Calling People “anti-Semitic” is a Trick, we Always Use

So says a former Israeli minister, Shulamit Aloni, answering Amy Goodman. This video from Representative Press is a response to that trick used repeatedly against dissidents, among them being that channel in channel comments. It is the standard defamation tactic of calling people anti-Semitic who speak out against those supporting immoral and illegal Israeli policies in violation of basic human rights. Raising the specter of the Holocaust is similarly used to deflect criticism, as if Zionists have the right now to abuse other people such as Palestinians because Jews have been horribly abused as scapegoats to distract attention from their own abuses by totalitarian regimes in the recent past.

The Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people justifies what we do to the Palestinians.

Shulamit Aloni

What Zionist Jews Need To Remember

From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught… that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells us, “vomit you out” if people did not live according to the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah (command):

When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an outsider of your society, the powerless one and then not only “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” but also “you shall love the other”.

Rabbi Lerner

Ha Aretz (The Land) was granted to the Jews as a tenancy only on certain conditions as Rabbi Lerner says. Jews were not to oppress the stranger. And God also said what the punishment would be for not complying. Ezekiel (33:24-29) received Yehouah's words of warning to the Jews who boasted that “the land is given to us for a possession”, as follows:

So says the Lord Yehouah: You eat on the blood, and you lift your eyes up to your idols, and you shed blood. And shall you possess the land? You stand on your sword, and you each do abominations, defiling his neighbor's wife. And shall you possess the land?
Says the Lord Yehouah: I will give the one who is on the face of the field to the beasts to be eaten, and those in the forts and in the caves shall die by the plague. For I shall make the land desolate and a waste, and the pride of her strength shall cease. And the heights of Israel shall be a waste that none will go through.
And they shall know that I am Yehouah, when I have made the land desolate and a waste because of all their abominations which they have done.

Many Zionists think or assume that Ha Aretz was given to the Jews as their possession, and base their religious and political beliefs on this thinking, but it is not so. The most orthodox Jews rightly reject it. So too should Christians. To be serious, they should be proselytizing Israelis, but that they fail to do. At the very least they should be deterring Jews from oppressing Palestinians as being utterly contrary to anything that Jesus taught. They do that even less.

Terrorism academics tell us what we already ought to know

Physorg reports that experts on terrorism are writing theses and mathematical tracts to tell us what we already know. Philip Vos Fellman, a Lecturer at Suffolk University, Boston, uses network analysis, agent based simulation, and dynamic NK Boolean fitness landscapes, whatever they are, to try and understand the complexities of terrorist networks. He wants to know how “long term operational and strategic planning might be undertaken so that tactics which appear to offer immediate impact are avoided if they cause little long term damage to the terrorist network”. It means he hopes to avoid a load of wasted effort!

His computer simulations of terrorist networks suggest that it is not worth the effort to target small cells within a large network. Effort should be on the hubs of the networks. From all this mathematics and computer wizardry, Vos Fellman discovers:

If you are not focused on the top problems, then considerations of opportunity cost suggest that it may be better to do nothing rather than to waste valuable resources on exercises which are doomed to fail.

Taking out the hub, like the ancients trying to take out the king or the general in battle, induces the collapse of the network around it, leaving the individual cells or soldiers isolated!

It seems that terrorist networks are “typical of the structures encountered in the study of conflict, in that they possess multiple, irreducible levels of complexity and ambiguity”. Moreover they are covert!

Key elements may remain hidden for extended periods of time, and the network itself is dynamic… A dynamic network contrasts starkly with the structure of the armed forces or homeland security systems, which tend to be centralized and hierarchical.

So all that computing and mathematical modeling tells us what ancient generals took for granted, that conflicts are rarely simple, that terrorists operate in secret, and you kill the commander to win the battle. Amazing!

Elsewhere, a Dr Gill of University College Dublin, Ireland, completed his doctorate showing that suicide bombings have become the ultimate smart bomb in the militant groups repertoire! Most suicide bombers today are male Muslims under 35. They typically cause more human and structural damage than conventional bombings, and a successful suicide bombing may also increase the membership of a militant organization or increase wider constituent support for the organizations campaign, dontcha know! He reckons that the IRA would have been using suicide bombers had it not first decided to settle for electoralism, when they realized that suicide bombing might not have been popular among Catholics as well as Protestants. The same happened with Hamas and Hezbollah. As they became involved in elections, they decreased their number of violent attacks. For his profound efforts, Dr Gill is now at the International Center for the Study of Terrorism (ICST) at Pennsylvania State University.

Suicide bombers range from 15 to 70 years old, are both well educated and uneducated, male and female, from all socio economic classes, Christian, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim, religious and secular, single and married, white and black. Consequently, counter terrorism should not bother trying to “profile” suicide bombers, and instead move towards a model of the structural and situational processes that facilitate and encourage the recruitment of suicide bombers. Does he actually mean we should try to find out why they are doing it? That really is revolutionary, but his new US employers are hardly likely to like it.

If people feel that there is a viable alternative to protracted violence, they may be more willing to denounce acts of suicide bombing. Opinion polls in Palestine show that when there was a peace plan on the table, support for suicide bombings decreased. The perceived level of threat in the local community then eased. Anti terrorism policies should focus on this, not on “Gung Ho”, “over the top” militarism which have never worked in such wars over many decades—rather showing that these wars are not meant to be won! They are there to be publicized to domestic audiences as a constant threat, to justify military waste that benefits only a narrow but rich caste in US society.

A way of decreasing the threat of suicide bombing is peaceful negotiation with all the insurgent groups. Excluding some causes bitterness, and makes that group more likely to continue the bombing at a level meant to convey a message of their determination.

So, we have discovered that profiling terrorism is a waste of time, we ought to want to know why people are blowing themselves up, and we should try to negotiate with them, presumably, if we are serious about stopping the attacks, by trying to solve the root problem. Amazing!

True Messianic Jews Oppose Zionism!

Rabbi Moses Jakubowicz has a short article on the website, True Torah Jews against Zionism entitled “Judaism is a Religion—Not a Race”. Throughout history, whoever joined the Jewish religion was called a Jew, no matter what his race, and whoever abandoned the Holy Torah was not considered a Jew. In fact, the biggest names in Jewish history were converts or descendants of converts—King David, Zipporah, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Meir, Shmaya and Avtalyon. Jewish people suffered many a time from fanatically religious governments who expelled or killed whoever refused to adhere to their religious belief, during the Middle Ages. Judaism is therefore a religion, not a race.

Now, Jewish people suffer from the world’s misunderstanding of the distinction between Judaism and Zionism. It is Zionists, for their own political and financial advantage, who have made Jews into a race. They have also changed the Torah, a book of divine law which teaches fairness, peace and piety, into propaganda for their political goals, and their claim to Palestine, helping to foment antisemitism, which is their intention. Jew hating drives Jews to Israel!

When Bush visited Israel, in 2008, several rabbis of the extremist Zionist settler community wrote asking the US President not to put any pressure on the Israeli leadership to yield land concessions to the Palestinian Authority. Yet, this is land Zionist Jews took from the Palestinians in the first place. They explained that he would be asking Israel to make concessions to terrorists while the US itself had announced a war on terror! Yet, Jewish terrorists, like those responsible for the bombing of the King David Hotel, drove out the Arabs so that the land would be free for grabbing by the Zionists, allegedly with biblical authority.

These Zionist rabbis compared the US President to Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, respectively the Babylonian king and the Roman general who became emperor of Rome, each of whom destroyed Jerusalem, implying that Bush would be doing the same. They ended:

You must surely remember that America does not benefit from causing damage, Heaven forbid, to the Jewish people and its land. If you help the wholeness of our holy land, we promise you and your country endless blessings.

These Zionist “rabbis” think they are God, trading his blessings for land, like beads to a savage. Rabbi Jakubowicz accused the authors of this letter of being rabbis in name only. They presumed to speak in the name of the Jewish religion, but the world must not allow itself to be fooled. They were “politicians and militants advancing their own agenda, for which they are distorting the Holy Torah and by doing so they are jeopardizing the Jewish people in the entire world as the Zionists did in the Second World War”.

Zionists desperately drum up support for Israel in the US, and try to convince Jews that they should be in Israel fighting to evict the Arabs. The pressure against Iran regarding their alleged nuclear weapons program is orchestrated by US Zionists and Israel, just as there was an orchestrated campaign of lies against Iraq, on the grounds of WMD which were never found. They simply did not exist, and the weapons inspectors had said they did not, and needed only a short while more to prove it conclusively. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful, and has made several proposals regarding it that would be acceptable to any reasonable power.

Despite the pressure and propaganda, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have emigrated to other countries with no plans to return. “Jews against Zionism” says the Zionist Absorption Ministry, once famous for bringing millions of Jews to the State of Israel and providing them with housing and employment, has said that around 20,000 Israelis emigrate each year. 650,000 Israelis live abroad, 450,000 in North America. The Ministry is struggling unsuccessfully to recover these expatriates.

All these former Zionists have admitted their mistake in setting up the state of Israel contrary to what observant Jews consider God’s will. These true Jews think it was a grave error to want to anticipate God’s plan and try to force God’s redemption before its time. The Zionists ought to hear the prophet Yirmiyahu, who says in the name of God:

They have left Me, the source of fresh water, to dig themselves broken pits that will not hold water.

Yirmiyahu, Jeremy 2:13

Only when God is ready will Jews see the fulfilment of the verse:

And those redeemed by God will return and come to Zion with song, with eternal happiness on their heads.

Yishaya 35:10

The objection of true Jews to Zionism is twofold:

1. Zionism, by advocating a political and military end to the Jewish exile, denies the divine basis of the Jewish Diaspora. Jews are in exile because God decreed it, and may emerge from exile solely by divine redemption. All human efforts to alter this divine command must end in failure and bloodshed. History repeatedly bears out this teaching.
2. Zionism has created a pseudo-Judaism with nationalism being a new secular foundation of Jewish identity, not God and his law. So, Zionism and Israel have persistently tried, by persuasion and coercion, to replace a divine and Torah centered understanding of Jewishness with an armed material militancy.

No reasonable and intelligent Jew—and Jewish culture has always produced plenty of people meeting these criteria—would want to stay in Israel for a second, if they were not fanatical Zionists, utterly indoctrinated by them, or feel trapped in a lobster pot. Jews are citizens of the world, and have always been. Israelis should be proud to be Diaspora Jews, like their ancestors, millions of whom died for the right to free thought, benefiting the whole world. Proper Jews, the true Jews of the Torah, still looked forward to the messianic age, when Jerusalem would be “a house of prayer for all nations” (Isaiah 56:7). Zionists should abandon the false and ungodly state of Israel—at least until the the Jewish Messiah has announced his presence!

The Palestinian Case in Brief

The Palestinians, who have lived in Palestine for 2000 years, are no closer to having their own state than they ever were. Israel’s desire to push forward with the peace process is not clear. It refuses to countenance either withdrawal from the occupied territories or the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under US pressure, did join his predecessors in endorsing Palestinian statehood, albeit grudgingly and with caveats. The idea is not popular with the right wing members of his coalition, and efforts to coax Israel into halting all settlement construction in the West Bank have not succeeded.

The illegal apartheid wall snakes through the West Bank. Illegal Israeli settlement colonies, still being expanded, on the West Bank are for Jews only, as are the specially constructed roads. Gaza is still being illegally blockaded. Palestinians in their homeland are confronted by a plethora of checkpoints and barriers that divide families and keep people from their homes, farms and workplaces. What red blooded Yankee would stand for it? Moreover, the international community’s failure to hold Israel to account for war crimes gives it virtual carte blanche to launch attacks with the best modern weaponry, supplied by Uncle Sam, on the virtually defenseless Arabs.

To cover up their criminal complicity, Israeli's and their western sponsor, the US, blame the victims, claiming that Hamas’s resistance to recognizing the current gains of their oppressors stands in the way of a just settlement. Avigdor Lieberman demands the execution as traitors of Arab members of the Knesset who have met Hamas, and the expulsion of Arab citizens who do not sign a loyalty oath to Israel “as a Jewish state”. Such ideas are plainly racist—a form of apartheid. Anti-Arab racism is woven into the fabric of Israeli society. Lieberman is an example.

Palestinians who were born on land inhabited by their forebears for centuries, were driven out by the Jewish terrorist groups that became the core of the Israeli Defense Force after Israel’s foundation, and have no right of return. But Lieberman was born in Chisinau in Moldova, a place totally foreign to Palestine and its Arab people. Yet his status as a Jew qualified him to emigrate to Israel with full civic rights and the ability to travel and to settle anywhere in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

At the root of this mess is the protective umbrella with which America unconditionally shields its Middle East ally. As long as the US has the power of veto within the UN Security Council, Israel can do what it pleases. At the same time, Britain cannot hold Israelis to account without risking its special relationship with Washington.

Britain, which has always prided itself on its legal system and respect for human rights, actually colludes with Israel to ensure its officials escape prosecution. The British Foreign Office engaged in diplomatic shenanigans so that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak could receive immunity from prosecution while on a private visit to London with his wife. British justice does not extend to Israeli war criminals being held to account for their atrocities.

Those who believed that President Obama would make a difference are disappointed. He now seems a man of fine words and little action, certainly in foreign affairs. Like his predecessors, he is perpetuating US double standards. He calls for a nuclear free Middle East and wags his finger at Iran for enriching uranium, then blesses Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”.

Britain, kow-towing to the US and Israel and in common with the rest of the European Union, refuses to talk to Hamas, even though it was properly elected in the Palestinian election, but it is ready and willing to engage with war criminals and racists. So much for the sanctity of democracy.

Meanwhile, the United Nations ignores Israel’s flouting of Security Council Resolutions, and chooses to bin its own investigations into Israel’s crimes. The carefully compiled report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was shelved. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, lobbied diplomatic support to back Israel’s objection to the report accusing Israel of war crimes. The report wanted its conclusions referred to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague, if the warring parties failed to conduct credible investigations within six months. The court at the Hague is not popular with the US either. Too many US leaders would be up for trial as war criminals, they fear.

Where does this sorry state of affairs leave the Palestinian people? Absolutely nowhere. They are constantly failed by international bodies and the international legal system. Is it any wonder that they have resorted to desperate methods? Who would not take them in the unjust situation Palestinians are in? Promises made that their own state is on the horizon are always broken.

When, in frustration, they turn to violence, they are branded as terrorists. The Islamist movement Hamas is regarded by Israel and the West as a terrorist organization after carrying out dozens of suicide attacks, but the invasion by Israel of Gaza on 27 December 2008, left 1,400 Palestinians, nearly all civilians, and 13 Israelis, nearly all soldiers, dead.

Surely something is seriously wrong with our world when a people who have been wronged for over a half century are treated as the criminals. Wherever the Palestinians turn, they find every door shut. Whatever they do to obtain a fraction of their rights, they face insurmountable obstacles. Time and again, they pursue international justice only to discover that it does not exist… for them! Recognized legal channels lead them nowhere.

Compiled from various sources.

Which now is the Rogue State in the Middle East?

The Zionist Israelis it seems have now murdered an elected representative of a sovereign state on foreign soil. Is this terrorism? The neoconservative New Labour rulers of Britain have expressed no concern for the implications for democracy and terrorism elsewhere, particularly here. It is concerned only that British passports were forged to effect the assassination. You can imagine what the reaction in the West would have been if the assassins had been Iranians, and the victim an Israeli.

“Democratic” Israel has full or shared control of 97% of the Palestinian people’s land in the West Bank, where it is demolishing Palestinian homes to build Israeli settlements. It is also building a “security” wall through the West Bank—to secure Arab land and water supplies for the Israelis! Palestinians suffer. They are subjected to arbitrary arrests and torture, and live under conditions many describe as open-air prisons or apartheid.

The Palestinians have been divided by the US and Israel, with Fatah and Israel siding together against Hamas. Fatah controls the West Bank while Hamas controls the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority, under Fatah, has been bought off. Israel’s chosen governing partner, directly controls the other 3% of the West Bank.

Hamas is the party democratically and legitimately elected by the Palestinians. Fatah is unelected, known for corruption, torture and intimidation, and bankrolled by the US. Keith Dayton is the US security coordinator overseeing the training of Palestinian forces. He says the stated aim of the mission is to “preserve and protect the interests of the state of Israel”. Hamas is villified and has been boycotted since winning the 2006 election while Fatah—or the Palestinian Authority—receives money and training from the US to fight the party Palestinians have elected.

The ruling caste of the US in Washington, and our own in London, boast their democratic credentials until representatives are elected they do not like, then suddenly they prefer unelected but easily bribed crooks. They have always preferred local bullies to do their military dirty work for them, when they can get them to.

The money and training are being used by the Palestinian Authority to wage war against Hamas, and the Palestinian population of the Gaza strip, literally a completely isolated strip of land confined by the sea and Israel, with a short stretch adjacent to Egypt. The Israeli war on Gaza at the beginning of 2009 killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. The independent Goldstone report heavily criticized Israeli war crimes and attacks on UN buildings in Gaza. The Israeli justification of the war was to stop Hamas rocket attacks. These represent a token resistance to Israeli brutality. The rockets are home made, unguided and almost useless, having killed almost no one. And Hamas had kept a ceasefire until Israel provoked a reaction as an excuse to fight the one sided war.

Israel has the upper hand in every measure. Fatah stays in power by policing Israel’s enemies. There is no peace process. Israel has no interest in peace. It is a small boy under the protection of the big boy in the schoolyard. It enjoys kicking the other small boys, knowing they dare not retaliate. The big boy sadistically enjoys the small boys’ pain and humiliation.

People rightly ask why we are under attack by terrorists, but they never listen to the answer. We are assisting an occupying power in the middle East. We must be implicated in their torture and other abuses. Why does our government keep on siding with international criminals subject to a long list of UN resolutions for their terrorism against their neighbors? We persist in supporting the rogue nation causing all the trouble in the middle east. It is not Iran, but Israel!

Additional reporting from Adam Uppal, The Standard, Canada

J J Goldberg: A History of Jewish Terrorism

From Forward

J J Goldberg, a veteran Jewish reporter, writes in the US Jewish news weekly Forward, that on 1 November, Israeli police arrested a West Bank settler, Jack (Yaacov) Teitel, a man born in Florida, charged with murder, assault and possessing weapons. Even Israeli officials accept Teitel is a case of Jewish terrorism, his dirty tricks stretching back 12 years, in the whole of which Teitel was able to operate undetected, effecting a series of well planned attacks apparently on his own, though that is an assumption. Among the targets of his terror, besides Arabs were left wing Jews, Christian Jews and homosexuals. Why did the Israeli security services—among the most diligent in the world at identifying Arab terror, and making sure by arresting many Arabs merely on suspicion and keeping them locked up so they can do no harm—took so long to identify Teitel.

Jewish anti Arab violence is a routine aspect of the West Bank where Israelis are settling illegally in land that belongs to Palestinian Arabs. Goldberg says their atmosphere of messianic religious nationalism makes West Bank settlements a breeding ground for extremist violence. The illegal Jewish settlers excuse themselves by blaming a few isolated acts on misfits. Yet Israeli terrorism is far more common than usually thought, though, because there are still many Israeli Jews who are liberal and oppose the Zionist right wing governors of the country, and because Israelis do not have to endure a life of unbearable oppression, Israeli terrorism is nothing like as widespread as that of the Palestinians, who have no choice but to turn to terrorism because the US persistently blocks UN resolutions criticizing Israel.

What is curious is Teitel has been arrested at all, and is called a terrorist by the authorities. The Israeli security forces and police normally conduct only cursory investigations of assaults of Palestinians by settlers, leading to no arrests and no publicity.

A study released in 1994 by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that between 1988 and 1993, during the first intifada, 1207 Palestinians were killed by Israelis, 62 by settlers, and 1,145 by security forces. In the same intifada, 117 Israeli civilians and 64 security personnel were killed by Palestinians. Of 48 of the 62 Palestinian deaths at the hands of settlers, 13 cases went to trial. Almost three quarters of the deaths of Palestinians by Israeli settlers studied never reached the courts. Of the 13 that did one led to a conviction for murder! Nine more were convicted of other offenses, and the rest could not be found guilty. Similarly, a government study released in 1984, by the Israeli Deputy Attorney General, looked at 70 Palestinian complaints of attacks by settlers between May 1981 and April 1982. 53 of them ended in no action due to lack of evidence or “absence of public interest” (Goldberg's quotation marks). The author concluded that the army and government consistently overlooked or downplayed settler violence against Arabs.

In the same year, 1984, Jewish terrorism first received widespread notice, following the mass arrest of the “Jewish Underground”. Their crimes included car bomb attacks on three Palestinian mayors, leaving two severely maimed, plus attempted bombings of Arab commuter buses and an armed assault on an Islamic college campus, killing three students and wounding 40. 25 were arrested, mostly leaders of the Gush Emunim settler movement, and most were given 20 years to life. Nearly all were paroled or pardoned within six years, by 1990.

In 1994, terrorist Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli born in Brooklyn, New York, killed 29 Arab worshipers in Hebron. In 1995, Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Jewish terrorists. Many more had negligible publicity and so were barely noticed even at the time. In 1984, besides the Jewish Underground arrests, two other, independent terror cells were exposed but the public could not distinguish them. One consisted of Kahanists carrying out bus bombings and shootings, and the other of kabbalists aiming to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount.

In 2003, following two years of roadside shootings, killing eight, and the bombing of an Arab girls’ middle school, wounding 11, nine men of an organized terrorist group were brought to trial and eventually convicted but so slowly that it attracted no publicity. What publicity there was justified the murders by eliciting sympathy for one of the terrorists whose 10 month old daughter had been killed by a Palestinian sniper in 2001.

The settler's excuse of blaming a few isolated acts on misfits is a well tried and tested technique in Israeli misinformation. Israeli terrorist crimes are immediately dismissed by officials as acts of deranged individuals to sidetrack media attention. Yet, given sufficient delay, the criminals are tried and convicted, showing they could not have been deranged, but were sane all along. Insanity is a defense! Examples are Alan Goodman, a Baltimore born soldier who opened fire on the Temple Mount in 1982, killing two guards and wounding nine others, and Ami Popper, a Rishon Letziyon youth who gunned down seven Arab day laborers at a bus stop in 1990. Now he is a hero of the far right.

Goldberg concludes:

It’s an unpleasant story, but an essential one. If we don’t remember the past, we can’t understand the present. We often speak of the sacred duty of remembrance, but memories are tricky things.

US Morality? Ignoring Israeli Atrocities

The UN Resolution on the Goldstone Report

US ambassador Douglas Griffiths, opposing the human rights resolution at the UN, said the Goldstone report written by South African Judge, Richard Goldstone, was unfair towards Israel. But Goldstone investigated both sides of the conflict, Israel and Hamas. The 575 page document concluded that, during its incursion into the Gaza Strip, on 27 December 2008, to root out Palestinian rocket squads, Israel:

• used disproportionate force
• deliberately targeted civilians
• used Palestinians as human shields
• destroyed civilian infrastructure.

It also pointed out that Palestinian armed groups, including Hamas, deliberately targeted civilians and tried to spread terror through years of rocket attacks on southern Israel. In fact, the report required both Israel and Hamas to look publicly and fairly into their respective human rights failings in the conflict, and, if they failed to conduct credible investigations within six months, recommended a reference of the offending party to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague.

So, the report itself is balanced, but the UN resolution emphasized the Israeli part because far more innocents were killed by Israeli professional soldiers than by Hamas fighters. The three week conflict in Gaza left 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead. It was the continuation over decades of such one sided “defense” of the territory that until 1948 had been the Palestinians’ for twelve centuries that has caused the hatred of Moslems worldwide. Consequently, the resolution agreed in Geneva called for the UN General Assembly to consider the Goldstone report, and then for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to report, on Israel’s adherence to the resolution, to the Human Rights Council.

For Washington, justice is a “distraction from the peace process”, according to the US ambassador. Naturally, Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, claimed the resolution “provides encouragement for terrorist organizations worldwide and undermines global peace”. Israel is not the terrorist organization he meant. Meanwhile Ambassador Griffiths continued with the usual pro-Israeli stance of all US administrations:

We had worked for a resolution that recognized the right of a state to take legitimate action to protect its citizens in the face of threats to their security while also condemning violations of international law regardless of the actor.

Read this carefully. “A state has the right to take legitimate action to protect its citizens.” It is true, and is enshrined in the Human Rights Act, but the US ambassador means Israel has the right, not the Palestinians who are actually fighting for the life and land of its people, yet always suffer completely disproportionally in the one sided war going on between Israel and Palestine. Numerous UN resolutions have been directed against Israel, but they lead nowhere because of US intransigence and veto.

In 40 years, Israel has featured in 65 Security Council UN resolutions, passed by two thirds majorities or better in the 15 nation Security Council—often 14 to one, the US! These resolutions have censured and deplored Israel’s actions and policies in respect of massacres of Palestinians, land grabbing since the 1948 partition, destroying Palestinian buildings including homes, making them refugees in their own land, restricting their access to water and electricity, illegal imprisonments, deliberate harassment and settling Israelis in illegal settlements. These are all violations of human rights, yet The US and Israel justify them by the fact that Palestinians protest against them! If someone did it to you, what would you do? Tip your cap in gratitude? Something is seriously wrong with the world when people wronged for half a century are treated as if they are criminals for trying to assert some sort of justice themselves.

For international justice for them is a joke, through US protection of Israel. It is impossible for them to find justice wherever they turn. Insurmountable obstacles are constantly placed in their way, legal channels are blocked, and their human rights are mangled in the interest of US oil imperialism. They have lost their own land, and are promised a share of it, as a Palestinian state but the never get even to share what was theirs sixty years ago. In the end, they only have one course open to them— to fight for their rights—then they are called terrorists.

Is it any wonder that Arab and African countries can only see US double standards in this, and try to use the UN for its proper purpose. The Israelis do all the damage, and the Palestinians get all the blame. Those who believed President Obama would act differently have already been disappointed. Change? He talks the talk but no longer walks the walk, in this key issue of foreign affairs. Typically and especially typical of his predecessor, he insists on a nuclear free Middle East, except for Israel, whose 60 nuclear bombs, though held contrary to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty never meet any US disapproval while Iran gets threatened with nuclear attack just for enriching uranium for legitimate reasons.

How can the leaders, and indeed the general population, of this immensely powerful superpower, the US, claim to be a moral nation, or even understand what morality is, when they have such an immoral attitude to some of the most ill treated people in the world. The Palestinians are treated as less than dogs. So much for the respect the meretriciously Christian Americans have for God and His creation, and Christ’s famous saying that to mistreat anyone is to mistreat himself in the same way!

At the root of the US hypocrisy is the unqualified protection America gives its Middle Eastern colony, Israel. The US can veto anything brought before the UN Security Council blocking any call to bring Israel to justice before the International Criminal Court. Israel therefore knows it stands above international law. It can therefore act just as it likes to its Arab neighbours, launching attacks wherever it fancies. The illegal segregationist wall stretches through the West Bank to protect the illegal Israeli settlements being expanded there—Arab land—and Gaza is still being illegally blockaded.

As the US ambassador said, countries have the right to self defense, and that is what the Palestinians have been doing, but the US has its own agenda behind its immoral attitude to foreign policy. It is the agenda of the magnates and militarists who make megabucks out of other people’s distress, and so have a permanent policy of causing it, not just in Palestine. It is time for American liberals and the genuinely Christian American, if any exist, to speak out against the criminality of their own leaders serving those who sacrifice human beings to the insatiable Moloch of greed and war bucks, America’s caste of robber barons.

Gaza: Israeli Criminals let off the Hook Again

In a special session, 25 members of the 47 nation UN body voted in favor of the resolution that chastised Israel for failing to cooperate with the UN mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone. Another 6 voted against—the US and Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine—while 16 others abstained or did not vote. Britain, France and three other members declined to vote. Russia and China, two permanent members of the UN Security Council, were among those voting yes.

Britain, which used to pride itself on its respect for law and for human rights did not vote, according to David Milliband, the UK's Jewish Foreign Secretary, because it had not finished discussing the issue, effectively colluding with Israel to keep its generals and officials from prosecution. The British Foreign Office prevaricated last month, over a private visit to London of Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and his wife until they had immunity from prosecution.

Moreover, the United Nations itself ignores Israel's flouting of Security Council Resolutions and has shelved the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, its own careful investigations into Israel's crimes.

Israel says focusing on its actions in Gaza could derail the start of talks toward a peace deal and the establishment of a Palestinian state, objectives Israel has consistently opposed in every way practical. “Any action against Israel in this area is incompatible with negotiations and concessions”, said Eytan Gilboa of Bar Ilan University.

Goldstone, a noted judge, who is a Jew and has been under strong pressure from Zionist Jews and Israelis, concluded that both Israel and Hamas, the militant ruling party of Gaza, elected by the Palestinian people, committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the conflict.

So the responsibility was evenly divided between Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinian people, having been consistently failed by international bodies and the international legal system, it can scarcely surprise anyone that they have tried to take matters into their own hands. Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto did the same—they fought back even though against the odds. why is it right for Jews to fight fascist oppression but it is not right for Arabs to do it against Israelis, Jewish colonists in the US colony of Palestine.

Israel is portrayed as the minnow even though it has nuclear weapons and every modern WMD it wants from their protectors the USA. The Palestinians have almost nothing, though Israel launched its vicious attack in response to some rockets fired from Gaza in late December 2008. These rockets were not professionally made military hardware, but are ingenious home made contraptions, little more than self propelled mortar bombs, and quite untargetable. They have caused some casualties and damage to property, but no fair judge can compare it with the full scale professionally equipped onslaught of the Israeli army last January.

And who can doubt the injustice looking at the figures of casualties from the three week long invasion of Gaza by the Israeli troops and their tanks. Almost 1,400 Palestinians—400 children—were killed during conflict, and just 13 Israelis, half by friendly fire! What is moral or defensible about professional soldiers killing defenseless women and children in their homes?

How can the US justify such immoral behavior? How can Obama especially justify it? It is not moral in the least to beat up and murder helpless people, and it is the Palestinians who are helpless not the Israelis. Obama in less than a year has been corralled by the military clique in Washington, yet has won a Peace prize. So too did Kissinger, but he at least gave his back. Why doesn't Obama change? Change was his slogan. Why not try it in foreign affairs as well as in health care? And even there he is struggling. We have to conclude that the Christian-Zionist military axis ruling the US is too strong for anyone. The US people themselves need to respond.