In Hebron, Israel Removes the Last Restraint on Its Settlers’ Reign of Terror
By Jonathan Cook | The National | February 13, 2019
You might imagine that a report by a multinational observer force documenting a 20-year reign of terror by Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers against Palestinians, in a city under occupation, would provoke condemnation from European and US politicians.
But you would be wrong. The leaking in December of the report on conditions in the city of Hebron, home to 200,000 Palestinians, barely caused a ripple.
About 40,000 separate cases of abuse had been quietly recorded since 1997 by dozens of monitors from Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Italy and Turkey. Some incidents constituted war crimes.
Exposure of the confidential report has now provided the pretext for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to expel the international observers. He shuttered their mission in Hebron this month, in apparent violation of Israel’s obligations under the 25-year-old Oslo peace accords.
Israel hopes once again to draw a veil over its violent colonisation of the heart of the West Bank’s largest Palestinian city. The process of clearing tens of thousands of inhabitants from central Hebron is already well advanced.
Any chance of rousing the international community into even minimal protest was stamped out by the US last week. It blocked a draft resolution at the United Nations Security Council expressing “regret” at Israel’s decision, and on Friday added that ending the mandate of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) was an “internal matter” for Israel.
The TIPH was established in 1997 after a diplomatic protocol split the city into two zones, controlled separately by Israel and a Palestinian Authority created by the Oslo accords.
The “temporary” in its name was a reference to the expected five-year duration of the Oslo process. The need for TIPH, most assumed, would vanish when Israel ended the occupation and a Palestinian state was built in its place.
While Oslo put the PA formally in charge of densely populated regions of the occupied territories, Israel was effectively given a free hand in Hebron to entrench its belligerent hold on Palestinian life.
Several hundred extremist Jewish settlers have gradually expanded their illegal enclave in the city centre, backed by more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers. Many Palestinian residents have been forced out while the rest are all but imprisoned in their homes.
TIPH faced an impossible task from the outset: to “maintain normal life” for Hebron’s Palestinians in the face of Israel’s structural violence.
Until the report was leaked, its documentation of Israel’s takeover of Hebron and the settlers’ violent attacks had remained private, shared only among the states participating in the task force.
However, the presence of observers did curb the settlers’ worst excesses, helping Palestinian children get to school unharmed and allowing their parents to venture out to work and shop. That assistance is now at an end.
Hebron has been a magnet for extremist settlers because it includes a site revered in Judaism: the reputed burial plot of Abraham, father to the three main monotheistic religions.
But to the settlers’ disgruntlement, Hebron became central to Muslim worship centuries ago, with the Ibrahimi mosque established at the site.
Israel’s policy has been gradually to prise away the Palestinians’ hold on the mosque, as well the urban space around it. Half of the building has been restricted to Jewish prayer, but in practice the entire site is under Israeli military control.
As the TIPH report notes, Palestinian Muslims must now pass through several checkpoints to reach the mosque and are subjected to invasive body searches. The muezzin’s call to prayer is regularly silenced to avoid disturbing Jews.
Faced with these pressures, according to TIPH, the number of Palestinians praying there has dropped by half over the past 15 years.
In Hebron, as at Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a Muslim holy site is treated solely as an obstacle – one that must be removed so that Israel can assert exclusive sovereignty over all of the Palestinians’ former homeland.
A forerunner of TIPH was set up in 1994, shortly after Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli army doctor, entered the Ibrahimi mosque and shot more than 150 Muslims at prayer, killing 29. Israeli soldiers aided Goldstein, inadvertently or otherwise, by barring the worshippers’ escape while they were being sprayed with bullets.
The massacre should have provided the opportunity for Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister of the time, to banish Hebron’s settlers and ensure the Oslo process remained on track. Instead he put the Palestinian population under prolonged curfew.
That curfew never really ended. It became the basis of an apartheid policy that has endlessly indulged Jewish settlers as they harass and abuse their Palestinian neighbours.
Israel’s hope is that most will get the message and leave.
With Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in power for a decade, more settlers are moving in, driving out Palestinians. Today Hebron’s old market, once the commercial hub of the southern West Bank, is a ghost town, and Palestinians are too terrified to enter large sections of their own city.
TIPH’s report concluded that, far from guaranteeing “normal life”, Israel had made Hebron more divided and dangerous for Palestinians than ever before.
In 2016 another army medic, Elor Azaria, used his rifle to shoot in the head a prone and badly wounded Palestinian youth. Unlike Goldstein’s massacre, the incident was caught on video.
Israelis barely cared until Azaria was arrested. Then large sections of the public, joined by politicians, rallied to his cause, hailing him a hero.
Despite doing very little publicly, TIPH’s presence in Hebron had served as some kind of restraint on the settlers and soldiers. Now the fear is that there will be more Azarias.
Palestinians rightly suspect that the expulsion of the observer force is the latest move in efforts by Israel and the US to weaken mechanisms for protecting Palestinian human rights.
Mr Netanyahu has incited against local and international human rights organisations constantly, accusing them of being foreign agents and making it ever harder for them to operate effectively.
And last year US President Donald Trump cut all aid to UNRWA, the United Nations’ refugee agency, which plays a vital role in caring for Palestinians and upholding their right to return to their former lands.
Not only are the institutions Palestinians rely on for support being dismembered but so now are the organisations that record the crimes Israel has been committing.
That, Israel hopes, will ensure that an international observer post which has long had no teeth will soon will soon lose its sight too as Israel begins a process of annexing the most prized areas of the West Bank – with Hebron top of the list.
15 Years in Prison for Clicking on Terrorist Propaganda Even Once – New UK Law
Sputnik – February 13, 2019
Upon the adoption of a new legislation, Home Secretary Sajid Javid said that the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act “gives the police the powers they need to disrupt plots and punish those who seek to do us harm.”
The Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 has received Royal Assent on 12 February, making the bill an Act of Parliament.
The act makes provision in relation to terrorism, enabling persons at ports and borders to be questioned for national security and updating the offence of obtaining information likely to be useful to a terrorist to cover material that is only viewed or streamed, rather than downloaded to form a permanent record.
The act sees to an increase to the maximum penalty for certain preparatory terrorism offences to 15 years’ imprisonment.
The UK government has been criticized by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy, Joe Cannataci, back in 2018. The inspector argued following his visit in the UK, that it was concerning that accessing propaganda “on three or more different ccasions” was viewed as an offence. Cannataci called the approach straying towards “thought crime.”
The three-click benchmark has been removed in the new bill and now even a single tap on ‘terrorist material’ could lead to years in prison. Exemption is provided for journalists, academic researchers or people who had “no reason to believe” they were accessing terrorist propaganda.
The Bill has also provided for a launch of an independent review of Prevent, the much criticized government’s strategy that aims to support persons vulnerable to radicalisation.
British intelligence services were condemned in 2018 for failing to properly monitor individuals of interest — later to be involved in terrorist activity — not under active investigation at the moment but in the peripheries of more than one investigation.
In 2017, the United Kingdom suffered five terrorist attacks in Westminster, the Manchester Arena, London Bridge, Finsbury Park and Parsons Green, with 36 people losing their lives and dozens injured.
Israeli Army Admits the Palestinian Motorcyclist They Killed Had No Explosives
IMEMC News – February 11, 2019
Following an investigation by the Israeli military into the killing of a Palestinian motorcycle rider on February 5th, and the severe wounding of his passenger, the military was forced to admit that their initial claim that the young man had explosives was a false claim.
Abdullah Faisal Omar Tawalba, 19, was shot and killed by Israeli forces on February 5th, 2019, at an Israeli military checkpoint in Jenin, in the northern part of the West Bank.
His passenger, Omar Ahmad Hanana, 15, was also shot by the Israeli military and badly injured, but is in stable condition at the Jenin Governmental Hospital run by the Palestinian Authority.
Initially, the Israeli military reported to the media that the young men had approached the checkpoint and “tried to plant explosives”.
An investigation by Israeli military police found no evidence whatsoever of any explosives of any kind.
The soldiers claimed that they “heard an explosion,” and were sure “an explosive was thrown at the roadblock, before they opened fire.”
The checkpoint where Abdullah was killed by the soldiers is located near the entrance of the al-Jalama village, northeast of Jenin in northern West Bank. The army’s initial statement claimed that Palestinians were riding a motor cycle and “hurled an explosive at the soldiers”.
There were no injuries of any soldiers.
Mahmoud Sa’adi, the director of the Emergency Department of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Jenin, said the slain Palestinian has been identified as Abdullah Faisal Omar Tawalba, 19, from the al-Jalama village, and added that Omar Ahmad Hanana, 15, was injured but is in a stable condition.
Palestinian medical sources said the medics moved the slain Palestinian, and the wounded teen, to Jenin Governmental Hospital.
They added that Tawalba was shot with several live rounds in the head and legs.
Hastily-Buried Radioactive Waste Lays Bare Nuclear Power Legacy
Sputnik – 11.02.2019
Over 126,000 barrels of radioactive material are stored in the Asse mine in Lower Saxony, a state in northwest Germany bordering the North Sea, a fact that has many locals – as well as the global anti-nuke community – frustrated.
Manfred Kramer, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, lives close to the Asse salt mine in which the decaying waste is stored and — while acknowledging that politicians are finally beginning to take notice — has long protested against having radioactive waste in the old mine, Tekportal reported.
“It’s nice that she’s finally coming,” Kramer said, referring to Environment Minister Svenja Schulze’s upcoming visit to the mine, which was originally used for the extraction of potash salt until 1965. “Soon she’ll have been in office for a year. It sure took a while!” he quipped, according to Deutsche Welle.
“Three generations operated nuclear power in Germany, and now 30 generations or even more will have to suffer the consequences,” Schulze noted, adding, “this is proof of how irresponsible nuclear energy was.”
According to mining engineer Thomas Lautsch, who works for BGE, Germany’s federal company for radioactive waste disposal, the retrieval of the nuclear waste from the mine will be complicated and expensive, at a minimum.
“We would have to build a retrieval mine, which is more than simply just a new shaft. We would also need an interim storage facility for the waste, and we would have to create many new shafts to gain access to the individual chambers,” he said, cited by Msn.com.
The construction phase of the project alone could take eight or nine years, according to studies.
Because the old mine shafts do not meet current legal standards for the ten-thousand-year storage of nuclear waste, a new mine must be built around the old mine.
“The barrels must be finally and safely disposed of somewhere else in the country,” Kramer noted, “should they actually able to be retrieved by 2050.”
The mine, developed between 1906-1908, has a depth of around 765 meters. Between 1965-1995, the Helmholtz Zentrum München (a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers responsible for studying environmental health issues) took the unprecedented step of using the mine to store the nation’s radioactive waste, including weapon detritus, medical offal and power plant leavings.
Man’s testicles tasered during horrific police arrest
RT | February 10, 2019
Disturbing bodycam video shows Arizona cops tasering a man 11 times, including on the testicles, as his horrified family scream for them to stop. The police are now being sued for “excessive force and torture.”
The nightmare tasering began when Glendale police officers approached a vehicle for a signal turn violation in July 2017. Johnny Wheatcroft was in the front passenger seat, while his wife Anya Chapman and their 11 and six-year-old sons sat in the back. A friend of the family was driving.
Officers Matt Schneider and Mark Lindsey asked Wheatcroft for his ID and he inquired why he had to show it, as he was not driving the vehicle. Police allege he went to stuff something in his backpack, and, after pressing the taser against his arm and telling him to “relax,” Schneider twisted Wheatcroft’s arm behind his back and pulled him from the car while still restrained by his seat belt.
The officer began tasering him when he was half out of the vehicle, before they pulled him to the ground and continued to tase him. Even after Wheatcroft was dragged on the ground towards the back of the car, his feet remained entangled in the seat belt. His older son leaned into the front seat to open the belt to free his father, prompting Schneider to shout at him, causing the boy to burst into tears.
Glendale police said in a statement that Wheatcroft “exhibited verbal non-compliance by refusing to identify himself and failed to obey the officer’s instructions.” Chapman reportedly swung a bag of bottles at Lindsey’s head during the incident, although this can’t be seen clearly in the video.
Horrifyingly, Schneider is next seen pulling Wheatcroft’s shorts down and placing the taser on the handcuffed man’s testicles. The lawsuit filed by the couple reports Schneider tased his testicles and perineum. He then placed the taser on his penis and said, “You want it again? Shut your mouth. I’m done f*cking around with you.”
Another officer held a handgun to his head and Wheatcroft was kicked in the groin.
According to the suit and the police’s own admission, the officers used a “drive stun” method, in which the taser is pressed against a person before being fired. Glendale police also released a 30 second CCTV video of the incident taken from a distance.
The pair were arrested and charged with aggravated assault and physically resisting arrest. They were both in jail for months as they couldn’t afford bail before Chapman pled guilty to a lesser charge so she could be released to look after her children.
Wheatcroft’s charges were dismissed by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office after prosecutors saw the bodycam video, which his lawyers released to media outlets.
Schneider was suspended for three days after the incident, Glendale police said.
Russian Arctic Archipelago Declares Emergency Amid Polar Bear Invasion
Sputnik – 09.02.2019
Russia’s remote archipelago of Novaya Zemlya is situated in the extreme northeast of the country’s European part and has a population of only slightly over 2,000 people.
An emergency has been declared on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region. The measure was triggered by a massive invasion of polar bears, the governor’s press office said in a statement.
According to Aleksander Minaev, deputy head of the Novaya Zemlya municipality, from December 2018 to February 2019, large gatherings of polar bears were spotted in the vicinity of settlements on the archipelago. Some 53 bears were detected near the settlement of Belushya Guba, with some of them attacking people, breaking into houses and other buildings.
“There are numerous oral and written statements from residents and groups of schools and kindergartens demanding to ensure safety on the territory of the municipality. People are scared, afraid to leave their houses, their daily activities are disrupted, parents are afraid to let their children go to schools and kindergartens”, the deputy chief of the municipality said.
Head of Novay Zemlya Zhigansha Musin has said that the regime of emergency will be in place until the security of the settlements will be provided.
As US Laments Human Rights in Venezuela, US-Allied Colombia Descends into Drug-fueled Humanitarian Crisis
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | February 8, 2019
BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA – Several troubling situations are currently playing out across Colombia, yet the country’s continuing downward spiral into drug-fueled and politically-motivated violence has caused little concern in Washington, offering yet another clear indication that the U.S.’ current posturing on Venezuela is hardly motivated by concerns about “democracy,” “human rights,” or the welfare of the Venezuelan people.
This, of course, can hardly be considered surprising, given that Colombia is a top U.S. ally whose government has long been closely aligned with Washington’s interests. However, although the lack of U.S. government or media attention to Colombia may effectively hide it from the American public, the country is becoming increasingly lawless, with cocaine production reaching new record levels and the government sanctioning the mass murder of the country’s largest indigenous group. Not only that but since Colombia’s new president, Iván Duque, came to power late last year, the number of indigenous social leaders who have been murdered has spiked to the highest levels in over a decade.
Ultimately, the lack of media coverage of Colombia’s humanitarian crises, which have large implications for the Americas as a whole, is a telling example of how such crises are regularly weaponized by governments and media to exclusively target governments it wishes to pressure or overthrow, while turning a blind eye to those same or worse acts when committed by an allied nation.
An absurdly double standard
Though it was Barack Obama who first deemed Venezuela a “national security threat” and re-initiated draconian sanctions against the oil-rich nation, the Trump administration has greatly increased the sanctions targeting Venezuela, often citing its government’s alleged participation in illegal drug trafficking as justification for doing so. However, the U.S. has offered little in the way of concrete evidence to back up those allegations.
During this same period, moreover, the Trump administration has expressed little concern for the booming illicit drug trade in neighboring Colombia, which has broken records for cocaine production for the last two years in a row. Though the Colombian government and military have been repeatedly tied to the country’s drug trade, the Trump administration – like previous U.S. administrations – hasn’t lifted a finger.
According to UN figures released last September, Colombia’s cocaine production has again broken records, with the country producing an estimated 1,379 tons of cocaine in 2017, the latest year for which such statistics exist. That figure is a 31 percent increase in cocaine production from 2016. 2016 itself was a record-breaking year with cocaine production gaining by 50 percent over 2015 levels.
Though Trump had threatened to decertify former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos’ government over the rapid growth of cocaine production, he ultimately gave Colombia a pass in the U.S.’ annual determination of countries considered to be “major drug transit or major drug producing” areas “because the Colombian National Police and Armed Forces are close law enforcement and security partners of the United States in the Western Hemisphere.”
The document also described Venezuela, along with its regional ally Bolivia, as “countries that have failed demonstrably during the previous 12 months to adhere to their obligations under international counternarcotics agreements” despite the fact that Bolivia had the fewest illegal coca crops of any South American country that year.
Since getting a free pass from the Trump administration, Colombia’s current president, Iván Duque, has signaled his hopes to revive a failed, U.S.-backed program to indiscriminately spray suspected coca fields with the infamous Monsanto product glyphosate to reduce cocaine production.
Though the U.S. government and Western media have traditionally placed the blame on leftist guerillas in Colombia, like the FARC, the 2016 peace deal that saw the FARC abandon the drug trade has removed this convenient scapegoat and highlighted the long-standing role of the Colombian military and prominent right-wing politicians in cocaine production.
In fact, the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) has described the Colombian military — which has been armed and trained for decades by the U.S. under the Clinton era policy known as “Plan Colombia” — as being among “the biggest heroin and cocaine trading institutions.”
The Colombian government has also been intimately involved, particularly during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe, who allegedly served as the “head of Colombia’s paramilitary groups” both before and while in office. Uribe was once ranked by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency “on a list of 104 important narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels.”
There are also indications of the U.S. government’s own involvement in the Colombian cocaine trade. For example, Colombia’s most notorious drug trafficker, Pablo Escobar, at one point worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, according to Escobar’s own children. Escobar allegedly sold cocaine for the CIA to help the U.S. government finance its fight against communism and left-wing governments in Latin America.
As pointed out in the book Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia, the U.S.’ anti-drug efforts in Colombia were never intended to eradicate cocaine, but instead alter the market share by ensuring that allies of the U.S. in Colombia – the Colombian government, paramilitaries and the wealthy elite who are favorable to U.S. business interests – could monopolize the drug trade with no competition from outsiders. Thus, it should hardly shock anyone that the U.S. continues to turn a blind eye to the country’s booming illegal drug trade and its associated violence, even as it continues to break records year after year.
Erasing the erasure of the Wayuú
As the long-standing, U.S.-backed plan to oust the Chavista regime in Venezuela has unfolded, Maduro’s government has been called out in Western media for “starving his own people,” despite the fact that U.S. sanctions imposed on Venezuela are a driving factor behind the country’s economic crisis. However, since 2011, Colombia has been the site of ongoing genocide against the country’s largest indigenous group – the Wayuú – in the country’s Guajira region, after the Colombian government diverted their only source of water to support the operations of the country’s – and continent’s – largest coal mine.
The suffering of the Wayuú, who have reported the deaths of at least 14,000 children due to the lack of clean water, has gone unreported by the same outlets that routinely raise concern about lack of essential goods in Venezuela. The Wayuú, who comprise around 20 percent of Colombia’s entire indigenous population and 48 percent of the Guajira region’s total inhabitants, are now on the brink of dying out completely seven years after the Ranchería river – their community’s only freshwater source – was diverted by the government-constructed Cercado dam in order to service the water needs of the Cerrejón coal mine.
An estimated 37,000 Wayuú now suffer from severe malnutrition, as they can no longer grow crops or raise livestock without a freshwater source. Each person in the community now lives off of less than 0.7 liters (24 oz.) of water a day while the Cerrejón mine guzzles more than 2.7 million liters of water in a 24-hour period – most of which is used to improve mine “visibility” by minimizing dust pollution. Despite the clear impact of the dam and mine on the humanitarian crisis facing the Wayuú, the Colombian government and supportive Western media have blamed “climate change” and weather patterns like El Niño for the situation.
The most likely reason for the erasure of the slow genocide of the Wayuú from Western media is the fact that the Cerrejón mine is a largely a U.S.-backed operation, as the mine was originally founded by ExxonMobil and is now owned by a consortium of largely Western mining companies such as Anglo American and BHP Billiton. These same mining companies often work with right-wing paramilitary groups — who are also closely connected to the Colombian government — and who repeatedly threaten the lives of Wayuú who speak up about their people’s suffering, including their chief legal advocate, Javier Rojas Uriana.
Notably, the Colombian Wayuú have been immigrating to the Wayuú community in Venezuela in order to avoid the slow death caused by malnutrition, lack of water, and waterborne illnesses from the polluted water from the community’s remaining wells. The Venezuelan Wayuú have been largely supportive of Chavismo and have backed the Maduro-led government, referring to U.S.-backed opposition protests as violent riots “intended to create chaos.” The Huffington Post noted in 2017 that the Wayuú’s support for Maduro had largely been erased by the Western media because it “does not match up with the media’s anti-Venezuelan government narrative.”
Liquidating social leaders, activists, human-rights advocates
While the fate of the Wayuú (and thus 20 percent of the country’s entire indigenous population) continues to hang in the balance, the plight of Colombia’s indigenous peoples has grown even worse since the recent inauguration of Colombian President Iván Duque.
Despite Duque’s having come to power just last August, El Tiempo recently reported that the murders of indigenous leaders in the country have spiked to levels unseen in over a decade since Duque became Colombia’s president. According to data cited by El Tiempo, 120 indigenous social leaders – as well as human-rights defenders — have been murdered in cold blood during Duque’s first 100 days in office.
Though the murder of social leaders by right-wing paramilitary groups has a standing problem in Colombia’s recent history, this level of targeted murder represents a spike over recent years — in which 226, 159, and 97 such murders occurred over the course of the entire years of 2018, 2017 and 2016, respectively. Notably, the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro has been routinely accused by Western media of murdering opposition activists; yet, those same outlets have been silent on Colombia’s recent spike in activist murders.
Despite the jump, Duque’s government has expressed little concern. This is hardly surprising when one considers that Duque is the hand-picked successor and protégé of Álvaro Uribe, the former Colombian president who was once “the head of Colombia’s paramilitary groups,” according to former paramilitary group commanders of the right-wing death squad AUC, which has been funded by several prominent U.S. corporations.
Uribe, who was Colombia’s president from 2002 to 2010, and was a close ally of George W. Bush, was also personally implicated in organizing a massacre conducted by a right-wing paramilitary group; and his cousin, Colombian politician Mario Uribe, was charged with mobilizing right-wing death squads in the country to help secure Uribe’s presidential victory in 2002. Uribe’s brother was also arrested for founding a right-wing paramilitary group in 2016.
Under Uribe’s presidency, the Colombian military massacred thousands of civilians — such as in the “false positives” scanda,l where the Colombian military dressed up an estimated 5,000 civilians in guerilla clothing and killed them in cold blood, subsequently gaining a bonus from Uribe’s government for the sinister act. It should be no surprise then that, under Uribe, the murder rate of indigenous leaders and human-rights activists reached its all-time high at 1,912 murders in 2003.
Given Duque’s close relationship to Uribe, it is also little surprise that paramilitary groups have endorsed Duque following his election and have vowed to “exterminate” Duque’s opposition, calling prominent Colombian progressives “military targets.”
What to expect if US gets its way in Venezuela
If Washington’s publicly stated concerns about “human rights” and the welfare of a country’s people in Venezuela were genuine, it would be equally critical of Colombia’s government, given the numerous troubling situations currently unfolding in that country. Instead, the dichotomy between Washington’s relationship with Venezuela and Colombia is yet another clear example that the public justifications for the U.S.’s Latin America policy are little more than window dressing for the U.S.-backed expansion of neo-fascist governments throughout Latin America.
Indeed, if Juan Guaidó – the self-declared, U.S.-backed “president” of Venezuela – manages to seize power in the country, the current state of affairs in Colombia is a telling harbinger of what would likely manifest should Nicolás Maduro be overthrown and replaced with the same type of government that the U.S. has either backed or installed in several Latin American countries over the last few decades, and particularly in recent years.
Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and has contributed to several other independent, alternative outlets. Her work has appeared on sites such as Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire among others. She also makes guest appearances to discuss politics on radio and television. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.
The ‘Peacekeeper’ Vigilante Website and Freedom of Speech in Ukraine
By Halyna Mokrushyna | CounterPunch | February 8, 2019
The 2013-2014 pro-European Union protest movement in Ukraine known as the ‘Euromaidan’ is officially celebrated in Ukraine and is largely recognized in the West as a pro-democratic, peaceful, popular revolution against the ‘corrupt autocratic regime’ (according to the mainstream Western and Ukrainian media) of president Victor Yanukovych. Ukrainians should now breathe more freely, live better and enjoy the rule of law and freedom of speech. And yet today, under the supposedly democratic, post-Euromaidan government, there is much less freedom in Ukraine and much more political violence.
Examples abound. They include the official banning of Russian social networks, movies, books and other cultural products; persecutions and imprisonment of citizens holding dissenting opinion; searches of the offices of media outlets that dare to criticize the new Ukrainian power holders; attacks by ultra-right nationalists against journalists and media offices with the connivance of the state; cyber-bullying of journalists and bloggers who hold alternative opinions, carried out by so-called porokhoboty – bloggers and opinion leaders who propagate the ‘official’ truth with the informal support by the administration of President Petro Poroshenko; increasing state control of television channels through the oligarchic owners of these channels. And the list goes on and on. (For a detailed and well-researched analysis on freedom of speech and opinion in Ukraine, I refer the reader to the recent report presented to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe by the Ukrainian human rights platform Uspishna Varta in September 2018.)
One of the new forms of intimidation of journalists and citizens who do not agree with the ‘official’ version of what is happening is Ukraine is the public exposure of their personal data by anonymous denunciators using the snitch Ukrainian website with the telling name ‘Myrotvorets‘, which translates as ‘Peacekeeper’ from Ukrainian. The website lists the names of journalists, Ukrainian citizens and foreign citizens accused of holding anti-Ukrainian and ‘pro-Russian’ views, foreigners who joined the military forces of the non-recognized ‘peoples republics’ of Donetsk and Lugansk, names of Russian volunteers assisting the republics or fighting on their side, and people who have entered Crimea through the territory of Russia instead of Ukraine. The Myrotvorets vigilantes cast their net really large: even a reposting from a Facebook group supporting the Anti-Maidan resistance movement in Ukraine is grounds for accusation of “treason”. The listing of persons on the website includes his/her profile on social media, home address and phone number, and personal data of relatives.
The Myrotvorets website formally calls itself the ‘Center for Research of Signs of Crimes against the National Security of Ukraine, Peace, Humanity and International Law’. Its self-described role is to provide information to law enforcement authorities and security services about “pro-Russian terrorists, separatists, mercenaries, war criminals, and murderers”, as it is stated on the home page of this ‘research center’. The information is obtained through illegal means, such as hacking and phishing of computers or searching through open sources.
Myrotvorets is curated by the security and intelligence services of Ukraine. A group of ‘volunteers’ began collecting data on “terrorists and separatists” in the summer of 2014. This group was led by Georgy Tuka, a Ukrainian politician and ‘activist-patriot’. In December of 2014, Anton Herashchenko, a deputy of the Ukrainian Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) and an advisor to the Minister of Interior of Ukraine, officially announced the Myrotvorets project. He called upon “conscious citizens” to use the website to denounce “terrorists” of the rebel Donetsk and Lugansk republics and their sympathizers in Ukraine and abroad, helping thus the Security Service of Ukraine and the Ministry of Interior to identify ‘enemies’ of the state.
By April 13, 2015, the Myrotvorets database had grown to contain over 30,000 records, including the names, phone numbers and home addresses of the journalist and writer Oles Buzyna and the former deputy of the Verkhovna Rada Oleg Kalashnikov. Kalashnikov was an active participant in the Anti-Maidan protests in Kyiv in December 2013 – February 2014 and one of the organizers of the Victory Day celebration in Kyiv on May 9, 2015.
Oles Buzyna was a well-known historian, journalist, and writer. He saw Ukraine and Ukrainian culture as part of a common Russian civilization. He criticized the ultra-nationalist, violent groups of the Euromaidan protests and took an active Anti-Maidan position. He was a target of many public and hidden threats from the Ukrainian extreme right militants. Like Kalashnikov, he was shot dead close to his home, in broad daylight, on April 16, 2015. The criminal investigations into these two cases have been dragging on for three years now with no prospect of being solved.
On May 7, 2016, Myrotvorets published names, phone numbers, and addresses of over 4,000 Ukrainian and foreign journalists from leading Western media that were accredited in the Donetsk People’s Republic. It stated that journalists who were risking their lives covering both sides of the conflict “collaborated with terrorists”. Anton Heraschenko explained that Myrotvorets obtained these data by hacking the accreditation lists of the authorities of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics in the last two years. Besides the journalists from international news agencies, such as BBC, AFP, CNN, Deutsche Welle and New York Times, these lists contained also the names of employees of NGOs.
The publication of that data provoked an international scandal. The Head of the European Union Delegation to Ukraine, Jan Tombinski, called upon the Ukrainian authorities to take the names of journalists out of the public domain because disclosure of personal data violates international norms and Ukrainian legislation. However, his appeal was ignored. OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic expressed concern about published personal information of journalists on Myrotvorets and called it ‘a very alarming development’. In July of 2017, following continuing international pressure, the National Police of Ukraine opened a criminal investigation into Myrotvorets‘ activities. However, the website continues to operate, while courts, the SBU, the State Border Service and other departments continue to use the data against Ukrainian citizens.
The lawyers of the Ukrainian human rights platform Uspishna Varta have established that in the last four years, data from Myrotvorets has been used as evidence in 28 court cases in all stages – from pre-trial inquiries to adjudication of the culpability. Ukrainian courts rely on these non-verified data to grant access to a person’s confidential banking data, phone conversations and e-mails; to identify suspects; to arrest and detain people; to extend periods of detention; and to start in-absentia pre-trial investigations. Myrotvorets website data is used not only in criminal cases but also in civil offenses as well, such as revocation of parental rights or permission for a child to travel abroad without a father’s permission.
From the legal point of view, publishing personal data without a person’s consent violates personal security and the right for the protection of personal data. It also violates Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the right to a fair trial for all.
And yet in spite of appeal of many international organizations to shut down its illegal activities, Myrotvorets remains up and running. By failing to intervene, the Ukrainian state silently approves it. Moreover, it is impossible to sue anyone associated with the website because all of the denunciations on it are anonymous. Myrotvorets claims to be an NGO, however it is not registered as such. The domain and the host of the website are outside of Ukraine – one is located in the US and another is registered to the name of a citizen of Thailand. Hence, in strictly legalistic terms, Ukraine does not have juridical power over it. Nevertheless, Ukrainian authorities use its data for repression against its own citizens.
My name is on the Myrotvorets website, too. In April of 2015, I went on a media fact-finding tour to the war-affected city of Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine with the purpose of witnessing how the residents of Donetsk and the broader Donbass region are coping in the difficult circumstances of Ukraine’s armed attacks against them. The press tour was organized by the German-Russian NGO ‘Europa-Objektiv’. The personal data of journalists participating in the tour were published on the Myrotvorets website. Under my name, it is written that I consciously violated the state border of Ukraine and that I “manipulated socially important information”. The webpage contains a facsimile of the main page of my Canadian passport with all its personal data.
Stating that I illegally crossed the Ukrainian-Russian border is a lie. Our delegation traveled from Rostov, Russia to Donetsk by bus and, indeed, crossed the border on the Ukrainian side. The border was under the control of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). There is no law in Ukraine that qualifies such crossing as illegal. And the claim that I manipulated socially important information is ridiculous for a country that declares itself democratic and free. In a free, democratic country, no one should denounce and threaten another person for merely expressing a different point of view or presenting information that contradicts the ‘official’ or mainstream version of facts.
The publication of my Canadian passport data on the Internet is a violation of international norms on the protection of privacy. It is an attempt to intimidate journalists and to silence those who seek to understand both sides of the armed conflict in Ukraine and inform the international community about it. People behind the snitch website Myrotvorets published my personal data in the hope that the Security Service of Ukraine will use the information to harass or prosecute me. As a proof that data of Myrotvorets is used by Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), I have an official letter by the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine declaring that, following a request from the SBU, they put me under an official ban from entering the territory of Ukraine for three years.
I have sought to draw the attention of Canadian government authorities to this dirty practice of the state organs of Ukraine which Canada so proudly supports. For one year and a half, I have e-mailed and phoned my Member of Parliament requesting a meeting to discuss the matter, but without success. I also consulted a Canadian lawyer who said that, essentially, Canada has no duty but does have the right to take action against Ukraine on my behalf. However, given complex legal issues involved in the process, Canada would most likely rely on Ukraine to intervene. I also know that with the unconditional support to the current Kyiv regime by the Canadian political leadership, no Canadian politician will publicly condemn actions of the Ukrainian state organs. So I am left with no choice but to draw as much attention as I can to the unacceptable, illegal practices of the Myrotvorets website and the people behind it.
Western countries are reluctant to acknowledge that the Euromaidan, which they so eloquently supported, did not bring more freedom to Ukraine. On the contrary, it brought tighter control of the media by the state and its proxy oligarchs; political repression against people with dissenting views, including imprisonment, searches, and interrogations; and acts of aggression by ultra-right, vigilante groups against opponents of the current political regime in Kyiv while police stand by without intervening.
Ukraine is suffocating. To breathe, it needs freedom – journalistic freedom to report what is happening on the ground, personal freedom to speak up and not be afraid of repression by the state apparatus, public freedom to conduct open and honest discussions about the present crisis and the common future, inclusive of all citizens of Ukraine. I hope that this article will contribute to public awareness of the dire situation with the freedom of speech in Ukraine, although I am very skeptical that it will lead to any response from Canadian or Ukrainian authorities.
Halyna Mokrushyna, Ph.D., is an independent researcher and journalist. Her research interests include the challenges of the post-Soviet transition in Ukraine; social and economic inequality in the post-Soviet context; historical and cultural divisions within Ukraine; social memory and politics of memory; relations between Russia and Canada and the broader context of the post-cold war world and relations between the East and the West.
US federal judge dismisses lawsuit against BDS supporters
MEMO | February 7, 2019
Pro-Israeli groups have suffered a major defeat in a US court after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against the American Studies Association’s (ASA) resolution to endorse the call to boycott Israeli academic institutions as part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
On Monday a district court in Washington threw out the lawsuit against ASA, which is the oldest scholarly organisation devoted to the interdisciplinary study of US culture and history. The federal judge ruled that the anti-BDS plaintiffs were unable to explain how they were injured by the boycott, a requirement for the lawsuit to go forward.
The ruling is a significant victory for human rights campaigners and a blow to efforts by Israel lobby groups to use courts to harass, intimidate and silence supporters of Palestinian rights in US universities – a tactic known as lawfare. It’s also a major boost for Americans sacked from their jobs on the back of anti-BDS legislation, denounced by critics as unconstitutional.
Pro-Israeli group, the Louis D. Brandeis Centre, filed a lawsuit against ASA in April 2016 over its resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The lawsuit argued that in adopting the resolution, which was voted on by an overwhelming democratic majority, the ASA operated beyond its corporate charter and caused the plaintiffs to “suffer significant economic and reputational damage.”
In the court’s 20-page ruling, US District Judge Rudolph Contreras wrote that the pro-Israeli group had “danced around key issues” and was unable to show that they had suffered enough monetary damages to warrant a federal case.
The judge found that at most, the individual plaintiffs could seek damages of a few hundred dollars to cover membership dues they allege were misappropriated, but they would have to find some other venue to pursue their claims.
Radhika Sainath, senior attorney with the civil rights group Palestine Legal, summed up the court’s judgement saying that “the court basically said, in no uncertain words, that the plaintiffs suing ASA lied when they claimed to have ‘suffered significant economic and reputational damage’.”
“But, as the court explained, ‘nowhere’ in the lawsuit could the plaintiffs explain what that damage was. It didn’t pass the smell test,” she added.
One of the four co-defendants, Dr Stephen Salaita, an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights who was fired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for tweets criticising Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza, said after the verdict: “I’m thrilled that this baseless case has been dismissed. It served no purpose other than persecuting those who dare to criticise Israeli policy and seek to end the occupation through peaceful means,”
Another co-defendant Wesleyan University Professor Kehaulani Kauanui denounced the lawsuit as a politically motivated attempt to suppress free speech. “The Brandeis Centre did not hold back its clear intent to punish me for standing up in solidarity with Palestinians and to deter others. They don’t call it lawfare for nothing.”
The court’s decision comes in the context of a broader federal assault on BDS for Palestinian human rights. On Tuesday, the US Senate passed a measure that would criminalise politically motivated boycotts of Israel across the US.
Palestinian Professors’ Unions Urge Pitzer College to Uphold Faculty Vote to Suspend Study Abroad with Complicit Israeli Institutions
Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), February 5, 2019
The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) supports the faculty at Pitzer College calling to suspend a complicit study abroad program in Israel over its discriminatory practices.
PFUUPE, which represents more than 6,000 Palestinian university staff at 13 higher education institutions in the occupied Palestinian territory, commends our colleagues at Pitzer College for overwhelmingly supporting this principled stand for Palestinian human rights and for equality.
Most importantly, we thank you for listening to us and acting upon the call from the vast majority of Palestinians, including academics and students, to refrain from business-as-usual academic relations with Israeli institutions while we are forced to live under oppression.
We hold dear the universal right to academic freedom, on principle and because Palestinians are obliged to fight for it every day, along with our right to education.
Our faculty members have, for decades, faced the policy of restricting movement and travel imposed by the Israeli occupation. This severely hampers our academic freedom, namely to reach our campuses, to teach our students, to conduct research, to collaborate with other academics or institutions and to participate in conferences, whether within the occupied Palestinian territory or abroad.
Israel also obstructs importation of academic material and scientific equipment for Palestinian universities, effectively imposing a boycott on our institutions of higher education.
Israel’s discriminatory policies further prevent international academics and students, in particular those of Palestinian/Arab origins or those supporting Palestinian rights, from teaching, studying and attending conferences at our universities. The past two years have seen an uptick in racially- or opinion- based denial of entry to Israel and refusal of visas and visa renewals, a repressive and deeply discriminatory Israeli policy that has long been customary.
Israel has repeatedly bombed Palestinian schools and universities in Gaza, and its illegal and brutal siege has denied the two million Palestinians there, including hundreds of thousands of students, their basic right to freedom of movement. Israel’s decade-old siege of Gaza is making it uninhabitable, according to the UN.
Palestinian students and faculty in the Israeli-occupied West Bank also face campus raids with Israeli soldiers firing live munitions and tear gas.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are subjected to Israel’s institutionalized racism, while Palestinian students face repressive restrictions on political activities and Palestinian educational facilities are underfunded.
We ask the Pitzer College community to try to imagine what it is like studying, teaching or performing research under these dire conditions of racism, repression and violent oppression.
As long as Israel continues to deny Palestinian human rights and academic freedom and impose discriminatory policies based on origins and political opinion, students, educators and academic institutions have a moral obligation and an ethical responsibility to ensure their campus is not contributing in any way to denying Palestinians our right to education and life.
We urge the Pitzer College Council to uphold the principled stand taken by an overwhelming majority of its faculty not to be complicit in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and its blatantly racist and anti-democratic discriminatory policies.
Doing so will send a strong signal to the Israeli government and its deeply complicit universities that principled academic institutions will no longer stand by. They will instead use their power of moral persuasion to hold Israel to account and effect a change in the stagnant status quo of oppression, as was the case during the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa.
Please, uphold the vote in support of our struggle for freedom, justice and equality. Keep our hope in freedom, justice and equality alive.
Sincerely,
The Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE)
Israel’s Military Bombed His Family to Death. Now He’s Taking the Bastards to Court
By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | February 6, 2019
At long last someone is making a move to bring two of the most wanted Israeli war criminals to book. Will you help?
The Ziada family from Gaza was all but wiped out by Israel’s murderous bombardment during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge when a bomb buried them under three storeys of rubble. Among the dead lay Ismail Ziada’s mother, three brothers, his sister-in-law, a 12-year-old nephew and a visiting friend. Ismail himself happens to be a Dutch citizen resident in the Netherlands, so he wasn’t in Gaza at the time.
And fortunately the Netherlands, unlike the spineless UK, still upholds a system of universal jurisdiction in civil proceedings for its citizens who are unable to gain access to justice elsewhere.
According to an informed source [1], Ziada hired a lawyer specializing in support for victims of war crimes and human rights violations, and papers were served on the Israeli military’s Chief of General Staff at the time of the bombing, Benny Gantz, and the Commander of the Israeli Air Force, Amir Eshel. It was assumed that neither would respond and court proceedings would be conducted in absentia. Surprisingly Gantz and Eshel both submitted a response claiming immunity and alleging that the Dutch court had no jurisdiction. They argue that Ziada can access justice in Israel. But the recent Israeli court ruling against Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, who filed for compensation against the Israeli state over the killing of three of his daughters in IDF shelling in 2009, nails that lie.
The Ziada writ focuses on the fact that the bombing of the family home was illegal and a war crime under international law. Next month, we’re told, there will be a court hearing – the first of its kind. If it works out well for Ziada it is anticipated that Gantz and Eshel will push the matter up to the Dutch Supreme Court, which could take years and incur significant expense.
So far Ziada has used his own funds and contributions from friends and supporters to pursue the case on behalf of all the victims of Israeli war crimes. But to achieve justice he’ll need wider moral and financial support. The target is 50,000 euros.
The good news is that the circumstances are such that this case has the potential to blow a hole in the Zionist regime’s arrogant belief that it is exceptional and above the law. Pressed home with enough determination and cash it could be the game-changer that creates the legal precedent decent folk around the world have prayed for. The word is that any compensation received will go into a fund for Palestinian war crime victims in general and children in particular. If you wish to contribute, go to GoFundMe. Roger Waters will match you.
Gantz and Eshel are military thugs of a particularly loathsome kind. Both waged war on Lebanon and played leading parts in the series of genocidal assaults on Gaza, the worst being Operation Protective Edge which, according to Israel’s B’Tselem, killed over 2,200 Palestinians, including 547 infants and children.
Gantz is a wannabee political leader challenging Netanyahu in the coming Israeli elections. Heading his new Israel Resilience Party he pledges to strengthen illegal Israeli settlement blocs and says that Israel will never leave the Golan Heights stolen from Syria. How nice is that?
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From the Archives
The great ADHD swindle
By Daniel Ken | TCW Defending Freedom | May 20, 2023
Over more than two decades in the classroom I’ve taught thousands of children and teenagers: some were lovely and lots were hard-working. On the other hand, quite a number were disruptive and argumentative, and a number were violently opposed to learning. But I don’t think I’ve taught more than a handful of kids who could be properly described as having the symptoms of ADHD. And that handful could just as easily have had something else wrong with them. Because here’s the thing: despite the fact that the best part of a million children are medicated for the condition, ADHD doesn’t exist.
There’s no definitive medical test for it, experts can’t agree on what it actually means, and most of the symptoms disappear if the child in question has lots of exercise, good diet and, crucially, a set of clear behavioural boundaries, preferably set early in childhood and, for the boys at least, enforced by a stable adult male living at home. … continue
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