How Israel robs Palestinians of Citizenship
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | September 22, 2017
Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over.
The policy, which only recently came to light, is being implemented by Israel’s population registry, a department of the interior ministry. The registry has been regularly criticized for secrecy about its rules for determining residency and citizenship.
According to government data, some 2,600 Palestinian Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.
The future offspring of those stripped of citizenship are likely to suffer problems gaining citizenship too.
Human rights groups have severely criticized Israel for violating its own laws, as well as international conventions to which it is a party, in carrying out such revocations.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal center for Israel’s Palestinian minority, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper: “This policy is illegal and in contravention to international law because you cannot leave someone stateless.”
Harsh treatment
Palestinian citizens, one in five of Israel’s population, are descended from Palestinians who survived a mass ethnic cleansing campaign waged during Israel’s creation in 1948.
Today, some 200,000 Bedouins live in Israel, most of them in a semi-desert area known as the Naqab (Negev).
One of the two fastest-growing groups in Israel’s population, the Bedouins have faced especially harsh treatment. Israel continued expelling them to Jordan, Egypt and Gaza through the 1950s and to this day tightly limits the areas in the Naqab where the Bedouins can live.
Revelations of the revocations emerged as Ayelet Shaked, the far-right justice minister, warned Israel’s judges to prioritize demographic concerns and maintenance of the state’s Jewishness over human rights. She called growing numbers of non-Jews in the state “national challenges” that risked turning a Jewish state into “an empty symbol.”
According to Adalah, Bedouins typically learn that they have been stripped of citizenship when they approach the interior ministry for routine services such as renewing an identity card or passport, obtaining a birth certificate, or declaring a change of address.
Some have discovered their loss of status when seeking a passport to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the obligations for Muslims.
Tip of the iceberg?
Aida Touma-Sliman, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, said the policy of revocations had intensified over the past 18 months.
“I’m afraid that what has been exposed is only the tip of the iceberg and what hasn’t been revealed yet is even more serious,” she told the Haaretz newspaper.
The legislator fears that many other Bedouins have been stripped of citizenship, but have yet to learn of the fact.
She said she believed that the government was in part targeting Bedouins with revocation of citizenship to weaken long-standing land claims against the state.
Tens of thousands of Bedouins have been mired in legal action for decades trying to claim back the title deeds to ancestral lands seized from them by military officials in the first years after Israel’s creation.
Israel has declared the surviving communities as “unrecognized,” effectively criminalizing their inhabitants and denying them basic services such as water and electricity. Officials have also been trying to revive the Prawer Plan, which seeks to evict some 40,000 Bedouins – Adalah puts the figure at 80,000-90,000 – and force them into poor “townships”. The original plan was ostensibly frozen in late 2013 after mass protests across the Naqab.
Touma-Sliman said that without citizenship, Bedouins would be largely defenseless against steps to evict them.
Endless foot-dragging
Mahmoud al-Gharibi, an unemployed carpenter from the al-Azazme tribe, was one of several Bedouins who spoke to Haaretz in August during a protest rally in the Naqab village of Bir Hadaj.
He was told his citizenship had been revoked when he applied for a new identity card in 2000. “Since then I’ve applied 10 times [for renewed citizenship], getting 10 rejections, each time on a different pretext,” he said. “I have two children who are over 18 and they too have no citizenship.”
Another Bedouin who spoke anonymously to Haaretz said: “No one explains anything and all of a sudden your status changes. You go in as a citizen and come out deprived of citizenship, and then an endless process of foot-dragging begins.”
Zaher pointed out that many of those recently stripped of citizenship had been voting in parliamentary elections for years, even though it is a right available solely to citizens.
Adalah has warned that revoking citizenship is not only illegal according to Israel’s own laws, but violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Israel signed in 1961.
The group has appealed to Israel’s interior ministry and attorney general, demanding that they cancel the policy. Israeli officials have justified the revocations on the grounds that bureaucratic errors made in the state’s early years meant that the affected Bedouin’s parents or grandparents were not properly registered.
Israel did not pass its Citizenship Law – governing citizenship for non-Jews – until 1952. The legislation’s primary purpose was to strip some 750,000 Palestinians who had been made refugees by the 1948 war, and their millions of descendants, of a right to live in Israel.
A separate law, the 1950 Law of Return, entitles all Jews around the world to instant Israeli citizenship.
Martial law
The failure to register many Bedouins in Israel is related to a draconian period of martial law imposed on the Palestinian minority during Israel’s first 18 years.
Bedouins, like other Palestinian citizens, were not allowed to leave their communities without a special permit. But the remoteness of their communities and Israel’s continuing efforts to expel them through the 1950s mean that officials may have preferred to avoid registration in many cases.
According to reports by the United Nations and others, thousands of Bedouins were secretly expelled into neighboring Egypt and Jordan during the early years of the military government.
Even those who were not expelled outside Israel were often evicted from their ancestral lands and forced into overcrowded “townships.”
This intentionally murky period in Israel’s history has made it hard for the Bedouins to prove many decades later what happened to their parents or grandparents.
Adalah’s Zaher told The Jerusalem Post : “Basically, we’re talking about the grandparents of the people who are now affected and don’t know what happened under military rule. And then suddenly in 2010 they were told that because their grandparents were granted citizenship by mistake, now they will be stripped of their citizenship.”
The interior ministry has downgraded those Bedouins stripped of citizenship to “permanent residents” – the same status accorded to Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem.
However, in practice, Israel does not treat “permanent residency” as permanent. Figures show that Israel has voided the residency status of nearly 15,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem since the city’s occupation began in 1967.
Treated as foreigners
Bedouins have been told they are eligible to apply for citizenship again through a naturalization process, treating them effectively as foreigners.
However, according to Adalah, many have found that when they apply they continue to be denied citizenship, often on grounds that documents cannot be located or they lack sufficient proficiency in Hebrew.
There is no Hebrew language test for foreigners seeking citizenship, either Jews immigrating under the Law of Return, or non-Jewish spouses of Israeli citizens naturalizing under the Citizenship Law.
According to Haaretz, other Bedouins have found the interior ministry so unresponsive they have given up in despair.
The only provision allowing citizenship to be canceled is for recent arrivals who provided false information in their applications. Even then, the interior ministry is required to act within three years – otherwise it has to make an application for revocation through the courts.
Adalah has complained that those affected were not given a hearing before their citizenship was rescinded or the chance to appeal. Zaher said the policy was also blatantly discriminatory as no Jews had been denied citizenship because of errors in their parents’ or grandparents’ registration under the Law of Return.
Equal rights for equal burden?
The treatment of Bedouins gives the lie to one of Israel’s most familiar claims: that Palestinian citizens will receive the same rights as Jewish citizens if they share an equal burden. Avigdor Lieberman, the defense minister, has repeatedly campaigned on a platform of “no loyalty, no citizenship.” He argues that Palestinian citizens who do not serve in the Israeli army or perform an equivalent form of national service should lose their citizenship.
However, a proportion of those stripped of citizenship are from Bedouin families that have served in the Israeli army as desert trackers.
Several unrecognized villages, home to some 100,000 Bedouins, have a tradition of military service, but have still been denied services. Their homes are all under threat of demolition.
Some of the residents of Umm al-Hiran, which is currently being demolished to make way for the exclusively new Jewish community of Hiran, served as trackers for the Israeli army.
Atalla Saghaira, a resident of the unrecognized village of Rahma, told Haaretz he had been stripped of his citizenship in 2002 when he applied for a passport, even though his father was a tracker for the Israeli army. After 13 years of struggle, he eventually managed to regain citizenship, but three of his brothers were still stateless.
‘No harm intended’
The Israeli parliament’s interior committee held a meeting last year at which officials for the first time gave details of the revocation policy.
The head of the interior ministry’s citizenship department, Ronen Yerushalmi, submitted a report stating that as many as 2,600 Bedouins were affected. He admitted, however, that the data was not precise and the figure could be even higher.
At another meeting, the committee’s legal adviser, Gilad Keren, warned that the ministry was most likely breaking Israeli law. He said he could not “understand how, when a person has been a citizen for 20 years and the state makes a mistake, that person’s status is changed.”
In a statement to The Jerusalem Post, the interior ministry denied the evidence heard by the committee, claiming that only about 150 people had been affected. “No one means to harm them,” a spokesperson said. “Now the ministry is asking them to legally re-register so they will remain citizens.”
Revelations of the mass revocations came as an Israeli court last month approved for the first time stripping of citizenship a Palestinian convicted of carrying out an attack.
The interior ministry gave Alaa Zayoud, from the town of Umm al-Fahm in present-day northern Israel, the status of temporary resident after he was sentenced to 25 years for carrying out a car-ramming attack last October on Israeli soldiers. Four people were injured in that incident.
The revocation was made on the basis of a 2008 amendment to the Citizenship Law that allows citizenship to be rescinded for “breach of loyalty” to the state.
Double standard
Adalah, which opposed the government’s decision, pointed out a double standard in not applying the amendment to Israeli Jews. It cited recent cases such as that of a Jewish man and two Jewish juveniles who burned alive a 16-year-old Palestinian, Muhammad Abu Khudair, in Jerusalem in 2014, and that of Jewish settlers behind an arson attack a year later that killed three members of the Dawabsha family in the occupied West Bank village of Duma. None had citizenship revoked.
In 1996, Israel’s high court also refused a request to rescind the citizenship of an Israeli Jew, Yigal Amir, who a year earlier had assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister. The judges ruled that such offenses should be dealt with in the criminal courts, not by revoking citizenship.
Previous revocations, though rare, have solely targeted Palestinian citizens. In 2002, Eli Yishai, then interior minister, stripped Nahad Abu Kishaq and Kais Obeid of citizenship.
Zayoud’s case was different because the interior ministry needed to seek court approval, therefore setting what Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel have called a “dangerous precedent.”
The fear is that Israel will use the case to justify many more such revocations or conditions of citizenship for the Palestinian minority on loyalty.
Ethnic cleansing
The question of whether Palestinians should have been awarded citizenship in the state’s early years is one that has exercised the Israeli leadership for decades. Many have feared that a growing Palestinian population in Israel poses a “demographic threat” to the state’s Jewishness.
Writing in 2002, Israeli historian Benny Morris suggested that Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, should have “gone the whole hog” in 1948 – ethnically cleansing all Palestinians from the newly founded state of Israel.
Research has shown that Ben Gurion gave citizenship only reluctantly to the 150,000 Palestinians who survived the mass expulsions. They were initially assigned residency, chiefly as a way to aid in identifying and expelling Palestinian refugees trying to cross back into the new state of Israel to reach their villages.
Only in 1952, under international pressure, did Israel award the Palestinian minority citizenship through the Citizenship Law, legislation separate from that for Jews.
However, scholars have noted that for more than a decade Israeli leaders repeatedly attempted to find ways to expel Palestinian citizens or establish incentive schemes to encourage them to leave.
Israeli scholar Uri Davis has noted that 30,000 Palestinians living in Israel remained stateless until 1980, when Israel passed an amendment to the Citizenship Law belatedly awarding them citizenship.
Ben Gurion himself hoped to fix the percentage of Palestinians in Israel at no higher than 15 percent of the population. But with the proportion of Palestinian citizens now at one in five, Israeli politicians have been seeking ever more desperate ways to rid Israel of sections of the minority.
In July, the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, was reported to have urged the Trump administration in the US to agree to a land swap that would move an area that is home to some 250,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel to Palestinian control.
The proposal echoed Avigdor Lieberman’s long-standing plan to redraw Israel’s internationally recognized borders as a way to deny hundreds of thousands of Palestinians their citizenship.
In early 2014, the Maariv newspaper reported that Netanyahu had first posited a land and population exchange as a quick fix to reduce Palestinian citizens to no more than 12 percent of the population.
Human Rights: The Latest Weapon Against Venezuela
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Lilian Tintori, wife of opposition leader Leopoldo López who is currently serving a 13 year sentence (in house arrest) for his responsibility in the deadly violence of the 2014 guarimbas.
By Ricardo Vaz | Investig’Action | September 21, 2017
The mainstream media have a crucial role to play in the war against Venezuela, creating a distorted narrative and a constant frenzy that are crucial for any regime-change operation. With violent protests having failed to topple the government and to stop the Constituent Assembly, the plan switched to military threats and economic sanctions. But these come directly from an unpopular US administration, and a more impartial-looking figure was needed. The High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jordanian Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad al Hussein, stepped up to the plate with the backing of more than 100 NGOs. We tackle the manipulation of human rights for imperial purposes, but first we examine how the term “NGO” is woefully inadequate to describe these organisations.
*****
So much more than NGOs
On occasion of the 36th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, 116 “NGOs”1 signed a letter demanding that Venezuela be a priority for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The effort was spearheaded by none other than Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW has a long and documented history of bias and outright lies in their reports on Venezuela, which is no surprise given their blatant revolving door with the US government. Among the signatories are several usual suspects such as Provea or Foro Penal, whose president Alfredo Romero was a recent speaker in a “US Democracy Support” forum.
Another organisation on the list is Transparencia Venezuela, which includes as sources of funding the EU, several embassies and the parent organisation Transparency International. And although Transparency International is much shadier than it sounds, at least we can laud their transparency in listing their backers. The list includes the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), George Soros’ Open Society, even corporations such as Shell. One more that stands out, and is quoted regularly by the media, is the International Commission of Jurists, which sounds very noble and independent until you discover that they were initially funded by the CIA.
The issue here is with the term “non-governmental organisation”, which are always presented by the media as faultless, impartial actors. While there are many scenarios in which independent organisations can step in and provide invaluable services, this is hardly the case of groups funded by the NED (or USAID, or similar agencies) to “promote democracy” or “defend human rights” in countries like Venezuela. These are merely extensions of the US and western foreign policy apparatus, working as the local infrastructure that is necessary in regime change operations as well as a source for the media to build its biased narrative.
At the end of the day, it is the term “non-governmental organisation” that falls very short of describing the nature and activities of these groups. If an organisation in Venezuela, or anywhere else, is funded by the US government, in what world is it a “non-governmental organisation”? One cannot prove that all the “NGOs” standing with HRW are western-funded, but advancing western interests is very much advancing corporate interests, and it is doubtful that anyone would do that for free.
UN High Commissioner for HR shaking hands with former US Secretary of State John Kerry. (If by accident their speeches were switched nobody would notice!)
Weaponizing human rights
While one should not judge a book by the cover, it might be useful to consider the background of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad al Hussein. A member of the royal family of Jordan, he comes from a Hashemite dynasty whose calling card has been its pliancy to imperial interests in the Middle East. And having served as ambassador to the US and permanent representative to the UN, he is, much like Jordan, someone the US can rely upon.
His most recent statement, which could just as well have been written by the US State Department, was delivered during the 36th Session of the Human Rights Council. It takes aim at every inconvenient country, from Iran to North Korea, while important US allies like Bahrain or Egypt are invited to “engage more productively” with his office. Israel is treated with kid gloves, and somehow the blame for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is supposed to be shared between Israeli and Palestinian authorities. And there is no mention whatsoever of Saudi Arabia, where surely there are no human rights issues… Even when addressing the catastrophe in Yemen there is only a passing mention to “coalition airstrikes”.
And then the High Commissioner gets to Venezuela, sounding like any opposition leader or US official on “human rights violations” during anti-government protests or the “crushing [of] democratic institutions”, and suggesting an investigation into possible “crimes against humanity”. Never mind Colombia, where for years the army killed thousands of civilians and dressed them as rebels to collect rewards. Never mind Saudi Arabia, conducting double tap strikes2 against funerals in Yemen, or the US “torturing some folks,” or Israeli soldiers killing children because they were “running like terrorists.” The High Commissioner is worried that crimes against humanity have been committed in Venezuela!
This statement comes on the heels of a OHCHR report about Venezuela that Joe Emersberger described as “embarrassingly shoddy and biased.” It barely mentions any violence coming from the opposition ranks, and while offering a tally of deaths allegedly caused by government forces and the bogeyman colectivos, there is no detailed breakdown to be compared with other accounts such as the one by Venezuelanalysis. Remarkably, given the importance of the issue and the damning verdict that the OHCHR wishes to pass, no investigators from the UN body set foot in Venezuela. Instead the report relies on carefully selected testimonies and the “NGOs” we just discussed.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza condemned the manipulation of human rights to attack Venezuela and the lies in the recent OHCHR report.
True NGOs strike back
While the amenable High Commissioner and the poorly-named “NGOs” put on their show to further the regime-change operation in Venezuela, others were not about to take it sitting down. True NGOs, independent organisations that are not pawns in imperialist machinations, and which are truly committed to human rights, condemned foreign meddling in Venezuela and the politicisation of human rights. One example was Swiss-based CETIM, an organisation focused on supporting social movements in the Global South. Concerning Venezuela, it released a statement that said:
[…] we declare ourselves for an immediate return to calm and to dialog, for the respect of Venezuelan peoples’ right to self-determination and the deepening of the process of democratic transformation that they have freely and courageously undertaken for two decades […]
Another organisation that reacted to the recent actions of the OHCHR was the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), through its representative at the UN, Micòl Savia, during one of the plenary meetings of the 36th Session of the Human Rights Council (intervention #35 in this link)
The IADL expresses its most profound dismay at the recent OHCHR report […]. Given its severity, we are particularly concerned by the High Commissioner’s mention of […] crimes against humanity, which lacks any legal grounds or sense of proportion. […]
The report is selective and biased, and represents a further example of the unfortunate politicisation that affects the work of the OHCHR, undermining its credibility and standing. Use of firearms, explosives, setting up barricades, people burned alive, attacks against hospitals, […], is this the model of “peaceful protests” that this council wants to promote?
Judge, jury and executioner
In the end the bias and lack of standards, or outright falsehood, of these claims and reports does not matter, because if the target is Venezuela they only have to look credible. The media will then do the rest, creating a background by repeating that “Venezuela has been accused by the UN of human rights abuses”, regardless of the shoddiness of the accusations, and this will be the basis to justify future escalations and aggressions as the empire pulls out all the stops to get rid of the biggest threat in its “backyard”.3
This is a good time to stress that legal systems are not moral or just by definition, but a reflection of who holds power, and this is especially true of international law. Though the struggle for an arena where all countries have the same weight is imperative, we are fooling ourselves if we are counting on international bodies to be impartial upholders of justice (just look at Palestine). Recent international tribunals have only served to reinforce the US/western narrative, either as a posteriori justification for past wars such as the one in Yugoslavia, or to justify upcoming ones against troublesome leaders like Gaddafi.
We should clarify that our argument is not some kind of moral relativism, whereby we defend that the alleged crime A should not be investigated until justice is served for (the much worse) crime B. We are not arguing that nobody can be guilty of crimes against humanity until Henry Kissinger is tried, although it is hard to take any international tribunal seriously if the most blatant crimes are immune from prosecution. But what is definitely absurd and unacceptable is to have the US empire, either directly or through its proxies, be the judge trying other people and countries.
Notes
- The HRW statement, and all pieces about it, refer to 116 NGOs; however, the organisations listed only total 115…
- Double tap strikes comprise an initial strike on a target followed by another one targeting first responders.
- In its article about this issue, the Guardian refers to a high-profile jailed opposition leader called Leonardo López (his name is Leopoldo López). Given the overall bias and lack of standards, this is probably fitting.
President Aoun at UN: Lebanon Won’t Allow Naturalization of Any Refugee
Naharnet | September 21, 2017
The Lebanese President Michel Aoun stressed Thursday in his maiden speech before the UN General Assembly that Lebanon will not allow the naturalization of any Syrian or Palestinian refugee on its soil “no matter what that might cost.”
“The decision in this regard belongs to us and not to anyone else,” Aoun underlined.
Noting that the Syrian state is now in control of “85 percent of its territory,” the president emphasized that “there is an urgent need to organize the return of refugees to their country.”
“Some call for the refugees’ voluntary return and we call for their safe return and differentiate between the two concepts,” Aoun noted.
“The claim that they will not be safe should they return to their country is an unacceptable excuse… If the Syrian state is carrying out reconciliations with the armed groups that it is fighting, wouldn’t it be able to do so with refugees who had fled war?” the president asked.
He added: “The UN better help the refugees return home instead of helping them to stay in encampments that lack the least requirements of decent life.”
Separately and from the same UN podium, Aoun nominated Lebanon to become a “permanent, UN-affiliated center for dialogue among the various cultures, religions and races.”
“I hope the member states will back Lebanon in this demand, so that we can all work for peace, security and stability,” he added.
US President Donald Trump’s suggestion that refugees be resettled closer to home instead of brought to the United States has angered many in Lebanon, a tiny country hosting more than 1.5 million refugees.
The country of just 4 million is officially hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees and some 500,000 Palestinians. The real numbers are likely higher as many don’t register with the UN.
Israel’s Chief Stooge at Westminster Shames Us Again
PM Theresa May holds a reception at Downing Street to celebrate the upcoming Jewish New Year. Image credit: Number 10/ flickr
By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | September 20, 2017
“As Prime Minister, I am proud to say that I support Israel. And it is absolutely right that we should mark the vital role that Britain played a century ago in helping to create a homeland for the Jewish people.”
Thus spoke Theresa May the other day as she welcomed members of the Jewish community to 10 Downing Street. But by focusing on creating a homeland for the Jewish people she’s also celebrating the hell that Balfour’s Declaration created for the gentle Palestinians and for the rest of the region. “Born of that letter, the pen of Balfour, and of the efforts of so many people, is a remarkable country,” said May, apparently blind to the reality.
Right now we’re on the run-up to the centenary of what is arguably the biggest foreign policy blunder in British history: the Balfour Declaration. In 1917 Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary, bowed to Zionist demands for a homeland for the Jews in Palestine and gave an undertaking that set the world on course for long-term turmoil and, for the native Palestinians, unspeakable misery, dispossession and displacement. It was a criminal conspiracy. And Balfour was an A-list idiot who bragged that he wasn’t even going to consult the local Arab population about this theft of their homes and lands.
Yet he remains a hero of the Conservative Party which, led by Theresa May, plans to celebrate this hundred-year “running sore” — as Lord Sydenham called it — in great style, inviting Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu to the festivities. That’s if the mad-dog warmonger isn’t under arrest by then on imminent charges of corruption back home.
“I will always do whatever it takes to keep our Jewish community safe,” May added. “Through our new definition of anti-Semitism we will call out anyone guilty of any language or behaviour that displays hatred towards Jews because they are Jews. We will actively encourage the use of this definition by the police, the legal profession, universities and other public bodies.”
She was referring to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism.
BDS “unsucessful”? Really?
One of May’s Cabinet minsiters, Sajid Javid, told the World Jewish Congress that the UK would celebrate the upcoming anniversary with pride. “Someone said we should apologise for the Declaration, to say it was an error of judgment. Of course that’s not going to happen.” To apologise, he said, would be to apologise for the existence of Israel and to question its right to exist.
Instead, he emphasised the UK government’s intolerance towards any kind of boycott of Israel. “I’ll be 100 per cent clear. I do not support calls for a boycott, my party does not support calls for a boycott. For all its bluster, the BDS campaign is most notable I think, for its lack of success…. As long as I’m in government, as long as I’m in politics, I will do everything in my power to fight back against those who seek to undermine Israel.” The UK, he said, has maintained close diplomatic, trade and security ties with Israel since its inception, and is counted upon by Israel to vote in its favour at the UN and other international institutions.
As Noam Chomsky has aptly observed: “People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.”
Israel lobby stooges like May and Javid continue trying to ram their pro-Zionist nonsense down our throats despite the fact that last time they attacked the successful BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, warning that her government would “have no truck with those who subscribe to it”, they came spectacularly unstuck. 200 legal scholars and practising lawyers from all over Europe put May in her place by pointing out that BDS is a lawful exercise of freedom of expression and outlawing it undermines a basic human right protected by international convention. Her efforts to repress it amounted to support for Israel’s violations of international law and failure to honour the solemn pledge by States to ‘strictly respect the aims and principles of the Charter of the United Nations’.
May needs a crash course in human rights
Top legal experts were recently asked for their views by Free Speech on Israel, Independent Jewish Voices, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Their verdict was that those in public life cannot behave in a manner inconsistent with the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for freedom of expression and applies not only to information or ideas that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive, but also to those that “offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population”.
What’s more, there is an obligation to allow all concerned in public debate “to express their opinions and ideas without fear, even if these opinions and ideas are contrary to those defended by the official authorities or by a large part of public opinion, or even if those opinions and ideas are irritating or offensive to the public”. Article 10 says that everyone has the right to freedom of expression including “freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says the same sort of thing, subject of course to the usual limitations required by law and respect for the rights of others.
Eminent human rights lawyer Hugh Tomlinson QC has sharply criticised the anti-Semitism definition touted by May. Firstly, it isn’t a legally binding definition so doesn’t have the force of a statutory one. And it cannot be considered a legal definition as it lacks clarity. Therefore any conduct contrary to the IHRA definition couldn’t necessarily be ruled illegal.
He says it was “most unsatisfactory for the Government to adopt a definition which lacks clarity and comprehensiveness” and suggests the Government’s decision to adopt the IHRA definition was simply a freestanding statement of policy — a mere suggestion as to a definition of anti-Semitism that public bodies might wish to use. But no public body was under an obligation to adopt or use it, or should be criticised for refusing to. He warned that if a public authority did decide to adopt the definition then it must interpret it in a way that’s consistent with the European Convention on Human Rights mentioned above.
A further obligation put on public authorities is “to create a favourable environment for participation in public debates for all concerned, allowing them to express their opinions and ideas without fear, even if these opinions and ideas are contrary to those defended by the official authorities or by a large part of public opinion, or even if those opinions and ideas are irritating or offensive to the public”.
According to Tomlinson, then, the IHRA definition doesn’t mean that calling Israel an apartheid state that practises settler colonialism, or urging BDS against Israel, can properly be characterized as anti-Semitic. Furthermore, a public authority seeking to apply the IHRA definition in order to prohibit or punish such activities “would be acting unlawfully.”
Retired Lord Justice of Appeal, Sir Stephen Sedley, has weighed in bycriticising the IHRA definition for lack of legal force. “It is not neutral: it may well influence policy both domestically and internationally.” He added that the right of free expression, now part of our domestic law by virtue of the Human Rights Act, “places both negative and positive obligations on the state which may be put at risk if the IHRA definition is unthinkingly followed”. Moreover the 1986 Education Act established an individual right of free expression in all higher education institutions “which cannot be cut back by governmental policies”.
Sedley felt the IHRA definition was open to manipulation. “What is needed now is a principled retreat on the part of government from a stance which it has naively adopted.”
As for Javid’s crack about not having to apologise for Israel’s existence, he must have forgotten that in the wake of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which granted the Jews territory within defined borders, they declared statehood in 1948 without borders, grabbing as much extra land as they could by armed terror and ethnic cleansing. The new state of Israel’s admission to the UN in 1949 was conditional upon honouring the UN Charter and implementing UN General Assembly Resolutions 181 and 194. It has failed to do so and to this day repeatedly violates provisions and principles of the Charter.
When the UK Conservative Government makes pronouncements on foreign affairs it pays to consider that 80 percent of its MPs are claimed to be signed-up members of Friends of Israel and this is a stepping-stone to higher office. Conservative Friends of Israel, according to their website, are active at every level of the party.
It is sad that so many of our politicians are so spineless and so insecure that they feel the need to herd together under the flag of what the UN has called a racist state.
103 Palestinian prisoners died since signing of Oslo
Palestine Information Center – September 18, 2017
RAMALLAH – A report issued by a Palestinian human rights organization on Sunday revealed that around 110,000 arrests against Palestinians have been documented since the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993. Nearly 16,000 of the arrests recorded involved juveniles while 1,700 arrests targeted females.
Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs Commission said in a statement on Sunday that the number of Israeli prisons has increased since the signing of the Oslo Accord, adding that new prisons were established and other old ones were re-opened.
The Commission affirmed that the Israel Prison Service has escalated its arbitrary and retaliatory measures against the Palestinian prisoners and pointed out that around 15 laws and bills violating the prisoners’ rights have been enacted.
The statement underlined that since the Oslo Accord was signed, 103 Palestinian prisoners have died inside Israeli jails either due to medical negligence, torture or direct killing.
It noted that the vast majority of the detainees are civilians who were arrested from areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority.
The Commission said on the 24th anniversary of the Oslo Accord that nearly 6,500 Palestinian prisoners are being held in Israeli jails, including 64 women, 350 children and 500 administrative detainees.
On 13th September 1993, the Oslo Accord was signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) under the auspices of the US in the White House.
Oslo was aimed at achieving a peaceful solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but Tel Aviv exploited it to impose a new reality and activate its settlement expansion projects in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967.
Argentina Sentences 6 to Life in Prison for Crimes Against Humanity During US-Backed Dirty War
teleSUR | September 16, 2017
In a landmark ruling, Argentina’s Court of Tucuman sentenced 17 people with crimes against humanity — including issuing 6 life terms— for their role in ‘Operation Independence’ during the U.S.-backed Dirty War in Argentina in the 1970’s and 80’s.
The six given life sentences include Roberto “El Tuerto” Albornoz, Luis De Candido, Ricardo Oscar Sánchez, Miguel Moreno, Enrique del Pino and Jorge Omar Lazarte, all were top officials during the period.
The court charged the rest of the defendants with prison sentences ranging from 4 to 18 years, based on the crimes of torture, abduction, forced disappearances, and rape, in addition to issuing seven acquittals.
The 1975 operation was the first large-scale military operation of the Dirty War, launched to crush the People’s Revolutionary Army, known by their Spanish acronym, ERP, and other left-wing forces in the country. Authorized by Italo Argentino Luder, who served as acting President when the incumbent Isabel Peron fell ill, it was continued under the military dictatorship of General Jorge Rafael Videla.
The court’s ruling came after 16 months of debate and testimonies from nearly 409 witnesses, according to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a group of Argentine women whose children disappeared during the Dirty War.
There were 20 defendants at the beginning of the trial, three had died during the hearings.
Prior the ruling, hundreds of activists and the relatives of the victims gathered outside the court, demonstrating with personal items and photos of their family members who were kidnapped, tortured, killed or disappeared.
August 2017 report: 522 Palestinians arrested by Israeli occupation
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network – September 16, 2017
Palestinian prisoners’ institutions released their monthly report on Palestinian prisoners and detainees of the Israeli occupation for August 2017. The Palestinian Prisoners’ Society, Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association and the Prisoners’ Affairs Commission compiled the report below. Translation by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.
In August 2017, Israeli occupation forces continued their policy of arbitrary detention against hundreds of civilians in the occupied Palestinian territory and their ongoing practices which violate international humanitarian and human rights law.
Arrest Statistics
In August 2017, 522 Palestinians were arrested by Israeli occupation forces, including 130 children and 16 women.
According to the documentation of the prisoner support organizations, 194 Palestinians were arrested from Jerusalem, 70 from al-Khalil, 50 from Ramallah, 45 from Nablus, 38 from Bethlehem, 33 from Jenin, 27 from Tulkarem, 24 from Qalqilya, 19 from Salfit, 11 from Jericho, seven from Tubas and four from the Gaza Strip.
The total number of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails reached 6300 prisoners, 64 of whom are women. Among them are 10 minor girls and 300 boys, 450 administrative detainees imprisoned without charge or trial and 12 detained members of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
134 administrative detention orders were issued in August for imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial; 61 were new orders and 73 were renewal orders, as administrative detention orders are indefinitely renewable.
The Arrest of Human Rights Defenders
Article 1 of the Declaration on the Protection of Human Rights Defenders was approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1998, providing that: “Everyone has the right, individually and in association with others, to promote and to strive for the protection and realization of human rights and fundamental freedoms at the national and international levels.” Despite this, the occupation continues to arrest and prosecute activists and human rights defenders.
On 23 August, Israeli occupation forces arrested a human rights defender, Salah Hamouri, a field researcher for Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, after invading his home in the town of Kufr Aqab north of Jerusalem, ransacking it. Hamouri has been arrested more than once. He was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison in a plea bargain but was released in the Wafa al-Ahrar prisoner exchange in 2011. A few days after his arrest, he was initially released on several conditions:
1) House imprisonment in the village of Reineh in occupied Palestine ’48 for 20 days
2) Travel ban for 3 months
3) Expulsion from the city of Jerusalem for 90 days
4) Paying a bail of 10,000 NIS ($3,800 USD)
However, before he was to be released, he was instead issued a 6-month administrative detention order. When brought before the court for confirmation, he was instead sentenced to return to the remainder of his prison sentence from which he was released in 2011, approximately 3 months. The prosecution appealed this sentence, and his 6-month administrative detention order was reimposed.
The arrest of Hamouri is an example of the arbitrary detention targeting human rights defenders and human rights activists for imprisonment, with the goal of preventing them from playing their role in the community in raising awareness and defending the rights and freedoms of the people. It is notewirthy that Hamouri was arrested more than once, during which he was subjected to various forms of torture and ill-treatment, most recently in 2004, after which he was imprisoned for nearly 7 years before being released in the 2011 Wafa al-Ahrar agreement. During his detention in 2004, he was offered a plea bargain by the Israeli occupation authorities to deport him to France for 10 years, since he is a French citizen, instead of sentencing him, but he refused the offer and stayed in Palestine. After he was released, he was subjected to several arbitrary practices by the Israeli occupation forces. He was issued an order preventing him from entering the West Bank twice, and the period of his prohibition was a year and a half. In 2016, Israeli occupation officials deported his pregnant wife Elsa, a French citizen, and banned her from Palestine for 10 years, with their child, Hassan, who she is forced to raise away from his father. Finally, all of his requests for the right to family reunification have been refused as an arbitrary punitive measure against Salah and his family.
Extrajudicial Killings: The Case of the Martyr Raed al-Salhi from Dheisheh Camp
The policy of field executions and shooting to kill is not a surprising action committed by individuals, but is instead a deliberate and systematic policy approve at the highest levels of the occupying power. Statements made by the government officials of the occupation state in the media or directly in proposals from members of the government emphasized the need to reduce the legal requirements for the use of live ammunition against Palestinians, to the extent that it constitutes a breach of international law.
Since September 2015, human rights organizations have been monitoring and documenting cases in which occupation forces engaged in extrajudicial executions of Palestinian civilians, by shooting at the upper body with intent to kill (areas between the head and abdomen) during demonstrations and confrontations that broke out in most of the occupied Palestinian territories.
The occupation did not hesitate to use this method even during the implementation of its arrest raids and invasions carried out by the army in Palestinian camps, villages and cities. On 9 August 2017, in the early hours of the morning, the Israeli occupation forces invaded the Dheisheh refugee camp, east of Bethlehem city, in order to carry out a campaign of arrestts of youth in the camp.
Occupation forces opened fire at point-blank range on the young Abdel-Aziz Arafa, who was wounded in the left leg by live ammunition, and Raed Salhi, who was critically wounded after being shot six times during his arrest. He was martyred on 3 September 2017 as a result of his injuries. He was directly wounded in the liver and kidney by live ammunition, and through field testimony collected from the families of the youths and others, it was confirmed that the army deliberately fired live ammunition at him, carrying out a field execution.
The prisoner, Bassam al-Salhi, the brother of Raed Salhi, said:
“On 9 August 2017 at 3:43 am, I was woken from my sleep by my mother’s voice screaming and crying, saying that the army is killing people and that they fired inside the house specifically. When I got up I went out to the living room and my mother was crying and screming. She told me that Raed is martyred, that he is wounded and is behind the wall behind our house. I was with my younger brother Mohammed and we went to try to save Raed, going out the door leading to the back wall. I jumped on the balcony to try to get to the back wall, because our houses in the camp are close together. And the occupation forces opened fire on the railings of our neighbors, the soldiers firing heavily. Then I saw a soldier lying on the railings of our home and it looked to me as if he was wounded. I later learned that the soldiers who fired at Raed hit the soldier, and all the soldiers concentrated on evacuating the wounded soldier. I thought I would take advantage of their preoccupation and jumped to the house of the other neighbors, where Raed was lying on the ground near their house, just behind ours. I saw Raed, who was lying on the ground and trying to walk and losing a lot of blood, and I approached him and extended my hand for him to take, but at this moment, one of the Israeli soldiers caught Raed in his laser sight. I dragged him by the hands quickly and his left leg was bleeding. He had a bullet in his leg and he was full of blood, we moved away from the place between the houses until we were settled away from our besieged neighborhood full of soldiers. Throughout this time, Raed was bleeding in large amounts and speaking to me about many things, as if he were dying. He was starting to spit up blood and after about 15 minutes a number of soldiers stormed the place, following the trail of blood. During this time, one of the soldiers asked me to move away from him but I refused, and then a soldier attack me. Another pulled out his gun and fired to frighten me but I did not move. Then the same soldier hit me on my right shoulder and leg and pushed me away by force from Raed. They took him away from me, and a soldier examined his pulse. I did not know what to do. Two soldiers then carried him by his arms and legs and I did not know where they took him after the army left the camp.”
The practice of extrajudicial executions and killings by the Israeli occupation forces is a war crime under international law, under article 8 (a)(i) of the Rome Statute. Murder is a war crime, and therefore the occupation bears full responsibility in this context of war crimes against the Palestinian people as a whole.
Arrests and Heavy Fines Imposed on Children
In August, the Israeli courts issued sentences against 39 children and imposed heavy fines on child prisoners, amounting to more than 110,000 NIS ($31,200 USD).
Human rights organizations’ monitoring and documentation showed that in the past month, 59 children were taken to the “Cubs” section of Ofer prison. Of these, 40 were arrested from their homes, 10 on the roads, 3 at the military checkpoints, 4 after being summoned to interrogation and two for lack of possession of work permits.
Four children were arrested after being shot and 13 more were injured. They were beaten and harassed during their arrest and taken to interrogation centers. Sentences issued ranged from one month to 32 months.
The Palestinian institutions consider that the imposition of excessive financial burdens on child prisoners is a major constraint on the future of the child, a form of collective punishment and a major burden amid the prevailing state of poverty, which affects and violates other human rights for themselves and their families. During the prior month, these fines reached the amount of 87,000 NIS. ($24,700 USD).
Legal Concerns
Here, the Palestinian organizations introduce the international humanitarian and human rights law on the human rights of detainees and the legal guarantees it provides, as well as Israeli violations and the legal prohibitions against such violations, as follows:
1 – Legal safeguards relating to the prohibition of arbitrary detention of Palestinian civilians. These arrests violate international human rights law, including the article 9 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and articles 9 and 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976).
2 – The policyof administrative detention by the occupation state, in which detention is carried out on the basis of secret evidence and without any charge against the detainee, violates internationally recognized rights to a fair trial according to the following:
a) It is contrary to Article 11 (1) of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that: “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.”
b) It violates articles 9 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1976, which guarantees everyone the right to a fair trial, to be informed of the charges against them and to be able to defend themselves.
c) The failure to disclose any charges against the person detained under the administrative detention order precludes every possibility of verifying the compliance of the occupying state with Article 78 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which states that “If the Occupying Power considers it necessary, for imperative reasons of security, to take safety measures concerning protected persons, it may, at the most, subject them to assigned residence or to internment.” It is impossible to verify whether this detention is permitted without knowing what the reasons have been and are.
d) Not to inform the detained person of the charges against them constitutes a violation of Article 71 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which obliges the occupying power to report charges without delay. They also constitute a violation of article 10 of the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons in Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment of 1988, which requires the same.
3. The killing of Raed al-Salhi by point-blank shooting is a violation of the right to life under Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The practice of extrajudicial executions and killings is a war crime under international law, pursuant to article 8 (2/a/1) of the Rome Statute. Murder is a war crime, and therefore the occupation bears full responsibility in this context amid the upsurge in war crimes against the Palestinian people as a whole.
4. The detention of children violates Principle 13 of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for Juvenile Justice (the Beijing Rules), adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1985, which stipulated that pre-trial detention should only be used as a last resort and for the shortest possible period, as well as providing for protection and social, psychological, educational, professional and medical assistance, which are not provided by the prison administration. The Israeli judiciary imposes heavy fines on children in the framework of collective punishment, contrary to the rules of international humanitarian and human rights law.
Conclusion
This report sustains a number of findings, through our analysis of the practices of occupation authorities and the reality of Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons, as follows:
1) The occupying forces are continuing their grave breaches and systematic violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.
2) These Israeli violations have resulted in severe suffering for Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.
3) The silence of the international community has encouraged the occupying power to increase their violations against Palestinian detainees.
4) The High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions did not play their roles and have in fact encouraged the occupation authorities to escalate their violations.
NGO says Israel’s censoring of online content ‘has no legal basis’
Ma’an – September 17, 2017
BETHLEHEM – Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, has called on Israel to shut down its so-called Cyber Unit, which collaborates with social media platforms to censor content, saying the unit has “no legal authority.”
The Israeli government launched the unit in the second half of 2015, when Israeli authorities alleged that a wave of unrest that erupted that fall was encouraged largely by online “incitement.” The crackdown has seen hundreds of Palestinians detained, while social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have complied with hundreds of requests by the Israeli state to censor content.
According to Adalah, the Cyber Unit says it is responsible for “dealing with cyberspace enforcement challenges” via censorship of social media posts and entails the removal of content added by users, restriction of access to certain websites, and outright blocking of users’ access to these sites.
Adalah said it sent a letter to Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, State Attorney Shai Nitzan, and Cyber Unit director Haim Vismonsky, “demanding that they immediately cease the illegal operations of the state attorney’s Cyber Unit,” arguing that much of the censorship has been conducted without any basis in Israeli law.
“Nothing in the law allows state authorities to censor content based solely on an administrative determination… that the content amounts to a criminal offense. Likewise, there is no explicit directive in (Israeli) law authorizing the removal of content determined to amount to a criminal offense, even by a court,” Adalah Attorney Fady Khoury wrote.
Adalah cited statistics released by the Cyber Unit in its end-of-year 2016 report, that said the Israeli agency handled 2,241 cases of online content that were ostensibly posted in violation of the law; 1,554 of these were removed as a result of the unit’s operations.
“While private bodies such as social media corporations are not subject to Israeli public law and therefore may lawfully choose to remove content in accordance with their terms of service, state agents — such as the Cyber Unit — are indeed subject to Israeli law and much of their censorship activities are therefore illegal,” Adalah emphasized.
Khoury also stressed that the Cyber Unit operations are a clear violation of free speech, explaining that the Israeli state attorney’s practice of criminalizing certain expression on social media is tantamount to “an unproven suspicion.”
“The Cyber Unit cannot impose sanctions based solely on this suspicion, let alone severe sanctions in the form of censorship. The authorities are not allowed to demand the removal of speech that has not yet been proven to be criminal, even if it is unpleasant to their ears,” the Adalah attorney said in the report.
He explained that, “When the Cyber Unit appeals to a service provider with a request to censor content based on its suspicion that the concerned content is expression forbidden by law and without a final (judicial) ruling in the matter, this constitutes an unconstitutional violation of freedom of speech.”
Adalah also noted that Cyber Unit operations are a violation of the principle of separation of powers: “The pretense of deciding upon the criminalization of expression, without appealing to the court or conducting any legal proceeding — and upon this basis determine censorship sanctions — impinges upon and supplants judicial authority and leads to the infringement of the principle of separation of powers,” the letter said.
Adalah concluded that because “Cyber Unit clerks and administrative officials decide for themselves” whether or not expression is “incitement to violence and terror, and support of a terror organization,” the state attorney is usurping judicial authority “illegally and without any legal authorization.”
“Adalah demands that the Israeli attorney general, state attorney, and Cyber Unit halt all internet content censorship activities using the “alternative enforcement system” operated by the state attorney’s Cyber Unit,” the report stressed.
The same day Adalah published its report, Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post reported that Cyber Unit does not keep any record of the cases it pursues with Google and Facebook.
The Israeli justice ministry told the outlet that, “As a rule we do not keep the content we work to have removed,” without providing an explanation for the lack of record keeping.
Adalah told The Jerusalem Post that the ministry’s refusal “pointed up secrecy and a lack of transparency and accountability in the government body.”
The crackdown on social media activity also came after as a bill introduced by Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked seeks to allow Israeli officials to force Facebook to censor certain content deemed to be “incitement” — but only when it is made by Palestinians against Israelis, according to rights groups.
The law has moved through the Knesset despite the fact that Facebook already complies with at least 78 percent of Israel’s requests to delete content or suspend accounts.
A report released by the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement 7amleh further documented that slanderous, provocative, and threatening posts made by Israelis against Arabs and Palestinians more than doubled in 2016, reaching 675,000 posts made by 60,000 Hebrew-speaking Facebook users — with only very few cases being opened against Israelis.
Ignore the spin, the siege of Gaza endangers everyone, Israelis included, so end it now
By Alastair Sloan | MEMO | September 16, 2017
Save the Children reckons that the Israelis have delivered a major project in record time, with the Gaza Strip described in the NGO’s latest report as “unliveable.” The United Nations made its own prediction in 2012, giving the territory until 2020 before it would be at that inhospitable stage.
As autumn wears on and some three years ahead of the UN deadline, the Israeli government has turned basic essentials such as food, water, hospital access, education and shelter into luxury items in an enclave that the state and its supporters still claim somewhat disingenuously to have “withdrawn” from in 2005.
Of course, Save the Children and the UN aren’t to be trusted; it you pay heed to the pro-Israel lobby you will know this. The lobby has a convenient conspiracy theory that the UN is engaged in “anti-Semitism” rather than reasonable criticism of the Israeli state and its policies. Much of this lobby nonsense comes from mysterious pro-Israel organisations like “UN Watch”, which routinely derides UN predictions and announcements the moment that they are made public.
Another such group is “NGO Monitor”; it has already dismissed the Save the Children report as a “renewed anti-Israel campaign.” Which, of course, it is, and rightly so. This group condemns the respected NGO for daring to publicise the suffering of children, and suggests that Save the Children “should return to a policy of providing aid without adopting the Palestinian political narrative.”
Telling NGOs what they can and cannot do and say is in vogue in Israel, much as it is in autocratic Turkey or Hungary, but the illogical positions of NGO Monitor are still worth exposing. Consider this: “[Save the Children] also called on Israel to blindly ‘lift the Gaza blockade’ without acknowledging the rationale behind it.” NGO Monitor claims that the siege is in place, “to prevent weapon smuggling into Hamas-controlled Gaza.”
We should test this thesis that it is all the fault of Hamas, and the Israeli-led blockade of Gaza is simply the state acting in self-defence.
Fifteen year old Ali suffers from cerebral palsy, and is an example of the kind of problems engulfing a Palestinian youngster which NGO Monitor cannot have missed because his story was included in the press release which accompanied the charity’s report. Ali’s mother Yara told Save the Children:
“My son is dying in front of my eyes. He can’t sleep most nights, and suffers from continuous pain. We don’t have enough power to get his electric wheelchair and mattress fully charged. If his wheelchair doesn’t get charged, he suffers psychologically, as he sees people around him move and walk but he can’t. He feels depressed and often fights with other children. When the wheelchair runs out of battery, Ali becomes totally paralysed. He also needs constant showers as he is wearing diapers, but there is no water. We don’t get water unless there is electricity. If I don’t change his diapers and wash him regularly he will suffer from skin rashes and other problems. We have not had any tap water for two days. I feel suffocated.”
The problem here then, as with so many of the problems outlined in the report, is primarily one of electricity, or the lack thereof. This is why Ali is growing up soaked by his urine and faeces, is unnecessarily paralysed and is suffering psychologically as he grapples with one of the world’s most cruel medical conditions.
In April, Gaza’s sole power plant was forced to shut down after completely exhausting its fuel reserves; the company which runs the plant was unable to obtain fuel due to a shortage of funds. How this makes Israel any safer is unclear, but its government claims that the blockade is all about security. Having 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza in darkness surely doesn’t make Israelis more secure, does it?
Likewise the contamination of Gaza’s water supply. The Palestinian Water Authority and the UN have now warned that the territory’s fresh water aquifer, shared by Israel and Egypt, may be “completely contaminated” by the end of this year. Israel says it won’t let in more aid or spare parts to repair the water treatment plants that it destroyed in its 2008/9 military offensive. Why? Because of Hamas. That, though, doesn’t explain why Israel has repeatedly refused to allow UN Environment Programme inspectors to assess the water situation and try to improve it.
As yet another curious pro-Israel lobby organisation – the American-Israeli Co-operative Enterprise (AICE) – puts it, “There is indeed a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, but it is not to be blamed on Israel.” Thus does the lobby acknowledge the pain that is being caused, and yet it denies that its favoured state, Israel, has anything to do with it, despite controlling everything that goes into or comes out of the Gaza Strip. “Israel has consistently sent aid in many forms through the border,” claims AICE, “and the blockade will be lifted once the violent Hamas government is ousted and the people of the Gaza Strip are ready to live in peace with Israel as their neighbour.”
There is no suggestion by the lobby that Israel, which is the relative newcomer in the neighbourhood, might decide to live in peace with the Palestinians. It is, after all, Israel which has repeatedly broken ceasefires, before telling the world that Hamas started firing rockets. It is also a fact that Hamas can be remarkably quiet when given the choice. Every few years, however, the Israelis re-invade Gaza unnecessarily, launching massive military offensives with accompanying death and destruction, and then withdraw, killing, maiming or traumatising a million children in the process.
The reality is that the siege of Gaza is a manifestation of Israeli military weakness. There is no chance that Israel will re-take Gaza from Hamas by force; the resistance movement not only enjoys general popular support amongst Palestinians but, more importantly, is also expert in the kind of guerrilla warfare that the founders of Israel used to such devastating effect themselves not so many years ago. Conventional armies of the kind that Israel deploys never, ever, win against Middle Eastern militias, particularly those with a religious mindset faced with a Western-backed enemy.
The siege tactic is the only option that the Israeli government can resort to. Ten years on, it appears to be working. As making somewhere “unliveable” is essentially a form of ethnic cleansing by what claims to be a democracy, a coterie of propaganda organisations and lots of media-spin groups are required to defend Israel and gloss over that very distasteful fact.
Perhaps these spin doctors should be asking their government why it can’t defend its citizens, who all pay for the Israel Defence Forces. The answer – or their own conclusion – might then be, because the increasingly right-wing governments of Israel which control the military are stubborn and stupid. They alone are endangering the people of Israel every day through their thankless and pointless siege. So ignore the spin, the siege needs to end now, not in 2020; that will be too late for all concerned.
Read also:
Oslo: 24 years of Palestinian losses
WHO: Israel hinders 40% of Gaza patients’ access to health care abroad
The (Criminal?) Subversion of the Academy in the Case Against Professor Anthony Hall
Power Against the Quest for Truth
Professor Anthony Hall. Image credit: The Lethbridge Herald
By Robin Mathews | American Herald Tribune | September 15, 2017
In “the civilized and democratic Western World” a huge battle is in process to control information, belief, understanding, ‘credible knowledge’, and the (real or contrived) ‘facts’ people hold to be true. The process involves a major activity of indoctrination – constant and on-going – towards the acceptance of an increasingly ‘top down’, undemocratic form of rule. The indoctrination does not just involve language as we (think we) know it but it involves a purposeful shaping and reshaping of language influenced by both action and inaction in the ‘public’ world.
The shaping of ‘the (apparently) real’ through language is darkly affected by action in society … and the failure of action. If Criminal Conspiracy – for instance – happens openly and observably and the State will not call it Criminal Conspiracy the real begins to become inauthentic and the language surrounding it begins to weaken. Criminal Conspiracy, just for instance, begins to possess a kind of non-existence although it really happens and really exists in law ….
In Canada (2015-2016), for instance, thirty-one criminal charges (put in place by the Canadian “Crown”) were levied against a controversial Senator in Canada’s “Upper Chamber” as part, many believe, of a huge campaign to indoctrinate Canadians about the (false) integrity of the people in power. The criminal charges were all (every last one!) thrown out by a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice with plain expression of his alarm at those conspiring to force actions upon the innocent Senator.
The judge gave every indication (without saying it outright) that Senator Duffy had been criminally conspired against. No criminal investigation, however, has been conducted against those conspiring and no criminal charges have been laid. None are expected. The Liberal government that has followed the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper (which undertook the unseemly set of actions against Senator Duffy) seems very clearly to be demonstrating that it doesn’t disapprove of criminal actions taken to indoctrinate the Canadian public.
The process of working at highest levels of government, of corporations, and the so-called Mainstream Press and Media to indoctrinate and condition the population to prescribed, false beliefs in a total or ‘totalitarian’ manner (‘as if exerted by a single force permitting no dissenting view’) is pervasive in almost all of ‘the civilized and democratic Western World’. The process is clearly intended to impose false views of reality upon whole, unsuspecting populations.
One of the significant, recent (in history) very successful (on-going) falsifications is described by Lance deHaven Smith in his book (2012) Conspiracy Theory in America. There deHaven Smith points out that the criticism of the Warren Commission inquiry into the assassination (1963) of John F. Kennedy was becoming so effective [the Commission and its ‘findings’ are now considered by many to be without any credibility] that the CIA set to work with surprising effectiveness to slander as “conspiracy theory” criticism of any spurious and/or fraudulent government or intelligence or police activity … and to designate that criticism as the product of cranks, imposters, and/or other wholly irresponsible rumour-mongers.
The CIA was so successful that the phrase “conspiracy theorist” has been lodged in the minds of a large population as a term indicating someone making fraudulent claims instead of someone pointing to possible unacceptable action taken by those in power. (Anthony Hall is accused – among other things – of being a conspiracy theorist.)
Since the Warren Commission (1963-1964) conspiracies against the “democratic” populations of the West have increased and grown in size. The falsification of evidence, supported by George W. Bush, U.S. president, and Tony Blair, British prime minister, in order to permit the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – just for instance – are now common knowledge (and both continue their lives untroubled by legal actions). Those wars, without naming related others, are resulting (still) in enormous destruction, death, and devastation of community.
Other egregious falsifications of actions and events by governments are not common knowledge – in fact are disputed by every device of modern misinformation. The Afghanistan and Iraq invasions (2001 and 2003) are both connected to the enormous (2001) alleged False Flag operation to destroy three Trade Tower buildings in New York – which operation had very quickly attached to it an official version which, today, lies in tatters but is still forcefully maintained by all the Western governments. [As I write, 79 year old, former CIA agent Malcolm Howard – given only weeks to live – has reported that he was involved in the “controlled demolition” of the building called World Trade Centre #7.]
The growing library of works rejecting the official version is becoming immense. Professor Anthony Hall – as a scholar seeking the truth about official allegations against non-white (so-called) terrorists in the matter – is named as a Conspiracy Theorist partly because he has engaged in denial of the official 9/11 accounts and has considered the allegation that Israeli interests may have been deeply involved in 9/11.
To entertain that possibility is not necessarily to be opposed to the State of Israel – and it is clearly not evidence of anti-Semitism. But those claiming or asking if the Israeli State had a part in 9/11 are immediately under threat of being charged with anti-Semitism. Part of the basis for naming Professor Hall an anti-Semite lies in his on-going concern, as a broadcaster, with The False Flag Weekly News and with the on-going researches being undertaken on the causes of what is called 9/11.
The nature of scholarly endeavour is very frequently to reconsider accepted explanations of events … to re-configure “history”, and/or to offer new analyses of forces at work. Anthony Hall does those things in his two large scholarly volumes dedicated to the history of the displacement and erasure of indigenous peoples … and the developing Imperial Globalization accompanying their (on-going) oppression since 1492.
A criminal conspiracy was almost certainly entered into in order to attempt the destruction of Senator Mike Duffy. A much wider conspiracy is, I believe, in play to destroy Professor Anthony Hall of the University of Lethbridge. In the briefest terms there seem to be four more-or-less invisible global forces at work (and in conflict) which very likely have shaped the personnel and the nature of (what I call) the conspiracy against Professor Hall.
One is the view of Germany from 1930 to 1945. Another is the shifting view of the State of Israel at the present. Another – which has already been referred to – is the problem of False Flag events, the dishonesty involved in them, and the official explanations of them. The fourth is the role of universities in the examination of truth and the conflicts engendered when questionable or fraudulent ideas are held and championed by powerful forces in or connected to the university which – almost of necessity – come into contact with ‘truth seekers’ in universities … working in the traditional environment of “academic freedom”: freedom to inquire, to seek clear answers, and to speak freely without fear of censure or repression about findings.
A generally held view of Germany from the 1930s to 1945 has been one that believes the emergence of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took Germany on a path of increasing brutality and social violence, and that the path seemed to be approved by the larger population. The “SS State” is thought to have enslaved, starved, tortured, murdered and otherwise destroyed “enemy” people: Jews, Slavs, political dissidents, gypsies, gays, etc. Moreover, it is said to have conducted what is now called The Holocaust: the active process of exterminating all Jews – ‘the final solution’.
Over the years since 1945 voices have been raised to challenge that view or aspects of it. On a video made recently by the Committee for the Open Debate of the Holocaust Professor Hall is asked if he approves of the work of the Committee. He replies there that he approves of open debate on all subjects and accepted truths. He has said, also, that he has been reading more recent materials on Germany from 1930 to 1945 that are making him re-think some of his ideas.
In short, the ‘truth’ about Germany from 1930 to 1945 is being reviewed and reassessed. Many Germans – often children and grandchildren of the adult members of the German community in those years – are seeking a re-examination and a reassessment of the “accepted” view, to provide, perhaps, a view of a much less brutal and single-minded State and population. Where the truth lies is in contest.
The accepted view of Israel in the West is of an unfairly punished people who have gained a homeland and are building a new society on sovereign territory. It is a people viewed not only as having been brutally oppressed and punished for their identity by Nazi power, but rejected and demeaned by many so-called democratic populations. That view has never been globally consented to partly because of the dispute about Israel’s legitimacy (“on Palestinian land”) held in parts of the Middle East.
As the State of Israel appears to become more warlike, oppressive of Palestinians, and greedy for the possession of territory, (the last condemned by the United Nations), the feeling for brutally mistreated Jewish people of the past does not diminish. But alarm at what is thought by some to be oppressive policies and actions of the Israeli State has created a body of people sharply critical of that State’s policies and actions – especially in relation to Palestine and the Palestinians.
That sentiment comes into sharp conflict with the efforts of at least a part of the Israeli State to equate itself with Jewish identity – and so with the attempt to equate criticism of the actions of the Israeli State with anti-Semitism.
Needless to say, in that context, any mitigation of the view of a ruthless, inhumane, and anti-Semitic Germany from 1930 to 1945 probably offends some in the State of Israel and its closest supporting organizations outside Israel. They seem to see the necessity of a consenting global community about the persecution of the Jews in order to have the global community accept Israeli State policies, however offensive. If the Nazi regime was not as viciously brutal to Jews as some sources wish it to be seen to have been, (and as it may have been) then sympathy for the State of Israel might diminish.
In the playing out of the astonishing (and growing) scholarship concerning what might be called the (alleged) false information disseminated by governments to explain extraordinary, violent, and/or visibly brutal events in the community, claims are made that ‘government’ and/or related forces create many of the violent events to condition the population to be fearful and so to accept increasingly fascist rule, and/or to believe the government-created violence is the act of the enemy (whichever ‘foreigners’, religion, or State the government wishes the people of the country to learn to hate). The work undertaken by serious and reputable investigators to reveal and to prove that governments (or their proxies) create random terrorist acts – or what are called “False Flag Events” – has grown to sizable and convincing proportions. Indeed, the growing “False Flag Investigative Industry” suggests a growing field of government criminal acts disguised as the random, insane, or purposefully effected acts of “enemies” (or those that governments wish to convince their populations are enemies).
Professor Hall has engaged actively in “False Flag” inquiry and is a co-host of the weekly program (on the net) called The False Flag Weekly News in which recent (and suspected) manifestations of False Flag activity are tabled and discussed. Among the False Flag theories in play, one concerns the truth of the collapsed Trade Towers of 9/11 and who (if the official story is incorrect) was responsible for the attack. One theory (not by any means the only one) is that a major participant in the event may have represented the interests of the State of Israel or may have been, in fact, an arm of the State of Israel.
Professor Anthony Hall has encouraged open questioning of the standard view of Germany between 1930 and 1945 (without saying he believes the standard view is wrong). He has engaged in open discussion of the False Flag phenomenon and its relation to government and government policy. He has been willing to consider the possibility of Israeli involvement in 9/11 – the destruction of the Trade Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. He has exercised academic freedom and democratic ‘freedom of speech’ in those matters as well as others that have fallen within the scope of his research.
On August 26, 2016 a vicious anti-Semitic cartoon was posted on Professor Hall’s Facebook page when he was not in Canada. He was unaware of the posting, and of its removal – all happening in a period of several hours. And he was unaware of actions being taken over the next days against him as a guilty party wishing to defame and asperse Jews … by means of what (the posted cartoon, used as evidence) can easily be called Hate Literature.
He was unaware of all that went on … because he didn’t post the obnoxious cartoon and didn’t even know of its posting … and because the President of the University of Lethbridge, Mike Mahon, who was informed as soon as the next day and who entered into discussion with accusers of Professor Hall (and with others) over succeeding days did nothing whatever to make contact with Professor Hall, his colleague, and to test Hall’s reactions to news of the posting.
In the minds of many people the behaviour of president Mahon may well suggest he wanted to believe the accusers of Professor Hall and did not want to have to entertain the possibility that his senior colleague and twenty-six year member of the scholarly community of University of Lethbridge did not post … and had nothing to do with the posting … of the slanderous and hateful cartoon.
Some observations may be made about the conduct of President Mahon. One I derive from my own wide experience on every major campus in Canada (see “Canadianization Movement”,Wikipedia) where I consulted, variously, with student, faculty, and administrative personnel. The first observation is to note the failure of the President of the University of Lethbridge to respect collegial relations and to consult early with Professor Hall, simply as a colleague – and to gain absolutely necessary information about the incident. Secondly, one must observe President Mahon’s rejection of the demands of natural justice which would require him as President to consult and to inform (at the earliest possible moment) anyone at U. of Lethbridge whose reputation and livelihood were in peril by growing accusations (untested). Failing grossly on those two matters suggests, to me, that President Mahon might well appear to fair-minded people to have been astonishingly incompetent as a professional and as a human being in his treatment of the very serious allegations brought against Professor Hall.
An even more serious allegation may lie in another observation: President Mahon (growing evidence reveals) apparently consulted with some of the false accusers of Professor Hall, sat with committees of so-called investigators, and formulated punitive measures to take against Professor Hall without having asked to meet and speak with Professor Hall. That behaviour on the President’s part may well point to his participation in a Conspiracy to do irreparable harm to Professor Hall. A Conspiracy very strongly appears to have been undertaken against Senator Mike Duffy … as I have said … but a worse one may well have been undertaken against Professor Anthony Hall.
Though Professor Hall knew nothing about the vile cartoon posted on his Facebook Page, B’nai Brith Canada personnel and sympathizers knew about it very quickly. In very short order they – or a collaborator – informed the president of the University of Lethbridge, the Premier of the province of Alberta, the Solicitor General, and the Minister of Education of the province. Replies were returned to the person giving false information with what I call astonishing speed. In my experience of writing to top government figures I can provide witness that the average Canadian is not responded to with that alacrity. Who, then, could write to the Premier of Alberta and members of cabinet (conveying false information to them) and receive such speedy and sympathetic response? The name of that person is being (for some inexplicable reason) kept from inquirers by the Alberta government. What is the Alberta government hiding … what does the government of Alberta fear??
In a truly astonishing letter written to President Mike Mahon and sent to others like Premier Rachel Notley on September 1, 2016, Bert Raphael, Q.C., LSM, President of the Canadian Jewish Rights Association quotes the whole of the unsavoury text posted on Professor Hall’s Facebook Page. And he finishes his letter (a Queen’s Counsel assuming guilt with the rashness of a school boy) with the following paragraph:
“I trust you agree that such a statement has no place in Canada and most certainly from the lips of a university professor. I would respectfully suggest that such an odious pronouncement would warrant Professor Hall’s dismissal from your University. I would be interested in your response which I undertake to share with the members of my organization whose names appear on the reverse side of this stationery.”
President Mahon waited weeks without seeking a meeting with Professor Hall, then sought one (October 3) almost immediately – and when Professor Hall, otherwise committed, couldn’t comply, President Mahon announced the next day (October 4) (in a letter to Hall) that he was immediately “suspended, without pay from all duties and privileges as a member of the academic staff at the University of Lethbridge, including any and all duties and privileges associated with teaching, research, and community service.” Professor Hall was, in addition, told he could not “attend” at any University of Lethbridge campus.
Having thus, summarily effected in fact (and surely in the public mind) a punishment for wholly unproved (and, in fact, a false allegation against Professor Hall), President Mahon finished his letter by saying that the suspension was “being implemented as a precautionary, not disciplinary, measure… “
Receiving what was libellous, wholly incorrect information (and accepting it as truth without engaging in a word of consultation with his accused colleague) President Mahon wrote to the university community the following about the order that Professor Hall remain off campus, cease his on-going teaching there, and no longer receive his professional salary.
“This action is not focused on Dr. Hall’s published scholarship, driven by complaints of students, or the demands of external advocacy groups. It is focused on his You Tube based videos and comments in social media that have been characterized as being anti-Semitic, supportive of holocaust denial and engagement in conspiracy theories.” [Notice President Mahon uses the term ”conspiracy theories” in the way the CIA shaped the phrase in order to slander and make ineffective substantial criticism and research about government(s) (and others’) misuse of power.]
The questions that arise out of President Mahon’s strange statement are obvious: if president Mahon did not answer the demands of an external advocacy group, how did he come to know of the posting on Professor Hall’s Facebook Page? The President nowhere says he discovered it for himself in the brief few hours the posting was available. Moreover, he had to learn that the posting had been there by the (so far) anonymous writer and then by other writers plainly sympathetic to B’nai Brith … such as Bert Raphael QC whose astonishing accusation I have quoted above.
In addition, President Mahon is reported to have spoken personally on September 1, 2016 to the president of B’nai Brith Canada (but he did not speak to Professor Hall). The university, moreover, has refused to release for examination most of the records of its activities and communications involved in the actions against Professor Hall.
That, alone, is simply astounding – that a university (the bastion of free and open inquiry) would conspire to keep secret its actions and communications relating to what is almost certainly the most serious (and dubious) disciplinary matter in its history.
In addition, President Mahon writes not that he, the President, holds Anthony Hall’s (falsely alleged) comments to be “anti-Semitic” but that they “have been characterized as being anti-Semitic….” If that is the case, someone must have characterized them for President Mahon as the negative things he mentions; some “external advocacy” group or groups must have conveyed that impression to him. The President of the University of Lethbridge appears to be tripping embarrassingly over his own feet in an attempt to disguise the truth about his alleged knowledge and its sources. He has the knowledge of falsely alleged evil done by Professor Hall, “characterized as being anti-Semitic” but he doesn’t characterize it as that himself … and he appears to claim no one else does either!
Ken Rubin, contracted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, reports further behaviour of the University of Lethbridge which points to a (criminal?) conspiracy to harm Professor Hall. I quote Ken Rubin:
“Incredibly, the records show President Mahon invited the 4 external groups (B’nai Brith et. al.) to consult with Robert Thompson, the university’s external lawyer investigating the Hall case where they could have their legal counsels present. Yet it appears Hall was never consulted or approached or at least there’s no record to that effect.” [Professor Hall reports he knew nothing of the meeting(s).]
The evidence convinces me that there is at least the likelihood that an intricate group of conspirators worked together to insult, to misrepresent, and to harm in character, reputation, and professional standing Professor Anthony Hall. President Mike Mahon of the University of Lethbridge, I believe, must be considered a possible central agent in such a concerted action. I may, of course, be wrong. The case being taken by Professor Hall against the University of Lethbridge should provide answers to most of the questions that the falsely attributed posting on Professor Hall’s Facebook have engendered.
At some time – quite early in this barbaric saga – the University of Lethbridge began and (apparently) completed a secret investigation of Professor Hall – an action repugnant in every way to the most basic principles of fairness held in university communities. In addition, it filed against him (without permitting him any participation) a complaint to the Alberta Human Rights Commission. The complaint was dismissed, but President Mahon’s team persisted, appealed the dismissal, apparently reformulated their materials, and had a complaint against Professor Hall accepted.
From the small part of it I have been able to examine, I judge I am reading a presentation that would be a delight to the CIA. Every statement of, for instance, “Islamic terrorism” or of a similar idea is accepted without murmur. Criticism of such easy acceptance is apparently a violation of someone’s Human Rights. That has to be a very peculiar state of mind in Canada. Especially since in July of 2016, Madam Justice Catherine Bruce of the B.C. Supreme court wrote a 217 page judgement making crystal clear that a so-called Islamic Terror Event staged at the British Columbia Legislature grounds (on July 1, 2013) was wholly undertaken by more than 200 RCMP employees, entrapping two socially challenged converts to Islam, spending millions of dollars of unknowing taxpayers money, and working with and through Ottawa Headquarters in relation to the action in British Columbia.
Other Islamic terror event shams have almost certainly occurred (probably frequently) in other places. Not to question those events may, indeed, contribute to the violation of the Human Rights of innocent people.
Anthony Hall – a wide-ranging, openly inquiring, continually scrutinizing Canadian – appears to have dared to ask questions and to be sympathetic to analyses that – while unproved – are in no way alien to discussion in democratic society … analyses that some forces in Canada wish to censor, to deny, and to erase from the attention of Canadians.
The seriousness of the attack on Professor Hall cannot be downplayed. Its perpetrators undertook to go around all established University of Lethbridge procedures built and agreed to by the faculty and administration there to manage such issues. The perpetrators undertook to ram into place a clause in a highly aberrant Alberta Education Law that permits university presidents to remove at will anyone they choose to remove. That strikes me as a plainly fascist initiative which President Mahon should have rejected openly and vigorously but which he seized upon to use against Professor Hall.
The size and the intensity of the conspiracy to destroy and defame Professor Anthony Hall can be glimpsed when one realizes it appears to want (A) to close down discussion of German history between 1930 and 1945. It appears to want (B) to close down discussion of False Flag (government and/or Deep State presentations of violent) events created apparently with the intention of placing blame for them upon whatever source those in power wish to defame and make ‘enemy’. It appears to want (C) to close down some perfectly legitimate considerations of the role of the State of Israel in Middle Eastern and global affairs. It wants (D) to keep secret almost all of its activities to inculpate Professor Hall. And, finally, (E), the conspirators appear to want to wipe out the idea of Academic Freedom – which is essentially what Canadians think of when they speak of “freedom of speech”. Canadians mean the right to inquire, to observe, to debate, to formulate and discuss ideas in public about public matters without fear of intimidation or punishment.
The (criminal?) conspirators (if that is what they are) acting against Professor Hall want, I believe, to decide what ideas Canadians in all walks of life are free to hold and to express. To name – as I think we must name – one university President as an actor among such alleged conspirators must be a wake-up call to all Canadians – and especially to those in the community of scholars – to make sure no one in the Academy can destroy its most fundamental and noble tradition: the open and unimpeded search for truth.
Robin Mathews is a retired professor who taught English literature at Carleton University in Ottawa Ontario and at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver BC. He is well known for his campaign to Canadianize the faculty and curricula of Canadian universities.
Facebook Promises To Censor All Material That Makes Zuckerberg Sad
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | September 13, 2017
Earlier this morning, Facebook Vice President of Media Partnerships shared a new blog post on the company’s website detailing precisely how they intend to censor content with which they happen to disagree. Apparently all content providers who share “clickbait or sensationalism, or post misinformation and false news” will be deemed ineligible to monetize their efforts over Facebook.
To use any of our monetization features, you must comply with Facebook’s policies and terms, including our Community Standards, Payment Terms, and Page Terms. Our goal is support creators and publishers who are enriching our community. Those creators and publishers who are violating our policies regarding intellectual property, authenticity, and user safety, or are engaging in fraudulent business practices, may be ineligible to monetize using our features.
Creators and publishers must have an authentic, established presence on Facebook — they are who they represent themselves to be, and have had a profile or Page on Facebook for at least one month. Additionally, some of our features like Ad Breaks require a sufficient follower base, something that could extend to other features over time.
Those who share content that repeatedly violates our Content Guidelines for Monetization, share clickbait or sensationalism, or post misinformation and false news may be ineligible or may lose their eligibility to monetize.
Ironically, the biggest peddlers of “clickbait or sensationalism, or misinformation and false news” these days seems to be the largest, and ‘most respected’ mainstream media outlets… presumably there is a carve out for the likes of CNN, NYT and Wapo ?
Of course, we first noted the efforts of Facebook to combat the spread of “fake news” over social media back in December 2016 when they first introduced a filter intended to flag ‘fake’ content so that users wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of critically analyzing information on their own. As we noted at the time, it was a genius plan, except for one small issue: who determines what is considered “fake news” and how exactly do they draw those conclusions? From our prior post (see “Facebook Launches Campaign To Combat “Fake News”“):
The first problem, however, immediately emerges because as NBC notes, “legitimate news outlets won’t be able to be flagged”, which then begs the question who or what is considered “legitimate news outlets”, does it include the likes of NYTs and the WaPos, which during the runup to the election declared on a daily basis, that Trump has no chance of winning, which have since posted defamatory stories about so-called “Russian propaganda news sites”, admitting subsequently that their source data was incorrect, and which many consider to be the source of “fake news”.
Also, just who makes the determination what is considered “legitimate news outlets.”
Luckily, Zuckerberg cleared up all the confusion in a subsequent post in which he basically admitted that all ‘fact-checking’ would be outsourced to disaffected Hillary voters and the completely impartial, ‘myth-busting’ website Snopes.com.
Historically, we have relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not. Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others — like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes — to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation. Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize this content in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread.
Keep in mind folks, this entire Facebook witch hunt has been prompted by $50,000 worth of ads that ‘MAY’ have been purchased by Russian-linked accounts to run ‘potentially politically related’ ads.
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The Balfour Declaration – A Century of Jewish Power
By Gilad Atzmon | May 17, 2017
This year, Palestinians and their supporters mark the 100th anniversary of The Balfour Declaration, a written statement from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, in favour of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine.
For Palestinians, The Balfour Declaration was the beginning of their plight: a century of ethnic cleansing at the hands of European newcomers who claim Palestine as their historic home. Yet, for some reason, supporters of the Palestinians are desperate to suppress discussion of the motivation for the Balfour Declaration – how and why did it come about? … continue
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