If you listened to some leaders, you'd think Gaza was occupying Israel

Responses to five commonly heard pro-war talking points.

1) CLAIM: Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.RESPONSE: Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested. Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate. In contrast, … with the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations. 

Noura Erakat (July 22, 2014) Five Israeli Talking Points Debunked, The Nation 

2) CLAIM: Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.RESPONSE:  Although in 2005 Israel removed approximately 8000 Jewish settlers who had been living in illegal colonies in Gaza under then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s so-called “disengagement” plan, Israel continues to exercise "unconsented-to effective control," the legal definition for qualifying as an occupying power. Israel continues to control Gaza’s airspace, coastline, and all of its entry and exit points except for one controlled by Egypt, which has cooperated with Israel in maintaining the siege and blockade of Gaza. This status has been affirmed by the Red Cross, Amnesty International, the U.N., and the U.S. State Department, among others.  

Institute for Middle East Understanding (July 31, 2014) Fact check: Israeli claims about the assault on Gaza

3) CLAIM: Gaza proves there can be no Palestinian stateRESPONSE: To grasp the perversity of using Gaza as an explanation for why Israel can’t risk a Palestinian state, it helps to realize that Sharon withdrew Gaza’s settlers in large measure because he didn’t want a Palestinian state.

Peter Beinart (July 30, 2014) What American Jews Haven’t Been Told About Gaza, Ha'aretz   

4) CLAIM: Hamas started this latest assault
RESPONSE: Israel’s assault on Gaza, as pointed out by analyst Nathan Thrall in the New York Times, was not triggered by Hamas’ rockets directed at Israel but by Israel’s determination to bring down the Palestinian unity government that was formed in early June, even though that government was committed to honoring all of the conditions imposed by the international community for recognition of its legitimacy.

Henry Siegman (July 22, 2014) Israel provoked this war. It's up to President Obama to stop it. Politico

 

5) CLAIM: Israel is acting under self defense. RESPONSE: All nations have a right of self-defense, including Israel. But that right may be exercised lawfully only in limited circumstances. Israel cannot validly claim self-defense in its recent onslaught against Gaza for two main reasons.

First…Israel remains an occupying power under international law, bound to protect the occupied civilian population. Israel can use force to defend itself, but no more than is necessary to quell disturbances. Hence this is not a war – rather, it is a top military power unleashing massive firepower against a penned and occupied Palestinian population. Second, self-defense cannot be claimed by a state that initiates violence, as Israel did in its crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank, arresting more than 400, searching 2,200 homes and other sites, and killing at least nine Palestinians.  
George Bisharat (July 22, 1014) Israel Has Overreacted to the Threats It Provoked The New York Times

Israel's historic use of human shields and war crimes

The use of civilian human shields is prohibited by Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel ratified this convention in 1951.

Israeli forces have a long history of using Palestinian civilians as human shields. From the years 2000 to 2005, they admitted to using human shields more than 1,200 times. This practice was banned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2005, but human rights groups have accused the Israeli army of continuing to use it. During the Gaza massacre of 2008-2009 Israeli occupation forces were accused by Amnesty International, as well as former Israeli soldiers, of using Palestinian children as human shields. It continues till today

 The argument that Hamas is using human shields has no weight. There is no evidence that this is actually occurring en masse. Gaza is tiny. It is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. There is no place where Hamas could stockpile arms away from a population centre. Furthermore, the Israeli army continually uses human shields. Israel is so militarised that nearly every Israeli bus or fast-food joint has armed soldiers – soldiers are ubiquitous in Israeli society.

• The Israeli army has killed more than 1700 Palestinians so far in this latest reckless adventure Operation Protective edge .According to the United Nations, approximately 80% of those killed are civilians.
• A UN agency is housing 167 269 displaced Palestinians.
• Rocket fire from Gaza has killed two Israeli civilians and a Thai migrant worker.
• About 64 Israeli soldiers have been killed in combat, all as a result of the army’s ground invasion.
• More Gazan children were killed in the first week of bombing than the total number of Israelis killed by Hamas rockets in the past 13 years.
• Israel has bombed schools, hospitals, a clinic for the disabled, a UN refugee centre and more. You do the maths.

Rule 156 War crimes ,who is funding them?

Dear friends,

As a new round of violence kicks off in Israel-Palestine and more children are killed, it's not enough just to call for another ceasefire. It’s time to take definitive non-violent action to end this decades long nightmare. 

Our governments have failed -- while they have talked peace and passed UN resolutions, they and our companies have continued to aid, trade and invest in the violence. The only way to stop this hellish cycle of Israel confiscating Palestinian lands, daily collective punishment of innocent Palestinian families, Hamas firing rockets, and Israel bombing Gaza is to make the economic cost of this conflict too high to bear. 

We know it works -- when EU countries issued guidelines not to fund the illegal Israeli settlements it caused an earthquake in the cabinet, and when citizens successfully persuaded a Dutch pension fund, PGGM, to withdraw, it created a political storm.

This may not feel like a direct way to stop the current killing, but history tells us that raising the financial cost of oppression can pave a path to peace. Click to call on 6 key banks, pension funds and businesses to pull out -- If we all take smart action now and turn up the heat, they could withdraw, the Israeli economy will take a hit, and we can turn the calculation of the extremists politically profiting from this hell upside down:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/israel_palestine_this_is_how_it_ends_short/?tbFFtbb

In the last five weeks three Israeli teenagers were murdered in the West Bank, a Palestinian boy was burnt alive, an American kid was brutally beaten up by Israeli police, and now over 40 Gazan kids have died in Israeli air strikes. This is not the “Middle East conflict”, it's becoming a war on children. And we are becoming numb to this global shame. 

The media makes out like this is an intractable conflict between two equal warring parties, but it is not. Palestinian extremists' attacks on innocent civilians must be condemned and ended but the root of the conflict lies elsewhere -- in the dispossession of the Palestinian people. Israel currently occupies, colonises, bombs, raids, and controls the water, trade and the borders of a legally free nation that has been recognised by the United Nations. In Gaza, Israel has created the largest open-air prison in the world, and then blockaded it. Now as bombs fall, the families, literally have no way to get out. 

These are war crimes and we wouldn't accept that anywhere else, why accept it in Palestine? Half a century ago Israel and its Arab neighbours went to war and Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Occupying territory after war happens all the time. But no military occupation should turn into a decades long tyranny which only fuels and benefits extremists who use terror to target the innocent. And who suffers? The majority of loving families on both sides that just want freedom and peace.

To many, particularly in Europe and North America, calling for companies to withdraw investments from financing or taking part in Israel's occupation of Palestine sounds completely biased. But it’s not -- this is the most potent non-violent strategy to end the ritual violence, ensure Israelis' security and achieve Palestinian freedom. Israel’s power and wealth dwarfs Palestine, and if it refuses to end its illegal occupation, the world must act to make the cost unbearable.

Dutch pension fund, ABP, invests in Israeli banks that help fund the colonisation of Palestine. Massive banks like Barclays invest in suppliers of Israeli arms and other occupation businesses. Computer giant Hewlett-Packard supplies sophisticated surveillance to control the movement of Palestinians. And Caterpillar provides bulldozers that are used to demolish Palestinian homes and farms. If we can create the biggest global call ever to get these companies to pull out, we will show clearly that the world will no longer be complicit in this bloodshed. The Palestinian people are calling on the world to support this path and progressive Israelis support it too. Let’s join them: 

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/israel_palestine_this_is_how_it_ends_short/?tbFFtbb

Our community has worked to bring peace, hope, and change to some of the world’s toughest conflicts, and often that means taking difficult positions to address the root cause. For years our community has looked for a political solution to this nightmare, but with this new round of horror unfolding in Gaza, the time has come to turn to sanctions and disinvestment to finally help end the horror for Israelis and Palestinians.

With hope and determination, 




MORE INFORMATION:

UN independent expert calls for boycott of businesses profiting from Israeli settlements (UN)
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43376#.U7_ynqhMrRI

12 more EU countries warn against trade with Israeli settlements (Haaretz)
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.603030

Israelis, Palestinians Pro Peace Process, but Not Hopeful (Gallup)
http://www.gallup.com/poll/161456/israelis-palestinians-pro-peace-process-not-hopeful.aspx

Under pressure, a strong EU-Israel relationship faces uncertain future (Middle East Monitor)
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/debate/9675-under-pressure-a-strong-eu-israel-relationshi...

Israel-Gaza conflict: 80 per cent of Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes are civilians, UN report says (The Independent)
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelgaza-conflict-80-per-cent-of-palestinians-killed-by-israeli-strikes-are-civilians-un-report-says-9606397.html

Rule 156. Definition of War Crimes (ICRC)
http://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v1_cha_chapter44_rule156

Palestinians: Most Gaza dead are children, women, elderly (Haaretz)
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.604443

Caught on Tape: US Teen Allegedly Beaten by Israeli Police (ABC News)
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/caught-tape-us-teen-tariq-abu-khdeir-allegedly-24449873

A policy of displacement (Visualizing Palestine)
http://visualizingpalestine.org/infograhic/a-policy-of-displacement

Exposing the Israeli Occupation Industry
http://www.whoprofits.org/

Additional sources for this campaign:
http://avaaz.org/en/israel_palestine_this_is_how_it_ends_sources_a/?blast

The Relentless Advance of the Gender-Benders Whatever Happened to Straight Fucking?

The Relentless Advance of the Gender-Benders
Whatever Happened to Straight Fucking?
This strange aspect of anthropology first bothered me in the 1990s, when a young man went to Court in California – where else? – because he wanted to marry his dog. And yes, it was definitely his dog, not a bitch. It was about this time that I and no doubt many others started wondering, for that matter, whatever happened to straight fucking in Hollywood. Were the increasingly unanchored morals of Hollywood having a contagious and queer effect in the wider population, or was marrying your dog itself a contagion, a human form of rabies, as in going the other way, up a blind alley, as it were.
The latest bout of this contagion has hit the UK, where the Scots have legalised gay marriage despite a 64% anti-vote, as the tyranny of the minorities sweeps aside the majority and normal democratic, and moral, conventions. (I have always harboured quiet doubts about the Scots, wearing skirts, no underpants and tossing their cabers for fun in public). In England, meanwhile, the heterosexual Prime Minister, and father of three and cheer-leader of the Conservative Party no less, is determined to enforce the presumed right of Homosexuals to marry in church, a policy not enunciated in the last Conservative Manifesto any more than it isn’t in the Bible.
As per usual, the English have been misled by their elected ones and have not been consulted. The greater part of his party’s rapidly declining membership see it as a further stab at the heart of the essential dignity of the church. That this is a policy that has been thrust up his blind side by his Coalition partners, the Lib-Dem bum-blasters, whose credo is what I’ve got is mine and what you’ve got is mine also, which all-inclusive doctrine doesn’t end on the outside of your bum, adds momentum to the notion that Cameron has lost his balls as well and has been well and truly Clegged over. There’s no stopping the nonsense, it seems, of the believers in the new doctrine of anal birth. It’s all about as daft as subsidising a Don Quixote wind-farm that can never make money, if you ask me.
Meanwhile, the Dean of St. Albans, Dr. Jeffrey John, a mance of a fruit if ever there was one, has accused the church of hypocrisy, and said “it doesn’t speak with integrity on this issue and should not be listened to”. He continued: “if a homosexual couple invite God into their relationship” - as queer une ménage-a-trois as can be imagined - “then of course he will bless you and sustain your love”, as in ‘of course helping you to keep it up forever, and ever, whirl’d without end, Ah men!’ The mind boggles at the scene as imagined by this Godless Dean, of him inviting God to do any such thing. This dean is clearly not a man to turn your back on, as he reaches for God in the same way that the rest of us reach for an aerosol can, in his case to squirt holiness into places where the sun doesn’t shine. My advice is not to listen to him on anything, as he doesn’t speak with integrity, or even with any notion of the sanctity pertaining to divine knowledge.

Our less-than-godly dean of dubious preferences should listen instead to the worldly advice of our great poet, W H Auden. He fled the criminality then attaching to his anal preferences at home and lived in Nazi Germany for the duration, for which absence Churchill duly exiled him from the land of the winners, the land then of straight-fucking heroes. (This recalls the honest but revealing reply of that queer phenomenon, the mother-fucking homosexual, who, when asked by the Conscientious Objection Review Board what he would do if he saw a German soldier raping his mother, wistfully replied: “O, I would come between them!”) Anyway, Auden was received with gratitude and open arms and legs in the Land of the Free-and-Easy, and an heiress was laid on for the necessary Green Card application. At the marriage of assumed heterosexual convenience in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, the young John Montagu, himself later the Poet Laureate of Ireland, approached the master and asked him why he had felt it necessary to marry a rich woman who looked for all the world like the back end of a London bus. Auden looked at him aghast, and replied: “My dear boy: Buggers can’t be choosers!”
Now the swing-both-ways Lib-dems are targeting the House of Lords, an unreformed chamber of 99.9% heterosexuals who have rarely strayed beyond the Missionary Position. One or two Lords a’leaping have admittedly had the odd away game, like Lords Jellicoe and Chatham, but at least it involved straight fucking and, in any case, was in a flat overlooking that other Lords, that alternative shrine in Marylebone. And they didn’t claim it on expenses. Most Lords, however, wouldn’t know what a Texan Two-strap was even if it came supplied with its own batteries and a book of words on how to use it. Anything to do with AC/DC has always been safely beyond them. But for this Coalition of Closet Queens, the straight-fucking Lords as we know them must also go, and be replaced by a host of elected fruits of dubious provenance, so that they can suck on the public and pubic tit well into retirement.
And now the contagion, with a Gallic difference, has spread to Paris of all places, the City of Eternal Light and Endless Pussy, the throne of Madame Claude, no less. The prostitutes are up in arms and running a blockade in La Place Pigalle, as they have been outlawed! Madame Claude would turn in her grave, even as she put the price up of putting sex back in the sizzle of the young gentlemen’s Grand Tour. Whatever next? Paris without Madame Claude is a flower in the sky, the son of a barren woman, a mance without a bum to burgle. The Paris pros, however, have got France and Mr. Hollande - aka Monsieur Flanby (French) or Plan B (English) - over a barrel, if not by the balls as well: they are not paying their taxes worth €6.0 billion pa, and France is basically bust. Welcome back, Ladies, and may your Tickle Trunks floweth over. France needs you back in the value-added business of straight fucking!

And back in the Big Apple again, I recall the old coloured guy who was the shoeshine years ago outside of Christie’s on Park Avenue, telling me he was studying Buddhism. Suitably impressed, I asked him if he believed in the transmigration of the soul, and what would he like to come back as. He thought as he polished hard and looked up to the heavens, and then announced: “I want to come back as one o’ dem Le’byuns!” Astounded that anyone would ever want to come back as a Libyan, or even as a Lib-Dem for that matter, I asked him the Devil’s Question: Why? “Because they lika pussy like I lika der pussy, and they’ve got gooooed jobs!” Quite: now that did make perfect sense, once the dime had dropped. But how about that for a line of Pure Hollywood as we once knew it!

Rantings on the Hill

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