Anti-apartheidist and supporter of Palestinian rights Archbishop Desmond Tutu supports the Occupy movement. ‘In a letter to OWS, Tutu describes Trinity Church, on Wall Street, as an “esteemed and valued old friend” but said it caused him pain to hear of the impasse in negotiations between OWS and the church over the site.’
Nutanyahoo expresses his wish that violent settler rioters will be prosecuted in military courts, as are occupied Palestinians. Does this presage the advent of similar juridicial trying of Israelis who are in solidarity with Palestinians, arrested for protesting Israel’s apartheid wall, land grabs and occupation?
Barak would rather treat the settler thugs as a terror group yet suggests ‘administrative arrests’. Lieberman worries about the impact of the rioters on the fortunes of Israel’s illegal settlements projects, seeing them as “weeds that must be uprooted.”
The ministers’ comments came after some 50 settlers and right-wing activists entered a key West Bank military base on Tuesday, throwing rocks, burning tires, and vandalizing military vehicles.
In an apparent price-tag attack earlier Wednesday, anonymous perpetrators set a historical Jerusalem mosque alight, spray painting phrases such as “Muhammad is dead” and “Muhammad is a pig” on its walls.
Also on Wednesday, Justice Minister Ne’eman is expected to form a list of proposals geared at toughening legal actions against right-wing activists and in the wake of recent price tag attacks.
Prosecution under military law would marginalise the settlers from Israel proper and could also move the goal posts contemporaneously for solidarity protesters.
The zionist ‘State’ has spoken – violent acts against its ‘defensive’ apparatus are not civil crimes, but acts of war regardless of whether the ‘crime’ is committed by the occupied, or those who steal from occupied Palestinians. (Crimes of theft from Palestinians and even crimes of violence against Palestinians by illegal settlers however are rarely prosecuted by Israel.) With its response to the settler assault on its IOF, the state is setting itself against its own nationals.
This is the sort of contradiction which exemplifies fascism. In fascist states, the state, the collective of ‘nationals’ (and only Jews are nationals in Israel) is deemed to be more important than the rights of the individual. Yet those who belong to the state – its nationals, are expected to have allegiance to the state, although it puts itself before their rights. To go against the state means pitting oneself against a collective of which one is a part by nationality and allegiance, to which one already has surrendered one’s individual rights.
Peres, the ‘soft’ face of Israel, pokes up his hypocritical head and wails about the Ten Commandments, as if zionists, other than the odd spiritual zionist, have ever cared about keeping them where Palestinians are concerned. Deceitfully, the Yesha (settler) Council chairman attempts to cover up for the settlers, setting the tone for the usual retreat back to the customary defensive posture of entitlement to land theft by claiming provocation, including an oblique slur toward Islam.
“most of the settlers are opposed to violence. There is no justification for (these) actions, no matter what the religion of the victims is.” However, Dayan added that “in recent days there is a trend of incitement… against the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.
since the start of 2011, more than 500 Palestinian homes, wells and water containers and other basic infrastructure in the West Bank and Jerusalem have been destroyed, which led to the displacement of more than 1, 000 Palestinians according to UN statistics.
“This is more than double the number of people displaced over the same period in 2010, and the highest figure since at least 2005. More than half of those displaced have been children for whom the loss of their home is particularly devastating,”
This BDS boycott will collectively punish genuine Arch Enemy metalhead anarchist fans like myself. Politics has nothing to do with music. Arch Enemy is for anarchism and freedom of expression and should play for us, our dream of Greater Israel for Jews and our right to settle ALL the land!!!! The Palestinian state is Jordan! We are Nemeses!
Israel’s theft from the people of Nabi Saleh of their water and land created the weekly protests against the Occupier. This is the moving speech of Nariman Tamimi, read at the Human Rights March rally in Tel Aviv, December 9, 2011 by Nisreen Alyan, an attorney at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which emphasises that
“In the shadow of the Occupation, there is no dignity and there is no freedom of expression.”
“Even the most basic right to demonstrate and protest against the action of the Occupation is grossly abused.”
A short time after the speech was read in Tel Aviv, at the weekly demonstration in Nabi Saleh, Mustafa Tamimi was critically injured from an IOF teargas projectile manufactured in the US and fired at him face from point blank range. He died in the hospital the following day, on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2011.
‘The soldiers laughed. They smiled. They took pictures of us, zooming in on each of our faces, and they smirked. ‘They laughed at us as we screamed at them to let us through to where he was, unconscious in a taxi near the watchtower. They threatened us if we didn’t go back. We waved the flag with his blood on it in front of them. One of them had the audacity to bat it away. We shouted, “His blood is on your hands!” They replied, “So?”’
Another eye witness, Ibrahim Bornat, artist and activist from Bil’in was standing next to Mustafa at the time of the murder and describes the inordinate, cruel delays created by the Occupation forces.
I ran back to get people, because we were far away, but there was no ambulance around, so the people around gathered him and put him in a servee [a communal taxi] and tried to leave. The soldiers stopped the servee and tried to arrest Mustafa, but when they saw that he was on the brink of death, they began to act as if they were humanitarian, to revive his heart. But what is ‘humanitarian’, to shoot someone to kill, and then to try to help him? These were the same soldiers from the jeep that shot him. They shot him, then say they want to help him. What they really did is prevent him from leaving.
The body lay on the ground for half an hour. They wanted Mustafa’s ID, and they also wanted the ID of his mother, of another family member, and of Bassem Tamimi’s wife, because these people wanted to go out with him too… They were doing some kind of medical treatment while he was lying on the ground, but this was no hospital, and what he needed was to be taken to a hospital. He should have been flown out in that moment. There is nothing you can do for him on the street there.
RT @ibnezra: The Israeli army has failed to confirm that its soldiers violated ‘open-fire regulations” resulting in the death of Mustafa Tamimi.
RT @shunradan: The jeep frm which #mustafatamimi was shot carries a “how am I driving?”sticker http://twitpic.com/7qupdd Call 02-5694211 & tell them!
RT @Abou_Charlie: #MustafaTamimi’s father was denied a permit to exit West Bank to be with his son as he fought for his life. How ethical!
RT @iRevolt: IOF spokesperson displays picture of slingshot as the reason 4 blowing off half of #MustafaTamimi’s head is.gd/JycvNU
RT @gazaheart: Hate has no limits. I was shocked to read comments re IDF murder of #mustafatamimi beneath article is.gd/EXLXZ0
Mustafa was the 20th person which Israel’s sadistic Occupation forces have killed with tear gas canisters, and the first martyr of Nabi Saleh. The criminal IOF have excused themselves by stating that the incident was ‘exceptional’. (exceptionally cruel?)
Figures in the army’s Central Command said the soldier claimed he “didn’t see” Tamimi. But even if that is true, the IDF’s rules of engagement prohibit the firing of tear gas grenades from a rifle pointed directly at demonstrators or from a distance of less than 40 meters away. They also stipulate that the shooter must use the rifle sight and verify that no one is in the line of fire. Central Command and the Military Police are conducting separate investigations into the incident.
Plan Dalet has never ended, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has never ended, Israel’s expansionism, its deceitful posture of ‘defence’ and ‘security’ which it uses to obscure and justify its foul land grabs and murder has never ended.
At Mustafa’s funeral, the IOF again resorted to violence, with 3 people injured and 8 arrested. Once again, the IOF fired tear gas projectiles directly at the crowd, spraying the village with skunk water which will pollute it for days. This collective punishment on people who are being robbed of their birthright and denied civil rights is a crime against humanity.
RT @LinahAlsaafin: The pig soldiers wanted to arrest us all. They beat us. We formed a human pile on the ground, limbs bodies twisted. They continued to hit us
RT @LinahAlsaafin: I held up a picture of #MustafaTamimi in front of a soldier’s face. He grabbed it and balled it in his fist. It’s in my bag now, torn.
On Saturday, Israeli soldiers fired artillery shells targeting a chicken and sheep farm in Beit Hanoun, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip — dozens of livestock died in the attack; excessive damage was reported.
The Maan News Agency reported that the shelling targeted the farm of local resident Ramadan Abu Ghazala, located east of Beit Hanoun. The shelling led to no human casualties.
A Palestinian child was severely wounded and her father was injured in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a house in Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza city at dawn Sunday.
At present, Gaza may serve as a scapegoat for Israel’s impotence toward incidents in the Sinai. Israel is also threatening to punish the Gazan people in another despicable way – by cutting off their water supply.
‘It is not important what this bill teaches us about Danon as a person – that he did not study history, for example, or that he did but he knows very well that in fascist regimes the State is above all else; or that as an experienced demagogue he knows just how close a connection there is between the level of discrimination against a certain ethnic group and the claims about crime among its members. ‘
Recalling that Bob Geldof praised the JNF land thieves. Bob Geldof breached the boycott [on May 31, 2011, ‘when he accepted a dis-honorary fake degree from Ben Gurion University] praised the JNF when he spoke to patrons at a Jewish National Fund event telling them that the JNF ‘got’ the idea of sustainability & the importance of water over 100 years ago.
The metal band Arch Enemy is scheduled to play apartheid Israel on 24th January, following their Khaos Over Europe Tour in conjunction with Amnesty International’s freedom of expression campaign.
The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) group Don’t Play Apartheid Israel (DPAI) created a Facebok page to support the Palestinian call for BDS and to try to persuade Arch Enemy to cancel the gig, in support of the oppressed Palestinian people.
The FB page was then attacked by some of Arch Enemy’s more unsavoury fans, those supporting apartheid Israel. They are very unlike the Arch Enemy fans that a DPAI representative spoke with on 6th December, who had completely different attitudes.
This is a sample of some of their posts, a flavour of the zionist fans of Arch Enemy. Some quotes: “you are missing the whole point, THERE IS NO PALASTINIAN PEOPLE, how can we occupy something that doesn’t exist? “ “fuck you asshole , go live in some non democratic muslim 3rd world country”