Author: Londonbear

The religious right in Israel are promoting a bill in the Knesset that would   amend the country’s basic law to include “the Jerusalem municipality is authorized to bar parades and processions on the grounds that they disturb public order, offend the public’s sentiments or on religious grounds.”

This is intended to enable the banning of the annual Gay Pride March which is the subject of a concerted hate campaign. The wording of course would enable any protest over matter of controversy to be banned, including the mass protests over the Prime Minister’s performance in the Lebanon War.

On Sunday, the bill passed its first hurdle when a committee of ministers approved it. It will now go to the Knesset for consideration. Haaretz speculates that:

    The bill’s approval by the committee could indicate that the (ruling) coalition will vote for it. Kadima Ministers Jacob Edery and Gideon Ezra both supported the bill, as did Tourism Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch (Yisrael Beiteinu).

The legislation is being promoted by Knesset Member Eliahu Gabbay of the National Religious Party. Previous rulings by the country’s High Court have been against local municipalities being able to make decisions on religious matters however the bill changes the Basic Law so (from Haaretz)

    As such, it is very doubtful that the High Court of Justice could overturn it. In fact, the High Court has never canceled a Basic Law. The Court would intervene and quash such a law only after becoming convinced that it constitutes a threat to democracy

Clearly Haaretz believes that the High Court would not consider that the banning of peaceful protests or demonstrations on religious grounds would constitute a threat to democracy.

Last year when Jerusalem was due to hold the World Pride event, the full range of religious force was imposed to stop it. The Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar wrote to the Pope to enlist his help.

    “We were shocked to hear of plans to hold the world Pride Parade in the Holy City,” rabbi Amar wrote, “The city which the entire world looks up to due to its holiness and glory, is now being attacked by evil people who wish to violate its honor and humiliate its greatness with deeds that theTorah despises, as well as all other religions. There is no need to elaborate about their plans and evil actions that bring humanity’s dignity to the ground”

Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger spoke at a religious meeting in Moscow.

    Metzger said: “As everyone knows, Jerusalem is the cradle in which the three monotheistic religions spouted. We have to unite to preserve its historical holiness and the values of purity and morality which characterize it.”

Ynet report for above two quotes.

Yehuda Levin, a member of the Rabbinical Alliance of America went to Israel with the mission to stop the event. He told World Net Daily”Israel is the Holy Land, not the homo-land,”. WND gave some more examples of this bigot’s views:

    Like some other rabbis here, Levin believes that there is a direct correlation between the homosexual parade scheduled to take place in Jerusalem and the recent onslaught of rockets raining from Lebanon and Gaza.

    Citing Leviticus [18:22-28], Levin said the Torah relates to Israel’ current conflict.

    Leviticus states, “You shall not lie down with a male, as with a woman: this is an abomination. For the nations, whom I am sending away from before you, have defiled themselves with all these things. And the land became defiled, and I visited its sin upon it, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. … For the people of the land who preceded you, did all of these abominations, and the land became defiled. And let the land not vomit you out for having defiled it, as it vomited out the nation that preceded you.'”

    Said Levin, “The terrorists, the leaders of Israel’s enemies are working for the destruction of Israel, to wipe the Jewish people off the map.”

    Levin believes their efforts are succeeding due to what he calls sexual promiscuity in the land of Israel.

So it’s not Hamas or Hezbollah that was responsible for last year’s wars, it was the homos. That was actually quite ironic as the objections to the march came from Christian and Muslim clerics too. The planned event was cancelled but not after violence involving the fire bombing of synagogues. (In 2005  an ultra-orthodox young man wounded three parade participants with a kitchen knife at a lower key event.) Later in 2006 a fixed rally took the place of the march.

Already this year, in April a bomb exploded injuring a worker, believed to be the work of the same ultra-orthodox groups who rioted in Jerusalem last year.

    Unknown persons detonated a medium-sized explosive device near a peaceful vineyard by the Israeli town of Beit Shemesh early Friday morning.

    The bomb’s location ran close to the path of the security fence being built just south of the town, near the Beit Jamal monastery, and a civilian tractor driver working at the construction site was lightly wounded in the explosion. An emergency medical team evacuated the man to the Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital in Jerusalem.

    Security forces investigating the scene later reported that they had uncovered leaflets at the scene of the crime which apparently call for the cancellation of the upcoming gay pride parade, set to be held in Jerusalem in late June.

Ynet

The way the law is framed, the Jerusalem authorities could ban the Gay Pride march but it is not clear whether it would also be used to stop the protest marches by the haredim which last year ended in  violence and police injuries.

At various times during discussion of Israel and Palestine on Daily Kos, pro-Israelis will come up with a reference to the European Union having a definition of antisemitism and claiming that it has been officially adopted by the “European Commission”.

The matter is fudged on Wikipedia under the entry for “New antisemitism” (in part}

In September 2004, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, a part of the Council of Europe, called on its member nations to ensure that anti-racist criminal law covers antisemitism. In 2005, the EUMC offered a definition of antisemitism, [98] one that the British government was urged to adopt by a 2006 all-party parliamentary inquiry. Some contemporary examples included, but were not limited to:

There then follows a list of actions.

This set me off further investigating as those of you who know anything of European and EU institutions will know that the Council of Europe is not an EU body. Having tried to navigate the EU’s sometimes labarynthine web sites, not helped by a change in the name of the body, I contacted the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Today I received an answer to my email which states quite simply at the end:

Finally I stress once again that “working definition” is part of an ongoing process with no legal basis whatsoever.

This was the main part of my email to the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA):

I have great difficulty in finding on your site or the main Europa site a definition of  “anti-semitism”. Is there one separate from the general treaties, including the Treaty of Amsterdam? Does it list activities which are automatically regarded as anti-semite and are there ones which must be judged separately?

If a separate definition exists, what status does this have within the acquis? Which EU bodies have endorsed this?

These  questions are prompted by assertions I have had from certain pro-Zionists that I have encountered which claim the EU regards criticising actions by the state of Israel’s actions towards the Palestinians is defined by it as anti-semitism. This has also been
phrased in terms of  “the oppressed becoming the oppressors”. Does the EU regard comparisons of actions by the Israeli governments to action by the Nazis or the apartheid regimes of South Africa to be automatically anti-semitic remarks? These appear to be the interpretations presented by those Americans  I have encountered and it would seem that this would
have the effect of restricting criticism of another form of Xenophobia.

The response makes it clear that the “definition” is a working definition used by the FRA and its allied agencies for the purpose of data collection and “supporting the implementation and enforcement of legislation dealing with antisemitism”. The exact definition is solely:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed towards Jews and non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

.pdf original

It indeed lists actions and opinions which might be regarded as antisemitism but, and this is the part frequently omitted, “taking into account the overall context”.

The FRA also directed me to the background on this working definition.

The EUMC Report on Antisemitism published in March 2004 highlighted both the lack of operational definitions of antisemitism in most EU Member States and the insufficient data comparability due to the different methodologies used by primary data collectors.

In order to support the collection of more specific and relevant data and to have a very precise view on the developments of anti-Semitism the EUMC and OSCE/ODIHR  consulted Jewish organisations like the European Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee , other major Jewish NGO’s and prominent academics. Informal discussions were held  with a view to develop a common “working definition” in line with the theoretical arguments elaborated in the EUMC’s antisemitism report, whose author was also consulted to ensure that the working definition is compatible with the theoretical considerations outlined in the report, which was adopted by the EUMC’s Management Board.

This working definition has a practical purpose acting as a basic guide to both official and non-official primary data collecting agencies highlighting possible examples of antisemitism, taking into account the overall national context.

The text was sent to the EUMC’s RAXEN network (organizations based in each EU Member State contracted by the EUMC to collect data) for distribution among data collecting agencies in order to get feedback regarding its functionality, effectiveness and relevance to their country specific situation. The role of the network does not include primary data collection. However, since they interact with both official and non-official primary data collectors, they were asked to discuss this working definition with them and provide the EUMC with feedback regarding their views on its functionality. The text will be reviewed again with all those involved in the process and the next steps will be discussed with OSCE/ODIHR and the Jewish organisations.

For the EUMC the “working definition” is developed as a practical tool to support more accurate data collection and is part of an ongoing process having no legal basis. Similar “working definitions” for data collection proposes, improving comparability and effectiveness, will be also developed in the future for other subjects.

The OSCE/ODIHR’s involvement is particularly important, since they have announced that they will also be collecting data on antisemitism in the near future, and is therefore worthwhile to make an effort to ensure coherence and consistency.

What is clearly a tool to provide common standards of data collection has somehow been transformed into official EU policy in the eyes of some on Kos. It is also interesting to note that changes in definitions also have an affect on the data collected. To take one example, the number of racist incidents reported by the police in the UK rose significantly when the victim was asked if he considered the incident racist. Clearly country by country increases in antisemetic incidents can be recorded where the country’s definition remains the same. On the other hand, EU wide statistics may well be affected by the adoption of a common working definition and its accompanying notes.

Today there is a meeting at Ben Gurion University in Israel to discuss the use of computers in terrorism and counter-terrorism, sponsored by NATO. One Jewish professor from California, the Director of one of the largest artificial intelligence research labs in the U.S. will not be there. He had been invited but was then “dis-invited” in light of his political views.

Last week the British University and College Union (UCU) held its first conference and passed a motion which is falsely represented as “boycotting Israeli academe”. One comment made in reports compared the impact of such a boycott on Israel to the impact that the Anti-Apartheid sporting boycott had on South Africa. Judging by the hysteria that has flowed from both Israel and Jewish supporters of Israel in the USA, this characterization hit the spot.
Since the motion has been misreported, I will reproduce it below (slight correction made to formatting error on original .pdf)

Resolution 30
Boycott of Israeli academic institutions

Congress notes that Israel’s 40-year occupation has seriously damaged the fabric of Palestinian society through annexation, illegal settlement, collective punishment and restriction of movement.

Congress deplores the denial of educational rights for Palestinians by invasions, closures, checkpoints, curfews, and shootings and arrests of teachers, lecturers and students.

Congress condemns the complicity of Israeli academia in the occupation, which has provoked a call from Palestinian trade unions for a comprehensive and consistent international boycott of all Israeli academic institutions.

Congress believes that in these circumstances passivity or neutrality is unacceptable and criticism of Israel cannot be construed as anti-semitic.

Congress instructs the NEC to

§ circulate the full text of the Palestinian boycott call to all branches/LAs for information and discussion;

§ encourage members to consider the moral implications of existing and proposed links with Israeli academic institutions;

§ organise a UK-wide campus tour for Palestinian academic/educational trade unionists;

§ issue guidance to members on appropriate forms of action; actively encourage and support branches to create direct educational§ links with Palestinian educational institutions and to help set up nationally sponsored programmes for teacher exchanges, sabbatical placements and research.

You will see that though the 61% in favor of the motion clearly want individual institutions and academics to engage in a boycott, the motion itself does not commit UCU to one.

The hysteria which the motion has caused can be seen from this Haaretz report which does at least manage to get a semi-accurate report of the motion buried later down.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on Friday conveyed to her British counterpart Margaret Beckett the severity with which Israel views the intentions of a British lecturers union to boycott Israel’s academic institutions.

In a telephone conversation between the two, Livni told her colleague that the British University and College Union’s (UCU) boycott plans are in utter conflict with the good relations maintained by Israel and Britain.

And of course any criticism of Israel must be countered by invoking memories of the Holocaust.

Professor Uriel Reichman, President of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, said Thursday night that the British boycott is “a modern reformulation of Judenreine” a German expression used by the Nazis meaning “Jew free,” describing areas they had emptied of a Jewish presence.

The professor called on Anglo-Jewry to send their children to learn in Israel “instead of sending them to institutions where there exists one-sided preaching for the elimination of the Jewish State.”

In a rather strange article in the Jerusalem Post harranging the delegates by Jeremy Newmark (described as “CEO of the Jewish Leadership Council and a Board member of the Fair Play Campaign Group” so he clearly has no bias)  we have the main UK body organizing protests against the war in Iraq described as the “anti-Zionist  Stop the War Coalition”

And if reasoned argument and abuse cannot persuade individuals and institutions to not pass a boycott, there are always threats.

Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor renowned for his staunch defence of Israel and high-profile legal victories, including his role in the O.J. Simpson trial, vowed to “devastate and bankrupt” lecturers who supported such boycotts.

<snip>

Prof Dershowitz said he had started work on legal moves to fight any boycott.

He told the Times Higher Educational Supplement that these would include using a US law – banning discrimination on the basis of nationality – against UK universities with research ties to US colleges. US academics might also be urged to accept honorary posts at Israeli colleges in order to become boycott targets.

“I will obtain legislation dealing with this issue, imposing sanctions that will devastate and bankrupt those who seek to impose bankruptcy on Israeli academics,” he told the journal.

Sue Blackwell, a UCU activist and member of the British Committee for Universities of Palestine, said: “This is the typical response of the Israeli lobby which will do anything to avoid debating the real issue – the 40-year occupation of Palestine.” Jewish groups have attacked the UCU vote, which was opposed by Sally Hunt, its general secretary.

All of this Israeli and American Jewish concern for academic freedom contrasts with the treatment handed out to Dr. Yigal Arens of the University of Southern California. As Haaretz reported back in January about the meeting starting today.

Dr. Bracha Shapira of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, one of the organizers of the conference, has stated that the organizers have chosen to remain silent. Arens, who immigrated many years ago to California, heads two centers that deal with information systems on matters of intelligence, the war against terror and digital government.

At the beginning of January a colleague, an American professor, invited him to participate in a working group that will convene this coming summer at Ben-Gurion University. The conference, which is funded by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), will deal with the role played by the Internet in terror and its prevention. The colleague said that the organizers, and among them Shapira, would be very glad if Arens accepted the invitation.

Five days later, before Arens replied to the invitation, his American colleague informed him that he should forget the whole thing. He related that the Israeli organizers had told him that government personnel who had been invited to the meeting would not feel comfortable in his presence. Arens sent an e-mail to Shapira and asked that she explain the withdrawal of the invitation. She replied that his American colleague had “exceeded his authority in extending the invitation without full consultation with the conference organizers.”

Haaretz

Arens is the son of a former Defense Minister and head of Likud. He refused to serve in the Israeli Army and emmigrated to the USA. His political views are clearly unacceptable in Israel.  What are those view? Well back to the Haaretz report.

According to Arens, the organizers had been aware initially of his political background. They learned about it from his American colleague who wanted to make certain, at Arens’ request, that they would spare him any unpleasantness, which according to him had been his lot at previous conferences in Israel.

The organizers of a conference at an academic institution that benefits from public monies do not believe it is the public’s right to know whether there is anything of substance in the grave suspicion that a scientists’ political opinions disqualify him from entering their gates. Arens, in fact, concealed nothing. For many years he has supported two states for two peoples, but today he fears “that a two-state solution is no longer practically possible.”

Arens believes that Israel should be a state for all its citizens, supports the right of return for Palestinian refugees and is opposed to any form of discrimination among citizens on the basis of their ethnic or religious background.

An email he sent to Israeli academics in January which is the basis of the Haaretz report is reproduced here but the US Jewish group MuzzleWatch reports on a recent email he has been circulating which comments on the reaction to the UCU motion.

A group of Israeli academics was in Brighton, in the UK, this week, trying to convince the University and College Union (UCU) that a boycott of Israeli universities is unjustified. Professor Zvi HaCohen of Ben-Gurion University is quoted in Ha’aretz of May 17, 2007, arguing that Israeli universities should not be boycotted because, inter alia, they “have no influence over the policies of the government or the parties.” This may or may not be the case, but what he isn’t saying is that the Israeli government exercises political influence over what are supposed to be academic decisions of Israeli researchers, and at least some of them — even at his own university! — are happy to go along.

It throws more light on why he was “dis-invited” to the seminar paid for partly by US and British taxpayers through NATO.

Before I managed to respond, I received a urgent call from Prof. Kantor. He apologized profusely and said that he had been told by the Israelis that government personnel would be present — people who would feel uncomfortable if I participated. He was instructed to rescind the invitation, which he was doing.

I was pretty amazed by this whole thing.

Not so much by the fact that Israeli government personnel would not want me to be present at a terrorism-related meeting. Not even so much by the fact that an Israeli researcher would accept governmental influence on academics. But by the fact that they would be so brazen as to state precisely what their reasoning was to an American outsider at a time when a boycott of Israeli academics was being fought, and that the American professor would agree to go along!

I asked Prof. Kantor how he would have reacted if American officials demanded that he not invite critics of US policy. He responded with mealy mouth excuses for the Israelis. For them these are “life and death issues”, you see. So it’s different.

So it is pretty two faced for the Israelis to ban Arens when as he puts it, “Israeli academics and officials are running around condemning others who would mix politics and science by proposing to boycott Israeli universities”

Like some aging pop star, Blair is on his “Farewell Tour”. This week he is in Africa. On Thursday he goes to South Africa and on Tuesday dropped in to Libya to sell some arms to his old mate Gaddafi, in the name of the War on Terra you understand.

It is his Wednesday stopover that should be noted tho as it goes towards understanding why he got involved in Iraq. It is in Sierra Leone where he has his greatest popularity, wildly so. He was installed with the honorary title of Paramount Chief and was greeted with the sort of welcome that Rumsfeld must have imagined Bush would have in a “liberated” Iraq
A quick word about Sierra Leone history. Freetown, the capital, was established as a colony for liberated slaves by British philanthropists in 1787, a bit like the American establishing of Liberia.

The current President,  Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, was elected in 1992 but there followed a series of coups and a bloody civil war. Kabbah was ousted from power by any army revolt in 1997 but was reinstated a year later by a West African intervention force. By 2000, the civil war had still not finished and many had been disabled by punishment amputations of limbs. The rebellions were financed in part by illegal diamond sales – the so-called blood diamonds. A BBC correspondent based in the country continues the story.

When Britain sent a battalion of paratroops – just 800 men – to Sierra Leone in May 2000, they came not as peacekeepers but, in effect, as combatants.

They backed the democratically elected government, whose army had fallen into decay and disarray, against a rebel army with a record of recruiting child soldiers, terrorising civilians and chopping off limbs.

British troops were welcomed in the capital, Freetown, and given popular credit for saving the city from another brutal rebel invasion.

Prime Minister Tony Blair remains wildly popular here.

For the British rebuilt the government armed forces, bringing discipline, guns, and expertise – sufficient to end the war not by negotiating a peace, but by winning it; by driving rebel forces out.

The British are still here, though in radically reduced numbers, and their guiding hand remains vital.

The Department for International Development remains the biggest single foreign donor.

It is an irony not lost on generations of Sierra Leoneans that the country, nearly 50 years after independence, is now looking to the old colonial master for leadership and protection.

BBC

There was even at one stage a political movement to return to the status of a British colony, even 50 years after independence.

Here then we can see the third in a series, after Bosnia and Kosovo, of successful military interventions where limited fighting had brought relative peace and stability. We then see the multi-national forces going into Afghanistan with again very little military opposition. Here though was perhaps the start of the delusion as that victory was effectively gained by the US buying off the warlords who anyway controlled most of the country outside the capital.

With these apparent successes behind him, what more natural for Blair to believe that once more the formula could be used to rescue the benighted people of Iraq from the yoke of Saddam’s oppression?

Which raises the question of whether he ever did believe that there were WMD there. To be honest, my own view is that he was, indeed convinced that Saddam had those stocks or at least the intent of building them. I am pretty sure this belief was only “faith based” and that it was not based on any convincing evidence. In any case, the removal of Saddam was the main motivation, despite having to present a case for regime change which, on its own, was neither a legal cause for war not likely to convince Parliament or the UN to sanction one.

On Wednesday the Blair government lost a case in the Court of Appeal. If it is not successfully appealed in the House of Lords or Supreme Court, it will enable the Chagos Islanders to return to their homeland. The best know of the islands is Diego Garcia and it was to build that US air base, sometimes called the Indian Ocean Guantanamo, that the islanders were illegally evicted.

The islanders will not be able to go to Diego Garcia itself, in the same way the Cubans cannot enter Gitmo, but they should be able to return to the other islands.
The origins of the story go back to the Cold War and a previous Labour Government. This is how the sorry tale unfolded as told by a UK group supporting the islanders.

In the midst of the Cold War, the United States decided it wanted a military base in the Indian Ocean to keep the USSR and China from threatening the Arabian Gulf. Suddenly the Chagos archipelago was more than just an insignificant speck on the map. The US’ first choice location for a new base was the uninhabited Aldabra Atoll, but Harold Wilson, the then British Prime Minister, feared antagonism from ecologists, as Aldabra is home to a rare breed of turtle. So he offered Diego Garcia instead, even though it was inhabited.

In 1966 Britain secretly leased Diego Garcia to the US for 50 years, with the option of an extension. This was done in exchange for a discount of millions of dollars on Polaris nuclear submarines – a way of concealing the payment. The US pays rent of one dollar per year. The deal was not disclosed to the US Congress, the British Parliament, or the United Nations.

The islands had been part of Mauritius but to avoid handing them over when it became independent, the “British Indian Ocean Territory” was created.

Not only did Britain have to effectively steal the islands, it also had to get rid of the people. The US took Diego Garcia only on condition that all the Chagos islands were uninhabited – the Chagossians had to go. To achieve this, Britain simply pretended that there were no Chagossians, and conspired to make sure their unlawful removal went unnoticed.

The Foreign Office invented a false history, claiming that the Chagossians were only itinerant labourers with no right of abode on the islands. This is a lie and they knew it – many Chagossians were fifth generation islanders. It is on record that one senior Foreign Office official described the islanders, in a letter, as ‘mere Tarzans and Men Fridays’. The US and the UK succeeded in keeping secret what had happened for many years. A small token force of British naval personnel is kept on Diego Garcia, which is now the US’ largest overseas military base.

The islanders were brutally evicted and forbidden to return. In November 2000, helped by papers released under the “30 year rule” governing secret documents, those born on the islands and their children regained the right to return to resettle on all the islands. The Government however declared that this must exclude Diego Garcia because of the treaty obligations to the USA.

The exile’s site goes on to describe a typical slight of hand under Blair where controversial decisions are made on “good days to bury bad news”.

On Thursday 10 June 2004 (better known as “Super Thursday” – local election day) royal orders were suddenly passed banning anyone from setting foot on the Chagos islands. The government made sure no one knew about this shocking move until it was too late. Not only did they pass the laws secretly as “orders in council” – requiring no prior consultation or debate – they also buried the move on a day when the news was dominated by the elections. The orders amounted to a new act of exile, overruling the court victory in 2000. This blow was followed a few days later by the refusal of permission to appeal a High Court ruling from October 2003 which denied the Chagossians compensation.

On Thursday 11 May 2006 the High Court overturned the orders in council of 2004, giving the Chagossians back the right of return that they won in 2000. The islanders’ solicitor Richard Gifford said: “The British Government has been defeated in its attempt to abolish the right of abode of the islanders after first deporting them in secret 30 years ago…This is the fourth time in five years that Her Majesty’s judges have deplored the treatment inflicted upon this fragile community.”

The reason that the government gave for being able to make the orders was that, because it involved a treaty, the Royal Perogative could be used. These are powers, in theory in the name of the Monarch, that ministers have been given to make decisions without Parliament. Ironically these powers were under review before the 2004 decision in order to strengthen the power of Parliament to hold the Government to account. The note attached to this  Parliamentary Press Release gives a fuller explanation of these powers and how they are used.  Increasingly though the use of the power has also been challenged in the courts. This is now called Judicial Review and no longer requires a “Petition of Right” to be able to bring a case. This was a release for the courts to consider a case. The agreement was indicated by signing with the rather grand sounding “Let Right be done”.

Today’s Court of Appeal decision upholds the High Court decision of 2006. The again rejected the Governments contention that the actions of ministers under the Royal Perogative under the guise of security and foreign relations considerations could not be challenged.

Lord Justice Sedley, giving the lead ruling, said the government’s use of the Order in Council under the Royal Prerogative – powers that allow action without reference to Parliament – was an unlawful way of preventing the islanders from returning.

Lord Justice Waller said the decision had been taken by a government minister “acting without any constraint”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6683205.stm

Channel 4 in the UK has broadcast couple of documentaries on Israel/Palestine to mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank. The pair were personal investigations of the history and current situations by the two presenters, Rod Liddle, a former senior BBC journalist and Paddy Ashdown.

Liddle concentrated on investigating whether the occupation of the West Bank has eroded Israel’s claim to be a democracy. Ashdown focused on Jerusalem. Most importantly, he proposed a series of five elements essential to bring about peace. These would involve changes in the present orthodoxy of the need to follow the Olso and Camp David processes.
Since no doubt there will immediately be making allegations on the independence of one or the other documentary makers, let me first outline their personal histories.{These two sections included because of original posting in the orange one}

Rod Liddle
Rod Liddle is no stranger to controversy. He has a long journalism career including five years as editor of the BBC Radio 4 flagship morning news programme “Today”.  In addition to this, he wrote and still writes newspaper columns and has made other programmes for Channel 4. He was forced to resign when the BBC considered a column he had written about demonstrations against the ban on for hunting as to partial. The described the “huntin, shootin and fishin” thugs, who had attacked police stewarding the demonstration, in less than flattering terms. Wiki summarises it.

Liddle wrote that readers may have forgotten why they voted Labour but would remember once they saw the people campaigning to save hunting

Nor is Liddle averse to making controversial documentaries and using unpopular voices. Again from the above Wikipedia link.

Liddle was heavily criticised by pro-Muslim groups following the broadcast of his Channel 4 documentary ‘Immigration Is A Time Bomb’ Amongst the complaints were that Liddle allowed BNP leader Nick Griffin to speak “unchallenged when arguing for freedom of speech” and that he “stated that Griffin should not have been arrested for stating his views” for incitement to racial hatred for which he had already received a two year suspended sentence in 1998

However he was officially cleared of bias.

Ofcom adjudicated that the programme was entirely fair. The complaints were dismissed.

Paddy Ashdown

Lord Jeremy John Durham (“Paddy”) Ashdown by contrast has had a varied career. He was born in India during the Raj as his father was an officer in the Indian Army. Wiki continues his biography (Slightly edited and reformatted.

He was largely brought up in Northern Ireland (hence the nickname “Paddy”) and educated at Bedford School, England. From 1959 to 1972 he served as an officer in the Royal Marines, including a stint in the elite Special Boat Service. After leaving the Marines, he worked for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, in industry, and as a youth worker before being elected Liberal Member of Parliament for Yeovil in 1983. It has been suggested that Ashdown worked for MI6 while a diplomat in Geneva in the 1970s, but he has publicly denied this.

In the House of Commons he was SDP-Liberal Alliance spokesman on Trade and Industry and then on Education. After the merger that formed the Liberal Democrats, he was elected as the new party’s leader in 1988.

Ashdown resigned the leadership in 1999 and was succeeded by Charles Kennedy. He was knighted (KBE) in 2000 and became a life peer as Baron Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, of Norton-sub-Hamdon in the County of Somerset in the House of Lords after retiring from the Commons in 2001.

After leaving British politics, he took up the post of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina on May 27, 2002, reflecting his long-time advocacy of international intervention in that region. He succeeded Wolfgang Petritsch in the position created under the Dayton Agreement.

Wikipedia biography

Channel 4 Programmes

Rod Liddle’s piece was broadcast Monday night with the title “Battle for the Holy Land: Love Thy Neighbour”.  Ashdown’s was broadcast on Saturday in the same thread as “Battle for the Holy Land: Jerusalem”. Channel 4 also has a background and descriptive mini site.

Ashdown’s Proposal

The site has a page devoted to Ashdown’s proposals from which I quote his five ingredients for peace.

The first ingredient of his recipe for peace is for Jerusalem, this city which is so central to the past, present and future of both peoples, to be the first item on the negotiating table, not the last.

His second ingredient is a recognition that Jerusalem has a shared history, and is not just the location of disparate and conflicting histories. This means both sides must accept the other’s right to exist, and face the painful truth that terrible things have been done: crimes have been committed by both sides, such as the massacre of Jews by Arabs at Gush Etzion and the massacre of Palestinians by Jews at Deir Yassin.

His third ingredient draws on the example of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre where, for 1,700 years, different denominations have fought, at times violently, for control of this holy site. In an attempt to stop the violence, in 1767 the Ottoman rulers issued a decree establishing a status quo that divided the church between the various groups. Some tensions and skirmishes notwithstanding, overall that status quo has remained in place ever since. Paddy Ashdown believes this could be a model for negotiating an agreement between Muslims, Christians and Jews for all their holy places.

The fourth ingredient is a charter of rights for all Jerusalem’s citizens to end the terrible discrimination against the city’s Palestinian inhabitants. This discrimination, says Paddy Ashdown, is not only inhuman and unjust but has provoked more conflict.

The fifth ingredient of Paddy Ashdown’s recipe for a sustainable peace is to dismantle the Wall as part of a broad agreement which includes a firm and binding commitment to end all terror attacks on Israeli citizens.

The first is perhaps the most important as it completely reverses the current “road map”. In that, final status talks were to be the last element in the process, a fudge that bedevils the prospects for any talks at the moment.

We should remember that Paddy has seen inter-communal conflict from his earliest career in the Army fighting the insurgency in Malaysia as an officer in the elite Special Boat Squadron and in Northern Ireland to his last official position as the representative of the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His proposals should not be lightly dismissed.

I had the timerity to point out inaccurate reporting in a diary written by a member who can be considered a member of the “Zionist” lobby on Kos. He claimed records released which included Nazi camp records would silence Holocaust deniers. I pointed out a couple of matter that meant I though that this was over optimistic and that any records would only reduce the range of estimates of deaths.

Of course this they took to be a Holocaust denial, presumably in an attempt to silence someone they see as anti-Israeli and therefore by extension anti-semitic. The usual tactics of character assassination by selective quotes, invented references etc are being employed by the usual suspects.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/16/62951/6424
The comments are slipping in and out of hidden status so I will reproduce the discussion, with apologies for the space used (and the spacing not coming out, will try to fix it later)

[UPDATE: Now removed – see below re edits and a fuller exposition of the tactics used as a long response to a post]

I’d just like to flag up two British sporting heroes who were in the news this weekend. Both in their own ways are inspirations. One is comparatively little known outside Britain or their own specialist field, the other is becoming successful and should be known worldwide, perhaps even gaining a championship this year.
The first of the pair is Tanni Grey Thompson who retired from competition this weekend. She is one of the towering figures in the world of parallel athletics, has been almost a fixture of the London Marathon and was elected Sports Personality of the Year by BBC viewers. This is part of her biography from a university where she was installed as the first Pro Chancellor in 2004:

Born in Cardiff in 1969, Tanni made her debut for Wales
at the Junior National Championships aged just 15.  Her first Paralympic success was in 1988 when she won bronze in the 400m at the Seoul Games.  Four years later in Barcelona Tanni claimed four gold medals, including world records in the 100m and 400m.  In 1996 in Atlanta she settled for silver in thee of her four disciplines with gold in the 800m whilst in Sydney 2000 she achieved victory in the 800m which was followed by success in the 100m, 200m and 400m.  Tanni has rounded off her gold medal tally by triumphing in the 100m and 400m in the 2004 Athens Paralympics.  However, it is not only over short distances that Tanni as achieved such success; she has also won six London Marathon titles, her latest in 2002 came just three months after giving birth to baby Cerys.  

Dame Tanni has used a wheelchair since the age of 9 because of her spina bifida. In 2005 she was given her third formal title in the New Year Honours list as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the female equivalent of a “Sir”. I sincerely hope with her retirement from competition the opportunity will be given to make her a life peer. This would enable her to continue her advocacy for parallel sports, especially in the run-up to the London Olympics in 2012.

The second figure is from conventionally a far more glamorous sport. Coming second in the Spanish F1 Grand Prix, he may have gone completely unnoticed if it was not that this put him at the top of the Championship table.  This is in the fourth race of his first season in Formula 1. At 22 years old Lewis Hamilton is the only person to have a “podium” place in the first four races of his career.

He drives for McClaren who signed him straight to F1 after what looks like a disgustingly long and successful career for such a young driver.

2006     
GP2 Series: Champion with ART Grand Prix; five wins; six fastest laps; first double win at the Nürburgring; pole position and winner of Monaco GP2 race; second double win at Silverstone in home race; seven 2 nd place and two 3 rd place podiums

2005    
F3 Euroseries: Champion with ASM F3 Dallara-Mercedes; 15 wins; 10 fastest laps; 13 pole positions; secured championship with four races remaining; winner of F3 Masters at Zandvoort including pole position and lap record; winner of the Monaco F3 Grand Prix including two pole positions and two race wins and one fastest lap; winner of Pau F3 Grand Prix in France; two pole positions, two race wins and two fastest laps

2004    
F3 Euroseries: fifth; one win and third place at the Norisring and the Nürburgring; winner of Bahrain F3 Superprix

2003    
British Formula Renault: Champion; 10 wins; nine fastest laps and 11 pole positions; Champion before final two rounds

2002    
British Formula Renault: third; three wins; three fastest laps; three pole positions; Formula Renault EuroCup Championship fifth; one win three podiums; competed in four out of nine rounds

2001    
British Formula Renault Winter Series; fifth overall.

2000    
Formula A: European Champion; winner of all four rounds; World Cup Champion; awarded Karting World Number 1; winner of Masters at Bercy; Founder member of BRDC `Rising Star’ membership

1999    
Intercontinental A (ICA): Italian “Industrials” Champion, Junior ICA (JICA): Vice European Champion; winner Trophy de Pomposa, 4th Italian Open Championship
1998     Junior ICA (JICA): second in McLaren Mercedes Champions of the Future series; fourth in Italian Open Championship; signed by McLaren and Mercedes-Benz to Young Driver Support Programme

1997    
Junior Yamaha: Super One British Champion; winner of McLaren Mercedes Champions of the Future series

1996    
Cadet Class: winner of McLaren Mercedes Champions of the Future series; Sky TV Kart Masters Champion; Five Nations Champion

1995    
Cadet Class: Super One British Champion; STP Champion

This engaging young man was born in Stevenage in southern England in January 1985 and lists his hobbies as “playing the guitar, music and training” (His favorite music genres are R & B, Reggae, Hip-Hop, and funky house.

The fact he is black is perhaps an irrelevance apart from the very positive role model he provides and that his success is in a traditionally white sport. Comparisons with Tiger Woods are obvious.

Ten years ago today as dawn broke over London a helicopter delivered Tony Blair and his wife to a victory rally on the South Bank. Later he would go to Buckingham Palace to be invited to become Prime Minister. This was a moment for his party to savor.

As the various characters we came to know and love know embarrassed themselves to various degrees with their attempts to dance, the loudspeakers blared the campaign song “Things can only get better”. There was undoubtedly an air of excitement. The Thatcher years ended with her sobbing in the back of her car as she left Downing Street, a sight at which only those with a heart of stone could fail to shed a smile. Her successor, John Major, although basically a fairly decent man was surrounded by his “bastards”. At the end, the country was just tired of the Tories.

Ten years on and we are on the eve of a new set of elections and change is again in the air. Now the country is just tired of Blair.
The comparisons between the end of the last Conservative period in office and the current Labour government are compelling. Blair has become what might politely be called accident prone. It was corruption and sleaze that did for the Tories and Blair is leaving under a cloud. His premiership started with a scandal about funding when Formula 1 racing was excluded from a ban on advertising, only for it to be discovered that the owner of F1, Bernie Ecclestone, had given £1million to Labour prior to the election. He ends with the police file on allegations of giving honours in exchange for large party donations going to the Crown Prosecution Service for them to assess charges against close aides. Yesterday the head of BP was forced to resign after lying in court to cover up how he met his former boyfriend. While not directly involved in politics, Lord Browne is a friend of Blair during whose premiership he was knighted (in 1998) and made a life peer in 2001.

Blair’s appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions today may well be his last as party leader. Yesterday he told an interviewer on a morning news show “I’ll make my position clear next week, I’ll say something definitive then.” That announcement will quite likely be next Wednesday in an attempt to get good news out of Northern Ireland to provide a “legacy” – or to cover up failure to construct a new power sharing executive if that occurs. Blair will remain as Prime Minister until a new Labour Party Leader is chosen.

Before then will be a likely trauma of elections in Scotland, Wales and England outside London. Labour is expected to do badly.

In Scotland and Wales the Parliament and Assembly members are selected by an “additional member” system of proportional representation. This sets aside “top up” seats while most are elected according to a constituency. Electors have two votes. One is for the local MSP or AM. The other is a party vote. After the constituency members have been elected by the usual “first past the post” method, party popularity is reflected by allocating additional members to parties which do not get enough ordinary seats for their popularity to be represented in the chambers.

In Scotland the outgoing administration was a Labour (largest party) and Liberal Democrat coalition. Labour is likely to lose to the Scottish Nationalists who may well become the largest single party. Possible scenarios are a Lab/Lib Dem coalition with a bare majority, a “grand coalition” of those opposed to the Scots Nats or a Scots Nats/Lib Dem coalition with a condition being the SNP drop the promised referendum on independence in the third year of the parliament.

In Wales, Labour is again likely to lose to the Nationalist, Plaid. Currently they have an overall majority and seem set to lose it. A Labour/Lib Dem coalition is possible, there has been a similar arrangement before.

In England, the Lib Dems are likely to win the same or fewer seats as the last elections were held during the height of their popularity for their opposition to the Iraq War. Here the Tories are likely to gain seats at the expense of Labour and the Lib Dems. In a few areas like Norwich, the Greens may gain seats at the expense of Labour. The benchmarks in these elections will be the number of council seats lost or gained and the number of councils changing control.

The outcome will not be a happy one for the dour Scot, Gordon Brown to take over from the Scot pretending to be English, Blair. Although he will try to demonstrate a distance from his predecessor, Brown is a co-creator of the “New Labour Project”. His saving grace for the moment will be the close association of the sleeze over party funding with Blair. As Chancellor he has been remarkably lucky in having a long period of sustained growth. Whether this can or will carry on remains to be seen. Despite some windowdressing, the actual policies are unlikely to be radically different from Blair’s. Things will be much the same.

The exploitation in workshops that make consumer goods for the west is well known. The use of forced labor in China is in the Congressional record. After allegations of abuse, Apple investigated a factory in China making iPods and found abuses but not child labor.

What they did not do is to investigate the sources of the raw materials where China has “outsourced” its child labor to Africa. The rape of that continent for its mineral wealth is fast approaching the worst excesses of the 19th century European empires.
This is from the New York Times reporting of the Apple investigation

“We did find that the weekly limit on hours worked was exceeded 35 percent of the time, and so the supplier is changing its policy as a result of the audit,” an Apple spokesman, Steve Dowling, said. Apple said it limits the workweek to 60 hours, with at least one day off.

The Apple report, available on the company’s Web site, noted: “The team reviewed personnel files and hiring practices and found no evidence whatsoever of the use of child labor or any form of forced labor. This review included examining security records targeted at discovering false identification papers — an important check for companies serious about preventing illegal employment of any kind.”

Foxconn is the trade name for Hon Hai Precision Industry, a Taiwan-based company whose customers include Intel, Dell and Sony. The Foxconn manufacturing center in Longhua employs 200,000 workers, with Apple using about 15 percent of them, the report said.

These devices are dependent on supplies of copper and cobalt. The principle sources for these are the copper mines of Zambia and the Katanga province of Congo. Last Friday, Channel 4 in the UK broadcast a half hour documentary on these two areas in their “Unreported World” thread. The Chinese are spending some of the billions of dollars they get from Wal*Martland to buy up mines and processing plants ready to ship copper back to China for use in the electonics industry. While it is providing more jobs and investment, the downsides are considerable.

As much attention is paid to the African environment as to the Chinese where rivers are now dead. The reporter, Aidan Hartley, found heavy pollution in a stream by using simple ph test equipment:

(M)any Zambians also accuse the Chinese of being so focused on making money out of Africa that they do not care about the local people. The team are shown a cemetery where 46 victims of one of Zambia’s worst industrial accidents – an explosion at a Chinese-owned factory – are buried. Local residents accuse the Chinese management of failing to uphold safety standards. Other locals claim that the factory is responsible for environmental damage, and Hartley finds a stream heavily polluted by acidic effluent.

The situation in Congo is, if anything, worse. Open cast mines swarm with humans of all ages scraping at the earth to extract minerals.

Hartley and (his Producer, Tom) Porter are confronted with an apocalyptic landscape, in which many of the miners appear to be drunk or high on drugs, with fights frequently breaking out.

Worst of all, the team discover that a key aspect of the huge copper and cobalt mining industry is the exploitation of child labour. Many of the miners have to hand-dig tunnels into the hillsides, and because the shafts are small they use children to hack out the ore and shift sacks of rocks. When it rains, the tunnels are vulnerable to collapse and dozens of miners die every month. The children are also exposed to radioactivity, since this area is close to the uranium mines which supplied the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Around the mine, the team find dozens of Chinese brokers exploiting this chaotic environment by buying up the ore extract. They react violently when Porter tries to film them. Local villagers tell Unreported World that although the Chinese are bringing enterprise, their business practices are making a profit at a tragic human cost. But, they say, they have no alternative but to trade with them.

The film makes it clear that the Chinese intermediaries know that child labor is involved. Children turn up at their compounds to sell ore, despite notices banning under 18s. Worst of all, despite the rise in the price of these commodities to record levels, the miners themselves recieve a pittance. A bare few dollars for a day’s hard labor is typical.

It should be said that greed is not confined to the Chinese. A western company has exploited the law and recieved $15.5 million after demanding $55 million from Zambia for foreign debt it bought from Romania for $3.2 million. This is rightly dubbed a “vulture fund”.

It is not only Zambia and Congo that the Chinese are interested in. Sudan has oil which the Chinese are keen to exploit and this has a bearing on their votes at the UN over Darfur. It’s not only minerals. When a repressive regime has crops that the Chinese want, any consideration of democracy and human rights, or even human decency goes out the window. Al Jazeera reports on a Chinese aid package of $25million to Zimbabwe.

Jia Qinglin, a senior Chinese Communist party official, presented the equipment, including 424 tractors and 50 trucks, to Robert Mugabe, the country’s president, on Saturday in a deal to replace equipment damaged when Mugabe’s government seized white-owned farms to resettle landless blacks.

But China wants all the tractors to go to tobacco farmers and expects Zimbabwe to deliver 30 million kilograms by the end of the year, Haru Mutasa, Al Jazeera’s correspondent, said in Harare.

As much as 80 million kilograms of the crop is to be exported by the fifth year, Joseph Made, Zimbabwe’s minister of agricultural engineering and mechanisation, said.

The tobacco crop was 55 million Kg last year, down from 200 million Kg in 2000. The previously “landless blacks” will no doubt be obliged to grow tobacco for the Chinese rather than food for their families.

You will recall that Zimbabwe is facing a food crisis. Even a heavily censored Harare based newspaper admits the position:

Most parts of Matabeleland South and North, Midlands, Masvingo and Manicaland provinces would need food aid this year.

Government is currently importing 400 000 tonnes of maize from countries in the region to augment supplies at the Grain Marketing Board which has so far taken delivery of 563 000 tonnes of maize from farmers, much of it from the 2005/06 farming season.

Zimbabwe consumes at least 1,8 million tonnes of maize and about 450 000 tonnes of wheat per year.

The shortfall of about half the maize needs from the crop and imports (Zimbabwe use to be an exporter) should be met by aid but there are problems even there with threats to ban NGOs operating because of their “political interference”.

Meanwhile, tobacco farmers are effectively on strike  as the government insists on pricing in accordance with the official exchange rate of $ZIM 250 = $1US when something like $ZIM 14000 can be obtained on the unofficial market.

ZIMBABWE’S annual opening of the tobacco auction floors hangs in the balance after Agriculture Minister Rugare Gumbo failed to get government approval for the new prices on Monday.

Tobacco farmers gathered Monday at a Harare hotel waiting for Gumbo’s announcement of new prices and incentives, but the ceremony was cancelled after nearly two hours, when Gumbo did not show up.

The scheduled opening of the tobacco floors Tuesday comes after its delay by more than a month as a result of a pricing dispute and inadequate packaging materials.

Neither are the Chinese having life all their own way. There have been protests in Zambia over the mines working conditions and this week Chinese scouting for oil in Ethiopia were killed by an insurgent group.