A stirring call from Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Civility and reason exists in Israel; just don’t expect the mainstream to agree: What will they come up with next? The campaign to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone, his fact-finding commission and the report that now bears his name seems…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
How Colombo killed innocent Tamils for simply being Tamil
Lest we forget: Tens of thousands of Tamil civilians died in the last, bloody months of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the International Crisis Group said in an investigative report to be released Monday, most of them as a result of government shelling of areas that were supposed to be safe zones. The report, which cites…
Israel and apartheid South Africa, friends til the end
The latest article by Max Blumenthal simply must be read in full. Powerful, telling and tragic, really. The legacy of Zionism is occupation and complicity with apartheid South Africa. Charming: A May 6 “expose” from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot gave Israeli government officials and their hardline American proxies the ammunition they had been seeking…
Israel and Iraq questions provide double whammy in Auckland
I’m currently at the Auckland Writer’s Festival. Wonderful event. Speaking to hundreds of people every day – mainly about the Middle East but also on the importance of alternative voices online – and the one message that keeps on coming up is how rarely dissenting Jewish perspectives or those critical of Israel appear in the…
How to make web freedom a key legal concern
France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has a patchy record on human rights protection, being described in the London Review of Books in 2009 as having eroded “the distinction between philanthropy and combat.” But his latest piece in the International Herald Tribune is a strong case for internet freedom and democracy and should be saluted: In…
What will Israel do when Dersh passes on?
Rabbi Brant Rosen is a sane American who knows exactly where the Jewish state is going (namely off a cliff with its eyes open). He tackles one of Israel’s leading global backers, Alan Dershowitz, a man the Zionist Diaspora seems to love because he’s so strongly “pro-Israel” but they really would defend this? Back to…
Why internet censorship is a fool’s paradise
My following article is published today by the Sydney Morning Herald/Age online: We live under the illusion that governments can protect us from the evils of the world. Paedophilia, extreme violence, lessons in self-harm and suicide, race hatred and terrorism. We have every right to expect governments to monitor hate and terror sites and arrest…
What real democracies should do; take responsibility for war crimes
Colombo’s crimes against the Tamils are not forgotten even if many in the country would like the international community to celebrate their “war against terror.” Fat chance: A new project established for the purposes of gathering evidence of war crimes in Sri Lanka has been launched by the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) and the…
What the West has brought the children of Fallujah (ie. not joy)
An important CNN report (simply being in the mainstream media is key) that highlights growing birth defects in Iraq: A large and growing number of Iraqi children are suffering from severe birth defects, as shown in the heartbreaking CNN segment embedded below, and their parents blame alleged U.S. chemical-weapons attacks. Lawyers representing the families have…
Israel must be judged how it treats its minorities
The ghosts of Israel’s past are far from resolved. But who really wants to address this today? The Jewish Diaspora? Hardly: More than one unwitting visitor to Jerusalem has fallen prey to the bizarre delusion that they are the Messiah. Usually, they are whisked off to the serene surroundings of Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital on…