Stéphane Frédéric Hessel is a diplomat, former ambassador, French resistance fighter and participant in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948: The Freedom Flotilla brings to mind the kind of civil society solidarity initiatives which brought an end to segregation laws in the US and apartheid in South Africa, an analogy…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
No wonder Israel likes this man
Israel launches an “independent” investigation into the Gaza flotilla debacle and includes a few foreign observers, including Nobel Peace laureate and Ulster Unionist leader David Trimble. This man’s record on such matters? From 2004: [Trimble] called human rights organisations a “great curse” yesterday and accused them of complicity in terrorist killings. “One of the great…
Red Cross calls the Gaza blockade illegal
Israel may be launching a far from independent investigation into the Gaza flotilla massacre but the real issue remains the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The International Red Cross has released a damning report: The serious incidents that took place on 31 May between Israeli forces and activists on a flotilla heading for Gaza once again…
The beginning of many such calls for BDS in the mainstream
Probably the first major Western publication to endorse the Palestinian BDS campaign, Ireland’s Tribune is setting an important precedent: They were not, as Israel’s defence minister Ehud Barack ludicrously tried to claim, “an armada of hate and violence”. Nor was the Mavi Marmara “a boat of hate”, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the…
The threat of female flesh in the streets of Tehran
Life for young people in Iran is a constant struggle and I deeply admire the men and women who challenge the hard-liners regressive view of human rights and decency: Iranian authorities have begun police patrols in the capital to arrest women wearing clothes deemed improper. The campaign against loose-fitting veils and other signs of modernism…
Public opinion is lost
While Israeli bloggers debate the rights and wrongs of this week’s Gaza flotilla massacre (there’s something right about it, I hear you ask?) this piece of news is pretty damning: Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of…
BDS gets noticed by Murdoch press
This piece in the Wall Street Journal highlights a serious problem faced by Israel and its Diaspora supporters: Israel’s bungled attempt to stop the aid flotilla from reaching Gaza also highlights how an increasingly forceful strategy by Palestinians and their supporters to turn to boycotts, international isolation, and relatively nonviolent protests is confronting Israel with…
Colombo cannot erase what happened to the Tamils
One year after the end of official hostilities in Sri Lanka still sees a country in turmoil, proudly anti-Tamil and unwilling to investigate the war crimes committed in the last months of the war. Chair of the UK-based Sri Lanka Campaign Advisory Council (I sit on the board), Edward Mortimer, says that the world can…
When we learn that occupation isn’t really occupation
This is going around today, by Lebanese-Australian writer and academic Ghassan Hage: I don’t write poems but, in any case, poems are not poems Long ago, I was made to understand that Palestine was not Palestine; I was also informed that Palestinians were not Palestinians; They also explained to me that ethnic cleansing was not…
A country can’t simply violently board a ship on the high seas
University of Sydney law professor Ben Saul – a man with a history of challenging human rights abuses – writes about Israel’s flagrant abuse of human rights this week: Israel’s response to the Gaza flotilla is another unfortunate example of Israel clothing its conduct in the language of international law while flouting it in practice.…