Politics

NOVANEWS The City of Ann Arbor's Human Rights Commission (HRC) was created in 1970 to, among other things, "Investigate, study, hold hearings and make recommendations to City Council regarding complaints from any class or group protected under the human rights ordinance" (Ann Arbor City Code §1:222(b)) The City has gradually gotten out of the human rights business by all but dropping "human rights" from the text of the relevant city code section (Chapter 112) and by eliminating the City's Human Rights department (HRD), which had several duties including providing staff support to the HRC, whose members are unpaid volunteers. It is probably not coincidental that the HRD was eliminated after the HRC, led by Helen Fox and a Palestinian, Hani Bawardi, showed great courage and integrity in 2003...

NOVANEWS Henry Siegman: Israel is ‘the only apartheid regime in the Western world’ by Adam Horowitz This is from Henry Siegman in The Nation. Just a reminder, Siegman was Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, and has been connected to the Council on Foreign Relations. If there’s ever been a sign the times are changing. Siegman: Israel’s relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possib...

NOVANEWS     1 January 2010 By Amira Hass The two Palestinian governments continue to infringe on the rights of Gazans to medical treatment. They are still quarreling over the details of a compromise in principle brokered by public figures and independent Palestinian organizations. According to the proposed compromise, Bassem Naim, the health minister in Gaza, is to reinstate the officials who answer to Ramallah, whom he dismissed from the department for referrals abroad. His counterpart from Ramallah, Palestinian Authority Health Minister Fathi Abu Maghli, is to establish a committee of independent doctors to assure transparency in the referral of patients. The crisis started in March when Egypt - acting on a demand from Ramallah - denied entry to patients whose referrals for treatment ...

NOVANEWS January 1, 2010 We, international delegates meeting in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March 2009 in collective response to an initiative from the South African delegation, state: In view of: · Israel's ongoing collective punishment of Palestinians through the illegal occupation and siege of Gaza; · the illegal occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the continued construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements; · the new Wall under construction by Egypt and the US which will tighten even further the siege of Gaza; · the contempt for Palestinian democracy shown by Israel, the US, Canada, the EU and others after the Palestinian elections of 2006; · the war crimes committed by Israel during the invasion of Gaza one year ago; · the continuing discriminatio...

NOVANEWS  Youtube: Chuck Carlson & friends protest John Hagee’s warmongering ministry 10-18-2009: Six Years of Vigils in Front of Christian Zionist Churches   By Charles E. Carlson “A Night to Honor Israel” at Symphony Hall in Phoenix, Arizona, may have been our best Project Strait Gate Vigil ever. Many of the now almost 65 efforts stand out in particular ways … this one was special because it was the easiest vigil we ever did. People came to help without the customary arm twisting and cajoling. Most came because of the frustrations they felt in their own churches, several from out of town. Watch some of it on You Tube, and then come back and read about where we plan to go from here.  We conducted our first vigil on November 10, 2002. Eleven conservatively dressed protesters s...

NOVANEWS Zionist War Criminal Ehud Olmert Owned By SF Citizens Bay Area residents attempted a citizen’s arrest of former Zio-Nazi Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, while he gave a speech to the World Affairs Council in San Francisco on 22 October 2009. Twenty-two people were arrested for challenging Olmert directly and demanding he be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Olmert has also faced protests at Tulane University, University of Kentucky and the University of Chicago. The recent International Independent Fact-Finding Mission, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone, found evidence that Israel had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during a three-week long attack on the Gaza Strip last winter, killing more than 1,400 Palestinians,...

Press NOVANEWS Haaretz Searing its own consciousness Akiva Eldar   According to the new-old fashion of thinking in Jerusalem, by the time these words appear in print, a divine voice will have emanated from the Prime Minister's Bureau to ridicule the American intelligence assessment that Iran has yet to give the go-ahead for the manufacture of a nuclear bomb. An industrious bureaucrat will naturally begin digging up dirt on U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. With a little luck, it will emerge that he is in fact a convert from Judaism - just another self-hating Jew. After all, everyone knows that the Iranians are making a fool of President Barack Obama and that the bomb is already ticking. It is a shame we cannot summon this Blair for clarifications along ...

From FreeGaza.org Today Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel. “This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip,” said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. “President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that’s exactly what we tried to do. We’re asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey.” Accordi...

NOVANEWS THE Middle East peace process is finished. It did not die: it was killed. Mahmoud Ab-Ass was undermined by the President of the Palestinian Authority and humiliated by the Zionist Prime Minister of ‘Israel’. His successor awaits a similar fate. The Zionist regime continues to mock its American patron, building illegal settlements in cynical disregard of the "Road Map." The President of the United States of America has been reduced to a ventriloquist's dummy, pitifully reciting the Zionist’s cabinet line: "It's all Arafat's fault." Zionist’s themselves grimly await the next bomber. Palestinian Arabs, corralled into shrinking Bantustans, subsist on EU handouts. On the corpse-strewn landscape of the Fertile Crescent, Olmert, Ab-ass , can claim victory, and they do. Have we reached th...

NOVANEWS           If I were a Palestinian   By Akiva Eldar         In a moment of candor, Ehud Barak once said: "If I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would join, at some point, one of the terrorist groups."If I were a Palestinian, of any age, I would declare an all-out war on all terrorist groups and fulfill the demand of the Jews to recognize the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people. Furthermore, as a present on the birthday of the Jewish people, as it completes 61 years of existence, I would announce that I also respect its Declaration of Independence of May 14, 1948. I would do this on the condition that all the state's principles, to the last one, apply to the territories controlled by the Jewish state - to ev...