuel (2009- ) Chief of Staff; Lee Feinstein (2009- ) Foreign Policy Advisor; Gary Gensler (2009- ) Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Elena Kagan (2009- ) Solicitor General of the United States; Ronald Klain (2009- ) Chief of Staff to the Vice President; Jack Lew (2009- ) Deputy Secretary of State; Eric Lynn (2009- ) Middle East Policy Advisor; Peter Orszag (2009- ) Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Dennis Ross (2009- ) Special Advisor for the Gulf and Southwest Asia to the Secretary of State; Mara Rudman (2009- ) Foreign Policy Advisor; Mary Schapiro (2009- ) Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission; Dan Shapiro (2009- ) Head of Middle East desk at the National Security Council; James B. Steinberg (2009- ) Deputy Secretary of State; Lawrence Summers (2009- ) Director National Economic Council; Mona Sutphen (2009- ) Deputy White House Chief of Staff
I think Bard may be missing a Shapiro (I’m guessing the asst secy of State is Jewish), as well as Stuart Levey, the Iran guy in Treasury, and czar Cass Sunstein. My impression is that Obama’s philosemitism outstrips Clinton’s and Bush’s. And the lesson is that Obama is a conservative person temperamentally who has a keen sense of where American power lies. Originally an outsider from a scattered family in the west, he gravitated unerringly toward the east coast Harvard establishment; and the American establishment today has a prominent Jewish component…
The WASPs are over; none are on the Supreme Court today. The significance of these numbers is the effect on Middle East policy. And of course, along with that, the absence of Arab-Americans; and the fact that people like Rashid Khalidi, Chas Freeman and Rob Malley (yes, a Jew, but a progressive one) are exiled from this braintrust.
By Philip Weiss on July 25, 2010
I missed this. After the Israelis came out with their lame investigation saying that they would indict several officers and soldiers in four cases arising from the Gaza conflict of ’08-’09, a fairminded South African columnist, Allister Sparks, published an important piece a few days ago, calling on South African rabbis to apologize to Judge Richard Goldstone for slamming Goldstone’s report last year.
The significance of the piece was explained to me by a friend: “This is an important statement recognizing that even the Israeli Gov’t is finding truth to the report’s findings—–it’s the beginning of a vindication of Goldstone… So why isn’t it all over the place that some of the findings in the report–a report that had been totally trashed by the Israeli gov’t and friends–are proving to be true? …Shouldn’t we challenge the overall attack on Goldstone and the report — like the SA rabbi being called to make a public apology?”
Great point. Here is Sparks’s case. Beautiful story about Naude, beautiful writing:
Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein… chastised Goldstone for “doing great damage to the state of Israel”. He should have recused himself instead, Goldstein said, and taken no part in the investigating mission.
I have had difficulty understanding what the chief rabbi meant by this.
Goldstein is a trained lawyer as well as a rabbi. Did he mean that no Jew, however professionally disciplined — and Judge Goldstone’s legal reputation is among the highest in the world — can be objective when it comes to a matter involving Israel?
And if so, does that involve Jews individually or collectively as well, or just the interests of the state of Israel? Or did he mean that it is a Jewish person’s inherent duty either to set aside his professional ethics and find in favour of the state of Israel regardless of the merits of a case or, if that is unacceptable, to recuse himself? But that for a Jew to find against Israel is traitorous?
…I am reminded here of the conflict between the Dutch Reformed Church and Beyers Naude over the issue of apartheid.
I attended the Dutch Reformed Church service in Linden, Johannesburg, at which Naude had to respond to the church leaders’ demand that he choose between the church’s doctrine of support for apartheid and his commitment to the nonracial Christian Institute he had founded.
In other words, Naude was forced to choose between his moral principles and his loyalty to his own people and their church.
I heard Naude announce his decision that memorable day before the glitterati of Afrikaner nationalism in the packed pews before him. Smilingly, boldly, he told them simply: “I choose God before man.”
In other words, principles, truth and justice before ethnic or group loyalty. It was the defining moment of that great man’s life.
So I ask the chief rabbi that same question today: what is your choice? Then, at the level of plain human decency, don’t you think, Chief Rabbi Goldstein and those members of the Orthodox Jewish community and the South African Zionist Federation whom you lead, that you owe Judge Goldstone an apology? A public, abject apology.
In the midst of its campaign against Hizbollah and Hamas “terrorists”, Israel has been accused by Britain of feting Jewish “terrorists” whose bomb attack killed 28 Britons 60 years ago today.
The accusation, which reopens the debate about the use of politically-inspired violence in the region, follows the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the attack on the King David hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, by the Irgun Jewish “resistance” to British mandate rule in Palestine. The 28 Britons were among 91 people killed.
This week, former Irgun fighters and current Right-wing politicians unveiled the plaque at the hotel, which read: “The hotel housed the Mandate Secretariat as well as the Army Headquarters. On July 22, 1946, Irgun fighters at the order of the Hebrew Resistance Movement planted explosives in the basement. Warning phone calls had been made urging the hotel’s occupants to leave immediately. For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated and after 25 minutes the bombs exploded, and to the Irgun’s regret and dismay 91 persons were killed.”
But Israel’s celebration of its “freedom fighters” remains highly controversial at a time when it continues to pound Palestinian “terrorists”.
Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, has found herself deeply embroiled in the debate – her father, Eitan, was Irgun’s chief operations officer.
Simon Macdonald, the British ambassador to Israel, and consul general John Jenkins, wrote to the mayor of Jerusalem protesting at the plaque. “We don’t think it’s right for an act of terrorism to be commemorated,” their letter read.
The embassy said: “There is no credible evidence that any warning reached the British authorities.” The plaque has subsequently been amended, dropping the implication that Britain ignored any warnings.
ANI | July 23, 2010
Washington: The United States has said that it will vote against China’s sale of nuclear reactors to Pakistan at the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) meeting.
US Acting Assistant Secretary of State for International Security and Non Proliferation, Vann Van Diepen, said this in response to a question during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
When asked by Congressman Ed Royce whether the US would vote against the exemption for China, Van Diepen said: ‘Yes sir, by definition, we do not support any activity that goes against the guidelines’.
The 46-nation NSG is an international forum designed to limit sales of nuclear technology.
Earlier, Van Diepen had said that based on the facts available to the US, the ‘sale would not be allowed to occur without an exemption of the NSG’.
He, however, added that while the US can vote against an exemption, it cannot stop China if it decides to sell the reactors to Pakistan without special permission from the NSG, the Nation reported.
China has signed a 2.4 billion dollar agreement with Pakistan to supply two 340-megawatt reactors.
China and Pakistan have repeatedly said that the nuclear cooperation is for peaceful purposes and in line with international obligations of both the countries.
By Stuart Littlewood | 24 July 2010
Israelis wanted for war crimes can sleep easier thanks to their friends and admirers in the British Establishment.
Yes, our brand-new coalition government intends providing a safe haven for the vilest of criminals.
When Israel’s ex-foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and other architects of the terror campaign against Palestinian civilians, recently cancelled trips to the UK for fear of being arrested under universal jurisdiction laws on charges of war crimes, it sparked a diplomatic row. Britain’s then foreign secretary-in-waiting, William Hague, an avid Friend of Israel since boyhood, said: “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.”
He found it “completely unacceptable” that someone like Livni felt she could not visit the UK. He didn’t explain how welcoming Livni with open arms was possible “without weakening our commitment to hold accountable those guilty of war crimes”.
Gordon Brown, the then prime minister, expressed his regret over the incident, saying that Livni was “most welcome in Britain any time” – even though she was no longer a government minister in Israel.
Under universal jurisdiction all states that are party to the Geneva Conventions are obliged to seek out and either prosecute or extradite those suspected of having committed grave breaches of the conventions and bring them, regardless of nationality, to court.
“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 Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Lo and behold, new Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has announced, just as MPs are about to disappear on their long summer recess, that “it would be appropriate to require the consent of the director of public prosecutions before an arrest warrant can be issued to a private prosecutor in respect of an offence of universal jurisdiction.”
Alerts have gone out from activist groups. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign urges its members to write to their MPs immediately:
This would seriously hamper the work of human rights lawyers in this country who are attempting to bring these war criminals to justice, and would deny the Palestinians yet another chance at justice.
Between September and December 2009, lawyers issued arrest warrants against three Israeli ministers who were planning to visit Britain. Two of them – Livni and Moshe Ya’alon – cancelled their visits as a result. The third – Ehud Barak – had his status upgraded by the then Labour government, so that he could attend the Labour Party conference in Brighton.
If the Government’s plans become law, warrants such as these will become much harder to serve.
Meanwhile, in his report to the UN, Judge Richard Goldstone found masses of evidence of war crimes by Israel in Gaza and has called for individual states in the international community to “start criminal investigations in national courts, using universal jurisdiction, where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949″.
Hague and Clarke, however, seem determined to make the likes of Livni and Barak and their murderous military henchmen a protected species.
The director of public prosecutions, a supposedly independent figure, is answerable through the attorney-general. The new attorney-general is Dominic Grieve. In 2007 he was in Israel with a Conservative Friends of Israel delegation. He spoke up for the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but his sense of justice apparently didn’t prompt him to mention the thousands of Palestinian civilians tortured and rotting in Israeli jails.
Grieve’s deputy is Solicitor-General Edward Garnier. In February, while still in opposition but warming up for the general election, he and Kenneth Clarke visited Israel as delegates of Conservative Friends of Israel when they could (and should) have gone under a neutral parliamentary flag. They met with deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon and leader of the Opposition Livni. Ayalon is also on the wanted list but was able to visit London after receiving a letter from the Foreign Office promising he would be safe from arrest while in England.
At the height of the Gaza blitz (which killed 1,400 including 350 children, destroyed or damaged 58,000 homes, 280 schools, 1,500 factories, water and sewage installations and 80 per cent of agricultural crops), Hague said in Parliament: “The immediate trigger for this crisis … was the barrage of hundreds of rocket attacks against Israel on the expiry of the ceasefire or truce.”
Wrong. A person in his position should know better than mouth off the Israeli propaganda line. The truce with Hamas didn’t just “expire”. It was violated after six months by Israeli forces, killing six Palestinians in air strikes and other attacks, in order to provoke Hamas. Israel had also failed to deliver its side of the ceasefire bargain, which was to lift the blockade.
While the evidence piles up against Livni and others, the justice secretary assures us that “our commitment to our international obligations and to ensuring that there is no impunity for those accused of crimes of universal jurisdiction is unwavering”. How can that be if universal jurisdiction cases in future are filtered and processed solely by the director of public prosecutions?
The fear is that the director of public prosecutions’ wheels turn so slowly that the birds will have flown before arrests can be made, and the change in the law will simply enable the director of public prosecutions to thwart private efforts to bring to book those criminals the British government regards as friends.
Let’s remember that after the 22-day devastation of Gaza and the mega-deaths and maimings, their friend Livni bragged how she would happily do it again.
Hague, after just two months in the top job at the Foreign Office, is already an embarrassment to English people who yearn for moral leadership in foreign affairs. It was Hague who uttered these words in 2008: “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.”
Undimished by the passage of crime, too.
By Hasan Abu Nimah | Ammon News | July 21, 2010
One major item on Israel’s menu for agreeing to talk to its enemies has always been “renunciation of violence”.
Under Yasser Arafat, the PLO had to commit to renouncing violence, in addition, of course, to other harsh conditions, before it qualified to exit Israel’s rejection list.
Among the many other conditions put by the so-called international community to Hamas nowadays is “renunciation of violence”. Because Hamas has refused so far to meet such a condition, it remains boycotted by almost every state regionally and internationally, including Arab states.
Currently Hamas is not engaging in any form of anti-Israel violence. In fact, the organisation that controls Gaza is strictly observing a unilateral ceasefire with Israel despite the siege and the sporadic Israeli air raids often killing innocent people and destroying private property. Hamas is now often blamed by its Fateh opponents for preventing other resistance groups from attacking Israel.
The Arab states, just less than a decade ago, also collectively renounced violence. That was when they pronounced peace as their strategic choice, through their 2002 Arab Peace Initiative.
That was one of the most unusual policy statements in history. Did the Arabs have other choices until they made that declaration? Were they engaged in wars and conquests against other nations before they decided to so drastically change course and have peace as their strategic choice? And with the specific reference to the Arab-Israeli conflict, was it the Arabs or the Israelis who started it?
The facts of history are still there for any verification. During the six-decade-long Arab-Israeli conflict, whose roots are in the Zionist project to turn Palestine into a national home for Europe’s persecuted Jews, in flagrant defiance of Arab objection, the Arab states only started one war against Israel, Egypt’s and Syria’s 1973 attempt to recover their occupied territories.
In 1948, there had been months of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population by Zionist militias before the Arab states belatedly intervened, in May of that year.
While Israel was moving from one war to another, expanding beyond the historical lands of Palestine, the Arab states often responded with verbal condemnations and empty threats, along with appeals to the ineffective United Nations.
Large areas of Syrian land have remained under Israeli occupation since 1967, in addition to the West Bank and Jerusalem, and parts of Lebanon. Since 1973, there has been total quiet – and that during a state of “war”.
For all Israel’s propaganda against them, the Arab states have been accommodating, some of them signing peace treaties with Israel even while their neighbours remained technically at war. Israel continues to build settlements and create irreversible facts on the ground, and the Arabs continue to protest and issue statements.
In the meantime, the Palestinian Authority, which is widely recognised, by the Arab League as well, as the official voice of the Palestinian people, continues to reassure Israel that whatever it does, the Palestinian people will never use violence to defend themselves, their rights or their existence. Moreover, the armed forces, created for the Palestinian Authority under the supervision of US General Keith Dayton with donor money, are there to suppress any Palestinian attempt to oppose the occupation or resist its practices.
So what has been so un-peaceful in the Arab, or Palestinian, behaviour towards Israel that requires another declaration of peace?
Unquestionably, peace and non-violence are, and should always be, the rule in governing peoples’ relations with each other. Nevertheless, neither our assumed civilised behaviour nor international law have succeeded so far in eliminating violence from our conduct as states or people.
As a last resort, violence could be used in self-defence, according to international law. The instinct of survival automatically drives all creatures to defend themselves when under attack. All states and peoples do the same. But besides that, there is the violence of choice. Warmongering remains a very active sentiment driving democratic leaders to wars against easier targets, with accountability hardly demanded when such adventures turn wrong, illegal, costly, counterproductive and disastrous.
The peculiar case of the Arab states and Arab peoples is that they volunteered to drop their intrinsic right to legitimate self-defence while under attack and while their lands are under occupation and their rights are repeatedly violated.
Calls for non-violence could not be but noble and right. Even in the most legitimate cases, resorting to violence should only be considered when every other option for a peaceful settlement has been tried. This is not what world powers themselves do when they use force to deal with disputes. Under no circumstance, however, should such calls require that a nation, a group or an individual renounce their right to defend their legitimate rights or to compromise their dignity.
This is precisely what Israel means when it requires its enemies to renounce violence.
While in most cases parties locked in conflict agree to mutually renounce violence as part of a dispute settlement, Israel requires renunciation of violence to enable its continued aggression unchallenged. This is exactly what happened with the PLO, and this is why the Arab states’ positions, including the generous Arab Peace Initiative, are never taken seriously by Israel.
Diplomacy can only be effective when supported by force, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan used to say to justify superpower threats to vulnerable countries like Iraq. But he was right. States have armies and they stock weapons not because they necessarily prepare for war, but because they prepare themselves to go to war or to respond to threat if necessary.
If they don’t do that, they would become vulnerable and invite aggression. States or organisations that declare in advance that they will drop violence from their political dictionary under any circumstances have shown that they expose themselves to all kinds of aggression.
Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian.
By Gideon Levy | Haaretz | July 22, 2010
Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian. It happens. His chances of being accepted as a human being in Israel are nil. Married and a father of two, he wanted to work in Jerusalem, his city, and maybe also have an affair or a quickie on the side. That happens too.
He knew that he had no chance with the Jews, so he adopted another name for himself, Dudu. He didn’t have curly hair, but he went by Dudu just the same. That’s how everyone knew him. That’s how you know a few other Arabs too: the car-wash guy you call Rafi, the stairwell cleaner who goes by Yossi, the supermarket deliveryman you know as Moshe.
What’s wrong? Is it only fearsome Shin Bet interrogators like “Capt. George” and “Abu Faraj” who are allowed to adopt names from other peoples? Are only Israelis who emigrate allowed to invent new identities? Only the Yossi from Hadera who became Joe in Miami, the Avraham from Bat Yam who became Abe in Los Angeles?
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Palestinian Sabbar Kashur, who was convicted of raping a woman after impersonating a Jew |
Photo by: Emil Salman |
No longer a youth, Sabbar/Dudu worked as a deliveryman for a lawyer’s office, rode his scooter around Jerusalem and delivered documents, affidavits and sworn testimonies, swearing to everyone that he was Dudu. Two years ago he met a woman by chance. Nice to meet you, my name is Dudu. He claims that she came on to him, but let’s leave the details aside. Soon enough they went where they went and what happened happened, all by consent of the parties concerned. One fine day, a month and a half after an afternoon quickie, he was summoned to the police on suspicion of rape.
His temporary lover discovered that her Dudu wasn’t a Dudu after all, that the Jew is (gasp!) an Arab, and so she filed a complaint against the impostor. Her body was violated by an Arab. From then on Kashur was placed under house arrest for two years, an electronic cuff on his ankle. This week his sentence was pronounced: 18 months in jail.
Judge Zvi Segal waxed dramatic to the point of absurdity: “It is incumbent on the court to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth, sweet-talking offenders who can mislead naive victims into paying an unbearable price: the sanctity of their bodies and souls.” Sophisticated offenders? It is doubtful that Dudu even knew he was one. Sweet talk? He says that even his wife calls him Dudu.
The court relied, as usual, on precedents: the man who posed as a senior Housing Ministry official and promised his lover an apartment and an increased National Insurance pension, and the man who posed as a wealthy neurosurgeon who promised free medical care and other perks. Dudu had nothing to offer but his good name, Dudu, and still his fate was sealed, just like those who promise apartments and perks. Not only fraud, but rape, almost like the convicted serial rapist Benny Sela.
Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein had, after all, defined the test of conviction for rape on “false pretenses”: “if in the view of an ordinary person this woman would have agreed to have sexual relations with a man who did not have the identity he invented.”
In tune with the public, Kashur’s judges assumed, rightly, that the woman would not have gotten into bed with Dudu were it not for the identity he invented. She also might not have gotten into bed with him if he had told her in vain that he was available, that he was younger than he really is or even that he is madly in love with her. But people are not prosecuted for that, certainly not on rape charges.
Now the respected judges have to be asked: If the man was really Dudu posing as Sabbar, a Jew pretending to be an Arab so he could sleep with an Arab woman, would he then be convicted of rape? And do the eminent judges understand the social and racist meaning of their florid verdict? Don’t they realize that their verdict has the uncomfortable smell of racial purity, of “don’t touch our daughters”? That it expresses the yearning of the extensive segments of society that would like to ban sexual relations between Arabs and Jews?
It was no coincidence that this verdict attracted the attention of foreign correspondents in Israel, temporary visitors who see every blemish. Yes, in German or Afrikaans this disgraceful verdict would have sounded much worse.
By Chaim Levinson | Haaretz | July 11, 2010
The Nokdim secretariat ruled two weeks ago to bar non-Jewish Russian-Israelis from buying homes in the small Bethlehem-area settlement where Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman makes his home. The decision came after a frenzied debate between residents over whether the entry of individuals not considered Jewish by religious law would lead to “assimilation” or improper behavior on the part of veteran residents and their children.
The current fracas was sparked after a number of families of Russian origin applied to be accepted in the community. In each of the families, at least one member is not Jewish according to halakha, or religious law. Nokdim is a mixed community of religious and secular Israelis, both native and Russian-speaking, in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc southeast of Jerusalem.
After several residents expressed opposition to admitting the families, the settlement’s absorption committee decided to bring up the issue at a secretariat meeting. Two weeks ago the panel decided the families’ applications would be rejected.
Nokdim’s secretary, Yossi Heiman, told Haaretz: “If there were an easy solution to this issue, we wouldn’t have to hold hearings on it. There are many considerations both ways; there are also strong arguments in favor of accepting these families. But, ultimately, the majority decided they were opposed to such a high number of these families coming in and changing the community’s demographics.
“The biggest problem is that if you accept 10 families in which the mother isn’t Jewish, then soon there will be 30 children, and tomorrow your son could fall in love with the good-looking girl next door. It’s a real problem,” Heiman said.
“It’s difficult enough with the dozens of terrorists who enter each morning,” added Nokdim resident Amit Gruen, in apparent reference to Palestinians employed in home construction in the settlement.
“We have to separate ourselves from the gentiles in commerce and everything else – particularly when it comes to living with them. It could lead to assimilation or idol worship; it opens the door to all kinds of trouble. They might lead us into committing offenses that Jews normally don’t do, like idolatry and incest and all kinds of other perversions. That’s why we have no place for them here,” he said.
“In principle, the fact that they serve in the army is a problem. They must not serve in the army – the fact that the state brought them over doesn’t mean a thing. Just as it brought them over, it can send them back to their own countries,” Gruen said.
Gil Gan-Mor, an attorney heading the branch on housing rights at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, said any decision not to accept a family as residents in a community on the basis of race, religion or sex is illegal discrimination.
By Jeremy Salt – Ankara – July 11, 2010
The spectacle of an American sucking up to an Israeli Prime Minister is familiar but no less sickening every time it happens. Not since Eisenhower has an American president had the guts to stand up to Israel. With this single exception, all of them have fallen over in their haste to give Israel whatever it wants and to hold it responsible for nothing, not even the murder of its own citizens. The recent meeting between Barack Obama, effectively apologising because his middle name is Hussein, and Benyamin Netanyahu surely marks the lowest point in this sick relationship. Obama has now thrown in the towel. That is what the White House meeting represented. He talked of a peace process which does not exist and Israeli ‘concessions’ which have never been made. Obama wants the non-existent peace process to be resumed with a Palestinian government that is not the Palestinian government and a Palestinian president who is not the president.
Everyone can see that the emperor is wearing not new clothes but no clothes. Can Obama see it himself? Almost certainly. He is a highly intelligent man, but with midterm elections coming up in November this is what he feels he has to say to appease the Israeli lobby. He has thereby gone the way of all American presidents with that single exception of Eisenhower. He has turned himself into a straw man before our eyes.
The Obama who last year demanded a halt to all Israeli construction in the occupied West Bank and occupied Jerusalem is now a figure of history. He had his moment and he did not have the backbone to stand up for his declared convictions. Netanyahu went back to Israel and thumbed his nose at him. Obama challenged Netanyahu, then backed off and has now surrendered obsequiously. It is a sad moment for the United States, and another disastrous moment for the Palestinians and the Middle East and perhaps even for the world.
The Obama who spoke when in Cairo last year of a ‘new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world’ has been revealed as an eloquent windbag. The war on Afghanistan has been accelerated and with it the deaths of more civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The President who declared that ‘we will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own’ has done just that.
Obama’s refusal to heed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s repeated calls for an international inquiry into the Israeli attack on the Gaza aid flotilla is part and parcel of his collapse before the perceived might of the Israeli lobby. The flotilla was surrounded by a ring of 30 Zodiac fast boats, each carrying ten to 15 heavily armed representatives of the state of Israel. Beyond this inner ring stood four warships and two submarines, with three helicopters circling overhead, yet it was Israel which claimed it was attacked. The Israelis were shooting as they boarded the Mavi Marmara and they were shooting to kill and not to disable. The attack was launched in international waters. Of the nine passengers killed, one was a Turkish-American. The captain of the Mavi Marmara was forced to steer the ship towards the coast of occupied Palestine. Hundreds of passengers were abducted and ‘detained’. All their possessions, including passports, credit cards, mobile phones and camera equipment were taken from them. Illegal use has since been made of their stolen credit cards.
None of this was enough to make Obama heed calls for an international inquiry but then the US government did nothing when 34 of its sailors were killed in the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, did nothing when Rachel Corrie was murdered by bulldozer and did nothing more recently when a Israeli border policeman fired a tear gas canister at a young American woman on the occupied West Bank and blinded her in one eye. As John Mearsheimer told an audience of Americans recently, any of them could go to Israel and be killed there and the US would do nothing.
But the attack on the Mavi Marmara does matter to its passengers, to the families of the nine men who were murdered, to the Turkish government and the Turkish people and to the ‘Muslims around the world’ Obama addressed in Cairo. What kind of message does Obama think he is sending out to the world by failing to condemn the murder and kidnapping of Muslims by Israel on the high seas (the Israelis targeted only Turks and not passengers of European or American appearance)? The message received yet again is that Israel literally has been given a license to kill by the US government, whenever and whomever it wants.
Turkey has told Israel that it either apologizes and pays compensation or it agrees to a proper international inquiry. The response from Netanyahu and Lieberman has been abusive. Turkey has done its best to play a bridging role in the Middle East in line with its policy of ‘zero problems’ on its borders. With a state like Israel this is impossible unless Turkey is to follow the example of Arab governments and do nothing. Turkey is already downgrading relations with Israel. The end point of this process may be the suspension of relations or their calibrated reduction to a bare minimum. It is a sign of the madness gripping Israel that it should now have picked a fight with the only country in the Middle East with which it had amicable relations and indeed a strategic working relationship. Obama has backed down but the message coming out of Ankara is that Turkey will not.
– Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
Aletho News If Americans Knew No Tricks Zone
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