"Underlying the growing alienation between the United States and the rest of the world community, including Europe, is America’s failure, even under Obama, to embrace human rights as a guide to its foreign policy. At a time when many of the world’s people suffer from impoverishment, conflict and a sense that their governments have failed them, have left them unprotected, the promise of universal human rights means a lot. Human rights language has yet to reach the US. When, recently, I did the rounds of Congress and the State Department promoting a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I was told that “justice” is not an active element in American foreign policy. I was advised by seasoned lobbyists not to even mention the term “human rights” in my meetings with senators and congress people, because it sounds anti-American, as if something trumps American law and policy (which human rights indeed does). But remove justice and human rights from foreign policy and you are left with short-range conflict management and damage control which, in the end, offers peace and security to no one. You certainly remove yourselves from the concerns of most people of the world."
—

Jeff Halper

via: antonyloewenstein.com

FIVE home demolitions this week. FIVE.

Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Barghouti on The Daily Show

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, part 1



The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, part 2

The story of the Sheikh Jarrah families has not ended yet. The international community should be actively opposing these actions. Where is the justice?

Solidarity Sunday in Sheikh Jarrah, Tomorrow, all day.



Solidarity Sunday in Sheikh Jarrah, Tomorrow, all day.

This week, there have been several violent settler attacks in Sheikh Jarrah, at the tent of the Al-Gawi family, that is still staying on the pavement outside their occupied house. During the attacks stones were thrown at the family and its guests, injuring a few of them severely. Later, police had arrested a few of the Palestinians present at the scene, and of course, none of the settlers involved.

On Thursday, authorities set an ultimatum for both the Hannoun and the Al-Gawi families to evacuate their tents by Sunday, or be forcefully evicted.

We urge you to come down to sheikh jarrah this Sunday (25.10.09), and show solidarity with the families who still live in this nightmare and on the wrong side of their houses walls. We will be sitting with them the whole day, starting with the early morning hours.

"In a year, 50 people are killed by terrorists, 35 women were also killed by their husbands. And this isn’t considered terrorism?"
—

Edita, from the doumentary film Zero Degrees of Separation.

showing November 7th at the ASHR film fest:

http://studentsforhumanrights.org/2009/10/film-festival/

(via Ibn Ezra)

AMY GOODMAN: CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, introducing Israeli journalist Amira Hass, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. This is the acceptance speech that Amira Hass gave right after.

    AMIRA HASS: Shalom, marhaba.

    Allow me to start with a correction. “Ah, how impolite,” you’d rightly think. But anyway, we Israelis are being forgiven for much worse than impoliteness. What is so generously termed today by the International Women’s Media Foundation as my “lifetime achievement” needs to be corrected, because it is failure. Nothing more than a failure. A lifetime failure. Come to think of it, the “lifetime” part is just as questionable. After all, it is about a third of my life, not more, that I have been engaged in journalism. Also, if the “lifetime” part gives you the impression that I am soon going to retire, then this impression has to be corrected, as well. I’m not planning to end soon what I’m doing.

    What am I doing? I’m generally defined as a reporter on Palestinian issues. But, in fact, my reports are about the Israeli society and policies, about domination and intoxications. My sources are not secret documents and leaked-out minutes which were taken out of meetings of people with power and in power; my sources are the open ways by which the subjugated are being dispossessed of their equal rights as human beings.

    There is still much more to learn about Israel, to learn about my society and about the Israeli decision makers, who invent restrictions such as: Gazan students are not to study in a Palestinian university in the West Bank, some seventy kilometers away from their home. Another ban: children above the age of eighteen are not to visit their Palestinian parents in Gaza, if the parents are well and healthy. If the parents are dying, Israeli order-abiding officials would have allowed a visit. If the children are younger than eighteen, the visit would have been allowed, as well. But on the other hand, second-degree relatives are not allowed to visit dying or healthy siblings in Gaza. It is an intriguing philosophical question, not only journalistic. Think of it. What, for the Israeli system, is so disturbing about reasonably healthy fathers or mothers? What is so disturbing about a kid choosing and getting a better education? And these are but two in a long, long list of Israeli prohibitions.

    Also, when I write about the progressively decimated and fragmented Palestinian territory of the West Bank, it’s not just about people losing their family property and livelihood that I write. It’s not only about the shrinking opportunities of people in disconnected, crowded enclaves. It is in fact a story about the skills of Israeli architects. It is a way to learn about how Israeli on-the-ground planning contradicts official proclamations, a phenomenon which collectivizes the acts of all Israeli governments in the past as in the present.

    In short, there is so much to keep me busy for another lifetime, or at least for the rest of my lifetime. But, as I said, the real correction is elsewhere. It’s not about achievement that we should be talking here, but about a failure. It is the failure to make the Israeli and international public use and accept correct terms and words which reflect the reality, not the Orwellian Newspeak that has flourished since 1993 and has been cleverly dictated and disseminated by those with invested interests. The peace process terminology, which took reign, blurs the perception of real processes that are going on: a special Israeli blend of military occupation, colonialism, apartheid, Palestinian limited self-rule in enclaves, and a democracy for Jews.

    It is not my role as a journalist to make my fellow Israelis and Jews agree that these processes are immoral and dangerously unwise for all of us. It is my role, though, to exercise the right for freedom of the press in order to supply information and to make people know. But as I’ve painfully discovered over the years, the right to know does not mean a duty to know. Thousands of my articles and zillion of words have evaporated. They could not compete with the official language that has been happily adopted by the mass media and is used in order to dis-portray the reality, official language that encourages people not to know. Indeed, a remarkable failure for a journalist.

    (via Democracy Now)

sarahstrnad:

An interesting interview with Richard Goldstone, the author of the Goldstone report.  I’m currently working on a paper for my International Criminal Tribunal Law class on some of the issues raised in this interview, specifically jus in bello (international humanitarian law, the laws of war).

Settlers attack Palestinian family in Sheikh Jarrah, injure seven

20 October 2009

The settlers who have recently occupied the house of the Gawi family, forcefully evicted from their home in Sheikh Jarrah on 2 August 2009, launched an attack today on the Palestinians camping outside. According to local sources, seven Palestinians were injured and four arrested.

The attack started between 8 and 8.30pm, when a driver of a lorry delivering furniture to the occupied house, accompanied by four settlers, attacked a five year old boy from the Gawi family who was playing nearby. The settlers then attacked a small tent where the Gawi family have been living since the eviction. The tent was full of mainly women and children at that time. A Palestinian woman who was hit hard by the driver had to be taken to hospital. A fight broke out immediately, involving at least 15 settlers. Several members of the family sustained light injuries and a 15-year old girl from the neighbourhood was hit by a falling TV as the settlers managed to tear down the tent.

When police arrived, they made no attempts to stop the settlers attacking the family and later arrested four Palestinians. Two were released and another two, Khalet Gawi and Saleh Diab have been taken to hospital and told to come back to the police station tomorrow for further questioning. Four settlers were taken for questioning and released immediately.

The Gawi and Hannoun families, consisting of 53 members including 20 children, have been left homeless after they were forcibly evicted from their houses on 2 August 2009. The Israeli forces surrounded the homes of the two families at 5.30am and, breaking in through the windows, forcefully dragged all residents into the street. The police also demolished the neighbourhood’s protest tent, set up by Um Kamel, following the forced eviction of her family in November 2008.

At present, all three houses are occupied by settlers and the whole area is patrolled by armed private settler security 24 hours a day. Both Hannoun and Gawi families, who have been left without suitable alternative accommodation since August, continue to protest against the unlawful eviction from the sidewalk across the street from their homes, facing regular attacks from the settlers and harassment from the police.

The Karm Al-Ja’ouni neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah is home to 28 Palestinian families, all refugees from 1948, who received their houses from the UNRWA and Jordanian government in 1956. All face losing their homes in the manner of the Hannoun, Gawi and al-Kurd families.

The aim of the settlers is to turn the whole area into a new Jewish settlement and to create a Jewish continuum that will effectively cut off the Old City form the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. Implanting new Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is illegal under many international laws, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

(via ISM)


Share/Save/Bookmark
1 of 16
Original theme by: Hunson

Twitter Updates