Latest Updates: The Only Democracy In The Middle East RSS
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thabet
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johnpi
The Only Democracy in the Middle East.
Apartheid in action. Ahmed Tibi, a member of Knesset, states, “Israel is democratic for Jews, but Jewish for Arabs.”
Tibi condemned legislation that would allow Israeli communities to bar Arab landowners from building.
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johnpi
Sometimes wild-sounding stories do turn out to be true.
It seems there is now a videotape admission from a supervisor in one Israeli hospital that organs were being harvested from dead Palestinians without permission from the family or anyone else.
The 57-minute video was filmed by Yehuda Hiss, the director and chief pathologist at the Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, and explains how he authorized organ theft, gave instructions to doctors to do so and said he would sometimes snatch the organs himself.
….Israeli law prohibits taking organs from corpses without obtaining permission from the family of the deceased, which Hiss said he specifically instructed doctors not to do.
“We did it for the sake of research and medical progress,” said Hiss, who admitted to having removed organs from 125 bodies without permission or authorization.
News of organ thefts led to the suspension of Hiss as director of the institute in 2005 but Israel’s top attorney decided not to press charges and Hiss ended up just being reprimanded and going back to his position at the institute.
The Israeli Ministry of Health responded to the tape by saying that everything was done in accordance with the law while hospitals that were named argued that the topic is old news and there is no point bringing it up again now.
Ho-hum. Old news…nothing to see here, just move along…
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johnpi
10,000 new settlers within 10 months: Israel.
An Israeli minister has predicted there will be 10,000 new settlers in the occupied West Bank over the next 10 months and insisted that a moratorium did not freeze but only limited construction.
The minister was saying this to try to placate extremist protesters who are engaging in civil disobedience (and worse) over the supposed freeze on settlement building that is currently in place. That didn’t stop settlers from going into a West Bank village and torching the local mosque.
Palestinians in the West Bank village of Kufur Yasuf, near Nablus, said a gang of Jewish settlers forced their way into the local mosque on Thursday night, doused carpets and copies of the Quran with petrol, and set them ablaze.
Graffiti scrawled in Hebrew at the threshold said it was “the price-tag” — an expression used by hardline settlers for systematic acts of vengeance against Palestinians.
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thabet
“State-sponsored incitement”? Is that when a state steals a people’s land, destroys their livelihoods, jails their children, razes their homes, bombs them indiscriminately, and tries to starve them to death?
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thabet
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thabet
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johnpi
Israel’s fear of Jewish girls dating Arabs; Team of psychologists to “rescue” women.
A local authority in Israel has announced that it is establishing a special team of youth counselors and psychologists whose job it will be to identify young Jewish women who are dating Arab men and “rescue” them.
The move by the municipality of Petah Tikva, a city close to Tel Aviv, is the latest in a series of separate — and little discussed — initiatives from official bodies, rabbis, private organisations and groups of Israeli residents to try to prevent interracial dating and marriage.
In a related development, the Israeli media reported this month that residents of Pisgat Zeev, a large Jewish settlement in the midst of Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, had formed a vigilante-style patrol to stop Arab men from mixing with local Jewish girls.
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thabet
The “Moral” IDF:
The Only Democracy In The Middle East:
Partner for peace:
Terror not on your telly:
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johnpi
Epic fail: Israeli government advertising campaign that proclaimed Jews in interfaith relationships have been “abducted” and should be informed on to Israeli government offices has been pulled.
The campaign was poorly received by Jews outside of Israel.
“We understand these reactions,” said Alon Friedman, Masa’s Director of Israel Operations, “but this campaign isn’t meant to encompass the entire Diaspora-Israel relationship.” The problem, he explained, “is that when I speak to the Israelis [about Diaspora issues] I have to speak ‘Israeli,’ and when I speak to Americans I have to speak ‘American.’ But in the internet world, everybody hears both, and they misunderstand what you’re saying.
“This is a campaign [intended for] Israeli society, not for Jewish Agency officials or for American Jewry. We had to speak the language that Israeli society understands,” he said.
Blogger Adam Horowitz writes:
It’s a good sign that this message doesn’t speak to American Jews and it raises the question – what is the “language that Israeli society understands”?…I continue to wonder – how much longer will the American Jewish community continue to blindly support a country that runs so counter to their values?
Adam Shapiro, a diaspora Jew who helped found the International Solidarity Movement and whose wife is this Palestinian-American Christian woman, says:
I think there’s an incorrect supposition that someone who is Jewish necessarily has to stand with Israel, or that someone who is Arab or Muslim has to stand with everything the Palestinians or the Arab countries do.
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thabet
‘Partner for peace’:
The Only Democracy, etc:
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thabet
‘Partner for peace’:
“Normal lives” is the phrase Israeli representatives use to refer to construction that allows for the growth of settler [colonialist] families among the West Bank communities [colonies], where 300,000 Jewish Israelis [colonialists] live on occupied Palestinian land.
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thabet
The president of the Official Council of Jewish Communities in Sweden offers a good response to Israel’s demands that the Swedish government denounce an article in a Swedish tabloid which claimed the Israeli Defence Forces is ‘harvesting organs’ of Palestinians:
“What’s even worse is that by making the preposterous demand for a government condemnation, the debate has changed from anti-Semitism to freedom of speech in Sweden: Instead of concentrating on debunking the story, they have made it a freedom of speech issue. The government is not going to condemn the article – freedom of speech here is sacrosanct,” added Posner, who said she could see how the Swedish mainstream media, which at first attacked the tabloid for printing the piece, were now supporting it, based on the principle of preserving the freedom of speech.
So, The Only Democracy In The Middle East is a little more like its neighbouring enemies than it imagined…
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johnpi
Israel justifies the shooting of American anti-occupation activist as an “act of war.”
Tristan Anderson, an American national, was critically injured on March 13 when he was shot with a high velocity tear-gas projectile during an unarmed demonstration against the Wall in the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has notified the Anderson family’s lawyers that Israel perceives the incident on 13 March 2009 as an “act of war.” This classification was made despite the fact that Anderson’s shooting occurred during a civilian demonstration and there were no armed hostilities during the event or surrounding it.
The Anderson’s criminal attorney, Michael Sfard, says, “If a process by which unarmed civilian demonstration is classified by Israel as an ‘act of war,’ then clearly Israel admits that it is at war with civilians.”
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thabet
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thabet
The Only Democracy In The Middle East and Its Moral Army:
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thabet
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thabet
Policing tactics which probably didn’t make the news in the US; therefore, didn’t allow the Leader of the Free World to pass comment:
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thabet
State violence against peaceful protests not in a White House press statement:
Protests against the illegal wall are even being covered by Fox News of all people. One of their reporters even found herself on the receiving end of the brutality of The Moral IDF when covering the demonstration.
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thabet
No public statement from Barack Obama on these examples of state violence:
- Israeli forces conducted 25 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank.
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thabet
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thabet
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thabet
The Only Democracy In The Middle East: no better than a ‘terrorist organisation’.
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thabet
What was her name? Let’s just call her Not-Neda.
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thabet
Illegal detentions and confiscation of private property; injuries to people peacefully protesting; inhumane application of violence against unarmed people; a state drunk on militarism.
No word yet from Downing Street on our ‘duty’ to speak up about this sort of state violence.
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thabet
War crimes hearing in Gaza:
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thabet
Illegal detentions, torture, beatings, and other forms of state violence that Barack Obama forgot to condemn in public.
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thabet
Ironic statement of the year:
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thabet
Tony Judt writes about Israeli ’settlements’ (colonies).
And on that subject, the Partner for Peace made moves to secure a lasting peace:
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thabet
State aggression against non-violent protests not on your telly (or being furiously re-tweeted):
