Campaigns

NOVANEWS   Avi Shlaim is relatively sound on Israeli political history and pretty unsound on quite a few other things, among them Zionism, a solution to the conflict, and the Nakba. Although The Iron Wall is a pretty good book, I consider him something close to providing flak for the Zionist entity. In that respect, I just finished reading Shlaim’s recent article on The Hill, “Obama and Israel: The pessimistic perspective a couple days ago.” The article gets everything wrong—Shlaim’s mind is not a sharp cutting instrument. He starts by taking standard IR analytical units, nation-states, and tells his readers in Washington, D.C. that the “American-Israeli special relationship is a classic example of the tail that wags the dog.” These terms obscure more than they reveal, in part because they...

NOVANEWS 27 December 2010 Boycott! Supporting the Palestinian BDS Call from Within Dear Thomas Quasthoff, We are a group of Israeli citizens, writing in support of the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine's (BRICUP) open letter to you. We support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it abides by international law and ceases its systematic violations of Palestinian human rights; as such, we would like to share with you our concerns regarding your scheduled performances in Israel and urge you to cancel them.   BDS is a rapidly growing non-violent, human-rights based Palestinian-led movement. It was launched by over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations, and amongst its many worldwide supporters – including director...

NOVANEWS   By: Tony Greenstein City's deputy mayor initiated bonfire of missionary-distributed material, held next to a synagogue in town. 20.05.08. Associated Press Orthodox Jews set fire to hundreds of copies of the New Testament in the latest act of violence against Christian missionaries in the Holy Land. Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon said missionaries recently entered a neighborhood in the predominantly religious town of 34,000 in central Israel, distributing hundreds of New Testaments and missionary material. After receiving complaints, Aharon said, he got into a loudspeaker car last Thursday and drove through the neighborhood, urging people to turn over the material to Jewish religious students who went door to door to collect it. "The books were dumped into a pile and set afir...

NOVANEWS It is ironical, given that fundamentalist Christians are those who are most supportive of Israel and the Zionists. Ironical because within Orthodox Judaism there is a virulent anti-Christian strain. Of course some of this was understandable, given the existence of Christian anti-Semitism you might think, but in fact Talmudic anti-Christian sentiments were a product of the Jews' historic social roles as traders. The contempt for Christianity was on a par with the contempt that the rich have for the poor, in other words a distorted form of class hatred at a time when Jews were, in Abram Leon's words [The Jewish Question, A Marxist Interpretation] a People-Class. As chance would have it, I was having a debate over this very topic. As is well known the Talmud holds that there is a dif...

NOVANEWS December 13, 2010 Israel President Shimon Peres is agonizing over the recent racist document produced by several dozen State-paid rabbis. He understands it's terrible publicity. But he also understands that the rabbis can't be fired, because what they propose is basically what Israel was built on: denying Palestinian Arabs a place on earth.The affair broke out on Dec. 7 when some 36 rabbis signed a letter calling on their flocks not to sell or rent apartments to non-Jews -- meaning, in an Israeli context, basically Arabs. By Dec. 9, two separate developments had taken place: on the one hand, secular Israeli Jewish politicians were quick to denounce the rabbis; on the other hand, some 240 other religious figures expressed their support for the racist ruling. Now for all the discla...

NOVANEWS Conference Report - START ‘Squaring the Circle? Britain and the De-Legitimisation of Israel’ - Henry Jackson Society, Just Journalism and Jewish Chronicle Key-Note Conference London UK December 2010 After passing through heavy security requiring IDs, questions about organisational/political affiliation and how far they had travelled about 200 people gathered in a synagogue in Bayswater London to attend a key-note UK Pro-Zionist meeting on how to counter the ‘de-legitimisation’ of the Zio=Nazi state. The audience was very largely composed of senior citizens and the late middle-aged.  There were few young people. Zio-Nazi’s Ambassador to the UK -Ron Prosser- opened the meeting.  In his view, Zionist'sIsr adversaries in the UK were ‘crossing the red line every day’. By this he explai...

NOVANEWS Israel Effectively Denies Palestinian Victims of Operation Cast Lead Access to Justice: PCHR files petition to Israeli High Court of Justice Tuesday, 21 December 2010 11:00   Ref: 112/2010   Today, 21 December 2010, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is filing a petition to the Israeli High Court of Justice against Israel's State Attorney on behalf of 1,046 victims of Israel’s 27 December 2008 – 18 January 2009 offensive on the Gaza Strip (Operation Cast Lead). The petition requests that the High Court of Justice (HCJ) order the State Attorney to refrain from raising a claim under the statute of limitations in future civil suits brought before Israeli courts. According to PCHR, the right of access to the courts demands that the statute of limitations...

    NOVANEWS modernityblog  21/12/2010   Tags: Anti-Muslim Bigots, Anti-Muslim Racism, EDL, English Defence League, Far Right,Leicester 2010, neo-fascism, Neo-Nazi, Racism | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/p4XPG-2Cv   In Britain, the elites often use understatement in English to convey their meaning or downplay a problem so the winter chaos is really just seen as a "little problem". International conflicts can be conveyed as "a temporary difficulty", normally this would not be a problem but BBC News has taken it one step further. For the BBC News, the neofascists in the EDL are "controversial". Instead of being racist thugs, the BBC News now calls them an "anti-Islamist group". Any competent journalist, or those able to access the Internet, would realis...

NOVANEWS   On Adeeb Abu Rahmah’s release More Recent Articles Search The Only Democracy?   By Rebecca Vilkomerson  Video of Adeeb Abu Rahmah being released     On a personal note, I remember very clearly the weekend that Adeeb was arrested. I was still living in Israel, and a friend from Anarchists Against the Wall was arrested  with him.  This friend was detained for over 24 hours, blindfolded, etc.  This was fairly harsh treatment for a Jewish Israeli, and he told me all about it on our way to visit:  Tristan Anderson. It’s still amazing to me to think that Adeeb spent a year and a half in jail for doing EXACTLY what an Israeli spent 24 hours in jail for. It’s so thrilling to see him at home, but so infuriating that he was there at all…. Here’s P...

NOVANEWS         Between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, over 1400 Palestinians were killed by Zio=Nazi in a brutal HOLOCAUST  on the Gaza Strip, destroying lives and infrastructure. Two years on, Gaza’s infrastructure has still not been repaired  due to Zio=Nazi’s blockade. Families are still living in tents. UN schools are unable to rebuild as Zio=Nazi blocks concrete and building supplies.   Vigil outside the Zio=Nazi Embassy, London, 27 December 1-3pm to mark the second anniversary of the start of  the  HOLOCAUST.   Join us, and bring family and   friends, to send a clear message – * END THE Zio=Nazi SIEGE ON GAZA! FREE PALESTINE!