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Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - Americas - PA: Punish Israel for Gaza crimes - 0 views

  • "The credibility and foundations of international human rights and humanitarian law as well as of the UN as a whole is at stake," he said.
  • Israel's impunity
  • But Gabriela Shalev, Israel's ambassador to the Security Council, did not refer at all to the Goldstone report during the meeting on Wednesday, but dismissed its findings before the debate even began.
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  • "I regret to say that the Goldstone report is one-sided, biased and therefore wrong - just as the forum and mandate that established its mission," she said.
  • The report accused Israel of using disproportionate force during its war against Gaza-based Palestinian fighters.
  • Israeli officials have condemned the report, saying their country had a right to defend itself from Hamas rocket attacks.
Julianne Greco

Iran: Israel out to sidetrack UN with ship claim - 0 views

  • Tehran says Tel Aviv spread 'false' claims about seizing a ship with Iranian ammunition to sway attention away from the Goldstone report on Israeli war crimes.
  • As the UN general assembly was busy reviewing the Goldstone report, Israel's UN mission submitted a letter to the Security Council accusing Iran of violating Resolution 1701, which was issued to stop Tel Aviv's 2006 offensive against Lebanon. Iran's responded to the allegation by reminding the Zionist regime that Tel Aviv has breached "not one but several" UN Security Council resolutions, including that very same motion.
Ed Webb

IDF general: Goldstone 'nothing' compared to next Lebanon clash - 0 views

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    What is the effect of such rhetoric? Is it simply a deterrent, responding to the political realities, as one comment suggests? Does it have the desired deterrent effect?
Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - Europe - Rights council adopts Gaza report - 2 views

  • The UN human rights council has endorsed the Goldstone report on Israel's war on Gaza, which accuses the military of using disproportionate force as well as laying charges of war crimes on Israeli occupation forces and Hamas.
  • 25 votes to six with 11 countries abstaining and five declining to vote.
  • Hamas 'thankful'
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  • The Palestinian Authority had initially agreed to defer a vote on the UN-sanctioned report, but later backtracked under heavy criticism.
  • The United States and Israel were among those countries which voted against the resolution.
  • the resolution "strongly condemns all policies and measures taken by Israel, the occupying power, including those limiting access of Palestinians to their properties and holy sites".
  • Israel rejected the charges saying the resolution – drafted by the Palestinians with Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tunisia, on behalf of non-aligned, African, Islamic and Arab nations – threatened peace efforts.
  • The report accused Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
  • It also accused Hamas, which has de facto control of Gaza, of war crime violations, but reserved most of its criticism for Israel.
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    Yea I just read that on Al Jazera. Well with this I hope it has a good outcome. I just wonder if the people inside of Gaza are going to recieve any kind of reperations; further more I think the reaction of the people in the Gaza is going to be crucial. Questions like where will they go?, If they stay will there be equal rights?, and how will they respond with all the past and present adversity?
Ed Webb

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment | The New York Review of Books - 2 views

  • They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel.
  • For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead
  • Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth
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  • while American Jewish groups claim that they are simply defending Israel from its foes, they are actually taking sides in a struggle within Israel between radically different Zionist visions
  • In 2006, Foxman called an Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians “bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.” The Conference of Presidents has announced that “biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children.” Last summer, an AIPAC spokesman declared that Human Rights Watch “has repeatedly demonstrated its anti-Israel bias.” When the Obama administration awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, former UN high commissioner for human rights, the ADL and AIPAC both protested, citing the fact that she had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. (Early drafts of the conference report implicitly accused Israel of racism. Robinson helped expunge that defamatory charge, angering Syria and Iran.)
  • Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a pipe bomb at his house.
  • Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called the anti-occupation group Peace Now a “virus.” This January, a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu accused Israeli human rights organizations of having fed information to the Goldstone Commission that investigated Israel’s Gaza war. A Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud promptly charged Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, which supports some of those human rights groups, with treason, and a member of Lieberman’s party launched an investigation aimed at curbing foreign funding of Israeli NGOs.
  • by downplaying the significance of Avigdor Lieberman, the settlers, and Shas, American Jewish groups allow these older Zionists to continue to identify with that more internally cohesive, more innocent Israel of their youth, an Israel that now only exists in their memories
  • America’s Jewish leaders should think hard about that rally. Unless they change course, it portends the future: an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for Israel.
  • In a more recent report on how to foster Zionism among America’s young, Luntz urges American Jewish groups to use the word “Arabs, not Palestinians,” since “the term ‘Palestinians’ evokes images of refugee camps, victims and oppression,” while “‘Arab’ says wealth, oil and Islam.”
  • In the world of AIPAC, the Holocaust analogies never stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry only about themselves. Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”
  • the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto
  • a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth
Jim Franklin

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Palestinian U-turn on Gaza report - 0 views

  • Many Palestinians have expressed anger at PA President Mahmoud Abbas for seeming to let Israelis off the hook following Goldstone's trenchant criticism of Israel's blockade of Gaza and attacks on its citizens.
  • Academics and rights workers held a street protest on Monday.
  • Hamas, which controls Gaza, has lashed out at the decision as "shameful and irresponsible", and posters saying "to the trash heap of history, you traitor, Mahmoud Abbas" have appeared in the Strip.
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  • Israel has rejected the evidence and said it had already investigated its troops' conduct, clearing most of the subjects of wrongdoing.
  • Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued that the report's conclusions would "devastate the peace process", although peace talks are currently stalled anyway over Israeli settlement-building in the occupied West Bank.
  • Palestinians and human rights groups say more than 1,400 people were killed in the violence between 27 December 2008 and 16 January 2009, more than half of them civilians.
  • Israel puts the number of deaths at 1,166 - fewer than 300 of them civilians. Three Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers were also killed.
Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Israel push to change laws of war - 0 views

  • Israel's prime minister has instructed his government to draw up plans for a "world wide campaign" to lobby for changes in the international laws of war.
  • Israeli government contends international law needs to be amended in order to fight global terrorism.
  • The statement was backed by Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, who said a change in the international laws of war was "in the interest of anyone fighting terrorism".
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  • An Israeli official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said the issue of establishing an official inquiry into the conduct of the military during the Gaza campaign was not raised at Tuesday's meeting.
  • "What peace process are they talking about? There isn't one."
Jim Franklin

Al Jazeera English - Middle East - Syria and Iran deny arms boat claim - 0 views

  • Syria has denied that a cargo ship loaded with hundreds of tonnes of weapons seized by Israel, was transporting Iranian arms to Syria.
  • "All the cargo certificates are stamped at the ports of origin, and this one was stamped at an Iranian port."
  • The weapons were "a drop in the ocean" of arms being shipped to Hezbollah, Ben-Yehuda said.
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  • Howver, Israel had not provided evidence that the arms were meant for the Lebanese group.
  • "The fact that the Israeli army chose to hold the press conference exactly the same time as the UN General Assembly was beginnning its debate on the Goldstone report [on the Israeli war on Gaza].
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