Zionism – Features

Christian non zionists launch boycott of settlement goods

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

“This decision has not been taken lightly, but after months of research, careful consideration and finally, today’s debate at the Conference. The goal of the boycott is to put an end to the existing injustice. It reflects the challenge that settlements present to a lasting peace in the region”.

By Jerome Taylor

(source: Rise for the Truth)

The Methodist Church today voted to boycott all products from Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories becoming the first major Christian denomination in Britain to officially adopt such a policy.

The decision was made at the church’s Conference in Portsmouth, an annual gathering which decides Methodist policy. The official stance of the church, the fourth largest Christian denomination in Britain, will be to boycott any products made on Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Lay Methodists will also be encouraged to follow the church’s lead.

The move will inevitably put Methodists on a collision course with Britain’s Jewish community. The Board of Deputies of British Jews had already expressed concern over a 50-page report which had been compiled by a Methodist committee and sent to all its churches before the conference explaining why a boycott was justified.

Palestinian factions reject direct talks

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

(source: Ma’an News Agency)

All major Palestinian factions except Fatah have come out with statements condemning the return to peace talks signaled by a PLO Executive Committee decision to accept a US invitation on Friday.

Factions expected a statement from the Middle East Quartet to lay the foundations of peace talks, but the document — released in parallel and in support of a US invitation to direct talks — was not accepted by the US as a basis for negotiations.

"When the Palestinian negotiating team relies on the Quartet’s statement, they are deceiving the Palestinian public opinion … neither Hamas nor the Palestinian people will abide by the outcome of these meaningless negotiations," a statement issued by Hamas from Gaza City said.

The US parameters for talks were scant, with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton saying there would be "no preconditions," and US Middle East Envoy George Mitchell later explaining that the Quartet document would have to be approved by the negotiations partners if it were to have any place in the talks.

Canadian muslims erect first minaret in arctic

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Michel Comte

(source: AFP)

OTTAWA — Canadian Muslims have erected the Arctic’s first minaret, atop a little yellow mosque which serves as spiritual home to the area’s fledgling Islamic community.

The prefabricated mosque arrived in Inuvik last month to serve a growing Muslim population in Canada’s far north, after traveling 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) over land and water. The minaret — built locally and installed this week — has four levels and stands 30 feet (10 meters) off the ground.

“It’s really beautiful when we turn on the lights in the dark,” Amier Suliman, a mosque committee member, told AFP on Wednesday. Only finishing touches — applying a second coat of paint inside, and hooking up bathroom plumbing — remain before the mosque’s grand opening next week.

The palestinian people betrayed

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

The leaked papers published by Al Jazeera show how craven Palestinian leaders are and how willing they were to sell out their people’s rights. Yet all they had to offer wasn’t enough for Israel.

By Saree Makdisi

(source: LA Times)

A massive archive of documents leaked to Al Jazeera and Britain’s Guardian newspaper offers irrefutable proof that years of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have been an empty sham. The papers make clear that the time has come for Palestinians and anyone interested in the cause of justice to abandon the charade of official diplomacy and pursue other, more creative and non-violent paths toward the realisation of a genuine, just peace. The leaked documents, assuming they are genuine — and both Al Jazeera and the Guardian say they have authenticated them — are behind-the-scenes notes from a decade of negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. On issue after issue, they show Palestinian negotiators eager to concede ground, offering to give up much of Jerusalem, to accept Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, to collaborate with Israeli occupation forces in suppressing dissent in the occupied territories — including killing fellow Palestinians — and even to forgo the right of return for most Palestinians driven from their homes by Israel in 1948.

The papers give the lie to Israel’s claim that it yearns for peace but lacks a Palestinian “partner.” And they reinforce the sense that Israel has gone along with these negotiations only to buy time to expropriate more Palestinian land, demolish more Palestinian homes, expel more Palestinian families and build more colonies for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers in militarily occupied territory, thereby cementing new realities on the ground that would make a Palestinian state a geophysical impossibility.

Anyone who doubts this has only to skim through the leaked papers, which show Israel spurning one gaping Palestinian concession after another. And this was Israel, not under Benjamin Netanyahu but under the supposedly more liberal Ehud Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, who claimed they were committed to the peace process. In shameless abjection, the Palestinian negotiators prostrated themselves and surrendered essentially every major objective for which their people have struggled and sacrificed for 60 years, only for the imperious Israelis to say again and again, no, no, no. Clearly, all that the Palestinians have to offer is not enough for Israel.