Friday, July 31, 2009

"Israel" massacres 1,400 Palestinians, destroys or damages 50,000 Palestinian homes, 39 mosques, 2 churches, 200 schools, & 800 industrial properties





About the Israeli massacre of Gaza, December 2008-January 2009:


"Israel says Gaza war 'necessary' "

BBC
July 31, 2009

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8177831.stm


"...Palestinian sources say about 1,400 Gazans died in the conflict. Thirteen Israeli died.


"The report said 100 inquiries had been launched into the conduct of soldiers and 14 criminal investigations opened.


"According to the United Nations, the Israeli military campaign left more than 50,000 homes, 800 industrial properties and 200 schools damaged or destroyed, as well as 39 mosques and two churches. "


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Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Monument to Mohammed Al-Dura, in Bamako, Mali.--


Click on the monument to enlarge it.

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Here is the news photo, from September 30, 2000, from occupied Palestine:




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Sunday, July 26, 2009

1953: Students protest dictatorship in Iran--



Above: A photo of three students who were killed for protesting against the U.S.-installed dictatorship, in Iran, at the time of Nixon's visit to the Shah.

On December 7th 1953 (the 16th of Azar), Iranian students came out in large numbers to demonstrate against the visit of the U.S. vice-president, Richard Nixon, to Iran, following the CIA-supported military coup of August 1953. Three students were killed by the Shah's U.S.-installed regime and that day became known as “Students’ Day” ever since.

The U.S. and Israel trained the Shah's "SAVAK" secret police, who tortured and murdered many Iranians for the next quarter-century.



Above: A photo of Vice President Nixon meeting the newly-installed Shah of Iran, December 13, 1953.


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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Trader Joe's supermarket is confronted by Boycott Israel movement:




Video:

"Deshelving Israeli Goods at Trader Joe's"

Summary:

"Over 30 activists in Oakland and San Francisco participated in National Don't Buy Into Apartheid Day on June 20, 2009.."


Video on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN1-OUP62CQ



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Sunday, July 19, 2009

Alice Walker on resistance to the racist occupation of Palestine.


"Overcoming speechlessness"

by Alice Walker

http://www.eurweb.com/images/articles/200903/alice_walker(00-headshot-b&w-med).jpg


July 18, 2009

On Ma'an News Agency, at:

http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=212871


[Pulitzer Prize winning author and feminist Alice Walker writes about her visit to the Gaza Strip only weeks after the Israeli ceasefire in March. She travelled to the Strip with CODEPINK.]


And so I have been, once again, struggling to speak about an atrocity: This time in Gaza, this time against the Palestinian people. Like most people on the planet I have been aware of the Palestinian –Israeli conflict almost my whole life. I was four years old in 1948 when, after being subjected to unspeakable cruelty by the Germans, after a “holocaust” so many future disasters would resemble; thousands of European Jews were resettled in Palestine. They settled in a land that belonged to people already living there, which did not seem to bother the British who, as in India, had occupied the land and then, on leaving it, decided they could simply put in place a partitioning of the land that would work fine for the people, strangers, Palestinians and European Jews, now forced to live together. When we witness the misery and brutality still a daily reality for millions of people in Pakistan and India, we are looking at the failure, and heartlessness, of this plan…..

Houses, hospitals, factories, police stations, parliament buildings, ministries, apartment buildings, schools, went up in dust. The sight of one family in which five young daughters had been killed was seared into my consciousness.

The mother, wounded and unconscious, was alive. Who would tell her? I waited to hear some word of regret, of grief, of compassion, from our leaders in Washington, who had sent the money, the earnings of American taxpayers, to buy the bombs destroying her world. What little concern I became aware of from our “leaders” was faint, arrived late, was delivered without much feeling, and was soon overshadowed by an indifference to the value of Palestinian life that has corrupted our children’s sense of right and wrong for generations. Later our government would offer money, a promise to help “rebuild.” As if money and rebuilding is the issue. If someone killed my children and offered me money for the privilege of having done so I would view them as monsters, not humanitarians.

I consulted my companion, who did not hesitate. We must go, he said. The sooner we reach the people of Gaza, the sooner they’ll know not all Americans are uncaring, deaf and blind, or fooled by the media. He went on to quote Abraham Lincoln’s famous line about fooling the people. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Americans, we know, are, for the most part, uninformed about the reality of this never-ending “conflict” that has puzzled us for decades and of which so many of us, if we are honest, are heartily sick. We began to pack.



Arriving in Cairo at three-thirty in the morning, my first task, assigned by the beautiful, indomitable and well loved co-founder of CODEPINK, Medea Benjamin, was to meet with her and the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, Ambassador Scobey, at ten-thirty a.m. to ask for assistance in crossing the border into Gaza from Egypt. After a few hours rest, I appeared early for the meeting (concerned that Medea had not arrived yet) which, though cordial, would yield no help. Even so, I was able to have an interesting talk with the Ambassador about the use of non-violence. She, a white woman with a southern accent, mentioned the success of “our” Civil Rights Movement and why couldn’t the Palestinians be more like us.


It was a remarkable comment from a perspective of unimaginable safety and privilege; I was moved to tell her of the effort it took, even for someone so inherently non-violent as me, to contain myself during seven years in Mississippi when it often appeared there were only a handful of white Mississippians who could talk to a person of color without delivering injury or insult. That if we had not been able to change our situation through non-violent suffering, we would most certainly, like the ANC, like the PLO, like Hamas, turned to violence. I told her how dishonest it seems to me that people claim not to understand the desperate, last ditch, resistance involved in suicide bombings; blaming the oppressed for using their bodies where the Israeli army uses armored tanks.


I remembered aloud, us being Southerners, my own anger at the humiliations, bombings, assassinations that made weeping an endless activity for black people, for centuries, and how when we finally got to a court room which was supposed to offer justice, the judge was likely to blame us for the crime done against us and to call us chimpanzees for making a fuss. Medea arrived at this point, having been kept circling the building in a taxi that never landed, and pressed our case for entry into Gaza. While appearing sympathetic to our petition, our ambassador emphasized it was dangerous for us to go into Gaza and that her office would be powerless to help us if we arrived there and were injured or stranded. We were handed some papers telling us all the reasons we should not go.

… She handed me an illustrated postcard that showed plainly what the situation between Israel and Palestine came down to: in 1946 the Palestinians owned Palestine, with a few scattered Jewish villages (picture one); some years later, under a United Nations plan for partitioning, Palestine and Israel would each own roughly half of the land (picture two); from 1949-1967 the Israel “half” grew by about a third; after the 1967 war, Israel doubled its land mass by virtue of the land it took from Palestine at that time. The last picture shows the situation in 2008: Palestinian refugees (in their own country) live in camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and the whole land is now called Israel. On the back of this card are words from former Israeli president Ariel Sharon, known as the butcher of Sabra and Shatila (refugee camps in Lebanon where he led a massacre of the people) where he talks about making a pastrami sandwich of the Palestinian people, riddling their lands with Jewish settlements until no one will be able to imagine a whole Palestine. Or know Palestine ever existed.

No one can imagine a whole Turtle Island, either; now known as the United States of America, but formerly the land of Indigenous peoples. The land of some of my Native ancestors, the Cherokee, whose homes and villages were obliterated from the landscape where they’d existed for millenia, and the Cherokee forced – those who remained – to resettle, walking “the trail of tears,” a thousand miles away. This is familiar territory. As is the treatment of the Palestinian people…

It was moving to hear the stories of why the Jews on our Gaza bound bus were going to Palestine. Many of them simply said they couldn’t bear the injustice, or the hypocrisy. Having spoken out against racism, terrorism, apartheid elsewhere, how could they be silent about Palestine and Israel? Someone said her friends claimed everyone who spoke out against Israeli treatment of Palestinians was a. a self-hating Jew (if Jewish) or anti-Semitic (though Palestinians are Semites, too). She said it never seemed to dawn on the persons making the anti-Semitic charge that it is Israel’s behavior people are objecting to and not it’s religion. As for being self-hating? Well, she said, I actually love myself too much as a Jew to pretend to be ignorant about something so obvious. Ignorance is not held in high regard in Jewish culture.


… I came out of this reverie to hear the story of Cindy and Craig Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie. Rachel Corrie was murdered when she tried to stop an Israeli tank from demolishing a Palestinian house. I was struck by her parents’ beauty and dignity. Cindy’s face radiates resolve and kindness. Craig’s is a study in acceptance, humility, incredible strength, and perseverance. Rachel had been working in Palestine and witnessed the ruthlessness of the deliberate destruction of Palestinian homes by the Israeli army, most surrounded by gardens or small orchards of orange and olive trees, which the army consistently uprooted.

No doubt believing the sight of a young Jewish woman in a brightly colored jumpsuit would stop the soldier in the tank she placed herself between the home of her Palestinian friends and the tank. It rolled over her, crushing her body and breaking her back. The Corries spoke of their continued friendship with the family who had lived in that house. Everywhere we went, after arriving in Gaza, locals greeted the Corries with compassion and tenderness. This was particularly moving to me because of a connection I was able to make with another such sacrifice decades ago in Mississippi, in 1967, and how black people became aware that there were some white people who actually cared about what was happening to them.


…Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the “rez”. To the “colored section.” In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase. When I lived in segregated Eatonton, Georgia I used to breathe normally only in my own neighborhood, only in the black section of town. Everywhere else was too dangerous. A friend was beaten and thrown in prison for helping a white girl, in broad daylight, fix her bicycle chain. But even this sliver of a neighborhood, so rightly named the Gaza strip, was not safe.


I thought of how, in the U.S. the first and perhaps only bombing on U.S. soil, prior to 9/11, was the bombing of a black community in Oklahoma. The black people who created it were considered, by white racists, too prosperous and therefore “uppity.” Everything they created was destroyed. This was followed by the charge already rampant in white American culture, that black people never tried to “better” themselves. There is amble evidence in Gaza that the Palestinians never stop trying to “better” themselves. What started as a refugee camp with tents, has evolved into a city with buildings rivaling those in almost any other city in the “developing” world. There are houses, apartment buildings, schools, mosques, churches, libraries, hospitals.

Driving along the streets, we could see right away that many of these were in ruins. I realized I had never understood the true meaning of “rubble.” Such and such was “reduced to rubble” is a phrase we hear. It is different seeing what demolished buildings actually look like. Buildings in which people were living….

Only the woman with one child has trouble speaking. When I turn to her, I notice she is the only woman wearing black, and that her eyes are tearing. Unable to speak, she hands me instead a photograph that she has been holding in her lap. She is a brown-skinned woman, of African descent, as some Palestinians (to my surprise) are; the photograph is of her daughter, who looks European. The child looks about six years old. A student of ballet, she is dressed in a white tutu and is dancing. Her mother tries to speak, but still cannot, as I sit, holding her arm. It is another woman who explains: during the bombardment, the child was hit in the arm and the leg and the chest and bled to death in her mother’s arms. The mother and I embrace, and throughout our meeting I hold the photograph of the child, while the mother draws her chair closer to mine.

What do we talk about?

We talk about hatred.

… Following their example of speaking of their families, I talk about my Southern parents’ teachings during our experience of America’s apartheid years. When white people owned and controlled all the resources and the land, in addition to the political, legal and military apparatus, and used their power to intimidate black people in the most barbaric and merciless ways.

These whites who tormented us daily were like Israelis who have cut down millions of trees planted by Arab Palestinians; stolen Palestinian water, even topsoil. They have bulldozed innumerable villages, houses, mosques, and in their place built settlements for strangers who have no connection whatsoever with Palestine; settlers who have been the most rabid anti-Palestinian of all, attacking the children, the women, everyone, old and young alike, viciously, and forcing Palestinians to use separate roads from themselves.

It feels very familiar, I tell them, what is happening here. When something similar was happening to us, in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, I say, our parents taught us to think of the racists as we thought of any other disaster. To deal with that disaster as best we could, but not to attach to it by allowing ourselves to hate. This was a tall order, and as I’m talking, I begin to understand, as if for the first time, why some of our parents’ prayers were so long and fervent as they stayed there, long minutes, on their knees in church. And why people often wept, and fainted, and why there was so much tenderness as people deliberately silenced themselves, or camouflaged atrocities done to or witnessed by them, using representative figures from the Bible.

… She laughs, this handsome woman; then speaks earnestly. We don’t hate Israelis, Alice, she says, quietly, what we hate is being bombed, watching our little ones live in fear, burying them, being starved to death, and being driven from our land. We hate this eternal crying out to the world to open its eyes and ears to the truth of what is happening, and being ignored. Israelis, no. If they stopped humiliating and torturing us, if they stopped taking everything we have, including our lives, we would hardly think about them at all. Why would we?

There is, finally, a sense of overwhelm, trying to bring comfort to someone whose sleeping child has been killed and buried, a few weeks ago, up to her neck in rubble; or a mother who has lost fifteen members of her family, all her children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, her husband. What does one say to people whose families came out of their shelled houses waving white flags of surrender only to be shot down anyway? To mothers whose children were, at this moment, playing in the white phosphorous laden rubble that, after 22 days of bombing, is everywhere in Gaza? White phosphorus, once on the skin, never stops burning.
There is really nothing to say. Nothing to say to those who, back home in America, don’t want to hear the news. Nothing to do, finally, but dance.

… The ecstasy, sublime. I was conscious of exchanging and receiving Spirit in the dance. I also knew that this Spirit, which I have encountered in Mississippi, Georgia, the Congo, Cuba, Rwanda and Burma, among other places, this Spirit that knows how to dance in the face of disaster, will never be crushed. It is as timeless as the wind. We think it is only inside our bodies, but we also inhabit it. Even when we are unaware of its presence internally, it wears us like a cloak.

I could have gone home then. I had learned what I came to know: that humans are an amazing lot. That to willfully harm any one of us is to damage us all. That hatred of ourselves is the root cause of any harm done to others, others so like us! And that we are lucky to live at a time when all lies will be exposed, along with the relief of not having to serve them any longer. But I did not go home. I went instead to visit the homeless…



The full text of Alice Walker’s writing on her CODEPINK trip can be found at:

http://www.alicewalkersblog.com/2009/07/overcoming-speechlessness-poet.html


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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

A "growing worldwide boycott movement, which gained momentum with Israel’s attack on Gaza killing 1400 Palestinians."



In Queens, singing protesters urge Motorola boycott due to Israeli human rights abuses

by New York campaign for the Boycott of Israel ( info [at] boycottisraelnyc.org )

Sunday July 12th, 2009

On Indymedia at:

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/07/12/18607248.php


Twenty New York human rights advocates captivated Astoria, Queens shoppers today with songs and street theater calling for a boycott of communications giant Motorola until it stops selling products that aid Israel’s army and settlement movement. Today’s protest outside a Sprint store selling Motorola cellphones on Steinway Street was the second of five summer actions planned by the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel (NYCBI).

The protests are part of a growing worldwide boycott movement, which gained momentum with Israel’s attack on Gaza killing 1400 Palestinians.


THE NEW YORK CAMPAIGN FOR THE BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL
http://www.boycottisraelnyc.org

In Queens, singing protesters urge Motorola boycott due to complicity in Israeli rights abuses

Media Contact: info [at] boycottisraelnyc.org

For Immediate Release

Astoria, NY, July 11 – Twenty New York human rights advocates captivated Astoria, Queens shoppers today with songs and street theater calling for a boycott of communications giant Motorola until it stops selling products that aid Israel’s army and settlement movement. Today’s protest outside a Sprint store selling Motorola cellphones on Steinway Street was the second of five summer actions planned by the New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel (NYCBI). The protests are part of a growing worldwide boycott movement, which gained momentum with Israel’s attack on Gaza killing 1400 Palestinians.

Holding Palestinian flags and signs saying, “Goodbye Moto, Goodbye Apartheid,” and “Boycott Motorola, Free Palestine,” protestors distributed hundreds of flyers to shoppers. Forty-two people signed pledges not to buy Motorola products. Many passersby who were heading to the Arab-American section of Steinway Street expressed gratitude and support for the campaign.

Protestors drew on classic songs from the African-American civil rights struggle as well as popular hit songs to tell shoppers about Motorola’s role in Israel’s violation of international law. To the tune of the 1963 top-40 hit “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter from Camp),” NYCBI singers addressed Motorola: “Hello Moto, here’s a photo/ This is me not buying your phone/ Not because we’re in recession/ But because of Palestinian dispossession.” To the tune of the theme to the TV show Gilligan’s Island they sang, “Come sit with us and you’ll hear a tale/ Of an occupation force/ That’s taking people’s land and lives/ With corporate help, of course.” Street theater drew parallels between the occupation of Palestinian lands, the displacement of Native Americans, and colonization and apartheid in South Africa. Previously, Motorola was the target of a successful boycott campaign for its support of Apartheid South Africa.

The protest came just after the fifth anniversary of the ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague that Israel’s wall and settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory violate international law. On the first anniversary in 2005, after governments failed to act on the ICJ decision, over 170 Palestinian civil society organizations called for worldwide Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israeli institutions and businesses. Because it produces equipment for Israel’s settlements and army, Motorola has been targeted for boycott by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, NYCBI and other groups.

Motorola has supplied the Israeli military with a Wide Area Surveillance System (WASS), radar devices and thermal cameras installed around Israel’s rapidly expanding settlement/colonies on Palestinian land in the West Bank. According to the Israeli watchdog group Who Profits, a related system, MotoEagle Surveillance, is now in use in 16 settlements. Motorola also provides an encrypted cellular network to the Israeli army, whose routine and severe violations of Palestinian human rights are well-documented by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others. According to Who Profits, MIRS, a subsidiary of Motorola, is the Israeli army's cellular services provider, and Mirs has an extensive infrastructure network in the West Bank. Additionally, in April 2009 Motorola stated that by May or June it would sell a controversial unit that manufactured bomb fuses for Israeli bombs dropped on Palestinians and Lebanese, but there has been no confirmation that the sale has occurred.

For protest photos: http://boycottisraelnyc.org/category/goodbye-moto/573/goodbye-moto-demo-7-11-09
§Protesters sing for boycott of Motorola: Photo by NYCBI
by New York campaign for the Boycott of Israel Sunday Jul 12th, 2009 7:36 AM

§Passerby signs pledge to boycott Motorola: Photo by NYCBI
by New York campaign for the Boycott of Israel Sunday Jul 12th, 2009 7:36 AM

§Boycott Motorola: Photo by NYCBI
by New York campaign for the Boycott of Israel Sunday Jul 12th, 2009 7:36 AM

§Hundreds of boycott Moto flyers were distributed: Photo by NYCBI
by New York campaign for the Boycott of Israel Sunday Jul 12th, 2009 7:36 AM

Friday, July 3, 2009

"Does Israel Really Have a Right to Exist?"


Israel war on Gaza: Share Album - Get Embed Code

Susan Abulhawa -


"Does Israel Really Have a Right to Exist?"


On PALESTINE THINK TANK, at:

http://palestinethinktank.com/2009/06/15/susan-abulhawa-does-israel-really-have-a-right-to-exist/



Jun 15th, 2009 •




Following Netanyahu’s much anticipated policy speech, politicians and journalists, like mindless automatons, have set about repeating Israel’s tired mantra that Palestinians should recognize Israel’s right to exist. Never mind the fact that the PLO and Palestine Authority have obliged this ludicrous call, not once, but four times. And never mind that Israel has always denied Palestine’s right to exist, not only as a nation, but as individuals seeking a dignified life in our own homeland.


Does anyone find it interesting that Israel is the only country on the planet going around with this incessant insistence that everyone recognize her right to exist? Given that we Palestinians are the ones who have been dispossessed, occupied, and oppressed, one might expect that we should be the ones making such a demand. But that isn’t the case. Why? Because our right to exist as a nation is self-evident. We are the natives of that land! We know we have that right. The world knows it.


That’s why Palestine doesn’t need Israel or any other country to recognize her right to exist. We are the rightful heirs to that land and this can be verified legally, historically, culturally, and even genetically. And as such, the only true legitimacy Israel will ever have must come from us abdicating our inheritance, our history, and our culture to Israel. That’s why Israel insists we declare she had a right to take everything we ever had – from home and property, cemeteries, churches and mosques, to culture and history and hope.


Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs which set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948. Those Palestinians and their descendants still languish in refugee camps. Israel attempted a similar scenario in 1967 when they conquered the remainder of Palestine, but Palestinians then couldn’t be dislodged from their homes as easily.


This remains true, despite 40 years of Israel’s violent and oppressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Despite home demolitions, land confiscations, rapacious building of Jewish-only colonies, endless checkpoints, targeted assassinations, bombings of schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and malls, closures and denials; despite the massive human rights abuses, the imprisonment and torture of men women and children alike, the separation of families, the daily humiliations; despite the massive killings – Palestinians remain. We still resist. We still live, love, and have babies. As much as we can, we rebuild what Israel destroys. Such are rights!


Rights are inherent and inherently just, like the right to live with dignity and to be masters of one’s own fate. It is a human right not be persecuted and oppressed because you happen to belong to one religion and not another.


That Israelis simply take property belonging to Palestinians is not a right. That is theft. That Israel cut off the movement of food, medicine and other basic goods to the Gaza strip, causing massive malnutrition, economic collapse and misery because Palestinians elected particular leaders is not a right. That is an affront to humanity.


That Israel rains death from the skies on an already battered and starved Gaza, murdering over 1000 human beings and maiming thousands more in a single month is not a right. It’s a war crime. That Israel has employed every imperialistic tactic to subjugate, humiliate, break, and expel an entire nation of principally unarmed civilians because of their religion is not a right. It is a moral obscenity. That every Jew from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia be entitled to dual citizenship, one in their native country and one in Israel, while the rightful heirs to the land linger as refugees without citizenship anywhere is not a right. It is an outrage.


I’m sure my words will be twisted in some way to imply that I’m advocating pushing Israelis “into the sea” or some other asinine claim. So let me be explicit: We all have the right to exist, to live, to be masters of our own destiny. We all have the right not to be oppressed by others. Such rights are inherent to every individual living in that land: Jew, Muslim, or Christian. But Israelis do not have the right to create particular religious demographics by causing the demise of the natives. To be a Jewish [or Muslim or Christian] state, where privilege is accorded to those belonging to a particular religion at the expense of those who do not is not a right.


A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight. And to recognize such racism as a human or national right goes against every tenet of international law. It defies the basic sense that the worth of a human being should not be measured by their religion, any more than it should be measured by the color of their skin or the language they speak.


Susan Abulhawa is the author of The Scar of David, a work of historic fiction. She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, www.PlaygroundsforPalestine.org and Board Member of Deir Yassin Remembered. She can be reached at: sjabulhawa@yahoo.com.
Visit Susan's website.



or



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Thursday, July 2, 2009

"Israel Imprisons Cynthia McKinney For Carrying Crayons To Gaza"


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The Editors

Former Georgia Congresswoman is imprisoned in Israel along with 20 others after being intercepted in international waters for the offense of carrying humantarian and reconstruction aid to the Palestinians of Gaza.




Video:

"Cynthia McKinney calls WBAIX from Israeli prison"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkPvzSZRuDo


RunCynthiaRun uploaded a new video (8 hours ago)
Cynthia McKinney calls WBAIX from Israeli prison. She and 20 others wher... more


The merciless Israeli blockade, aided and abetted by the Obama Administration continues to deny Palestinians the right to obtain the necessities of ordinary life such as medical suplies, writing paper, crayons, and cement to reconstruct their homes and businesses and carry on their ordinary lives.

Israeli Govt Imprisons Cynthia McKinney For Carrying Crayons To Gaza -- Updated Again


Former Congresswoman May Not be Released Until Sunday

by The Editors

The Israeli government continues to hold former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and 20 other human rights workers, after surrounding and seizing their relief vessel, Spirit of Humanity, on the high seas – an act of piracy. The ship was 23 miles off the Gaza coast when boarded by the Israelis. Activists of the Free Gaza Movement were attempting to deliver desperately needed supplies to the 1.5 million Palestinian residents of Gaza, who have been subjected to an Israeli land and sea blockade since 2007.

McKinney and her comrades were taken to Ramle Prison, in Israel, where they refer to themselves as the “Free Gaza 21.” Several hundred people demonstrated at the Israeli consulate in New York City, Wednesday, demanding release of the activists. City Councilman Charles Barron led the chant, “Hands Off Cynthia McKinney.”

In December, Ms. McKinney was aboard the Dignity, another vessel operated by the Free Gaza Movement, when it was rammed and badly damaged by Israeli naval ships while on a similar relief mission from Cyprus to Gaza. The Dignity managed to limp into a Lebanese port.

David Josue, a close colleague of Ms. McKinney, says he was told by Alisa Green, a staffer at the U.S. Embassay in Tel Aviv, that Ms. McKinney "refused to sign" a deportation order. According to Mr. Josue:

The embassy told me that Israeli law requires that inmates that refuse to sign a deportation must be kept in jail for 3 days before they are sent away. It will be Sunday before we know when and if she will leave Israel."

BAR will provide audio and video materials on this story, later today.


Cynthia McKinney
10:31 AM
-- Statement by former Rep. Cynthia McKinney


"We were in international waters on a boat delivering humanitarian aid to people in Gaza when the Israeli Navy ships surrounded us and illegally threatened us, dismantled our navigation equipment, boarded and confiscated the ship.

All of us on board were then taken off the ship and into custody, and brought into Israel and imprisoned. Immigration officials in Israel said they did not want to keep us, but we remain imprisoned. State Department and White House officials have not effected our release or taken a strong public stance to condemn the illegal actions of the Israeli Navy of enforcing a blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians of Gaza, a blockade that has been condemned by President Obama."




The continuing blockade of Gaza, in which Israel and the U.S. collectively punish 1.5 million people is a crime under international law, and one of many stories not covered in the corporate news. Here are a few places where you can find out more about the situation in Israel-Palestine and the blockade.


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