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Palestine – Features

Better late than never

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Asmal’s groundbreaking call for targeting Israel’s legitimacy

By Iqbal Jassat – Chairperson: Media Review Network

While Kader Asmal’s opinion piece “World must deny legitimacy to Israel” [Mail & Guardian, June 25] was welcomed as a breathtakingly courageous call for action against the Zionist entity, unsurprisingly it has also elicited raging howls of complaints from the usual suspects.

However, what I do find quite intriguing is the personal attack David Saks of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies hurls at Asmal.  His insulting response as an apologist for Israel is reflective of the increasing difficulty spin-doctors for the usurpers of Palestine have in countering credible and sound analysis.

Accusing Asmal of falsehood and of “standard anti-Israel polemic” and then himself indulging in emotive rhetoric without any reference to the key components of Asmal’s brilliant argument to bring an end to Palestinians’ long ordeal, is a total cop-out!

Asmal, a veteran of the struggle against apartheid and having been closely associated with legal probes into violations of international law by Israel following its invasion of Lebanon in 1980 and the Sabra and Shatila massacres of hundreds of defenceless Palestinian refugees, cannot neither be dismissed as “ignorant”, nor of having a “jaundiced approach”.

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The british labour party vs the Isaraeli labor party secret visits by anc mps to Isarael

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(source: Writing Rights.org)

The British Parliament has debated the cruel detention and kangaroo court trials of Palestinian children by the Israeli military. The article by Amira Hass is a must read. Next year Open Shuhada street will campaign for similar debates in the South African Parliament.

Writing Rights has learnt that a secretive pro-Israel organisation in South Africa takes ANC members and other civil society leaders to Israel to provide “a balanced view of the conflict”. Since when is a brutal colonial occupation balanced?  The South african Human Rights Delegation to Palestine and Israel did not hide our visit or our support for freedom, democracy, human rights and security for all. The ANC leaders who have gone on these free trips should be ashamed of themselves and Open Shuhada Street will ask that they be censured. Similarly, the secretive organisation acting as a defense of occupation should be ashamed of itself.

Zackie Achmat

Otherwise Occupied / Labour is concerned

No, not Labor. The British parliament is the one debating the treatment of underage Palestinian detainees by Israeli military tribunals.

By Amira Hass

Labour Party representatives who had visited the Ofer military tribunal in the West Bank two weeks ago expressed shock over how the court conducts its hearings. In a parliamentary debate about detained Palestinian minors, they said that given a sample of 100 children, 69 said soldiers beat them and kicked them when they were being arrested. The children were better off pleading guilty regardless of whether they had done something, because if they were detained until the end of proceedings, this could be three times longer than their punishment, the parliamentarians said.

The Labour legislators cited data they had received from the Palestinian branch of Defense For Children International.

This is not the Israeli Labor Party. The visitors at Ofer were members of the British Labour Party. It was not Israel’s parliamentarians who spent an hour and a half debating a subject that shows the face of Israeli society, but rather their British counterparts.

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Osama bin ladens second death

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By Paul Craig Roberts

(source: Centre for Global Research)

If today were April 1 and not May 2, we could dismiss as an April fool’s joke this morning’s headline that Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Pakistan and quickly buried at sea.  As it is, we must take it as more evidence that the US government has unlimited belief in the gullibility of Americans.

Think about it.  What are the chances that a person allegedly suffering from kidney disease and requiring dialysis and, in addition, afflicted with diabetes and low blood pressure, survived in mountain hideaways for a decade?  If bin Laden was able to acquire dialysis equipment and medical care that his condition required, would not the shipment of dialysis equipment point to his location? Why did it take ten years to find him?

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