Gaza: Pupil goes to HRC

A pupil at King David School, in Linksfield, Johannesburg, has complained to the SA Human Rights Commission that he has been bullied and discriminated against for his views on Israel.

The Grade 12 pupil said: “If you are critical of Israel once, you will be written off by the leadership at King David for the rest of your school career.”

The pupil identified himself and posted a comment on the Facebook page criticising Israeli policy.

King David principal Marc Falconer wrote to pupils and parents explaining that the pupil’s appointment as a “student leader”, or prefect, would be deferred because he “had engaged in a debate that was not appropriate in the forum of Facebook ” and the debate was not “complimentary for the school”.

Falconer did not name the pupil, but the boy’s lawyers said everyone knew who he was.

In the newsletter, Falconer said that “debate was important and the school had learned from the Facebook page that there was a need to discuss the Jewish people’s complex relationship with Israel in a different forum”.

In his complaint to the SAHRC, the pupil says he was singled out in the newsletter, “humiliated” and that his rights to freedom of expression were violated.

A pupil at King David School, in Linksfield, Johannesburg, has complained to the SA Human Rights Commission that he has been bullied and discriminated against for his views on Israel.

His lawyer, Andre Bloem, said the pupil was “criticised for participating in open debate” and accused of acting in a “dangerous” manner.

Last week King David Victory Park deputy head prefect Joshua Broomberg posted a photograph of himself on Facebook wearing a “Palestinian scarf” and expressed support for the people of the Gaza Strip. This led to the compilation of a petition of more than 2000 signatures calling for him to be stripped of his prefect status.

All school leaders at King David must sign an undertaking that they will at all times support Israel.

Source: timeslive.co.za

French lawyer files complaint against Israel at ICC

A French lawyer said on Friday that he had filed a complaint on behalf of the Palestinian justice minister at the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing Israel’s military of having carried out “war crimes” in the Gaza Strip.

More than 800 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive in Gaza, launched on July 8 in response to Hamas militants firing rockets into the Jewish state.

The complaint targets “war crimes committed by the Israeli army in June and July 2014 in Palestine” in the context of the operation known as Protective Edge, Gilles Devers told reporters.

“Israel, the occupying power, is carrying out a military operation which in principle and form violates the basis of international law,” he said. “Every day new crimes are committed and over 80 percent of the victims are civilians. Children, women, hospitals, UN schools… the Israeli soldiers respect nothing.

“This is a military attack against the Palestinian population.”

The Israeli offensive has left more than 5,200 Palestinians injured, according to emergency services in Gaza, and 33 Israeli soldiers and two civilians have died, too.

The Palestinian Authority, which has non-member observer state status at the United Nations, has not yet signed up to the Hague-based ICC, due to what Devers said were “political” quarrels over the Palestinians’ status.

But according to Devers, the complaint is still valid.

The UN Human Rights Council is launching a probe into Israel’s offensive in Gaza, with rights chief Navi Pillay saying the Jewish state’s military actions could amount to war crimes.

Source: AFP

‘Idiot’ Afrikaners and clever Jews

by Johan de Wet

I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks
Let’s make lots of money
You’ve got the brawn, I’ve got the brains
Let’s make lots of money – The Petshop Boys

Afrikaans columnist Manfred Delport has just alerted me to the latest Boerehaat shriek by one Richard Poplak from the Daily Maverick which he calls a “linkse haatblad” (leftist hate site). No, Manfred, said Daily Maverick is not so much leftist, as Jewish. OK, so usually the two go together. Outside Israel, one can almost count the number of right-wing Jews on one hand.

I know I am sticking my neck out in daring to point to the ethnic composition of the Daily Maverick’s set of Boerehaat screamers. Voltaire said that if you want to know who your oppressors are, you should think about the people you are not allowed to criticise. Until this latest spate of child-killing by the Israelis, the J-word was about as taboo in South Africa as the K-word. But in an astonishing twist of fate, the word “apartheid” which so many Jews in South Africa, in Britain and in the USA worked so hard to turn into a stigma attached to South Africa and to Afrikaners has now come back to haunt them, with “Apartheid Israel” being flavour of the month.

Even Chomsky has said that apartheid as practised in Israel is actually worse than apartheid in South Africa. He recently repeated this statement in a phone interview with PressTV:

“Hospitals have been attacked repeatedly. Each one is a war crime. In fact, for Israel to fire one bullet across the border is also a crime. Trials for war crimes only apply to the defeated. Within the occupied territories, Israel’s policies are much worse than apartheid, if you mean by apartheid South African-style apartheid. And it is a kind of gift to Israel to compare it to South Africa.”

 

Although Johannesburg Jews pretend otherwise, the Afrikaner government actually built Baragwanath hospital in Soweto, they never once bombed it! Imagine, after one of Joe Slovo and Umkhonto we Sizwe’s terrorist attacks in the 1980’s, we had to send the Mirages over Soweto to bomb black civilians there in retribution, like Israel is doing at present. This is the stuff of fantasy, Jewish fantasy. Read Nadine Gordimer’s trashy little novella, July’s People, where she foresees the shooting down of civilian aeroplanes, Malaysian Airlines-style, full of screaming white people in South Africa’s glorious anti-white revolution sometime in the future.

The Daily Maverick is the latest in a long line of leftist Jewish publications, starting with Ruth First’s Guardian and the Rand Daily Mail in its more extremist moments, which was partially resurrected in the form of the Weekly Mail founded by two Jews, Irwin Manoim and Anton Harber. These days its successor, the Mail & Guardian, is slightly more of a mainstream newspaper, hence the need for the Daily Maverick where “Jewish genii” may vent their hatred for everything South African and especially Afrikaans.

Afrikaners in their naivete still remember the days when Israel was an ally of previous Afrikaner governments and are completely unaware of the sustained Jewish onslaught on them. Richard Poplak is a self-proclaimed Jewish genius whose mommy has been telling him since his Bar Mitzvah that he would one day receive the Nobel prize for literature, just like Nadine Gordimer.

If there are two things I understand about Jewish identity in Johannesburg and probably Cape Town, they are: (1) Every Jew is also an American. (2) Every Jew abhors Afrikaans, Afrikaners, boeremusiek, volkspele, boerewors, biltong, rugby, Steve Hofmeyr, the architecture of Gerard Moerdijk, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, the paintings of Pierneef and just about everything else you can think of. In fact, academic Jews give each other PhDs for denouncing the Afrikaans language and culture as racist, backward, fascist and so on.

In Blade Nzimande’s quest for “more South African PhDs”, he should just hand all 80 000 Jews in the country a title; after all, they already congratulate each other on their utter brilliance all the time. It might also save us from the embarassing episodes when we discover that black politicians, praised almost as lavishly by Jews as those of their own ilk, such as Pallo Jordan, turn out to have fake PhDs.

And, of course, within the “chosen people” ideology of Jews, Afrikaners are congenitally stupid. Hence Richard Poplak’s rant about the two female students in which he makes two main points: He, Richard Poplak, is a genius. After all, he has heard of something called “conceptual art”. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! And, secondly, Afrikaans students are in need of re-education. As he puts it:

I propose an art gallery of South African stupidity, a building devoted to the enactment of racial stereotypes that remind us of our foetal id, of the miasma we swim in every day in our tentative and botched way of becoming a different, properly reconciled country.

“South African stupidity” is code for Afrikaans culture and the incomplete re-education of Afrikaners, all of whom have not yet accepted vicarious Jewish domination through Malema-like “Marxist-Leninist” radicalism and fervent white guilt. The father of Jewish-South African radicalism, Joe Slovo, envisaged a world in which a committee of Jews within the South African Communist Party would rule the country while their Zulu and Xhosa impis cheer their “liberators”. Like the NAACP in the USA, for most of its existence the ANC has been a Jewish front organisation controlled by the more kosher Communist Party. Mandela’s “autobiography” was written by an American Jew, Richard Stengel. An interesting article is currently doing the rounds, The role of Jews in South Africa since 1948. Nothing much of this is new: Jews openly brag about their role in the downfall of Afrikaner power in South Africa in various books and articles.

Apparently there is something like a Black-Jewish Entrepreneurs Network which proudly proclaims that Jews and blacks will “develop the country together”. The rest of us are not needed. In fact, if one reads between the lines, white South Africans and especially Afrikaners, have no future in the land of braaivleis and sunny skies.

Blacks have the numbers, Jews have the money. It is a beautiful synergy in South Africa, where every black leader or politician is for sale. Hence the motto above from the Petshop Boys:

I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks
Let’s make lots of money
You’ve got the brawn, I’ve got the brains
Let’s make lots of money

After Brian Joffe’s takeover of Adcock Ingram and Clencore’s acquisition of Xstrata’s coal empire, there are few areas of the South African economy left that are not in some way controlled by Jews, including Gill Marcus at the helm of our central bank and Rob Davies as minister of trade and industry. It is almost comical how the South African Reserve Bank has now become a purveyor of Mandela coins, to be on-sold by Jewish coin merchants. According to Niall Ferguson’s book on the Rothschild family, Mayer Amschel Rothschild set off on conquering Europe’s banking capitals by trading in collector’s coins. Old habits die hard.

The Russian Pravda recently carried a surprising comment in its delectably Russified English:

The victim of the humanitarian imperialism could be a Boer (a Palestinian in our times) or any people convinced of a barbarian conduct (see the pamphlets of the NYT against ‘homophobe’ Uganda these last weeks).

Jews were first welcomed into the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) in the 1890s as refugees from Lithuania. In an amazing turn of the tables, Johannesburg’s powerful Jewish elite is now dictating what “South African” identity should be (and even whom may still be tolerated in the country).

Hence Pravda’s comparison between Boers and Palestinians, harking back to nineteenth-century imperialism – itself partly driven by London Jewish banking interests such as those of the Rothschilds – has a flavour of history repeating itself. The 20th-century tragedy of the Russian nation who lost tens of millions of people in Stalin’s purges, may be traced back to Jewish migration from the Pale of Settlement to St. Petersburg and Moscow where radical Jews were in the forefront of the Bolshevik revolution.

There is something like a Jewish “echo chamber”, nicely revealed by the recent comment by an American Jew, Yochanan Gordon, that if it takes Palestinian genocide to ensure “a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel”, then so be it. Jews must fantasize among themselves about simply exterminating the 1,8 million Palestinians in the Gaza strip, thereby claiming another chunk of the Holy Land for themselves. Arguably, South African Jews are already seeing a post-Afrikaner South Africa where our people will be simply gone, either driven out or worse.

The most positive future that Jews foresee for us is “becoming Coloureds”: “White and black must make Coloured,” as Nadine Gordimer put it in an interview with the BBC. Presumably we will then all live in a kind of Gaza strip on the Cape Flats, addicted to alcohol supplied by Jewish liquor stores and drugs supplied by Jewish druglords. Rumour has it that the drug trade in DA-run Cape Town is already controlled by Jews. A Muslim politician from Cape Town once said, privately: “We are ruled by Zionists in Cape Town.” According to journalist Garth van Onselen, the liberal DA has a large number of Jewish donors who were once alarmed by an anti-Israel position taken by the party, which was promptly “corrected”.

It is an enduring source of amazement to many that a group as endogamous as Jews should always advocate multiculturalism and race-mixing for others, from Afrikaners to Swedes. As Barbara Lerner Spectre of the European Institute for Jewish Studies in Sweden famously put it:

I think there’s a resurgence of antisemitism because at this point in time Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural, and I think we’re gonna be part of the throes of that transformation, which must take place. Europe has not yet learned how to be multicultural. Europe is not going to be the monolithic societies that they once were in the last century. Jews are going to be at the center of that. It’s a huge transformation for Europe to make. They are now going into a multicultural mode, and Jews will be resented because of our leading role. But without that leading role, and without that transformation, Europe will not survive.

From their confident tone, you may surmise that everyone writing in the Daily Maverick is a “natural born leader”, spearheading the “huge transformaton” that we all “have to make”. While the Daily Maverick, Africa Check, Section 27 and other Jewish-dominated groups and NGOs regularly vituperate Afrikaner public figures, remaining pockets of Afrikaans at universities, as well as our politically incorrect behaviour, there is a deathly silence about South Africa’s so-called white genocide, the atrocities committed against farmers, elderly Afrikaners and children. Where Jews take cognisance of such ethnic violence at all, it is to exonerate the perpetrators thereof, minimise the statistical relevance of such murders or blame the victims by suggesting that they are mere “racists” deserving of their fate.

However, in Europe there is now a counter-current. The left-wing intellectuals who used to be enthralled with Jewish ideas, praying at the altar of Frankfurt School cultural Marxism, have become very critical of Israel. Reacting to Israel’s attacks on Palestinian civilians, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo said: “Israeli Zionist bastards have nothing to do with the Jews [bastardi israeliani sionisti che non hanno niente a che fare con gli ebrei].”

In France, ex-Marxist thinker Alain Soral is now spearheading the critique of globalism and internationalist, multicultural Jewish ideas. He collaborates with comedian Dieudonné whose shows have on occasion been banned by the French government due to pressure from organised French Jewry.

Many French people are now openly mocking Jews, a bit like Jews in South Africa have for a long time mocked Afrikaners as “boorish, boerewors-eating, brandy-drinking, rugby-watching” idiots, to quote a phrase from a controversy some years ago. A self-confessed Jewish radical, Glen Moss, recently described rugby as “boorish, the preserve of Afrikaans-speaking apartheid-supporting racists with both spectators and players prone to violent behaviour”.

As far as I am aware, there has never been a riot by rugby spectators in South Africa or behaviour akin to “soccer hooliganism”, unlike in many other countries and unlike among South African blacks who riot all the time, including sometimes at soccer matches. According to South African History Online,

13 January 1991: At least forty soccer spectators of a friendly match between Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs died and 100 were injured as they fled fighting between rival team supporters at the Oppenheimer stadium near Orkney, Western Transvaal (now North West Province).

Jews’ sense of their own genius and talent has been known for a long time. I came upon the following amazing quote by French author Céline via The New York Review of Books where Céline satirizes in a conversation between himself and another character the Jewish control of the media and the mindless promotion of Jewish artists, thinkers and politicians. Admittedly Céline was a hard-core anti-Semite whose wife has forbidden the republication of his pamphlets from the 1930s but, given the Zeitgeist of Boerehaat emanating from Daily Maverick and others, it is perhaps time, as The New York Review of Books puts it in its headline, “to uncover Céline”:

“Ferdinand, you have become quite the fanatic, thus you are always chattering on, but I’m warning you and I’m putting you on your guard, that the Jews are very intelligent…they are the ones in France who read the books, who gather information, who man the information pipeline, they are armed with knowledge , and occupy all of the high positions, all of the rackets are in their hands, they know how to make themselves popular, in addition they do good, to the little people, the forty hour week, that’s their security…and then there’s the vacations… You are going to get yourself put into prison… You are going to wind up getting cut to pieces, beyond doubt…”

“Intelligent, how?…” I retaliated. “They are racist, they have all the money, they have seized all the levers of control, they have latched unto all the positions of command… Is that how they’re intelligent?… There’s nothing of brilliance to that!… They do stay on track admirably, as they eliminate, dissuade, pursue, and hound down, all of those who might rival them, or cause them the least little bit of umbrage… It’s their crusade against us, a crusade unto the death… That’s the stuff of their intelligence!… All of the interesting jobs, they’ve put into their pockets…monopolizing, they expel outright or with little ado anyone who is not properly Jewish…filthy Jewish… Judaized… pro-Jewbie…ass-reamed Jewish… This is the great technique of the cuckoo… To put it bluntly, in order to cast a better light on things, if Einstein weren’t Jewish, if Bergson weren’t circumcised, if Proust had been only a Breton, if Freud didn’t bear the mark, people wouldn’t be saying very much about any one of them…these are not at all amongst those geniuses who will have brought enlightenment unto the world!… I can bloody well guarantee that… The least little fart by a Jew is called a boom! one of the admirable discoveries of our age my friend, instantaneously! through the automatic effect of the world Jewish apparatus…millions of little bells go off… That pathetic fart is raised up like some sort of miracle! and at top speed!… It is due to that that the painting of Cézanne, Modi, Picasso and all the others…the films of Monsieur Benhur, the music of Tartinowsky all suddenly become a big deal…An enormous favorable pre-judgment, world-wide, precedes and forms the prelude for every Jewish intention… The Jews, all of the critics in the universe, all of the artistic circles…all of the news media!… All of the world’s Jewish agencies set about spitting forth claps of Thunder, to the very least murmur, the very least quiver of Hymie creativity…and the Jewish supremacist publicity in the spoken media provides an admirable echo… Every trumpet sounds from one end of every continent to the other, heralding, intoning, resounding, buzzing with the marvelous Hosanna! to the sublime messenger from Heaven! Yet another incomparable Jew at the palette! on the screen! at the violin! in politics! infinitely more brilliant! without contest more renovating, than all of the geniuses of the past (and all Aryans of course). The grotesque goyim are quickly caught-up into a whirlwind of epilepsy, they rejoice as a choir of cuckolds, they violently join into the chorus, with all the force of their stupidity, and they have themselves completely consumed within! …it’s the triumph of a new Jewish idol!… In order to pack them in, it is enough to offer them a little more Jewish shit in which to wallow… They are no longer particular…They have lost all of their instinct… They don’t know the difference between the living and the dead…the ‘organic’ and the diffuse, a cardboard box and the pure juice, the bladder rather than the lantern, the false and the authentic… They no longer know at all… They have sucked up far too much garbage over too many centuries and epochs, to wind up with anything of authenticity… They would rather treat themselves to falsifications… They mistake bleach for spring water…and they find it most preferable! infinitely superior. They are geared towards the counterfeit. By consequence, of course, misfortune, shit! for the indigenous person who through some sort of original gift, some little bit of music all his own…one little whispers attempt! he immediately becomes hateful, suspect, perfectly shameful to his racial brethren. It’s the law in a conquered country that nothing must ever be allowed to disturb the torpor of the enslaved masses… Everyone must fall back down as soon as possible…into the ruminations of drunkards… It is they, the racial brethren, who are most strictly charged methodically to obstruct, to denigrate, and to stifle. No sooner does one of the indigenous people arouse himself…than the others of the same race rise up against him, with lynching being not far off… In penal colonies, the dirtiest deeds are performed by the convicts themselves…amongst themselves, a thousand times as cruel as the most atrocious slave galley…

The New York Times Book Review provides a link in a footnote to Trifles for a massacre by Céline where I got this quotation from.

Among the many delights of Afrikaans culture is the fact that it is truly indigenous and free of political correctness. For a long time we have enjoyed a truly astonishing degree of freedom of speech in Afrikaans. That is, until recently, when Adriaan Basson took control of the Beeld newspaper in Johannesburg. Is it any coincidence that there are apparently now “lecturing sessions” to the Beeld journalists by Anton Harber, founder of the Weekly Mail? Basson is on a crusade against “Nazism” and “anti-Semitism” at the rural University of Potchefstroom which in more than a century has never known such a campaign.

Besides a small number of so-called Boerejode, Jews in South Africa have never taken an interest in Afrikaans and considered the language beneath them. The reference for most Jews is America, beaming out to them from across the Atlantic. When Jews talk about “history”, they automatically refer to American history, especially over the last century since they have been so intimately connected with that country. The “sixties” means “sixties America” and have nothing to do with us. Their authors are mostly American (Jewish) authors, feminists, anti-racists, and the like.

Reviewing Poplak’s outobiography, another Johannesburg Jew, David Dyzenhaus, writes:

Like Poplak, I am a former South African and a Jew from Johannesburg. However, I was born in 1957 and grew up with a rather heightened awareness of the politics of apartheid. My mother was what would be called today a human rights activist. My father, who had survived the Warsaw ghetto and the destruction of Warsaw, had no tolerance for nationalism of any kind, whether that of the Afrikaners or of the black liberation movements.

Both Poplak and Dyzenhaus now live in Canada, not being able to stomach life out here in our “transformed” utopia. Why on earth does Poplak take an interest in what happens in a women’s residence at the University of Pretoria? Except that in some sense he knows that those students represent the “target population”?

Apart from the times when they may “trash” or vilify us, Afrikaners do not really exist for Johannesburg’s all-conquering Jews. We are more or less part of the local fauna, like Impala grazing in the Kruger National Park and that you gaze at from afar through a pair of binoculars.

The upshot of Jewish disdain has been that Afrikaans has been largely and blissfully free of Jewish influence, “authentic” and not false, as Céline would say. However, suddenly over the last few months, more and more Jewish “commentators” are now being published in the Afrikaans newspapers in translation. We are now being told what to think, how to behave if we have any desire to “fit into” the South Africa busily being socially engineered by Jews according to their American model. What Richard Poplak is saying is essentially the same as the “huge transformation” Barbara Lerner Spectre has in mind for Swedes and Europeans. We have to become “a properly reconciled country”, which I suppose means that we have to accept the dominance of Jews and their coterie of quasi-communist, radicalized, politically correct blacks reciting Karl Marx (or Andrea Dworkin) to us. Every Zulu chief in South Africa has now become a feminist to boot, soon to be spotted at the Cape Town Gay Pride.

Those two Afrikaans girls at Tukkies have now been expelled from their residence. The Jews and their lackeys have been lenient this time. Soon we might be treated to more Soviet punishments for our lack of ideological purity. But now those two hapless students will have to find other accommodation, in regularly burgled flats in Hatfield, near the university. I live in Pretoria and speak to students, so I know. They will also suffer the sexual taunts of the indolent black youths who lurk around the university campus and make it a point of reminding all young white girls that they have now been “liberated” into sexual relations with whites, sometimes of the forced kind called rape. This is what the Jewish genii of the Daily Maverick call “our non-racial, non-sexist South Africa”.

All of that is “common cause” as they say in the law courts. What concerns me is the future. Whatever we may think of Palestinians or Muslims generally – although South African Muslims have always behaved in an exemplary way – the lack of respect for non-Jewish life displayed by Israel, readily acclaimed by Johannesburg Jews, does not portend well for us here. Come to the think of it, Jewish terrorists like Joe Slovo or Ronnie Kasrils displayed a similar contempt for the lives of our civilians – black and white – when they were using car bombs in our streets or bombs in supermarkets or restaurants to “persuade” us of the well-foundedness of their Marxist doctrine.

Pravda’s analogy between Boers and Palestinians may still prove to be prophetic.

Johan de Wet is a businessman from Pretoria

Protesters shut down Israeli arms factory in Britain

A group of pro-Palestine activists have allegedly shut down operations in a Staffordshire factory that they say supplies arms to Israel.

Around 10 activists from the London Palestine Action Group have taken to the roof of Elbit systems, an Israeli company with a subsidiary based in Shenstone, near Birmingham.

According to the LPAG, Elbit systems is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of unmanned aerial drones, which many suspect the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have used in their ongoing offensive in Gaza.

According to the group’s Tumblr blog, the activists chained the doors of the factory shut, and are demanding the closure of the factory, along with‘all forms of military trade and cooperation with Israel.’

The blog goes on to say: “The factory that we are occupying produces engines for drones and is owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military company and the world’s largest drones producer. Drone engines manufactured at this factory have been [sic] exported to Israel in 2010, 2011 and 2012 and Elbit Systems drones are being used in Israel’s ongoing massacre. Any claims that components manufactured at this factory are not being used in Israel’s current attack on Gaza are not credible.”

The group also says that the factory is part of the ‘Watchkeeper program’ which “is leading the manufacture of a new generation of drones for the UK military.”

The protest began in the early hours of Tuesday morning, with protesters hanging a banner across the factory roof saying “UK: Stop arming Israel”.

Source: RT

Palestinians demand ICC war crimes investigation against Israel

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki said there was clear evidence of war crimes by Israel during its offensive in Gaza as he met International Criminal Court prosecutors on Tuesday to push for an investigation.

Malki visited The Hague shortly after Israel and the Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement that dominates Gaza entered a 72-hour truce mediated by Egypt in an effort to secure an extended ceasefire.

Last week, the United Nations launched an inquiry into human rights violations and crimes alleged to have been committed by Israel during its offensive, given the far higher toll of civilian deaths and destruction on the Palestinian side.

“Everything that has happened in the last 28 days is clear evidence of war crimes committed by Israel, amounting to crimes against humanity,” Malki said. “There is no difficulty for us to show or build the case. Evidence is there for people to see and collect. Israel is in clear violation of international law.”

As neither Israel nor the Palestinians are ICC members, the court lacks jurisdiction over Gaza. This could be granted by a U.N. Security Council resolution, but Israel’s main ally, the United States, would probably veto any such proposal.

Malki told reporters that the Palestinian Authority (PA) wanted to give the ICC jurisdiction to investigate alleged crimes by both sides in the Gaza conflagration and that he had discussed a timeline with prosecutors to join the court.

Unless the Palestinians do so, no investigation is possible.

Malki said the PA’s current status at the United Nations, upgraded to “non-member state” from “entity” by a vote of the General Assembly in 2012, qualified it to become an ICC member and a decision on whether to apply could happen “very soon”.

But he pointed to possible complications by saying this could go ahead only with the cooperation of Hamas, which is shunned by the West as a designated terrorist group and is a strong political rival of the Western-backed PA, which governs only in parts of the West Bank not occupied by Israel.

By joining the court, the Palestinian territories would automatically open themselves up to war crimes both committed by adversaries and by themselves within their borders.

“We want really to be assured that if we undertake that decision (for ICC membership), then all Palestinian factions adhere to that decision and know in advance its consequences and ramifications,” Malki said.

“If it (includes) action committed by Palestinian groups (against Israelis), then we are ready to accept that. But nothing compares to the atrocities, the carnage, committed by Israel,” he added, accusing Israel of destroying schools, hospitals and water grids in Gaza during its incursion.

Source: Reuters

Apocalypse Blair

Mr Blair paid a singer to sing If I Ruled The World to him

While Gaza writhes in agony, Middle East Peace Envoy Tony Blair’s private jet last week was in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Two months earlier Blair had certainly visited Las Vegas and Los Angeles on the same journey. In Las Vegas Blair was paid a large but undisclosed sum to attend a conference of hedge fund managers. His meetings in Los Angeles were “private”.

I have been unable to discover whether Blair was on his jet last week, or it was Cherie shopping or Alistair Campbell following up on the “business opportunities” for Blair from the July meetings. But he was evidently not in the Middle East. Just before the jet left for the USA he was in Britain hosting a lavish and deeply tasteless birthday party for his wife, two months before her birthday.

From the Daily Mail:

Guests sang Happy Birthday to Cherie, as waiters brought a garish pink-coloured cake into the marquee.

Mr Blair, whose role is to hammer out a ceasefire in times of conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, spent large sums of money to have celebrities perform to Ma Cherie Amour. Bobby Davro then impersonated a blushing Mr Blair, and sang If I Ruled The World, from the musical Pickwick.

Yesterday the Guardian announced Blair’s new role as adviser to the Government of Azerbaijan, to add to the money he gets from advising Sisi of Egypt, Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, numerous Gulf despots and any other dictator who does not realise that the Blair brand has become even more toxic than their own.

Blair’s attendance at the July conference of hedge fund managers was appropriate, as they are the epitome of the heartless irresponsibility and short term financial outlook of the new capitalism which Blair so heartily embraced. His fellow guest speaker at that conference was Francis Ford Coppola. I went to bed last night mulling this article and the aptness of combination of Tony Blair and Apocalypse Now.

Then I woke up this morning to the news that after twenty years of peace fighting had broken out between Blair’s brand new client, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. The man really is cursed. Perhaps once you voluntarily brought so much war and terrible death, there is no way to stop. Apocalypse Blair. He should rename that private jet The Four Horsemen.

Source: Craig Murray

Israel shells Gaza’s only power plant

Over a million people in Gaza could be without electricity after Israeli tank shells hit the fuel depot of the enclave’s only power station, causing it to shut down. Its director, Mohammed al-Sharif, said, “The power plant is finished.”

A thick column of black smoke rose from the facility, which supplies the territory with two-thirds of its energy needs, and the fuel containers were in flames. Al-Sharif added that the local fire brigade was not equipped to extinguish the blaze.

The deputy director of the energy authority in the Palestinian territory, Fathi al-Sheikh Khalil, told AFP: “Gaza’s sole power plant has stopped working due to Israeli shelling last night, which damaged the steam generator and later hit the fuel tanks which set them on fire.”

Gaza’s power plant was forced to shut down after two tank shells hit one of three fuel tanks, said Jamal Dardasawi, a spokesman for Gaza’s electricity distribution company. The shelling sparked a large fire and a huge column of smoke was seen rising from the site. Dardasawi said 15 workers were trapped inside by the fire and that the damage would take months to repair. There was no immediate word on casualties, AP reported.

Source: RT

Israel using flechette shells in Gaza

The Israeli military is using flechette shells, which spray out thousands of tiny and potentially lethal metal darts, in its military operation in Gaza.

Six flechette shells were fired towards the village of Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis, on 17 July, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. Nahla Khalil Najjar, 37, suffered injuries to her chest, it said. PCHR provided a picture of flechettes taken by a fieldworker last week.

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) did not deny using the shells in the conflict. “As a rule, the IDF only employs weapons that have been determined lawful under international law, and in a manner which fully conforms with the laws of armed conflict,” a spokesperson said in response to a request for specific comment on the deployment of flechettes.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, describes a flechette shell as “an anti-personnel weapon that is generally fired from a tank. The shell explodes in the air and releases thousands of metal darts 37.5mm in length, which disperse in a conical arch 300 metres long and about 90 metres wide”.

The munitions are not prohibited under international humanitarian law, but according to B’Tselem, “other rules of humanitarian law render their use in the Gaza Strip illegal. One of the most fundamental principles is the obligation to distinguish between those who are involved and those who are not involved in the fighting, and to avoid to the extent possible injury to those who are not involved. Deriving from this principle is the prohibition of the use of an imprecise weapon which is likely to result in civilian injuries.”

The legality of flechette munitions was upheld by the Israeli supreme court in 2002, and according to an Israeli military source, they are particularly effective against enemy fighters operating in areas covered by vegetation.

The source said a number of armies around the world deploy flechette shells, and that they were intended solely for use against legitimate military targets in accordance with international law.

The IDF has deployed flechette shells in Gaza and Lebanon before. B’Tselem has documented the deaths of nine Palestinians in Gaza from flechettes in 2001 and 2002. Flechettes have also killed and wounded dozens of civilians, including women and children, in conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Source: The Guardian

Nobel Peace Prize winners call for arms embargo on Israel

Seven Nobel Peace Prize winners were amongst the 64 public figures calling for an international arms embargo on Israel for its “war crimes and possible crimes against humanity” in Gaza. The statement came in a letter published in Britain’s The Guardian on Friday.

“Israel has once again unleashed the full force of its military against the captive Palestinian population, particularly in the besieged Gaza Strip, in an inhumane and illegal act of military aggression. Israel’s ability to launch such devastating attacks with impunity largely stems from the vast international military cooperation and trade that it maintains with complicit governments across the world,” read the statement.

“We call on the UN and governments across the world to take immediate steps to implement a comprehensive and legally binding military embargo on Israel, similar to that imposed on South Africa during apartheid,” the letter concluded.

Among the signators were Nobel peace laureates Desmond Tutu, Betty Williams, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, Jody Williams, Adolfo Peres Esquivel, Mairead Maguire and Rigoberto Menchu.

Also signing were academics Noam Chomsky and Rashid Khalidi, filmmakers Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, musicians Roger Waters and Brian Eno, writers Alice Walker and Caryl Churchill, and journalists John Pilger and Chris Hedges. Two Israelis, academics Ilan Pappe and Nurit Peled, signed the letter as well.

Gaza: France experiencing ‘torrent of internet hate’

Given the many threats of violence and murder they have to deal with, moderators struggle to cope psychologically.

The deadly Israeli offensive in Gaza has unleashed a torrent of hate on media websites and social networks in France that moderators find increasingly difficult to contain.

The bombardment by land, sea and air that has killed at least 425 Palestinians has enflamed tensions far afield from the Middle East, especially in France with its large Muslim and Jewish communities.

Paris protests in support of Gaza residents have degenerated into violence on several occasions.

“As soon as you talk about Israel, it crystallises all passions, with up to 20 000 or 30 000 comments sometimes after an article, of which we will only let five to 10 percent through,” said David Corchia, head of Concileo, a firm of moderators that counts the dailies Le Figaro and Liberation as clients.

Helped by software that automatically reports suspect keywords, online moderators can filter comments in accordance with special legal requirements in France as well as client requests. Those laws ban racist, anti-Semitic or discriminatory messages among others, as well calls for violence.

The moderators have little time to decide whether to let a remark through, and generally block 25 to 40 percent of comments.

But on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the rejection rate can reach 95 percent.

“There are three times as many comments than normal, all linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Jeremie Mani, head of Netino, which looks after the websites of the Le Monde daily, Europe 1 radio and major French television channels.

Netino’s 250 moderators, most of them based in Madagascar, deal with tens of millions of comments every month.

“We see racist or anti-Semitic messages, very violent, that also take aim at politicians and the media, sometimes by giving journalists’ contact details,” Mani said.

“This sickening content is peculiar to this conflict. The war in Syria does not trigger these kinds of comments.

“On the pro-Palestinian side, identical messages are posted on dozens of sites. On the pro-Israeli side, there are fewer messages but they are better organised,” he said.

The vitriolic messages about the conflict come up not only after content about the conflict itself — but can be found under any subject.

“On an article about the Tour de France, after four comments it’s about Gaza,” said Mani.

“On one story about salmon fishing, I saw a comment saying: ‘Stop talking about this, the problem is there are too many Jews’.

“Without any moderation, these hate messages would invade everything, particularly as they quickly breed followers.”

Media sites are not the only platforms that fall victim to violent messages. Public spaces on social networks such as the Facebook pages of famous people are targeted, and those comments are first published before they can be removed.

And while the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict may generate a large amount of vitriol, other issues with a racial or ethnic element do too.

Corchia said that when a teacher was stabbed to death by a student’s mother in front of her young pupils earlier this month, racist messages began pouring in as soon as the foreign-sounding name of the assailant was revealed.

And when a former local election candidate for the Front National was given a nine-month jail sentence this week for comparing France’s black justice minister, Christiane Taubira, to a monkey, Corchia said that on one story, moderators were only able to publish 500 comments out of 10,000.

“We watch for word associations. For example, any allusion to World War II is eliminated,” he said.

Pierre Duhau-Laurent, marketing director for Atchik Services, which moderates the websites of the French presidency and the Le Parisien daily, said “organised propaganda” was currently sweeping social networks at night.

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has bought sponsored tweets for his messages. And Hamas’s response is just as organised,” he said.

Given the many threats of violence and murder they have to deal with, moderators struggle to cope psychologically.

62 Palestinians killed in Gaza ‘massacre’ as death toll exceeds 400

At least 62 Palestinians were killed on Sunday in Israeli shelling of a Gaza neighborhood that left bodies strewn in the streets and thousands fleeing for shelter to a hospital packed with wounded, Palestinian witnesses and officials said.

The Israeli military said militants from Gaza’s dominant Hamas group responded with anti-tank missiles and heavy weapon fire in some of the bloodiest fighting since Israel launched its Gaza offensive 13 days ago.

A two-hour “humanitarian ceasefire” in the area, agreed by both sides at the request of the International Committee of the Red Cross, broke down in minutes with each side blaming the other.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of carrying out a massacre and declared three days of mourning. The Israeli military said Hamas had fired rockets and built tunnels and command centers in Sheja and that it had warned locals to evacuate two days earlier. Its ground forces were backed up by air strikes and artillery, the army added.

Anguished cries of “Did you see Ahmed?” “Did you see my wife?” echoed through the courtyard of Gaza’s Shifa hospital, where panicked residents of Shejaia gathered in family groups. Inside, bodies and wounded lay on blood-stained floors.

Elderly men there said the Israeli attack was the fiercest they had seen since the 1967 Middle East war, when Israel captured Gaza.

Shifa hospital’s director, Naser Tattar, said 17 children, 14 women and four elderly were among the 62 dead, and about 400 people were wounded in the Israeli assault.

Death toll exceeds 400

Gaza’s Health Ministry officials said at least 403 Palestinians, many of them civilians, have been killed and about 2,600 wounded in the 13-day offensive, that Israel says it launched to halt mounting cross-border rocket fire by militants.

On Israel’s side, two civilians have been killed by cross-border fire and five soldiers have died in fighting. More than 50 Israeli troops have been wounded, hospital officials said.

Thousands fled Shejaia, some by foot and others piling into the backs of trucks and sitting on the hoods of cars filled with families trying to get away. Several people rode out of the neighborhood of 100,000 in the shovel of a bulldozer.

Video given to Reuters by a local showed at least a dozen corpses, including three children, lying in rubble-filled streets, though the footage could not be verified independently.

As the tank shells began to land, Shejaia residents called radio stations pleading for evacuation. An air strike on the Shejaia home of Khalil al-Hayya, a senior Hamas official, killed his son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, hospital officials said.

Israel, which has accused Hamas of using civilians as human shields by launching rockets from residential areas, sent ground forces into the Gaza Strip on Thursday after 10 days of air, naval and artillery barrages failed to stop the salvoes.

The military said it beefed up its presence on Sunday, with a focus on destroying missile stockpiles and a vast tunnel system Hamas built along the frontier with Israel.

“It has been a tough day of combat, but it won’t deter us,” Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid said, without referring to events in Shejaia.

“The operation is necessary and, if needed, we will broaden it,” he told reporters while visiting wounded Israeli soldiers in a hospital in the southern city of Beersheba. – Reuters

Kerry calls for an Apartheid state in Israel

mandela_israeli_apartheidThe US Secretary of State said that if Israel doesn’t make peace soon, it could become “an apartheid state”, like the old South Africa. Many are fuming over the ill-informed comparison.

Kerry is clearly confused about apartheid, since the two-state solution implies apartheid rather than a single state containing both Jews and Arabs.

Kerry warned that if there was no “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state”.

Secretary of State Kerry confused a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday about seperate development, ethnic selfrule and notions of Jewishness.

Senior American officials have rarely, if ever, used the term “apartheid” in reference to Israel, and President Obama has previously rejected the idea that the word should apply to the Jewish state.

Kerry’s use of the loaded term is already rankling Jewish leaders in America because it is bound to attract unwanted attention to Israel.

Kerry also repeated his warning that a failure of Middle East peace talks could lead to a resumption of Palestinian violence against Israeli citizens. He suggested that a change in either the Israeli or Palestinian leadership could make achieving a peace deal more feasible. He lashed out against Israeli settlement-building.

Kerry told his audience that a unitary state “winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens, or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state”.

The US nevertheless imposed a unitary state solution on South Africa, strangely, to “end apartheid”. They have now changed course 180 degrees on the matter it seems.

According to the 1998 Rome Statute, the “crime of apartheid” is defined as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” The term is most often used in reference to the system of racial segregation and oppression that governed South Africa from 1948 until 1994.

A two-state solution and claims of Jewishness imply racial segregation however.

Former president Jimmy Carter came under fire in 2007 for titling his book on Middle East peace Palestine: Peace or Apartheid.

Carter explained after publishing the book that he was referring to apartheid-type policies in the West Bank.

“Apartheid is a word that is an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank, and it’s based on the desire or avarice of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land,” Carter said.

Israel’s leaders have employed the term as well. In 2010 former Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak used language very similar to Kerry’s. “If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Kerry suggested in March that if peace talks fail, it would bolster the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

Time and demographics are on the Palestinian side, and Israel has to confront notions of the Jewishness of the state, Kerry implied, further strengthening the notion that the US would like to see apartheid being applied to Israel sooner rather than later.

South African Jews, Muslims fly to Washington to heal the rift

South African Jews and Muslims meet at the South African ambassador's residence in Washington

Partnership between Jews and Muslims in South Africa flourished when both communities joined forces in the struggle to end the apartheid regime. But as the common cause uniting them was resolved in the early 1990s, Jews and Muslims, both minorities in South Africa, grew apart and allowed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to become a wedge issue and a source of ongoing tension.

Now, leaders of the two communities are in Washington are trying to find ways, thousands of miles away from their homeland, to rebuild the bridges.

“The greatest challenge we’ve encountered is South Africa,” said Rabbi Marc Schneier, who is the founder and president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, the organization that put together the joint mission of Muslim and Jewish leaders to the United States. This challenge, which he sees as being more difficult than in other parts of the world in which the group has been trying to promote interfaith dialogue, is made up of a community of 70,000 Jews and a Muslim population 10 times its size, both of which have been far behind the United States in terms of interfaith cooperation. The reason, leaders of both communities agree, has to do more with the Middle East than with relations on the ground in Africa.

“Obviously, Israel is a huge issue,” said Rabbi Ron Hendler, who represented South Africa’s chief rabbi in the mission to Washington. “Many in the Muslim community feel very, very strongly about the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and many in the Jewish community are very Zionist.”

Sitting around a breakfast table at the residence of Ebrahim Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to the U.S. and one the country’s leading Muslim activists, leaders of the two communities expressed their eagerness to move closer. Rasool, who co-founded the Call of Islam, a Muslim organization formed to fight apartheid, told the Forward that he would like to see the discussion about Jewish-Muslim relations begin not in the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, but rather in 1492, when Christians expelled Jews and Muslims from Spain, a place in which both communities flourished together. Like other activists, Rasool lamented the break in Muslim-Jewish cooperation once South Africa transitioned beyond its racist past. “We all cooperated in fighting apartheid. Our humanity forced us to reach our common values,” he said, “but as soon as that evil was pushed down, we allowed ourselves to retreat to the issue of Israel-Palestine.”

Speaking to two dozens activists gathered at his home, Rasool said that in order to build bridges, both communities need to “divest from the exclusive victimhood.” He quoted South African leader Nelson Mandela, who “knew that victims can’t make peace.”

In practical terms, organizers hope the short trip to Washington can inspire South African Jews and Muslims to follow some of the models set in the United States for interfaith dialogue, including the idea of twinning synagogues and mosques, the flagship program of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.

The organization has long sought to spread the idea of interfaith relations beyond the United States and has already conducted programs in Europe and Latin America. This mission, which alongside delegates from South Africa also included representatives from Australia and from New Zealand, is the first attempt to reach out to Jews and Muslims in the Southern Hemisphere.

“South Africa is such a deeply prejudiced society,” said David Jacobson, executive director of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, the community’s umbrella organization. But it is this deep divide that gave participants hope that just as South Africa overcame its racial tensions, it can build bridges between Jews and Muslims. “If we can do it in South Africa, we can be a beacon to the world,” Jacobson said. – Jewish Daily Forward

Israel launches racially segregated buses

From Monday Palestinians travelling to day jobs into central Israel from the West Bank will be urged to board special buses at a checkpoint instead of the regular services used by Israelis.

The scheme was drawn up by the Israeli transport ministry after residents in two Jewish settlements complained that Palestinians travellers on the Trans-Samaria road – also known as Highway 5 – between the West Bank and Tel Aviv were a potential threat.

There were also reports of overcrowding and fights between Israeli and Palestinian passengers.

The transport ministry insisted the move was “designed to improve the service for Palestinians entering Israel”.

But some human rights groups called it “blatant racism” that resembled South African-style apartheid.

“They are institutionalising segregated services for Jews and non-Jews,” said Ofra Yeshua-Lyth, an activist with Women For Civil Disobedience, an Israeli-Palestinian campaign group. “Many people don’t class the Israeli situation as apartheid because for a long time, Israel refrained from the characteristics of petty apartheid, like separate roads, cafés and buses. This bus situation is a step in the direction of petty apartheid because people are being segregated in their daily activities.”

Avner Ovadia, a transport ministry spokesperson, said there was no official ban on Palestinian workers travelling on public buses.

“Furthermore, the transport ministry is not authorised to stop any passenger travelling on these bus routes,” he said.

But drivers with the Afikim bus company, which operates the Trans-Samaria route, said Palestinians attempting to use the regular services would be pointed towards a different bus.

“We are not allowed to refuse service and we will not order anyone to get off the bus, but from what we were told … there will be checks at

the checkpoint, and Palestinians will be asked to board their own buses,” one driver told Ynet, an Israeli news website.

Flyers in Arabic advertising the new service have been distributed at bus stops near Palestinian villages in the West Bank.

Yirsael Maidad, a spokesman for the Jewish Settlers Council, said Israelis felt justified in refusing to share buses with Palestinians because of Israel’s experience with suicide bombers.

“Since we ride buses with Arabs every day in Israel, it’s not a racist thing but for some strange reason, Arabs blow themselves up in buses and Israelis find that very unnerving,” he said. “If you were to ask some bright young radical, he would say forcing Arabs to ride Israeli uses would be a form of colonialism. Having their own buses should be very much welcomed as part of a state-building process.”

Campaigners say troops began ordering Palestinians with Israeli work permits off buses after settlers made complaints last November.

After witnessing one such incident, Ms Yeshua-Lyth lodged a report with Makhsom Watch, an Israeli group that monitors check point incidents. She described how soldiers herded around 30 Palestinian workers from a bus travelling from Tel Aviv to the West Bank.

“The soldier/officer roars: “Udrub!” (Move!) And then: “Sit on your butts! On your butts!,” she wrote. “They are then marched to the terminal fence and made to stand along it in a line, then to sit on the cold ground and wait.”

When the men asked why they had been taken from the bus, they were told “You’re not allowed to be on Highway 5” and “You’re not allowed to use public transportation at all”.

Palestinians say they have been forced to walk several miles to their homes or use expensive taxi services since the policy of removing them from buses began. An estimated 29,000 Palestinians travel to jobs in Israel every day, according to official figures. – http://www.telegraph.co.uk