i just got back from all of the hoop jumping one must go through if you happen to have a passport that allows you to go to palestine and lebanon. loving people in both places means you need two passports. but i had to jump through an extra hoop today because i had my jordanian stamp in my passport that i only use for palestine and i had to give it to the u.s. embassy this morning (the rage i had to repress in order to sustain that little visit is going to last me a while; i cannot wait until the day when i can burn that passport and never have to use it again). anyway, i had to go to some jordanian office called “foreign borders.” it is a place where they will give you a valid stamp in the passport you need it in. but while i was running around jumping through hoops before my trip to beirut tomorrow, i missed recent developments on several fronts. the first is that a group that i and another friend belong to on face book called “prevent a new genocide: save gaza” was hacked by zionist terrorists (see photo above). i immediately removed myself from the group as apparently my friend told me that if it was hacked that maybe those internet zionist terrorists could hack your overall facebook account. these terrorists changed the logo to something called the “jewish internet defense forces” and other items in the group. this is what we are up against, we, those who seek to tell the truth about gaza.
and i had a thought this morning about those people who stay silent, who do nothing in the face of this massacre-genocide-holocaust that israeli terrorists are perpetrating against the people of gaza who are trapped in a prison with nowhere else to go: americans, and perhaps europeans as well, don’t really care about human life, especially if those humans are arabs and muslims (especially if they are arab and muslim men). so i started thinking that the photographs i posted were not having an effect on my readers. silly me, i thought photographs of all the hundreds of massacred and injured palestinian children might tug at the heartstrings of some people who may have a shred of morality left, who may get up off their asses and do something. but then i remembered: what americans do care about are dead animals. so here are the animals who have been killed by israeli terrorists. do you think they were launching hamas resistance rockets too?
meanwhile, more children are being massacred in gaza by israeli terrorists, for those who care:
it is the same way that american academics are not doing s*&^ with respect to the academic boycott of israel. clearly, american academics feel that their precious little freedom of speech is more important than palestinian lives. that much is obvious. but i thought that maybe they might give a s(*& about the targeting of schools. at this point israeli terrorists have targeted the islamic university of gaza, several schools, including an amerian school in gaza, and today not only did israeli terrorists target a school: they targeted AN UNRWA SCHOOL BEING USED TO HOUSE FAMILIES FLEEING FROM ISRAELI TERRORISTS. this is one of 11 schools for internally displaced palestinians–5,000 of them are staying in these make-shift shelters. here is ma’an’s report on the attack on the unrwa school/shelter:
In a statement circulated on Tuesday, UNRWA said that Israeli forces attacked the Asma Elementary School in Gaza City, which is currently sheltering 400 people who fled their homes in the town of Beit Lahiya.
The school was clearly marked as a United Nations installation. The three men, 24-year-old Hussein Mahmoud Abed Al Malek Al Sultan, 19-year-old Abed Samir Ali Al Sultan, and 25-year-old Rawhi Jamal Ramadan Al Sultan, were killed at 11:30 last night. The three men, all from the same family, were killed as they left the school toilet at eleven thirty last night when the school compound took a direct hit.
The director of the UN general commissioner’s office in Gaza Adnan Abu Hasanah said that another UN facility, the Ash-Shouka School in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, was also bombarded. At this time there were no details available about the civilians who had taken shelter in the school.
UNRWA is strongly protesting these killings to the Israeli authorities and is calling for an immediate and impartial investigation.
“Where it is found that international humanitarian law has been violated, those responsible must be held to account,” UNRWA said.Well before the current fighting, UNRWA said it had given to the Israeli authorities the GPS co-ordinates of all its installations in Gaza, including Asma Elementary School.
“This tragic incident again illustrates the most urgent need for an end to the fighting. It also underlines the sad reality facing those fleeing the violence that unless there is a lasting ceasefire, there will remain pervasive risks to civilian lives in Gaza today,” the agency added.
apparently this happened late last, but it wasn’t reported earlier when i read the news. the united nations had told the israeli terrorists and gave the israeli terrorists their coordinates so that it would not be a target. but if you remember the israeli terrorist invasion of lebanon in july 2006 they did the same thing: they targeted the united nations there too.
i should say there are a few people responding to the israeli terrorism targeting schools (meanwhile there is some motherf*&$^% AMERICAN israeli terrorist soldier that alan fisher just interviewed on al jazeera english who was rationalize the targeting of this unrwa school). of course the initial calls came from palestinians like the palestinian association of university teachers in gaza:
1. Immediately impose boycotts, sanctions and divestment on the Apartheid Israeli state.
2. Try the Israeli generals for their on-going crimes against the Palestinian people.
3. Demand a halt to Israel’s savage aggression, end its brutal occupation and lift its suffocating and lethal siege on the Gaza Strip.
4. Implement all UN resolutions related to the inalienable national rights, particularly UN resolution 194 calling for the right of return for the Palestinian refugees to their homes and their property from which they were uprooted by the terrorist Zionist gangs in 1948.
5. Comply with 4th article of the Geneva Convention, the international human rights law, the international humanitarian law, and the universal declaration of human rights as well as all other related agreements.
6. Lift the draconian blockade against Gaza as stipulated by the 1948 convention on Genocide, and consider anyone participating as a war criminal who must be tried for crimes against humanity.
Israel is a rogue state that is a threat and danger to world peace and security; therefore she must be banished and punished by the international community, before it is too late for the people of Palestine, the people of Israel and the people in the surrounding countries.
for those who don’t understand why teachers in palestine would accurately describe the terrorist state of israel as a “rogue state” you may want to look at how one of its chief terrorists and propagandists rationalizes the targeting of a university in gaza:
During Sunday’s cabinet meeting the foreign minister said “here we have departments of life sciences, while for them it is the department of death sciences.”
According to intelligence information gathered by the IDF and Shin Bet, the compound near the Islamic college, bombed twice in the past week, was being used as a chemical lab and as Hamas’ explosives lab in Gaza.
Military officials said terrorists had been working there to produce improved rockets and manufacture mortar shells that were later fired toward Israel’s home front.
The Prime Minister’s Office and the IDF dubbed the lab as “the Palestinian Rafael (Israel’s leading developer of arms related technology).”
a new group, california scholars for academic freedom has come up with a response to these terrorist acts and i am hoping that these folks step up a serious boycott campaign in the u.s.:
While we decry Israeli war crimes and violations of human rights, and condemn the massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza which has caused hundreds of deaths, as educators in California institutions of higher learning, we are especially appalled at the destruction of educational institutions and student casualties.
On 27 December, Human Rights Watch reported that an Israeli air-to-ground missile struck a group of students leaving the Gaza Training College, adjacent to the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in downtown Gaza City, killing eight students and wounding 19 others. Two days later, on 29 December 2008, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, destroying the science laboratory block and destroying or damaging other blocks of buildings, including the library. Although Israel has claimed that the science laboratory facilities were used as “a research and development center for Hamas weapons,” this claim has been denied by officials of the Islamic University, and according to the New York Times of 1 January 2009 Israel has not produced any evidence for its claim.
These direct assaults on Palestinian students and educational institutions are only the latest chapter in Israel’s ongoing denial of the right to education guaranteed in international conventions. Since the first uprising in 1987, Israel has systematically frustrated or denied Palestinian students their right to study, not just in the occupied territories, but at universities abroad, as most recently demonstrated by the Israeli government’s refusal to allow students awarded prestigious Fulbright fellowships to leave for the United States. University students living in Gaza have not been able to leave in order to attend universities throughout the world, let alone Birzeit University, and students in the West Bank itself have to negotiate roadblocks and checkpoints to get to their classes — often never making it.
The background to the current crisis is too complicated to detail in a press release. It is, however, important to note, first, that under international law, Israel is still an occupying power, maintaining control of Gaza’s borders, air and water space. It has completely isolated Gaza and wrought a humanitarian catastrophe, as noted by UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk. Second, the current bombing campaign by Israel constitutes collective punishment, which is a violation of international law. Third, Hamas won the majority of seats to the Palestinian Legislative Council in the internationally acknowledged fair election of January 2006.
As California Scholars for Academic Freedom, we will continue to play our mandated role to educate the international public about the right to education and the egregious violation of that right by the Israeli government. We will participate in campaigns aimed at exerting pressure on international authorities and the governments of Israel and the US to implement an immediate cease-fire and begin preparations for an end to the blockade and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.
We insist that Israel has the responsibility to ensure the right to education as mandated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which Israel ratified in 1991. The undermining and disruption of Palestinian education as a result of the deliberate destruction of academic facilities constitutes a violation of a basic human right that will have long-term negative political, economic, and humanitarian ramifications for all people involved.
California Scholars for Academic Freedom is a one-year-old group of 100 academics who teach in 20 California institutions. The group formed as a response to various violations of academic freedom that were arising from both the post-11 September 2001 climate of civil rights violations and the increasing attacks on progressive educators by neo-conservatives. Many attacks were aimed at scholars of Arab, Muslim or Middle Eastern descent or at scholars researching and teaching about the Middle East, Arab and Muslim communities. Our goal of protecting California Scholars based mainly in institutions of higher education has grown broader in scope. We recognize that violations of academic freedom anywhere are threats to academic freedom everywhere.
also, david lloyd set up a website–he’s related to the california group–has a new website set up and is calling for academics to sign a letter addressed to president-elect barack obama, who i promise you will be far more of a terrorist than george w. bush ever was when it comes to this region in which i live. here is david’s letter:
Dear President-Elect Obama
By David LloydOnce, in what was perhaps an unguarded moment, you stated that: “Nobody’s suffering more than the Palestinian people”. After days of relentless Israeli bombing in the Gaza strip that has already killed over four hundred people, most of them civilians or policemen, and injured more than two thousand, many of whom may yet die for lack of medical supplies and facilities, your words have never rung more true. And yet, so far, your only response to this latest assault on the Palestinians, that the UN Secretary General diplomatically calls “disproportionate”, has been to defend Israel’s right to respond to mostly harmless rocket attacks.
Does this mean that on the long way to the White House you have trimmed your sails and, for the sake of securing the power you will soon assume, fear now to speak truth to power? Does this mean that, unlike Dr. King, your sense of justice is adjustable for the sake of political expedience? Those who supported you from the early days of your primary campaign did so not on account of your response to economic crisis, but because they believed in your sense of justice and your commitment to put an end to business-as-usual in Washington, and because they believed in your genuine desire to shape a new and different world order.
In 1981, while you were an undergraduate at Occidental College, you were among the first of a courageous group of students and faculty who, while the cause was still unpopular or unheard of, spoke out for divestment from the apartheid regime in South Africa. You knew then that it was imperative to place pressure on a racist regime which shamefully oppressed a black and coloured population that was discriminated against, subject to pass laws and control of its every movement, parceled into Bantustans, and subject to detention, torture and extra-judicial execution. When the black population protested, like the school children of Soweto, they could be summarily shot down by police or army. The ANC, under Nelson Mandela, was proscribed as a terrorist movement, its leaders were imprisoned, tortured or killed, its guerrillas faced the overwhelming power of the South African army, equipped and trained in part by the United States and its European allies. A regime that was so unafraid to use violence in the defense of its discriminatory and racist regime, and so unashamed to do so in the face of international condemnation, could only understand the language of force. The divestment movement in which you so actively participated understood that the euphemistically and cynically named policy of “constructive engagement” was a moral and practical failure and that only the non-violent pressure of a financial boycott on the South African regime had any hope of bringing an end to apartheid without an horrific bloodbath.
Public figures as diverse as Bishop Desmond Tutu and President Jimmy Carter have recognized that Israel too is an apartheid regime, in practice if not in name. South Africa, now a functioning multi-racial democracy, was a white state for a white people. Israel is a Jewish state for a Jewish people. Its non-Jewish, mostly Palestinian Arab citizens are discriminated against in numerous ways, economically and civilly. The dispossessed and ethnically cleansed Palestinian populations, dispersed in the diaspora and in the refugee camps of Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, are denied the internationally recognized right of return. They have had their lands and homes taken from them by armed and “legal” force, are subject to collective punishment, prolonged states of siege, the absolute and deliberately destructive control of their daily movements. Where South Africa instituted the pass laws, the checkpoints that have proliferated all over the West Bank and at the exits from Gaza prevent students from reaching their schools and hospitals, workers from reaching their places or work, keep farmers from their fields, the sick from the few hospitals that survive to serve them. The illegal settlements, that in contravention of all international laws regarding occupation have proliferated across the West Bank, are designed to be permanent “facts on the ground” and have divided recognized Palestinian territory into segmented islets, into besieged Bantustans, with the intent of preventing a contiguous Palestinian state. A so-called security wall, illegally built, as even the Israeli Supreme Court recognized, on Palestinian territory, has cut farmers from their lands and turned formerly prosperous villages into isolated prisons. Regular Israeli military incursions into Palestinian cities and refugee camps, and bombings from the air, have killed innumerable civilians, many of them children. Since the election of Hamas, in fair and open elections, Israel has subjected the civilian population of Gaza to a prolonged state of siege, designed to suffocate them into submission, depriving them at will of water and power, medical supplies and food, and of access to the outside world. The most recent, all-out assault on Gaza, the disproportionate and bloody use of excessive force, is no act of self-defense, but the dramatic extension of an insidious policy of extermination of a people that refuses to disappear.
Every one of these acts is a crime against humanity. In their ensemble, they constitute one of the most massive, ethnocidal atrocities of modern times. Alone among nations, Israel acts in flagrant violation of international law and UN resolutions and does so with impunity. That it can do so is in large part the consequence of the uncritical support offered to Israel by a succession of American administrations. Without the military and economic aid of the United States, which amounts to more than a third of all US foreign aid, Israel could not have mounted its violent offensives against the Palestinians or Lebanon, could not maintain its security apparatus, could not afford the illegal settlements that seek to expand Israel into what remains of Palestinian territory. The United States has supplied the F-16s that are bombarding the Palestinians, their schools, police stations and mosques, and the cluster bombs that continue to kill and maim children and farmers in southern Lebanon. America continues to support Israel to the tune of billions every year at the expense of US taxpayers and at the expense of its moral standing in the world.
You will continue to do so, according to your own web page, because “our first and incontrovertible commitment in the Middle East must be to the security of Israel, America’s strongest ally in the region.” You and your Vice-President, Joe Biden, not only “defend and support the annual foreign aid package that involves both military and economic assistance to Israel”, but moreover “have advocated increased foreign aid budgets to ensure that these funding priorities are met.” In doing so, you lend your support, in the name of the United States, to a regime no less criminal in its acts and in its policies towards its own minority population and its dispossessed Palestinian neighbors than South Africa was in the 1980s. Then, it was argued, South Africa was our strongest ally in the region, a bulwark in the war against communism, a crucial supplier of uranium and other minerals, a prosperous Western-style democracy, if not the only democracy on the continent. To bring down the South African apartheid regime, it was argued, would be to create chaos in southern Africa, unleash a bloodbath in which whites and blacks alike would suffer, and pave the way for a communist or dictatorial postcolonial regime. The divestment movement, a non-violent coalition of students and academics, union members and churches, came together in the spirit of the Civil Rights movement to challenge those self-serving assumptions. It changed the direction of US foreign policy, disgracing its support of a racist regime, and placed effective pressure on the apartheid regime to begin serious negotiations with the ANC. Through a combination of diplomacy and divestment, we did end apartheid, making way for a functioning multi-racial democracy that confronts its challenges, indeed, but has not dissolved into chaos or tyranny.
It is time for the United States to place a similar pressure on Israel. That Israel has been America’s beneficiary, unchallenged in its war crimes and in its acts of terror, uncontested for its racist civil constitution and illegal occupations, has not been to the United States’ advantage. On the contrary, such unquestioning support of Israel has fueled the legitimate anger of the Islamic world, supplied the justification for terrorism, and continually tarnished the United States’ reputation among the democracies of the world. That the United States has stood so often alone in defending Israel before the court of world opinion in the United Nations is not a sign of its virtue, but of the obstinacy and arrogance of its stance.
But it is not for the sake of the reputation or advantage of the United States that you should take a new path in relation to Israel. It is in the name of justice. It is not just to support the territorial ambitions, realized settlement by settlement, of a Zionist minority in the region. It is not just to continue to supply Israel with the most advanced weapons and the most deadly arms in order that it may murder civilians, children and policemen. It is not just that we should support Israel with all our diplomatic force and financial aid, while leaving Israel’s victims to die slowly for lack of food, medicine, water and power. It is not just that we should sacrifice a dispossessed people for the security of a state that discriminates and expropriates, continually and violently ignores UN resolutions and international appeals, collectively punishes those whose right to resist occupation is recognized in international law. There is no road to peace through such injustice.
It may be that the compromise in the end will be the establishment and security of two separate states. Almost certainly, the only hope of a lasting solution is a single state in Israel/Palestine, committed to the civil and human rights of all peoples within its boundaries, irrespective of religion or ethnicity. That is, after all, the standard to which we hold all other states in the world, Israel alone excepted. But no solution at all will be possible until we hold Israel accountable for its criminal violence and its illegal acts, until we cease to supply it with the means to pursue a course of domination and expansion, with arms and warplanes, with finance and diplomatic support. It is time for constructive disengagement from Israel, financial, diplomatic, military. What worked in the case of South Africa, divestment and pressure, may finally work in the Middle East.
Without such justice, there will be no peace.
David Lloyd
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, January 1, 2009
you may click on the link at the top of the letter if you would like to find out how to become a signatory to it.
there are now 593 martyrs. 2,800 wounded. 75% of gaza has no electricity. hospitals are running on generators.
unrwa’s john ging just said: “the international community must be held responsible for their action and inaction.”
body on the line 