Here’s Helen Thomas being asked to explain comments that dared tell Israelis to get off colonised Palestinian land. Note the CNN host, demanding that Jewish suffering is worse than anybody else’s:
Israeli writer Etgar Keret has a way with words:
Perhaps this is the time to mention that the title of “most moral army in the world” is, to my ears, akin to being lauded as “man with least facial hair in the Hezbollah leadership.” Because, after all, an army’s purpose is not to feed the hungry or act as a crutch for the crippled and maimed but rather to fight and exact casualties from its enemies. Still, a myth is a myth. The IDF’s image as a scrupulous and unfailingly just military has always been Israel’s sacred cow, and it refuses to die no matter how many times you take a slaughterer’s knife to its neck.
Australian independent journalist Austin G. Mackell travels to the north of Australia to examine the deleterious effects of the Northern Territory Intervention. Just the latest stage of white paternalism towards our first inhabitants:
How do we know the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against apartheid Israel is working? A member of the Knesset this week said that the state was losing millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, Tel Aviv simply believes that by expanding the occupation in the West Bank, the world will love it more. Washington is keen to help the process of colonisation.
The response from the Zionist establishment in Australia? Smear anybody who dares challenge the status-quo. This week’s Australian Jewish News (AJN) in Sydney has a cover headline: “Laughing stock of the world”. Marrickville council in Sydney recently embraced BDS (brought by the Greens and Labor) and the AJN found a Marrickville councillor to say, “No Palestinians have asked for this.” Seriously. In fact, BDS is backed by virtually the entire Palestinian civil society but why let facts get in the way of a Zionist hatchet-job?
The paper’s editorial is even funnier, calling for dialogue and engagement on the issue. This is a from a publication that regularly publishes articles in praise of the occupation:
The “laughing stock of the world” and “a joke”. Two terms used to describe Marrickville Council by one of its own councillors this week, after it passed a resolution last December subscribing to the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.But, in reality, just how funny is the motion?Certainly there are elements of the absurd about it. For all the “noble” intentions that some may ascribe to this grandstanding platform, nothing has actually been achieved in the past two months. Well, we say nothing, but in fact, it seems, an immense amount of time, effort and money has been expended trying to work out how to put the policy into practice.As for the motion itself, much has already been written in these pages and elsewhere, as to the sinister undertones of BDS and the true motives of those behind the movement. And there’s certainly nothing funny about those.One need only consider the words of the campaign’s founder, Omar Barghouti, who has voiced his vision of “a Palestine next to a Palestine, rather than a Palestine next to an Israel”. Is this truly what those who advocate a boycott believe in, when in the words of the Marrickville Council motion, they “support the principles of the BDS campaign”? Possibly not. But when they lend their names to a cause that condemns Israel as an apartheid regime and perpetuates only one side of the narrative, they wittingly or unwittingly fuel the flames of delegitimisation that threaten the Jewish State’s very existence.And on a local level, that one-sided narrative is reinforced. Marrickville’s motion, like the NSW Greens before them and other boycotters, condemns Israel, but there’s no mention of the sustained terror campaign waged against Israeli citizens, the refusal to recognise Israel’s right to exist, or the virulent anti-Semitism preached from Palestinian pulpits, broadcast on Palestinian television and taught in Palestinian schools.In reality, as visiting US unionist Stuart Applebaum observes in The AJN this week, trade can be a tool to help resolve the conflict – not by boycotting it though, but by inviting all parties to the table to forge ties, rather than destroy them. The same applies in the field of sport and culture. We must strive to break down the barriers, not build new ones.
What’s more unedifying than Zionist historians seriously disputing whether 1948 ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians really constituted genocide?
What more evidence do you need that it simply isn’t happening?
The Egyptian revolution has kicked open the door to a vast Arab population that, for the first time, is poised to influence the course of its country’s policies directly. For Israel’s supporters, this could mean a new frontier for public diplomacy and a chance to reach out to Arab masses.
But the new reality emerging in the Middle East also requires a change in mindset. Israel has only a handful of Arab-language specialists dealing with public diplomacy aimed at the Arab world, a number that pales in comparison with the battalions of foreign service staffers serving in the same role in the United States and Europe.
Marwan Bishara, senior political analyst at Al Jazeera English and host and editor of the television program Empire, talks to Democracy Now! about the desperate need for America to see the world in a way other than through a Zionist frame:
Everyone was caught in the headlights—What is going on? Who are these people?—not realizing that in places like Bahrain, places like Yemen, certainly Egypt, Tunisia and so on and so forth, a pent-up tension has been building up for years. This is not a new thing that’s gone on on Facebook. So, in Saudi Arabia, like in the rest of the Arab world, we’re going to see what has been building up for years. In Bahrain, they used to call it, for the last 30 years, attempts to topple the government, attempts to topple the regime. In fact, they were community organizers. They’re not exactly like Chicago; the risks are far higher in the Arab world. But these are community organizers in Egypt and Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain and other places, trying to live—or trying to root for decent living, but always being called terrorists or always been oppressed under the pretext of terrorism.
AMY GOODMAN: Marwan Bishara, you just came back from Washington, D.C., where you were meeting with think tanks. What is your sense of the Washington consensus understanding versus what you are experiencing in the Middle East?
MARWAN BISHARA: You know, sometimes I forget exactly what are the concepts that are allowed on television or not, but let me just put it this way: they were caught with their pants down, completely. I mean, people in Washington, until today, have not realized exactly what is going on. They’re still trying to play catch-up with what’s going on in the Arab world.
So, for example, I was in one of those brainstorming sessions that tried to talk about what’s next for Palestine and Israel. And what amazes me is that everything that they speak about has an Israel reference to it, because that’s where the correspondents for their main networks are, that’s where their people are, and that’s how they’ve seen the region—Egypt, Palestine and so on—from Israel’s prisms. So, every point of reference is, what did Netanyahu say, or what does Israel think, what would the Israeli lobby consider. Would now, for example, President Obama do this and that, and will the Israeli lobby allow him? What does that mean for our strategic interests in the Middle East? Not understanding that there is a complete sweep that requires not only a change of mindset and, if you allow me here, a change of decision makers, perhaps, or a change of aides in Washington. There’s a complete class of bureaucrats in Washington that are not only not in touch with what’s going on in America, they certainly are not in touch with what’s going on in the Arab world.
America must be proud of its close friend, Bahrain.
Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz: “How school trips to Hebron resemble visits to Auschwitz“, scaring children and making them far more nationalistic. Arabs must be feared and settlers celebrated.
This Haaretz editorial reveals the fascist bent of the Zionist state:
Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s announcement that starting in the upcoming school year, his ministry will make student trips to the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron part of a new curriculum is cause for serious concern. In his decision to bring schoolchildren to the heart of the most violent and problematic settlement in the territories, the education minister took a controversial political step – not a pedagogic one.
Sa’ar’s desire to promote knowledge of the historic roots of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel is understandable. It is also possible to see why the Tomb of the Patriarchs could be designated a Jewish heritage site. But the problematic political context of the trips cannot be overlooked.
The Tomb of the Patriarchs is today next to a settlement housing a handful of Jews, who have forced thousands of Palestinians to abandon their homes and shops, turning the place they lived into a ghost town. There is no other place in the occupied territories where injustice is so blatant. Visits by schoolchildren to this place, while ignoring what Israel and the settlers have done there, is anti-educational. The visits will intensify nationalist feelings, faith in power and blindness to the injustices of the occupation. They will also promote the effective annexation of the Hebron settlement.
Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes a point of not visiting occupied areas beyond the separation barrier, whereas Sa’ar, considered for whatever reason to be relatively liberal, is pressing to stake another claim to a site that no political agreement would include in Israeli territory.
There are a myriad of problem in the education system, and Saar has confronted difficulties solving them. Unsatisfactory performance on achievement tests, rising violence and the low status of teachers are just some of the issues. Provocative political trips will not solve these problems and will even exacerbate them. In Hebron, schoolchildren will learn that might is right, that whoever takes over property that is not his and evicts others from their homes with violence, backed by acts of fraud and the guns of the IDF, wins. This is an extremely problematic educational message, but the education minister wants to instill it in Israeli schoolchildren. For that reason, this new curriculum of his should be scrapped immediately.
