Day: March 21, 2010

GazaFriends: Update on the arrest of Huwaida Arraf: Thanks everyone – I’m OK

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21 March, 2010 — Gaza Friends

Dear friends,
Thanks so much for your concern, solidarity and support. I was released last night at around 6:45pm from Neve Tirtze prison in Ramle. Save for minor cuts and bruises, I am OK. I haven’t gotten a chance to see Ellen Stark (the ISM volunteer shot in the arm) yet. I hear she has a broken wrist but is doing OK.

I was arrested on Friday at around noon as I tried to get the Israeli soldiers to stop shooting at people in Nabi Saleh (a small village of about 400 people), especially after ISM volunteer Ellen Stark was shot in the arm. We were in Nabi Saleh for a weekly demonstration by the villagers against the theft of their land. Simultaneous demonstrations were taking place in Jerusalem and in a number of villages throughout the West Bank. In Nabi Saleh, the demonstration took the form of people walking down a hill towards the confiscated land. “Stop shooting…a woman has been injured and needs medical attention”

http://www.freegaza.org/en/home/56-news/1154-ism-volunteer-shot-hospitalized-ism-co-founder-arrested

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Depleted Uranium: A War Crime Within a War Crime By William Bowles

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21 March 2010

Destroying Iraq’s Future, Its Children

As if destroying a country and its culture ain’t bad enough, how about destroying its future, its children? I want to scream it from the rooftops! We are complicit in crimes of such enormity that I find it difficult to find the words to describe how I feel about this crime committed in my name! In the name of the ‘civilized’ world? Continue reading →

Undercover police in Jerusalem protests

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18 March, 2010 — The Real News Network

Actions in Jerusalem against military closures and settler provocations met with police repression

Riots took place all over East Jerusalem this week in protest of settlers threatening to force their way into the Al Aqsa Mosque. As a result, Israeli security forces shut down major areas of the Old City, including the mosque compound to Muslim men under 50. The Real News’ Lia Tarachansky spoke to Toufic Haddad, journalist and author of Between the Lines: Israel the Palestinians, and the U.S. “war on terror” about the real reason for these protests. Haddad explains that Israeli colonization over East Jerusalem led to home demolitions, confiscations, and the flourishing of settlements all over the Palestinian Territories. Because these protests are supported by the government, Palestinian protests are systemically repressed, leading to mass arrests, injuries, and sometimes death. Alternative tactics, such as undercover police often lead to the tensions which are expected to rise as the Jerusalem Municipal Police approved another right-wing settler protest for Sunday through the Palestinian East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.

Bio
Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American writer based in Jerusalem. He is the co-author and editor of Between the Lines: Readings in Israel, the Palestinians and the U.S ’War on Terror’. His writings on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been featured in Monthly Review Zine, Znet, Counterpunch, the International Socialist Review, and the Journal of Palestine Studies. He has also been translated into French, Spanish, German, Norwegian, Dutch, Hebrew and Arabic.

Transcript

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The True Meaning of Never Again – For Anyone

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20 March, 2010 — International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Camden New Journal article letters arising out of the House of Commons meeting of the Never Again – For Anyone tour on Holocaust Memorial Day. The letters, responding to attacks are, in chronological order, from Yael Kahn, Ivor Dembina IJAN.

Auschwitz survivor, 86, takes on the protesters 4 Feb 2010
IT’S not often you meet a have-a-go hero, let alone three! I met spritely 86-year-old Dr Hajo Meyer, a survivor of the Nazi death-camps, at the House of Commons. At a Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony, Dr Meyer spoke about the Nazis and pleaded for an end to the war against Palestinians. Israel, he said, was “dehumanising the Palestinians as the Nazis tried to dehumanise me”. But when a dozen protesters tried breaking up the meeting, shouting pro-Israel slogans and hurling abuse at Dr Meyer, they met their match. The plucky professor – barely over 5ft – refused to back down. “I grew up under Hitler and lived through Auschwitz. I’m not scared of people like you,” he told the burly protestors. Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn, who helped organise the meeting, had to call the police and it took several officers to cart the men away. Minutes later we heard the voice of another hero. Speaking by telephone from Gaza, Dr Haider Eid reported how Israel’s blockade of the enclave has cut power and plunged its 1.3m people into darkness. Because of the embargo families are in tents, orphans on the streets, food and medicines have dwindled, he said. But he wanted pay tribute to the tens of thousands of Jews trapped by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. The meeting was chaired by Hampstead resident Selma James, 79 year-old widow of the black writer CLR James.

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