1. “The discrimination against Israeli Arabs, of course, is not new; even the official Israeli Or Commission stated in 2003 that “government handling of the Arab sector has been primarily neglectful and discriminatory.” But whereas the early 2000s could give the impression the discrimination was diminishing, the last years show an opposite movement. The landmark seems to be the amendment to the naturalization law of December 2003, which bars Palestinians from the occupied territories from obtaining any residency status or citizenship in Israel through marriage to an Israeli citizen, thereby preventing them from living in Israel with their spouses. Heavily criticized by Israeli and international human rights groups, the law is aimed exclusively against Israel’s Palestinian minority, whose members often marry across the Green Line.
The flow of laws and regulations against Israeli Arabs increased exponentially. A year ago, a forgotten British Mandate regulation from 1939, banning the import of books printed in enemy countries, was suddenly revived, closing the import gates on Arabic schoolbooks and all kinds of literature printed in Lebanon (a major publishing center in Arabic) and other Arab countries. No security issues are at stake: all imported books are subject to censorship anyway.
A similar provocation is the transportation minister’s recent order to wipe Arabic place names off road signs, replacing them with their Hebrew names. Thus place names, including those of mixed or Arab towns like Yaffa (Jaffa) or Shafa’amr, should be publicly spelled in Arabic (!) according to their Hebrew form – Yafo or Shefar’am. While all over the world, from Canada to Australia, former colonialist nations recognize and respect the cultural heritage of, the rights of, and the evils done to indigenous minorities, colonialist Israel is eager to wipe them out – politically, culturally, and physically.
A further attack on the Israeli-Palestinian minority is the suggested law to ban the commemoration of the Nakba, the catastrophe in 1948 in which hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed and hundreds of thousands became refugees. Though its original form, including jailing individuals who do commemorate it, has been softened to a formulation forbidding only public-supported organs from commemorating the event, the intention is clear – as was that of the (currently rejected) law demanding a declaration of loyalty from every Israeli citizen.
The attack on Israel’s Palestinian minority has deep ideological roots in extreme nationalistic purism, but it is mainly politically motivated. The Israeli Arabs, despite six decades of discrimination, have been an incredibly loyal minority. The Israeli right-wing clearly wishes to put an end to this loyalty, hoping the incitement will lead Israeli Arabs to some form of violent resistance, from street violence to terror attacks. This would create the desired atmosphere of suspicion, fear, and hatred that fascism always needs in order to flourish. An Arab-Israeli Intifada is the wet dream of many Israeli right-wingers: nationally and internationally, it would enable them to present Israel once again as a threatened victim of Arab/Muslim/Gentile persecution, not as the rogue colonialist regional power it actually is.”
2. What an egregious piece of propaganda:
“Vatican teaching Hezbollah how to kill Jews, says pamphlet for IDF troops
The Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews, according to a booklet being distributed to Israel Defense Forces soldiers. “
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101158.html
3. “For a professor of law at one of the country’s best law schools who was once the go-to guy in the Justice Department whenever the Bush White House needed legal cover for its truly lawless ventures outside the Constitution, John Yoo has revealed a breathtaking ignorance of American values, history, and jurisprudence.
In his startling mea culpa, published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Professor Yoo confessed to advising President Bush that he possessed powers from some source other than the Constitution, that in the name of public safety he could cut down all laws written for the express purpose of restraining the President, and that Americans would expect no less than this so long as they were actually kept safe as a result of it.
He advanced the argument that since the President’s first job is to keep us safe, he could disregard the 1978 FISA law as “obsolete” since it was written in an era when modern day non-state terrorism was not contemplated. By this unprecedented and perverse logic, one wonders if the President was told if he could disregard as obsolete any law that was inconvenient to his purposes; even the Supreme Law of the Land itself, which the Constitution declares itself to be.
The whole purpose of FISA was to abolish the Nixonian notion that “If the President does it, it’s not illegal.” While FISA’s statutory reduction of the constitutionally-mandated standard for obtaining a judicial search warrant – from probable cause of crime to probable cause of foreign status – is itself of dubious constitutionality, nevertheless, it is and was at the time Professor Yoo was telling President Bush to disregard it, the “exclusive” lawful means for agents of the President to wiretap foreign persons present in the U.S. Moreover, the FISA court has become the President’s rubber stamp by granting well over 99% of requested warrants.
It is not painless for one who loathes this law to defend it; but it was among the laws that the President and the Professor swore to uphold, it does force the executive branch to identify and specify who and what it wishes to pursue, and it presents at least a minimum of checking and balancing by forcing the President to go before a super-secret court (without an adversary present) and seek permission to violate the Fourth Amendment-guaranteed rights of the President’s targets.
The time-is-of-the essence argument is nonsense. I once issued a search warrant in my gym shorts from my living room at 3 am, and I know of a former FISA court judge who did the same from his cell phone while riding a motorcycle. While neither of these situations is optimal, there are at least written records of what was done to whom and why; and that was a goal of the law which President Bush was told was obsolete.
The Framers never contemplated FISA, and I cannot conceive of Jefferson, Madison, or even Hamilton condoning it. But one thing we know the Framers would never condone is a government that refused to reside within the Constitution; “chained down” by it as Jefferson once said.
…
President Bush argued frequently and forcefully that his first job was to keep us safe. He was wrong. The Constitution tells us that his sole job was to enforce the Constitution; and that means keeping us free. Free from tyrants who sought and claimed power from thin air; free from prince-like federal agents who could behave without constitutional or legal restraint; free to live with a government that obeyed its own laws. Any president who keeps us safe but unfree is rejecting his oath to the American people.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/napolitano6.1.1.html
4. “CONCERN GROWS OVER LACK OF PANIC
CONCERN was growing last night that the British public is not freaking out quite as much as it was supposed to.
In the last week the government, the media and a range of experts have all thrown more resources at their swine flu panic inducement strategies, including a series of contradictory announcements, random, blood-curdling death tolls and a warning that Britain’s fleet of ice cream vans will be needed to store all the dead bodies.
But despite their all-out efforts, millions of people across the country have decided to simply wash their hands twice a day and accept that if they do get swine flu the chances of them dying from it are so small as to be really quite tedious.
Nevertheless the department of health will today urge people to empty their freezers, stressing that is where they will have to store their grandmother until the army can collect her and throw her into a landfill.”
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/health/concern-grows-over-lack-of-panic-200907201915/
