NEW YEAR 2008 WISHES FOR THE WORLD.
I believe that
because jealousy, cowardice and ignorance are powerful tools for fuelling tribalism, hatreds and wars;
that because Israel is dealing with enemies who seem to be:among the stupidest people on earth; with some of the evilest leadership in the world today,;
and because of some of the most cowardly diaspora Jews who just add more fuel to the raging fires;
I wish these groups to develop the wisdom, the courage and the heart to effect changes from within their groups, for the benefit of their and all our peoples as a whole..
Who are these ill-begotten groups?
1) If the Palestinian Arabs were cleverer, they would ditch their leaders and join up cooperatively with the Jewish State to develop a State of their own and share with Israel in its successful development into a modern nation for the benefit of all ther people;
2) the evil-doers in the Islamic world, who as usual want to use the
Jews,- and the Palestinian people,- as their scapegoats before overcoming the West with their medieval ideologies of ruling the women, the ignorant masses and the world,i.e. supposedly in their mythical " caliphate".;
3) some cowardly diaspora Jews who think that by being anti-Israel will make them acceptable to the anti-Semites.
Therefore, may the successful development of the Jewish nation of Israel in a mere 60 years after the attempted annihilation of the Jewish people by the Nazis, continue for ever more and become the "light onto the nations" that it deserves to be in that part of the world !
May its enemies and their supporters never see their evil intents realised!
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
GAZA by Ami Isseroff.
Gaza on my mind15.12. 2007
Ami Isseroff.
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
In 2007, over 2000 Qassam rockets and mortars were fired on Israel from Gaza. Sderot has become a ghost town. For unfathomable reasons, the Israeli government is unwilling to invest in proper shelters for the people of Sderot. It is also unwilling or unable to negotiate with the Hamas who control the Gaza strip, and yet at the same time is unwilling or unable to undertake a decisive military "solution."
At the same time, Israel has not been idle. Gaza, as Israel's opponents point out, has been under siege from land and sea. The Hamas and its allies expend extraordinary efforts to import arms and explosives via tunnels from Egypt, but food, fuel and medicine are in short supply. The IDF has not been idle either. Over 300 people were killed by IDF raids in Gaza in the four months following the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in 2006. In November and the first half of December, about 53 people were killed in Gaza by IDF, of whom about 30-35 were probable terrorists. The IDF has preformed 115 targeted operations on Gaza in the last six months, killing some 300 terrorists, according to army sources. Not all IDF operations are directly related to stopping rocket fire. IDF raids in Gaza seem to be primarily aimed at stopping arms smuggling from Rafah in the south. Several Gazans have been killed when they approached too close to the security fence. In almost every case, the Israelis claim they were probable infiltrators, while the Palestinians claim they were innocent farmers or bird watchers.
Every other day in the past months, IDF Chief of Staff Ashkenazy and others have said that a large scale Gaza incursion is inevitable, drawing near, being prepared, imminent and about to happen (see here, here here). On alternate days however, other IDF personnel explain that IDF is not ready for an incursion, that there would be many IDF casualties and that the political timing is not right.
This frustrating situation is ideal for internal political opposition, which can point out that the Israeli government has left the people of Sderot and other communities defenseless against rocket fire. It is also ideal for anti-Zionist propagandists, who can point out that Israel has killed, and is killing, a very large number of Palestinians, at least some of whom are civilians.
Those who clamor for drastic action now should take into account the following:
Controlling the area - Chief of Staff Ashkenazy gives as a rationale for an invasion that terrorists can only be controlled if IDF controls the area. But the Qassam rockets began falling before the disengagement, when IDF was in Gaza. IDF presence was not sufficient to deter the terrorists.
Massive retaliation - Armchair generals who advocate bombing square blocks of Gaza need to understand that apart from moral considerations, this is not an option. Carpet bombing of Gaza will surely isolate Israel completely in the international community, and unite the Palestinians behind the most militant leadership. Apart from that it would have no result except to intensify the terror attacks. Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists don't care about civilian casualties and suffering among their own people, except to use them for propaganda purposes, and they are not deterred by them in any way.
Casualty equations - Qassam rockets have killed about 12-14 people in all. Most of these were killed at the start of the Qassam fire before there was an early warning system and at least minimal civil defense precautions. A wide scale operation in Gaza would probably result in 15 -100 casualties initially. In addition, while IDF occupies Gaza there would certainly be casualties every week if not every day. Gilad Shalit would probably be killed, as the Palestinians have threatened, as well as initiation of more and bigger terror operations as long as they are able to carry them out. At the same time, based on the experience of Jenin and the Lebanon war, any Palestinian deaths would certainly be trumpeted around the world by the BBC, Human Rights Watch and the other usual culprits as a massacre on the scale of those committed by the Huns, and Israel would be pilloried by the media. The Photoshop artists of Reuters news service would be employed overtime to manufacture pictures of smoke-covered Gaza cities, and the UN Human Rights Commission would break all of its previous records for condemnations of Israeli human rights violations. It would be Christmas for John Dugard. It is easy to say "do something," but it is not so easy to know what to do.
On the other hand, we must take into account the probability that unless the situation in Gaza is brought under control, the terror groups will develop longer range and more accurate rockets, that could hit population centers and factories in Ashqelon for example, and cause a very large number of deaths.
Palestinian politics - Whatever the government of Mahmoud Abbas may be worth as a peace partner, it is certainly less bad than Hamas and Islamic Jihad. An Israeli invasion of Gaza would likely end the peace talks and the hope for Palestinian reform, and empower the more radical elements among the Palestinians. Those who think this is a "good thing" should take into account that this would mean a resumption of suicide bombings from the West Bank.
What if it doesn't work? - The possibility of failure must always be considered in any military operation. Those who discount the possibility of failure, should consider the Second Lebanon War. One always knows how the military operation starts, but one never knows how it will end. A failure would destroy Israel's deterrent and create a very dangerous situation. Therefore, any intervention in Gaza requires very careful very careful preparation and commitment in advance of sufficient resources to ensure success.
Need for total success - An operation such as IDF contemplates may be insufficient to solve the problem, and if the problem is not solved, it would certainly get worse. Control of the Philadelphi route and control of northern Gaza might or might not guarantee quiet. There would still be ways found to smuggle arms and explosives into Gaza, and in addition, the motivation to carry out terror attacks from the West Bank would increase. An operation should be undertaken only if there is a reasonable chance of actually breaking the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in Gaza by apprehending and imprisoning or killing their leaders and most of their active members, and eliminating every vestige of their organizational infrastructure. Gaza is not like the West Bank. This would not be another Operation Defensive Shield.
What Next? - In the imagination of some, it is sufficient to occupy Gaza in order to guarantee success: "Mission accomplished." But Israel occupied Gaza since 1967. The Hamas was born and bred when Israel occupied Gaza. And for most of the time that Israel occupied Gaza, most Israelis who thought about Gaza at all were thinking of how to get out of there. If Israel reoccupies Gaza, it has to ensure that our troops are not pinned down there indefinitely, sitting ducks for Hamas or a Islamic Jihad or a successor organization. It is certain that Iran and Syria and Al-Qaeda will not give us a free pass in Gaza. If we destroy the Hamas, they will attempt to create something else. We had better know how we are going to prevent that before we go in.
In the future, perhaps Israel will really have a proper defense against Qassam and Katyusha rockets, though it is not certain how effective it will be, or how long it will take before it is fully operational. If it is effective, there is no doubt that terrorists will eventually find means to attack in other ways. Meanwhile, it is clear that Israel must end the suffering of the people of Sderot and put an end to the anarchic and dangerous situation in Gaza. Indeed, it should be a responsibility of the international community, and not just of Israel. But it is not clear how to do it. Intensified sanctions such as those favored by Defense Minister Ehud Barak are not going to weaken the hold of the Hamas on power. They have had no effect until now, and it is unlikely that they will in the future. Hamas simply doesn't care about its citizens and capitalizes on the economic hardships. The people are unable to do anything to influence their "government" or the terrorist groups that really make the decisions, and are apt as not to blame the situation wholly on Israel.
Negotiating with Hamas is not an option either. There is no deal imaginable in which Hamas would agree to end the smuggling of arms or preparations for its own wider assault on Israel. Any truce would clearly be just a dangerous postponement of the inevitable and would cost many more lives in the long run. It would also pull the rug out from under the moderate Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas.
Nonetheless, there are a number of things Israel and its supporters should be doing:
Protect Citizens - If the government cannot find an immediate solution for the Qassam rockets, it must protect the citizens of Sderot and other communities in the Western Negev by suitable civil defense measures including better shelters and fortified public places. There is no good explanation for why this has not been done. There cannot be higher priorities.
Make people aware of the situation - A recent Israel Project poll revealed that most Americans are totally unaware that 2000 rockets have fallen on Israel this year. Media have largely ignored the rocket barrages unless they produce casualties. The low casualty rates do not reflect in any way on the dedication of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad to murder. Palestinian terrorism is not less of a war crime because they have bad aim or because Israel has relatively efficient civil defense. Each of us needs to make sure that media report the story of Sderot and other communities victimized by the Qassams, rather than focusing exclusively on complaints about Israeli rights violations. The world, and in particular the US, cannot ask Israel to stand by indefinitely while Sderot and other communities are subjected to terror.
Use leverage and make the US answerable - A large share of the blame for the mess in Gaza rests with the United States. At US insistence, Israel evacuated not only settlements from Gaza, but also the IDF. This was contrary to the original disengagement plan. At US insistence, Hamas was included in the elections for the Palestinian authority. The US did nothing to stop Fatah from entering into the ruinous unity government with Hamas, at the urging of US ally Saudi Arabia. The US is anxious for a Palestinian state and a final settlement in 2008, but these goals are totally absurd as long as Gaza is ruled by Hamas. It is simply incredible that the Gaza situation was not even mentioned at the Annapolis meeting. When President George Bush comes here next month, he should be hearing about Gaza day and night, at every opportunity. If nothing else, Mr. Bush should be made to understand that if the situation in Gaza continues, the days of the Olmert government are numbered. It will be replaced by a militant right-wing coalition, that will not be interested in any peace process. Mahmoud Abbas is not the only one who can use the radicalization card.
You can also email the White house at president@whitehouse.gov and politely tell President Bush why Gaza has to get top priority.
Gaza, we should remember, was supposed to be the model of the Palestinian state in the making. It is a very edifying model that has given us a very useful demonstration. Palestinians murder each other, fire rockets at Israel, and focus their energies on smuggling in armaments from Egypt. That is hardly an incentive for Israel to enter into peace negotiations.
Stopping Qassam rocket fire is important, but it is only treating a symptom. The goal in Gaza must be to end Hamas rule, restore orderly government, hold elections that exclude armed groups and those who are unwilling to abide by the peace accords, and make possible the flow of civilian goods between Gaza and the rest of the world, without the smuggling of arms and explosives. This general solution cannot be brought about by IDF action alone. It won't happen without international cooperation. In the absence of such cooperation, Israel will have to act to defend itself. That in itself would not be a solution, but it could stop the Qassam rockets for a while. But before doing so, Israel must make the world understand its case, and it must at least make an effort to get the United States and others to do their part.
Ami Isseroff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original content is Copyright by the author 2007. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000463.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.
__._,_.___
Contents are the responsibility of the posters.
Visit these Web sites:
http://www.zionism-israel.com
http://www.zionismontheweb.org
http://www.zionism.netfirms.com
=========================================================================
Ami Isseroff.
Original content copyright by the author
Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com
In 2007, over 2000 Qassam rockets and mortars were fired on Israel from Gaza. Sderot has become a ghost town. For unfathomable reasons, the Israeli government is unwilling to invest in proper shelters for the people of Sderot. It is also unwilling or unable to negotiate with the Hamas who control the Gaza strip, and yet at the same time is unwilling or unable to undertake a decisive military "solution."
At the same time, Israel has not been idle. Gaza, as Israel's opponents point out, has been under siege from land and sea. The Hamas and its allies expend extraordinary efforts to import arms and explosives via tunnels from Egypt, but food, fuel and medicine are in short supply. The IDF has not been idle either. Over 300 people were killed by IDF raids in Gaza in the four months following the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in 2006. In November and the first half of December, about 53 people were killed in Gaza by IDF, of whom about 30-35 were probable terrorists. The IDF has preformed 115 targeted operations on Gaza in the last six months, killing some 300 terrorists, according to army sources. Not all IDF operations are directly related to stopping rocket fire. IDF raids in Gaza seem to be primarily aimed at stopping arms smuggling from Rafah in the south. Several Gazans have been killed when they approached too close to the security fence. In almost every case, the Israelis claim they were probable infiltrators, while the Palestinians claim they were innocent farmers or bird watchers.
Every other day in the past months, IDF Chief of Staff Ashkenazy and others have said that a large scale Gaza incursion is inevitable, drawing near, being prepared, imminent and about to happen (see here, here here). On alternate days however, other IDF personnel explain that IDF is not ready for an incursion, that there would be many IDF casualties and that the political timing is not right.
This frustrating situation is ideal for internal political opposition, which can point out that the Israeli government has left the people of Sderot and other communities defenseless against rocket fire. It is also ideal for anti-Zionist propagandists, who can point out that Israel has killed, and is killing, a very large number of Palestinians, at least some of whom are civilians.
Those who clamor for drastic action now should take into account the following:
Controlling the area - Chief of Staff Ashkenazy gives as a rationale for an invasion that terrorists can only be controlled if IDF controls the area. But the Qassam rockets began falling before the disengagement, when IDF was in Gaza. IDF presence was not sufficient to deter the terrorists.
Massive retaliation - Armchair generals who advocate bombing square blocks of Gaza need to understand that apart from moral considerations, this is not an option. Carpet bombing of Gaza will surely isolate Israel completely in the international community, and unite the Palestinians behind the most militant leadership. Apart from that it would have no result except to intensify the terror attacks. Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists don't care about civilian casualties and suffering among their own people, except to use them for propaganda purposes, and they are not deterred by them in any way.
Casualty equations - Qassam rockets have killed about 12-14 people in all. Most of these were killed at the start of the Qassam fire before there was an early warning system and at least minimal civil defense precautions. A wide scale operation in Gaza would probably result in 15 -100 casualties initially. In addition, while IDF occupies Gaza there would certainly be casualties every week if not every day. Gilad Shalit would probably be killed, as the Palestinians have threatened, as well as initiation of more and bigger terror operations as long as they are able to carry them out. At the same time, based on the experience of Jenin and the Lebanon war, any Palestinian deaths would certainly be trumpeted around the world by the BBC, Human Rights Watch and the other usual culprits as a massacre on the scale of those committed by the Huns, and Israel would be pilloried by the media. The Photoshop artists of Reuters news service would be employed overtime to manufacture pictures of smoke-covered Gaza cities, and the UN Human Rights Commission would break all of its previous records for condemnations of Israeli human rights violations. It would be Christmas for John Dugard. It is easy to say "do something," but it is not so easy to know what to do.
On the other hand, we must take into account the probability that unless the situation in Gaza is brought under control, the terror groups will develop longer range and more accurate rockets, that could hit population centers and factories in Ashqelon for example, and cause a very large number of deaths.
Palestinian politics - Whatever the government of Mahmoud Abbas may be worth as a peace partner, it is certainly less bad than Hamas and Islamic Jihad. An Israeli invasion of Gaza would likely end the peace talks and the hope for Palestinian reform, and empower the more radical elements among the Palestinians. Those who think this is a "good thing" should take into account that this would mean a resumption of suicide bombings from the West Bank.
What if it doesn't work? - The possibility of failure must always be considered in any military operation. Those who discount the possibility of failure, should consider the Second Lebanon War. One always knows how the military operation starts, but one never knows how it will end. A failure would destroy Israel's deterrent and create a very dangerous situation. Therefore, any intervention in Gaza requires very careful very careful preparation and commitment in advance of sufficient resources to ensure success.
Need for total success - An operation such as IDF contemplates may be insufficient to solve the problem, and if the problem is not solved, it would certainly get worse. Control of the Philadelphi route and control of northern Gaza might or might not guarantee quiet. There would still be ways found to smuggle arms and explosives into Gaza, and in addition, the motivation to carry out terror attacks from the West Bank would increase. An operation should be undertaken only if there is a reasonable chance of actually breaking the Hamas and the Islamic Jihad in Gaza by apprehending and imprisoning or killing their leaders and most of their active members, and eliminating every vestige of their organizational infrastructure. Gaza is not like the West Bank. This would not be another Operation Defensive Shield.
What Next? - In the imagination of some, it is sufficient to occupy Gaza in order to guarantee success: "Mission accomplished." But Israel occupied Gaza since 1967. The Hamas was born and bred when Israel occupied Gaza. And for most of the time that Israel occupied Gaza, most Israelis who thought about Gaza at all were thinking of how to get out of there. If Israel reoccupies Gaza, it has to ensure that our troops are not pinned down there indefinitely, sitting ducks for Hamas or a Islamic Jihad or a successor organization. It is certain that Iran and Syria and Al-Qaeda will not give us a free pass in Gaza. If we destroy the Hamas, they will attempt to create something else. We had better know how we are going to prevent that before we go in.
In the future, perhaps Israel will really have a proper defense against Qassam and Katyusha rockets, though it is not certain how effective it will be, or how long it will take before it is fully operational. If it is effective, there is no doubt that terrorists will eventually find means to attack in other ways. Meanwhile, it is clear that Israel must end the suffering of the people of Sderot and put an end to the anarchic and dangerous situation in Gaza. Indeed, it should be a responsibility of the international community, and not just of Israel. But it is not clear how to do it. Intensified sanctions such as those favored by Defense Minister Ehud Barak are not going to weaken the hold of the Hamas on power. They have had no effect until now, and it is unlikely that they will in the future. Hamas simply doesn't care about its citizens and capitalizes on the economic hardships. The people are unable to do anything to influence their "government" or the terrorist groups that really make the decisions, and are apt as not to blame the situation wholly on Israel.
Negotiating with Hamas is not an option either. There is no deal imaginable in which Hamas would agree to end the smuggling of arms or preparations for its own wider assault on Israel. Any truce would clearly be just a dangerous postponement of the inevitable and would cost many more lives in the long run. It would also pull the rug out from under the moderate Palestinian government of Mahmoud Abbas.
Nonetheless, there are a number of things Israel and its supporters should be doing:
Protect Citizens - If the government cannot find an immediate solution for the Qassam rockets, it must protect the citizens of Sderot and other communities in the Western Negev by suitable civil defense measures including better shelters and fortified public places. There is no good explanation for why this has not been done. There cannot be higher priorities.
Make people aware of the situation - A recent Israel Project poll revealed that most Americans are totally unaware that 2000 rockets have fallen on Israel this year. Media have largely ignored the rocket barrages unless they produce casualties. The low casualty rates do not reflect in any way on the dedication of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad to murder. Palestinian terrorism is not less of a war crime because they have bad aim or because Israel has relatively efficient civil defense. Each of us needs to make sure that media report the story of Sderot and other communities victimized by the Qassams, rather than focusing exclusively on complaints about Israeli rights violations. The world, and in particular the US, cannot ask Israel to stand by indefinitely while Sderot and other communities are subjected to terror.
Use leverage and make the US answerable - A large share of the blame for the mess in Gaza rests with the United States. At US insistence, Israel evacuated not only settlements from Gaza, but also the IDF. This was contrary to the original disengagement plan. At US insistence, Hamas was included in the elections for the Palestinian authority. The US did nothing to stop Fatah from entering into the ruinous unity government with Hamas, at the urging of US ally Saudi Arabia. The US is anxious for a Palestinian state and a final settlement in 2008, but these goals are totally absurd as long as Gaza is ruled by Hamas. It is simply incredible that the Gaza situation was not even mentioned at the Annapolis meeting. When President George Bush comes here next month, he should be hearing about Gaza day and night, at every opportunity. If nothing else, Mr. Bush should be made to understand that if the situation in Gaza continues, the days of the Olmert government are numbered. It will be replaced by a militant right-wing coalition, that will not be interested in any peace process. Mahmoud Abbas is not the only one who can use the radicalization card.
You can also email the White house at president@whitehouse.gov and politely tell President Bush why Gaza has to get top priority.
Gaza, we should remember, was supposed to be the model of the Palestinian state in the making. It is a very edifying model that has given us a very useful demonstration. Palestinians murder each other, fire rockets at Israel, and focus their energies on smuggling in armaments from Egypt. That is hardly an incentive for Israel to enter into peace negotiations.
Stopping Qassam rocket fire is important, but it is only treating a symptom. The goal in Gaza must be to end Hamas rule, restore orderly government, hold elections that exclude armed groups and those who are unwilling to abide by the peace accords, and make possible the flow of civilian goods between Gaza and the rest of the world, without the smuggling of arms and explosives. This general solution cannot be brought about by IDF action alone. It won't happen without international cooperation. In the absence of such cooperation, Israel will have to act to defend itself. That in itself would not be a solution, but it could stop the Qassam rockets for a while. But before doing so, Israel must make the world understand its case, and it must at least make an effort to get the United States and others to do their part.
Ami Isseroff
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original content is Copyright by the author 2007. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000463.html where your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.
__._,_.___
Contents are the responsibility of the posters.
Visit these Web sites:
http://www.zionism-israel.com
http://www.zionismontheweb.org
http://www.zionism.netfirms.com
=========================================================================
Friday, December 07, 2007
UN : Abandoning Israel. 30/11/07. Anne Bayefsky
UNITED NATIONS
December 05, 2007, 9:50 a.m.
Forsaking Israel
The 2007 U.N Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People follows past precedent.
By Anne Bayefsky
Hatemongers at the United Nations outdid themselves again at the annual U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, held every year on November 29. This year was the 60th anniversary of the U.N. General Assembly resolution which partitioned Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state a resolution rejected across the Arab world. At U.N. Headquarters the day was marked by speeches from all U.N. leaders in a room adorned with just two flags, the U.N. flag and a Palestinian flag. The flag of the U.N. member state of Israel was nowhere to be seen.
In 2005, with Kofi Annan at the helm, the same event sported a U.N. Middle East map without the state of Israel and included a moment of silence honoring the self-sacrifice of suicide bombers. In 2006 after the scandal was widely publicized the map did not appear and the moment of silence was cancelled. Instead, the U.N. Trusteeship Council room was adorned with a series of panels rewriting the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the Arab point of view, describing 7 or 8 million Palestinians claiming a right of return enough to destroy the Jewishness of the state of Israel, and lauding the success of the violent Palestinian uprising or intifada.
In 2007 after the 2006 debacle was also publicized the panels did not appear. This year, instead, the occasion was marked by what a Secretariat official casually described as “just keeping it clean” flying only the flags of “Palestine” and the U.N.
Lest the simple message of the organizers who refused to fly the Israeli flag be missed, statements of some meeting participants were more explicit. They glorified violence, complained of the evils of “Judaization,” pressed the message of a racist “apartheid” Jewish state, and called for Israel's economic strangulation (boycotts, divestment, and so on.) Paul Badji is Chairman of the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) which sponsors the annual event, and which was created on the same day as the U.N.'s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution to implement that message. Badji gushed: “It was 20 years ago that the Palestinians as a people stood up to the occupation, and the world learned a new word intifada.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered a statement through Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary-general of the Executive Committee of the PLO. This alleged peace partner accused Israel of “the construction of the apartheid Wall” at the same time as he objected to “judaization measures.” Lost on the PLO representative was the contradiction between alleging Israel practices apartheid on the one hand, and objecting to Jews living in “Arab territory” on the other. (He took no notice of the fact that one-fifth of the population of Israel is Arab with more democratic rights than in any Arab state, while Arab states were rendered Judenrein after the creation of Israel.) The logo of the letterhead of the Palestinian U.N. Mission, upon which his statement was officially circulated, has a map claiming all of Israel as “Palestine.”
The representative of “civil society” invited by the U.N. Committee to address the audience was Rev. Chris Ferguson of the World Council of Churches. He could only bring himself to refer to terrorism in quotation marks “‘terrorizing’ Qassam rocket attacks.” He was given a U.N. platform webcast around the world to call upon the international community to “strengthen the global campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions…against Israeli…apartheid and oppression,” and to laud the latest NGO “campaign identifying and opposing Israeli policies as violations of the International Covenant Against the Crime of Apartheid.”
During the afternoon of November 29, the General Assembly dedicated yet another session to condemning Israel. PLO representative Abed Rabbo fresh from the PLO’s Annapolis declaration of peaceful intentions demanded “the right of more than 4 million Palestine refugees to return to their homes and properties” (thus destroying a Jewish state). He also made a point of analogizing Israeli actions to those of Hitler and apartheid South Africa, making wild accusations about Palestinian “ghettos” and “Bantustans.”
Following the General Assembly meeting, Abed Rabbo, and Paul Badji opened a public exhibit in the entrance hall to U.N. headquarters. The exhibit is billed as celebrating “traditional Palestinian costumes and embroidery” and consists of a series of costumes previously exhibited in various parts of the United States with one exception. Set in the middle, evidently more attuned to a Palestinian cultural exhibit presented “under the auspices of the U.N. Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, in cooperation with the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations” is a depiction of Israel’s security barrier adorned with flowers. The barrier, which has dramatically reduced Palestinian suicide bombings and terrorist attacks since it was erected, is accompanied by this description “The Return of the Soul” Ceramic painting by Najat El-Khairy, 2007. “Spring flowers adorn the ‘Wall’ with motifs taken from the traditional embroidered Palestinian costumes; the flowers climb and hide its ugliness.”
Evidently the ugliness of Jewish men, women and children blown apart by suicide bombers was of less significance then the aesthetics of a barrier keeping would-be-killers out.
Though November 29, 1947, was a day celebrated by Holocaust survivors, the following 60 years has seen the occasion bemoaned by the many who wish the Jewish people had never succeeded in creating a haven in the land of their ancestors. Kofi Annan labeled the U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People “a day of mourning and a day of grief.” Sixty years later, the vast majority of U.N. members and the organization they own and operate, are still trying to turn back the clock.
Anne Bayefsky is senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. She also serves as the director of the, Touro Institute for Human Rights and the Holocaust and as the editor of EYEontheUN.org.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTFlYmZiNjM0ZjJlMTBhZWU1MmI3YjZlYmFjYTJkMmM =
-------------------------------------------------
Forget the 30th of November - Sarah Honig on the "Nakba"
On this exact date 60 years ago Israel's - alas, still ongoing - War of Independence began. There had been plenty of bloodshed previously, aimed at eradicating the Jewish presence in this land and quashing the embryonic Jewish homeland. But on November 30, 1947, the decisive struggle erupted.
Initially it couldn't be differentiated from what preceded it - unprovoked Arab attacks on Jews wherever they could be ambushed, which was mostly on the roads (an Arab penchant well into the 21st century).
And so it was on the day which regrettably slipped from our collective memory. Jews perhaps don't recall it because there was so much slaughter before that fateful morning, and by the 1949 armistice there would be over 6,000 Jewish dead, a full 1 percent of the fledgling state's beleaguered population.
And that wasn't all. The bloodletting continued on-and-off for the ensuing six decades. The most recent and horrific megaterror spate was triggered by what false prophets, led by Shimon Peres, promised us was the dawning of the Osloite peace of 1993. "Peace victims," as then-premier Yitzhak Rabin depicted them in his inimitable Orwellian newspeak, are still being offered on the altar of an accommodation which hinges on the establishment of a Palestinian state - the very state which the Arab world rejected with vehement violence in 1947.
The Arabs' failure to annihilate newborn Israel and their subsequent masquerade as downtrodden innocents made it desirable to omit from the memories of willingly bamboozled world opinion and mercilessly indoctrinated Arab masses what happened 60 years ago on the outskirts of Petah Tikva, in the very center of the Jewish heartland, right at home, hardly in a distant usurping empire.
That was when Arabs, by their own conscious decision, set off what they later bewailed as their nakba - the catastrophe that left many of them dispossessed and Israel sovereign and resilient beyond even its founders' dreams.
NOVEMBER 30, needless to stress, followed November 29, a pivotal day in Jewish annals, a day on which the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181. That resolution called for the partition of western Palestine into two economically integrated states - one Jewish and one Arab. Eastern Palestine, comprising nearly 80% of the total, was arbitrarily ripped off by the British Mandate in 1922 and handed over to a princeling from what has since become known as Saudi Arabia. Emir Abdullah's gift-package was artificially dubbed Transjordan - a country entirely unheard of in human history and whose bogus nationality is today known as Jordanian.
Though on paper Jews received 54% of the remainder, in fact they got three non-contiguous slivers, the largest of which included the Arava, eastern Negev and the Negev's far south (down to then-nonexistent Eilat). Most of the moonscape terrain wasn't arable, and was certainly unsuitable for large-scale urban habitation.
Another bit was wedged in the eastern Galilee around Lake Kinneret. The most densely populated mini-slice was an unimaginably narrow noodle along the Mediterranean, where most Jews congregated and which was chillingly vulnerable. Within it was enclosed the Arab enclave of Jaffa, while Nahariya was left outside the Jewish state.
Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to comprise a corpus separatum or international zone, notwithstanding the fact that Jerusalem boasted an undeniable Jewish majority going back at least to the beginning of the 19th century (there were no censuses before that).
But organized Christianity couldn't abide the affront of Jewish dominion in the Holy City.
UNTENABLE AND implausible though this hodgepodge partition was, Jewish multitudes rejoiced in the streets. At that point it didn't matter how nightmarish and absurd the disjointed territorial splinters assigned to them were. What mattered was that for the first time in 2,000 years, Jewish self-determination - if even on a ridiculously diminutive and fragile geographical fragment - appeared increasingly like a viable reality, despite immediate Arab venomous denunciation of any compromise whatever with any Jewish entity.
Independence itself wouldn't be formally declared until the premature peevish British departure in mid-May 1948 (instead of August). Arab threats of genocide found their preliminary tangible expression as the last exuberant hora circles and outdoor celebrations were winding down in the early hours of November 30. Egged bus No. 2094, carrying 21 passengers, left Netanya at 7:30 a.m. heading for Jerusalem. When it reached the Egyptian migrants' hamlet of Fajja, directly adjoining Petah Tikva (a kilometer from the Syrkin junction), the driver noticed three men waving to him. Assuming they were hitching a ride, he slowed down.
Critically too late, he detected a machine gun protruding from under a coat. He tried to speed up but hand grenades and automatic fire sent his bus off the road and injured most its commuters. The marauders then climbed on board to finish off whoever couldn't escape, including a husband trying desperately to revive his wounded wife.
A British officer who chanced by later found five bodies inside the bullet-riddled vehicle. They were subsequently identified as Shalom Ya'ari of Netanya, Hanna Weiss of Jerusalem, Hirsh Stark of Jerusalem (70 years old when murdered), Haya Yisraeli (24) of Netanya and Shoshana Mizrahi (22) of Netanya, traveling to her wedding in Jerusalem. They were the War of Independence's first official casualties.
The number soon rose to seven when a mere 25 minutes afterward a second bus - going from Hadera to Jerusalem - was attacked in the identical manner nearby, probably by the same infamous Abu-Kishk gang.
On February 17, 1948 the IZL launched an offensive against Fajja, and in April the Hagana finished the job. Nowadays Fajja is woefully lamented on every Nakba Web site, cited as the hapless Palestinian prey of Jewish interlopers.
So much for Arab veracity.
That's why it's preferable, from the point of view of Arab propagandists, to forget the 30th of November, because - indistinguishable as its events may have been from the indiscriminate homicidal Arab terror that preceded it and from that which followed - November 30, 1947, debunks each and every counterfeit Arab myth brazenly spawned and so successfully marketed to the brainwashed Mideast and the ever-gullible international community.
http://tinyurl.com/23nyk4
December 05, 2007, 9:50 a.m.
Forsaking Israel
The 2007 U.N Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People follows past precedent.
By Anne Bayefsky
Hatemongers at the United Nations outdid themselves again at the annual U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, held every year on November 29. This year was the 60th anniversary of the U.N. General Assembly resolution which partitioned Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state a resolution rejected across the Arab world. At U.N. Headquarters the day was marked by speeches from all U.N. leaders in a room adorned with just two flags, the U.N. flag and a Palestinian flag. The flag of the U.N. member state of Israel was nowhere to be seen.
In 2005, with Kofi Annan at the helm, the same event sported a U.N. Middle East map without the state of Israel and included a moment of silence honoring the self-sacrifice of suicide bombers. In 2006 after the scandal was widely publicized the map did not appear and the moment of silence was cancelled. Instead, the U.N. Trusteeship Council room was adorned with a series of panels rewriting the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the Arab point of view, describing 7 or 8 million Palestinians claiming a right of return enough to destroy the Jewishness of the state of Israel, and lauding the success of the violent Palestinian uprising or intifada.
In 2007 after the 2006 debacle was also publicized the panels did not appear. This year, instead, the occasion was marked by what a Secretariat official casually described as “just keeping it clean” flying only the flags of “Palestine” and the U.N.
Lest the simple message of the organizers who refused to fly the Israeli flag be missed, statements of some meeting participants were more explicit. They glorified violence, complained of the evils of “Judaization,” pressed the message of a racist “apartheid” Jewish state, and called for Israel's economic strangulation (boycotts, divestment, and so on.) Paul Badji is Chairman of the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) which sponsors the annual event, and which was created on the same day as the U.N.'s infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution to implement that message. Badji gushed: “It was 20 years ago that the Palestinians as a people stood up to the occupation, and the world learned a new word intifada.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered a statement through Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary-general of the Executive Committee of the PLO. This alleged peace partner accused Israel of “the construction of the apartheid Wall” at the same time as he objected to “judaization measures.” Lost on the PLO representative was the contradiction between alleging Israel practices apartheid on the one hand, and objecting to Jews living in “Arab territory” on the other. (He took no notice of the fact that one-fifth of the population of Israel is Arab with more democratic rights than in any Arab state, while Arab states were rendered Judenrein after the creation of Israel.) The logo of the letterhead of the Palestinian U.N. Mission, upon which his statement was officially circulated, has a map claiming all of Israel as “Palestine.”
The representative of “civil society” invited by the U.N. Committee to address the audience was Rev. Chris Ferguson of the World Council of Churches. He could only bring himself to refer to terrorism in quotation marks “‘terrorizing’ Qassam rocket attacks.” He was given a U.N. platform webcast around the world to call upon the international community to “strengthen the global campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions…against Israeli…apartheid and oppression,” and to laud the latest NGO “campaign identifying and opposing Israeli policies as violations of the International Covenant Against the Crime of Apartheid.”
During the afternoon of November 29, the General Assembly dedicated yet another session to condemning Israel. PLO representative Abed Rabbo fresh from the PLO’s Annapolis declaration of peaceful intentions demanded “the right of more than 4 million Palestine refugees to return to their homes and properties” (thus destroying a Jewish state). He also made a point of analogizing Israeli actions to those of Hitler and apartheid South Africa, making wild accusations about Palestinian “ghettos” and “Bantustans.”
Following the General Assembly meeting, Abed Rabbo, and Paul Badji opened a public exhibit in the entrance hall to U.N. headquarters. The exhibit is billed as celebrating “traditional Palestinian costumes and embroidery” and consists of a series of costumes previously exhibited in various parts of the United States with one exception. Set in the middle, evidently more attuned to a Palestinian cultural exhibit presented “under the auspices of the U.N. Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, in cooperation with the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations” is a depiction of Israel’s security barrier adorned with flowers. The barrier, which has dramatically reduced Palestinian suicide bombings and terrorist attacks since it was erected, is accompanied by this description “The Return of the Soul” Ceramic painting by Najat El-Khairy, 2007. “Spring flowers adorn the ‘Wall’ with motifs taken from the traditional embroidered Palestinian costumes; the flowers climb and hide its ugliness.”
Evidently the ugliness of Jewish men, women and children blown apart by suicide bombers was of less significance then the aesthetics of a barrier keeping would-be-killers out.
Though November 29, 1947, was a day celebrated by Holocaust survivors, the following 60 years has seen the occasion bemoaned by the many who wish the Jewish people had never succeeded in creating a haven in the land of their ancestors. Kofi Annan labeled the U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People “a day of mourning and a day of grief.” Sixty years later, the vast majority of U.N. members and the organization they own and operate, are still trying to turn back the clock.
Anne Bayefsky is senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. She also serves as the director of the, Touro Institute for Human Rights and the Holocaust and as the editor of EYEontheUN.org.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTFlYmZiNjM0ZjJlMTBhZWU1MmI3YjZlYmFjYTJkMmM =
-------------------------------------------------
Forget the 30th of November - Sarah Honig on the "Nakba"
On this exact date 60 years ago Israel's - alas, still ongoing - War of Independence began. There had been plenty of bloodshed previously, aimed at eradicating the Jewish presence in this land and quashing the embryonic Jewish homeland. But on November 30, 1947, the decisive struggle erupted.
Initially it couldn't be differentiated from what preceded it - unprovoked Arab attacks on Jews wherever they could be ambushed, which was mostly on the roads (an Arab penchant well into the 21st century).
And so it was on the day which regrettably slipped from our collective memory. Jews perhaps don't recall it because there was so much slaughter before that fateful morning, and by the 1949 armistice there would be over 6,000 Jewish dead, a full 1 percent of the fledgling state's beleaguered population.
And that wasn't all. The bloodletting continued on-and-off for the ensuing six decades. The most recent and horrific megaterror spate was triggered by what false prophets, led by Shimon Peres, promised us was the dawning of the Osloite peace of 1993. "Peace victims," as then-premier Yitzhak Rabin depicted them in his inimitable Orwellian newspeak, are still being offered on the altar of an accommodation which hinges on the establishment of a Palestinian state - the very state which the Arab world rejected with vehement violence in 1947.
The Arabs' failure to annihilate newborn Israel and their subsequent masquerade as downtrodden innocents made it desirable to omit from the memories of willingly bamboozled world opinion and mercilessly indoctrinated Arab masses what happened 60 years ago on the outskirts of Petah Tikva, in the very center of the Jewish heartland, right at home, hardly in a distant usurping empire.
That was when Arabs, by their own conscious decision, set off what they later bewailed as their nakba - the catastrophe that left many of them dispossessed and Israel sovereign and resilient beyond even its founders' dreams.
NOVEMBER 30, needless to stress, followed November 29, a pivotal day in Jewish annals, a day on which the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181. That resolution called for the partition of western Palestine into two economically integrated states - one Jewish and one Arab. Eastern Palestine, comprising nearly 80% of the total, was arbitrarily ripped off by the British Mandate in 1922 and handed over to a princeling from what has since become known as Saudi Arabia. Emir Abdullah's gift-package was artificially dubbed Transjordan - a country entirely unheard of in human history and whose bogus nationality is today known as Jordanian.
Though on paper Jews received 54% of the remainder, in fact they got three non-contiguous slivers, the largest of which included the Arava, eastern Negev and the Negev's far south (down to then-nonexistent Eilat). Most of the moonscape terrain wasn't arable, and was certainly unsuitable for large-scale urban habitation.
Another bit was wedged in the eastern Galilee around Lake Kinneret. The most densely populated mini-slice was an unimaginably narrow noodle along the Mediterranean, where most Jews congregated and which was chillingly vulnerable. Within it was enclosed the Arab enclave of Jaffa, while Nahariya was left outside the Jewish state.
Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to comprise a corpus separatum or international zone, notwithstanding the fact that Jerusalem boasted an undeniable Jewish majority going back at least to the beginning of the 19th century (there were no censuses before that).
But organized Christianity couldn't abide the affront of Jewish dominion in the Holy City.
UNTENABLE AND implausible though this hodgepodge partition was, Jewish multitudes rejoiced in the streets. At that point it didn't matter how nightmarish and absurd the disjointed territorial splinters assigned to them were. What mattered was that for the first time in 2,000 years, Jewish self-determination - if even on a ridiculously diminutive and fragile geographical fragment - appeared increasingly like a viable reality, despite immediate Arab venomous denunciation of any compromise whatever with any Jewish entity.
Independence itself wouldn't be formally declared until the premature peevish British departure in mid-May 1948 (instead of August). Arab threats of genocide found their preliminary tangible expression as the last exuberant hora circles and outdoor celebrations were winding down in the early hours of November 30. Egged bus No. 2094, carrying 21 passengers, left Netanya at 7:30 a.m. heading for Jerusalem. When it reached the Egyptian migrants' hamlet of Fajja, directly adjoining Petah Tikva (a kilometer from the Syrkin junction), the driver noticed three men waving to him. Assuming they were hitching a ride, he slowed down.
Critically too late, he detected a machine gun protruding from under a coat. He tried to speed up but hand grenades and automatic fire sent his bus off the road and injured most its commuters. The marauders then climbed on board to finish off whoever couldn't escape, including a husband trying desperately to revive his wounded wife.
A British officer who chanced by later found five bodies inside the bullet-riddled vehicle. They were subsequently identified as Shalom Ya'ari of Netanya, Hanna Weiss of Jerusalem, Hirsh Stark of Jerusalem (70 years old when murdered), Haya Yisraeli (24) of Netanya and Shoshana Mizrahi (22) of Netanya, traveling to her wedding in Jerusalem. They were the War of Independence's first official casualties.
The number soon rose to seven when a mere 25 minutes afterward a second bus - going from Hadera to Jerusalem - was attacked in the identical manner nearby, probably by the same infamous Abu-Kishk gang.
On February 17, 1948 the IZL launched an offensive against Fajja, and in April the Hagana finished the job. Nowadays Fajja is woefully lamented on every Nakba Web site, cited as the hapless Palestinian prey of Jewish interlopers.
So much for Arab veracity.
That's why it's preferable, from the point of view of Arab propagandists, to forget the 30th of November, because - indistinguishable as its events may have been from the indiscriminate homicidal Arab terror that preceded it and from that which followed - November 30, 1947, debunks each and every counterfeit Arab myth brazenly spawned and so successfully marketed to the brainwashed Mideast and the ever-gullible international community.
http://tinyurl.com/23nyk4
Sunday, December 02, 2007
21st century slavery. Rahila Gupta
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/5050/16_days/enslaved
The UK's modern slavery shame
Rahila Gupta
Women's exploitation lies at the heart of a modern-day underclass
that keeps the machinery of civilised Britain well-oiled, writes
Rahila Gupta.
26 - 11 - 2007
In the UK, we are coming to the end of a year stuffed full with
events commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave
trade. Only a few of these events have acknowledged the hollowness of
these commemorations when slavery continues to thrive and affects
more people today than during the historic transatlantic trade. As
usual, it is women who bear the brunt of this inhuman trade. Although
the hidden nature of modern slavery makes the statistics unreliable,
there is no doubt that more women than men are trafficked. Women are disproportionately affected by poverty and are over-
represented among those trafficked into the UK for sexual
exploitation, for domestic work and for labour in the care sector. A
2004 US State Department report records that 70 percent of the
approximately 800,000 people trafficked across international borders
each year are women. The majority of these victims are forced into
the commercial sex trade. Non-sexual forced labour is made up of 44
percent men and boys, and 56 percent women and girls (International
Organisation of Labour, 2005).
21st century slavery
This article is the second in a series on openDemocracy marking the
"16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence" from 25 November - 10
December, an annual mobilisation aimed at heightening global
awareness of violence against women
Also in openDemocracy on the 16 Days theme, part of our overall 50.50
coverage, a multi-voiced blog where women around the world contribute While researching my book Enslaved: The New British Slavery, I had no
pre-conceived ideas about the gender balance in the five stories I
would choose to tell. I ended up with two women, two girls and a man,
a proportion which is roughly representative of those enslaved here.
Farhia Nur, a devout Somali woman, was caught up in the civil war,
raped and forcibly married to her rapist. She escaped to Britain,
lost her application for asylum, went underground, had no money and
was forced into prostitution; Natasha, a Russian girl was trafficked
to Britain at the age of 17, raped and assaulted by her pimps, and
prostituted; Amber, an Asian woman was forced into a marriage,
imprisoned, starved and sexually assaulted by her husband and in-
laws; Naomi, an illiterate street child from Sierra Leone was brought
to London at the age of 15 to work as a domestic slave, ran away, was
picked up by a man who prostituted her, ran away again and discovered
that she was pregnant. Finally, Liu Bao Ren, a Chinese man was
smuggled in by the snakeheads (Chinese trafficking gangs), whose
brother died in the Dover 58 tragedy - in which 58 Chinese illegal
immigrants died in a lorry entering the UK - and worked long hours
for little or no pay in the construction industry under terrible
health and safety conditions.
They all had one thing in common: their immigration status was
uncertain. An individual is powerless while her/his passport is in
the hands of somebody else whether it is an ‘employer', a ‘spouse',
an ‘agent', a ‘trafficker', or indeed the government as in the case
of failed asylum seekers. The defining feature of modern slavery is
entrapment - physical, psychological and financial - often sustained
through violence. While no human being legally owns another human
being today, men, women and children continue to be bought and sold.
Current immigration legislation plays a central role in keeping
people trapped in slavery.
Apart from the stories in the book, there are thousands of others who
are enslaved in the production of our food, in the running of our
homes, the care of our elderly and disabled and scandalously, in
keeping our sex industry alive. The government argues that more
draconian immigration controls will stop the people smugglers and
traffickers. In fact, this strategy has failed. Perhaps it suits the
government to tighten controls: it creates a larger pool of easily
exploited ‘illegal' workers whose presence drives wages down. The
more I investigated this issue, the more I became convinced that only
the abolition of immigration controls will lift a large chunk of
people out of slavery in Britain. Each time controls are part-
liberalised in a piecemeal fashion (and that's not often) they create
further nooks and crannies in which injustice and slavery flourish. An open solution The debate around immigration is so hysterical that to raise the
issue of open borders is to invite ridicule. It is a widely held
belief that Britain will be inundated. However, this is not borne out
by the trends. In general, migration follows jobs. If the UK economy
is attracting migrants, it is because its economy is booming. We
already have open borders with Europe, with a total population of
half a billion people, and we have not been swamped. Despite
headlines in the popular press about the numbers of Polish people who
have arrived, most of them have been soaked up by a labour hungry
market. Even when there is a humanitarian crisis, most people flee to
the next town or just across the closest border. Despite the
horrendous living conditions created by the US and UK invasion of
Iraq, only 8000 Iraqis have sought asylum in Britain (only 20 per
cent of whom have been allowed to stay) as compared to 1 million in
Syria and 800,000 in Jordan.
Most mainstream debate on UK immigration concentrates on the needs of
the British economy, whether the migrants coming in to the country
match the needs of the economy and whether the walls that have been
put up to keep out ‘undesirables' are solid enough. Broader questions
which impact on immigration have not really been raised: British
multi-nationals, for example, displace communities in developing
countries in the process of building dams or mining for minerals and
generate refugees and economic migrants, some of whom may turn up on
our doorstep. As far as I am aware, no one has attempted to draw up a
balance sheet which measures the number of jobs generated and taxes
paid by these companies to the treasury against the immigrants who
arrive on British shores. Ditto with the defence industry which is
worth billions of pounds and where sales of arms are often made to
countries in conflict. We see the direct consequences of that policy
in the number of refugees claiming asylum.
We need the equivalent of a Stern review on climate change to explore
these broader questions and to examine the benefits and drawbacks of
immigration because the movement of peoples is an irresistible fact
of globalisation. It is estimated that Britain will need 500,000 new
workers entering the economy every year in order to sustain the
current pensions system. We need to add into the equation the number
of migrants who contribute to pensions and then do not stick around
to receive the benefits, the subsidies made by the third world in
terms of providing qualified migrants to the first world and the fact
that remittances by migrants is double British aid (an estimated £8
billion to £3.8 billion in international aid) - to drag this highly
poisoned debate a little closer to the centre ground.
While open borders may not completely eradicate slavery, it remains a
crucial weapon in the fight against slavery in Britain. When
Lithuania joined the EU, for example, the number of women being
trafficked into the sex trade increased. However, unlike other
slaves, Lithuanian women are now in no danger of deportation and have
the right to full protection of the state once they are rescued or
run away. We also need to criminalise the buying of sexual services
to make a dent in the number of women trafficked to Britain as
happened in Sweden and tighten employment laws so that employers who
exploit workers are penalised.
As the fourth richest country in the world which prides itself on its
respect for human rights, we can no longer ignore the human rights of
an underclass that keeps the machinery of civilised Britain well-oiled.
The UK's modern slavery shame
Rahila Gupta
Women's exploitation lies at the heart of a modern-day underclass
that keeps the machinery of civilised Britain well-oiled, writes
Rahila Gupta.
26 - 11 - 2007
In the UK, we are coming to the end of a year stuffed full with
events commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave
trade. Only a few of these events have acknowledged the hollowness of
these commemorations when slavery continues to thrive and affects
more people today than during the historic transatlantic trade. As
usual, it is women who bear the brunt of this inhuman trade. Although
the hidden nature of modern slavery makes the statistics unreliable,
there is no doubt that more women than men are trafficked. Women are disproportionately affected by poverty and are over-
represented among those trafficked into the UK for sexual
exploitation, for domestic work and for labour in the care sector. A
2004 US State Department report records that 70 percent of the
approximately 800,000 people trafficked across international borders
each year are women. The majority of these victims are forced into
the commercial sex trade. Non-sexual forced labour is made up of 44
percent men and boys, and 56 percent women and girls (International
Organisation of Labour, 2005).
21st century slavery
This article is the second in a series on openDemocracy marking the
"16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence" from 25 November - 10
December, an annual mobilisation aimed at heightening global
awareness of violence against women
Also in openDemocracy on the 16 Days theme, part of our overall 50.50
coverage, a multi-voiced blog where women around the world contribute While researching my book Enslaved: The New British Slavery, I had no
pre-conceived ideas about the gender balance in the five stories I
would choose to tell. I ended up with two women, two girls and a man,
a proportion which is roughly representative of those enslaved here.
Farhia Nur, a devout Somali woman, was caught up in the civil war,
raped and forcibly married to her rapist. She escaped to Britain,
lost her application for asylum, went underground, had no money and
was forced into prostitution; Natasha, a Russian girl was trafficked
to Britain at the age of 17, raped and assaulted by her pimps, and
prostituted; Amber, an Asian woman was forced into a marriage,
imprisoned, starved and sexually assaulted by her husband and in-
laws; Naomi, an illiterate street child from Sierra Leone was brought
to London at the age of 15 to work as a domestic slave, ran away, was
picked up by a man who prostituted her, ran away again and discovered
that she was pregnant. Finally, Liu Bao Ren, a Chinese man was
smuggled in by the snakeheads (Chinese trafficking gangs), whose
brother died in the Dover 58 tragedy - in which 58 Chinese illegal
immigrants died in a lorry entering the UK - and worked long hours
for little or no pay in the construction industry under terrible
health and safety conditions.
They all had one thing in common: their immigration status was
uncertain. An individual is powerless while her/his passport is in
the hands of somebody else whether it is an ‘employer', a ‘spouse',
an ‘agent', a ‘trafficker', or indeed the government as in the case
of failed asylum seekers. The defining feature of modern slavery is
entrapment - physical, psychological and financial - often sustained
through violence. While no human being legally owns another human
being today, men, women and children continue to be bought and sold.
Current immigration legislation plays a central role in keeping
people trapped in slavery.
Apart from the stories in the book, there are thousands of others who
are enslaved in the production of our food, in the running of our
homes, the care of our elderly and disabled and scandalously, in
keeping our sex industry alive. The government argues that more
draconian immigration controls will stop the people smugglers and
traffickers. In fact, this strategy has failed. Perhaps it suits the
government to tighten controls: it creates a larger pool of easily
exploited ‘illegal' workers whose presence drives wages down. The
more I investigated this issue, the more I became convinced that only
the abolition of immigration controls will lift a large chunk of
people out of slavery in Britain. Each time controls are part-
liberalised in a piecemeal fashion (and that's not often) they create
further nooks and crannies in which injustice and slavery flourish. An open solution The debate around immigration is so hysterical that to raise the
issue of open borders is to invite ridicule. It is a widely held
belief that Britain will be inundated. However, this is not borne out
by the trends. In general, migration follows jobs. If the UK economy
is attracting migrants, it is because its economy is booming. We
already have open borders with Europe, with a total population of
half a billion people, and we have not been swamped. Despite
headlines in the popular press about the numbers of Polish people who
have arrived, most of them have been soaked up by a labour hungry
market. Even when there is a humanitarian crisis, most people flee to
the next town or just across the closest border. Despite the
horrendous living conditions created by the US and UK invasion of
Iraq, only 8000 Iraqis have sought asylum in Britain (only 20 per
cent of whom have been allowed to stay) as compared to 1 million in
Syria and 800,000 in Jordan.
Most mainstream debate on UK immigration concentrates on the needs of
the British economy, whether the migrants coming in to the country
match the needs of the economy and whether the walls that have been
put up to keep out ‘undesirables' are solid enough. Broader questions
which impact on immigration have not really been raised: British
multi-nationals, for example, displace communities in developing
countries in the process of building dams or mining for minerals and
generate refugees and economic migrants, some of whom may turn up on
our doorstep. As far as I am aware, no one has attempted to draw up a
balance sheet which measures the number of jobs generated and taxes
paid by these companies to the treasury against the immigrants who
arrive on British shores. Ditto with the defence industry which is
worth billions of pounds and where sales of arms are often made to
countries in conflict. We see the direct consequences of that policy
in the number of refugees claiming asylum.
We need the equivalent of a Stern review on climate change to explore
these broader questions and to examine the benefits and drawbacks of
immigration because the movement of peoples is an irresistible fact
of globalisation. It is estimated that Britain will need 500,000 new
workers entering the economy every year in order to sustain the
current pensions system. We need to add into the equation the number
of migrants who contribute to pensions and then do not stick around
to receive the benefits, the subsidies made by the third world in
terms of providing qualified migrants to the first world and the fact
that remittances by migrants is double British aid (an estimated £8
billion to £3.8 billion in international aid) - to drag this highly
poisoned debate a little closer to the centre ground.
While open borders may not completely eradicate slavery, it remains a
crucial weapon in the fight against slavery in Britain. When
Lithuania joined the EU, for example, the number of women being
trafficked into the sex trade increased. However, unlike other
slaves, Lithuanian women are now in no danger of deportation and have
the right to full protection of the state once they are rescued or
run away. We also need to criminalise the buying of sexual services
to make a dent in the number of women trafficked to Britain as
happened in Sweden and tighten employment laws so that employers who
exploit workers are penalised.
As the fourth richest country in the world which prides itself on its
respect for human rights, we can no longer ignore the human rights of
an underclass that keeps the machinery of civilised Britain well-oiled.
Fighting words: ISLAMOFASCISM. Christopher Hitchens
THE SLATE
fighting words
Defending IslamofascismIt's a valid term. Here's why.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 22, 2007, at 11:33 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It's quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it's ahistorical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn't use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because to do so is to risk incriminating an entire religion. He and others don't want to tag Islam even in its most extreme form with a word as hideous as fascism. Finally, I have seen and heard it argued that the term is unfair or prejudiced because it isn't applied to any other religion.
Well, that last claim is certainly not true. It was once very common, especially on the left, to prefix the word fascism with the word clerical. This was to recognize the undeniable fact that, from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, there was a very direct link between fascism and the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. So, there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being "singled out" on this point.
The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain's Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. I didn't know about this when I employed the term "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the attack on civil society on Sept. 11, 2001, and to ridicule those who presented the attack as some kind of liberation theology in action. "Fascism with an Islamic face" is meant to summon a dual echo of both Alexander Dubcek and Susan Sontag (if I do say so myself), and in any case, it can't be used for everyday polemical purposes, so the question remains: Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?
I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)
There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?
Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.
This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values. There is one final point of comparison, one that is in some ways encouraging. Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2176389/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
fighting words
Defending IslamofascismIt's a valid term. Here's why.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Oct. 22, 2007, at 11:33 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The attempt by David Horowitz and his allies to launch "Islamofascism Awareness Week" on American campuses has been met with a variety of responses. One of these is a challenge to the validity of the term itself. It's quite the done thing, in liberal academic circles, to sneer at any comparison between fascist and jihadist ideology. People like Tony Judt write to me to say, in effect, that it's ahistorical and simplistic to do so. And in some media circles, another kind of reluctance applies: Alan Colmes thinks that one shouldn't use the word Islamic even to designate jihad, because to do so is to risk incriminating an entire religion. He and others don't want to tag Islam even in its most extreme form with a word as hideous as fascism. Finally, I have seen and heard it argued that the term is unfair or prejudiced because it isn't applied to any other religion.
Well, that last claim is certainly not true. It was once very common, especially on the left, to prefix the word fascism with the word clerical. This was to recognize the undeniable fact that, from Spain to Croatia to Slovakia, there was a very direct link between fascism and the Roman Catholic Church. More recently, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica, coined the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Messianic settlers who moved onto the occupied West Bank after 1967. So, there need be no self-pity among Muslims about being "singled out" on this point.
The term Islamofascism was first used in 1990 in Britain's Independent newspaper by Scottish writer Malise Ruthven, who was writing about the way in which traditional Arab dictatorships used religious appeals in order to stay in power. I didn't know about this when I employed the term "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe the attack on civil society on Sept. 11, 2001, and to ridicule those who presented the attack as some kind of liberation theology in action. "Fascism with an Islamic face" is meant to summon a dual echo of both Alexander Dubcek and Susan Sontag (if I do say so myself), and in any case, it can't be used for everyday polemical purposes, so the question remains: Does Bin Ladenism or Salafism or whatever we agree to call it have anything in common with fascism?
I think yes. The most obvious points of comparison would be these: Both movements are based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind. ("Death to the intellect! Long live death!" as Gen. Francisco Franco's sidekick Gonzalo Queipo de Llano so pithily phrased it.) Both are hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons), and both are bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories. Both are obsessed with real and imagined "humiliations" and thirsty for revenge. Both are chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia). Both are inclined to leader worship and to the exclusive stress on the power of one great book. Both have a strong commitment to sexual repression—especially to the repression of any sexual "deviance"—and to its counterparts the subordination of the female and contempt for the feminine. Both despise art and literature as symptoms of degeneracy and decadence; both burn books and destroy museums and treasures.
Fascism (and Nazism) also attempted to counterfeit the then-success of the socialist movement by issuing pseudo-socialist and populist appeals. It has been very interesting to observe lately the way in which al-Qaida has been striving to counterfeit and recycle the propaganda of the anti-globalist and green movements. (See my column on Osama Bin Laden's Sept. 11 statement.)
There isn't a perfect congruence. Historically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure. There isn't much of a corporate structure in the Muslim world, where the conditions often approximate more nearly to feudalism than capitalism, but Bin Laden's own business conglomerate is, among other things, a rogue multinational corporation with some links to finance-capital. As to the nation-state, al-Qaida's demand is that countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia be dissolved into one great revived caliphate, but doesn't this have points of resemblance with the mad scheme of a "Greater Germany" or with Mussolini's fantasy of a revived Roman empire?
Technically, no form of Islam preaches racial superiority or proposes a master race. But in practice, Islamic fanatics operate a fascistic concept of the "pure" and the "exclusive" over the unclean and the kufar or profane. In the propaganda against Hinduism and India, for example, there can be seen something very like bigotry. In the attitude to Jews, it is clear that an inferior or unclean race is being talked about (which is why many Muslim extremists like the grand mufti of Jerusalem gravitated to Hitler's side). In the attempted destruction of the Hazara people of Afghanistan, who are ethnically Persian as well as religiously Shiite, there was also a strong suggestion of "cleansing." And, of course, Bin Laden has threatened force against U.N. peacekeepers who might dare interrupt the race-murder campaign against African Muslims that is being carried out by his pious Sudanese friends in Darfur.
This makes it permissible, it seems to me, to mention the two phenomena in the same breath and to suggest that they constitute comparable threats to civilization and civilized values. There is one final point of comparison, one that is in some ways encouraging. Both these totalitarian systems of thought evidently suffer from a death wish. It is surely not an accident that both of them stress suicidal tactics and sacrificial ends, just as both of them would obviously rather see the destruction of their own societies than any compromise with infidels or any dilution of the joys of absolute doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus, while we have a duty to oppose and destroy these and any similar totalitarian movements, we can also be fairly sure that they will play an unconscious part in arranging for their own destruction, as well.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2176389/
Copyright 2007 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)