Dominique, an activist in Israel working for the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, blogs at The Other Side of the Wall. Her latest piece, on the dispossession of Palestinians from Jerusalem, details the tragically mundane nature of ethnic cleansing: When talking about Palestine and Palestinian’s rights it is difficult to decide where to start. So…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
Jews hidden in dark corners around the world, like Yemen
A fascinating feature from the weekend’s Wall Street Journal on the profound troubles facing Jews in Yemen. I often argue anti-Semitism is a phenomenon that is deliberately exaggerated in the West to justify Israeli actions, but these stories seem real and devastating: In his new suburban American home, Shaker Yakub, a Yemeni Jew, folded a…
The great pains of Aceh
For some reason, there’s an avalanche of stories in the Western media about Aceh in Indonesia (all after my recent visit there.) Here’s the latest, in the Los Angeles Times, about the significance of the two large ships that have become massive memorials to the horrific 2004 tsunami (one of my pictures is here): They…
All we are saying is give Facebook a chance
I’m sceptical, but when the political elites aren’t really interested in bringing peace, alternatives must be found: For many of its 300 million enthusiasts, Facebook is a convenient way to keep in touch with friends, track down old sweethearts and share drunken photographs with the world. But the global power of the social networking site…
Occupiers aren’t democratic by definition (listen Israel)
J Street talks about a Jewish democracy in the Middle East but these actions below in East Jerusalem, just the latest in a series of outrageous attempts by Israel to evict Palestinians from their rightful homes, is the sign of a nation utterly opposed to the rule of law: And here’s yet more evidence, via…
The price paid by humanity last century
Historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen writes in his new book Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity: The number of people who have been mass murdered [in the 20th century] is, conservatively estimated, 83 million. When purposeful famine is included, the number becomes 127 million, and if the higher estimates are correct…
Keeping the Tamils on the front page
A welcome statement by Human Rights Watch on the dire situation in Sri Lanka: The Sri Lankan government’s proposal to create a committee of experts to examine allegations of laws-of-war violations during the conflict between the government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is an attempt to avoid an independent international inquiry,…
Don’t allow racial division to infiltrate the Jewish community, J Street
Sydney Levy writes for Jewish Voice for Peace and argues against the issue of Israel facing a “demographic threat” from Arabs discussed here at the J Street conference. That’s called racism, peoples: The Palestinians are of course non-players in this Jewish democratic drama. At most, they are a threat just for being there. At best,…
Those rules don’t apply to Washington and Israel
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on Benjamin Netanyahu’s definition of “war crimes”: The Prime Minister says Hamas is guilty for denying Red Cross access to prisoners: exactly what the U.S. did.