Today, there’s yet another ‘deeply disappointing’ from the UK foreign minister as Israel swipes more Palestinian land to sprout illegal Jews-only housing.
Israel’s interior ministry announced its sanction of 1,600 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, and impending approval of 2,000 more in Givat Hamatos and 700 in Pisgat Zeev on Thursday, a week after 900 housing units were announced in Har Homa.
On August 11, the US was ‘deeply disappointed’ with Israel’s new East Jerusalem construction plan, on April 6, Catherine Ashton arched an eyebrow and sighed she was ‘deeply disappointed’ at previous land theft.
Without concerted action, this ‘deep disappointment’ is shallow. When will there be a ‘totally despicable’ and ‘we are going to sanction and divest from you until you stop stealing land from Palestinians, end your illegal occupation and apartheid?’
Disability and Palestine
RT @Tweet_Palestine: i wish we had people fighting for disabled peoples’ rights here there is no regards to disability despite large numbers
RT @Tweet_Palestine: 1of the biggest problems now is that the PA is not paying all benefits to those with disability which are very low to start with Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
@occpal also read Art 30, 2nd paragraph, of 1949 Geneva Convention III :Special facilities shall be afforded for the care …etc”
RT @Budouroddick: Disability rights in Pal are criminally overlooked. I tried to start an empowerment project, but none helped. Help this radio station in Gaza get equipment for blind reporters
Spokesman from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Dr Danny Lamm unctuously preaches isolationism, as if Australians never object to injustice in other countries at any time.
“A strong bipartisan voice saying ‘No’ to BDS will reflect the basic sentiment of most Australians that the bitterness and complexity of foreign conflicts should be kept out of our peaceful country.”
In fact, the majority of Australians support Palestinian rights and the Australian government adopting a policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict that calls for negotiations to be based on international law and human rights.
The next action in support of BDS against Israeli apartheid will be held in Brisbane on August 27 at 1 pm
Boycott apartheid Israel! Boycott Max Brenner!
Max Brenner Chocolates is a 100% Israeli-owned company belonging to the Strauss Group, the second largest Israeli food and beverage company. On the “corporate responsibility” section of its website, the Strauss Group emphasises the support it gives to the Israeli army. The Strauss group is proud that for more than 30 years, it has supported the Golani reconnaissance platoon infamous for its involvement 2006 invasion of Lebanon and other atrocities. As their website puts it: “Our connection with soldiers goes as far back as the country, and even further. We see a mission and need to continue to provide our soldiers with support, to enhance their quality of life and service conditions, and sweeten their special moments.”
PROTEST: Sat August 27
Gather at 1pm in park on cnr of Merivale & Glenelg St for a march to Max Brenner store at South Bank
‘We stand with Australian activists in the face of the organized repression and smear campaign they have been facing for the past year, since the attempts to overturn the Marrickville council BDS motion.
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‘We remind the government of Australia of its obligations under international law to respect basic human rights and end all support of Israel’s war crimes and other serious violations of international law. The Australian government must urgently end its arms trade with Israel and impose sanctions upon it rather than investigate dissident organizations who, in the tradition of principled international solidarity, are taking the moral responsibility to end Israel’s impunity and Australia’s complicity in it.”
Here’s how the Marduk press is attempting to divide the BDS movement in Australia – quoting Jim Barr from APAN, which is a newly formed advocacy group as ‘THE head of Australia’s peak pro-Palestinian group …’ objecting to violence at the Max Brenner demo (caused by the cops charging the protesters).
‘Mr Newton, who was recently elected vice-president of the Australia-Palestine Advocacy Network, said the network was made up of groups of people who wanted justice for Palestinians affected by the conflict.’
The settlement was negotiated by the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) on behalf of the family of a mother and daughter killed by Israeli soldiers during Cast Lead. The payment is to be made to the family in return for their dropping the claim against the Israeli military.
And, of course, the Histadrut is only nominally a “labor federation”: in reality, it assists an accumulation process tightly tied into the state apparatus, regulating wages and – notoriously – offloading state enterprises onto politically connected figures in the private sector in the looting of the commons euphemistically called “privatization.” As ever, the state is not looking out for the interests of the dispossessed. It is looking out for the interests of the possessed, and looking out for them with great care and skill: ten large business groups now control 30 percent of the market value of public companies, while 16 control half of the money in the whole country.
Islamophobe racist Theodore Dalrymple aired his noxious opinions on the UK riots on Radio National’s PM yesterday afternoon in clipped icy tones – he thinks that the great unwashed unemployed of Britain should starve. Dalrymple’s doctrine could be straight out of Breivik’s manifesto, and indeed, Breivik mentions him therein. He is also feted in the far rightwing Brussels Journal where he claims that ‘the main interest for Islam for these young [black] men is the control over women’. Dalrymple has supernatural powers – he can manufacture intent at a glance on the streets of Britain where stride ‘rather vicious looking people who obviously are angry about something, their anger is misplaced, but nevertheless they’re angry. They look vicious, they look as if they would be ready to stick a knife in you if you crossed them in any way or displeased them in anyway.’
Dalrymple aka Anthony Daniels is a multi-nymed character who worked for years as a prison doctor/psychiatrist. Did the prison system brutalise him into misanthropy as it can prison inmates?
The brutal conditions of incarceration offer up one reason why recidivism is so high in Britain, which serves as a typical example of Western justice systems (with the United States as an extreme which magnifies the problems a thousand-fold). The treatment of children is a particularly poignant example of this. Reporting to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Children’s Commissioner for England found that “the protection of children in custody remains a fundamental concern. There are high incidences of mental health problems, self-harm and bullying with a significant proportion of children feeling unsafe. There are high levels of intimidation, violence and abuse, not only from other prisoners but also from staff.”
Manchester lawyer, Joseph Kotrie-Monson, draws attention to the dangers of further criminalisation consequent on the harsh prison sentences which are being applied to rioters in response to heavy-handed government and public reaction.
“Of course we all want people to be punished for offending. What we don’t want is children to be criminalised and children to end up in situation where they’re in custody with real criminals, learning how to be a proper criminal.
“When an appropriate dealing with a youth offending team worker, effective dealing with them at the sentencing stage, rather than giving them big long sentences or whatever, effective dealing in that way is much more likely to prevent further offending.”
“As any lawyer will tell you with practical experience swift justice is nearly always rushed justice, equals bad justice,” he said.
“As far as dealing with people in rapid fire courts, sometimes without them even visiting the magistrates court, as is happening increasingly in the UK, where people appear for their first appearance by video link from the police station, these types of things don’t result in people getting treated appropriately.
“You’ve got to ask yourself: do I want punishment to be dealt out or … do I want this type of thing not to happen again?
“Well if you identify children and you identify young people who are likely to commit further offences, you can either demonise them and make the problem worse, or you can deal with them.”
Clasford Stirling does not reside in Dalrymple’s rarified climes, but in the Tottenham community, with a grounded view on the impact of Cameron’s proposed 16,000 man cuts to the police force:
CLASFORD STIRLING: He’s not going to do that by making these cuts, which are affecting everybody so bad that we haven’t even got anybody to talk to the young people anymore, because he certainly can’t, you know what I mean? I maybe one of the only ones left in my community that’s maybe still employed. A lot of the people that young people know has either been made redundant or have just lost their jobs. And it’s very difficult, people are looking at well how do we do this and how do we do that; well we’re not going to be able to do it if the people ain’t there to bridge the gap between the young people and the police and the young people and the system.
One of Cameron’s and his fascist troupe’s ruthless, ineffectual solutions is to introduce obscene collective punishment for the families of rioters, and appallingly, evictions have already commenced. What next? a reintroduction of transportation to the colonies?
But several Conservative-led local councils, in London, Nottingham and Salford, an outlying district of Manchester, have already said that they would start eviction proceedings against tenants convicted of rioting. And one, in Wandsworth, said it had started the process of evicting a woman whose teenage son was convicted in the rioting. A petition on a government Web site for a proposal to authorize public housing evictions drew more than 100,000 signatures within 48 hours. That number guaranteed that Parliament would have to debate the proposal.
The other scapegoat the British rightwing upper class is attempting to maul is the internet. While Cameron is keen to get his grubby hands on the internet, all in the name of security (aka protecting the ruling elite), Evgeny Morosov sounds a vital warning:
‘After violent riots in 2009, Chinese officials had no qualms about cutting off the Xinjiang region’s Internet access for 10 months. Still, they would surely welcome a formal excuse for such drastic measures if the West should decide to take similar measures in dealing with disorder.’
And below, a representative of the Turkish Kurdish community in London identifies one of the prime culprits for the riots. ‘The biggest gang roaming on the streets of London are the Metropolitan police.’ The activist ‘condemns British police and media for trying to clash Turkish and Kurdish community with black and other ethnic minorities’, further stating that ‘shop owners only defended their own shops against looters; however the media and police tried to publicise this in a manner that can clash ethnic minorities with each other’.
ANNE BARKER: You know the youngest person I’ve heard of is an 11-year-old girl who admitted to throwing stones and smashing windows and joining a large riot of 30 men and three girls. She’s been given, for example, a nine-month referral order – she lives in a foster home already.
MARK COLVIN: I think the magistrate there said he wasn’t even quite sure what to do with her, 11 is very young?
ANNE BARKER: Very young. I mean a lot of these people are getting, you know, as much as nine months in jail, six months in jail for simple burglary. One man, I think, got several months for stealing several bottles of water. This is an electrical engineering student who faced obviously a good career. A dental nurse with a baby son…
Zulkfar said he had run community projects for 25 years but gave up in 2009, dismayed by the lack of resources. A well-regarded support and advice centre closed in 2004 and now there are few places for people to come together. Others talked enviously of a multimillion-pound community and sports centre in Handsworth, less than two miles away and the scene of riots in the early 80s. “We should have learned from what happened in Handsworth, but we don’t even have a job centre here,” one man said.
Following anti-Democratic Arrests and Intimidation Attempts: Israeli Citizens in Solidarity with Australian BDS Activists!
We, Israeli citizens, members of Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within, would like to express our solidarity with the numerous Australians who are involved in the burgeoning BDS campaign in Australia.
Witnessing first-hand the brutality of our government against the Palestinian people, we have joined the July 2005 Palestinian call for a comprehensive boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the state of Israel and its institutions. Such means should be applied as long as Israel continues to flout international law and UN resolutions and refuses to acknowledge the Palestinian people’s universally recognized human rights: The rights of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories, the rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, and the rights of Palestinians who were expelled from their homes during the Nakba (the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine).
As Israeli citizens, we are angered by the outrageous attempts to exploit the horrors committed by the Nazi regime, through a comparison of the Palestinian led BDS campaign to the 1933 Nazi boycott campaign, in order to try and silence the Palestinian non-violent popular struggle for freedom and justice. The deplorable and racist Nazi boycott campaign targeted all Jews, without exception, and only for being Jewish. The Australian BDS campaign does NOT target Jewish businesses, as argued by demagogues in Australia! The lesson from the Jewish holocaust should be, in our view, the need to oppose all forms of discrimination and violence committed against different ethnic groups in the name of nationalist or supremacist ideologies. The state of Israel has failed to learn that lesson.
To reiterate, we are concerned that some politicians in Australia have accused the activists involved in BDS of being anti-Semitic. We reject those accusations. The BDS campaign is a legitimate form of non-violent political action, whereby people and organizations are required not to participate in or support violations of international law. We take a clear stand against all forms of racism, including antisemitism and Islamophobia. Not only does the BDS campaign oppose anti-Semitism, it is also a responsible call that targets only complicit institutions rather than individuals. BDS is neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Israeli, since it does not oppose all that is Israeli because it is Israeli: the campaign simply insists that Israel abide by its obligations under international law. Furthermore, by attempting to lump together all Jews around the world as a monolithic block that is expected to support its criminal policies, the state of Israel is denying the fact that many Jews, including in Israel, oppose the occupation and apartheid policies inflicted on the Palestinian people.
The current debate within Israeli society shows us that the boycott campaign is extremely effective. The latest attempt by the Israeli government to silence its own citizens, the new anti-boycott legislation, in addition to other explicitly racist laws, is yet another indication of the need for this Palestinian-led non-violent global movement, in order to insure the rights of all people in this region.
The recent Australian BDS actions have been a great inspiration. We are encouraged to know that as far-away as Down Under there are individuals and groups active in the BDS campaign, promoting the Palestinian people’s unassailable rights. The BDS movement needs your help and support. We call upon all Australians to join and support the struggle for freedom and equality in Palestine.
With the deepest gratitude and all our support,
Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within
Consumerism says “Buy”, crisis capitalism says “Only if you are rich.” UK debtor’s prisons don’t have walls these days, they are council estates with invisible class walls. Since David Cameron can’t see any relationship between poverty, cuts in youth service funding and social services, and an increase in youth crime, he needs to get out of the Circumlocution Office more often.
As he introduces further austerity measures which will impact most upon already disadvantaged people, Cameron forgets that prevention is better than cure, ignoring the existing vast wealth and privilege inequities, the alienation of youth who feel and are made to feel unwanted. Ostracism is society’s most powerful tool against vulnerable people and the UK government is leading the charge.
Three years after Wall Street precipitated a global crisis, British youth unemployment reached record levels earlier this year, An analyst noted that “”Being out of work for more than a year can have a scarring effect, making it harder to get a job as well as having a negative impact on one’s health and wellbeing,” adding: “The Government’s decision to abolish job guarantees for young people may leave a generation of young people scarred for many years to come.”
By 2008, Great Britain had reached the highest level of income inequality in more than half a century, and the austerity measures imposed by the new government targeted the victims of that inequality. As a recent report showed, the poorest 10% of the population saw their real income fall over the last decade, while “richest tenth of the population have seen much bigger proportional rises in their incomes than any other group.”
The riots began in Tottenham, which has the highest unemployment rate in London. Youth clubs have been closed, because the austerity economics regime slashed 75% of the youth services budget. And, as Seumas Milne points out, young people in the neighborhood said the club closings could lead to rioting, as bored and anxious young people take to the streets.
And the austerity crowd has slashed police budgets, too, just as the House Republican budget did here in the United States. Even law and order, that shibboleth of conservatism, takes a back seat to the radical austerity ideology. That makes it harder for the right and the pseudo-center to justify their discredited policies, leaving them to come up with increasingly shrill and implausible explanations for the violence.
Where are the tallest pillars of this society to provide ethical models and strategies to lead youth toward hope and a future of their choice? As David Harvey highlights:
But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone’s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.
A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices to the point of daylight robbery, particularly of the poor and the vulnerable, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected, has become the order of the day.
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Thatcherism unchained the feral instincts of capitalism (the “animal spirits” of the entreprenuer they coyly named it) and nothing has transpired to curb them since. Slash and burn is now openly the motto of the ruling classes pretty much everywhere.
This is the new normal in which we live. This is what the next grand commission of enquiry should address. Everyone, not just the rioters, should be held to account. Feral capitalism should be put on trial for crimes against humanity as well as for crimes against nature.
Cameron’s reaction is to glower about the social media, like a petty dictator in the Middle East which imperials implanted and cossetted then looked down upon and chastised for draconian measures against insurrection, foolishly imagining he can commit a human rights violation by preventing internet access and escape public opprobrium. When other countries use social media to struggle for democracy, it is acclaimed, yet now Cameron wants to control it and demonises it. For easy approval in uncertain times, Cameron fervently supports Laura Norder – Tory opportunism and personal conviction coincide. If looters’ parents are to be held responsible for their childrens’ crimes and evicted from their homes, why is Murdoch able to evade his corporation’s crimes? Is it a surprise that youth without hope and nothing to lose have followed the UK elite’s no-blame no-criminality culture? Prepare for the fight against increased withdrawal of civil liberties, as the ruling elite defend their piles of loot by any means they can muster. The local small businesses targeted by youthful insurrectionists on their rampage are the meat in the sandwich and offer Cameron a wedge – he can protect them from and coopt them againt the loathsome youth menace without reference to the underlying malaise which has festered during years of neglect.
Cameron could ensure affordable education, health, social services and housing, but prefers to raid taxpayer funds to employ more cops with increased leeway for brutality to protect property, which for Tories, comes before people, particularly hated youth. Businesses damaged by looting will be recompensed from the public purse, yet where’s Cameron’s compensation to the public for decades of economic irrationalism and elite looting? When will shorters of banking stocks get their comeuppances? Cameron’s response to unrest caused by vast inequities of wealth and privilege is to add fuel to the fire with mass arrests and incarceration – sure to enrage youth further and solidify their untouchability. With thousands of arrests promised, the 3 private corporations – G4S, Kalyx and Serco – who run 11 of Britain’s prisons will be dining well this week. Perhaps Australia will be seeing more British ships loaded with the raddled empire’s unwanted felons arriving on its shores.
Dr. Clifford Stott, who specialises in crowd psychology at the University of Liverpool, sounds a prescient note:
While there is no real causal relationship, however, he [Dr. Clifford Stott] noted that in societies that see outbreaks of riotous behaviour, the existence of large disenfranchised population is a common factor.
“One of the things that we know about riots is that they are underpinned by perceptions of illegitimacy of authority,” he said.
The tendency to cast crowd action as either explosions of mob irrationality or criminality – something common to both authoritarian and democratic governments, Stott said – undermines attempts to understand the root causes behind the violence.
“It is the dominant discourse around riots, it always has been,” he said. “Society tends to pathologise collective action.”
Fascists love scapegoats, and conveniently, youth don’t vote. But their mums and dads do – Cameron and his foppish old school tie set’s days in power are numbered. But will there be sufficient mobilisation amongst the UK people to support an end to an obscenity which sacrifices the futures of UK children and livelihoods of small business people in their community to obscure malevolent ruling class pillage? A vicious, classist society which doesn’t care about all of its youth sabotages its own future.
“Things got out of hand & we’d had a few drinks. We smashed the place up & Boris set fire to the toilets.” David Cameron, 1986
RT @ciderpunx: #londonriot hotspots are /all/ in areas w high child poverty. See @newint #map http://is.gd/6kLjp4 #inequality #poverty #
If we want to live in a society where people feel included, we must include them, where they feel represented, we must represent them and where they feel love and compassion for their communities then we, the members of that community, must find love and compassion for them.
Meanwhile Cameron threw cash at firms that have lost money in the riots, saying even uninsured shops will get payouts.
He said any shop affected won’t have to pay business rates, can defer its tax and claim from a £20 million “high street support scheme”.
So while he claims there’s no money for youth centres, or workers’ pensions, or anything else being cut, he can suddenly produce piles of cash for businesses.
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Meanwhile it was revealed that MPs will be getting all their flight costs and hotel bills on expenses to compensate them for having to come back from their holidays.
And they’ll also be given money to fly back out again and continue their getaways.
Even growth’s blunt promise of material prosperity is failing. GDP in the UK increased by 11% from 2003 to 2008. Over the same period, median real incomes stagnated. The economy boomed, but few shared in its rewards. Living standards were maintained through unsustainable debt. As we crawl back into recession, the majority will find those rewards still harder to come by – even if a minority continue to grow fat.
No light had ever been shone on the behaviour of Mr Howard and former foreign minister Alexander Downer.
“They have never been made to sit down and explain why over many, many weeks and months arguing about WMD and terrorism when it was very quickly apparent that the official case for war was a lie,” Mr Wilkie said.
