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 Judaism
A nice example of the Israel lobby in action (and mouthing talking points)
Here’s how it works. A columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald, Mike Carlton, writes a column critical of Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla. The following week his column begins thus: It is a ferocious beast, the Jewish lobby. Write just one sentence even mildly critical of Israel and it lunges from its lair, fangs…
My people like to slam all Muslims as terrorists
A new blog on the Foreign Policy in Focus website, Focal Points, aims to present a different perspective on the world. A recent post highlights the resistance to new mosques in America and guess who is fanning the flames? It has been said before that Al-Qaeda’s greatest victory was not September 11th but Abu Ghraib.…
The boats will be sailing into Gaza one day soon
This is inspiring. Let the boats come, as many as possible and as often as possible, inevitably forcing Israel to abandon its futile siege on Gaza: The [Israeli] security forces are preparing to receive the three vessels expected to reach Gazan shores soon. Israel’s policy, as declared by Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Prime Minister…
The paradise known as Gaza
The Los Angeles Times on Gaza: Passing through the half-mile Erez checkpoint and emerging into Gaza, the contrast could hardly be more stark. In Israel, there are shopping malls and traffic lights. In Gaza, donkey carts and herds of goats cross the road. Young boys pick through the debris of bombed-out buildings to salvage construction…
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…
Doing the work that journalists should be doing
A regular reader, Sydney-based Stewart Mills, has started an investigative blog, Israeli Propaganda, that documents and challenges Israeli spin after the Gaza flotilla massacre. And his work has only just begun.
Melanie Philips, unplugged
A very helpful “digested read” in the Guardian of the latest work by Melanie Philips: This book arose from a sense of perplexity that almost everyone in the world thought I was clinically mad. Everywhere I looked there were people who believed boarding a humanitarian aid convoy in international waters and murdering nine people was…
Please sir, can we buy the bomb?
Yet more revelations that shows Israel as a nation like any other; ruthless and unprincipled: An apartheid-era cabinet minister carried a “nuclear trigger” to South Africa from Israel as part of Pretoria’s efforts to build an atom bomb, according to a report in a Johannesburg newspaper. Two renowned South African journalists have revealed that Eschel…
How long can the Holocaust be used to generate sympathy?
Israeli commentator Eitan Haber has a word of warning to fellow Jews: We thought we deserve everything, after the Holocaust and the six million dead. The world was silent while our grandparents were being burned? Well, the world shall pay. We deserve everything. Yet how come we didn’t realize that one of these days, the…