| HRW has changed its opinion of the PFLP over the years from a terror group to a respected political organizationnoreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 26 Oct | | Human Rights Watch issued a report in 2002 detailing the terror attacks during the start of the second intifada. The report described the various terror groups that had been targeting and killing Israelis.
Here's what it said about the PFLP: The PFLP has not claimed any separation between its military wing and its political leaders. As with the other armed Palestinian groups that have intentionally and repeatedly organized suicide attacks against civilians, persons carrying out attacks on civilians claimed by the PFLP are individually criminally liable for their actions. PFLP leaders are also liable both directly and under the doctrine of command responsibility. HRW accurately said that the PFLP political and terror components are one and the same. But over the years, as Human Rights Watch lurched leftward become the leading anti-Israel organization, its descriptions of the socialist PFLP has become less critical and more admiring. In 2007, it called the PFLP "a secular leftist party that also conducts armed attacks against Israel." In 2012, HRW said that PFLP - which is had previously documented in 2002 of being guilty of crimes against humanity - was merely a group "which Israel considers...Read More |
From Ian: For the Anti-Israel Left, the Jewish State Is but a Screen onto Which It Projects Its Fantasies There is another problem with intersectionality, at least in the way it is now being used. It, too, is a kind of conceit—an updated version of "We Are the World." As the political theorist Michael Walzer told me, "Intersectionality is a genuinely useful idea. But there is no intersection between American Blacks and Palestinians. The moral significance of solidarity is that it extends solidarity to people with whom you have no intersection. Intersectionality is an entirely different idea from internationalism." The Israeli journalist Etan Nechin observed to me that the American left's discourse on Israel is "an offshoot of identity politics, with emphasis on 'me.' But internationalism was never about that." To support other peoples or movements because they are somehow "like" you—or because they "look like you"—betrays the traditional ethos of internationalism. And in the Manichean imagination—and this, I think, is its greatest sin, if I can use that word—the democratic forces within Israel, both Jewish and Arab, are rendered literally invisible, as if by a perverse magic trick. In Haaretz, Nechin recently charged that those on the American left—and particularly the Jewish American left—"dismiss realities on the ground in Israel and Palestine entirely, and instead...Read More |
One difference between the Arab boycott of Israel from the 1940s (still officially in effect) and BDS is that the Arab boycott would restrict business from any companies that had business in Israel. This is why Israelis couldn't buy Pepsi Cola, Toshiba computers, Toyota or Nissan cars until 1992, because those companies adhered to the boycott out of fear for losing the more lucrative Arab market.
But BDS couldn't make such a boycott work, without the support of the Arab world.
And for one other reason: BDSers themselves couldn't live for five minutes without using products from companies that have branches in Israel.
This morning I saw that AT&T opened up it second R&D center in Israel; the first was opened in 2007. It employs 600 people.
For high tech companies in Israel, that is practically nothing.
Wikipedia's page of companies with R&D facilities in Israel is a who's who of the top companies in high tech, not to mention many other industries.
Imagine BDS trying to boycott Apple, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft.
That's why they nibble around the edges, going after HP and AirBnB. Because they know that they cannot possibly adhere to a real boycott themselves, let alone demanding that others do.
This is why Israel's best defense...Read More |
From AFP/Kuwait Times: The Gaza Strip might be off-limits for foreign foodies but the coastal Palestinian enclave is brimming with seafood restaurants, many owned by one local family whose culinary hook is their matriarch's spicy fish tajine. Munir Abu Hasira arrives at the Gaza port's fish market at daybreak, but holds back as traders snatch up sardines and other fish caught during the night. He is angling for more discerning catches like grouper, sea bream and large shrimp, which can go for around 70 shekels ($22) a kilo-a small fortune in the impoverished enclave, under Zionist's entity blockade since 2007. "It's expensive because of the economic situation, but we buy the fish to supply restaurants and to export" to the occupied West Bank, he says, as workers pile fresh fish into a van. .For decades, the Abu Hasira family were fishermen, but since opening their first restaurant in the 1970s, they have gradually traded their fishing kit for chef's tools. Sitting on a chair in a Gaza courtyard, Eid Abu Hasira, in his 80s, said he was the last of the family's fishermen. "I sold everything in 2013," said the head of the family, sporting a white moustache and wearing a traditional robe and headdress. "Today, we are in the fish trade, and have 13 Abu Hasira restaurants," he said, clutching Muslim prayer beads as he leaned on a wooden cane. If the name...Read More |
From Ian: Melanie Phillips: The "human rights" terror laundry One of the things that has fried the western brain over the last few decades is the hijack of language to present evil as good and to reverse oppressor and oppressed, victimiser and victim. One of the principal mechanisms of this moral inversion has been the culture of so-called "human rights," which has been used to extinguish actual human rights in support of certain agendas. To be more precise, the agenda to destroy the State of Israel. To that end, "human rights" has become in effect a laundromat for terrorism. In the Middle East, the vehicles for this agenda have been certain "human rights" NGOs. These conduct systematic campaigns of defamation and delegitimisation against Israel — the only upholder of human rights in the Middle East — while downplaying, sanitising or ignoring the real human rights abuses by tyrannical regimes. These include Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which perpetrate or support war crimes and terrorist outrages against Israel as well as committing human rights abuses and /or war crimes against their own people. Now, the Israeli government has identified six Palestinian "human rights" NGOs that it says go further and work for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has been declared a terrorist organisation by the United States, Israel, Canada, and the European Union. Ben...Read More |
Someone forgot to tell Jordanian writer Mohamed Fouad Zaid Al-Kilani that he is supposed to substitute "Zionist" for "Jew" in his essays.
Al-Kilani has written extensively for Palestinian, Jordanian and Iraqi media. In today's Kitabat he writes that there really isn't any normalization between Arabs and Israel, because Arabs remain as patriotically antisemitic as they ever were.
And he is damned proud of it. There is much evidence of the fakeness of this normalization. Whether it is through sports, media, education or politics, we find the exact opposite, that Arab peoples refuse to deal in any way with this mortal enemy. In the matches that were held some time ago in Japan, Arab players refused to play with the Jewish team, despite the sports regulations and the slogan "sports for all." In the artistic community as well, there are large protests, if any Jew is dealt with, in any artwork, meeting or otherwise, this is rejected by the Arab peoples. What happened in Iraq recently in terms of a conference of normalization with the Jews, the Iraqi government had an honorable position by bringing the organizers of the meeting of the printers and interrogating them. On the political level, the Arab delegations refuse to sit with this mortal enemy in any conference or gathering in which these Zionists are present. In terms of education, the Arabs still reject...Read More |
Last week, CAMERA posted a discussion of a story "Uncle Meena" by Palestinian author Ibtisam Barakat. The story is assigned as reading in some elementary school classes. As CAMERA notes, the story shows a one-sided, false view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is even worse than that.
The story is about a Palestinian girl from Ramallah, Noora, whose family is visited by her uncle Meena from California. For much of his stay he is depressed because he cannot walk around the center of Ramallah because of an Israeli action there. Finally, he tells his mother that he is in love with a Native American girl, and the religious Muslim mother accepts it without any qualms.
The only slight hint that there might be two sides of the conflict is when the girl narrator mentions that the Israeli actions are after "an explosion in Jerusalem." Not the slightest indication of who might have caused this explosion or if there were any casualties.
At one point, Uncle Meena sees kids playing "Jews and Arabs," and he explains that it is just like American kids playing "Cowboys and Indians," but the Palestinians are the Native Americans and the Israelis are the colonialist cowboys who have taken over the land. He tells his niece that there are Native American reservations in America, just like refugee camps in the West Bank, and his niece notes that she was shocked, because she thought that everyone in the world...Read More |
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