Israel continues injustices against occupied Palestinians

The respected Israeli Uri Avnery writes every week about events in his country.


He fought in the so-called "war of independence" on the side of Israel and was a highly respected member of the Israeli Knesset.

It is not comforting to read his constant witness to the ongoing injustices perpetrated on the Palestinian population by the Israeli occupiers.

Lately he wrote about the recent visit of President Obama and his contrasting attitudes when he visited Israel and the West Bank.  Every word right in Israel, but in the Palestinian occupied West Bank, a different story...


"He told his Israeli audience to “put yourselves in the shoes of the Palestinians”. But did he do so himself? 

Can he imagine what it means to wait every night for the brutal banging on the door? 

To be woken by the noise of bulldozers approaching, wondering whether they are coming to destroy your home? 

To see a settlement growing on your land and waiting for the settlers to come and carry out a pogrom in your village? 

 Being unable to move on your roads? 

To see your father humiliated at the road blocks? 

To throw stones at armed soldiers and brave tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and sometimes live ammunition?
 
Can he even imagine having a brother, a cousin, a loved one in prison for many, many years because of his patriotic actions or beliefs, after facing the arbitrariness of a military “court”, or even without a “trial” at all?
 
This week, a prisoner called Maisara Abu-Hamdiyeh died in prison, and the West Bank exploded in rage. Israeli journalists ridiculed the protest, stating that the man died from a fatal disease, so Israel could not be blamed.
 
Did any of them imagine for a moment what it means for a human being to suffer from cancer, with the disease slowly spreading through his body, deprived of adequate treatment, cut off from family and friends, seeing death approaching? 

What if it had been their father?"

Letter on Guantanamo posted online to White House website.

To President Obama of the US and Barack Obama, human being

( I posted this letter without headings today)


Your promise to close down Guantanamo remains unfulfilled.

Instead, prisoners who are completely innocent are being held imprisoned indefinitely without trial.

Worse still they are being tortured, force fed and their human rights destroyed in a United States hell hole where United States law does not apply.

There is no regard for ethics, morality or international law.

The recent comments you have made, Barack, Mr President, indicate that your own concern is more about the bad name Guantanamo is giving to the US than any concern you have for the basic human rights of the tortured victim inmates you have flown from innocent freedom into Guantanamo torture.

You are right to believe that your name is besmirched because of Guantanamo but surely you as a human being should have deeper concerns about the individual welfare of these innocent victims of US torture and injustice.

Close Guantanamo, free the kidnapped victims, admit your crimes, stop interfering in other countries' affairs in a biased way. 

Be a man, a human we can be proud of, someone your children will be proud of, someone who uses your immense moral power without fear to do good rather than evil.

Please don't plead inability.

Remember YES YOU CAN.

With best personal wishes

Justin Morahan

zero dark thirty

Uneasy viewing in Tallaght last night, and not just because of the torture.

I had a queasy feeling that this was a slick production that deliberately set out to justify Bush and Obama's wars and their acceptance of torture as a legitimate weapon.

The character of  the oh-so-sensitive but determinedly patriotic "Maya" played by Jessica Chastain reinforced my queasy feeling. Maya is portrayed by Jessica as a beautiful CIA agent who has all the charm you need to win over a partisan audience to her producer's point of view.

She is the female John Wayne without the guns but not without the hired guns and water boarders.  We are back to the days of the good guys and the bad guys, cowboys and Indians. And the cheer lines are there after the horrors.

As torturers cannot even yet be depicted as heroes for cinema-goers, Maya is always at one remove from the torturers.  The horror on her face, while it is happening, assures us that here is a human being, just doing her duty to her  country.

As with the cowboy and Indian myths, America is good, Bin Laden is bad. So kill Bin Laden.

The film begins with a dark screen with frantic voices.  This is meant to depict 9/11. There is no serious question asked about why or how this atrocity happened.  We are expected to know.  Didn't George W Bush tell us it was Bin Laden.

The lies of the neo-cons, post 9/11, are air-brushed out of the narrative.  The war in Iraq - scarcely a mention.  It has to be good guys and bad guys - or good dolls and bad guys.

It was the perfect propaganda entertainment for the convinced and the brain-washed.

When I was told that American audiences did not take kindly to the film, I wondered about Kathryn Bigelow, the award-winning producer - was I misjudging her.

Was she maybe telling it as it was, warts and all?  She did point to the hypocrisy of Barack Obama by juxtaposing a torture scene in the film with a real TV clip of the President telling his audience that America does not do torture.

But then again, Obama was not the "hero" of this production.  The real hero was the CIA and the young woman who described herself as the "mother-fucker" (sic) who had found Bin Laden's hiding place.

Letter to Atorney General Chris Koster of Missouri

This morning I got good news and bad news from the Innocence Project.   

 George Allen Jr. was released from a Missouri courthouse earlier this month after serving more than 30 years for a rape and murder that previously undisclosed evidence shows he didn’t commit. Judge Daniel Green overturned Allen’s 1982 rape and murder conviction based on police failure to disclose evidence pointing to his innocence and ordered Allen’s release. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce announced that she will not retry Allen for the crime, Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster filed a meritless appeal to a state intermediate appeals court, which is only serving to further delay justice for Allen.

Having looked up Chris Koster's website I was pleased to find an  e-mail contact: attorney.general@ago.mo.gov.

My e-mail to him was returned however, unread. So I am hoping that he will now be able to read it here when one of his helpers Googles his name for news.

Letter to Chris Koster

Dear Chris

I read with horror the case of George Allen recently released after 30 years of unjust imprisonment in your State.

It beggars belief that officers used every trick of their trade to get false confessions from this man, false confessions that have now been discredited but which have kept him as a prisoner for all of those years.

What an outrage for any human being to be deprived of his liberty for a crime that he did not commit.

How terrible to think that this human being could have been murdered by the State through the connivance of its officers only for a juror's unexpected and enforced absence rendered the sentence of death impossible on the day.

DNA has been the ace that has has shown up all the false convictions that have taken place throughout the United States over many years on people who were often inadequate poor black or from poorer strata of society.

I am amazed and horrified to learn that, in spite of all the new evidence pointing to a gross miscarriage of justice against George Allen, you, Chris, have decided to appeal the decision to release him and so put him through further torment with the courts.

I appeal to you to reverse this decision.

With best personal wishes

Justin Morahan 
Human rights activist

Netanyahu a War Criminal says Nobel Peace Laureate

Calls for Boycott,Divestment, Sanctions

Summary: In a speech delivered in Belfast on 24 October 2012, Mairead Maguire declared that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's Premier, is a war criminal. She also criticised Obama's stance on Israel, and the media's lies; and she called for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel

The following is the full text of her speech


"Hello Everybody, I would like to thank the Irish congress of Trade Unions and all the other organisations for inviting me to speak today and for organising this rally and I would like to thank each and every one of you for coming along today. We heard that the ceasefire has been declared but we know that this is not the end of the siege of Gaza or the occupation of the people of Palestine. We witnessed yet again on our television sets this week inhumanity that we cannot believe is allowed to exist. It was called 'self-defence'. But how can you call self-defence the massacre of women and children in Gaza and the destruction of their infrastructure, this is a war, these are crimes against humanity, we declare that Netanyahu is a war criminal and we can do something about this.

We can ensure that when any of the Israeli leaderships such as, Perez, Netanyahu and their military war executive, try to leave their country and come to any civilized country, we as the people will issue our own indictments of war crimes. We as the people have to stand up for human rights, for international law, for democracy, for a future for our world, because if we don't do this, our world will plunge into war and to destruction and to barbarity and we will not have such a thing as a civil or political or religious liberty or right. We elect politicians to serve the people, to stand up for our right to food, education, safety and security.

Obama's dismal failure

Our politicians are failing us dismally; we have no real political leadership with any moral courage in our world today. We supported Obama when he came in and said 'there is a new way'. President Obama stood in Burma this week and he said: ' There is no excuse for violence against innocent people', what was his message about the violence against the people of Gaza? What has his message been about the violence, occupation,destruction, persecution, apartheid regime against the Palestinian people for the last 60 years? His message was (and the minutes are available from the White house two weeks ago) ' We will uphold Israel’s right to self-defence and anybody who questions that, we will not accept'.

What kind of political leadership is that to our people in the world today? The biggest block to real change is not Israel but the United States of America continually vetoing and supporting the murder of children in Gaza and war against civilians.

What Israel is about

We have to know what Israel is about. Jimmy Carter gave an interview last week, and in this interview Jimmy Carter said the policy of the Israeli government is to confiscate Palestinian land. The policy of the Israeli government is to take more and more Palestinian land, they want a greater Israel and not only do they want a greater Israel, they want the 20% of the Arab people who live within Israel proper to acknowledge Israel as a 'Jewish state'. They want a Jewish state for a Jewish people. When do they think we're living? Do they think we're living in the dark ages? Every person has a right to their statehood. Every person has a right to their freedom, a right to dignity. But it's about the land stupid, it's about the land as Bill Clinton would say, it's about the territory stupid. Let's wake up, this is not about Hamas, this is not about the fact that Israel has no partner for peace. I sat with Yasser Arafat in his little compound before he was killed and he cried out for peace. I sat in Gaza with Hamas in 2008 and they cried out for peace. What was Israel's answer? Israel's answer was war against them, and not only dropping one or two bombs but the policy of the Israeli government, and look it up, is that when they go to war, they do the utmost damage. They don't kill one or two, they destroy a people.

"Sociocide"

There's a new concept available now, it's called 'Sociocide', you know our Philosophers and our Professors, too many of them who sit behind university walls, if it’s not going out to new links with other universities so they can get more money for military experiments. Sociocide means another country destroys a people’s whole ability to live - and this is what’s happening in Gaza. The Gazan people: their identities are being destroyed as Palestinians, their country is being destroyed as Palestine, their children are being killed, their spirit is being dampened, they're being demonised by the Israelis as if they were nothing. Who are the Palestinians? The Israelis created another lie in 1948 when they said they went to 'a land without people', they went to a land that was full of the very best of people, good people, kind people, people who opened their hearts to them coming in, in 1948, people who gave them homes and supported them and what did the Israelis do? What did the Zionists do? In 1948, they cleared over 400 Palestinian villages, putting the people out of their homes. The Palestinians had to flee their land, this was 'The Nakba' of the Palestinian people. It was genocide as important as the genocide of the Holocaust. I've been to Auschwitz, I am not an Anti-Semite. I've been to Auschwitz, I've seen the suffering and in Auschwitz I swore the next time I saw people suffering like this I would not remain silent and we must not remain silent.

We must stand up against Israeli aggression

It is a myth that The Nakba and the ethnic cleansing that went on in 1948 by the Israeli's is over. It's happening today as we stand. The Israelis are clearing villages in the Negev desert so they can take over the very best of Palestinian land. We must up stand up against this. This is not acceptable and we're not powerless. We're not powerless, the people of Northern Ireland, no they're not powerless because we know what it's like for bombings and shootings and killings and fear and division. And we stood up and we said this is not acceptable. So the people of Israel and Palestine together can stop this. They have to do it, because the world leaders are not going to do it. The people have to do it and do it together, because Israeli's too are suffering.

Boycott, Divest, Sanction

We must support the Israeli Peace Activists. They are on a hard road but their message is right. Their message is non-violence, dialogue and solving this problem. It's not who will start this problem; it's who will end it. Boycott all Israeli goods. Boycott Israel and the companies that trade with them. Divest from Israel and the countries that support Israel. We must applaud the Co-op, because the Co-op, one of the first retailers has come out with a very strong Boycott campaign and we send out from this platform our thanks to the Co-op and we implore more and more to follow their example. But, you know, also sanctions, sanctions against the arms that are flowing into Israel. We must say to America, you are breaking your own laws because every day you have 8 million dollars going to support the militarism of Israel. They are being used illegally by Israel and America has to stop this. Europe too has a lot of work, Europe funds Israel, Israel gets more money out of the European kitty - and that's our money - to do military research so it can remain a nuclear weapons country with the fourth biggest army in the world.

We're paying for that, so they use these to destroy a country and destroy the buildings that our tax money built in Gaza. This is not acceptable.

Lies from the Media

I thank you all for coming. We are powerful but the most important thing, our greatest enemy is cowardice, our greatest enemy are those who refuse to speak the truth because of their own fear. Our greatest enemies are people like the BBC and the media who tell lies about what is happening . Where are the media reporting exactly what is happening? We demand, we're paying tax, we're paying our license and we want the truth. Thank you very much for all you’re doing. There's great hope because I have met with the Israeli activists and I have met with the Palestinian people and witnessed their message of non-violence, Palestine has a great non-violence movement, tragically a lot of them are in Israeli prisons. So we together can solve this and help our Palestinian people. We did it in Northern Ireland and we are a model. People said it couldn't be done, we said it will not be done through militarism, arm struggle and violence. It will be done with truth and courage and love and forgiveness and we can do it. That's our message to the Israeli and Palestinian people. You can do it another way.''