Israeli Bedouin Kills Border Policeman Ethnically-Cleansing His Village
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | January 18, 2017
When is “terror,” terror? When is it something else? Who defines what is “terror?”
Um al Hiran several weeks ago (Nov. 2016) in happier times
Tonight’s post will be difficult to write because it will try to parse the linguistic thicket defining “terrorism” in the Israeli context. Most of us understand terror as an act of violence by individuals or groups aggrieved for their treatment at the hands of others. In some cases, the target is a nation which rules over them. In others, terror is used to eliminate perceived political, religious or ethnic enemies.
In Israel, terror is used by both Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Among Israeli Jews there is ad hoc terror perpetrated by settlers. But there is also state-sponsored terror, which is based on historical policies of theft, oppression, ethnic cleansing, assassination and murder. Israelis seem to think that states, or at least their state, are outside the definition of “terror” since they’re not individual actors or oppressed groups. This simply isn’t the case. In Israel’s case, its state policies are terror because they employ mass violence to uphold a regime systematically oppressing the Palestinians in violation of international law. Keep in mind that approximately 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since 1948.
In that sense, today’s ethnic cleansing of the Bedouin village of Um al Hiran was an act of state terror. Hundreds of police brandishing weapons, tear gas and other forms of repression assaulted the village and began destroying its residences. The village had been founded in 1956 when the IDF sent its residents there to live after their previous village had been destroyed during the 1948 War. Unlike other Bedouin communities which were established by the residents themselves under their own initiative, Um al Hiran was founded by State authority.
But now, the Judaizing policies of the current Israeli regime plan to remove thousands of Bedouin from their ancestral homes in favor of new domestic settlements for Jews. This village is slated for demolition as are many others. The Bedouin “refusers” will be forcibly moved to urban towns artificially decreed for the habitation of Bedouins. No attempt has been made to consult with Bedouin about any of this (the Prawer Plan was a State attempt to negotiate Bedouin acquiescence to the expulsion, which the Bedouin rejected). They’re merely plopped down in the middle of an environment that is totally alien to their way of life; then told to make do.
This is an act of cultural dispossession. It is a throwback to the colonial era when ruling powers could treat native peoples arbitrarily and such policies often resulted in acts up to, and including genocide. I am not using that term in connection to the Bedouin. But the echo of earlier powers who did engage in it is not accidental on my part as a warning of what the future might hold.
MK Ayman Oudeh after being shot by Border Police rubber bullet
The native Bedouin residents of this village appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court asking for their right to their homes. The Court, which has now been eviscerated of any previous sympathy for the civil rights championed by former justices like Aharon Barak, turned down the appeal. That exhausted the legal remedies of the Bedouin. And set the stage for this morning’s tragedy.
As the police began their destruction, a Bedouin schoolteacher named Musa Abu Alqiyan plowed his car into a group of them. One policeman was killed and another seriously wounded. Abu Alqiyan was shot and killed. Israeli Palestinian MK, Ayman Oudeh, was also shot in the face by a Border Police rubber bullet. The bullet which struck his temple (from what I can tell in pictures) could easily with a millimeter’s difference, have struck his eye and blinded him. I can’t recall any other instance in Israeli history when an official representative of the state shot and injured a member of Knesset. Of course, being a Palestinian MK excludes him from the circle of protection the authorities would afford Jewish MKs. Which is a further confirmation of the level of racism in Israeli society.
The Border Police in willing collaboration with Israeli media are spreading the lie that Oudeh was struck by a rock thrown by Bedouin protesters. You might just as well claim Oudeh threw the rock at himself and struck his own head. The idea that a protester would strike a Palestinian MK is not only preposterous, it’s offensive. The idea that the Border Police would shoot at a Palestinian MK is not only credible, but likely. The whole sordid show is typical of the lies of the Israeli police (remember when they said Mohammed Abu Khdeir was murdered by his family in an honor killing because he was gay? ‘Nuff said) and hasbara apparatus.
The family of the attacker claimed he was murdered in cold blood and that he was neither a terrorist or an Islamist. Apparently, according to my sources this is not true. A security source tells me he was an Islamist. Israeli reports have variously associated him with the Islamist Movement and Islamic State. Those are two entirely different entities, but ones about which most Israelis don’t make any distinction.
Israeli forces arrest Bedouin protesting destruction of his home village
But for the purposes of this discussion, I think it hardly matters whether the man was an Islamist or not. His village was being destroyed by the Israeli state. To him this was an act of state terror. He responded in the most dramatic fashion he could.
While I don’t endorse violence myself, I simply cannot call his act unjustified. When a state blocks every avenue of redress for a people who are being robbed of their homes and lives, what should they expect? Silent and sullen acceptance? No, Israel is at fault in this. It brought the residents to this place then tried to steal it from them. It denied them any legal or peaceful recourse. I don’t see any other outcome that was possible under the circumstances.
Oh, and I’ll offer a deal to all the Israel-defenders out there who are screaming bloody murder about this new “terror attack.” If you’ll call the systematic dispossession of tens of thousands of Negev Bedouin an act of State terror, then I’ll agree to call this killing an act of terror. Any takers?
The world should rally round the Negev Bedouin. It should declare their ethnic cleansing to be a violation of international law. It should add this crime to the long list which will sometime be sent to the Hague for deliberation. It should add this to the list of crimes which should be addressed in UN resolutions and sanctions.
Why Palestinian Children Throw Stones
By Jonathan Cook | Dissident Voice | January 16, 2017
Forget the empty posturing of world leaders in Paris yesterday. This photo tells us what the Israel-Palestine “conflict” is really about.
Imagine for a second that the little boy – how old is he, eight, nine? – is your son, trying to adjust his keffiyeh because it keeps falling over his eyes and he can’t see anything. Imagine your small son surrounded by masked Israeli “soldiers”, or what looks more like a Jewish militia than an army. Imagine that the boy is likely soon to be bundled into the back of a military van and taken for interrogation without his parents or a lawyer present, or even knowing where he is. That he could end up beaten and tortured, as human rights groups have regularly documented.
Maybe you can’t imagine any of that because you, a responsible parent living in Europe or the United States, would never let your child out to throw stones.
Then you need to know more about the story behind this picture.
This photo was taken in Kfar Qaddum last month. The boy and his friends aren’t there to bait Israeli soldiers or indulge a bout of anti-semitism. Jews from the violent – and illegal – settlement of Kedumim have taken over their farm lands. Kedumim’s expansion has been further used to justify the army closing the access road in and out of Qaddum. The village is being choked off at the throat. In short, these villagers are being ethnically cleansed.
Parents living in such circumstances do not have the privilege of concealing from their children what is happening. Everyone in the village knows their community and its way of life are being extinguished. Israel is determined that they will leave so that the Jewish settlers next door can grab their land. Israel expects these villagers to join the rest of the aid-dependent Palestinian population in one of the ghettoised towns and cities in the bantustans of the West Bank.
Even little boys understand the stakes. And unlike your child, this one knows that, if he doesn’t resist, he will lose everything he holds dear.
Israeli Forces Seize Tractors in Jordan Valley
IMEMC News & Agencies – January 16, 2017
Israeli forces stormed the village of Khirbet Abziq, east of Tubas in the northern Jordan Valley, on Monday morning and seized two agricultural tractors while abusing Palestinian citizens.
Witnesses said, according to Al Ray, that Israeli soldiers broke into AL-Madareb, in Khirbet Abziq, and seized two agricultural tractors belonging to Fayez Nghneghya and Nemr Horoub, and took them to a nearby military camp.
They pointed out that seizures have happened repeatedly, in an attempt to harass citizens and force them to leave Khirbet Abziq.
More than two dozen tractors have been confiscated in different areas of the Jordan Valley, over recent months.
It is noteworthy that dozens of citizens living in Khirbet Abziq, mostly refugees from the pre-1948 occupied territories, are being deprived of many basic essential services under Israeli policies. The tractors are used for agriculture and water transference.
Facebook’s aim: combat fake news with fact checkers & ‘untrustworthy’ shame label
RT | January 15, 2017
Facebook is gearing up to battle the problem of “fake news” on social media with a new name-and-shame system involving independent fact checkers being trialed in Germany.
The social media giant has employed the services of Correctiv, a nonprofit group involved in investigative journalism and news auditing, as an independent fact checker.
According to Facebook, new updates to the social site for German users can be expected in the coming weeks. It could see content shared by outlets deemed to be purveyors of false information sent to the back of the Facebook algorithm queue.
The changes include tabs that allow users to report suspected fake news, as well as labels that name-and-shame organizations believed to be peddling fraudulent information.
Facebook insists the system will work through third-party fact auditors associated with Poytner’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles.
“If the fact-finding organizations identify contributions as fraudulent, they are provided with a warning label that identifies them as untrustworthy. The warning contains a link to the corresponding article as well as a justification for this decision,” Facebook says.
“Messages classified as untrustworthy may also appear later in the newsfeed,” they added.
Correctiv announced the partnership via their official Facebook page and the fake news phenomenon as a major threat to politics in Germany.
“Fake news – especially on Facebook – is already one of the major threats [to] our society. That is clear. We fear these threats will become even more massive in the comings months. Whether it be in the NWR election [North Rhine-Westphalia state election] or the election of the Bundestag next autumn,” the company said.
A Facebook statement read: “It is important to us that posts and news posted on Facebook are reliable.”
“We are pleased with this progress, but we know there is still a lot to be done. We continue to work on this challenge and will introduce these innovations in other countries in the near future.”
It comes after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asserted he is taking the issue of misinformation seriously, but admitted the social nature of the business meant the company erred on the side of “letting people share what they want whenever possible.”
“We need to be careful not to discourage sharing of opinions or to mistakenly restrict accurate content. We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves, but instead rely on our community and trusted third parties,” he said last November.
Last year, German Social Democratic Party politician Thomas Oppermann suggested social media sites like Facebook should face individual fines of up to €500,000 for the spread of fake news.
READ MORE:
German politicians want €500k fines if Facebook fails to remove fake news within 24hrs
‘EU’s new tool against political opponents is to link them to Russia’ – targeted Danish journalist
RT | January 14, 2017
Danish Journalist Iben Thranholm, who was branded as a Russian propagandist and included on an EU blacklist for comments she made on migrant policy, tells RT that such character assassinations have become the new go-to tactic of Western governments.
Thranholm is a Danish current events columnist who penned an opinion piece for Russia Insider in 2016, in which she explained her reservations about the EU’s current migrant policy and its inability to properly integrate Muslim migrants into European society.
She had also written a piece for RT earlier in which she explained how the “spiritual vacuum” created by Western cultural nihilism is the core factor behind growing Muslim radicalization within the EU.
She also criticized the EU’s unwillingness to recognize religion as a factor at all as just one indicator of this trend.
These and other comments earned the Danish journalist a spot on the EU’s East StratCom Task Force black list – a body set up in 2015 with the purpose of “collecting examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation articles” – not unlike American Senator McCarthy’s communist witch-hunt of the 1950s.
“Today, it is me who is on the list,” Thranholm says. “Tomorrow it could be a different journalist who has similar views. They claim that I’m damaging – doing harm – to the EU just for criticizing them. I criticized them for their immigration policy,” she says, adding that many people in Europe agree with her.
The Danish journalist argues that the EU’s mechanism for dealing with such dissenters “is to link the person with Russia, or claim that there are close ties between this person and Russia. And then, this person is just not trustworthy anymore – it’s a kind of character assassination.”
“It’s hard to believe that modern democratic Europe has ended up in some kind of totalitarian or semi-totalitarian democracy where our leaders have a special definition of what is democracy – and if you don’t agree with it, you will be put on the list. I think it’s very, very alarming and very disturbing,” she said.
Thronhalm has gone to great pains to explain that her views are not anti-Islamic. As she wrote for RT in 2015, “Secularism, relativism of values, materialism and democracy as a new religion (idolatry devoid of a deity) constantly prove their feeble inadequacy when facing Islamism.”
Foreign Minister Anders Samuelsen has recently defended her inclusion on the EU task force’s blacklist, saying she was promoting a “Kremlin narrative,” when prodded by Marie Krarup, who heads Denmark’s People’s Party and shares views similar to Thranholm’s. Thranholm later wrote that she was “appalled” at the minister’s conclusion that her inclusion on the list was justified, comparing the decision to one that would be taken by a “totalitarian Soviet state.”
Read more:
Federal Regulator Halts Move to Toughen Radiation Exposure Limits
By John Laforge | CounterPunch | January 13, 2017
Work has been halted on two rulemaking projects that would have reduced the amount of radiation the government permits workers and the public to be exposed to without their consent. The improved limits would have been in line with internationally accepted standards, Bloomberg BNA reports. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission announcement says stopping the process of setting stricter radiation exposure limits was “due to the high costs of implementing such changes.” The purpose of the NRC is to protect public and nuclear worker health and safety, but this time it’s just saving money for the nuclear industry.
The cancellation of two unfinished and long-overdue precautionary improvements, noted in the Dec. 27 Federal Register, came as a shock to nuclear industry watchdogs who have campaigned for increased radiation protection since 1990. That year, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) recommended that radiation industry worker exposures be reduced by three-fifths, from 50 milliSieverts per year to 20 milliSieverts per year. (A milliSieverts is a measure of the body’s absorption of radiation.) The recommendation has never adopted by the United States. Based in Ottawa, Ontario, ICRP sets standards used worldwide as the basis for radiological protection, working to reduce cancer and other diseases caused by radiation exposure.
Ed Lyman, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Bloomberg BNA the termination of these projects “makes the US look out of step with the rest of the world. It makes it look like we’re basing our regulations on obsolete information.” Jerry Hiatt, with the industry lobbying group Nuclear Energy Institute, was relieved by the NRC move telling Bloomberg that existing rules were adequate, and that it’s unnecessary to reduce currently permitted exposures.
The rulemaking project was begun by the NRC staff in 2008 and was intended to update the country’s radiation protection standards in accordance with ICRP’s international standards, primarily with respect to radiation dose. The NRC staff had previously recommended that the commission reduce the total radiation worker exposure from 50 milliSieverts-per-year to 20 milliSieverts-per-year — in line with the ICRP’s 1990 global recommendation. However, the NRC rejected the recommendation.
The NRC’s decision not to align permitted radiation exposures with those of the ICRP is the equivalent of “throwing out one of the most significant changes to get the US in step with the rest of the world,” Lyman said. The commission formally approved the stop-work orders in April, but it only notified the public on Dec. 27.
The NRC also decided to stop work on a second rulemaking which would have brought the US in line with international rules regarding daily releases of radioactive waste water from nuclear reactors. By way of explanation, the NRC said, its current standard “continues to provide adequate protection of the health and safety of workers, the public and the environment.”
Over the last 70 years, permitted radiation exposure limits for workers and the public have dramatically decreased as science has come to better understand the toxic and cancer-causing properties of low doses.
In its 2012 pamphlet “Radiation Exposure and Cancer” the NRC acknowledges that, “[A]ny increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk.” Likewise, the National Academy of Sciences, in its latest book-length report on the biological effects of ionizing radiation BEIR-VII, says: “[L]ow-dose radiation acts predominantly as a tumor-initiating agent,” and that “[T]he smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.” And the US Environmental Protection Agency agrees, “[A]ny exposure to radiation can be harmful or can increase the risk of cancer … In other words, it is assumed that no radiation exposure is completely risk free.”
But today, when the international standard dose limit is less than half what our own government allows, it’s the radiation industry shareholders that are being protected by the NRC, not public health and safety.
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John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter.
Obama, Obamacare and Single Payer
By Russell Mokhiber | CounterPunch | January 12, 2017
In his farewell address, President Obama bluntly laid down a challenge – “If anyone can put together a plan that is demonstrably better than the improvements we’ve made to our health care system – that covers as many people at less cost – I will publicly support it.”
There is such a plan. Not only does it cover as many people as Obamacare, it covers everyone. And at less cost than Obamacare.
Everybody in. Nobody out.
And Obama did publicly support it. Before he turned against it.
That plan was put together more than fifty years ago – it’s called single payer.
And we as a country implemented it for people of a certain age – it’s called Medicare.
The single payer Medicare for All bill has been languishing in Congress for decades – it’s called HR 676.
It will again be introduced into the new Congress sometime over the next couple of weeks.
And before Obama was against single payer, Obama was for it.
In 2003, as a state Senator in Illinois, Obama publicly supported single payer.
“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program,” Obama said at the time. “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”
Which of course the Democrats did.
And then Obama let the insurance industry write Obamacare and push single payer off the table.
Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter..
Sheriff’s Office Raids Home, Seizes All The Furniture, Ultimately Returns Everything But The Couch
By Tim Cushing | TechDirt | January 11, 2017
The joke about asset forfeiture is that it’s actually not a joke. Advisors to law enforcement have actually said it’s a great way for cops to go shopping for things they want. It’s not just cash being taken, although it’s primarily that. It’s vehicles, too. And when that just doesn’t seem to be enough, it’s houses. And everything in them.
So, the “going shopping” joke is one very dark punchline. Here’s another one: “take everything that isn’t nailed down.” Except that this actually happens. And it includes things that are nailed down. Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella has more details.
In 2012, Rehfeldt says the Hind County Sheriff’s Office raided his client’s apartment on suspicion her boyfriend was a drug dealer. Anything purchased with drug proceeds is fair game to be seized by police under civil asset forfeiture laws, and they determined the boyfriend had furnished the apartment, so off went her TV, her table and chairs, her couch, her lamps, and even the pictures on the wall.
“Her case is the first in my 38 years of practicing law where they took the furniture,” Rehfeldt says.
What’s the proper response? Shock that this sort of thing actually happens? Or relief that law enforcement doesn’t clean out a person’s home every time they have a hunch something may have been purchased with the proceeds of criminal activity?
In this case, most of what was taken by the sheriff’s office was eventually returned. Rehfeldt’s clients is one of the lucky ones, able to navigate a legal pathway that’s a greased downhill slope for law enforcement, but an expensive, uphill battle for those whose property has been seized.
His client got everything back. Well, not everything.
“It is, therefore, ordered and adjudged that one Visio television, one dining room table and chairs, pictures and lamps are to be returned to the plaintiff upon execution of this Order by this Court,” the Feb. 10, 2015 order in the Hinds County Court reads. “Additionally, one white couch is hereby forfeited to the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office.”
For reasons unexplained, the sheriff’s office was allowed to keep the couch. Perhaps deputies had grown attached to it after it was placed in the breakroom. Or maybe it was “disposed” prior to the forfeiture being finalized and there was simply no way to retrieve it. Or maybe it was just the state’s skim — the percentage taken off the top of every forfeiture, whether or not the seizure was legally-justified.
The skim is part of the problem. Mississippi’s legislature is looking at overhauling the state’s forfeiture laws and a Senate committee letter obtained by Reason confirms that law enforcement’s tendency to charge fees or withhold some percentage of the property seized gives the program the appearance of impropriety.
Upon a cursory analysis of these orders, PEER staff notes that Agreed Orders tend to have the most potential for indicating possible abuse. This is because most Agreed Orders are entered into upon a settlement agreement in which the arresting authority receives some or all of the forfeited property as a condition subsequent to some sort of agreement made between the arresting party and the defendant.
As the arresting party often seizes a large amount of property or cash and many of these Agreed Orders stipulate that some or most of the said property or cash will be returned while some will be forfeited, a reasonable person might assume that the arresting party is using its authority to gain assets from an arrest by settling with the defendant.
If this is how it’s routinely handled, it encourages law enforcement to take everything it can get its hands on, if for no other reason than it increase its chances of being able to retain some of it if the forfeiture is challenged. This settlement system perverts incentives, changing it from serving the general public through the targeted crippling of criminal organizations (however loosely-defined) to serving law enforcement agencies by allowing them to directly profit from the taking of citizens’ property.
Palestinian teen undergoes leg amputation ‘after being hit by Israeli jeep’
Ma’an – January 11, 2017
BETHLEHEM – A 16-year-old Palestinian detainee has had to undergo a below-the-knee amputation due to a severe injuries he sustained after an Israeli jeep hit him at an Israeli military checkpoint in the northern occupied West Bank district of Jenin last week, according to Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer.
Addameer wrote in a statement on Tuesday that an attorney representing Sharif Khanfar said the teen was with three of his friends riding a Vespa motorcycle when they were apprehended by Israeli forces for allegedly planning a vehicular attack on soldiers on Jan. 3, and were injured after an Israeli jeep hit them.
The statement contradicted reports from Israeli police at the time of the incident, which did not mention an Israeli vehicle being involved.
Initial reports from Israel media claimed the incident was a deliberate vehicular attack, but Israeli police spokesperson Luba al-Samri said later that it was an accident.
The accident occurred at a so-called “flying checkpoint” — a non-temporary Israeli military checkpoint — that had been set up between the city of Jenin and the al-Jalama checkpoint, which Palestinians use to cross into Israel from the northern occupied West Bank.
Al-Samri’s initial statement said that one motorcycle “bumped into” Israeli soldiers who were on foot at a military checkpoint, while three other motorcycles involved in the incident “fled the scene.”
However, she issued a correction later saying only three motorcycles had been involved — one carrying two Palestinians and another carrying one — without elaborating details of how the accident itself occurred.
A second Palestinian was severely injured in the incident, and a third was lightly injured. Two Israeli soldiers were lightly injured under unclear circumstances, though al-Samri seemed to suggest, without saying explicitly, that they were on foot by neglecting to mention the involvement of a military jeep.
Al-Samri also did not mention in her statements that anyone was detained after the accident or accused with wrongdoing. An Israeli police spokesperson could not immediately be reached on Wednesday to confirm whether or not the teen was in fact being detained.
Israel’s emergency medical service Magen David Adom (MDA) said they evacuated the two severely injured Palestinian motorcyclists to Israel’s HaEmek hospital.
However, according to Addameer, Khanfar was being detained by Israeli authorities in the hospital, which is located in the Israeli city of Afula, north of the border with the occupied West Bank.
Addameer’s statement said Khanfar and his family members were “shocked” by the incident that resulted in the loss of a leg, and denied that he and his friends had intended to carry out an attack.
Since a wave of unrest began in October 2015– largely marked by small-scale attacks by Palestinians targeting uniformed Israeli soldiers and police with knives or similar weapons — a number of deliberate car ramming attacks have occurred.
However, Israeli authorities’ version of events have been challenged in a number of incidents, with officials in some cases later admitting so-called “terror attacks” were actually traffic accidents.
Amid the unrest, Israel has come under widespread condemnation for implementing a “shoot-to-kill” policy against Palestinian committing or allegedly committing attacks. Among the more than 100 Palestinians to be killed by Israeli forces and settlers throughout 2016, 33 were minors aged 17 and younger, according to Ma’an documentation.
In addition to lethal shootings of Palestinian children committed by Israeli forces, Palestinian NGO BADIL has warned of an increasing trend of Israeli forces shooting Palestinian youth in a deliberate attempt to leave them crippled for life.
Rights groups have also widely documented the mistreatment, abuse, and torture of Palestinian minors in detention, and the harsh interrogation practices used to force their confessions.
Israeli UK Embassy Scandal: Officer Who Sought to Destroy Tory Leader Worked for Strategic Affairs Ministry
Israeli minister Gil Erdan meets with Conservative Friends of Israel MPs during the London visit, when he also met with Shai Masot
By Richard Silverstein | Tikun Olam | January 10, 2017
The Guardian has uncovered a major element of the Shai Masot scandal. I speculated in my last post about this story that Masot worked for an Israeli intelligence agency. No one I consulted found it likely it could be the Mossad. Masot was too public and too pushy to be Mossad. Others speculated that he worked for the IDF intelligence unit, AMAN, since he had until recently been an IDF Major. But his LinkedIn account noted that he’d left the IDF.
Now the Guardian has put two and two together and gotten closer to key elements of the story. He worked for the Strategic Affairs ministry headed by ambitious Likud pol, Gil Erdan. His agency has been tasked with mounting a global campaign against BDS. At a conference in Israel, one of Erdan’s fellow ministers even threatened BDS activists with “civil elimination,” a term dangerously close to ‘assassination’ in colloquial Hebrew. Erdan’s budget is huge ($34-million devoted to fighting BDS alone) as the latter has become the bête noire of the Israeli state–named as Public Enemy Number 1; the new “existential threat” to the “Jewish state” and Jewish people.
The Israeli foreign ministry, according to the Guardian story, recognized the danger of what Masot was doing and its London staff wrote a cable warning that freelancing of the type Masot was engaged in was extremely dangerous because funding UK organizations directly with Israeli state funds would jeopardize the non-profit status of any UK non-profit who accepted them. In videos, Masot boasts about founding pro-Israel astro-turf groups which were local in name only. Masot pulled the strings both financially and politically. He also boasts about collaboration with Conservative Friends of Israel and offers 1-million pounds to a Labour Friends of Israel MP in order to encourage other MPs to participate in junkets to Israel. Joan Ryan, the MP before whom he dangled this bauble didn’t seem to have a clue as to the danger it posed to her. She merely joked to Masot that she didn’t expect he was carrying the 1-million in a bag on his back!
One telling passage from the MFA cable confirms that the Israeli government is far more aggressive in creating such astroturf groups in the U.S. than it has been so far in Britain:
“Attempts to act behind our back have happened before and will happen again, but ‘operating’ Jewish organisations directly from Jerusalem, with no coördination and no consultation, is liable to be dangerous,” it said. “Operating like this could encounter opposition from the organisations themselves, given their legal status: Britain isn’t the US !”
This calls to mind the multitude of Israel Lobby groups which closely coördinate their activity with the Israeli government, and perhaps more. They include StandWithUs, The Israel Project, Christians United for Israel, CAMERA, and many others. In fact, then-deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon boasted on an Israeli TV show that his ministry was funding a SWU lawsuit against the Olympia Food Coop.
This reinforces my strong impression developed over the years that many of these groups, which are ostensibly independent U.S.-based groups are either fully or partially “operated” by the Israeli government. I have even reported on several projects of these NGOs which were explicitly funded by the government. This should endanger their non-profit status and force them to register as agents of a foreign government. But our IRS hasn’t chosen to tangle with the Israel Lobby or even the settler lobby (though it should).
Returning to the Strategic Affairs ministry, it released this statement in response to the September MFA cable. It indicates that the ministry either lied or was totally ignorant about what its own operatives like Masot were doing in Israel’s name:
“We work in coordination with the Israeli embassy in Britain and the Foreign Ministry. Every action is done according to the law and in accordance with government decisions and the ministry’s authority. We regret there are elements in the Foreign Ministry who don’t understand the division of responsibilities between the ministries and prefer to deal with struggles of honor instead of focusing on our goals.”
Someone back in Tel Aviv should be eating crow about now. But given the abysmal lack of accountability in virtually everything done in the government, it’s doubtful anything will come of it. … Full article
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- Green Energy Debacle: German Expert Professor Fritz Vahrenholt Warns Of Severe Economic And Social Consequences
- Two More Paleo Reconstructions Affirm Meters-Higher Sea Levels Across Ireland, Brazil 7000-6000 Years Ago
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
