Shorter Danny Danon (Likud)

Hat tip to an associate of mine stranded in the US of A, who found this gem in the NYT:

Making the Land of Israel whole

The Palestinians had better not declare independence, or else we're gonna occupy them.

Bibi, I've figured it out!

Look, it's totally not apartheid. . .

They support equality, but please, no Arabs . . .

The secretary of the settlement of Elazar, Yossi Kaufman, told Haaretz: "[Residents of] Elazar have approached the regional council and requested that the settlement's buses not have an Arab driver. If army directives require a guard for an Arab entering the community, there can't be an Arab school-bus driver. If someone wants to earn a living, be my guest. In fact, Arabs built the houses in Elazar. When it comes to children, that's an issue of safety. We were notified that the driver is not Arab and that was the end of the story."

The wisdom of old men

From Ha'aretz:

Leading Haredi Rabbi refuses to endorse letter forbidding the rental of homes to Arabs

Rabbi Steinman, 96

. . . A source that was present at the scene said, "As soon as Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu introduced himself, Rabbi Steinman, who knew why he was being approached, said 'I won't sign,' and immediately left the room.". . .

One of Steinman's confidants related the rabbi's words to Haaretz: "They are making a fierce nationalistic statement. We will not irritate others, that is not the Haredi way. There are things that should not be done; what if there would be a similar call in Berlin against renting properties to Jews? Where is the public conscience? What will this do to Jews around the world? We must act responsibly.". . .

Emphasis mine.

Peace will be an outcome of liberation, not its starting point.

- Moshe Machover

Here is the real road to peace

From Ha'aretz:

Author questioned for allegedly smuggling Palestinians into Israel for a day of fun

. . . Avoiding the security forces at West Bank checkpoints, they took the women out to eat in a restaurant in Jaffa, swimming in the Mediterranean, and took them home via Jerusalem where they could see the Old City walls from afar. . . Most of the Palestinians had never seen the sea or visited certain holy places. None of them had permits to enter Israel. . .

They had grown up less than an hour away, but they had never seen the sea.

The outrage of Zionism is that it proposes that a Jew who cannot trace a single ancestor to anywhere near Palestine should have a greater right - a "birthright" - to live and travel in that land than an Arab whose family has lived and worked there for generations. That is why those of us who have no other ill-feeling towards Jews or Judaism find the Zionist project to be so morally nauseating.

Peace will not come from the hollow theatrics on now display in Washington and New York. Peace will come when ordinary people resolve, as Ilana Hammerman did, to disregard the racist laws that maintain the status quo. Ordinary people have to act first, and only then will the leaders be dragged, kicking and screaming.

Slow, methodical, cruel

From Ha'aretz:

Gestures to the Palestinians

Israel declares huge amounts of private Palestinian land as firing zones and expels the residents under the false and self-righteous guise of concern for their welfare, lest they be harmed by the military training; but these firing zones are always to be found solely on Palestinian land, and never on settlement land. Have you ever heard of any settlers being expelled from their homes because their settlement was declared part of a firing zone? But against these wretched shepherds in the Jordan Valley, anything goes. This is Israeli justice, this is equality as practiced by the Israel Defense Forces.

Are you sure it's not apartheid?

The comparison just got harder to ignore. From the Guardian:

Barak: make peace with Palestinians or face apartheid

'If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state' – Ehud Barak Photograph: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, last night delivered an unusually blunt ­warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish ­majority or an "apartheid" regime.

His stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of the gravity of the deadlocked peace process.

There have been no formal negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in more than a year, but Barak was speaking at a rare joint event with the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, as part of an annual national security conference in the Israeli city of Herzliya. The pair shook hands and both were warmly applauded.

Barak, a former general and Israel's most decorated soldier, sought to appeal to Israelis on both right and left by saying a peace agreement with the Palestinians was the only way to secure Israel's future as a "Zionist, Jewish, democratic state".

"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic," Barak said. "If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

He described Israel and the Palestinian territories as the historic "land of Israel" to which Israelis had a right.

"We have to demarcate a border within the land of Israel," he said.

"We have a linkage, we have a right, but the reality of standing on the stage of history in realistic terms requires us to pay attention to ­international constraints." Barak is in a delicate political position. He leads the Labour party, supposedly a centre-left movement, but accepted a position in a rightwing coalition under Binyamin Netanyahu, a decision that split his party.

Though Barak articulates a willingness for peace talks, he represents a government that has defied US and Palestinian calls for a full settlement freeze as a prelude to any negotiations. He was also defence minister during last year's Gaza war in which nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

The Herzliya conference has echoed Israeli concerns about growing ­international criticism, particularly in the year since Gaza. Barak himself alluded to the danger that Israel might lose ­legitimacy if no peace deal was forthcoming. "The pendulum of legitimacy is going to move gradually towards the other pole," he said.

He acknowledged that Washington was pushing the two sides towards "proximity talks" but said this was "only an initial stage" before any return to full negotiations.

Fayyad, who has a limited political following among Palestinians, called on Israel to stop settlement building in the occupied territories and to halt military incursions in Palestinian cities as a sign of seriousness about negotiations.

"Things have to begin to happen in order to give the suggestion that this occupation is going to end," he said. "That Palestinian state is supposed to emerge precisely where settlements are expanding." Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has refused to start fresh negotiations with Israel unless settlement construction stops, in line with the 2003 US road map. Nearly 500,000 Jewish settlers live in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, even though settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.

"How confident can we all be that once relaunched that political process is going to be able to deliver that which needs to be delivered, the permanent status issues and the key question of ending the ­occupation?" Fayyad asked.

Canada's Likud Government

We have articulated and implemented a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism. What does this mean? It means that we eliminated the government funding relationship with organizations like for example, the Canadian Arab Federation, whose leadership apologized for terrorism or extremism, or who promote hatred, in particular anti-Semitism.

We have ended government contact with like-minded organizations like the Canadian Islamic Congress, whose President notoriously said that all Israelis over the age of 18 are legitimate targets for assassination. We have defunded organizations, most recently like KAIROS, who are taking a leadership role in the boycott. And we’re receiving a lot of criticism for these decisions. I can’t recall how many times I’ve been sued for some of the decisions that we have taken, but we believe that we’ve done these things for the right reasons and we stand by these decisions.

-- Conservative Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, Dec. 16, 2009, text from the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee

And so it continues . . . Not content with its boycott of the Canadian Arab Federation for its criticism of the government's policies (a move that mainly hurt people looking for ESL training), or its banning of British anti-Occupation firebrand George Galloway from entering the country, Harper's government is at it again. As usual his henchman Jason Kenney is at the forefront, this time crowing to an overwhelmingly Jewish, 100% Zionist audience at having once again moved to stifle criticism of Israel using the oldest trick in the book - scream anti-Semitism.

Even one blogger for the National Post, that insolvent anti-Canadian CanWest rag, sees some inconsistencies in the Kenney's position, as the Honourable Minister attempted to straighten out his story in the Toronto Star:

I did not accuse KAIROS of being anti-Semitic. What I said was that KAIROS has taken "a leadership role in the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (against Israel)." While I disagree with the nature of KAIROS's militant stance toward the Jewish homeland, that is not the reason their request for taxpayer funding was denied. International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda – not me – is responsible for the Canada International Development Agency. And she has been clear that a cost-sharing program with KAIROS was not approved because it did not meet CIDA's current priorities, such as increased food aid.

He didn't accuse them of anti-Semitism, he just mentioned them in the same breath as other organizations whom he had accused of the same thing.

I don't see anything wrong with an international boycott of Israeli goods - that was what ended the apartheid in South Africa, and Israel is no less dependent on international trade. Is, however, KAIROS even advocating that? A 2002 document released by the group answers the question explicitly:

The final step of the Board-mandated process is this paper, which sets out a range of options to enable the members of KAIROS to contribute, each out of their own faith tradition, to their common quest for a just peace in Israel and Palestine. The paper also contains recommendations for KAIROS actions that would support member initiatives. Finally, section 6 of the paper also makes clear that KAIROS is not advocating sanctions against Israel nor a boycott of products from Israel.
(emphasis from KAIROS)

A further reading of the document shows that KAIROS supports "Morally Responsible Investment" and not the more forthright "Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions" campaign. Their "economic advocacy" is ill-defined, but examples provided include moves from other Church groups to divest from companies providing equipment for the construction of infrastruction used by the Occupation, such as the Wall, and requiring the labelling of products made in Jewish colonies in the West Bank.

None of this, however, actually matters to Jason Kenney, or to Stephen Harper. What matters to them is that God gave the Holy Land to the Jewish people in the Bible, and the nasty infidel Muslim Arabs (and in the minds of Mssrs Harper and Kenney, there is no other kind) are standing in the way.

Wishing all my Christian friends a Merry Christmas. . .

. . .and reminding them of the plight of the people of Bethlehem today:

The Toronto International Film Festival . . .

. . . has become an unwitting tool for zionists in Canada, as they seek to dampen the growing movement for boycott and divestment from the world's last formally colonial state.

Naomi Klein, Jewish Canadian author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine , lays it all out in a commendable article for the Globe and Mail:

We don't feel like celebrating with Israel this year:

. . .For more than a year, Israeli diplomats have been talking openly about their new strategy to counter growing global anger at Israel's defiance of international law. It's no longer enough, they argue, just to invoke Sderot every time someone raises Gaza. The task is also to change the subject to more pleasant areas: film, arts, gay rights – things that underline commonalities between Israel and places such as Paris and New York. After the Gaza attack, this strategy went into high gear. “We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theatre companies, exhibits,” Arye Mekel, deputy director-general for cultural affairs for Israel's Foreign Ministry, told The New York Times. “This way, you show Israel's prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.”


Toronto got an early taste of all this. A year ago, Amir Gissin, Israeli consul-general in Toronto, explained that a new “Brand Israel” campaign would include, according to a report in the Canadian Jewish News, “a major Israeli presence at next year's Toronto International Film Festival, with numerous Israeli, Hollywood and Canadian entertainment luminaries on hand.” Mr. Gissin pledged that, “I'm confident everything we plan to do will happen.” Indeed it has. . . .

Heroism at Sea

From Al-Jazeera's English service:

It should be noted that the siege of Gaza was imposed not as a response to rocket attacks, which it pre-dated, but as a response to the 2006 Palestinian elections, in which Hamas won a democratic majority over the notoriously corrupt and ineffectual leadership of Fatah.

One of the few Israeli journalists of conscience, Gideon Levy, puts it well:

The Israel Defense Forces has once again used its power to overcome the weak; the navy has once again acted like pirates. The Arion was abducted in the framework of protecting Israel's security for all eternity, blah, blah, blah. . .

. . . This then is the great progress of the "people's army" to train women to kill, while their comrades, soldiers and Border Police, are routinely sent to shoot live fire at unarmed demonstrators at Bil'in and Na'alin. This, for the most part, is the IDF's balance sheet. This is what largely preoccupies the best, most moral army in the world. Pilots who have never fought in an air battle and soldiers with no army against them now spend most of their time maintaining the occupation in a kind of pathetic combat, and they are our protective shield. When the day of reckoning comes, we will remember this.

Shorter Moshe Arens

Article: So what's your solution?

Israel can't give the Palestinians a state until they agree to stop resisting the occupation and admit that Jews should have more rights than they do.

Call it what it is

The above poster is a cartoon. Whether or not a small boy holding a teddy bear, casting a shadow forming the word "Gaza" was ever fired upon by an Israeli helicopter is irrelevant.

The poster makes no claims about Jews, or even about Israelis. It presents the conflict, however, as the David-and-Goliath struggle that it is, where a high-tech, multi-billion dollar army of occupation, motivated by a religious-nationalist ideology, seeks to crush the life of the native population.

When two Canadian universities banned the above poster from appearing on their billboards, the argument of one of them was:

"A poster from the campus group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights has recently come to the attention of the Communications Office. All posters approved by the Communications Office must promote a campus culture where all members of the community can play a part in a declaration of human rights recognizing the inherent dignity and equal rights of all students. Consequently, we will not place this particular poster on our campus billboards."

In other words, because the poster was going to upset Zionists, it couldn't be displayed.

When the Muhammad cartoons were published in Canada, every wingnut came out of the woodwork to defend Ezra Levant. Despite my distaste for the man, I was with them, and not only because fining the man only increased his fame. When Geert Wilders produced his film "Fitna," I yawned, and wondered what the fuss was about. He has since become a hero amongst the usual anti-Islam types who style themselves "defenders of free speech."

Will they stand up for the artist in this case?

Don't hold your breath.

"all in 5 square kilometres"

From a conversation with a Gazan (who apparently follows this blog) that I had a few days ago, that seems to be stuck in my head:

"Gaza is not like the West Bank - in the West Bank, the Israelis can come into a town in a Jeep, with maybe 3 or 4 soldiers even walking along, arrest whoever they're interested in, and then leave. Nobody does anything about it. They would never dare try that in Gaza. Gaza is too well-armed. There are guns everywhere. The Gazans would fight. . .

". . . I was talking to an uncle of mine, and he said 'You know what? I've spent my whole life in 5 square kilometers. I was born, went to school, got married, got a job, all in 5 square kilometers. I've never left.' You have to wonder what that does to the society."

Comparisons with Apartheid

As I have said here before, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not so significant for its magnitude, but rather for the scale of the public relations fraud that has been committed in North America by those who, openly or secretly, support zionism. We thus have the bizarre spectacle here of watching certain people accuse the Muslim world of waging a religious war against non-Muslim nations while simultaneously supporting the creation of a state primarily for European Jews in the heart of the Muslim world, with little more than the Bible as an excuse.

The thuggish tactics of the occupiers against the occupied, though well documented in situ, rarely make it to these shores. The rare occasions on which the occupied successfully lash out with their homemade weapons are each given their own media circus.

Here in Canada, opposition to this bizarre and mendacious narrative has faced difficulty getting off the ground. It is difficult to get your message out when 149 of the country's newspapers, and one of its private national broadcasters were recently owned by a supporter of Likud Canada, who passed the company to his kids.

One great hope is Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. Well-organized, and representing a broad cross-section of Canadians, this group has already put on some phenomenal events. The next one, with South African human rights lawyer John Dugard, promises to be no different.

If you're in one of the 4 cities where Mr. Dugard will be presenting, I highly recommend attending.

Remember: It's still not apartheid.

Which is what everyone from Barack Obama to AIPAC will tell you, despite the obvious resemblance.

From the Hebrew daily Ha'aretz:

. . . Israel's Water Authority said on its Website average daily per capita water consumption, including household and industrial use, was about 770 liters (203 gallons) in 2005 - over 10 times the 60 liters (16 gallons) Attili said Palestinians consumed last year.

Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said a drought - which has this year deprived parts of the West Bank of almost half its normal rainfall - and "unfair" distribution of water resources would cause severe shortages in Palestinian areas this year.

The International Committee of the Red Cross last month started trucking in water for about 1,000 people and 50,000 animals in the worst affected areas of the southern West Bank.

"We have water under our feet," Attili said. "But people are thirsty and we aren't allowed to use it while settlers and Israelis in general are enjoying swimming pools and irrigation."

Zimbabwe, Terrorism, and Mandela

Well, it's official. Robert Mugabe is now a bad guy.

If you follow the English press in a Western country, you might be saying "Well, duh." If you ONLY follow the English press in a Western country, your opinion does not count, because, as I have pointed out here on many occasions, they have a tremendously unrecognized propensity for lying.

Nelson Mandela, on the other hand, does not. While sound criticisms of some of his policies have been made, if there is one former head of state whose word I would take at face value, it would probably be Mandela's.

So when Mandela "failed" to publicly condemn Mugabe, it caused great consternation amongst the wise sages who pen weekly opinion columns. Still, in a speech before his 90th birthday celebrations in London, he called what was happening in Zimbabwe "a tragic failure of leadership." For some well-meaning white people who still feel they know better than Mandela, this is not enough. As usual, people still want Mandela to sing with the choir. When reporters asked him to do a solo against Castro, he declined. When Clinton asked him to sing a ditty against Libya, he refused. Mandela doesn't let other people decide who his enemies should be.

Mandela knows what he is doing. And if he says that Zimbabwe's situation represents a failure of leadership, then that's all that needs to be said.

--------------

Adding to Mandela's credibility is the fact that only last week did the U.S. Senate vote to remove Nelson Mandela's ANC party from its list of terrorist organizations. ANC members are now free to travel in the United States. Truly the courage of U.S. Senators is legendary. . .

The United States of America is not now, nor has it ever been, a champion of freedom.