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Tag Archives: Palestine
There is no future for apartheid Israel
“No one people has a monopoly on human suffering and every ethnic tragedy stands on its own.
If I were a Jew or Gypsy, Nazi barbarity would be the most atrocious event in history. If I were a Black African, it would be slavery and apartheid. If I were a Native American, it would be the discovery of the New World by European explorers and settlers that resulted in near-total extermination. If I were an Armenian, it would be the Ottoman massacres.
I happen to be a Palestinian, and for me it is the Nakba.
Humanity should consider all the above repugnant. I do not consider it advisable to debate hierarchies of suffering. I do not know how to quantify pain or measure suffering. I do know that we are not children of a lesser God.”
Afif Safieh – Palestinian diplomat
Palestinian protesters burn an Israeli flag during clashes with Israeli troops near Israel’s Ofer Prison, near the West Bank city of Ramallah May 16, 2014. (Reuters/Mohamad Torokman)
But for those on the receiving end what a largely desensitized world considers “tired” and “routine” bespeaks terror and brutality. Given the lack of intervention on the part of the international community whenever an Israeli security crackdown occurs, it is evident by now that a tacit acceptance has taken root to the effect that massacring Palestinians has been elevated to the level of bloodsport within Israeli society.
For those of us who still care about the plight of a people whose only crime is that they exist on land coveted by a settler colonial state, the latest manifestation of Israel’s disregard for international law and human rights is as good a reason as any for closer examination. In so doing, we must call upon the greatest teacher of them all: history.
Most empires and colonial projects fall under the weight of their own contradictions, but usually over a protracted period of resistance, both passive and active, on the part of its victims. At the same time the material privileges gained from the exploitation and expropriation of a colonized people acts as a slow-acting corrosive on the society of the colonizing state, poisoning it with racism and hatred for those it has colonized as it seeks to justify the material privileges and psychological sense of supremacy and national pride that accrues from that colonization. This moral decay is commonly reflected in the degeneration that takes place in the armed forces of the state in question, where the emphasis of the troops shifts from self-sacrifice and heroism in support of a just and galvanizing cause to personal survival as demoralization sets in.
In other words, the day-to-day reality of perpetuating oppression and injustice overcomes any amount of national propaganda in support of that oppression. In this, the case of American troops in Vietnam is a prime example.
There, the reality on the ground of killing and being killed in a country thousands of miles from home in an ignoble war eventually proved stronger than the propaganda the troops had been fed that they were fighting in the cause of freedom. This resulted in a widespread and growing breakdown in discipline, almost to the point where the US military effort in Vietnam was in danger of complete collapse. It might even be argued that on a certain level atrocities like My Lai were informed by a projection of the self-loathing experienced by more and more American troops in the field as the reality of the injustices they were committing took hold.
Another and contemporary example of this moral degeneration is the case of the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces. More than any other, the IDF is a product of the constructed mythology that has sustained Israel since its creation in 1948. It is a mythology which combines both a biblical and political justification for the state’s existence. On the one hand it constitutes the realization of an ancient covenant in which the land of historic Palestine was promised by God to the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham, over 2,000 years ago, while on the other hand it is the fulfillment of the Zionist postulate that in a world that is irredeemably anti-Semitic the Jewish people, hitherto stateless, would never find peace and security until they had a state of their own.
While the former can instantly be dismissed as obscurantist poppycock, it must be said that the second of the aforementioned philosophical arguments in support of Israel’s existence reflects a concrete historical reality in the shape of the wave of anti-Semitism that swept across Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, and which gave rise to the emergence of Zionism.
Israeli Defense Force soldiers set off on a tracking drill near Tze’elim in southern Israel June 9, 2014. (Reuters)
If anyone was still in any doubt as to the power behind the early proponents of calls for a Jewish state, as the vast majority of Jews around the world were for decades, the inimitable horrors of the Holocaust in the Second World War instantly dispelled them. Indeed, the psychological impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish people cannot be underestimated even today, despite it proving fertile ground for the extreme nationalism that has taken root within a significant section of Israeli society.
No matter the impact of the Holocaust on Israel, however, it can never justify the decades of injustice suffered by the Palestinian people as a consequence, else we describe a world in which the only answer to oppression is oppression. Moreover, the victims of the Nazi Holocaust share a bond of humanity with victims of every other genocide and state sanctioned crimes against humanity throughout history. It is a bond that transcends ethnicity, religion and/or nationality, and which embraces the many thousands of Palestinian victims of the Nakba and the millions more subsequently rendered stateless and refugees as a consequence.
Desperate propaganda
The romantic ideals attached to the pioneering spirit of the founders of Israel, along with international sympathy for a people who’d suffered such grotesque brutality at the hands of the Nazis, imbued the nascent state with a sense of purpose and destiny that helped mask the atrocities being carried out in its name.
A mythology of heroism and bravery was already well on the way to being constructed in 1948 when it came to Zionist militia organizations like the Haganah and Irgun. It was a mythology that continued on into the ranks of IDF when Israel was founded in 1948, embodied in the adoption of the state’s guiding “purity of arms” ethos, one designed to give romantic flavor to the militarism that sits at its heart. Yet in truth the ranks of the Haganah, Irgun and various other militia groups were filled with racist killers massacring men, women and children in order to fulfill the biblical and national destinies previously mentioned.
This toxic mix of racism and exceptionalism has led to the existence of a state that since its formation has viewed its repeated violations of international law and its crimes against humanity entirely justified. So deeply ingrained is the biblical and historical justification for Israel’s continued depredations against the Palestinians that when it comes to international condemnation of its crimes, rather than a cause for reflection and introspection within Israeli society, for many it merely serves to reaffirm Israel’s view of itself as the last bastion of defense of the Jewish people in a hostile world.
The day-to-day reality of this corrosive outlook involves young Israeli soldiers, mostly conscripts, humiliating, intimidating and brutalizing civilians at checkpoints, or killing Palestinians and Arabs in general in the knowledge they are able to do so with relative impunity.
Israeli soldiers take part in an operation to locate three Israeli teens near the West Bank City of Hebron June 21, 2014. (Reuters)
But when those same soldiers come up against a determined and dogged resistance on the ground, such as they did in 2006 during the brief war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, their resolve crumbles and they are defeated. This is key to understanding why Israel, just like its chief sponsor the US when it comes to its own military operations, has come to rely on an advanced arsenal of missiles, aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones and tanks in its continuing conflict with the entire population of Gaza for the crime of exercising its right to elect a government of its own choosing.
Such would be the demoralizing effect not only on the troops but also and more importantly on Israeli society at large. Israel knows it cannot afford to sustain heavy casualties during its repeated military operations against a largely unarmed population.
To put it another way, while Israeli troops are more than willing to kill to maintain the material privileges attached to living in a settler colonial state, one in which their consumer lifestyles are subsidized by the West, they have consistently demonstrated a reluctance to die for those privileges. Evidence of the increased pressure that Israel is under is reflected in the growing desperation of its propaganda in painting the motivation of its growing number of critics and opponents as being founded in anti-Semitism. But where previously such calumniation would have been suffice to silence dissenting voices, now it merely discredits Israel’s supporters and apologists further.
Throughout history, humanity has been locked in struggle between oppressor and oppressed. It is a struggle that has posed the same question to each succeeding generation: Whose side are you on?
Israel as an apartheid state has no future. Only as a state which embraces the concept of universal human rights, justice and dignity for all who share the same land can it ensure the peace and security of its people. More than any other this is the abiding lesson of history.
Courtesy: http://rt.com/op-edge/170912-israel-no-furute-apartheid/
Lauren Booth’s journey to Islam and the heart-warming reaction of her family
Lauren Booth, broadcaster and journalist, who embraced Islam in 2010.
Lauren Booth, broadcaster and journalist, is former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, who converted to Islam in 2010. Here below is her journey to Islam and the heart-warming reaction of her family in this translated version of a recent interview:
I thank Allah for giving me the chance to spend a month with the greatest Muslims alive in this Ummah today.
At the end of Ramadan, I went to a family home in Rafa one of the poorest refugee camps in the poorest areas, of the over populated city in the entire world. I had iftar with a family there who had about 16 mats, which were used at night to sleep on. In the middle of this tent area the mother places the meal if she has any for her children to eat.
This lady greeted me at the door and it was as if she was welcoming me to the Taj Mahal not a hellhole in the Gaza strip. ”Sallam alaykum!” she says with a smile that lights up the whole area. I asked her: “What is it like in Rafa at Ramadan with very little food?” She said: ‘Alhamdulillah!’ with such joy I couldn’t help but smile. And as I sat there on the floor of this home eating what little leaves that they had; a bit of hummus, a pita bread that was our Iftar.
I got angry … really angry! I thought what is this God That makes hungry people even hungrier? What is this God Who creates a fast for the poorest of the oppressed people in the world. So, I turned to this sister and I said: “With all due respect I want to ask you, why does your God starve you in Ramadan? Why do you fast in Ramadan…sister, just explain to me?” This lady who never owned a handbag, whose children didn’t have, never had shoes. Whose children I was sitting with didn’t have pen or paper to do any drawings, she said to me: “Sister we fast in Ramadan to remember the poor.” And a key went to my heart and unlocked it.
But of course Islam wasn’t for me that was for somebody else so I put the thought of how great Islam was to one side and said so what I like the Palestinian people but it has nothing to do with Islam.
Then last year in Ramadan again I went to Iran as a journalist and I visited a mosque there, it’s the Bibi Fatima Mosque and I made wadu because I knew how to do it and I put on a shadur and I made a simple prayer: Allah … and I used the word Allah. “Allah, don’t give me anything. I have everything. Thank you for this journey, but Allah, don’t forget the people of Palestine.”
Then I sat down in this busy mosque with women feeding their children, pilgrims coming and going; but when I sat down, this immense feeling of peace came over me. Peace and tranquility that I never knew before, such a calm that the tension in my heart went. There was no sound in my head for the first time in my life as an adult … just deep, deep joy and calm. I sat there for a long time in this place of calm knowing that somewhere in the universe everything is like this. Over the course of that evening women kept coming over to me holding me by the shoulders and saying: “I love you.” At one point a child came over and held my hand and just said in Farsi (Persian): “I love you.” I said to my friend Nadia, “Is this what it is like in the mosque?” She said, “Not really. I think something is happening.”
I slept that night on the floor of the mosque with a lot of other pilgrims and the next morning, Fajr sounded and I was inside the mosque and I prayed Fajr. Then I came outside and had a cup of chai and the sun was coming up and I had one very specific thought. “O, no… not Islam, please not Islam.”
I just want to say that a couple of strange things happened to me after that. I took the plane back to London from Tehran. As the plane was coming into London the pilot said: “Thank you for flying Tehran airways we’ll be in London in 20 minutes.” And at that point every Iranian Muslim woman took off the hijab and made out like she was from Sex in the City even showing some cleavage. I thought great. Thank goodness, my hands wouldn’t take off the hijab. My hands wouldn’t take off the hijab and I thought I was having a nervous break down.
Seven days later I said my Shahada in a London mosque and it was time for me to return to the Qur’an. This time I opened the Qur’an, and Surah Al-Fatiha (the opening chapter) look like saying to me: ‘Hello Sarah where have you been, welcome to the religion of peace, joy and tranquility,’ and I couldn’t put it down. Someone once told me — and I feel much like that before Islam — I had given up on God but God never gave up on me. Alhamdulillah.
The question everyone wants to know is how did your family or children react. My two daughters who are very practical and are aged 8 and 10. They came to me with three questions:
Mummy when you’re a Muslim will you still be mummy?
I said: When I am a Muslim you know what, I will be a better mummy, they said: “Horrayyy!”
Mummy will you drink alcohol?
When I am a Muslim I will never drink alcohol again and they said “Horrayyy!”
When you’re a Muslim will you show your chest?
I said why would you ask such a question? They said when you come to the school and your chest is showing we are embarrassed and we hate it and we want you to stop it.
When I am a Muslim I will cover all this area and to which they said: “We love Islam.”
It was that easy. When you look at those 3 questions the basic female womanhood is summarized in those 3 questions from the purity of children.
Question no. 1. Will you be the center of our household? Can we rely on you as a mother to be there for us rather than putting your work, your colleagues/friendships or the bar in front of us?
Question no. 2. Will you remain in the limits that Allah has described for all of us in behavior?
Question no. 3. Will you be a modest dignified woman in Islam?
Alhamdulillah that is all I have to say. What I have learnt this year in being a Muslim is this, when you have problems don’t tell to your friends or family …if you can read the Qur’an every night or read 10 min. everyday your Imaan is much, much higher. If you live in a non-Muslim country those of us who do it can go very low very quickly, you must read the Qur’an.
If those who are not on the path of Islam if they come to Islam like me; or, if you’re a Muslim … you are on the path as well, so make sure that you don’t miss those signs in everyday life. All praise is to Allah (Almighty).
Courtesy of www.islamicbulletin.com
Israel continues genocide of Palestinians as apathetic World watches
Baby martyred by Israeli attacks on 14 Nov 2012
Question: Which country alone in the Middle East has nuclear weapons?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and bars international inspections? ?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East seized the sovereign territory of other nations by military force and continues to occupy it in defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East routinely violates the international borders of another sovereign state with warplanes and artillery and naval gunfire?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What American ally in the Middle East has for years sent assassins into other countries to kill its political enemies (a practice sometimes called exporting terrorism)?
Answer: Israel .
Question: In which country in the Middle East have high-ranking military officers admitted publicly that unarmed prisoners of war were executed?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country in the Middle East refuses to prosecute its soldiers who have acknowledged executing prisoners of war?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country in the Middle East created millions of refugees and refuses to allow them to return to their homes, farms and businesses?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country in the Middle East refuses to pay compensation to people whose land, bank accounts and businesses it confiscated?
Answer: Israel .
Question: In what country in the Middle East was a high-ranking United Nations diplomat assassinated?
Answer: Israel .
Question: In what country in the Middle East did the man who ordered the assassination of a high-ranking U.N. diplomat become prime minister?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country in the Middle East blew up an American diplomatic facility in Egypt and attacked a U.S. ship, the USS Liberty, in international waters, killing 34 and wounding 171 American sailors?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country in the Middle East employed a spy, Jonathan Pollard, to steal classified documents from USA and then gave some of them to the Soviet Union ?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country at first denied any official connection to Pollard, then voted to make him a citizen and has continuously demanded that the American president grant Pollard a full pardon?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What Middle East country allows American Jewish murderers to flee to its country to escape punishment in the United States and refuses to extradite them once in their custody?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What Middle East country preaches against hate yet builds a shrine and a memorial for a murderer who killed 29 Palestinians while they prayed in their Mosque.?
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country on Planet Earth has the second most powerful lobby in the United States , according to a recent Fortune magazine survey of Washington insiders?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East deliberately targeted a civilian U.N. Refugee Camp in Qana , Lebanon and killed 103 innocent men, women, and especially children?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East is in defiance of 69 United Nations Security Council resolutions and has been protected from 29 more by U.S. vetoes?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East receives more than one-third of all U.S. aid to the world yet is the 16th richest country in the world?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East receives U.S. weapons for free and then sells the technology to the Republic of China even at the objections of the U.S. ?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East routinely insults the American people by having its Prime Minister address the United States Congress and lecturing them like children on why they have no right to reduce foreign aid?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East had its Prime Minister announce to his staff not to worry about what the United States says because “We control America ?”
Answer: Israel .
Question: What country in the Middle East was cited by Amnesty International for demolishing more than 4000 innocent Palestinian homes as a means of ethnic cleansing?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East has just recently used a weapon of mass destruction, a one-ton smart bomb, dropping it in the center of a highly populated area killing 15 civilians including 9 children?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East routinely kills young Palestinian children for no reason other than throwing stones at armored vehicles, bulldozers, or tanks?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East signed the Oslo Accords promising to halt any new Jewish Settlement construction, but instead, has built more than 270 new settlements since the signing?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East has assassinated more than 100 political officials of its opponent in the last 2 years while killing hundreds of civilians in the process, including dozens of children?
Answer: Israel .
Question: Which country in the Middle East regularly violates the Geneva Convention by imposing collective punishment on entire towns, villages, and camps, for the acts of a few, and even goes as far as demolishing entire villages while people are still in their homes?
Answer: Israel .
مدینہِ ثانی 