In Pursuit of Justice

Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on right to food, castigated the Israeli occupation and described it as the only “colonial regime” which refuses to abide by any international law, calling on the UN to adopt an effective policy forcing Israel to respect human rights and the Geneva Convention.”The Israeli occupation is a colonial regime and an illegal military occupation from the UN’s point of view, it continues to annex more Palestinian lands; and thus the Israeli occupation is the worst in the history of colonialism,” Ziegler stated in a TV interview.

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“The challenges we face in the Arab and Islamic worlds are challenges of survival, not only of reform and development. Our knowledge level will determine to a large extent our ability to bypass these challenges,” said Shaikh Mohammad in his inaugural speech to scholars, experts, university presidents and professors from the Arab world.

“Let us take the challenges of unemployment for example, which is about 15 per cent, the highest rate in the world. The challenge facing all of us today is not only finding jobs for the unemployed. It is finding 80 million job opportunities during the next decade.”

He urged governments to take this challenge seriously. “Naturally, we are not in the age of miracles. There are no magical solutions, or ready recipes. Either we create miracles ourselves, and make solutions with our own hands, or the region will be heading towards millions of frustrated, angry young men and women … and you may imagine the consequences,” he warned.

Full article here

I hope this turns out to be as great as it sounds!

Ironically, I heard about this from my friends in the States.  I didn’t see any mention of this in the English or Arabic press here [Dubai].  I think it’s great that the government of Dubai still tries to honor the boycott against Israel, although I don’t know how long this will last for.  Not all hope is lost I guess.

In a last-minute decision, Dubai has refused to grant entry visas to an Israeli delegation of 25 forwarding and logistics firms that were planning to take part in next week’s World Congress of the FIATA, the International Federation of Freight Forwarders Associations.

Dubai has, in the past, enforced an anti-Israel trade ban. Last year, The Jerusalem Post revealed that the Dubai Ports World, which is entirely owned by the government of Dubai via a holding company known as Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation (PCZC), joined the Arab boycott against Israel. Dubai Ports World actively enforced a trade embargo against Israel.

Full story here

This is obvious to any objective person following the situation in Palestine, but the UN envoy’s statements give even more weight to the facts:

John Dugard, the UN human rights envoy for the Palestinian Territories, told the BBC the US, EU, UN and Russia were failing to protect the Palestinians.

He said the UN “does itself little good by remaining a member of the Quartet”.

In his role as a UN special rapporteur, Mr Dugard has been visiting the West Bank and Gaza for the past seven years.

“This time, I was very struck by the sense of hopelessness among the Palestinian people.”

Mr Dugard attributed this to “the crushing effect of human rights violations”, and in particular Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement.

He said that although Israel did have a threat to its security, “its response is very disproportionate”.

He said the purpose of some of the checkpoints in the middle of the West Bank was to break it up “into a number of cantons and make the life of Palestinians as miserable as possible”.

The South African retired professor of international law said the response of the Quartet was weak because it was “heavily influenced” by the US.

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I’m glad someone is speaking out against events like One Million Voices.  They sound all great and dandy until you realize that they are only superficially addressing the issues and not even coming close to the root causes.

I would half understand if such events were organized by well-meaning people who just don’t understand the real conflict, but when it’s done by Israelis and Palestinians an endorsed by mainstream politicians from both sides - you know there’s something fishy going on.

Instead of raising awareness of the true causes of the conflict and helping people acknowledge their past wrongs and move forward to a just resolution, such events just make it easier for the oppressors to get away with what they are doing.

Below is the press release by PACBI which says it all:

Celebrating Peace or Camouflaging Apartheid? Boycott the Jericho-Tel Aviv Public Event on October 18th!
PACBI October 4, 2007

On October 18th, One Million Voices, an organization led by Israelis and international figures with the support of some Palestinians, is organizing a public event in Jericho and Tel Aviv, simultaneously. The event will include performances by renowned artists Brian Adams and Ilham Madfa’i. As stated on the organization’s English webpage, the objective of the event is to “mark the first time that massive numbers of Israelis and Palestinians gather simultaneously to unite against violent extremism.”

According to the widely accepted boycott criteria advocated by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the event falls under the category of normalization projects and violates the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), endorsed by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, trade unions, political parties, and grassroots movements, for the following reasons:

1. Participants are required to join the One Voice Movement and sign a mandate — ostensibly based on a “two-state solution,” but without any commitment to international parameters — which assumes equal responsibility of “both sides” for the “conflict,” and suspiciously fails to call for Israel’s full compliance with its obligations under international law through ending its illegal military occupation, its denial of Palestinian refugee rights (particularly the right of return), and its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens.

2. The event is sponsored by Israeli institutions (mostly from the private sector) and endorsed by mainstream Israeli political figures from parties including the Likud, Labour and Shas. These Israeli “partners” are unquestionably complicit in maintaining Israel ’s occupation and other forms of oppression.

We believe this event is being organized to promote a “peace” agreement that is devoid of the minimal requirements of justice, and that will leave the Palestinian people as disenfranchised as previous agreements have. The unfortunate and harmful support of Palestinian businessmen, religious and political figures, among others, for this event indicates either ignorance of the hidden agenda inherent in the whole initiative, deceptively camouflaged as a collective call for peace, or willingness to forfeit the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in return for advancing selfish interests.

We call on the Palestinian public and international supporters of a just peace in Palestine not to take part in this public relations charade that conceals a misleading political program that falls significantly short of international law tenets and the Palestinian national program.

We call on Arab and Palestinian artists, in particular, not to participate in this or any similar event whose real objectives have nothing to do with genuine peace.

We call on Palestinian board members of the One Million Voices to withdraw their support for this movement that only serves to blind the Palestinian public and sidetrack it from struggling, with the solidarity of its international supporters, for its UN-sanctioned rights, for justice, equality and freedom.

* Endorsed by tens of cultural and other civil society organizations in Palestine and the Arab World.

My last post seems to have stirred up some attention.  Below are 2 more articles on the brutality of the IOF which goes unnoticed by the world and which no one is held accountable for.

And my comment about making dua for our oppressed brothers and sisters those last blessed days of Ramadan: I have yet to hear the imam at the masjid I’ve been praying at make dua for any of other brothers under occupation in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan….or anywhere else!!  I hear imams in the UAE are supposed to stay away from such ’sensitive’ topics!  That’s another post all together though…

Excerpts from this article by Saifedean Ammous:

In Memory of Iman Al-Hams, On the Third Anniversary of Her Murder

On the morning of the 5th of October, 2004, a morning as rudimentarily awful as any lived under a brutal occupation, 13-year-old Iman, wearing her blue and white school uniform and carrying her schoolbag, left her house in Rafah refugee camp to go to school. Iman wandered a few meters away from her usual route to school and ventured into the large security zone surrounding an Israeli military base, which is, as is common, located near Palestinian civilians’ houses and schools. What follows is a gruesome tale of sickeningly cold-blooded murder.

Iman was spotted by the Israeli military base’s watchtower. She was about 100 yards away from the military base when the following conversation took place between a soldier in the watchtower, an army operations room and a certain Captain R, who remains unnamed to this day: 

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From the watchtower: “It’s a little girl. She’s running defensively eastward.”

From the operations room: “Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?” 

 Watchtower: “A girl about 10, she’s behind the embankment, scared to death.”

A few minutes later, Iman is shot from one of the army posts 

Watchtower: “I think that one of the positions took her out.”

Captain R: “I and another soldier … are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill … Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her … I also confirmed the kill. Over.”

Captain R—along with another soldier—walks towards Iman, and shoots two bullets at point-blank range into her head to “confirm the kill.” He starts to head back to his base, before turning around again and emptying all the bullets from his machine gun into the body of Iman.

Captain R then “clarifies” why he killed Iman: “This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.” 

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After she was taken to the hospital, doctors counted 17 bullet wounds in Iman’s body, and three in her head, though they were unsure of the exact number since her little body was shattered to the point where one couldn’t accurately count how many bullets had riddled it. Anywhere in the world, you would expect such a murderer to be tried and to receive a very harsh sentence. Unfortunately, the laws that apply in most of the world do not apply to Palestinian children and their murderers.

 An Israeli military court, on October 15, 2004, cleared the soldier of any wrongdoing or unethical behavior, declaring that “confirming the kill” is standard procedure. A few of the soldiers serving with Captian R seem to have not been satisfied. They were apparently motivated by racist animosity towards him (he is Druze, they are Jewish), and took the matter to a Military Police court. He was charged not with the murder of Iman, but with “illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and perverting the course of justice.” He was cleared on all counts.

To add insult to fatal and gruesome injury, Captain R was then compensated with 80,000 Israeli Sheckels (around US$20,000) plus legal fees for the inconvenience of being taken to court over a triviality such as the life of a Palestinian child. The court also criticized the Military Police for investigating the case in the first place. Captain R was then promoted to the rank of Major, and continues to serve in the Israeli Army, where he may well have murdered other children in the past three years. 

This is by no means an isolated incident or a freak failing of the “justice” system, but rather one example of many such stories that will shock anyone with an ounce of conscience or humanity in them. One could write whole books with the stories of children like Iman, killed in callous cold blood, whose murderers faced no repercussions whatsoever for their crimes. Since 2000, almost 1,000 Palestinian children have been murdered by the Israeli Army, and countless other thousands injured. Not a single Israeli soldier has faced any form of punishment, demotion, or even reprimand over any of these murders.

Also, see this article by Gideon Levy in Haaretz (exceprts below):

The concern Israel demonstrates for the fate of one Palestinian boy touches the heart: Again, note what a fuss is being made about the case of the killing of Mohammed al-Dura. Our heart is impervious to the fate of other children who have been killed. Just little Mohammed continues to haunt us.

But the question of who killed al-Dura is not important. And maybe he is even alive, as some eccentrics claim. Perhaps he committed suicide, as the strange investigations are liable to suggest.  All of these are tasteless questions designed to divert attention from the truly important issues: According to data collected by human rights group B’Tselem, Israel is responsible for killing more than 850 Palestinian children and teenagers since al-Dura was killed, including 92 in the past year alone.

Last October, we killed 31 children in Gaza. This is what should have raised a storm and not the measurements by the former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Southern Command, Yom Tov Samiyeh, aimed at proving that his soldiers did not kill al-Dura, or the “investigations” by the physicist Nahum Shahaf. In an eccentric obsession, Shahaf has devoted the past years to this affair, after previously having also obtained “amazing material” on the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. Al-Dura refuses to step down from the stage because he has become an icon of the Palestinian struggle and a symbol of Israeli brutality. A thousand Nahum Shahafs will not succeed in blurring the unequivocal fact that a scandalous killing of children is taking place in the territories.

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Scary and disturbing, but a truth that the world must know of.  As Sam Bahour puts it, most people won’t even be able to finish reading this article, let alone endure living under this type of occupation for over forty years.

Also, a good reminder to keep our brothers and sisters under occupation in Palestine (and elsewhere) in our prayers especially during these last days of Ramadan.

Excerpts:

Testimony: “I went out on my first patrol … Others on the patrol were just shooting like crazies … I also started shooting like all the others … It was … look, I won’t tell you that it wasn’t cool, because suddenly for the first time you come and hold the weapon seriously, you’re not training in some drill or in some dugout in the dunes, or I don’t know what, or you have some commander who is looking over your shoulder in the firing range. Suddenly you are responsible for what you are doing. You take the gun. You shoot. You do what you want.”

There were some tough soldiers who developed an ideology holding that even minor events necessitated a brutal response. “A 3-year-old kid, he can’t throw, he can’t hurt you no matter what he does, but a kid of 19 can. With women I have no problem. With women, one threw a clog at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw clogs at me. When one of them [a woman] spat at me I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t have what to spit with anymore.” 

Another soldier describes one of the first times he entered a house to arrest an Arab, “an absolute giant, around 30, maybe. Rampaging. We shout at him to lie down, we hit him, but he doesn’t lie down, he wants to escape … These four guys show up and throw stones at him from all sides, and we are beating up on him … Lie down! Lie Down! Lie down! Until in the end he lies down … We get to company headquarters and it turns out he lost consciousness … and a few days later he is dead.”

Some junior commanders encouraged the brutality and even endorsed it. “After two months in Rafah a [new] commanding officer arrived … So we do a first patrol with him. It’s 6 A.M., Rafah is under curfew, there isn’t so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. He [the officer] suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He was from the combat engineers. We all run with him. He grabbed the boy. Nufar, I am a degenerate if I am not telling you the truth. He broke his hand here at the wrist. Broke his hand at the wrist, broke his leg here. And started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left. We are all there, jaws dropping, looking at him in shock … The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.” 

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This is one of the BEST talks I’ve heard in a long time.  In 35 minutes H.Y. manages to tackle the major issues facing Muslims and the world today and inspire a crowd of thousands to truly live Islam and follow Prophet Mohammad’s example in being a mercy to mankind.

I love his idea of a Social Mercy movement! And with regards to his 4th point, I think global climate change can easily fall under that.  And his final comments on sectarianism-right on!

Also, I think a lot of what he describes as his future vision for American Muslims can be expanded to Muslims around the world.

If you have 35 minutes to spare, this is a must-see/hear!