The world's double standards towards Gaza are utterly repulsive!

The world's double standards towards Gaza are utterly repulsive! - An Israeli child is killed, and the world uproars, yet over 10,000 Palestinian children are killed, and there's deafening silence! - Israel mistakenly executes three of its soldiers, and the world demands an immediate investigation. Meanwhile, the same army executes dozens of Palestinians daily without a word from this unjust world! - Hamas has dozens of captives, mostly soldiers, and the world everyday demands their release. Yet thousands of Palestinians have been imprisoned for years, and there are no calls. - The world supplies Israel with hundreds of weapon trucks while denying entry for water and milk to Gaza, letting two million Palestinians suffer in silence! - Israel kills two Palestinian Christian women in a church, and call for investigations pour in from Washington and Europe. Conversely, Israel destroys dozens of mosques with worshippers inside and burns hospitals, and Europe remains silent! This is a brutal, unjust world devoid of values and principles. I am ashamed to speak of the illusion of human rights!

 @RamAbdu on X 

The Empire Files: Abby Martin: Cconversation with Miko Peled

Love Israel, Hate Jews

The Birthright Agenda

I went on a Birthright trip when I was 20. I didn’t know anything about Israel or Palestine, and I kind of wanted to keep it that way rather than delve into what appeared to be an endlessly complicated, exasperating web of politics. I did not want to have an opinion on this; it seemed to be a subject too hopeless to be worth wading through all the controversy. But Birthright didn’t seem particularly political, and it blatantly claims not to be; it’s ten free days of traveling, fun and cultural learning in Israel for Jewish young adults. So many people I knew were coming back from these trips saying that it was the best experience of their lives. How could I say no?

What became abundantly clear – even after experiencing and seeking out so much from the pro-Israel side of things – is that Israel enacts many layers of systemic oppression and human rights violations upon the Palestinian people on a daily basis. There are sometimes violent acts of retaliation from Palestinians – in the form of Hamas rockets, stabbing attacks, all of those things the news publicizes- and these acts of violence are obviously worthy of full condemnation. But unlike what I’d assumed before, this was not a case of two sides with roughly equal power and resources that just hate each other and just hopelessly can’t coexist. In reality, this is one colonial power – a group with large sums of money and resources (largely in the form of $3.5 billion of annual aid from the U.S.) – claiming ownership over a piece of land and ethnically cleansing the population that had been there for, at the very least, many generations prior. Not only are the death tolls(especially civilian death tolls) exponentially higher when it comes to Palestinians killed by Israel than the other way around, but the actual power structure is similarly skewed. This is what the term “Israeli Occupation” refers to. It encompasses genocide, rampant violations of international law, large-scale racism, colonialism and de facto grand apartheid. All of that is the undeniably relevant context in which Birthright trips take place.

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Video: CAIR-FL Rep Joins U.S. Teen Beaten by Israelis on CNN’s ‘The Lead with Jake Tapper’

Here are 6 crazy things Israel has done to maintain racial purity

Israel bills itself as the Middle East’s only democracy, but it is increasingly clear that this label depends a lot on how you define the Middle East, and how you define democracy. Perhaps the sharpest dissonance between the description of Israel as a liberal democracy and its actual policies is the drive for racial purity.

Israel insists on being the historic homeland for the world’s Jews, something few would disagree with. But it also insists on being a Jewish-majority country, at all costs. In order to maintain its Jewish majority, it must demonize non-Jews, particularly Muslims and Christian Arabs, as “demographic threats.”

Here are six crazy things the Israeli government or the Israeli people have done to maintain this racial makeup.

1. No-Sex Contracts: In 2003, an Israeli company importing Chinese workers required them to sign a contract agreeing not to marry or have sex with any Israelis. No legal action was taken against the company, as Israel has no laws protecting workers from such demands.

2. Birth Control Without Consent: For years, the Israeli government was injecting Ethiopian Jewish immigrants with birth control, “often without their knowledge or consent.” When the practice was exposed in 2013, it was ordered to be halted.

3. Deporting Non-Jews: Anyone in the world with Jewish lineage can move to Israel and claim citizenship. But if you’re not Jewish, things can be dicey. Many refugees from African conflicts have fled to Israel to claim asylum. Israel has locked many of them into massive camps in the desert. It has granted asylum to 0.07% of those seeking it, deporting many others. NPR recently did a story on some refugees who were deported, only to be slain by ISIS.

4. Stripping Palestinians of Land Rights: The Israeli Supreme Court recently laid out two decisions essentially allowing Israel the right to demolish Palestinian communities within Israel itself—not the Occupied Territories—to clear land for Jewish Israelis.

5. Discriminatory Marriage Laws: In the United States, marriage is one of the ways a spouse can gain legal entry through a green card and citizenship. Israel prohibits its citizens from marrying Palestinians in the territories, by refusing to recognize their spouses as citizens. Israel also has no civil marriage law, leaving the institution in the hands of religious clerics who work to prevent interracial marriage.

6. Right Of Return, For Jews Only: The most systematic policy designed to maintain a Jewish majority is the Law of Return. Under this law, Jews can come to Israel from anywhere in the world and claim citizenship, but Palestinians expelled after various wars from homes that were in Israel cannot. The double standard was expressed by Ghada Karmi and Ellen Siegel, a Palestinian woman and a Jewish woman who met in London in the early 1970s. They have posed multiple times with these signs over the years:

These laws, norms, and practices form a matrix with one goal: to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel. (In the case of the birth control given to Ethiopian Jews, it was also an example of trying to maintain a certain type of Jewish majority.)

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Banksy’s Grim Tour of Gaza: Watch a Mini Documentary by the Shadowy Street Artist

The world’s most mysterious street artist released a 2-minute documentary online Wednesday that details the horrors of Gaza—allegedly shot by the man himself.

“Make this the year YOU discover a new destination.”

That welcoming tagline serves as the opening title card to a 2-minute documentary that the legendary U.K. street artist Banksy posted to his website Wednesday evening. But in typical Bansky fashion, what follows is a an eye-opening short film, Welcome to Gaza.

A man—presumably Banksy—is seen traveling by car and then climbing through what he calls “a network of illegal tunnels” before entering Gaza. The camera homes in on children playing in the rubble.

“The locals like it so much they never leave,” text says over the screen, “(because they’re not allowed to),” followed by shots of IDF soldiers.

The “tourism” video includes a statistic on Operation Protective Edge, a military operation launched by Israel in 2014 that it claims leveled 18,000 homes. Also included is footage of drone strikes—accompanied by American voices—locals voicing their disapproval at the state of things, and footage of the notoriously mysterious street artist stenciling several works on rock walls in Gaza. Banksy’s publicist Jo Brooks has confirmed that the video, as well as the four new graffiti works unveiled in Gaza, are all authentic.

“Gaza is often described as ‘the world’s largest open air prison’ because no one is allowed to enter or leave. But that seems a bit unfair to prisons—they don’t have their electricity and drinking water cut off randomly almost every day,” Banksy wrote on his website.

The video ends by focusing on a message graffiti’d in red letters on a wall:

“If we wash our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless we side with the powerful—we don’t remain neutral.”

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In Israel, only Jewish blood shocks anyone

Terror is always Palestinian, even when hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed. The name and face of Daniel Tragerman, the Israeli boy killed by mortar fire during Operation Protective Edge, were known throughout the world; even U.S. President Barack Obama knew his name. Can anyone name one child from Gaza among the hundreds killed?

A few hours after the attack in Jerusalem, journalist Emily Amrousi said at a conference in Eilat that the life of a single Jewish child was more important to her than the lives of thousands of Palestinian children. The audience’s response was clearly favorable; I think there was even some applause.

Afterward Amrousi tried to explain that she was referring to the way the Israeli media should cover events, which is only slightly less serious. This was during a discussion on the ridiculous question: “Is the Israeli media leftist?” Almost no one protested Amrousi’s remarks and the session continued as if nothing had happened. Amrousi’s words reflect Israel’s mood in 2014: Only Jewish blood elicits shock.

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