Last Resort

January 31st, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

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Non-Israelis to vote in Israeli domestic politics?

January 31st, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

Haaretz:

Israel should grant all of world Jewry the right to vote even on political issues, the president of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, demanded on Monday.

OK, how does this sound? Let me vote in the US elections because my family are Christians? No?
What’s the difference, then?

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It’s for your own good…

January 30th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

The Guardian:

Tory leader David Cameron has pledged to scrap restrictions on controversial police stop-and-search powers in a bid to reduce gun and knife crime.

He said there needed to be “far more” on-the-spot action and pledged to take on critics who argue the tactic alienates ethnic minorities who are more likely to be stopped.

In an interview with The Sun newspaper, he argued black and Asian youngsters would benefit most from a tougher regime as they were the ones being stabbed and shot.

Because the Police, at the moment, need a reason to stop someone. As if they don’t have enough reasons already, like loitering suspiciously, or acting suspiciously or walking suspiciously, or, well, you get the idea. If they don’t have to give a reason just imagine the amount of crimanals they could catch!

He added: “Stop and search rules were put in place to protect young black and Asian British kids. Now it’s the young black and British Asian kids that are being stabbed and shot and the rules are getting in the way of protecting them.

Stop and search rules weren’t put in place to protect black and asain kids. They were put in place to protect us all from a Police state.

Racist attitudes in the police had now been changed, he said, meaning the powers could be extended without charges of prejudice being levelled at officers.

What the fuck does that mean? I unserstand that charges of racism can be easily thrown at officers, and being white working class (the wife would say middle class, but then she is Indian) I don’t really have any experience of harrassment by The Fuzz, but I’m sure that the Police already have all the powers they need to stop an asain or black kid if they’re acting suspiciously.
Or is it the quotas getting in the way again?

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Palestinians Are Nobody’s Negroes

January 28th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

I wish I’d written this, one day I will make time to write a proper post and shock you all…

It’s a long post so I’m not going to post all of here, but it is worth reading.

Lawrence of Cyberia:

Palestinians Are Nobody’s Negroes

Before I get into the details of why the “Jewish state” controversy is so revealing of Israel’s general inability to come to terms with its own past, I should make a few preliminary points. First, it is a good thing that the “Jewish state” issue is being discussed, even if the discussion so far tends to generate more heat than light. This is what the I/P conflict is about, and this is the kind of issue that needs to be aired honestly if it’s ever going to be resolved. The I/P conflict is not about how many nonexistent West Bank roadblocks the IDF can fool Condoleezza Rice into thinking have been removed this week, or any of the other superficial lipstick – on – a – pig, how – can – we – make – the – Occupation – appear – less – onerous – to – the – outside – world kind of issues that Israel has managed to restrict discussion to over the last seven years. The I/P conflict is, at base, about what it means to create a state for Jewish people in a land with a preexisting population that is overwhelmingly not Jewish. It might have saved a lot of blood and treasure if the subject had been honestly debated a century ago, instead of being hidden behind silly lies like “a land without a people for a people without a land”, but it wasn’t. So, better late than never, I guess.

What the PLO is offering is a real painful concession, in which people who were not squatters in illegal settlements in belligerently occupied territory, but indigenous residents living in their own homes in their own land, offer to implement their legitimate legal right to go home in a way that preserves the way of life of those who forcibly evicted them in the first place. It means accepting the outcome of their own ethnic cleansing at the hands of a once-persecuted people that the Palestinians themselves were not responsible for persecuting. Palestinians do not accept the rationale or the rightness of the ethnic cleansing but, for the sake of their own future generations and of Israel’s, the PLO is offering to acknowledge the outcome. As Yasir Abed Rabbo, a senior Palestinian negotiator and himself a refugee in 1948, put it in a debate at the Brookings Institution on 20 November 2001:

We asked [at Taba] for the principle of the right of return, but the implementation of it, should be discussed in a very practical and even pragmatic way, without affecting or without — yes, without affecting — the Jewish nature of the state of Israel…

You want, as a Palestinian who was born in Jaffa, to forget my personal thing, my attachment as a person to the place of my birth? I will not do that. But you want me, as a serious politician responsible for the future of my people, and as a person who wants, really, to put an end to these agonies, to take a position which hurts me — I should take it. I will do that. This is the difference.

— cited by Akiva Eldar, in You’re holding the baby, Colin, try not to drop it; Ha’aretz, 22 Nov 2001.


This is a generous offer whose proportions the Israelis – who apparently think that Barak’s attempt (left) to give back disjointed parts of something that didn’t belong to him in the first place, actually constitutes a “generous offer” – cannot begin to imagine.

Via JSF

Labels: Palestine

Professional Protest Stall on Police March

January 26th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

“Realising that the Police are far more used to being on the other side of protests, the Space Hijackers set up a stall at the Police March offering tips on protesting, free placards and even police issue anti F.I.T team face masks”

Professional Protest StallClick the pic for more.

Labels: Demostrations, The Police

Gaza/Egypt crossing opens, slightly

January 23rd, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

CNN.com:

“We are not opening the Rafah crossing just for everybody to cross — we’re opening it because it’s a very dire humanitarian situation,” said spokesman Hassam Zaki.


Via Desertpeace

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Egypt joins in denying medical care

January 22nd, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

Ma’an News Agency:

Hundreds of Palestinian women were beaten by Egyptian security forces after the women broke through barbed wire on the Rafah border into Egypt from the Gaza Strip on Tuesday afternoon.

Demonstrations began at the Rafah crossing point on Monday, with protesters calling for the border to be opened to allow Palestinian patients into Egypt for medical treatment.

Brought to my attention by Desertpeace

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Gaza. Such trouble for the Israelis

January 22nd, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

Haaretz:

Olmert: “as far as I am concerned, every resident of Gaza can walk because they have no gasoline for their vehicles, because they have a murderous regime that doesn’t let people in southern Israel live in peace”

Never mind that the Zionists haven’t let the Palestinians live in peace for a hundred or so years.

Labels: Israel,

Poor old Sderot

January 21st, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

Lenin:

Getting Away With Murder

It turns out that this is stupendously easy. The magic word is “Sderot”. Poor old Sderot. Poor, wretched Sderot. Gaza is a place where “rage” boils and bubbles over, especially since the “Hamas takeover” (the failed Fatah putsch, in other words), and Sderot pays the price. Rockets, empty streets, fleeing mattresses, the dog not getting walked. Poor, miserable Sderot.

Gaza has been under Israeli siege for some time. It is starving. Aid can’t get in, because of Israel’s blockade. Israel continues to ravage the territory with air strikes. As usual, Israel’s imposition of its preferred racial order in the Middle East regionally intersects with its domestic racial order. The daily massacres in Gaza coincide with the internal campaign against the Bedouin of the Negev, the ongoing theft of Palestinian land and property, the ‘Judaising’ of annexed territory, the construction of segregated roads, all the usual. In the West Bank, a Fatah fiefdom since June, attacks are frequent. It doesn’t matter how much Abbas connives – even his allies are not safe from Israeli assassination.

Read the rest

Labels: Israel, Palestine

MSC Napoli: One year on

January 18th, 2008 § 0 comments § permalink

Last January the cargo ship MSC Napli ran aground off the coast of Branscombe.

BBC:

In January 2007, scavengers swarmed to Branscombe in Devon in search of plunder. But what happened to the booty they took away?

A year on, the MSC Napoli still casts a shadow over Branscombe – literally.

Half of its stern, still waiting to be removed by salvagers, is still visible from the shore.

When it ran aground off the coast of Branscombe, the villagers could not have predicted what the wreck would bring them.

And the best bit? Keeping traditions going:

[a person] admits that his attempts to profit from the Napoli’s fate has not been universally well-received in the area.

“There are some pompous gits who say it shouldn’t be allowed, that it’s vandalism,” he says. “But wrecking is a great west country tradition.

Labels: Odds and Sods

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