Can Americans be murdered by the Israeli government with impunity?
By Paul Woodward on June 3, 2010
For several days, Israel has been able to contain some of the fallout from the flotilla massacre by withholding information about the dead and injured. The object of this exercise has clearly been to slow the flow of information in the hope that by the time the most damning facts become known, the international media’s attention will have turned elsewhere.
But the dead now have names and faces and one turns out to be a nineteen-year-old American: Furkan Dogan.
Dogan is alleged to have been shot with five bullets, four in the head.
Does the Obama administration intend to investigate the circumstances in which one of its citizens was killed? Protecting the lives of Americans is after all the most fundamental responsibility of our government.
Dogan’s death was presumably instant, but according to Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal there were others on board the Mavi Marmara who died because Israeli soldiers refused to treat their injuries.
“After the shooting and the first deaths, people put up white flags and signs in English and Hebrew. An Isreali [on the ship] asked the soldiers to take away the injured, but they did not and the injured died on the ship.”
Crimes have been committed and since the suspects all acted under the direction of the Israeli government and its defense forces and took place on international waters outside Israel’s area of legal jurisdiction, “a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation conforming to international standards” — a demand made by the UN Security Council with the support of the Obama administration — cannot be conducted by the Israeli government or a commission appointed by them. An investigation conforming to international standards must also be an international inquiry.
The day the world became Gaza
By Ali Abunimah | Al-Jazeera | June 3, 2010
Since Israel’s invasion and massacre of over 1,400 people in Gaza 18 months ago, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, global civil society movements have stepped up their campaigns for justice and solidarity with Palestinians.
Governments, by contrast, carried on with business as usual, maintaining a complicit silence.
Israel’s lethal attack on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza may change that, spurring governments to follow the lead of their people and take unprecedented action to check Israel’s growing lawlessness.
Lip service
One of the bitterest images from Operation Cast Lead was that of smiling European Union heads of government visiting Jerusalem and patting Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, on the back as white phosphorus still seared the flesh of Palestinian children a few miles away.
Western countries sometimes expressed mild dismay at Israel’s “excessive” use of force, but still justified the Gaza massacre as “self-defence” – even though Israel could easily have stopped rocket fire from Gaza, if that was its goal, by returning to the negotiated June 2008 ceasefire it egregiously violated the following November.
When the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report documented the extensive evidence of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the willful killings of unarmed civilians, few governments paid more than lip service to seeing justice done.
Even worse, after Cast Lead, EU countries and the US sent their navies to help Israel enforce a blockade on Gaza which amounts to collective punishment of the entire population and thus violates the Fourth Geneva Convention governing Israel’s ongoing occupation.
Not one country sent a hospital ship to help treat or evacuate the thousands of wounded, many with horrific injuries that overwhelmed Gaza’s hospitals.
Carrot and stick
The blockade has never been – as Israel and its apologists claim – to stop the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.
Its goal has always been political: to cause the civilian population as much suffering as possible – while still politically excusable – in order for the Palestinians in Gaza to reject and rise up against the Hamas leadership elected in January 2006.
The withholding of food, medicine, schoolbooks, building supplies, among thousands of other items, as well as the right to enter and leave Gaza for any purpose became a weapon to terrorise the civilian population.
At the same time, Western aid was showered on the occupied West Bank – whose ordinary people are still only barely better off than in Gaza – in a “carrot and stick” policy calculated to shift support away from Hamas and toward the Western-backed, unelected Palestinian Authority leadership affiliated with the rival Fatah faction, who have repeatedly demonstrated their unconditional willingness to collaborate with Israel no matter what it does to their people.
“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” senior Israeli government advisor Dov Weisglass notoriously explained in 2006. By this standard the blockade – supported by several Arab governments and the Quartet (the US, EU, UN secretary-general, and Russia) has been a great success, as numerous studies document alarming increases in child malnutrition as the vast majority of Gaza’s population became dependent on UN food handouts. Hundreds have died for lack of access to proper medical care.
Filling the ‘moral void’
While inaction and complicity characterised the official response, global civil society stepped in to fill the moral and legal void.
In the year and a half since Cast Lead, the global, Palestinian-led campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel (BDS) has been racking up impressive victories.
From the decisions by Norway’s pension funds and several European banks to divest from certain Israeli companies, to university divestment initiatives, the refusals by international artists to perform in Israel, or the flashmobs that have brought the consumer boycott to supermarkets around the world, Israel sees BDS as a growing “existential threat”.
At this point, the effect may be more psychological than economic but it is exactly the feeling of increasing isolation and pariah status that helped push South Africa’s apartheid rulers to recognise that their regime was untenable and to seek peaceful change with the very people they had so long demonised, dehumanised and oppressed.
Indeed, the BDS movement is only likely to gather pace: world-best-selling Swedish author Henning Mankell who was among the passengers on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara kidnapped and taken to Israel, said on being freed: “I think we should use the experience of South Africa, where we know that the sanctions had a great impact.”
The Freedom Flotilla represented the very best, and most courageous of this civil society spirit and determination not to abandon fellow human beings to the cruelty, indifference and self-interest of governments.
The immediate response to Israel’s attack on the Flotilla may indicate that governments too are starting to come out of their slumber and shed the paralysing fear of criticising Israel that has assured its impunity for so long.
Growing gap
Indeed, the global reaction demonstrates the growing gap between the US and Israel on one side and the rest of the world on the other.
While Israeli officials scrambled to offer justifications from the ludicrous (elite commandos armed with paint ball guns) to the benign (the attack was an “inspection”), the US has once again stood behind its ally unconditionally.
As the Obama administration forced a watered-down presidential statement in the UN Security Council, Israeli apologists in the mainstream US media repeatedly attempted to excuse Israel’s actions as lawful and legitimate.
Senior administration officials, including Joe Biden, the vice president, openly began to echo their Israeli counterparts that Israel’s attack was not only legitimate but justified by its security needs.
Despite the predictable and shameless US reaction, international condemnation has been unusually robust.
In his speech to the Turkish parliament following the attack, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, denounced Israeli “state terrorism” and demanded that the international community exact a price.
Erdogan vowed that “Turkey will never turn its back on Gaza,” and that it would continue its campaign to lift the blockade and hold Israel accountable even if it had to do so alone.
There are hopeful signs it may not have to.
European and other countries summoned Israeli ambassadors and several recalled their envoys from Tel Aviv.
Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister and one of Israel’s staunchest apologists in Europe, said his country “absolutely deplored the slaying of civilians” and demanded that Israel “must give an explanation to the international community” of killings he deemed “absolutely unacceptable, whatever the flotilla’s aims”.
Small countries showed the greatest courage and clarity. Nicaragua suspended diplomatic ties completely, citing Israel’s “illegal attack”. Brian Cowen, Ireland’s prime minister, told parliament in Dublin that his government had “formally requested” of Israel that the vessel Rachel Corrie still heading toward Gaza, be allowed to proceed, and warned of the “most serious consequences” should Israel use violence against it.
The boat – named after the young American peace activist killed by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza in 2003 – is carrying Malaysian and Irish activists and politicians including Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire.
Crossed a threshold
These are still small actions, but they indicate Israel may have crossed a threshold where it can no longer take appeasement and complicity for granted.
It is a cumulative process – each successive outrage has diminished the reserve of goodwill and forbearance Israel enjoyed.
Even if most governments are not quite ready to go from words to effective actions, growing public outrage will eventually push them to impose official sanctions.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, may have hastened that day with his fulsome pride in, and praise for, the slaughter at sea even after the outpouring of international condemnation.
Despite its intensive efforts to hide and spin what happened aboard the Mavi Marmara in the early hours of May 31, the world saw Israel use exactly the sort of indiscriminate brutality documented in the Goldstone Report.
This time, however, it was not just “expendable” Palestinians or Lebanese who were Israel’s victims but people from 32 countries and every continent. It was the day the whole world became Gaza. And like the people of Gaza, the world is unlikely to take it lying down.
The Israeli flotilla attack: victimhood, aggression and tribalism
By Glenn Greenwald | June 3, 2010
One of the primary reasons the Turkish Government has been so angry in its denunciations of the Israeli attack on the flotilla is because many of the dead were Turkish citizens. That’s what governments typically do: object vociferously when their citizens are killed by foreign nations under extremely questionable circumstances. Needless to say, that principle — as all principles are — will be completely discarded when it comes to the U.S. protection of Israel:
A U.S. citizen of Turkish origin was among the nine people killed when Israeli commandos attacked a Gaza-bound aid flotilla . . . An official from the Turkish Islamic charity that spearheaded the campaign to bust the blockade on Gaza identified the U.S. citizen as 19-year-old Furkan Dogan . . . . Dogan, who held a U.S. passport, had four bullet wounds to the head and one to the chest . . . .
Will the fact that one of the dead at Israel’s hands was an American teenager with four bullet wounds to his head alter the Obama administration’s full-scale defense of Israel? Does that question even need to be asked? Not even American interests can undermine reflexive U.S. support for anything Israel does; even the Chief of the Mossad acknowledged this week that “Israel is progressively becoming a burden on the United States.” One dead 19-year-old American with 4 bullet holes in his head (especially one of Turkish origin with a Turkish-sounding name) surely won’t have any impact.
Yesterday, newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron became the latest world leader to unequivocally condemn Israel, saying the attack was “completely unacceptable” and demanding an end to the blockade. But last night on Charlie Rose’s show, Joe Biden defended Israel with as much vigor as any Netanyahu aide or Weekly Standard polemicist. Biden told what can only be described as a lie when, in order to justify his rhetorical question “what’s the big deal here?,” he claimed that the ships could have simply delivered their aid to Israel and Israel would then have generously sent it to Gaza (“They’ve said, ‘Here you go. You’re in the Mediterranean. This ship — if you divert slightly north you can unload it and we’ll get the stuff into Gaza’.”). In fact, contrary to the Central Lie being told about the blockade, Israel prevents all sorts of humanitarian items having nothing whatsoever to do with weapons from entering Gaza, including many of the supplies carried by the flotilla.
One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration’s depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn’t it have been even more indefensible — or at least oozingly hypocritical — if the U.S. had condemned Israel? After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn’t routinely done and continues to do? As even our own military officials acknowledge, we’re slaughtering an “amazing number” of innocent people at checkpoints in Afghanistan. We’re routinely killing civilians in all sorts of imaginative ways in countless countries, including with drone strikes which a U.N. official just concluded are illegal. We’re even targeting our own citizens for due-process-free assassination. We’ve been arming Israel and feeding them billions of dollars in aid and protecting them diplomatically as they (and we) have been doing things like this for decades. What’s the Obama administration supposed to say about what Israel did: we condemn the killing of unarmed civilians? We decry these violations of international law? Even by typical standards of government hypocrisy, who in the U.S. Government could possibly say any of that with a straight face?
* * * * *
What this really underscores is that the mentality driving both Israel and the U.S. are quite similar, which is why those two countries find such common cause, even when the rest of the world recoils in revulsion. One of the more amazing developments in the flotilla aftermath is how a claim that initially appeared too self-evidently ludicrous to be invoked by anyone — Israel was the victim here and was acting against the ship in self-defense –has actually become the central premise in Israeli and (especially) American discourse about the attack (and as always, there are far more criticisms of Israeli actions in Israel than in the U.S.).
How could anyone with the slightest intellectual honesty claim that Israel and its Navy were the victims of a boat which Jon Stewart said last night looked like “P Diddy’s St. Bart’s vacation yacht”; or that armed Israeli commandos were the victims of unarmed civilian passengers; or, more generally, that a nuclear-armed Israel with the most powerful military by far in the Middle East and the world’s greatest superpower acting as Protector is the persecuted victim of a wretched, deprived, imprisoned, stateless population devastated by 40 years of brutal Israeli occupation and, just a year ago, an unbelievably destructive invasion and bombing campaign? The casting of “victim” and “aggressor” is blatantly reversed with such claims — which is exactly the central premise that has been driving, and continues to drive, U.S. foreign policy as well. In Imperial Ambitions, Noam Chomsky — talking about America’s post-9/11 policies — described the central mental deception that is at the heart of all nations which dominate others with force:
In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, “There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them. We are outnumbered fifteen to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.” That is a constant refrain of imperialism. You have your jackboot on someone’s neck and they’re about to destroy you.
The same is true with any form of oppression. And it’s psychologically understandable. If you’re crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it, and it can’t be, “I’m a murderous monster.” It has to be self-defense. “I’m protecting myself against them. Look what they’re doing to me.” Oppression gets psychologically inverted; the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.
Thus, nuclear-armed Israel is bullied and victimized by starving Gazans with stones. The Israel Navy is threatened by a flotilla filled with wheelchairs and medicine. And the greatest superpower the Earth has ever known faces a grave and existential threat from a handful of religious fanatics hiding in caves. An American condemnation of Israel, as welcomed as it would have been, would be an act of senseless insincerity, because the two countries (along with many others) operate with this same “we-are-the-victim” mindset.
* * * * *
A prime cause of this inversion is the distortion in perception brought about by rank tribalism. Those whose worldview is shaped by their identification as members of a particular religious, nationalistic, or ethnic group invariably over-value the wrongs done to them and greatly under-value the wrongs their group perpetrates. Those whose world view is shaped by tribalism are typically plagued by an extreme persecution complex (the whole world is against us!!!; everyone who criticizes us is hateful and biased!!!). Haaretz today reports that “Jewish Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. gave a rare demonstration of unity on Wednesday when they backed Israel’s raid of a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid flotilla.” Gee, whatever could account for that “rare demonstration of unity” between these left-wing Jewish progressives and hard-core, Jewish right-wing war cheerleaders who agree on virtually nothing else? My, it’s such a mystery.
I can’t express how many emails I’ve received over the last week, from self-identified Jewish readers (almost exclusively), along the lines of: I’m a true progressive, agree with you on virtually every issue, but hate your views on Israel. When it comes to Israel, we see the same mindset from otherwise admirable Jewish progressives such as Anthony Weiner, Jerry Nadler, Eliot Spitzer, Alan Grayson, and (after a brief stint of deviation) Barney Frank. On this one issue, they magically abandon their opposition to military attacks on civilians, their defense of weaker groups being bullied and occupied by far stronger factions, their belief that unilateral military attacks are unjustified, and suddenly find common cause with Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, and the Bush administration in justifying even the most heinous Israeli crimes of aggression.
It will never cease to be mystifying (at least to me) that they never question why they suddenly view the world so differently when it comes to Israel. They never wonder to themselves:
I had it continuously drummed into my head from the time I was a small child, from every direction, that Israel was special and was to be cherished, that it’s fundamentally good but persecuted and victimized by Evil Arab forces surrounding it, that I am a part of that group and should see the world accordingly. Is this tribal identity which was pummeled into me from childhood — rather than some independent, dispassionate analysis — the reason I find myself perpetually sympathizing with and defending Israel?
Doesn’t the most minimal level of intellectual awareness — indeed, the concept of adulthood itself — require that re-analysis? And, of course, the “self-hating” epithet — with which I’ve naturally been bombaded relentlessly over the last week — is explicitly grounded in the premise that one should automatically defend one’s “own group” rather than endeaveor to objectively assess facts and determine what is right and true.
This tribalism is hardly unique to Israel and Jews; it’s instead universal. As the Bush years illustrated, there is no shortage of Americans who “reason” the same way:
I was taught from childhood that America is right and thus, even in adulthood, defend America no matter what it does; my duty as an American is to defend and justify what America does and any American who criticizes the U.S. is “self-hating” and anti-American; the wrongs perpetrated by Us to Them pale in comparison to the wrongs perpetrated by Them on U.S.
Or listen to Fox News fear-mongers declare how Christians in the U.S. and/or white males — comprising the vast majority of the population and every power structure in the country — are the Real Persecuted Victims, from the War on Christmas to affirmative action evils. Ronald Reagan even managed to convince much of the country that the true economic injustices in America were caused by rich black women driving their Cadillacs to collect their welfare checks. This kind of blinding, all-consuming tribalism leads members of even the most powerful group to convince themselves that they are deeply victimized by those who are far weaker, whose necks have been under the boots of the stronger group for decades, if not longer.
That’s just the standard symptom of the disease of tribalism and it finds expression everywhere, in every group. It’s just far more significant — and far more destructive — when the groups convincing themselves that they are the Weak and Bullied Victims are actually the strongest forces by far on the planet, with the greatest amount of weaponry and aggression, who have been finding justifications for so long for their slaughtering of civilians that, as Israeli Amos Oz suggested this week about his country, there are virtually no limits left on the naked aggression that will be justified. Thus, even when Israel attacks a ship full of civilians and wheelchairs in international waters and kills at least 9 human beings, this is depicted by its tribal loyalists as an act of justified self-defense against the Real Aggressors.
Israel dismisses UNHRC Flotilla probe
Press TV – June 3, 2010
Israel has dismissed a decision by the UN Human Rights Council to launch a probe into its deadly attack on an aid convoy, calling the UN body of no moral authority.
“The authority of this council, which once again is working stubbornly against Israel, has reached rock bottom,” AFP quoted said Israel’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Ygal Palmor as saying on Thursday.
A six-ship fleet carrying some 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid and accompanied by hundreds of international activists, the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla came under Israeli fire while it was in international waters.
Amid mounting international protests against the Israeli attack, the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on Wednesday adopted a resolution which condemned the “outrageous” move and ordered an independent international investigation into the naval strike.
The Israeli foreign ministry, however, criticized the UNHRC’s decision, arguing some of the council’s members states who signed the resolution were in a “bad position to present themselves as defenders of human rights,” accusing them of “massive violation of human rights.”
The Human Rights Council earlier conducted an independent probe into the devastating Gaza offensive Israel launched in late 2008, which claimed the lives of more than 1,400 people — mostly civilians — and left thousands more injured.
A final report by the council’s special Gaza war commission, led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, found Israel guilty of war crimes, including deliberate targeting of civilians and using Palestinian civilians and human shields.
Backed by the United States, Israel refused to cooperate with the Goldstone investigation.
Israel Confidently Defies World, Rejects Independent Probe Calls
Al-Manar TV – 02/06/2010
Israel on Tuesday night rejected international calls to end its naval blockade of Gaza and to launch an “independent” investigation into the Israeli navy commandos killing of at least nine unarmed activists during a raid of the Mavi Marmara passenger ship, which was part of a flotilla that aimed to break the blockade on Gaza.
“It’s important to understand that this [blockade] is essential to protect Israel’s security and its right to defend itself,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told a special meeting of the diplomatic-security cabinet in Jerusalem.
“Gaza is an “Iranian-sponsored terrorist state,” and as such it is vitally important to prevent the entry of weapons there, whether by air, sea and land,” he said.
Netanyahu, who expressed full backing to Israeli forces and their decision to execute the raid and commit the massacre, acknowledged that weapons are already smuggled into Gaza through tunnels, but said there was a vast difference between the scope of that operation and the scale and quantity of weapons that could be brought into Gaza by ship if cargo was allowed to arrive unchecked.
“Opening a naval route to Gaza would be a huge threat to the security of our citizens. That is why we insist on maintaining the blockade and on examining the ships” in spite of the international pressure and criticism against it, he said.
Calls for an immediate investigation into the raid have been issued by the United Nations, the European Union and the United States. Britain, France, Russia and China — four of the five veto-wielding Security Council members — have also urged Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip.
The flotilla was supposed to deliver 10,000 tons of aids, medical supplies, and construction material to the besieged people of Gaza. After searching the ships, Israel found what it termed as “weapons”; they were kitchen knives, tools and wrenches for maintenance, tables and chairs and they were used by the activists to defend themselves from Israeli soldiers shooting at them live rounds from assault rifles in international waters.
US President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he supports an ‘independent’ probe that would examine the events leading to Israel’s Monday raid on the Gaza-bound protest flotilla, Israeli Army Radio reported. Earlier, White House sources hinted that they might demand an international investigation of the affair. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said they backed the UN Security Council’s call for an investigation
But Clinton sought to ease the pressure on Washington’s closest ally. She added that the US could support “an Israeli investigation that meets those criteria” and was open to different means of assuring a credible investigation, including international participation. She said that the Obama administration would be discussing these avenues with Israel and other countries in the days ahead.
Israeli public opinion was split over the calls for a probe, according to a poll published on Wednesday in the Maariv daily, which found 46.7 percent in favour, while just over half — or 51.6 percent — thought it unnecessary.
Photo credit – Ma’an Images
Flotilla fallout
By Kevin MacDonald on 02.06.2010
Jake Tapper, a reporter for ABC News writes that “there won’t be any daylight between the US and Israel.” The rationale? A senior administration official says “The president has always said that it will be much easier for Israel to make peace if it feels secure.”
Of course, that’s nonsense. Israeli security has nothing to do with it. The reality is that Israeli aggression is possible only because Israel understands that the US is its poodle and that the US will work on its behalf in the UN and elsewhere, no matter what Israel does. The Israel Lobby is ultimately to blame, meaning ultimately the influence of Jewish money on the political process.
AIPAC’s spin on this is an amazing piece of propaganda. AIPAC’s article is headlined, “Radical Hamas Supporters Beat, Stab Israeli Soldiers“–a breathtaking lack of context. The ADL said pretty much the same thing, calling the flotilla “a deliberate provocation against Israel.”
From Israel’s point of view, “the government appeared anxious to make an example of this six-ship flotilla — the largest effort to date to break the blockade of Gaza — to show the world that it would not tolerate efforts to break the blockage, international condemnation notwithstanding.” The main Israeli talking point, apparent in the AIPAC press release and the ADL statement, is that they had offered to unload the cargo at the Israeli port of Ashdod where it would be shipped overland to Gaza.
But that doesn’t square with the common understanding that Israel has erected a barrier of red tape for getting supplies into Gaza. A 2009 Christian Science Monitor report pointed to delays and arbitrary exclusions and stated that around 25% of the pre-blockade supplies were getting into Gaza. Another CSM article from June 2009 pointed to growth stunting in Palestinian children.
Despite Israel’s claims, there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
Israel’s actions will likely make it far more difficult to develop a consensus against Iran, and that’s all to the good. It will also greatly increase the cost of the Israeli-American alliance, as the US attempts to shore up support for Israel in the teeth of moral outrage around the world. That may well result in some push back here, as happened recently with the statement by General David Petraeus that Israeli policies oppose vital US interests in the Middle East. (He later denied it, doubtless under pressure.) Even Meir Dagan, the head of the Mossad, acknowledges that Israel is becoming more and more of a burden to the US.
Israel’s supporters in the US never tire of playing the role of innocent victim. They will continue to do so, as indicated by the statements of AIPAC and the ADL. But such rhetoric is so far out of touch with reality that at some point politically aware Americans must realize that US support for Israel is based on nothing more than Jewish power with no moral justification at all. That doesn’t mean that the lobby will lose its power, but at least we will all know that it’s about power, and can’t be intellectually justified… Full article
Israel vows more attacks on aid ships
Press TV – June 1, 2010
A defiant Israel downplays international condemnations of its deadly raid against a Gaza-bound aid convoy, vowing to prevent all aid ships trying to break the Gaza siege.
“We will not let any ships reach Gaza and supply what has become a terrorist base threatening the heart of Israel,” AFP quoted Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai as saying on Tuesday.
The remarks came in response to an announcement by organizers of Gaza Freedom Flotilla, saying they intended to send two more aid boats to Gaza, despite Israel’s deadly naval operation.
The commando raid killed some 20 people accompanying the six-ship fleet and left more than 50 others wounded, according to Palestinian sources.
Israel’s Army Radio reported that the MV Rachel Corrie, a converted merchant ship, would reach Gazan waters by Wednesday.
An unnamed Israeli marine lieutenant told the radio in an interview that he expected an easy takeover of the ship, saying the Israeli forces would be “ready” for the Rachel Corrie, Reuters reported.
Israel’s latest threat comes as a slap in the face of sharp criticism and envoy-summonings against Israel across the world, particularly in Muslim nations where a seething anti-Israeli sentiment erupted into angry street rallies.
On Tuesday, Israel announced a decision to hold 480 activists captured on Monday in jail, saying the international campaigners would face prosecution.
The UN Security Council condemned the bloodshed in the Monday’s attack and called for the immediate release of the civilians in the Israeli custody.
The 15-nation council also ordered an impartial investigation into the deadly Israeli attack on the freedom flotilla.
Israeli’s Nuclear Policy: From South Africa to Iran
JAMES PETRAS | 01. Jun, 2010
Dimona nuclear power plant
On May 24, 2010, the Guardian (U.K.) published a highly confidential document released by the South African government. The 1975 document reveals a secret military agreement signed by Shimon Peres, Israel’s Foreign Minister at the time (and today Israel’s President) and South Africa’s Defense Minister P. W. Botha. Israel offered to sell the apartheid regime, weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical and conventional weaponry to destroy and defeat the million person African resistance movement. The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organization, immediately set in motion the Lying Machine claiming the official minutes of the Israeli nuclear offer and a far reaching agreement on military ties between two apartheid regimes were merely a “conversation” (sic) and that Israel did not “make an offer”.1 Then without blinking Israel’s apologists went on to contradict themselves by speculating that a nuclear agreement would not have had the approval of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Daily Alert May 25, 2010). The documents were discovered by a US academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in South African archives and are published in his book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Alliance with Apartheid South Africa. Apparently Israel’s regime thought the documents were more than a “conversation” because they pressured the post-apartheid South African government not to release them.2
The Israeli nuclear offer and the South African request took place at a time of rising popular struggles throughout South Africa, from Sharpeville to Soweto, including armed resistance and the beginning of international boycotts. South Africa expanded its military offensive invading Angola where they were eventually defeated by a joint Cuban-Angolan army. As a result it was facing problems buying the kinds of deadly weapons of mass destruction which would not only decapitate the leadership of the South African freedom movement but destroy its grass roots support and national allies. Israel was prepared to serve as a willing accomplice to a Nuclear Solution.
The Genocidal Implications of Israel’s Nuclear Offer
Most liberal commentators and critics of Israel’s offer to supply apartheid South Africa with nuclear warheads merely focused on Israel’s “irresponsible behavior” in violating the non-proliferation treaty.3 For others the issue was merely an “embarrassment” for the Jewish state, given a forthcoming meeting (June 2010) on non-proliferation.4 Few if any raised the great moral and political question of the profound human consequences of complicity in a genocidal nuclear assault on millions of Africans. The question is Israel’s moral responsibility, if South Africa had followed up the Jewish State’s offer, bought the nuclear warheads and sent the missiles raining down on millions of Africans demanding freedom. One might ask if complicity in a potential genocidal act is subject to a war crimes tribunal, in the same way that the German industrial manufacturers of poison gas for concentration camp prisoners were put on trial at Nuremberg for complicity in the war crimes of the Nazi State.?5
Israel’s offer to supply nuclear missiles if implemented would most likely have led to the shelling of shanty towns and refugee camps across the borders, housing millions of South Africans, killing hundreds of thousands and radiating many more to a slow painful death. Nuking a mass popular resistance in this case through the deliberate efforts of two racist regimes, is more than a ‘war crime’, it is a monstrous crime against humanity.
More than any other single factor, American Zionism’s defense of Israel’s military alliance and support of Apartheid South Africa deeply offended knowledgeable Afro-Americans and soured longstanding amicable relations between Jews and American blacks.
On the other hand, Israel had no compunctions about strengthening its military and economic ties with racist South Africa6, a relation backed by Zionist business leaders in Johannesburg.
Why Israel Offered Nukes to Botha
Israel’s decision to offer nuclear missiles to South Africa was based on commercial, political and ideological considerations. South Africa was an emphatic and unconditional backer of Israel’s invasions of Arab countries, its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Above all it sympathized with a likeminded settler-colonial regime at a time when Israel was condemned by the United Nations, most of Europe, and the newly independent post-colonial countries. Two pariah states had a lot of common enemies and a need to support each other in the face of the world’s rejection of colonial-settler regimes.
Secondly, the two had an ideological affinity based on a racial ideology rooted in biblical belief of Chosen People destined by Divine power as Superior People. Judaism and Christianity rooted in ethnic pre-eminence legitimated rule over blacks and Arabs! Equally important arms sales and military advisory services were the leading export sectors of the Israeli economy and the backbone of its manufacturing, technology and communications sectors. The Zionist-racist trade union confederation Histadrut was deeply rooted among workers in the war industries and was a champion of arms sales to South Africa. Israeli Uzis upheld white capital and repressed black labor especially in the mines.
The Central Role of the Zionist Labor Left in the Nuclear Arms Offer
Contrary to the assumptions of many gentile and Jewish leftists, liberals and progressives who attribute all of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians to neo-conservatives or “Likud” or rightwing religious parties, the authors and proponents of a nuclear weapons sales to South Africa were leaders of the Labor Party. Shimon Peres (the Defense Minister) and Yitzhak Rabin (Prime Minister) were the major figures involved in the nuclear deal. All of Israel’s early wars of conquests, massive expulsions of Palestinians and the construction of Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile were undertaken under the aegis of the Labor Party. The latter never lacked in socialist rhetoric [they are members of the “Socialist” International (sic)] or anti-racist speeches when the occasion warranted, but never lost an opportunity to sell conventional arms to a Latin dictator (Pinochet in Chile, Videla in Argentina, Rios Mont in Guatemala), or offer nukes to a brutal South African regime under siege from its black majority.
The central role of the Israeli Labor Party in offering a nuclear solution to the minority white regime demonstrates that all major Israeli parties are capable of pursuing a genocidal policy if it serves their perceptions of “Jewish interests”. The leading role of the Labor Party confirms the idea that there are no basic differences between the Israeli Left and Right when it comes to committing crimes against humanity. The underlying belief system is that Chosen People are exempt from the laws against war crimes.
Nuclear Revelation: The Reactions of the Leading American Jewish Organizations
The Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, true to their role as an unconditional transmission belt of the Israel state, echoed the line that Israel did not offer nuclear weapons to South Africa, denying the documented proof and predictably refused to condemn Israel’s complicity with the genocidal implications of nuking millions active in the African freedom movement7. One of the leading Zionist organizations the “Anti Defamation League”, in fact had a long standing relation with South Africa’s secret services, hiring private agents to collect information and spy on the anti-apartheid movement up through the 1980’s.8 Most of the Zionist influenced mass media including the New York Times, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN and the Washington Post blocked the story ,as if Israel’s complicity in a plan nuking millions of Africans was unworthy of publication, let alone an object of the harshest condemnation. Let us be clear about why this crime, comparable to the Holocaust was not consummated. It was not because of any influence of the Hebraic moral traditions or “Jewish guilt” or even irresolution because of fear of the subsequent worldwide outcry. The Israeli sale of nukes did not go through because, according to authoritative South African accounts, the latter decided not to go through with the purchase, relying on Israeli “conventional” arms instead.9 There is no definitive explanation for why Israel’s nuclear war industry lost a sale but there are several possible explanations, from the high price that the Jewish state was asking, to the fear that the fallout from nuclear weapons might radiate whites as well as blacks. The “collateral costs” to the white racist population may have caused the apartheid regime to rethink its purchase.
Let us be clear: Israeli complicity in this venture into nuclear genocide was freely given, under no duress. In fact the Jewish state in the best traditions of a Nazi haberdasher, offered the racist state a choice of three ‘styles’ of weapons: nuclear, chemical and conventional. Take your pick they all fit in nicely with protecting the user from any further annoyances by the black majority.
Given the enormity of this crime of complicity, is it surprising that the Zionist and even most of the anti-Zionist media and spokespeople gave scant attention to this crime against humanity. A mention one day, a pronouncement here or there, nothing more. More likely, if the genocidal act was carried out, the moral outrage would have focused exclusively on … the South Africans not their weapon suppliers and accomplices before the act.
What explains the fact that the vast majority of American Zionist Jews who play a leading role in defending and apologizing for Israel’s role in offering nukes to racist South Africa, are high income, well educated professionals, businesspeople, scientists, academics, media performers and the like? Many are respectable family persons and civic minded. A majority consider themselves liberals, defenders of the environment and social programs. A few even speak favorably of ‘democratic socialism’. Yet, they are the same individuals who willingly support and apologize for a regime ready and willing to supply the means to radiate millions of Africans in the past, nuke tens of millions of Iranians today and massacre scores of peaceful humaniarians on the high seas.
The key to this apparent “contradiction” is the capacity of pro-Israel Jews to compartmentalize their professional work, family life and civic activity from their obsessive commitment to Israeli war crimes and genocidal pathologies. We have a case of respectable and focused high achievers with intense irrational attachments to a state engaged in crimes against humanity. An attachment voluntarily given and with full access to the knowledge and information pertaining to the deadly consequences of the Jewish state’s acts. Actions sanctioned at the highest level of the Israeli state and approved by the most prominent members of the mainline Jewish organizations.
Some liberal Jewish critics of Israel take offense at gentile and anti-zionist Jewish critics, accusing them of “picking on Israel”. This is a deliberate evasion, knowing full well that many of these same critics denounce criminal acts around the world. But there are reasons why Israel warrants special attention. It is the only state to offer nuclear weapons to a racist regime to destroy a liberation movement, nay an entire people. Israel is the only country which has blockaded an entire people 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza, having bombed and destroyed their sources of water, food and habitation. Israel is the only country which butchers dozens of pacifists in international waters. More to the point, today Israel along with its Zionized supporters in the US government are the only two regimes which openly threaten to launch a nuclear war of mass destruction against 72 millions Iranians.
Given what we know about Israel’s nuclear complicity with South Africa this is not idle speculation. The precedent of collaborating with South Africa in the proposed nuking of millions of Africans, with absolutely no moral compunctions, makes Israel the major nuclear threat in the Middle East today.
Raising the issue of Israel’s sale of nukes to South Africa is not merely a historical incident of academic interest. Some liberal Zionists might say “after all Israel didn’t actually supply the nuclear missiles and the South Africans didn’t nuke the blacks” … More to the point, the same Israeli and American Zionist mindset that threatens to use nuclear weapons against Iran, especially evident in the rantings of Secretary of State Clinton, exhibits the same propensity to sell nuclear weapons as a means to resolve conflicts in the past. Worse still Israel and its American Zionist followers have instilled the same moral indifference to genocide among vast sectors of their captive mass media audience and their colonized American Congressional and White House leaders. One has only to glance at the news reports of how Clinton dismissed the Turkey-Brazil-Iran diplomatic resolution of the enriched uranium exchange.10 Clinton insists on proceeding with sanctions because her paymasters, led by ultra-Israel Firsters like Haim Saban, demand that Iran must be brought to its knees at best and nuked if necessary.11 Clinton knows that new sanctions will destroy the negotiated compromise, even if it is on the same terms proposed by the US several months earlier. A compromise which Israel never accepted and now insists, through each and every major Jewish Organization that the United States should sabotage via new harsh sanctions.
Despite Clinton’s claim of a “consensus” on new sanctions, Russia, China, India , the league of Arab States and even France have publicly praised the Iran-Turkish-Brazil diplomatic agreement.12 Only the British toadies themselves infested by Zionist parliamentarians at fundraisers toed the Clinton-Obama line. The question is whether the US Zionist power configuration, headed by Rahm Emmanuel and Hilary Clinton, will secure the sanctions over and above the wishes of governments representing two-thirds of mankind.
The policy of nuclear genocide by proxy, proposed by Israel toward Iran, is executed by its bimodal high achieving fifth columnists operating from the top positions in the State Department, National Security Council, Congress and above all in the White House. Let us remember and never forget that Israel’s willingness to supply nukes to South Africa has immense relevance to their efforts urging our own servile public officials to become perpetrators of nuclear genocide against 70 plus million Iranians. With racist South Africa, Israel was helping a racist ally and making a profit. With Iran it is destroying an adversary of colonial oppression. Today May 31,2010 American Zionists defend the Israeli assassination squad which machine gunned 600 pacifists, humanitarians, Nobel Prize winners, murdering 20 and wounding dozensin international waters. In both cases, Israel’s nuclear policy and its slaughter on the high seas, and their defense by American zionists are acts of moral depravity. The sooner the Middle East – namely Israel – is denuclearized, and demilitarized and the USA dezionized the safer the world will be.
James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of 64 books published in 29 languages, and over 560 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles.
The Enemies of Humanity Expose Themselves Again
By Doug Steil | Aletho News | June 1, 2010
The recent storming by Israeli state terrorists of a Turkish humanitarian aid ship Mavi Marmara in international waters, killing of at least 15 people during the illegal seizure, and subsequent kidnapping of nearly seven hundred passengers, is yet another of numerous Israeli operations that have highlighted the essence of Zionism and its utter disregard for humanity.
The massacre of Turks and Arabs defending themselves from an unwarranted attack aboard the humanitarian aid ship was the consequence of a seriously botched operation that has certainly achieved the opposite of its intent. It demonstrates both the arrogance and sloppiness of those master terrorists who planned it, since it derived from various miscalculations. Not only were many of the passengers aboard the main ship awake and vigilant, even though it was during the wee hours of the morning and the ship was roughly 150 km offshore in international waters, but the military operation, using helicopters, was indeed being simultaneously broadcast by journalists to Turkish and Arabic television viewers through a live satellite feed (satellite phone service had reportedly been jammed). Within hours, millions of other people around the world could watch the recorded videos directly on their laptops, of the killers dropping from the Israeli helicopter.
The evidence that the operational planners did not anticipate that the Turkish ship was equipped with a direct satellite link to broadcast the attack for all to see derives from the basic fact, that perpetrators do not relish their crimes broadcast in real time, coupled with the fact that the live broadcast came through. Apparently, there were no applicable jamming attempts, nor were the Israeli operatives monitoring the Turkish television media to get a clue that their terror event was being broadcast live on air. The natural consequence was emotional outrage and almost immediate mass demonstrations in Turkey followed later in other major cities such as Athens, Paris, and London, where many people are surely also aware, at some level, that the current economic crisis affecting them is a consequence of blatant misdeeds by eight prominent and powerful Zionist Jews in America (Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner, Maurice Greenberg, Lloyd Blankfein, and Richard Fuld). That is to say, public outrage is accumulating amidst a discernible pattern of the usual suspects displaying contemptible hubris toward the general population.
Video cameras, held by reporters or amateurs, installed at hotels and airports, or inside mobile phones, tend to be ubiquitous nowadays. Earlier this year, during the course of a Mossad assassination operation at a luxury hotel in Dubai, images of the Israeli perpetrators were eventually broadcast around the world, though not in real time. The planners of this operation must have assumed in that case, that their victims were simply too stupid to discover, much less reconstruct the phases of, their conspiratorial plot. Similarly, the planners of the Israeli military operation of destruction in southern Lebanon must have assumed that Hezbollah was too disorganized and unsophisticated to have deployed fiber optic cables for their communications network, not subject to eavesdropping or jamming measures. This miscalculation ultimately gave the Hezbollah defenders the tactical edge on the battlefield that forced an Israeli retreat.
Whereas more than twenty years ago it was still possible for Israeli operatives to stage a false-flag event, such as the bombing of the PanAm jumbo jet over Scotland, without the public in the western world catching on, today, thanks to modern technologies and the Internet, many millions of people are no longer fooled by the insidious Jewish propaganda machine.
By now it is widely understood by millions of well-informed people throughout the world, that the attack on the World Trade Center by aircraft and the controlled implosion of three of the buildings using nano-thermite explosives was part of an elaborate Israeli operation. (The attack on lower Manhattan was thoroughly a Zionist operation, masterminded from Israel, with highly placed Jews in the media, among other places, actively participating in the subsequent cover-up.)
The masterminds of that spectacular operation certainly could not anticipate, more than a decade ago, the widespread availability of broadband Internet service in conjunction with the phenomenon of video file sharing and online blogging, along with the intelligence of thousands of people capable of analyzing slow motion video images and making logical inferences, shared with millions of others. Notwithstanding pervasive control over traditional motion picture, print, and broadcast media in America and elsewhere by Zionist Jews, who cultivate a strong emotional affinity to Israel, the facts, such as they are, can no longer be contained, due to modern technology, particularly the Internet.
A common thread in these instances of Israeli terror operations, cited above, including their inherent miscalculations, is the Talmudic based sense of Jewish supremacy, coupled with utter contempt for non-Jews. This sociopathic attitude is once again evident by the official public relation attempts to blame the victims for the crimes of the perpetrators. This is often accompanied by oblique innuendo invoking the conventional but increasingly discredited Holocaust narrative. Such behavior, of constant, habitual lying and bullying, insults the intelligence and dignity of millions of people, but appears to be a perpetual phenomenon throughout Jewish cultural history.
Zionism and support for Israel is merely the most expedient mechanism for attempting to attain the utopian goal of Jewish supremacy and domination, truly a lunatic fantasy, entertained by the enemies of humanity. To the extent that ordinary Jews not directly affiliated with the odious Zionist power nexus nonetheless express their support for Israel or provide apologies for its criminal actions in light of the continually emerging evidence, by extension or through their tacit complicity, they too risk becoming widely regarded as enemies of humanity by an informed and outraged population.
“Criminal pirate” Israel makes a fool of the OECD only days after it clasped the viper to its bosom
By Stuart Littlewood | My Catbird Seat | May 31, 2010
This morning I’m hearing reports of 20 or more dead and dozens injured after Israeli forces attacked the Free Gaza flotilla in international waters and gunned down unarmed crew and passengers.
This is no surprise. Israel had been threatening for weeks to use violence, as is its style, to intercept the peaceful mission.
And I have just watched Israel’s chief lie-monger, Mark Regev, on BBC TV. “We did everything we could to avoid violence,” he said. “They [the aid workers] chose the path of confrontation… This is elementary, we have to defend ourselves.” He claimed the Israeli boarding party was attacked! The week-kneed BBC failed to question this act of piracy in international waters and the blatant violation of maritime law.
Former British MP George Galloway, a mainspring behind the Free Gaza movement, called it “a murderous act of piracy” on innocent humanitarian aid workers and demanded a wholesale review of the international community’s relationship with “the criminal pirate state of Israel”.
When the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) just 3 weeks ago, made their woeful decision to admit Israel to their club, the Zionist regime’s plan to attack international ships attempting to bring relief to the 1.5 million innocent Gazans it had bombed and blockaded for 4 years, was already known. But the Organisation nevertheless went ahead… it does not, of course, explain what many would love to know: how Israel’s vile conduct is deemed to comply with the OECD’s fundamental values.
So I asked our ambassador. The office of Britain’s delegation to the OECD had to be prodded and goaded several times before making a half-baked reply to the simple question: Why did the British government give approval – in the British people’s name – for relaxing the rules to allow Israel to join?
Ambassador Dominic Martin was too lazy to issue a personal statement. Or maybe he was just too embarrassed by the thought of having to spout the sort of bilge I would receive 17 days later from one of his junior assistants.
When I finally got a reply it was from a lady who did not reveal her job title. But her previous job was with the Honours Unit in the Protocol Division so, clearly, here was somebody with deep background knowledge of Israel’s theft of the Holy Land and general lawlessness. This is what she said…
28 May: The rules for joining the OECD were not relaxed to allow Israel to join, and there was consensus among OECD members to admit Israel. Israel had to undergo a rigorous process of technical reforms to ensure that it met the standards of the OECD acquis in a wide range of diverse areas, from changing legislation in line with the Anti Bribery Convention to the environment. Israel has made commitments to bring its standards into line with those of the OECD in two areas, post accession – statistics (where it has been asked to disaggregate statistics for the Occupied Territories from those of Green Line Israel) and Intellectual Property Rights.
The UK has always been supportive of Israel’s application to the OECD and welcomes the successful conclusion of accession negotiations. Israel is a country with whom the OECD and its members have many natural synergies. We view the accession of Israel as a positive development for a number of reasons. It is significant that Israel believes that adherence to OECD values and standards is important and helpful in the country’s economic and social development, including its efforts to address high levels of poverty and deprivation, particularly among certain categories of the Israeli population.
The UK, together with EU member states, is confident that Israel’s accession to the OECD will open new areas of co-operation in our mutual interest. We do not believe that economic sanctions or boycotts are the way to engage or influence Israel.
You asked in your subsequent email about a statement or press release. Neither we, nor the FCO, issued a press release or statement when Israel joined the OECD.
– Tanya Collingridge, UK Delegation to the OECD
Who actually wrote that… Mrs Collingridge? Ambassador Martin? Or, more likely, some hack in the FCO’s Hasbara Unit quoting from the Israeli crapaganda manual?
- “The rules for joining the OECD were not relaxed…”
Its mission statement says that the OECD “brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy”. And in December 2007 a roadmap towards Israeli membership set out the OECD’s “fundamental values” to which members must adhere. These include “a commitment to pluralist democracy based on the rule of law and respect of human rights”.
Oh dear. Israel, as everyone has come to realize, is no western-style democracy and no respecter of the rights of others. It is an ethnocracy with deeply racist policies and criminal territorial ambitions. Since 1967 it has ruled over millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories without according them any democratic rights at all. It discriminates systematically against its Arab minority in numerous ways. For example, the OECD’s own report Israeli Child Policy and Outcomes finds that “government spending per child is much lower in the Arab sector than in the Jewish sector… average spending per child in the Arab localities is estimated to be 36.8% lower than in Jewish localities”.
Ongoing human rights violations are too numerous to list here – it’s latest murderous outrage has just been demonstrated on the high seas. Others range from preventing Gaza’s 3,500 licensed fisherman from earning a livelihood by shooting up their vessels whenever they put to sea, and preventing students from Gaza finishing their degree courses at West Bank universities such as Bethlehem and Birzeit, to what former prime minister Olmert himself described as “deliberate and insufferable” employment discrimination against their Arab minority.
Israel also operates discriminatory land laws that benefit Jews and prevent its non-Jewish Palestinian citizens (20% of the population) from exercising an equal right to own land. Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens are denied full legal status, thus excluding some 16,000 women from exercising their social rights such as accessing health care.
Basic services such as water and electricity are denied to Bedouin citizens of the Negev/Naqab. Their homes are frequently destroyed.
Has the OECD turned a blind eye to the terror and havoc wrought by Israel’s military? The sanctions and blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip, and Israel’s ‘Cast Lead’ blitzkrieg launched in December 2008 against the tiny enclave’s citizens and infrastructure have caused a massive humanitarian crisis. Promised relief and reconstruction are cruelly obstructed.
Between 2000 and the start of Cast Lead (according to Israel’s B’Tselem statistics), Israelis killed 4,790 Palestrinian civilians in their homeland. Of these, 952 were children. In the same period Palestinians killed 490 Israeli civilians within Israel, including just 84 children.
Yes, 952 Palestinian kiddies snuffed in their own streets. Israelis slaughtered at least 350 more during Cast Lead and have kept Gaza under daily air attack ever since. So the “most moral army in the world” must have eliminated nearly 1400 youngsters by now. The number left maimed and crippled doesn’t bear thinking about.
Israel’s claim to sovereignty over all of historic Palestine has no basis in law, yet land confiscation and illegal settlement building continues throughout the West Bank in blatant breach of UN resolutions and previous peace accords, as do home demolitions and displacements, especially in East Jerusalem.
Doesn’t the OECD know about the severe restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by Israeli checkpoints and bypass roads, to the extent that Palestinians cannot easily reach their place of work or their farmlands, or even access the meagre healthcare facilities, and both Arab Christians and Muslims are prevented from visiting their holy places?
Isn’t the OECD aware of the torture and ill-treatment of Palestinians held in Israeli jails and detention centres, the widespread denial of children’s rights.and Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian refugees the right of return?
Israel’s contemptuous disregard of international law, UN declarations and normal codes of conduct shows that it is not the slightest bit committed to the “attainment of the purposes of the United Nations”. Thanks to its never-ending aggression, the persistent expansion of its borders and refusal to end its illegal occupation, Israel has miserably – many would say purposely – failed to establish “peaceful and harmonious relations” with its closest neighbours. It regularly violates Lebanese and Palestinian airspace and makes armed incursions into Gaza whenever the mood takes it.
It has made no contribution whatever to the economic expansion of non-member countries and no attempt to abolish obstacles to the exchange of goods and services or enable the liberalisation of capital movements. On the contrary, it has used unrestrained military might to wreck and ruin its neighbours’ prospects and reduce them to permanent poverty.
The OECD surely knows these things.
- “Israel has made commitments to bring its standards into line with those of the OECD in two areas, post accession – statistics… and Intellectual Property Rights.”
Given the Israelis’ long crime sheet, are these the only commitments the OECD was able to wring from them? Why did it not, at the very least, insist on an end to the economic and military blockade of Gaza?
- “Israel believes that adherence to OECD values and standards is important…”
Israel believes quite the opposite, as its actions show.
- “The UK, together with EU member states, is confident that Israel’s accession to the OECD will open new areas of co-operation in our mutual interest.”
Has anyone explained what interests and values we could possibly have in common with the Israeli regime?
- “We do not believe that economic sanctions or boycotts are the way to engage or influence Israel.”
Since when have we been squeamish about slapping crippling sanctions on other countries… Iraq since 1990 and Palestine especially when we didn’t like the outcome of their democratic elections in 2006 or the’ flavour’ of their fledgling but perfectly legitimate government? We eagerly joined with the bully-boys to crush it and pile on the misery for innocent Gazans.
Now we’re itching to “engage and influence” Iran with tougher sanctions. None of these countries have posed a threat to the UK.
For 62 years normal diplomacy has failed with Israel. People with a grain of sense have concluded that it’s time to change tack. The British thumbs-up for Israeli membership of the OECD is an obscene reward for previous bad behaviour and the first act of lunacy on the watch of our new Foreign Secretary, William Hague. But we can expect many more. Hague is so passionately pro-Israel that he’s determined to make the UK a safe haven for that regime’s thugs. This will be achieved by ducking out of our legally binding obligation to exercise universal jurisdiction over persons accused of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.
He is reported in Haaretz as saying, “We cannot have a position where Israeli politicians feel they cannot visit this country and indeed not just Israel, but this could apply to many other nations as well. So this has to be put right. And that is well understood and agreed in the coalition government.”
How silly. Israeli politicians are welcome to visit the UK as long as their hands are clean. But Hague wants Mrs Livni, who is deeply implicated in the bloodbath in Gaza, and many more who are accused of crimes against humanity, to be able to come and do their shopping in London. I simply don’t believe that the entire coalition government shares Silly Willy’s protective attitude towards foreign war criminals. Besides, Hague’s coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, are not as hopelessly hoodwinked by Zionism as he is.
And the public, one hopes, would regard sheltering Israelis wanted for war crimes as totally unacceptable.
It might be worth mentioning that Foreign Secretary Hague became a Friend of Israel at the tender age of 15, when still in short trousers. How can he possibly be fit for purpose? How clever is it to allow signed-up, card-carrying admirers of the rogue state anywhere the levers of international power?
The stark reality of Israeli terror
As I write, the fate of that altogether more gutsy coalition, the international Free Gaza flotilla, and its humanitarian cargoes and brave passengers, is still unknown. But after the callous murders at sea it can’t be good.
Some 30 British nationals are believed to be aboard, along with £millions-worth of humanitarian supplies donated by British citizens, peacefully going about their lawful business. Where was the Royal Navy? The Government had been alerted to Israel’s threats.
According to Aljazeera, Israel claimed the Free Gaza boats were embarked on “an act of provocation” against the Israeli military, rather than providing aid, and the flotilla would be breaking international law by landing in Gaza,
Last night I wrote to Nick Clegg, Britain’s deputy Prime Minister, saying: “What action is Her Majesty’s Government taking, please, to guarantee freedom of the seas and protect those going about their lawful business from Israeli piracy? Ministers were warned of Israel’s threats so had ample time to prepare for this development. Let’s have no whimpish driveling from the Foreign Office this time, please. What’s needed is firm, decisive intervention. Just for a change let us see our Government do us proud on the international stage.”
This was only one of many angry messages he and Prime Minister David “I’m-a-Zionist” Cameron must have received.
Every decent person this morning will feel great sorrow – but also tremendous admiration – for those who lost their lives or were wounded in a noble effort to relieve the endless suffering inflicted by the foulest professional politicians on earth. I fully expect their sacrifice to be marked by remembrance services across the world.
Meanwhile, hands up anyone who feels sorry for the OECD, which has been so comprehensively pissed on by the delinquent regime it welcomed with open arms only days ago.
Footnote: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is where a select group of 31 countries compare policy experiences, identify good practice and coordinate domestic and international policies. Its roots go back to 1947 and the reconstruction of Europe under the Marshall Plan. It is funded by its member countries to the tune of 328 million euros.
Freedom Flotilla and the BBC’s Shame
By M. Idrees | Pulse Media | May 31, 2010
The BBC proves its despicable subservience to the Israeli propaganda machine once again. Before it was shamed by Al Jazeera and others into covering the Freedom Flotilla massacre, it reported the story as a mere Hamas claim. Here is how it first appeared on the BBC’s website:
BBC News – Israel intercepts Gaza flotilla, says Hamas
The Palestinian movement Hamas says the Israeli navy has intercepted a flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip.
The massacre soon became the top news story on Google News and Twitter. The BBC could no longer pretend that it couldn’t see. It finally reported it as a matter of fact, but appended this line: “Hamas, a militant palestinian group that controls the Gaza strip, has fired thousands of rockets into Israel over the past decade.”
The victims weren’t innocent, you see. They were on their way to aid these terrible people who fire ‘thousands of rockets into Israel’. That’s all you need to know. And if you mention those hundreds of thousands of bombs, missiles and rockets that Israel has shot into Gaza…Why, you must be an anti-Semite!
I took the risk, and sent in a complaint. I am assuming I wasn’t the only one questioning the relevance of the line to the report because it was swiftly removed. In its place, it posted a short video segment in which the reporter went out of his way to ‘stress’ that according to the Israeli military no one was killed. He then went on to excuse the killings because ‘clearly when you have as many as 600 people on board these ships, at night, in high sees, it is a very very difficult situation…and you can imagine a rather chaotic situation. Of course the Israeli military is very well experienced with dealing with crowd control’. But turns out he wasn’t entirely shameless. He did add: ’but certainly if you’ve got live fire being fired as well as tear gas canisters which is what is being reported was fired, then that is a very dangerous situation in a very crowded space’.
The BBC has now added a sidebar in which ‘diplomatic correspondent’ Jonathan Marcus tells readers how terrible this massacre is…for Israel’s image! The clueless ass tells us that ‘this was always going to be a high-risk operation’… for Israel! He adds: ‘Taking over vessels at sea is no easy task, even if the units carrying out the mission are well-trained, and it is especially difficult if the people already on board the vessels resist.’ But at least he thinks the deaths are a tragedy…but for Israel! Because they ‘threaten to make what was always going to be a potential public relations disaster for Israel into a fully-fledged calamity.’ So the BBC pays a ‘diplomatic correspondent’ your tax money so he can worry about the myriad ways Israel hurts itself by killing innocent civilians in international waters!
Thanks to all who’ve written in. Don’t let them get away with using your tax money to feed you propaganda on behalf of a foreign criminal entity. For more on the BBC’s disgraceful record of whitewashing Israeli crimes here and here.
This is your money being used in the service of murderers and child molesters. You have a responsibility to act. At minimum, you can complain.
Israel offered nukes to apartheid South Africa
Chris McGreal | The Guardian | 24 May 2010
Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state’s possession of nuclear weapons.
The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”. The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.
The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence.
The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky’s request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week’s nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.
They will also undermine Israel’s attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a “responsible” power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.
A spokeswoman for Peres today said the report was baseless and there were “never any negotiations” between the two countries. She did not comment on the authenticity of the documents.
South African documents show that the apartheid-era military wanted the missiles as a deterrent and for potential strikes against neighbouring states.
The documents show both sides met on 31 March 1975. Polakow-Suransky writes in his book published in the US this week, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret alliance with apartheid South Africa. At the talks Israeli officials “formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal”.
Among those attending the meeting was the South African military chief of staff, Lieutenant General RF Armstrong. He immediately drew up a memo in which he laid out the benefits of South Africa obtaining the Jericho missiles but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.
The memo, marked “top secret” and dated the same day as the meeting with the Israelis, has previously been revealed but its context was not fully understood because it was not known to be directly linked to the Israeli offer on the same day and that it was the basis for a direct request to Israel. In it, Armstrong writes: “In considering the merits of a weapon system such as the one being offered, certain assumptions have been made: a) That the missiles will be armed with nuclear warheads manufactured in RSA (Republic of South Africa) or acquired elsewhere.”
But South Africa was years from being able to build atomic weapons. A little more than two months later, on 4 June, Peres and Botha met in Zurich. By then the Jericho project had the codename Chalet.
The top secret minutes of the meeting record that: “Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available.” The document then records: “Minister Peres said the correct payload was available in three sizes. Minister Botha expressed his appreciation and said that he would ask for advice.” The “three sizes” are believed to refer to the conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons.
The use of a euphemism, the “correct payload”, reflects Israeli sensitivity over the nuclear issue and would not have been used had it been referring to conventional weapons. It can also only have meant nuclear warheads as Armstrong’s memorandum makes clear South Africa was interested in the Jericho missiles solely as a means of delivering nuclear weapons.
In addition, the only payload the South Africans would have needed to obtain from Israel was nuclear. The South Africans were capable of putting together other warheads.
Botha did not go ahead with the deal in part because of the cost. In addition, any deal would have to have had final approval by Israel’s prime minister and it is uncertain it would have been forthcoming.
South Africa eventually built its own nuclear bombs, albeit possibly with Israeli assistance. But the collaboration on military technology only grew over the following years. South Africa also provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons.
The documents confirm accounts by a former South African naval commander, Dieter Gerhardt – jailed in 1983 for spying for the Soviet Union. After his release with the collapse of apartheid, Gerhardt said there was an agreement between Israel and South Africa called Chalet which involved an offer by the Jewish state to arm eight Jericho missiles with “special warheads”. Gerhardt said these were atomic bombs. But until now there has been no documentary evidence of the offer.
Some weeks before Peres made his offer of nuclear warheads to Botha, the two defence ministers signed a covert agreement governing the military alliance known as Secment. It was so secret that it included a denial of its own existence: “It is hereby expressly agreed that the very existence of this agreement… shall be secret and shall not be disclosed by either party”.
The agreement also said that neither party could unilaterally renounce it.
The existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme was revealed by Mordechai Vanunu to the Sunday Times in 1986. He provided photographs taken inside the Dimona nuclear site and gave detailed descriptions of the processes involved in producing part of the nuclear material but provided no written documentation.
Documents seized by Iranian students from the US embassy in Tehran after the 1979 revolution revealed the Shah expressed an interest to Israel in developing nuclear arms. But the South African documents offer confirmation Israel was in a position to arm Jericho missiles with nuclear warheads.
Israel pressured the present South African government not to declassify documents obtained by Polakow-Suransky. “The Israeli defence ministry tried to block my access to the Secment agreement on the grounds it was sensitive material, especially the signature and the date,” he said. “The South Africans didn’t seem to care; they blacked out a few lines and handed it over to me. The ANC government is not so worried about protecting the dirty laundry of the apartheid regime’s old allies.”
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Lies are Unbekoming | January 25, 2026
The waiting room is clean. The receptionist is polite. The forms ask reasonable questions. Nothing in the physical environment suggests danger. The magazines are current. The hand sanitizer dispenser works. Someone has chosen calming colors for the walls.
A pregnant woman sits in a chair designed for her comfort. She has been told to be here. Not ordered—no one orders. Recommended. Strongly recommended. Everyone does this. Her mother did this. Her friends did this. The women in her prenatal group compare notes about their appointments the way they compare notes about nursery furniture. Which provider did you choose? What tests have you had? The questions assume the answers. The answers assume the questions.
She will be offered things today. Offered is the word used. The offers will come with information sheets that list risks and benefits in tabular form. She will sign consent documents. Everything will be voluntary in the legal sense. No one will hold her down. No one will threaten her. She will choose, and her choices will feel like choices, and she will leave feeling she has done the responsible thing.
What she will not feel is the weight of what has been arranged before she arrived. … continue
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