News from Britain’s Trades Union Congress (TUC): its annual conference is urging the British government to “a) condemn the Israeli military aggression and the continuing blockade of Gaza; (b) end arms sales to Israel which reached a value of £18.8 million in 2008, up from £7.7 million in 2007; (c) seek EU agreement to impose a ban on the importing of goods produced in the illegal settlements; and (d) support moves to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement which provides preferential trade facilities to Israel.”
Archive for September, 2009
Over at the CST blog, eagle-eyed Dave Rich observes a particularly well-known habitué of Afghan caves recommending - eight years after the slaughter of 9/11 - that Americans read the works of Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt. Writes Dave: “[T]hey cannot claim to be completely surprised that the leader of al-Qaeda has cited their book in support of his cause; after all, they cited him first, as evidence that the activities of the Israel Lobby were damaging American interests (‘There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians.’)”
Here are a couple of key passages from the report on the Gaza conflict commissioned by the UN’s utterly discredited Human Rights Council:
“While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole…deeds by Israeli forces and words of military and political leaders prior to and during the operations indicate that as a whole they were premised on a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed not at the enemy but at the ’supporting infrastructure.’ In practice, this appears to have meant the civilian population.”
Continue reading ‘UN Human Rights Council Report Distorts Gaza War’
Suspended on full pay, reports the Times.
He ducks, he dives, he evades and then he ends on a note of delusional pomposity. Yes, it’s Marc Garlasco, who concedes that he wrote a “handful” (actually, it was more than 7,000) of “juvenile” posts on a couple of online militaria forums, but wants us to remember that “because of the intense suffering during the Second World War and the genocidal campaign against the Jewish people, I spend my days doing what I can to ensure that such horrors are never allowed to happen again.”
Right. I guess that explains the sweatshirt.
Helena Cobban - a member of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch and a trenchant critic of Israel for many years - isn’t impressed (and check out her earlier posts.) However, given that Garlasco could not be writing this kind of trash without HRW’s prior approval, it seems unlikely that Cobban’s concerns will register in the office of the organization’s boss, Ken Roth.
ProPublica, a non-profit organization supporting investigative journalism, has very helpfully published the Iranian regime’s proposal for “comprehensive, all-encompassing and constructive” negotiations on everything bar Iran’s own nuclear program.
It’s a chilly, gray, extremely wet morning in New York. Find yourself standing at an exposed street corner and the wind and rain will whip your face. Looking out of my office window, I can see sheets of heavy rain splashing the cars and taxis heading uptown on Third Avenue.
All in all, a marked contrast to the brilliant sunshine which ushered in September 11, 2001. And that is as it should be: this is an anniversary for dismal clouds and weeping skies.
We will not forget.
Mark Gardner of the CST with an important piece here.
As documented on numerous other blogs - here and here and here for starters - it appears that this person and this person are one and the same. So what does this tell us about the Human Rights Watch researcher and virulent Israel critic, Marc Garlasco?
You remember all the fuss at the start of the year about Israel’s supposedly disproportionate use of force in Gaza, no? Well, unless you are a close student of Afghan affairs it may have escaped your attention that last Thursday Spanish forces killed 13 members of the Taliban without suffering so much as a scratch on their own side.
Writing in The National Post, Charles Lewis pours scorn upon the group of artists and writers who have called on the Toronto Film Festival to cancel the showing of ten films about Tel Aviv, in order to avoid complicity with “the Israeli propaganda machine.”
This article, by the Hungarian journalist János Gadó, has been translated and edited by Karl Pfeifer. On September 22nd, Gadó will appear in a Budapest court to face a defamation charge brought by Tamás Polgár, the far-right activist discussed below.
On April 7, 2008 we defended the Újlipótváros, a centre of Budapest Jewry. At the corner of Hollán Ernõ street, we stopped the demonstrators with black uniforms. Fighting both their fear and the mentality that “it is better not do anything,” antifascists, Budapest Jews, liberals, leftists and some conservative supporters organized themselves and waited for the extremists planning to “buy tickets.”
Continue reading ‘Confronting the Fascists on Budapest’s Streets’
Swedish journalist Mats Skogkär has an intelligent piece on Foreign Policy about what he regards as the deeper significance of the Aftonbladet scandal. “To Israelis, Sweden seems destined to misunderstand their predicament,” he writes. “Tucked between Finland, Norway, and Denmark, Sweden has the friendliest neighbors in the world. Israel has the world’s most hostile and resentful. There is a Swedish no-doubt-about-it conviction that differences, however deep and old, always can be settled in negotiations.”
Continue reading ‘Israel and the Swedish Blood Libel Scandal’
