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(Haaretz) – Israel is facing a global campaign of delegitimization, according to a report by the Reut Institute, made available to the cabinet on Thursday. The Tel Aviv-based security and socioeconomic think tank called on ministers to treat the matter as a strategic threat.
The report cites anti-Israel demonstrations on campuses, protests when Israeli athletes compete abroad, moves in Europe to boycott Israeli products, and threats of arrest warrants for Israeli leaders visiting London.
Reut says the campaign is the work of a worldwide network of private individuals and organizations. They have no hierarchy or overall commander, but work together based on a joint ideology – portraying Israel as a pariah state and denying its right to exist.
Reut lists the network’s major hubs – London, Brussels, Madrid, Toronto, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley.
The “delegitimizers” cooperate with organizations engaging in legitimate criticism of Israel’s policy in the territories such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, blurring the line between legitimate censure and delegitimization. They also promote pro-Palestinian activities in Europe as “trendy,” the report says.
The network’s activists are not mostly Palestinian, Arab or Muslim. Many of them are European and North American left-wing activists. The Western left has changed its approach to Israel and now sees it as an occupation state, the report says. To those left-wing groups, if in the 1960s Israel was seen as a model for an egalitarian, socialist society, today it epitomizes Western evil.
Listen to Israel’s Ambassador Oren words of Likud propaganda and Netanyahu’s great victory over Obama on ME policy …
(Haaretz) – In a statement printed by the Orange County Register, a newspaper, the Muslim Student Union said:
“We condemn and oppose the presence of Michael Oren, the ambassador of Israel to the United States, on our campus today.
“We resent that the Law School and the Political Science Department on our campus have agreed to cosponsor a public figure who represents a state that continues to break international and humanitarian law and is condemned by more UN Human Rights Council resolutions than all other countries in the world combined.”
U.S. Ambassador Michael Oren eventually completed his speech, some time later than scheduled, but did not take questions from the audience as planned.
VIDEO: Israeli Amb. Oren overcomes Irvine, CA Islamist antagonists
[Watch the last 8 min. of the video, interview with a Palestinian man – Oui]
(Times Online) – Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister is considering pressing charges against a pro-Palestinian protester who allegedly hurled racist abuse at him during an address at the Oxford Union.
Danny Ayalon was addressing the student audience on Monday evening when protesters waving Palestinian flags began shouting in Arabic and English.
One was alleged to have shouted the Arabic phrase “Idhbah al-yahud”, meaning “kill the Jews”, before being ejected by security.
(Haaretz) – Ten agents, including three women, participated in the assassination of senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January, according to Intelligence Online, a Paris-based journal dedicated to tracking intelligence activity worldwide.
The journal published what it termed “new details” about the operation, which has been widely attributed to Israel’s Mossad intelligence service. It said that one of the female agents dressed herself in the uniform of a reception clerk at Al Bustan Rotana, the hotel where Mabhouh was staying, and then knocked on his door.
When he opened it her fellow operatives rushed him and stunned him with an electric device, the journal said, then they injected poison into his veins, in order to disguise the cause of death.
The journal added that Dubai’s secret service had requested assistance in the investigation from its counterparts in Egypt and Jordan and from Interpol.
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This notion that pro-Israel speakers and scholars do not even deserve on a moral or intellectual basis, an opportunity to participate in scholarly debate is a very dangerous one, even if it comes from tendentious students. It starts with the assumption that Israel, because of its perceived moral defects and its oppression of the hapless Palestinians and the theft of their lands, does not even have the right to participate in intellectual debate; that academic free speech in Israel’s case can be modified and is not absolute.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."“tendentious students”??????
Oren is such a proponent of Israeli propaganda in the US it is a wonder that anyone can view his critics as tendentious, but not him.
I was just looking for background on Cravatts since I’m not nearly as well-informed on these issues as you are.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/tag/richard-cravatts-publishes-lies-about-facts-on-the-
ground-book/
We’ve discussed the various linkages before. In that case, it was one between the Christian Right and elements within Israel.
I haven’t read your linked stories but I will as soon as I finish this. I’m especially intrigued by links to U.S. groups in the wake of the SCOTUS decision on “corporate 1st amendment rights.” I can’t help but wonder if that decision opens the door to new kinds of advocacy beyond what’s already been envisioned.
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Of course this could never happen in Washington DC, it did pass in Israel …
(Ynet) – Amidst Knesset efforts to deny the Supreme Court’s power of nullifying laws – another case in point emerges. Three months after nullifying the prison privatization law, a panel of nine Supreme Court judges has ruled against a clause inside the Criminal Procedure Law.
In a rare step, the judges have decided that the clause which permits holding remand hearings in the cases of detainees suspected of security offenses in their absence should be nullified. It was claimed that the clause offends the detainee’s right to be present during his arrest procedures and therefore contradicts the Human Dignity and Liberty Basic Law.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
(Haaretz) – The United Nations is likely to refer the findings of the Goldstone report to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, diplomatic sources in New York said.
A decision to bring the report on last year’s Gaza war before the court would follow a debate in the UN General Assembly over Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s response to the document last week.
Assembly president Ali Abdussalam Treki announced that member states were drawing up a plan of action over Ban’s answer to the report, in which retired South African Judge Richard Goldstone accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."And that’s precisely where it should go. Then like Ariel Sharon, the troika of Barak, Olmert, and Livni, who wiped out 1400 mostly Palestinian civilians in Gaza, will have to restrict their travel to Israel and the US for fear of arrest for war crimes.
That bugs me a bit to know that my own country harbors war criminals.
So the people of the world wise up, as opposed to their useless governments, and Israeli Zionism inc gets all upset. I feel a propaganda campaign stressing the greatness of Israle and how as Jews were once hideously oppressed lunatic Zionist facists must now be able to hideously oppress. Nop doubt most of the worlds media, half the government s and copious other bodies will fall in line for operation brain wash everyone about Israel and no doubt the US will take the lead.
One thing Israel cant have is the truth being known which is starting to happen now inspit eof their influence over loads of media and government.