They Witnessed Mob Attack in Tel Aviv

Very good piece on 972mag site about the mob attacks on Sudanese migrants in Tel Aviv.  It was written by a Tel Aviv observer of the “demonstration” whose girlfriend was almost attack by the mob.

“The legend that African refugees turned the paradise that was south Tel Aviv into a terrorized crime zone has to be rejected with a terse “you gotta be shitting me.” Statistics proved time and time again the crime wave exists mostly in the minds of the politicians stroking the hatred, of which Ben Ari is an ambitious competitor. I lived in Hatikva for two years; I’ve seen the people, the despair, the fear at nights, the absence of infrastructure, the flooding every winter when the sewage system collapsed – with my own eyes. Spare me the bullshit about a quiet neighborhood of happy poor workers.”

What happened to the social movement that had hundreds of thousands in the Tel Aviv streets last summer?  None of its demands were met that I noticed.  If mistreated workers aren’t fighting their 1% they’re going to become fertile recruiting grounds for the Zionist-nazi-wanna-bees like Ben Ari.

The whiners and racists talk about the utter horror of people coming into Israelin defiance of “the law”.  How times change.   When I was growing up everyone read “Exodus” about the ships that brought Jewish refugees to Palestine.  In those day the lawbreakers were pictured as  brave, wonderful heroes.  Oh I forgot they’re weren’t black people.

Most of the refugees are from Eritrea and Sudan. Sudan, isn’t that the country of Darfur where we are told a genocide has taken place?  And Sudanese get no hearings at all on their claims for asylum in Israel, the only demoKKKracy in theMiddle East?  Our own State Department says “… Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers, which are about 85 percent of African migrants in Israel were not allowed access to asylum procedures’ “.   Israel gave asylum to exactly one person in all of 2011.

Excellent Group

Fine meeting in New York City on May 16 sponsored by Havaar, a group of Iranians and Iranian/Americans.  They style themselves as part of the Green movement of Iran, very much against the repressive government there.  Also totally against any sanctions on Iran (and of course) invasion.  Packed room, maybe 60 people.

 

They’re very unhappy that some of the ‘Peace Movement” think it’s wrong to critcize Ahmadinejad and the regime running the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI).  Ahmadinejad comes to the UN yearly and actually meets with US leftists who things he has pearls of wisdom to offer.  They offer him only softball criticisms if that.

 

Havaar showed a video which included photos of Iranians given years (3-12 year sentences) in prison for taking part in protests.  It also showed 2009 when immense crowds filled the streets of Tehran calling for change.

 

Several of their speakers spoke against being involved in organizations that included supporters of the IRI.  In terms of UNAC I urged them to take part in the Chicgo demo, to join UNAC and fight from within.

Compare Grass’ “Military Service” to Jeffrey Goldberg’s

Adding to the storm of slander against Günter Grass, the Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg attacks him for supposedly writing about the “vicious sins of the Jews”.  The word “Jew” is not even in the poem and not implied there, but that doesn’t stop Bloomberg’s mudslinger.  More seriously Goldberg derides Grass for being “delusional” in his poetic claim that an Israeli first strike would “annihilate” the Iranian people.   But as this article on the Israeli website 972mag shows the threats to Iran include threats to nuke the country and if the result won’t be extermination it certainly would be catastrophic.

And what can you say about Jeffry Goldberg? You won’t see it in his Bloomberg biography, but he was a prison guard at the notorious Ketziot prison camp in the Negev during the first intifada (1987-1993).

How bad and illegal was Ketziot?  Goldberg himself wrote about it here  “Suffice it to say that the very existence of the prison violated what was then settled international law.  The prison’s location, in the unremitting desert, was a human rights violation: prisoners are supposed to be proected from the harsher elements.  Ketziot’s location also fiolated the rule that prisoners hould not be transferred to another country, the prisoners, all of whom were residents of the “West Bank and Gaza should have been jailed in the territores, and not inside Israel.  The treatmnet of children was even more troubling …”  As you might expect other accounts are even more negative.  In this 1988 article Linda Gradstein talks about how prisoners were beaten to relieve soldiers boredom..

The “Noxious” Moderate Alternative

The noxious Thomas Friedman praised Obama as the most pro-Israel president ever in the New York Times on 3/7.  He supported Obama’s supposed moderate line (giving “sanctions” time to work on Iran before blowing it to kingdom come).

I confess to my shame that I once took that position.  It was 1991 and the US was preparing to make war on Iraq for what it did to Kuwait .  I took the positions that as an alternative to war we should allow (some) sanctions  to continue.  Of course, what Bush the First had in mind was quite different: horrendous sanctions to weaken Iraq and then war and then more sanctions.  The sanctions continued till 2003 killing a million plus people.

Now we have the George W. Bush-Obama sanctions under even less justification  (Saddam, after all, had invaded Kuwait .  Iran is an “existential threat” to Israel only in the demented brains of Judeo-Fascists and their enablers)  They are not biting as hard yet.  One could argue that they’ve already killed Iranians (lack of spare parts for planes have most likely contributed to Iran ‘s woeful air safety record), but certainly not anything on the scale of genocided Iraq .  Not yet anyway.