Palestinians march to commemorate al-Nakba, in Bethlehem, Palestine, May 14, 2013. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler / Activestills.org)
Glenn Greenwald shreds Bill Maher on US intervention in Muslim countries
Last night I was on Bill Maher’s HBO show “Real Time”. There have always been numerous views of Maher’s with which I agree. But he has become one of the most vocal and extreme advocates of the view that - while religion generally should be criticized - Islam is a uniquely threatening and destructive force and that Muslims are uniquely oppressive and violent, and that mentality has infected many of his policy views (see here and here for some comprehensive background; just two weeks ago, he had a fairly typical outburst on this topic). When I was scheduled to do the show, I was hoping that the opportunity would arise to debate these views (or that I could create the opportunity), and last night it did.
In this photo collage: Dozens of Palestinians including three photojournalists that were detained by Israeli forces yesterday at the Jerusalem Day March, May 8, 2013.
Photos by: Oren Ziv, Yotam Ronen, Anne Paq / Activestills.org
See also: “La-La, Mohammed’s dead” Group of Israelis celebrating Jerusalem Day
While inside the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, they sang:
He’s not a prophet,
Just another Arab,
He’s got a moustache full of lice,
he sells goat cheese,
a construction worker,
even when he fasts on Ramadan,
he has an orange ID,
Mohammed’s a homo son of a bitch!
Slaughter the Arabs
Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president’s conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres’s 90th birthday.
Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.
Hawking’s decision marks another victory in the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions targeting Israeli academic institutions.
In April the Teachers’ Union of Ireland became the first lecturers’ association in Europe to call for an academic boycott of Israel, and in the United States members of the Association for Asian American Studies voted to support a boycott, the first national academic group to do so.
In the four weeks since Hawking’s participation in the Jerusalem event was announced, he has been bombarded with messages from Britain and abroad as part of an intense campaign by boycott supporters trying to persuade him to change his mind. In the end, Hawking told friends, he decided to follow the advice of Palestinian colleagues who unanimously agreed that he should not attend.
Hawking’s decision met with abusive responses on Facebook, with many commentators focusing on his physical condition, and some accusing him of antisemitism.
By participating in the boycott, Hawking joins a small but growing list of British personalities who have turned down invitations to visit Israel, including Elvis Costello, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, Annie Lennox and Mike Leigh.
However, many artists, writers and academics have defied and even denounced the boycott, calling it ineffective and selective. Ian McEwan, who was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 2011, responded to critics by saying: “If I only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out of bed … It’s not great if everyone stops talking.”
Noam Chomsky, a prominent supporter of the Palestinian cause, has said that he supports the “boycott and divestment of firms that are carrying out operations in the occupied territories” but that a general boycott of Israel is “a gift to Israeli hardliners and their American supporters”.
Hawking has visited Israel four times in the past. Most recently, in 2006, he delivered public lectures at Israeli and Palestinian universities as the guest of the British embassy in Tel Aviv. At the time, he said he was “looking forward to coming out to Israel and the Palestinian territories and excited about meeting both Israeli and Palestinian scientists”.
Since then, his attitude to Israel appears to have hardened. In 2009, Hawking denounced Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza, telling Riz Khan on Al-Jazeera that Israel’s response to rocket fire from Gaza was “plain out of proportion … The situation is like that of South Africa before 1990 and cannot continue.”
Israel Maimon, chairman of the presidential conference said: “This decision is outrageous and wrong.
“The use of an academic boycott against Israel is outrageous and improper, particularly for those to whom the spirit of liberty is the basis of the human and academic mission. Israel is a democracy in which everyone can express their opinion, whatever it may be. A boycott decision is incompatible with open democratic discourse.”
In 2011, the Israeli parliament passed a law making a boycott call by an individual or organisation a civil offence which can result in compensation liable to be paid regardless of actual damage caused. It defined a boycott as “deliberately avoiding economic, cultural or academic ties with another person or another factor only because of his ties with the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control, in such a way that may cause economic, cultural or academic damage”
Related: An Israeli law centre has since released a statement suggesting Professor Stephen Hawking cuts off the computer-based system which he relies on to communicate.
“His whole computer-based communications system runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team. I suggest if he truly wants to pull out of Israel he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet,” said Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of Shurat HaDin.
Poll: Is Stephen Hawking right to join the academic boycott of Israel?
Follow @iyad_elbaghdadi / #ArabTyrantManual
Related:
- Sami Kishawi: “Genuinely disgusted by pro-Assad thugs who say they also support Palestine against Israel’s oppression. Don’t need your backward support.”
- Airstrike carried out by Bashar al-Assad’s forces on a mosque in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Syria [extremely graphic]
- [Extremely graphic] Videos and photos from #MassaceofBaniyas, in which Assad’s forces executed at least 62 Muslims, 14 of whom were children; Victims were stabbed and shot, women found mutilated, toddlers covered in burns
- Assad’s soldiers force Muslim man to prostrate to poster of him and call their leader his G-d
We’re changing the name ‘Palestinian Territories’ to ‘Palestine’ across our products. We consult a number of sources and authorities when naming countries. In this case, we are following the lead of the UN … and other international organisations.
Google spokesman Nathan Tyler confirms the Internet giant’s recognition of the Palestinians’ upgraded UN status
The domain name www.google.ps, Google’s search engine for the territories, now brings up a homepage with “Palestine” written underneath the Google logo.
The UN General Assembly in November upgraded Palestine to the status of non-member observer state by a vote of 138 votes in favour, nine against and 41 abstentions.
Palestinian authorities have since begun to use the “State of Palestine” in diplomatic correspondence and issued official stamps for the purpose.
Israel however questioned the move, saying that it raised questions about the multinational company’s involvement in international politics.
“This change raises questions about the reasons behind this surprising involvement of what is basically a private Internet company in international politics, and on the controversial side,” Yigal Palmor Isreal foreign ministry spokesman told AFP news agency.
First the United Nations, now Google. On Thursday, the Palestine News Network noticed that the Internet giant had changed the tagline for the Palestinian edition of its search engine, Google.ps, from the “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine.” The decision comes after a November vote by the U.N. General Assembly to recognize Palestine as a non-member state over the objections of Israel and the United States.
Here’s how Google.ps looked earlier this year, according to the Wayback Machine Internet archive. The gray words in Arabic below the word “Google” say, “Palestinian Territories.”
And here’s how the same page looks today, with the word “Palestine” instead:
The change is obviously a minor one, but within the context of the fraught politics of the Middle East, Google’s decision could be interpreted as a victory for advocates of Palestinian statehood who supported Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent decision to circumvent the long-stalled, U.S.-supported peace process with Israel.
Since the beginning of the settlement enterprise, Israel has not constructed advanced regional wastewater treatment plants in the West Bank settlements as it has done inside Israel. Only 81 of the 121 settlements are connected to wastewater treatment facilities, and even these are outdated, frequently malfunction and shut down, and are not able to treat the necessary amount of sewage. Of the 17.5 million cubic meters of wastewater created annually by the settlements, 5.5 mcm flow as raw sewage into West Bank streams and riverbeds. The Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection has failed to take serious enforcement actions against settlements.
[…]
The first victims of the neglect of wastewater treatment are Palestinians, primarily residents of small towns and villages, who depend on water from natural sources - springs and wells - whose pollution causes disease and harms crops. Because settlements are generally at higher altitudes, their untreated wastewater flows down to nearby Palestinian communities.
Photograph: A Palestinian farmer checks his destroyed crop as raw sewage from the illegal Jewish settlement of Elon Moreh flows through his olive grove, close to the Palestinian village of Deir al-Hatab in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, October 26, 2010. The Israeli army regular denies residents access to the grove for ‘security reasons’, despite the land and all surrounding areas belonging to Palestinians. The residents discovered thousands of destroyed olive trees on this rare occasion that they were allowed to enter their own farmland. (Getty Images)
(Reuters) - Israeli soldiers evicted several hundred Bedouins from a village in the occupied West Bank on Monday after the army declared the area a live-fire training zone.
The residents of Wadi al-Maleh, a village mostly inhabited by shepherds in the arid area bordering Jordan, had almost all left their homes by an evening curfew and retreated to neighbouring villages, Aref Daraghmeh, a local leader, told Reuters.
The displacement coincided with several demolitions of Arab properties in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which come as the United States is trying to revive stalled peace.
In January, villagers received a similar eviction order and left without resisting, only to return after 48 hours. Almost all of their 90 buildings, including shelters for their animals, were demolished in 2010, local rights groups said.
Israeli soldiers prevented outsiders, including journalists, from entering the area, saying it was a “closed military zone”.
“It should be emphasised that these structures, located in closed military zones actively used by the IDF, are illegal in nature…the residents of these illegal structures have been requested in advance to vacate the premises voluntarily,” an Israeli Defence Forces spokesperson said.
“This drill is a part of the IDF’s pre-planned yearly exercise schedule,” the spokesperson said.
Wadi al-Maleh is located in “Area C,” a swath of land making up two-thirds of the West Bank under full Israeli control and where most [illegal] Jewish settlements are located.
Half a million settlers live [illegally] in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, territory captured in the 1967 Middle East War which Palestinians want for a future state.
Israeli army firing zones comprise 18 percent of the West Bank, roughly the same size of “Area A,” the land including major cities and towns which is under full Palestinian control.
According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 5,000 Palestinians in 38 herding communities live on army firing zones, along with several sprawling Jewish settlements and farms.
Besides al-Maleh, 12 Bedouin villages throughout the length of the Jordan Valley have received eviction orders since 1999, according to the Association for Human Rights in Israel.
The International Court of Justice and most governments deem Jewish settlements in the West Bank illegal. Israel disputes this and cites Biblical and historical links to the land.
Israeli authorities razed two family homes in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of al-Tur on Monday morning, displacing 18 Palestinians who failed to acquire elusive building permits, local officials said.
The army also demolished a well near a Palestinian refugee camp south of the city of Hebron and cleared an agricultural area of dozens of olive trees east of Bethlehem, according to Palestinian government media.
Israeli officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on those incidents.
Israel airport security ‘allowed to read tourists’ email’
JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli security officials at Ben Gurion airport are legally allowed to demand access to tourists’ email accounts and deny them entry if they refuse, the country’s top legal official said on Wednesday.
Details of the policy were laid out by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein in a written response to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the group said in a statement.
In June 2012, ACRI’s Lila Margalit wrote to the attorney general demanding clarification following media reports about security officials demanding access to tourists’ email accounts before allowing them into the country.
“In a response dated April 24, 2013, the attorney general’s office confirmed this practice,” ACRI said, quoting sections of the document which said it was only done in exceptional cases where “relevant suspicious signs” were evident and only done with the tourist’s “consent”.
“However, the attorney general’s office also noted that while a tourist may refuse such a search, ‘it will be made clear to him that his refusal will be taken into consideration along with other relevant factors, in deciding whether to allow him entry to Israel’,” it continued.
ACRI slammed the policy as a “drastic invasion of privacy” heaping scorn on the idea a tourist could freely give their consent while facing the threat of possible deportation if they refused.
“A tourist who has just spent thousands of dollars to travel to Israel, only to be interrogated at the airport by Shin Bet (domestic security) agents and told to grant access to their email account, is in no position to give free and informed consent,” Margalit said.
“Such ‘consent’ — given under threat of deportation — cannot serve as a basis for such a drastic invasion of privacy,” she said.
“Allowing security agents to take such invasive measures at their own discretion and on the basis of such flimsy ‘consent’ is not befitting of a democracy.”
