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thx ET
It is remarkable, one must say. On the other hand I would assume – outside lobotomized Germany – many universities in Europe share the criticism but keep a low profile. I mean you must be blind (or German) to not realize.
Jonathan Cook:
Why Media Have Failed Gaza
May 6, 2024
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/06/why-media-have-failed-gaza/on double standard
“(…)
Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv’s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post — apparently approvingly — a diagram showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.
Two years later, in its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.
It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks – even though those soldiers, unlike Russia’s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.
But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren’t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.
(…)”Boy the leaders of Saudi arabia really love Israel.
Saudi arrests critics of Israel as normalisation talks continue
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240502-saudi-citizens-increasingly-face-arrests-for-criticising-israel-on-social-media/And now the saudis along with other corrupted, western/israeli backed arab regimes will target… Yemen, apparently the genocide in Yemen past decade was not enough.
Exclusive: Yemen Braces For Impending Massive US-Led Air and Ground Campaign
Senior military officials in Sana’a have informed MintPress News of ongoing military preparations by the US, UK, and Saudi-led Coalition over the past two weeks. According to these sources, there are plans to initiate a significant aerial assault on the Yemeni mainland, focusing particularly on coastal regions in the west, as well as areas in the south near the Saudi border. This assault is expected to be accompanied by ground offensives carried out by factions aligned with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.Ridiculous to watch what is unfolding in Rafah, west, that hyped up this “generous offer” to Hamas for weeks, when Hamas accepted it Israel started to pound Rafah instead – and the west are nowhere to be seen. Videos are now streaming out Rafah like a reprise from past 6 months of onslaught: hospitals are attacked, patients are forced out, videos of slaughtered children.
This is what the enablers in the west and arab world triggered. If they only had the courage to stand up to Israel 40000 lives would have been saved.And just today Biden blamed the victims with the most absurd israeli hasbara lies:
https://twitter.com/SxarletRed/status/1787884148096442684The courageous jewish antiwar activist Medea Benjamin from http://codepink.org
Medea Benjamin, Gaza activist, gets extensively patted down in public #palestine #gaza #shorts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0tlI3azRvUVideo of IDF soldiers using the debunked propaganda and seems totally unconcerned that 35000 people have been killed:
https://twitter.com/medeabenjamin/status/1787886573318447468US delays report on Israel war crimes probe – Politico
The administration of US President Joe Biden is postponing a report on whether Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, Politico said on Tuesday, citing anonymous lawmakers.
For several months, the State Department has been investigating if Israel has violated international humanitarian law since the beginning of its military operation in the Palestinian enclave. Should the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) be found in violation, the usual US military assistance to the Jewish state would be at risk of drying up.
https://swentr.site/news/597190-us-israel-crimes-report/
Read that line: “whether Israel has committed war crimes
Whether!? Sickening.JACK
Germany had been investigating whether or not the US had violated Art. 51 with its Iraq invasion.The investigation took about 20 years. And I forgot how it ended. We will witness the same with Nordstream. And the same with Gaza. I assume they all pay the same special unit for investigating these matters, known to be extremely fast and efficient and truthful.
Yeah exactly, I am from a US puppet state too – Sweden – that, abruptly closed their Nordstream investigation without releasing any conclusion! And as you perhaps know Sweden recently joined Nato, the propaganda for Nato was immense which in turned scared swedes to become more positive to Nato.
And Sweden has been super quick to help, investigate and report crimes by Russia in Ukraine, 95% of the mainstream media outlets here is pro-Israel so when it comes to Gaza the same people have been dead silent with criticism, instead they have openly supported Israel and constantly use sources from Israel that is of course ridden with disinformation but they keep spreading it anyway. The prime minister of Sweden have from the start defended Israel, just some days ago he claimed that Israel’s war is just. There is also a whole lot of open islamophobia by the liberal and rightwing journalists.
And As you perhaps know, Greta Thunberg have been quite hailed in Sweden….well that was until she condemned Israel’s war. Then just over night the media/politicians began to slander and hate her, framing her as an antisemite, an extremist and even compared to Hitler by one of the biggest newspapers.
We won’t stop speaking out about Gaza’s suffering – there is no climate justice without human rights
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/05/gaza-climate-justice-human-rights-greta-thunbergThere are 8 parties in the parliament. 1 of them, a leftist party, have, sometimes, condemned Israel but is very often very passive and mute. The same leftist party support sanctions and even sending fighter jets to Ukraine.
So yeah the situation is terrible here too. Swedes are germans are quite like I assume: often believe media propaganda, often follow what the state say, absurdly pro-american and so on. And then both nations try to frame themselves as liberal, democratic, pro-rule of law, humanitarian etc.
A sick joke is what it is!Sigh, what the hell is this? General Miley defend Israel’s killing of civilians because americans….have done that too historically so US should shut up about any criticism. Then the other moron comes in and say college peace-activists are war-activists!? And note Miley’s last statement about Hamas charter.
https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1788064544406839417
No, Hamas charter do not call for jews to be killed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Hamas_charter#Rejection_of_antisemitismNorman Finkelstein spoke to the protesting students at Columbia.
Jacobin has his crisp, wise speech.“Norman Finkelstein: Build a Majority for Palestine
By Norman G. Finkelstein
Holocaust scholar and pro-Palestine activist Norman Finkelstein expresses his support for the student protests, insisting on the importance of free speech and uniting the majority of Americans around solidarity with Gaza.”
AG, the link doesn’t work, perhaps for me only. I screenshoted the error message
https://prnt.sc/8vqcYWJhNOJH
Is there any other way to get there?Tatyana, here’s the original URL:
Norman Finkelstein: Build a Majority for Palestine
archive.is seems to be having a lot of different problems recently.
Clark is correct, archive.is is having some trouble it seems.
Sometimes the link works, sometimes it doesn´t…* * *
This is another good piece on Gaza and US campus protest with some history on donors destroying higher education.
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/ghosts-of-68
The awful thing – for most of the media this happens in the shadows. They don´t see it, don´t report it, public thus never learns of it, until it´s too late.
Also with some grown-up criticism of things like BLM, linking e.g. to this:
“Why Black Lives Matter Can’t be Co-opted”
https://nonsite.org/why-black-lives-matter-cant-be-co-opted/From NLR:
“(…)
At Columbia, whose endowment is $13.6 billion, students must pay $90,000 per year plus travel expenses – a dramatic rise since the 1980s. Administrative posts and salaries have increased relative to faculty ones, and the number of non-tenured staff has grown steadily. Nationally, three-fourths of faculty are non-tenured and therefore do not have academic freedom. The privileged minority of tenured faculty did nothing to fight this trend, nor did they participate in adjunct efforts to unionize, since the current system enables them to take research leave and sabbatical. Now tenure itself – under attack from Republican politicians, trustee boards and university administrations – seems unlikely to survive. Recent years have seen an upswell of labour activism among graduate students and adjunct faculty, some of whom have managed to win collective bargaining rights, but they are a long way from re-democratizing the academy.Another crucial factor is the influence of so-called ‘shot callers’: a donor class of billionaires, often working through politicians or board members, with the power to force institutional changes or get people fired by threatening to withhold funding. As universities have become more like corporations, whose primary duties are to their shareholders, administrators have become increasingly pliant before donors and their representatives. Presidents can be forced to resign even when they have strong support from students and faculty, as at Harvard; or, conversely, they can ignore significant internal opposition because their outside backers, as at Columbia. (One of the main shot callers there is Democratic donor Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who responded to the protests by revoking a donation and taking out full-page advertisements in major newspapers which denounced ‘antisemitic hate’ and demanded greater ‘protection’ on campuses.)
(…)”Palestinian statehood – emergency vote tomorrow (10 May):
Al Jazeera live update
– “…contacts between Ireland and Spain, and between Slovenia and Malta, had intensified with a view to the countries jointly recognising Palestinian statehood.”
Jeffrey Sachs and Sybil Fares at al Jazeera:
Peace starts with Palestine’s UN membership– “According to Article 4 of the UN Charter, admission is effected by a decision of the General Assembly following a recommendation of the Security Council. On April 18, the Security Council’s vote on Palestinian membership was vetoed by the US, but with 12 out of the 15 council members voting in favour. The UK abstained, as if it’s not already made enough of a mess in the region. Because of the US veto, the General Assembly will take up the issue during an Emergency Special Session on May 10. This vote will show an overwhelming support of Palestine’s membership. It will then be taken up again by the Security Council.”
Jack, thank you very much for the link to the Wikipedia article about the updated and current Hamas Charter. I must inform my MP of this.
The RTE (Irish braodcaster) report on recognising the Palestinian state is here.
I wonder if a two state solution is actually viable (as opposed to a single state solution). However, the media noise that may be created by this move might help move things forward. I am certain the Israeli ambassador to Ireland (and the other states) will have something vile and cringe worthy to say.
Voting on granting Palestine full UN membership tomorrow.
Palestinians seek UN General Assembly backing for full membershipUNITED NATIONS, May 6 (Reuters) – The United Nations General Assembly could vote on Friday on a draft resolution that would recognize the Palestinians as qualified to become a full U.N. member and recommend that the U.N. Security Council “reconsider the matter favorably.”
Israel, US, 99% of Europe, and some other nations will of course vote no.
143 (of 193 nations) already recognize Palestine (Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem) as a state:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_the_State_of_Palestine
Jack, eight EU member states already recognise Palestine as a sovereign state including Sweden. If Ireland, Spain, Norway, Slovenia and Malta + possibly Belgium vote to do so tomorrow we are approaching 50% of EU member states.
Norway is not EU member but is part of the EU association area.The onslaught is going on repeat, how many times have we not heard this:
WHO: Rafah’s hospitals will run out of fuel in 3 days
The World Health Organization says it has only three days of fuel for its medical operations in southern Gaza, with shortages already forcing one of three remaining hospitals in the city of Rafah to shut down.https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/8/hospitals-in-south-gaza-running-out-of-fuel-who-warns
Still the world will not act and stop the human suffering even though we all know what the result of this would be for the patients at the hospitals.
Netanyahu is obviously a maniac that only knows violence thus should he should be subdued with violence by the outside world.
After Biden warns of weapons shipment freeze, Netanyahu shares speech in English: Int’l pressure won’t prevent Israel from defending itself
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-09/ty-article-live/biden-u-s-will-halt-arms-shipments-to-israel-if-it-goes-ahead-with-rafah-invasion/0000018f-5b18-d65e-a9cf-dfb8da4c0000?liveBlogItemId=1785362587#1785362587From German daily SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG, May 9th
“(…)
What critics of Israel are allowed to do
They are even allowed to paralyze the university for days on end. The talk of restricted freedom of expression in Germany misses the point.
by Ronen SteinkeAll those who believe that it is not safe to talk about Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in Germany, that one cannot freely criticize the Israeli government, and certainly that one cannot talk as openly as necessary about the Israeli army’s “genocide” in Gaza in the country of the former main perpetrators of the Holocaust – after this week, all of them are once again recognizable as self-pitying exaggerators.
What can you do in this country? Well, a protest at the Free University (FU) in Berlin has shown it. In this country, you can vilify the whole of Israel as a “colonial project”, you can chant “Fuck you, Israel!” in chorus, you can demand that the university boycott all Israelis “academically and culturally”.
should boycott all Israelis.
You can do this as loudly as you like, even as agitated as you can and perhaps should be and perhaps should be in view of the blatant injustice of Israeli military strikes on civilian targets in the Gaza Strip.You can even go so far as to call for an “intifada” against Israel from Berlin, i.e. for a violent uprising – and no police officer will come to the German capital and snatch the megaphone out of your hand. That’s how far freedom of opinion goes in the state of the Basic Law. That’s how far open debate goes. And that is the intention: If freedom of opinion only applied would only apply to those who have balanced, historically differentiated, moderate opinions, then we might as well leave it alone.
A university management exercises its domiciliary rights – this is not repression.
In Germany, you can see how a university management looks at this protest for quite some time – until at some point, when demonstrators also break open locked lecture halls and smash fire alarms, they exercise their domiciliary rights. And how the police then – only then! – disperse the demonstration, as is their duty. Just as the police do at the request of the university management when other campus blockades turn into crimes. Regardless of the political issue. Climate protests, tuition fee protests, the FU is rich in history.
You can still see a mayor of Berlin puffing out his cheeks afterwards and saying that “anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel” are “not expressions of opinion, but criminal offenses”. But that is fake news. Anti-Semitism is not a criminal offense simply because of the many debates about where it begins in individual cases (it’s no different with racism and sexism, by the way). Apart from the fact that attitudes are never justiciable anyway. Only when there is a specific call for violence is the borderline reached with incitement to hatred.
And finally: you can see how even 120 very, very indulgent “teachers at Berlin universities” publicly address the university management with a statement in which they wish that the university management had shown more patience. Mind you, “regardless of whether we agree with the specific demands of the protest camp”. They demand that those students who have been caught committing acts of violence should not be subjected to criminal proceedings at all.(…)”
The author: born in 1983, studied law and criminology, doctorate in international criminal law. Since 2011 at the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in between guest researcher at the Fritz Bauer Institute for Holocaust Research. Book author. Otto Brenner Prize.
A strongly worded piece critical of US, UK and Germany from one of Ireland’s respected political journalists US, UK and Germany have sown the shame of their nations in Gaza’s blood-drenched soil.
“When historians sit down to write the record of Israel’s current bombardment of Gaza, the biggest puzzle they will have to address is why other powerful, self-congratulatory democracies stood by and watched 14,500 children – the death toll at the end of April – being slaughtered. Sorry, scratch the words “stood by”. The US, the UK, Germany and assorted strongman states have encouraged and armed the military onslaught on 2.3 million people trapped in the tiny Palestinian territory.”
Good point by Craig Mokhiber:
I’ve never heard any of these critics claim that it’s wrong for students to protest Iran, or Sudan, or Myanmar, or Russia because it “might make people feel uncomfortable or unsafe.” It’s a lie. And we have no duty to protect to the feelings of people supporting
https://twitter.com/CraigMokhiber/status/1787969651185479858
Right? But when it comes to Israel, oh then the rules area somehow different. Poor pro-israeli jews could get offended, be triggered at the campuses. Sigh.
Craig was of course the top UN official that stepped down early on in the war protesting the war, genocide:
Top UN official in New York steps down citing ‘genocide’ of Palestinian civilians
Craig Mokhiber, director of human rights body, accuses the US, UK and much of Europe as ‘wholly complicit in the horrific assault’UN General assembly vote for Palestinian UN memembership with 143 votes of 193. The despicable west at large abstained.
The assembly adopted a resolution on Friday with 143 votes in favour and nine against – including the US and Israel – while 25 countries abstained. It does not give the Palestinians full UN membership, but simply recognises them as qualified to join.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/10/un-general-assembly-backs-palestinian-bid-for-membership
Alhough the final decision is made by UNSC with the americans that will block the call.143 states formally recognise Palestine before this vote today, and 143 voted yes in this vote. The UN website hasn’t published the full voting record as yet and I can’t find it anywhere else. It’s got to be available somewhere, or the news sites wouldn’t be able to say who voted what way. The 25 who abstained plus the 9 that voted sums to 34. Where were the other 16 countries? Do some of them not have a vote, or were they just absent?
short and to the point:
“Prof. Amos Goldberg: ‘Yes, It Is Genocide’ –
In most cases of genocide, the perpetrators of the murder said they were acting in self-defense. The fact that what is happening in Gaza does not resemble the Holocaust, writes Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, does not mean that it is not genocide.”
https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/10/prof-amos-goldberg-yes-it-is-genocide/
