Dr Ibrahim Mousawi speaking at the World Against War international peace conference in London, December 2007 (10:13)

McCarthyism comes to Europe and the Levant: The Zionist Targeting of Lebanon’s Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi

by Franklin Lamb in Beirut and Ann El Khoury in Sydney

You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
– Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, April 1954

In a US Senate hearing just over fifty years ago, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch famously rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with these now immortal words. They have been immortalized because they have helped furnish what we understand McCarthyism to mean: extreme, mean and unreasonable persecution of people by means of witch-hunts and other tactics including guilt by association or through simple prejudice. This is done in order to achieve a political objective of silencing dissent and preventing the public from learning inconvenient truths. Read the rest of this entry »

Cartoonist Eran Wolkowski

Palestinian prisoner and Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti (who even Ha’aretz has editorialised should be set free) has said of Israel’s latest Palestinian prisoner release:

“The release (of Palestinian prisoners) tomorrow is a joke. The majority of the prisoners would have been released anyway in the next few months. It is possible to release thousands of prisoners and not just 400. Abu Mazen asked for more, but they wouldn’t let him have any more.”

The Jerusalem Post reports that 400-500 “terror operatives” are arrested each month by IOF forces operating in the West Bank, about the same number of Palestinian prisoners released on Monday.

The homecoming detainees – most from the West Bank – are a small proportion of the 9,000+ prisoners held in Israeli jails, and they do not include long-term detainees who were jailed before the Oslo accords in the early Nineties.

As Ha’aretz editorialised in An endless pool of prisoners (22 Nov):

Why is Israel releasing 440 Palestinian prisoners specifically ahead of the Annapolis conference, and not 500 or 300, or 2,000 as the United States had expected? The impression is that no one is exercised by the security risk entailed in releasing prisoners - aside from politicians who want to make political capital off of it - and that all the wheeling and dealing revolves around the question of how many prisoners “are worth wasting” on this or that event.

This regular game with the fate of people - some 10,000 of them - who are incarcerated in Israel, taking no account of the length of their prison sentences but only the political utility their fate can serve, warps Israel’s image as a law-abiding state. If at any given moment there is a pool of candidates for release, it stands to reason they could have been released long ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Dixon is another who makes the case that the “Save Darfur” campaign is more or less a “humanitarian imperialism” front to be used to justify intended neocon oil and resource wars in the African continent, particularly in the resource-rich Sudan.

Cartoon © Khalil Bendib, All rights reserved. Click on thumbnail for full-size

See also:

IPS, War in the Name of Peace: Interview with Jean Bricmont, author of ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’; Paul de Rooij, “Humanitarian Wars” and Associated Delusions (review of Bricmont); Kevin Funk and Steve Fake, Divestment and Darfur: Solution or Diversion?; Mahmood Mamdani, The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency (and here for an interview on Democracy Now!); Ned Goldstein, Exploiting African Genocide for Propaganda; Roger Howard, Where anti-Arab prejudice and oil make the difference; Alexander Cockburn, Gaza and Darfur: When Will Kristoff Go to the Occupied Territories?; William Reed, How to Save Darfur; Keith Harmon Snow, The US’s War in Darfur.

The star-studded hue and cry to “Save Darfur” and “stop the genocide” has gained enormous traction in U.S. media along with bipartisan support in Congress and the White House. But the Congo, with ten to twenty times as many African dead over the same period is not called a “genocide” and passes almost unnoticed. Sudan sits atop lakes of oil. It has large supplies of uranium, and other minerals, significant water resources, and a strategic location near still more African oil and resources. The unasked question is whether the nation’s Republican and Democratic foreign policy elite are using claims of genocide, and appeals for “humanitarian intervention” to grease the way for the next oil and resource wars on the African continent. Read the rest of this entry »

American historian Carl Becker has an astute observation, previously cited here, that often,

Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained.

Excepting the encouraging alternative streams of discourse on the web, Becker’s truism seems well demonstrated in the current level of propagated public discourse in the USA regarding Iran and President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University this week.

It is as if Faux Fox News writ large has permeated even the hallowed halls of Columbia University, with its President Lee Bollinger repeating half-truths, canards and lies and adding ingracious personal insult to these injuries.

First, let’s choose to look at the glass half-full. Under the aegis of academic freedom, Columbia University did not succumb, at least, to the denial of a Head of State’s visit, as happened with the rejection of the Iranian President’s request to visit Ground Zero to pay his respects. The invited address went ahead and many people will now have the opportunity to hear Ahmadinejad directly through the web (videos below; see also full transcript available here).

In a thirty minute address, the populist figurehead President speaks about academic freedom, science and religion. Towards the end of his address (20 minute mark, see third video clip) he is impassioned about the perennial need to have academic inquiry open on subjects such as the Shoah, and questions why Palestinians are paying the price for the Holocaust in WWII. He then defends Iran’s rights to nuclear technology and energy self-determination, citing Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA’s inspections.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the much anticipated book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by Walt and Mearsheimer is released this month, the liberal Jewish-spiritual progressive magazine Tikkun has its current issue devoted to the Israel Lobby (including, but not limited to, AIPAC) and its disproportionate and highly unrepresentative influence on US foreign policy, particularly towards the Middle East.

The cover reads: The Israel Lobby: Bad for the U.S., Bad for Israel, Bad for the Jews. With an interview of Democratic Congressman Jim Moran as its centerpiece (interview excerpt follows), the Israel Lobby’s major role in the decision to go to war in Iraq and its position on calling for an attack on Iran is scrutinised.

Congressman Moran speaks sensibly about Iran, and reading his comments here was a breath of fresh air.

Jim Moran’s voicing of the obvious has however all too predictably earned the ire of Lobbyists and some MSM journalists who sing to the Lobby tune (see WaPo here and here—thanks Fanonite). Interviewer Rabbi Lerner defends Moran’s statements as observations with which he himself would agree, supporting his assertions with evidence and personal experience. Lerner writes:

To take an example from these past few months of the Israel Lobby exercising its power, liberals in the House of Representatives in the spring of 2007 sought to include in the defense-funding budget an amendment that would require specific authorization from Congress before the Administration could use the defense budget monies for a military strike at Iran. The amendment failed. Most liberals in the U.S. today oppose preventive wars in general and a military strike against Iran in particular. So who supports such a move? The answer is: the right wing government of Israel and its champion in the U.S., the Israel Lobby.

Don’t be surprised that Jim Moran was pushed from his office as one of the leaders of the Democrats in Congress by AIPAC and other elements of the Israel Lobby. Here is how it happened: Congressman Moran was asked at a constituents’ meeting by a woman identified with the Jewish community why we had gotten into the war in Iraq. Moran responded provocatively “If the Jewish community had organized against it, we wouldn’t be in this war.” It’s the kind of statement I would have made to any religious community, or to any labor movement audience, citing their own failures to act as a critical factor in why we had gotten involved. In the case of the Jewish community there is the added factor that leading people in the Israel Lobby actively supported and still support the war in Iraq and that some of the strong supporters of the Israel Lobby played central roles in the effort to push the Iraq war inside the Bush Administration.

Why the “Liberal” Media is Illiberal on Israel

I’ve had similar experiences with the Israel Lobby and the media. For the first few years of Tikkun’s existence Tikkun’s perspective was covered on many topics in American politics. But once we got on AIPAC’s radar screen, this began to change. I finally got the op-ed editor of The San Francisco Chronicle to tell me the story. He had been approached by the Executive Editor, Dick German and told by German in no uncertain terms to stop publishing op-eds from American Jews critical of Israel, because Israel had “too many enemies.” This is what he told me.

A similar thing happened to me at The New York Times. I was asked by The Times to do a review of a book on Israeli settlers. Without any shame, my editor insisted that I change what I had written so that it would accord with his politics. I was never again given a chance to write a review for The Times. Hundreds of other liberal Jews have had similar experiences trying to write for The Times op-ed or book review—the voices of those of us who are seriously and intensely critical of Israeli policy but still lovers of Israel and proudly committed to Judaism are rarely part of the acceptable discourse.

Here is an excerpt of the Tikkun interview between Rabbi Michael Lerner and Congressman Jim Moran on AIPAC and its role in pushing the United States into war with Iraq and calling for an attack on Iran:

TIKKUN: What do you think the reasoning is for the Democrats who voted against the amendment requiring that the president get authorization from Congress before attacking Iran?

JIM MORAN: Well, AIPAC strongly opposed it. In fact, Rep. Murtha, Rep. Obey, and myself wanted it in the supplemental. We had it in and then the leadership had to take it out because AIPAC was having a conference in Washington, and insisted with the leadership and many of the members with whom they have close alliances.Yesterday [NB. interview conducted in May], AIPAC had an amendment to recommit the whole Armed Services Bill in order to add language requiring America to develop missile defenses jointly with Israel, to share all its missile defense technology with Israel. That passed overwhelmingly. There were only thirty members—that’s less than 10 percent—who voted against sharing all our missile technology with Israel. It received about 400 votes in favor of it. I was one of the thirty.

My feeling was that it wasn’t just the incendiary language that Israel is under immediate attack and we need to protect it from another Holocaust, it was also the idea that the solution to Israel’s security is a militaristic one. I would urge you to read the Congressional record for the debate on the recommital. It put our loyalty to Israel in terms of complete military support. My feeling is that both America and Israel have acted in counterproductive fashion and have undermined their security by focusing exclusively on military capability.

That was a key vote yesterday. It was phrased by many as an “AIPAC vote.” As a result, it prevailed approximately 400 to thirty.

TIKKUN: In your estimation, how does AIPAC get that power?

MORAN: AIPAC is very well organized. The members are willing to be very generous with their personal wealth. But it’s a two edged sword. If you cross AIPAC, AIPAC is unforgiving and will destroy you politically. Their means of communications, their ties to certain newspapers and magazines, and individuals in the media are substantial and intimidating. Every member knows it’s the best-organized national lobbying force. The National Rifle Association comes a close second, but AIPAC can rightfully brag that they’re the most powerful lobbying force in the world today. Certainly they are in the United States. Not in Europe, obviously. Most people that are involved in foreign policy especially look at a broad range of issues and consider a person’s entire voting record. AIPAC considers the voting record only as it applies to Israel. Read the rest of this entry »

Mild Congressional Democrat-front group MoveOn.org have launched a full-page $65,000 ad in the New York Times entitled “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?: Cooking the Books for the White House.“

First, credit where its due: MoveOn recognises the obvious danger of General Petraeus (read his testimony here), like Colin Powell before him, serving as a shill to deliver the Bush-Cheney White House version in order to justify its agenda of prolonged war, as well as to downplay the extent of violence wracking Iraq. The advertisement (.pdf here) notes, for example, that “We’ll hear of neighborhoods where violence has decreased. But we won’t hear that those neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed.” This is the type of public mainstream dissent that was altogether absent when it was Colin Powell justifying war in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

In terms of historic parallels, we are reminded about the Johnson administration’s General Westmoreland during the Vietnam War here (read Westmoreland’s address here). Are these former generals and administration officials troubled about their role? In Powell tried to talk Bush out of war (Sunday Times, 8 July), the former US secretary of state subsequently claimed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade Bush not to invade Iraq. He believes, moreover, that today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

While General Petraeus is rightly copping flak, he’s outranked by the Thief-Commander-in-Chief: he’ll ultimately deliver what’s favourable for the Bush-Cheney junta and the AIPAC lobby, and ultimately do as he’s told. He has been called the iPod general (Pepe Escobar), programmed to play the tune(s) selected by his owner, the White House.

A major glaring error of the advertisement, however, is MoveOn’s claim that

“Most importantly, General Petraeus will not admit what everyone knows: Iraq is mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

An unwinnable war, yes; a “religious” war, no. This claim altogether fails to address the fact that the root cause of violence is the occupation. Sunni and Shia have been living together and intermarrying for centuries here, why a sudden “religious” war? Any sectarian enmity that now exists is largely being created, its not pre-existing. This also deflects scrutiny from Bush administration culpability and attempts to instead pretend that the “real conflict” is between Shiites and Sunnis and has nothing or little to do with the US military presence. In his ‘progress report’ (video here), General Petraeus also spouted this notion in declaring that “the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources.”

Contrary to MoveOn’s and General Petraeus’s claim, the US-UK invasion, occupation and several psy-, black- and false flag-ops manufactured this sectarian conflict. We recall the bombing of the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, which Mike Whitney argues has been used as a “Pearl Harbor-type” event. We recall the two British SAS snipers who were caught out in Basra disguised as locals, captured with explosives in their car. We recall that the possibility of employing the Salvador Option to use Shia death squads against Sunnis had been openly entertained in the US, and the appointment of John Negroponte as US ambassador to Iraq—Negroponte oversaw death squad activity from Honduras in the 1980s—only added to the suspicions of US-Israeli designs for instigating a civil war in Iraq.

Why would the occupier and its neocon-AIPAC underwriters want to manufacture a civil war? At least three reasons. A civil war in Iraq serves the occupation’s interests not only in deflecting attention away from the crimes of the occupier, it furnishes further rationale for their continued presence, to “protect” the civilian population. This ignores, among other things, how US soldier atrocities in Iraq have been systemic and that increasing numbers of soldiers, already stretched, are resisting the war. Thirdly, it sets up the case for the ‘soft partition of Iraq‘, as raised openly by many punters, including columnist David Brooks in today’s New York Times. Dividing Iraq makes it easier to divide the spoils of war and removes the threat (primarily to Israel) of Iraqi regional hegemony.

As veteran correspondent Robert Fisk acknowledged last year in his suspicions about attempts by the occupation authorities to provoke a civil war in Iraq:

The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I’d like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much…We’re not hearing of death squads all being arrested…Somebody is operating these people…Is it really the case that all of these Iraqis that fought together for eight years against the Iranians – Shiites and Sunnies together in the long massive murderous Somme-like war between the Iranians and Iraqis — suddenly all want to kill each other?…

We need to look at this story in a different light. That narrative that we’re getting - that there are death squads and that the Iraqis are all going to kill each other, the idea that the whole society is going to commit mass suicide - is not possible, it’s not logical. There is something else going on in Iraq…something is wrong with the narrative we’re being given the press, from the West, from the Americans, from the Iraqi Government.

MoveOn started with a strong antiwar message; after coopting 3 million antiwar activists, it watered down to insipid levels its antiwar agenda and became a front for the Democratic “impeachment is off the table” branch of the War Party. Recalling that most voters gave the Democrats a mandate to end the war, let us hope the MoveOn leadership does not betray its own constituency, never mind the contrived establishment outrage.

Read the rest of this entry »

An interesting UK-based ITV documentary narrated by Melvin Bragg about how Jesus is viewed in Islam. Most of us know Jesus is viewed as an important prophet in Islam rather than the Son of God as he is in Christianity; other than this difference in the recognition of divinity, this documentary reveals other fascinating facts about how Jesus and other prominent biblical figures such as Mary are viewed by Muslims. The Qur’an does affirm the Immaculate Conception, for example, and there has been a major Iranian film on Mary’s life.

Directed and produced by Irshad Ashraf. R/T: 45mins (disregard the eye-rollingly sensationalist first 45 seconds—otherwise its a great bridge-builder).

Any intelligent observer can easily discern that the “new” anti-semitism today has little connection with discrimination against Jews. Anti-semitism nowadays is mostly about deplorable discrimination and racist attacks against Arabs. Right now in New York, the Likudnik thought police are trying their darndest to designate Arabic words like intifada and madrassa (which simply means ’school’ in Arabic, regardless of religious affiliation), treasonous. Madrassa does not mean religious school.

We see this playing out in the trumped-up brouhaha about the Kahlil Gibran International Academy, wherein Debbie Almontaser, the head, was branded a terrorist for not apologising enough (for the hardline-Zionists liking) about the word ‘intifada’ (which simply means ’shaking off’) on a T-Shirt–worn by someone else! The racist bullying and defamation resulted in Almontaser resigning.

This reflects poorly on NYC, which has a rich history of cosmopolitanism, the same American tradition that brought Kahlil Gibran, the timeless Lebanese-born poet and philosopher, to the shores of the US where he made such a lasting impact upon the world of literature.

As Anthony DiMaggio notes, Daniel Pipes is one of the reactionaries spouting utter rubbish about Arabic, such as: “Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage” and “Muslims tend to see non-Muslims learning Arabic as a step toward an eventual conversion to Islam…”

Islamophobe Pipes fails to mention that the most populous Muslim country is Indonesia (pop: 242 million), whose national language is Bahasa Indonesian. He neglects to mention that there are a great many Christian Arabic speakers too, such as myself. Yes, Arab culture is attached to Islam—since when then is that a crime?–but also to Christianity and Judaism, too. The demonisation of Islam and of Arabic as a language by ignoramuses and ideologues such as Pipes and Bella Rabinowitz is all in service of the terror-blather that has hijacked public discourse in the United States.

Samuel Freedman is one of the very few voices in the MSM to more accurately document the affair, as Richard Silverstein observes.

Press Picks:

• Anthony DiMaggio, The Right-Wing’s War on the Gibran Academy: Arabic as a Terrorist Language, Counterpunch
• Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI) Statement on Debbie Almontaser

Al Jazeera news clip (Thanks Ressentiment)

Sign the Open Letter to the major television networks urging them to NOT follow FOX’s lead to another war. The video shows the evidence of how they are repeating the same distortions and fear mongering they did before the Iraq war.

RT 3.31

Gazan children are being denied the right to learn — the Israeli government is currently obstructing shipments of textbooks and printing paper (along with foodstuffs, trading, aid, money, resources and other items). While the shameful starvation and economic strangulation of Gaza weighs in most heavily, the denial of textbooks to schoolchildren is one denial of a basic human right that is being addressed in a campaign by The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI).

IPCRI are one of several grassroots examples of joint Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives, successfully working together while some of their government official counterparts woefully bluster. The small but significant successes are often achieved within and despite the overwhelming structural violence of the Israeli occupation; they offer hope and a way forward at the important community and grassroots level. Groups are variously collaborations by profession, cultural and interfaith exchanges, women, youth, sporting, dialogue and confidence-building based, and are both one and two state advocates.

In this particular case, ICPRI are a two-state proponent think-tank tasked with helping to develop practical solutions to the conflict, with Palestinian and Israeli experts working together to produce detailed proposals about security, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water, and, significantly, peace education textbooks.

As they write in their dispatches: “In light of the lack of confidence in peace on both sides of the conflict, we asked Israelis and Palestinians what would convince them that the other side was really interested in peace, the #1 answer was: when they begin teaching peace in their classrooms“.

Others include the PRIME curriculum project by the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). PRIME are history teachers—West Bank Palestinians and Israeli Jews—who develop texts for students presenting the Palestinian and Israeli narratives. 1948 is described both as the Israelis’ year of “independence” and the Palestinians’ “catastrophe,” or Naqba. This is a welcome improvement upon the fact that despite Israel having illegally occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem (in violation of international law) for 40 years, maps in its school textbooks show these as part of Israel.

Peace education is an important part of meaningful peace initiatives. While it is not a substitute for the work to be done at the level of “high politics” and statecraft, it is a crucial foundation to it.

***I very highly recommend this powerful piece by Nurit Peled-Elhanan: For the children: Education or mind infection? and invite you to consider contributing to these worthwhile actions listed below.

1. From IPCRI:

IPCRI LAUNCHES PUBLIC AND DIPLOMATIC CAMPAIGN TO ALLOW THE CHILDREN OF GAZA TO HAVE SCHOOL BOOKS

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

To the Ambassadors, Consul Generals and Representatives to Israel and to the Palestinian Authority

Dear Friends,

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza most goods heading to Gaza from Israel or from abroad have been blocked as part of the policy of pressuring Hamas. One of the goods being blocked by the IDF is paper for the printing of text books for UNRWA schools in Gaza.

In the coming days the children of Gaza will return to school and they will not have text books in their school bags. Five truck loads of paper have been waiting for the Israeli Minister of Defense himself to decide that paper for the printing of text books for UNRWA schools is a “humanitarian need”.

Just imagine if it were your children who would be going to schools without text books! Read the rest of this entry »

A refreshingly honest and well-made 43 minute documentary from Canada’s CBC, notwithstanding the implicit acceptance of other official lines. This Fifth Estate installment looks at the lies that led to the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq, and the Bush administration/PNAC’s manoeuverings (H/T: Fanonite). CBC is Canada’s national public broadcaster.

Meanwhile, a timely remainder about the reality of the grim conditions in Iraq, compiled by Steve Lendman.

Iraq’s real ‘Surge’

(T)he so-called “surge” is a bust. All that’s “surging” is the number of:

• daily attacks played down in the major media;
• deaths that a Just Foreign Policy report calculates at over 1 million since March, 2003 based on updating an earlier Lancet study estimating 655,000 or more deaths through July, 2006;
• uncontrollable violence throughout the country;
• refugees fleeing for safety; the International Rescue Committee and UNHCR estimate the number at around four million including the internally displaced with a further 40,000 Iraqis fleeing their homes each month; and
• a near-total breakdown of essential services like electricity, drinking water, sanitation, medical care, education, security and even food compounded by mass unemployment and extreme poverty; the result is a crisis level humanitarian disaster of epic proportions that continues to worsen.

A July 30, 2007 Oxfam International and NCCI network of aid organizations report had grim findings. It estimates:

• eight million Iraqis need emergency aid - one-third of the population;
• four million can’t buy enough to eat;
• 70% of Iraqis have no adequate water supply;
• 80% lack adequate sanitation;
• 28% of children are malnourished;
• the rate of underweight baby births has tripled;
• 92% of Iraqi children suffer learning problems due to fear; and
• there’s been a mass exodus of around 80% of doctors, nurses, teaching staff at schools and hospitals and other vitally needed professionals.

UPDATED with additional links

This image has already received a good airing in the blogosphere; following on the heels of Cheney’s near-sensible statements back in 1994 about the lunacy of invading and occupying Iraq, I thought it might be worthwhile to air again in service of a timely reminder about another Orwellian neoconservative policy backflip, this time on Iran and its national ambitions to go nuclear.

(NB. A colleague informed me the other day that former governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten had wryly observed that the prefix “neo” before a word might as well mean “not” in these times, particularly as they pertain to the terrible twins neocon and neoliberal. That is, neocons are really not true conservatives at all, neoliberals are really not genuine small ‘l’ liberals in the classical sense. I agree).

Click for larger image and better resolution

The above is an advertisement commissioned by US energy companies advocating nuclear energy for the US. It features the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was brought to power after 1953 after a CIA-supported coup ousted democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. The Shah was in turn deposed with the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Iranian nuclear programme was launched with the active input of the US in the 1950s. Iran was urged to invest its oil profits in expensive US nuclear technology, on the rationale that Iran’s oil was a finite resource and going nuclear was an energy investment for the longer-term future. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATED: many thanks to Jenny Tonge for kindly responding to a query about full Hansard transcript availability which has allowed me to feature more of her address. Parliamentary debate transcripts at both the House of Commons and House of Lords can be found on the Hansard link here by date and member name.

Liberal-Democrat peer Jenny Tonge spoke out for justice in Palestine in a House of Lords speech last month, predictably earning the ire of Israel-apologists (see J-Post)

Here’s an excerpt of her speech:

The Palestinians have been brought to their knees. A cultured and well educated society with high skill levels has been reduced to a third-world country. The statistics are there for all to see. If noble Lords do not believe me or any of the other speakers, the Select Committee for International Development in the other place produced a good report this year. I hope that noble Lords will read it. It tells of injustice—injustice to Palestinians.

The new Government talks of rebuilding the economy in Palestine and of getting the Palestinians back to work, which is very welcome. But how will they do that with road blocks, checkpoints and Bantustans divided by settler-only roads? How can an economy work in this situation?

Even education is being destroyed as children are terrorised by raids on their schools. Exams in Nablus, for example, were disrupted only last week by the IDF. An unskilled and illiterate generation will emerge, capable of very little except low-wage labour. The economy cannot be rebuilt unless Israel changes its policies.

Therefore, the problem remains—how do we persuade Israel to change? We want Israel to be a secure and prosperous state—and I say that sincerely. How can anyone in Israel believe that the present situation will give them what they want, long-term security. I am not anti-Semitic, but I am appalled by the racist, apartheid state of Israel. I use the word “apartheid” in its literal sense—it means separation—because that is what is going on.

Policies of the western countries towards Israel must change. Israel must be made to understand. We must consider trade sanctions and boycotts, if necessary, to make that country obey international law. The present situation is a disaster for Palestinians. It is a disaster for Israel. It is a disaster for the whole world. It has to change.

Thank you, Jenny Tonge. Hope you are holding up well with the usual character smears and pathetic denigration this kind of speaking truth to power elicits from the Likudnik ideologues. Of course, unlike them, Dr Tonge has actually been to Gaza and seen conditions for herself. Dr Tonge, who cites her proudest achievement in parliament since 2001 as “highlighting the plight of the Palestinians under occupation by Israel”, is a treasure.

German peace movement spurns settlement products

In other positive developments, Ha’aretz reports that Germans have protested the sale of food from West Bank settlements.