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The secular religion of “the Holocaust”, a tainted product of consumer society

By Robert Faurisson | August 7, 2008

The religion of “the Holocaust” is a secular one: it belongs to the lay world; it is profane; in actuality, it has at its disposal the secular arm, that is a temporal authority with dreaded power. It has its dogma, its commandments, its decrees, its prophets and its high priests. As one revisionist has observed, it has its circle of saints, male and female, amongst whom, for example, Saint Anne (Frank), Saint Simon (Wiesenthal) and Saint Elie (Wiesel). It has its holy places, its rituals and its pilgrimages. It has its sacred (and macabre) buildings and its relics (in the form of cakes of soap, shoes, toothbrushes, …). It has its martyrs, its heroes, its miracles and its miraculous survivors (in the millions), its golden legend and its righteous ones. Auschwitz is its Golgotha. For it, God is called Yahweh, protector of his chosen people, who, as said in one of the psalms of David (number 120), recently invoked by a female public prosecutor, Anne de Fontette, during the trial in Paris of a French revisionist, punishes “lying lips” (by, incidentally, sending them the “sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper”). For this religion, Satan is called Hitler, condemned, like Jesus in the Talmud, to boil for eternity in excrement. It knows neither mercy, nor forgiveness, nor clemency but only the duty of vengeance. It amasses fortunes through blackmail and extortion and acquires unheard-of privileges. It dictates its law to the nations. Its heart beats in Jerusalem, at the Yad Vashem monument, in a land taken over from the natives; in the shelter of a 26-foot high wall built to protect a people who are the salt of the earth, the companions of the “Holocaust” faith rule over the goy with a system that is the purest expression of militarism, racism and colonialism.

A quite recent religion whose growth has been meteoric

Although it is largely an avatar of the Hebraic religion, the new religion is quite recent and has exhibited meteoric growth. For the historian, the phenomenon is exceptional. Most often a religion of universal scope has its origins in remote and obscure times, a fact that makes the task of historians of religious ideas and institutions rather arduous. However, as luck would have it for that type of historian, in the space of fifty-odd years (1945-2000), right before our eyes, a new religion, that of “the Holocaust”, has suddenly come into being and proceeded to develop with astonishing speed, spreading nearly everywhere. It has conquered the West and intends to impose itself on the rest of the world. Any researcher interested in the historical phenomenon made up by the birth, life and death of religions ought therefore to seize the occasion, never so much as hoped for, thus offered to study from up close the birth and life of this new religion, then calculate its chances of survival and the possibility of its demise. Any specialist of war watching out for indications of a coming conflagration would owe it to himself to survey the risks of a warlike crusade such as the one into which this conquering religion may take us.

A religion that embraces consumerism

As a rule, consumer society places religions and ideologies in difficulty or danger. Each year, growth in both industrial production and business activity creates in peoples’ minds new needs and desires, truly concrete ones, lessening their thirst for the absolute or their aspiration towards an ideal, factors that religions and ideologies feed on. Besides, the progress of scientific thinking makes people more and more sceptical as to the truth of religion’s stories and the promises it gives them. Paradoxically, the only religion to prosper today is the “Holocaust” religion, ruling, so to speak, supreme and having those sceptics who are openly active cast out from the rest of mankind: it labels them “deniers”, whilst they call themselves “revisionists”.

These days the ideas of homeland, nationalism or race, as well as those of communism or even socialism, are in crisis or even on their way to extinction. Equally in crisis are the religions of the Western world, including the Jewish religion, and in their turn but in a less visible manner, so are the non-Western religions, themselves confronted by consumerism’s force of attraction; whatever one may think, the Moslem religion is no exception: the bazaar attracts bigger crowds than the mosque and, in certain oil-rich kingdoms, consumerism in its most outlandish forms poses an ever more insolent challenge to the rules for living laid down by Islam.

Roman Catholicism, for its part, is stricken with anaemia: to use Céline’s phrase, it has become “christianaemic”. Amongst the Catholics whom Benedict XVI addresses, how many still believe in the virginity of Mary, the miracles of Jesus, the physical resurrection of the dead, everlasting life, in heaven, purgatory and hell? The churchmen’s talk is usually limited to trotting out the word that “God is love”. The Protestant religions and those akin to them are diluted, along with their doctrines, in an infinity of sects and variants. The Jewish religion sees its members, more and more reluctant to observe so many peculiar rules and prohibitions, deserting the synagogue and, in ever greater numbers, marrying outside the community.

But whereas Western beliefs or convictions have lost much of their substance, faith in “the Holocaust” has strengthened; it has ended up creating a link – a religion, according to standard etymology at any rate, is a link (religat religio) – that enables disparate sets of communities and nations to share a common faith. All in all, Christians and Jews today cooperate heartily in propagating the holocaustic faith. Even a fair number of agnostics or atheists can be seen lining up with enthusiasm under the “Holocaust” banner. “Auschwitz” is achieving the union of all.

The fact is that this new religion, born in the era where consumerism expanded so rapidly, bears all the hallmarks of consumerism. It has its vigour, cleverness and inventiveness. It exploits all the resources of marketing and communication. The vilest products of Shoah Business are but the secondary effects of a religion that, intrinsically, is itself a sheer fabrication. From a few scraps of a given historical reality, things that were, after all, commonplace in wartime (like the internment of a good part of the European Jews in ghettos or camps), its promoters have built a gigantic historical imposture: the imposture, all at once, of the alleged extermination of the Jews of Europe, of camps allegedly equipped with homicidal gas chambers and, finally, of an alleged six million Jewish victims.

A religion that seems to have found the solution to the Jewish question

Throughout the millennia, the Jews, at first generally well received in the lands that have taken them in, have ended up arousing a phenomenon of rejection leading to their expulsion but, quite often, after leaving through one door, they have re-entered through another door. In several nations of continental Europe, in the late 19th and early 20th century, the phenomenon appeared once more. “The Jewish question” was especially put in Russia, Poland, Romania, Austria-Hungary, Germany and France. Everyone, beginning with the Jews themselves, then set about looking for “a solution” to this “Jewish question”. For the Zionists, long a minority amongst their coreligionists, the solution could only be territorial. The thing to do was to find, with the accord of the imperial powers, a territory that Jewish colonists could settle. This colony might be located, for example, in Palestine, Madagascar, Uganda, South America, Siberia, … Poland and France envisaged the Madagascar solution whilst the Soviet Union created in southern Siberia the autonomous Jewish sector of Birobijan. As for National Socialist Germany, she was to study the possibility of settling the Jews in Palestine but wound up realising, from 1937, the unrealistic nature of the idea and the great wrong to the Palestinians that such a project would entail. Subsequently the 3rd Reich wanted to create a Jewish colony in a part of Poland (the Judenreservat of Nisko, south of Lublin), then in its turn, in 1940, it seriously considered creating a colony in Madagascar (the Madagascar Projekt). Two years later, beset by the necessities of a war to wage on land, sea and in the air and taken up with the more and more distressing concerns of having to save German cities from a deluge of fire, to safeguard the very life of his people, to keep the economy of a whole continent running, a continent so poor in raw materials, Chancellor Hitler made it known to his entourage, notably in the presence of Reichsminister and head of the Reichskanzlerei Hans-Heinrich Lammers, that he intended to “put off solving the Jewish question till after the war”. Constituting within her a population necessarily hostile to a Germany at war, the Jews – in any case a large portion of them – had to be deported and interned. Those able to work were made to do so, the others were confined in concentration camps or transit camps. Never did Hitler either desire or authorise the massacre of Jews and his courts martial went so far as to order the death penalty, even in Soviet territory, for soldiers found guilty of excesses against Jews. Never did the German State envisage anything else, as concerned the Jews, than “a final territorial solution of the Jewish question” (eine territoriale Endlösung der Judenfrage) and it takes all the dishonesty of our orthodox historians to evoke incessantly “the final solution of the Jewish question” and deliberately evade the adjective “territorial”, so important here. Up to the end of the war, Germany kept on offering to deliver interned Jews to the western Allies, but on condition that they then stay in Britain, for example, and not go and invade Palestine to torment “the noble and valiant Arab people”. There was nothing exceptional about the fate of Europe’s Jews in the general blaze of war. It would have deserved just a mention in the great book of Second World War history. One may therefore quite rightly be astonished that today the fate of the Jews should be considered the essential feature of that war.

After the war it was in the land of Palestine and to the detriment of the Palestinians that the upholders of the “Holocaust” religion found – or believed they’d found – the final territorial solution to the Jewish question.

A religion that, previously, groped along with its sales methods

(Raul Hilberg’s recantation)

I suggest that sociologists undertake a history of the new religion by examining the extremely varied techniques in line with which this “product” was created, launched and sold over the years 1945-2000. They can thus measure the distance between the often clumsy procedures of the beginning and the sophistication, at the end, of the packagings designed by our present-day spin doctors (crooked “com” experts) for their presentations of “the Holocaust”, henceforth a compulsory and kosher mass-consumer product.

In 1961, Raul Hilberg, first of the “Holocaust” historians, “the pope” of exterminationist science, published the first version of his major work, The Destruction of the European Jews. He expressed in doctoral manner the following thesis: Hitler had given orders for an organised massacre of the Jews and all was explained as somehow coming of those orders. This way of displaying the merchandise was to end in a fiasco. With the revisionists asking to see the Hitler orders, Hilberg was compelled to admit that they had never existed. From 1982 to 1985, under the pressure of the same revisionists asking to see just what the magical homicidal gas chambers, in technical reality, looked like, he was led to revise his presentation of the holocaustic product. In 1985, in the “revised and definitive” edition of the same book, instead of taking an assertive, curt stance with the reader-customer, he sought to get round him with all sorts of convoluted phrases, appealing to a supposed taste for the mysteries of parapsychology or the paranormal. He expounded on the history of the destruction of the European Jews without in the least bringing up any order, from Hitler or anyone else, to exterminate the said Jews. He explained everything by a kind of diabolical mystery through which, spontaneously, the German bureaucrats told themselves to kill the Jews to the very last.“Countless decision makers in a far-flung bureaucratic machine” took part in the extermination enterprise by virtue of a “mechanism”, and did so without any “basic plan” (p. 53); these bureaucrats “created an atmosphere in which the formal, written word could gradually be abandoned as a modus operandi” (p. 54); there were “basic understandings of officials resulting in decisions not requiring orders or explanations”; “it was a matter of spirit, of shared comprehension, of consonance and synchronization”; “no one agency was charged with the whole operation”; “no single organization directed or coordinated the entire process” (p. 55). In short, according to Hilberg, this concerted extermination had indeed taken place but there was no possibility of actually demonstrating it with the aid of specific documents. Two years previously, in February 1983, during a conference at Avery Fischer Hall in New York, he had presented this strange and woolly thesis as follows: “What began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus-mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy”. To sum up, that vast project of destruction was executed, magically, by telepathy and by the diabolical workings of the “Nazi” bureaucratic genius. It can be said that with Hilberg, historical science has thus turned cabalistic or religious.

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, at their end, wanted to set off on the same road of fake science when they called upon French pharmacist Jean-Claude Pressac for assistance. For several years the poor Pressac strove to sell the tainted product in a pseudo-scientific form but, realising the imposture, in 1995 he did a complete turnaround and admitted that, all things considered, the dossier of “the Holocaust” was “rotten” and fit only “for the rubbish bins of history”; such were his own words. The news of his change of heart was to be kept hidden for five years, emerging only in 2000 at the end of a long book by Valérie Igounet, another Shoah peddler, entitled Histoire du négationnisme en France (Seuil, p. 652).

A religion that has at last discovered the up to date sales techniques

It was then that the spin doctors came onto the scene. What with the product having become suspect and potential customers starting to ask questions, the “Holocaust” religion’s management had to steer an altogether different course and give up defending the merchandise with ostensibly scientific arguments: their new approach would be a resolutely “modern” one. It was decided to set only the very least store by efforts at logical argumentation and to replace serious research with appeals to sentiment and emotion, in other words with art: the cinema, theatre, historical novels, shows, story telling (the contemporary art of throwing together an account or framing a “testimony”), the media circus, stage designs in museums, public ceremonies, pilgrimages, worshiping of (false) relics and (false) symbols (symbolic gas chambers, symbolic numbers, symbolic witnesses), incantations, music and even kitsch, the whole thing matched with assorted ways of forcing people to buy it, including various kinds of threats. The filmmaker Steven Spielberg, a specialist in dishevelled and extraterrestrial fiction, has become the leading instigator for holocaustic films as well as for the casting of 50,000 witnesses. In order to sell their tainted product better in the long term, our fake historians and real junk dealers have sought and obtained the primary school “franchise”, with which they instil a taste for “the Holocaust” in the very youngest clientele: for it’s in the earliest years that appetites are acquired, making so that, later on, the customer need hardly be enticed: he’ll demand on his own what he enjoyed as a child, be it sweets or poison. Thus has it come to be that no one involved could care less about history: all serve the sole cause of a certain Remembrance, that is a jumble of legends and slanders that give the public the pleasure of feeling good andrighteous, ready tosing the virtues of the poor Jew and curse the intrinsically wicked “Nazis”, to call for vengeance and spit on the graves of the defeated. At the end it only remains to collect a flood of cold hard cash and receive new privileges. Pierre Vidal-Naquet was but an amateur: in 1979, he had shown himself from the outset to be too basic, too rough in his “Holocaust” promotion. For example, when asked by the revisionists to explain how in blazes, after a gassing operation with hydrogen cyanide (the active ingredient in the insecticide “Zyklon B”), a squad of Jews (Sonderkommando) could enter unharmed into a room still full of that terrible gas, then handle and remove up to a few thousand corpses infused with poison, he, along with 33 other academics, replied that he simply need not provide any explanation. Spielberg, a more skilful man, was to show in a screen drama a “gas chamber” wherein, for once, “by a miracle”, the showerheads sprayed… water and not gas. Subsequently, in his turn, Vidal-Naquet had, quite awkwardly, attempted to answer the revisionists on the scientific level and made a fool of himself. Claude Lanzmann, for his part, in the film Shoah, sought to produce testimonies or confessions, but his result was clumsy, inept and hardly convincing; that said, at least he’d grasped that the main point was to “make movies” and occupy the public forum. Today there is no longer a single “historian” of “the Holocaust” who makes it his business to prove the reality of “the Holocaust” and its magical gas chambers. All of them do like Saul Friedländer in his latest book (L’Allemagne nazie et les juifs / Les années d’extermination, Seuil, 2008): they leave it as understood that it all existed. With them history becomes axiomatic, although their axioms aren’t even drawn up. These new historians proceed with such self-assurance that the reader, taken aback, doesn’t realise the trick being played on him: the smooth talkers go on endlessly about an event whose reality they haven’t established in the first place. And so it is that the customer, believing that he’s bought some goods, has actually bought the smooth talk of the one giving him the sales pitch. Today’s world champion of holocaustic bluff is a shabbos goy, Father Patrick Desbois, one hell of a trickster whose various productions dedicated to “the Holocaust by bullets”, notably in the Ukraine, seem to have reached the very peaks of Judeo-Christian media hype.

A success story of the great powers

A veritable success story in the art of selling, the holocaustic enterprise has acquired the status of an international lobby. This lobby has blended with the American Jewish lobby (whose flagship organisation is the AIPAC) which itself defends, tooth and nail, the interests of the State of Israel, of which “the Holocaust” is the sword and shield. The mightiest nations in the world can hardly allow themselves to annoy such a network of pressure groups which, under a religious veneer, was at first a commercial concern only to become later on military-commercial, constantly pushing for new military adventures. It follows that if other countries, called “emerging”, want to be in good graces with a certain more powerful one, then they would be well advised to bend to its wishes. Without necessarily professing their faith in “the Holocaust”, they will contribute, if need be, to the propagation of “the Holocaust” and to the repression of those who dispute its reality. The Chinese, for example, although they have no use at all for such nonsense themselves, keep well away from any calling into question of the “Jewish Holocaust”; this enables them to pose as the “Jews” of the Japanese during the last war and so point out that they too have been victims of genocide, a formula which, they think, may open the way to financial reparations and political profits, as it has done for the Jews.

A particularly mortal religion

The future trouble for the religion of “the Holocaust” lies in the fact that it is too secular. Here one may well think of the Papacy, which, in centuries past, drew its political and military strength from a temporal power that, in the final analysis, ended up causing its downfall. The new religion is hand in glove with, all together, the State of Israel, the United States, the European Union, NATO, Russia, the big banks (which, as in the case of the Swiss banks, it can force to knuckle under if they show unwillingness to pay out), international racketeering and the arms merchants’ lobbies. This being the case, who can guarantee it a solid base in the future? It has made itself vulnerable by endorsing, de facto, the policies of nations or groups with inordinate appetites, whose spirit of worldwide crusade, as may be particularly noted in the Near and Middle East, has become adventurist.

It has come to pass that religions disappear with the empires where they used to reign. This is because religions, like civilisations, are mortal. That of “the Holocaust” is doubly mortal: it spurs countries to go on warlike crusades and it is rushing to its doom. It will rush to its doom even if, in the last instance, the Jewish State vanishes from the land of Palestine. The Jews then dispersed throughout the world will have only one last resort, that of bewailing this “Second Holocaust”.

***

Translator’s note: The italicised English words are in English in the original.

NB: Already in 1980, in my book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire (“Statement of case against those who accuse me of falsifying history”, La Vieille Taupe, Paris), I dealt with “the new religion” of “the Holocaust” (p. 261-263). In 2006 I wrote two articles on the subject: “La ‘Mémoire juive’ contre l’Histoire ou l’aversion juive pour toute recherche approfondie sur la Shoah” (“‘Jewish Remembrance’ versus History, or the Jewish aversion to any thorough research on the Shoah”) and “Le prétendu ‘Holocauste’ des juifs se révèle de plus en plus dangereux” (“The Alleged ‘Holocaust’ of the Jews is proving ever more dangerous”).

The second may be found here in English translation.

January 27, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

US bid to create crisis in Iran-IAEA ties ‘falling flat’: Report

Press TV – January 26, 2019

The US has failed to create a crisis in Iran’s cooperation with the UN atomic agency which has repeatedly confirmed the peaceful nature of the country’s nuclear program, Bloomberg reports.

Bloomberg said the US was pushing to open “a special investigation” into Iran’s past nuclear work, but “it’s not gaining traction among the international officials who can make it happen.”

The financial news provider said it had obtained documents and interviewed diplomats who attended a meeting between US officials and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna last week.

“American officials have been ratcheting up pressure at the International Atomic Energy Agency in recent weeks, threatening new sanctions and advocating for more aggressive inspections,” Bloomberg said.

“However, the efforts are falling flat,” it said, citing three diplomats who participated in the meeting.

It’s a rare pushback for the US at the IAEA … the episode illustrates the rising difficulty American officials face in convincing allies to follow the US on Iran,” it added.

During the private meeting held on January 20 and attended by 70 diplomats assigned to the IAEA, the participants heard what hawkish US national security adviser John Bolton called “substantial evidence” that Iran had lied to IAEA inspectors.

“There is a sense that the administration is frustrated that their campaign to renegotiate the deal isn’t working,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

“What we see is the US maximum pressure campaign is heating up even further,” she added.

The diplomats said the fresh US allegation was based on an analysis by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Institute for Science and International Security, which used data supplied by Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has on several occasions drawn international ridicule for his allegations about Iran’s “secret” nuclear activities.

Last September, Netanyahu went to the UN to show pictures of an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons storage site, which turned out to be a carpet cleaning factory, with the IAEA ignoring the claim.

“There has been a concern that the US and some other countries want to precipitate an inspection crisis,” Geranmayeh said. “But there’s been resistance to this. The deal’s stakeholders feel they have a good grip on what’s happening in Iran.”

The US has been trying to coerce the Europeans into following its lead and withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, which President Donald Trump renounced in May.

Since the US left, the deal’s remaining powers — China, France, Germany, Russia and the UK — have struggled to provide the sanctions relief promised when Iran agreed to nuclear caps.

The Europeans are currently trying to put a special purpose vehicle designed to protect companies from US sanctions into operation, but are facing Washington’s threats of retribution for any trade with Tehran.

Bloomberg cited the diplomats in Vienna as saying that “while they will continue engaging with the US, they want to avoid provoking a scenario that will escalate into a new crisis with Iran.”

One envoy said the US was forcing the IAEA to “rehash 20-year-old information” which had already been settled by the nuclear agency, warning that it could shut the doors to diplomacy and lead to “tragic consequences”.

January 26, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Wars for Israel | , , , | Leave a comment

Florida bill would censor info on Israel-Palestine in schools, colleges

By Alison Weir | If Americans Knew | January 25, 2019

Three Florida state lawmakers have introduced a bipartisan bill that uses a new, Israel-centric definition of “anti-Semitism” that experts say would censor information about Israel-Palestine in Florida public schools and colleges.

The bill’s sponsor is Republican Mike Caruso of Palm County. The co-sponsors are Democrat Michael Grieco of Miami Beach and Republican Anthony Sabatini of Lake County.

Israel partisans are promoting such bills around the United States at both the state and federal level. The bills are part of an international effort to use an Israeli created redefinition of anti-Semitism to prohibit and even at times criminalize the dissemination of negative facts about Israel.

Entitled “HB 371 Discrimination In Florida K-20 Public Education System,” the bill contains a section on what it calls “anti-Semitism” that is virtually identical to a bill already passed in South Carolina.

Legislation using using the same Israel-centric definition has been introduced in the U.S. Congress.

Section #7 of the Florida bill states that “a public K-20 educational institution must take into consideration anti-Semitism when determining if a practice or act was discrimination on the basis of religion. For purposes of this section, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ means all of the following…” The bill then lists 13 actions that are “anti-Semitic.” Nine of them concern Israel.

The standard, dictionary definition of anti-Semitism, discrimination or hostility against Jews, says nothing about Israel.

The new, Israel-centric definition of anti-Semitism was first formulated by an Israeli government minister in 2004. The official then assisted in procuring the adoption of this formulation in the United States. Israel partisan Hannah Rosenthal adopted it in the U.S. State Department in 2010.

‘Poses threat to free speech’

Numerous analysts oppose the bills on the basis that they violate freedom of speech and academic inquiry.

The Miami New Times reports that the  ACLU of Florida plans to track the bill’s progress to ensure that it doesn’t silence political speech. An ACLU Florida spokesperson said that addressing anti-Semitism and all forms of religious discrimination “is crucial, but it does not justify silencing constitutionally protected speech. All Floridians have the right to free speech without the threat of government interference.”

The national American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has a record of opposing such legislation, stating that it poses “a serious threat to the First Amendment free speech rights of those on campus who may hold certain political views.”

In a letter of opposition to the federal bill, the ACLU stated: “The First Amendment prevents the federal government from using its great weight to impose severe penalties on a person simply for sharing a political viewpoint critical of Israel.”

An ACLU analysis points out that “anti-Semitic harassment is already illegal under federal law.” The new legislation “does not change that fact, but its overbreadth makes it likely that it will instead silence criticism of Israel that is protected by the First Amendment.”

The article, entitled “The Latest Attack on Free Speech in the Israel-Palestine Debate,” states that there is a “disturbing surge of government-led attempts to suppress the speech of people on only one side of the Israel-Palestine debate. The trend manifests on college campuses, in state contracts, and even in bills to change federal criminal law, but the impact is the same: Those who seek to protest, boycott, or otherwise criticize the Israeli government are being silenced.”

The authors conclude: “These efforts to censor criticism of the Israeli government and advocacy for Palestinian rights do a disservice to the real problem of anti-Semitism in the United States.”

‘Affront to academic freedom’

One of the individuals who helped write the Israel-centric definition, attorney Kenneth Stern, has written that imposing it on campuses is “unconstitutional and unwise.” According to Stein, applying the definition to colleges “is a direct affront to academic freedom.”

Mike Caruso, sponsor of the Florida bill, is serving his first term in the Florida legislature after an extremely close election, winning with a 32-vote margin out of about 80,000 votes cast.

He represents Palm Beach County, known as a particularly pro-Israel area of Florida; approximately one third of the residents are Jewish and there are frequent pro-Israel events in the area. The local Jewish Federation website features a prominent announcement for the 2019 convention of the Israeli American Council, which advocates for Israel.

Recent related legislation

The U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month passed a bill that would force President Trump to appoint a special envoy who would monitor criticism of Israel.

The position was created in 2005 as part of the effort for the U.S. to adopt the Israel-centric definition. The bill has not yet gone to the Senate.

The first Senate bill of 2019, S.1, would finalize a $38 billion package to Israel, the largest military aid package in U.S. history. Attempts to move the bill to a quick vote have stalled while Congress debates the government shutdown.

The bill is sponsored by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose major backers include pro-Israel advocates Norman Braman, a Florida businessman, Paul Singer, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

A companion bill, H.R.336, has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew, president of the Council for the National Interest, and author of Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel.

January 25, 2019 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel warns Ireland over bill boycotting settlement goods, summons ambassador

RT | January 25, 2019

Israel has warned Ireland over passing a bill to ban imports of West Bank settlement products, saying the legislation, if adopted, would have “severe ramifications” on mutual relations, AP reported.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry said Friday it summoned Irish Ambassador Alison Kelly to the headquarters in Jerusalem and made Israel’s stance on the matter clear to her.

The ministry says the bill, which was advanced in Ireland’s lower house of parliament on Thursday, is “hypocritical and anti-Semitic.”

The law envisions prison terms and high fines for Irish businesses trading with goods originating from illegal settlements on occupied land.

If the bill becomes law, Ireland would become the first European country to ban settlement goods and would apply to illegal occupations anywhere in the world, not just Palestine and Israel.

The EU in 2015 issued guidelines on labeling settlement products. Palestinians see the West Bank as part of their future state.

January 25, 2019 Posted by | Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , | Leave a comment

Palestinian Prisoners and Israeli national security

By Nasser Nasser | MEMO | January 24, 2019

The attempt by some in Israel to link the escalation on the Gaza border with external factors and Iranian orders was not successful. According to Haaretz newspaper’s military correspondent, Yaniv Kubovich, some security circles in Israel are claiming that the reason for the escalation was the hunger strike organised by the Islamic Jihad prisoners in Ofer Prison. However, the more accurate reason is that security agencies with narrow interests in Erdan’s interior ministry and the prison authorities attacked Palestinian prisoners, beginning with the Islamic jihad prisoners and then extended to the rest of the Palestinian prisoners.

These hostile parties believe that the Palestinian prisoners are living in a vacuum and that the attacks on them will not have any repercussions. They seem to have forgotten the hunger strike by the administrative prisoners, which led to a domino effect that resulted in a war that shook Israel for 51 days in 2014.

The security and political level in Israel can learn a valuable lesson from the escalation in Gaza occurring on January 22nd. The experience is that any attack or assault on prisoners in a barbaric manner is considered an attack on the region’s security and specifically Israel’s security. Based on this, the decision-making rules regarding the prisoners could change in a manner that does not allow those with narrow interests to make decisions that implications and consequences on Israel’s interests and security.

It is unclear whether the sniper bullet that hit the helmet of a secret commander in the Israeli army, almost killing him on January 22nd is in line with the rules of fire and understandings reached by the Palestinian resistance factions in the Gaza Strip with the Israeli occupation authorities mediated by Egypt. However, it is apparent that the Palestinian prisoners are highly regarded and respected, especially among the Palestinian people and all the Palestinian resistance factions, especially in this case the Al-Quds Brigades and Islamic Jihad. This has reached the extent of Islamic Jihad fighters targeting an Israeli officer and exposing the area to escalation. This may be because they are aware that the increase would be limited, and it may be useful to respond to the series of Israeli attacks and delays in all matters relating to understandings regarding prisoners and Gaza.

Yesterday’s incident was followed by Israeli responses, which were exaggerated as usual, in the form of attacking the resistance’s sites, leading to the death of wounding of several Palestinians. This was then followed by Netanyahu’s decision to stop the entry of Qatari funds into Gaza. These actions indicate the extent of national concern, especially in the case of the prisoners, firmly and proudly endured by the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This is at a time when many Arabs and Palestinians, especially in the leadership, abandoned the issues and concerns of their people to serve personal, narrow, or mistaken interests.

Hence, the escalation incident yesterday highlighted the fact that the prisoner issue is a matter of Palestinian national security, and that the abuse of prisoners inside the prisons and the unjust attacks on them, such as that taking place in Ofer two days ago, will also affect the Israeli national security. Many Israeli leaders and influential figures have acknowledged this, but will Minister Erdan and those like him realise this?

January 24, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Likud deputy minister enlists Hebron shooter Elor Azaria in primary campaign

Image of a demonstration against Elor Azarya, the Israeli soldier charged with manslaughter after shooting a wounded Palestinian in the head
[Wisam Hashlamoun/Apaimages]
MEMO | January 24, 2019

An Israeli deputy minister has recruited former soldier and convicted killer Elor Azaria in a campaign video ahead of Likud party primaries scheduled for 5 February, reported the Jerusalem Post.

Deputy Environmental Protection Minister Yaron Mazuz posted a video on his Facebook page yesterday showing him seated next to Azaria.

“I am sitting next to my friend Elor Azaria, whom we enlisted to our primaries campaign, and with God’s help, together with him, we will succeed,” Mazuz tells the camera.

According to the report, the video ends “with a picture of Mazuz and Azaria, who appeared to be laughing together”.

Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Mazuz gave Azaria a paid position on his campaign, and called him “intelligent and diligent”.

“We have to support our soldiers and let them act according to the threats they face in the battlefield,” Mazuz told Channel 12. “We cannot tie their hands and neuter them when facing vile murderers.”

In March 2016, Azaria shot wounded Palestinian Abdel Fatah Al-Sharif in the head in Hebron, in the occupied West Bank. He eventually served just 14 months of an 18-month manslaughter sentence.

Azaria became a popular cause for a number of right-wing Israeli politicians and groups, with rallies in support of the soldier.

READ ALSO:

Settlers give Hebron shooter a hero’s welcome at crime scene 

January 24, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , | Leave a comment

A Contrast in Murders

Aiia Maasarwe was a student at La Trobe University. (Photo: via Instagram, Ruba Photography)
By Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle | January 24, 2019

In late January Aiia al Maasarwe, initially described in the Australian media as an ‘Israeli student’, then as an ‘Arab Israeli’ but never as a Palestinian, the correct description, was murdered in Melbourne.

Aiia, a student of Chinese and English, was in Melbourne as an exchange student, had traveled home by tram after watching a comedy show and was talking to her sister in Palestine when she was attacked, raped and killed while walking a kilometer home late at night.

It was a shocking crime and Melbourne was appalled. The tram she had taken, no. 86, stopped at all stops so people could get on with bundles of flowers to be delivered to the crime scene. Government officials, including the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, made statements expressing their horror.

Compare this with Israel where, to quote The Times of Israel,

“While the murder is major news in Australia, it is not in Israel despite the fact that the two countries have comparable murder rates … no Israeli official has said anything of substance about the killing … while the murder is on the front page of leading Australian newspapers it merits merely a blip on the front page of Israel’s dailies, as will most killings of a not-terror nature.”

In the week after her death, the Israeli embassy in Canberra made contact with the family in Aiia’s home town, Baqa al Gharbiyya, but there was no personal contact from anyone in the government until President Reuven Rivlin wrote to the family.

Baqa al Gharbiyya is not ‘mostly Arab’ as the Australian media, genuflecting to Israel as always, reported but wholly Palestinian. Until Israel began building its apartheid wall in 2000, there was one Baqa: now the wall cuts it into two, Baqa al Gharbiyya (western Baqa), inside pre-1967 Israel, and Baqa al Sharqiyya (eastern Baqa), inside the territories taken in 1967.

Writing in the Guardian, Jennine Khalik, a Sydney-based Palestinian,  wrote that while it should not matter where the murdered young woman came from, it did. Either through ignorance or through deliberate suppression, the Australian media insisted that this young Palestinian was an ‘Arab Israeli,’ the official Israeli description of its Palestinian population, and a term rejected by almost all Palestinians.

In keeping with its drive to eradicate Palestine from the map, in every way and at every level, the government of Israel refuses to call its Palestinian population ‘Palestinian.’ It prefers the generic ‘Arab’ which means they come anywhere and could belong anywhere in the Middle East, except in their homeland.

Haifa University professor Sami Smooha carried out a survey in 2017 which showed that only 16 percent of Palestinians living within pre-1967 Israel was willing to be called ‘Arab Israelis.’

They have exactly the same attitude to their Palestinian identity as Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, occupied Jerusalem and the occupied Gaza Strip. The Palestinians inside pre-1967 Israel are not living in a state of its citizens like other states but a state for and of the Jewish people. By legal definition they are second class, a status deliberately created by discriminatory laws at every level and now reinforced by the passage last year of the nation-state law.

This law, declaring that Israel is a Jewish nation-state, automatically excludes the Palestinian 17.5 per of the population, Sunni or Christian, plus all others (including the Druze who serve in the armed forces) who are not Jewish.

The law is the inevitable product of a racist ideology which never intended Jews to live peacefully with the Palestinians but to live in Palestine instead of them. The consequence has been an endless round of wars with and on neighboring states, plus deepening oppression of the Palestinian people in the further territories stolen in 1967, as well as oppression of Syrians in the occupied Golan. For Israel to survive as a Jewish state on stolen land this is as it must be.

By and large, this process is supported by the Israeli Jewish population, amongst whom racism has been deliberately inculcated by religious and political leaders to the level of hatred of Palestinians, delight in their suffering and endless justification when they are killed.

Let’s get straight to a central issue here. Had the young woman murdered in Melbourne been Jewish, the media would have reported it entirely differently.  The story would have been headlines, it would have run for days and there would have been interviews with the family plus phone calls and visits from senior members of the government.

As it was, little attention was paid to the murder in the media and nothing came to the family from the government until Reuven Rivlin sent his letter. From Netanyahu and senior members of the government, there still has been no personal word of condolence for Aiia’s family.

The killing of Aiia can be contrasted with the response to the murder last October of Aisha al-Rabi. Ayesha, from the Nablus district village of Biddya, was in a car with her husband and a daughter when it was pelted with rocks thrown by youths from a nearby settlement.

These twisted youths, the young Zionist pioneers of the present generation, carrying forward the process of occupation and colonization, are hate-filled fanatics. They glory in the death or discomfort of Palestinians. They terrorize, they scrawl anti-Arab graffiti (not anti-Palestinian as they scarcely recognize the Palestinians as human beings let alone as Palestinian) on walls, they harass women and children, they destroy crops and olive trees, they commit acts of arson, they beat and occasionally they murder.

Violence of this nature has tripled in the past year, with 482 ‘incidents’ reported during the 12 months to December compared to 140 for the previous year.

Time to take a stand, one would think, but not in Israel.  Even in the most extreme circumstances the violence every excuse is found for the lenient treatment of these settler youths.

Take for example the stoning of the car which killed Ayesha Rabi’a, the mother of eight children. Many stones were thrown, near the Tapuah checkpoint, not just one, and five youths from the nearby settlement yeshiva – a religious seminary where hatred of ‘Arabs’ seems to be high on the agenda – were arrested.

In a state of its citizens, one might expect messages of sympathy to flow towards the family of the murdered woman from senior members of the government. One might expect assurances that justice would be done and the killers punished to the full extent of the law but in an ostensible Jewish state the sympathy flowed in the other direction, towards the families of the youths accused of killing Ayesha.

They were visited by Ayelet Shaked, the so-called ‘justice minister’ in Netanyahu’s coalition government, a vicious racist by any definition.

In 2015 Shaked paid a similar visit to the families of the youths accused of firebombing a Palestinian home at Douma in July, killing three members of the Dawabshe family, husband, and wife and their 18-month-old son Ali, with only five-year-old Ahmad surviving.

Shaked expressed her sympathy with the families’ plight and encouraged one mother to ‘stay strong.’

There was no visit by Shaked or anyone else in the Israeli government to the relatives of the murdered Palestinian family. While public outrage was expressed in demonstrations, settlers continued to celebrate the murders. At a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem in late 2015, guests brandishing Molotov cocktails, knives and guns danced around holding photos above their heads of Ali Dawabsheh which they then proceeded to stab and burn. The persecution of the Dawabsheh family by settlers continued, with a family house being destroyed in May 2018.

In June 2018 the ‘Lod’ (Lydda – ethnically cleansed in 1948) district court ruled out some of the confessions of the accused youths on the grounds that they had been obtained under torture. One of the defendants who had confessed to previous acts of arson, vandalism and the scrawling of hate graffiti on walls was released to house arrest.

Outside the court several dozen ‘hilltop youth’ celebrated, taunting the Dawabsheh grandfather with cries of ‘Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is on the grill.’ When Reuven Rivlin condemned Jewish terror he received a spate of death threats. The case against the main defendant continues.

Ayalet Shaked was a member of the Jewish Home party until she broke away recently and founded, along with Naftali Bennett, who also split from the Jewish Home, the Heyemin Hehadash (New Right) party.

This new grouping is being misleadingly defined as ‘conservative’. In fact, it is violently rightwing and racist, effectively a Jewish fascist party. Bennett has boasted of killing ‘Arabs’, while Shaked, like many Zionist racists before her, has compared the Palestinians to snakes.

In the meantime, while all of this goes on inside occupied Palestine, the retiring Israeli army chief, Gadi Eisenkot, has boasted that Israel has carried out thousands of air attacks on Syria in recent years, attacking, in fact, almost on a daily basis.

Many of these attacks have been carried out from Lebanese air space. Some have been made behind the radar shield of civilian aircraft, once behind a Russian military aircraft which was then shot down by Syrian air defenses. A frequent target has been installations around Damascus international airport, prompting the Syrian ambassador at the UN, Bashar al Ja’afiri, to warn that if the UN does not intervene, Syria might be forced to retaliate against Tel Aviv airport.

Eisenkot was the author of the ‘Dahiye doctrine’ according to which the aerial destruction visited on the Beirut suburb of Dahiya – the political headquarters of Hizbullah – in 2006 will be carried out across Lebanon in the next war.

Israel is also campaigning again for war on Iran, if it does not start one by its attacks on Syria. Internally and externally, this racist and violent state, a time bomb planted in the Middle East by the British a century ago, is destined to erupt cataclysmically at some point in the future.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).

January 24, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Syria Ready to Strike Tel-Aviv, Determined to Liberate Golan (Full UN Speech)

Statement of the Permanent Representative of Syria at the UN, Dr. Bashar Ja’fari, during the Security Council devoted to the situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question, January 22nd, 2019.

Transcript:

Thank you, Mr. President.

In the beginning, I congratulate your country [Dominican Republic] for your non-permanent membership in the Security Council, and I congratulate you personally for presiding over the work of this Council during this month. I welcome the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indonesia, Mrs. Marsudi, and I congratulate Palestine, the State of Palestine for presiding over the G77 + China.

Mr. President,

Yesterday, the Israeli occupation forces once again committed a series of aggression using missiles targeting the Syrian Arab Republic territories from above Lebanese territories – it was mentioned by my colleague, the representative of Lebanon in great detail. They attacked us from above the Lebanese territories, from the occupied Palestinian territories and from the See of Galilee in the occupied Syrian Golan. This was a gross violation of international law, of the UN Charter and of the relevant UN Security Council Resolutions, as well as the 1974 Disengagement Agreement (between Israel and Syria).

These acts of aggression would not have been committed if the Security Council hadn’t failed in compelling the implementation of Security Council Resolutions relevant to the Israeli-Arab conflict over long decades, and were it not for the unlimited support provided by some permanent members of this Security Council to this rogue entity. This encouraged Israel to increase their frequent crimes, violations and State terrorism, away from any kind of accountability, even purely formal. This was demonstrated by the repeated acts of aggression against my country carried out by Israel, and the multifaceted support they provided for years to terrorist organizations.

These acts were not condemned, nor was there any call by the Security Council to stop such acts, in light of the position of the US, Britain and France, who are accomplices and supporters of Israel in such acts of aggression. The policies of these 3 countries and their stances in the UN run counter, in the letter and spirit, to the responsibility they are supposed to shoulder in maintaining international peace and security in line with the international law and the UN Charter’s provisions. The fact that these countries continue to play the role of false witnesses and prevent the Security Council from undertaking its responsibilities will not stop us from exercising our legitimate right of self-defense and work on retaking the occupied Syrian Golan by all means possible.

Mr. President,

Recovering the Syrian Golan is an established right for the Syrian Arab Republic. This imprescriptible right is not subject to negotiations, concessions or expiration. The full withdrawal of the Israeli occupying forces from the Golan, to the June 4th, 1967 line is an obligation that shall be fulfilled. It is an unwavering demand based on the principles of international law and the binding UN International Resolutions, including your own resolutions 242, 338 and 497.

Israel feverishly strives to alter this reality, as we have seen today in the Israeli representative’s intervention – he talked about everything, except the Palestinian cause and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel feverishly strives to alter this reality, and keeps uttering aggressive statements and undertaking criminal acts, but they are doomed to fail, and will never lead in any form whatsoever to any prejudice against the legal or sovereign rights of my country.

Certain countries have invested heavily in the terrorist war waged against my country, and counted on the situation of some countries in the region to overshadow Arab rights and choke the voices calling to implement the binding UN International Resolutions imposing the end of the Israeli occupation of Arab land. Moreover, these countries tried to achieve gains for the occupation and promote some suspicious deal to liquidate the Palestinian cause and the established and unwavering rights of the peoples and countries in the region.

They tried to ignite artificial strife and stir surrealist conflicts between countries of the region, in order to deviate their attention from the fundamental cause of what’s happening in the Middle East. All this lack of stability, prosperity and development is because of the continued Israeli occupation, Israeli settlements and Israeli massacre of the Palestinian cause.

Mr. President,

The past period has witnessed many dangerous and systematic Israeli practices, through which the occupying forces tempted to consolidate their control and impose their will on the occupied Syrian Golan. Let us mention for example: holding meetings of the Israeli government in the occupied Syrian Golan; striving to organize illegitimate local elections there; signing deals and issuing permits to loot the natural resources of the Golan; just recently, looting the properties of Syrians and displacing them to establish a project for wind power generation over around 6000 dunams of land, in some of the surrounding sites around the cities of Magd al-Chams, Ayn Qania, Buqata and Massada; and the continuous settlement activity as well as crimes and daily repression against Syrian citizens under the yoke of the occupation. They arrest them and throw them in Israeli prisons arbitrarily, as is still the case of the activist Sedqi al-Maqet, Syria’s Nelson Mandela, and Amal Abu Saleh. They also subject other Syrians to house arrest. The Israeli officials have also issued repeated aggressive statements, which stress that the occupying power cares neither about international law nor about the Resolutions of your Council, and intends to continue its occupation.

Unfortunately, all these issues and their rejection by our people in the Golan did not catch the attention of the Special Coordinator, Mr. Mladinov, so that they could be included in his monthly briefing to you. Worse, he avoided on purpose to call things by their names. He talked to us about about the side “Alpha” and the side “Bravo”, as if each of you knew what means Alpha and what means Bravo [1], instead of issuing a clear condemnation of the almost daily Israeli aggression against the territories of the Syrian Arab Republic, including the continuous aggression against the Damascus International Civil Airport, which is, I repeat, a civilian airport. Such blatant disregard is a political and moral failure to undertake his mandate in a way that turns counter to the principles and rules applicable in the UN, and thus deprives him of any legitimacy.

Mr President, isn’t it high time for this Council to take the necessary measures to stop the repeated Israeli aggression against the territories of my country? Or should we attract the attention of the war makers of this Council by exercising our legitimate right for self-defense and respond to the Israeli aggression against the Damascus International Civil Airport in kind by striking Tel-Aviv Airport?

Mr. President,

We are pragmatic and we know the differences in the political stances of the members of this Council. However, we call upon you to focus on the common ground that joins us, that is the international law, the UN Charter and the Resolutions of this Council of yours. Thus, we stress the necessity for the countries supporting Israel, its policies and stances to review their approach, to stick to that common ground that I have touched upon now, and to work towards the restoration of the legitimate rights to their true owners in line with the binding UN International Resolutions and the internationally recognized bodies. Otherwise, the destiny of this international organization will be just a repeat of the failure of the League of Nations for the same reasons.

Let us remember that many of the calamities suffered by our country came due to the violation of international law and of the UN Charter, through the constitution of illegitimate coalitions like the ones which targeted Irak, Libya, Yemen, Syria and others, and due to call for meetings that bypass the Security Council, like this Warsaw Meeting [called by the US against Iran], or the Middle East Strategic Coalition known among intelligence experts as the NATO of the Middle East. All these coalitions are made outside the UN Security Council.

This begs the question : from where do such coalitions and meetings gain their legitimacy? Are international relations governed by international law and the UN Charter upon which the founding fathers strove to agree? Or are they governed by the will and the destructive agendas of some countries? Are we not correct, Mr. President, to warn that this organization might end up just like the League of Nations if we do not hold a stance against the policies of these countries? The absence of a UN sponsoring of the Warsaw meeting clearly shows that such an approach will not manage to resolve anything, and won’t realize what was announced by the organizers themselves, namingly the drafting of a common strategy on the Middle East. They said themselves that the Warsaw meeting meant to draft a common strategy on the Middle East.

Mr. President,

My country expresses its firm and principled position supporting the rights of the Palestinian people for self-determination and independent statehood over all its territories with Al-Quds (Jerusalem) as its capital, and the right of return of the refugees in line with Resolution 194 of 1948. We renew and stress that any measures that would prejudice those rights are null, void and rejected, and will only escalate tensions and threaten peace and security in the region and in the world.

To conclude, Mr. President, I tell those who are trying to redraw the maps of our region along their own whims that our people, who stood against the unprecedented international terrorist war imposed on us, will also stand against such evil plans, and will thwart them just as he thwarted others over decades.

Thank you, Mr. President

[1] Here is how Nickolay Mladenov, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, briefed the Security Council on the Israeli aggression, at the beginning of the session:

“On the occupied Golan, the ceasefire between Israel and Syria has been maintained with relative calm and low levels of military activity in the areas of separation and limitation on the Bravo side. UNDOF attributes this activity to controlled detonations of explosive ordnance as part of clearance conducted by Syrian security forces. The relative calm in the UNDOF area of operation was interrupted by events that occurred on 25 December and most recently on 20 and 21 January.

On 25 December, UNDOF observed a helicopter on the Alpha side fire four rockets that impacted on the Bravo side. On that day, UNDOF also heard and observed surface-to-air missiles, anti-aircraft defense guns, rockets and heavy machine guns fired on the Bravo side but could not observe the points of origin or impact.

On 20 and 21 January, UNDOF observed and heard an increase in air activity over, and firing of missiles into, the areas of separation and limitation on the Bravo side. UNDOF liaised with both sides to de-escalate the situation. The observations of military activity coincided with open source reports of Israel’s confirming that it had conducted a series of airstrikes on targets in Syria in response to a missile fired from Syria intercepted by Israel.

Such events demonstrate the volatility of the area and risk jeopardizing the long-standing ceasefire between the two countries. It is critical that both parties to the 1974 Disengagement of Forces Agreement respect the Agreement at all times to prevent escalation across the ceasefire line and actions that undermine progress towards stability in the area.”

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_4FA4VblHg

Translation: unz.com/sayedhasan

January 23, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

UN Officials Reaffirm that Forcible Transfers are In Breach of Geneva Convention

IMEMC News & Agencies | January 23, 2019

After visiting the Palestinian Sabbagh family, who is facing eviction from its home, in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied Jerusalem, for the benefit of Israeli settlers, United Nations and other officials have again warned that forced eviction and transfer of Palestinians are a breach of Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jamie McGoldrick, Humanitarian Coordinator United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the occupied Palestinian territory, Gwyn Lewis, Director of West Bank Operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), James Heenan, Head of Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in the occupied Palestinian territory, and Kate O’Rourke, Country Director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in a statement that they visited the Sabbagh family “who face imminent forced eviction from their home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, part of the occupied Palestinian territory, and are at heightened risk of forcible transfer.”

According to the statement, the Sabbagh family is a Palestinian refugee family originally from Jaffa city, who were settled in the neighborhood, along with 27 other families, with the support of the United Nations and the Jordanian government, in the 1950s.

Like other families in the area, for years they have been engaged in a legal dispute opposing efforts by Israeli settler organizations to evict them from their homes. Recently, this legal struggle was deemed unsuccessful as Israeli courts have ruled in favor of the settlers’ claims. Thirty-two members of the Sabbagh family, including six children, now face forced eviction, while an additional 19 members will be directly affected by the loss of the family property, should the eviction take place.

“In the occupied Palestinian territory, strict obligations apply with regard to the prohibition of forcible transfer and forced eviction,” said the officials in the statement. “Along with house demolitions, forced evictions are one of the major factors contributing to the creation of a coercive environment that may result in no other choice for individuals or communities but to leave. Forcible transfer is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Forced evictions contrary to international law also violate the right to adequate housing and the right to privacy, and may be incompatible with other human rights.”

They added, according to WAFA : “In many cases in East Jerusalem, including in Sheikh Jarrah, the forced eviction of Palestinians is occurring within the context of Israeli settlement construction and expansion, illegal under international humanitarian law. An estimated 3,500 Israelis are currently living in settlements established with the support of the Israeli authorities in the heart of Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem. In Sheikh Jarrah alone, more than 200 Palestinians face potential eviction, should they be unsuccessful in similar cases currently before Israeli courts.”

They called on the Israeli authorities “to immediately halt plans to evict the Sabbagh family to prevent further displacement of these refugees, cease settlement construction, and abide by their obligations as an occupying power under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

January 23, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | , , , , , | Leave a comment

In letter, Palestinian Authority asks US to drop all remaining aid

Press TV – January 23, 2019

The Palestinian Authority (PA) says it will refuse American aid in its entirety after Washington cut humanitarian funds to Palestinians, adding that accepting such help could carry unwelcome legal consequences for the Ramallah-based administration.

The Authority “sent an official letter to the US administration requesting it stop all aid to the PA, including assistance to the Palestinian security services,” senior negotiator Saeb Erekat said on Tuesday.

US President Donald Trump has already pledged to cut almost all humanitarian aid to Palestinians. American-funded projects are being phased out gradually.

Erekat further said the decision was made due to concerns over the so-called Anti-Terrorism Clarification Act (ATCA), approved by President Trump in October 2018, which makes it possible for US citizens to sue foreign entities that receive US aid.

This may prompt US families to start exposing the PA to “costly” lawsuits over alleged “past Palestinian attacks,” AFP said.

American authorities have, in the past, blamed Palestinians for “political violence” targeting American interests inside and outside the occupied territories. This is while Washington provides an annual military aid of around $3 billion to Israel, which engages in routine deadly acts of aggression against Palestinians.

PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah wrote in the letter sent to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo back on December 26, 2018 that “as of January 31st, 2019, it fully disclaims and no longer wishes to accept any form of assistance referenced in ATCA.”

The US aid features roughly $50 million in annual support for Palestinian security services, including support for security coordination with the regime in Tel Aviv. Israel claims that the coordination is “crucial” for maintaining calm in the occupied West Bank, where Israeli acts of aggression are a daily occurrence.

Relations between the PA and the US, already strained due to Washington’s unwavering support for Israel, took an unprecedented dip in late 2017, when Washington recognized Jerusalem al-Quds as Israel’s “capital” in the face of the Palestinians’ internationally-recognized claims to the occupied city.

The PA, in response, stopped recognizing any mediation role by Washington in the decades-long conflict with the Israeli regime.

January 23, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | Leave a comment

Syria threatens to ‘strike Tel Aviv airport’ unless UNSC acts against Israel’s impunity

RT | January 23, 2019

Damascus has threatened to exercise its legitimate right for self-defense against Israeli aggression and target Tel Aviv airport in a mirror response, unless the Security Council puts an end to IDF intrusions into Syrian airspace.

Apparently fed up with years of Israeli impunity in the Syrian skies and regular strikes carried out in the vicinity of Damascus International Airport, Syria has threatened to retaliate in explicit terms.

“Isn’t time now for the UN Security Council to stop the Israeli repeated aggressions on the Syrian Arab Republic territories?” Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, Dr. Bashar al-Jaafari wondered Tuesday.

“Or is it required to draw the attention of the war-makers in this Council by exercising our legitimate right to defend ourself and respond to the Israeli aggression on Damascus International Civil Airport in the same way on Tel Aviv Airport?”

Air strikes against alleged ‘Iranian targets’ in close proximity to Syria’s busiest airport have become a norm for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), whose former chief of staff openly confessed last month to running a large-scale bombing campaign in Syria for years. Besides causing casualties and material damage by their “near-daily” strikes, Israeli combat missions into Syria have also repeatedly endangered flights operating over the conflict-torn country.

While the IDF rarely acknowledges striking specific targets in Syria, the Russian military has been keeping a close watch on IDF maneuvers over the Arab Republic. On Christmas Day, Israeli jets endangered two civilian aircraft while engaging targets in Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry said, noting that the IDF F-16s flew in as civilian jets were landing at Beirut and Damascus airports. In September, Israeli actions resulted in the death of 15 Russian servicemen after Israeli jets deliberately used Russian Il-20 recon plane as a cover and placed it into the path of a Syrian air defense missile.

Urging the UN Security Council to adopt measures to stop such blatant violations of Syrian sovereignty by the Jewish state, Jaafari accused France, Britain and the US – all permanent members of the world body – of endorsing Israeli aggression in breach of their responsibility to “maintain international peace and security in accordance with international law.”

Placing little faith into Western intentions to bring long-awaited peace to the country, the diplomat noted that Syria plans to restore full sovereignty over its lost territories, including the Golan Heights, which Israel continues to occupy.

“The restoration sovereignty of the occupied Syrian Golan is a permanent right of Syria that [is] not subject to negotiations,” Jafari stressed.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War. While Tel Aviv refrained from extending sovereignty over the Golan for over a decade, in 1981 the Jewish state annexed the area. The Druze of the Golan were offered full Israeli citizenship under the Golan Heights Law of 1981, but only a small minority changed their allegiance from Syria to Israel. Syria repeatedly reiterated that the occupied land is an integral part of its territory, and that it will work to return it by all means necessary. Tel Aviv sees things differently.

“Israel will remain forever on the Golan Heights, and the Golan Heights will forever remain in our hands,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in November, after the US become the only state to vote alongside Israel against a symbolic, non-binding UN resolution calling on Tel Aviv to withdraw from the occupied region.

January 22, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Malaysia’s Decision to Bar Israeli Athletes Was Much Needed

By Yousef Aljamal | Palestine Chronicle | January 22, 2019

Malaysia has historically been a strong supporter of the Palestinian people who experienced and continue to experience colonization, military occupation and many forms of discrimination for over 100 years.

In fact, it has always been Malaysia’s policy to support the Palestinian people, who have suffered immensely due to the ongoing Zionist colonization project in Palestine, which resulted in establishing Israel on the ruins of Palestinian homes.

Support for Palestine has been expressed under different Malaysian governments, most notably under the administrations of Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, who has always been vocal in his criticism of Israel’s discriminatory and militant policies.

Palestine has always enjoyed the support of ordinary Malaysians, who exhibited their strong solidarity, often in emotional ways, during times of Israeli wars on the Gaza Strip in 2008-9, 2012 and 2014.

Islam and its shared values among Palestinians and Malaysians have always played a big part in the existing rapport between both nations.

However, due to existing ethnic tensions in the country, solidarity with the Palestinian people, has, at times, seemed confined to the Malay Muslim community.

While such a truth remains paramount, perspectives began to change in recent years, as Chinese and Indian communities developed a keener understanding of the situation in Palestine. Therefore, seeing Chinese and Indian activists at the forefront of Palestine solidarity in Malaysia is no longer a rare event. A reason behind this important shift is the fact that the approach of solidarity itself evolved from a religious-based appeal to a human-rights based one.

The year 2015 saw the first Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) conference in the country, held at the University of Malaya, where the importance of boycott as a political tool for change was stressed and thoroughly discussed.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that a radical shift started on that very date. More Malaysians engaged with the BDS movement then, launching campaigns against HP, G4S and other international companies involved in facilitating Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Therefore, the decision by Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to ban Israeli athletes is a rational step in that direction.

Last year, Malaysians voted in historical elections that changed their government to what many Malaysians hoped would be in the best interests of their country. The move by the Malaysian government to ban Israeli athletes from participating in an international sports event set to be held in the city of Kuching this year is a representation of this momentous change.

The elections, many hope, would decrease ethnic tensions and bring more justice to all Malaysians.

Palestinians have been suffering under Israeli colonization and military occupation for more than 70 years. Despite massive Palestinian political and territorial compromises, Israel gave up nothing. For example, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) has conceded 78% of historic Palestine in return for peace, which never actualized. To the contrary, the pace of illegal Jewish construction has increased by several folds and military occupation of Palestine is more entrenched than ever before.

This grim reality was the main motive behind the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society to boycott Israel. The BDS movement is the outcome of that collective Palestinian decision.

According to this call, Palestinians demand:

  1. Ending Israeli occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Apartheid Wall.
  2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.
  3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in United Nations Resolution 194.

The truth is this, Israel has never respected Malaysia, its people and national security. The Israeli Mossad is widely believed to have been behind the assassination of Palestinian scholar Dr. Fadi Al-Batsh on a Malaysian soil last year. Thus, Israel has actively been engaged in harming Malaysia’s national security. This alone should be a compelling rationale for Malaysia – which has no diplomatic relationship with Israel anyway – to ban Israeli athletes.

Sports and politics are directly linked as the boycott of the South African Apartheid regime has shown in the past. Malaysia certainly did the right thing by banning Israeli athletes, especially as the Palestinian people are reduced to live in disconnected Bantustans in the West Bank and under a hermetic siege in Gaza.

Malaysians are important in the global solidarity movement, and their support for BDS can prove crucial considering the country’s large and diverse economy. This country, which has often chosen morality over politics can indeed help the Palestinian people end the oppressed Israeli Apartheid regime.

As a Malaysia Alumnus, and a Palestinian who lost two of my siblings because of Israel’s colonization, I call upon every single Malaysian to support equality for all in Palestine, by contributing to our collective struggle through the BDS movement.

Apartheid can only be defeated when we all realize that “a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

January 22, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

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