| New @Amnesty report makes up yet another fake definition of apartheid - just for Israelnoreply@blogger.com (Unknown), 30 Jan 05:45 AM Amnesty Intern | | Amnesty International is set to release a report this week that parrots Human Rights Watch's report of last year accusing Israel of apartheid. As we have seen, HRW had to take bits and pieces of different international conventions to try to pretend that Israel's treatment of non-citizen Palestinians somehow fits under the definition of apartheid. Their main evidence that apartheid applies to groups beyond racial groups came from the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which did expand the definition of "racial discrimination" to include discrimination against national groups - but HRW did not quote the next paragraph of the ICERD which explicitly says "This Convention shall not apply to distinctions, exclusions, restrictions or preferences made by a State Party to this Convention between citizens and non-citizens."
Clearly, HRW was twisting the definition of apartheid in ways it was never meant to be defined, as the bulk of its arguments are based on how Israel makes distinctions between Israeli citizens and non-citizens, not between Jews and Arabs.
Every nation on Earth gives fewer rights to non-citizens.
I have seen a copy of Amnesty's embargoed report, and for the most part its arguments have the exact same flaws as HRW's. But they came up with another definition of apartheid under international law they claim says that discriminating...Read More |
From Ian: Normalize, let insulters fend for themselves WHY are we the ones being insulted by the Palestinians? When they are happy, they curse the Gulf leaders and people. When they are angry, they use all of the defamatory and abusive words in their dictionary against us. We, the Gulf nationals, overlook all that by sending them aid. We also participated in all the Arab wars for defending the right of the Palestinians for self-determination and the establishment of an independent state on the 1967 borders. We are the only ones who rescued them in the year 1970 when they launched their war on Jordan. The late Sheikh Saad Al-Abdullah evacuated their leader Yasser Arafat from Amman. The Arabian Gulf states, led by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, boycotted oil export to the Western countries during the 1973 war. Furthermore, Riyadh presented two initiatives to solve the issue. Despite their support of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and their participation in acts of intimidation, abuse and killing against Kuwaiti citizens, the Gulf nationals especially Kuwaitis continued to support the Palestinians and their resistance factions. They supported the late Jamal Abdul Nasser against us. They stood with Gaddafi when he hurled everything he had on the leaders of the Gulf. Their derision even reached the point that they wrote the names of the kings and princes of the Gulf countries on...Read More |
From MLive (Ann Arbor): After two years of legal battles over anti-Israel protests outside an Ann Arbor synagogue — demonstrations the courts have upheld as free speech — a federal judge has ordered the plaintiffs to pay the protesters nearly $159,000 to cover their legal defense fees. U.S. District Court Judge Victoria Roberts issued the ruling this week, deciding plaintiffs Marvin Gerber and Miriam Brysk and attorney Marc Susselman are liable for the protesters' attorney fees for pursuing meritless and frivolous claims. The ruling comes as Brysk, represented by Susselman, is now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case. Gerber, now represented by a Washington, D.C. law firm, is separately petitioning the nation's high court. Susselman, who has been lead counsel in the federal case, called the judge's ruling on attorney fees "a reversible error" and said he plans to file an appeal challenging it. He disputes Roberts' determination the claims were frivolous. The original lawsuit was filed in late 2019 by Susselman and Gerber, a member of the Beth Israel Congregation on Washtenaw Avenue, where Henry Herskovitz and his anti-Israel group have protested on Saturday mornings since 2003. Brysk, identified in court records as a Holocaust survivor and member of the Pardes Hannah Congregation in an annex...Read More |
From Ian: Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper: As world marks Holocaust remembrance day, Hitler's vision lives on Never again should anyone confuse an advanced education with morality. Some of Germany's most educated enthusiastically followed Hitler; today there are too many educated people prepared to forge strategies legitimizing crimes in the name of a greater good. Never again should leaders turn a blind eye to today's evils unleashed against innocents in China or Iran with the hope that somehow catering to tyrants will work out for the best. That didn't work for Neville Chamberlain and it won't work now. Germany will always have special obligations linked to Wannsee: First and foremost. It must never harm Jews. In word and deed, Germany in 2022 must be guided by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. Today's Germany should take all necessary measures to hold accountable all perpetrators and purveyors of anti-Semitism at home. It must take the public lead against all Holocaust denial and distortion, on social media and in the halls of power and diplomacy. Nowhere is such a commitment as needed and sorely lacking as when it comes to Germany's continuous pursuit of economic gain in Iran. That is the only way to explain Berlin's deafening silence as Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Khamenei, and his human-rights-crushing regime pursue Holocaust denial as...Read More |
From Ian: Melanie Phillips: How the West's Appeasement Mentality Brings Not Peace, But War Appeasement blindness is why the Biden administration thinks an agreement with the Iranian regime would be worth more than the piece of paper waved by Chamberlain on his return from Munich. And appeasement blindness is why the West is responsible for the war by the Arab world against Israel. In the 1930s, Britain sought to buy off the Arab uprising in Palestine against the proposed Jewish homeland by offering the Arabs land promised by international agreement to the Jews. For most of the period since the State of Israel was created, the West has continued with the fiction that the Arab war of extermination against the Jewish homeland is instead a conflict over the division of the land between two sets of people with an entitlement to that land. As a result, the Palestinian Arabs have been incentivized to continue their war of extermination, confident that the West would blame Israel for defending itself. People often wonder why tiny, embattled Israel bucks the Western trend of fatally low birthrates, sclerotic economies and miserable populations. The basic answer is that it believes in itself and is determined to survive. To convince Putin not to invade Ukraine, he has to believe that the West means to defend its principles. But for that to happen, the west has to start...Read More |
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The New York Times Magazine is publishing a long report on NSO and spyware this weekend. it shows how the FBI had shown interest in the tool and how the CIA paid for NSO to sell the spyware to Djibouti.
The major issues with NSO Pegasus is that the spyware can and has been used for human rights abuses. It has also been used by governments to crack terrorism and drug rings.
The article shows that Israel made some decisions on who Pegasus can be exported to based on diplomatic considerations. From Panama to Mexico to the UAE and Saudi Arabia, although there was rarely an explicit quid pro quo, Israel reaped major benefits from allowing potential allies to use the tool. The article even says that Saudi Arabia opening its airspace to Israeli planes last year was a response to NSO renewing its license with the monarchy.
Every country makes decisions based primarily its own best interests, above human rights issues. That is the way it has always been and the way it will always be.
Cyberweapons, like all weapons, are tools than can be used for good or ill. Pegasus has helped nations do great things - and horrible things.
Who makes the decision as to where to draw the line? When critics of Israel like Human Rights Watch spend time and effort to only go after Israel's diplomatic use of NSO, and ignores the fact that every nation does the exact same thing with their own assets, it...Read More |
In 2019, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared Israeli actions in Gaza to the Holocaust, saying "we view the Holocaust in the same way we view those besieging Gaza and carrying out massacres in it."
Last year, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Erdogan released a video about the dangers of xenophobia and Islamophobia, and didn't say the word "Jews" once. He talked about various genocides, pointedly excluding the Armenian genocide.
Lately, Erdogan and Turkey gave a different message.
In December, Erdogan hosted members of the Jewish community in Turkey and the Alliance of Rabbis in the Islamic States. He's been emphasizing his goal of improving relations with Israel. He invited Israel's President Isaac Herzog to visit Turkey. But a lot of this is smoke and mirrors. Turkey still hosts Hamas even though it "leaked" news that it will expel the terror group...Read More |
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