(source:Abdel Bari Atwan’s Website)
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is implementing changes to British Law aimed at protecting Israeli war criminals implicated in atrocities carried out by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip from arrest and prosecution.This step follows on from a pledge made by Brown to Tzipi Livni after a warrant for her arrest was issued by a British judge should she step foot in the UK [in December 2009].
That the British judiciary should be so flagrantly compromised to satisfy Brown’s Israeli friends -whose hands are stained with the blood of Palestinian women, children, and innocent people whose bodies were torn part by Israeli rockets and phosphorus bombs – is a historical disgrace which casts shame on British democracy, the principle of separation of authorities, and the value of championing the downtrodden and victims of crime.
Regrettably, Brown takes this step, which totally contravenes the values of Western justice and humanness, at a time when Israeli Mossad agents violated British sovereignty and threatened British security and citizens, as a Mossad cell used British passports to carry out a terrorist assassination of martyr Mahmud al-Mabhuh, one of the founders of the military wing of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas. Laws against war criminals are not uniquely British; they were enacted in implementation of international treaties by the countries that won World War II to protect Jews and hunt down war criminals implicated in the holocaust crimes. Mr Brown now wishes to alter these laws because they are being used to target the new victims of the old Nazi victims. In other words, the crimes in Gaza were committed by the grandsons of the victims of the holocaust against innocent, unarmed peoples whose only guilt was that they were Palestinians, not Jews. This discriminatory view of British laws, based as it is on ethnicity, religion, and nationality, is a great insult to the victims of the holocaust themselves. Were the holocaust victims to express their view on this issue, they would have resisted any alteration to these laws, stood on the side of the victims in the Gaza Strip, and demanded the trial of the war criminals for tearing apart those victims' bodies, destroying their homes, and forcing more than 60,000 of them to live in the open air without shelter! Brown published a highly misleading article in The Daily Telegraph concerning the evidence that the British judiciary used to issue the arrest warrant against Livni and other Israeli army commanders implicated in war crimes. It is as though the British Prime Minister were unaware of the report issued by Richard Goldstone, the South African judge (who is Jewish himself and whose daughter is an Israeli citizen), a report that outrightly condemned the Israeli carnage in Gaza. Neither Goldstone nor his report told lies, because the report was issued after field visits by a team of judges with international reputations in their specialization. We hoped that Britain, which prides itself on its democracy and independent judiciary, would have respected these judges' findings, complied with their report, and supported the international demand for economic sanctions on Israel. These Israeli war criminals should have been brought before the International Criminal Court in the Hague where the war criminals of Bosnia have, rightly, been tried. This is Britain's legal and moral responsibility, especially since it is the county that bears the greatest responsibility for the tragedy of the Palestinian people. By introducing these alterations to British law, Brown sets a deeply regrettable historical precedent by bartering the credibility of his nation's judicial system for the satisfaction of his Israeli friends.
- PRESS RELEASE : Protectthe Rohingya. - June 8, 2020
- EID-UL-FITR MESSAGE-1441 (A.H) (2020) - May 23, 2020
- How Israel Legitimizes the Abuse of Palestinian Political Prisoners - April 30, 2020