Pro-Israeli lobby groups weaponizing 'diversity' campaigns to pump up anti-Palestinianism sentiment

Yves Engler
Dissident Voice

Should "Jewish Heritage Month" be used as a cover for Israeli nationalism and to suppress Palestinian protest?

A recent incident at a Toronto high school demonstrates the depravity of the pro-Israel lobby. It also illustrates their use of Canadian cultural and "diversity" initiatives to promote a country that declares itself to be the exact opposite of diverse.

Amidst the recent slaughter of nonviolent protesters in Gaza, a half-century illegal occupation of the West Bank and weekly bombings in Syria, an Israeli flag marked with "Jewish Heritage Month" was hoisted in the main foyer of Forest Hill Collegiate Institute. After a couple days the flag created by Israeli nationalist students was moved - possibly due to complaints from other students - to a less prominent location where Jewish Heritage Month events were taking place. In response B'nai Brith, Hasbara Fellowships, Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies and Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) all claimed persecution. "Discrimination has absolutely no place in our schools", noted a CIJA spokesperson with regards to moving the Israeli flag to a less prominent location in the school. For their part, the Wiesenthal Center said our "objective is to ensure that TDSB [Toronto District School Board] adheres to its own values of equity and inclusivity for all students" while B'nai Brith's press release decried the "Jewish students who have had their heritage denigrated." That group then published a story titled "Forest Hill Collegiate Has History of Alienating Jewish Students, Former Pupil Says."

After the uproar the flag was returned to the Forest Hill Collegiate Institute's main foyer and the TDSB apologized. At an assembly to discuss the matter, in which the principal and TDSB representative spoke standing behind a podium adorned with an Israeli flag, a student apparently yelled "Free Palestine". B'nai Brith immediately denounced the brave, internationalist-minded high schooler, tweeting: "

This morning, before an assembly about the removal of a #JewishHeritageMonth banner at Forest Hill Collegiate, a student yelled 'Free Palestine' during the morning announcements. We have been assured that this was not approved by the school and that an investigation is underway."

In another Twitter post B'nai Brith claimed the Israeli flag flap made a "mockery of Canada's first Jewish Heritage Month." Their statement highlights a mindset that views gaining official sanction of cultural initiatives as a way to strengthen their campaign to support a violent, European colonial outpost in the Middle East. 

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5,000 feminists go on topless 'SlutWalk' in Tel Aviv in spirit of #MeToo

Comment: This is femininity in the 21st Century? Not for most people. And it seems Palestinians suffering under occupation is not as important.

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RT

SlutWalk demonstrators in Israel have taken to the streets to demand freedom from sexual harassment and shaming based on dress and behavior, and also for a justice system that better serves the needs of harassment victims.

"The word 'slut' is not just degrading to women, but it is also used by society and the system to justify rape," said Bracha Barad of the Kulan group, which organized Saturday's SlutWalk through central Tel Aviv, explaining the provocative name and outfits of the participants. "There is no connection whatsoever between sex and sexual violence and there is no connection between the victim's clothing or her sexual past and the attack she has undergone.

The mostly female crowd, estimated at between 2,000 and 5,000 by Israeli media outlets, brandished posters of public figures implicated in sexual assault allegations, such as ex-president Moshe Katsav, and chanted slogans like "No means no", "Silence doesn't mean consent", "Not your toy" and "Polite women don't make history."

The movement began in 2011, after a Toronto police official urged women not to "dress like sluts" in order to lessen the risk of sexual assaults, which many interpreted as victim-blaming, before resolving to reclaim the word 'slut' by making it a centerpiece of their protest.

Since then, dozens of similar walks have taken place all over the world, but the movement has been reinvigorated by the #MeToo scandal, which has once again brought focus not only on stories of abuse, but also how they were subsequently dealt with by those in power.  

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See also: Why I am Uneasy About the #MeToo Movement

#MeToo 'Trivializes And Blurs' Rape With Flirtation – Academic

The IDF vs The Teenage Girl: Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi Arrested For Slapping Soldiers Who Shot Boy

Andrés Perezalonso
Sott.net

Ahed Tamimi lives in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. She has literally been fighting tooth and nail against Israeli occupation soldiers since before she was a teenager. In the 2015 video above, we see her fighting off a soldier who was trying to take away her then 11 year-old brother Mohammed. Since the video, she became both a symbol of Palestinian resistance and an easily recognizable target for Israelis, both civilian and military.

She told Al Jazeera:

"Many Israelis threatened me on social media after the video was released, demanding that I be detained or even killed... The harassment handcuffed my life. I was scared to even go outside or visit my friends." [...]

The harassment began immediately following the video's release, as Israelis called her a "terrorist" on social media and threatened to kill her, the family says. Bassem, Ahed's father and a long-standing leader in the village, said that her 19-year-old brother, Waed, was detained after the release of the video. At the start of his 10-month stay in Israeli jail, Ahed's mother, Nariman, received permission to enter Israel to visit him, and Ahed tagged along.

"When we passed a checkpoint near Jerusalem, the Israeli soldiers got on the bus and immediately singled her out," Nariman told Al Jazeera. "While everyone else was permitted to pass, Ahed was pulled off the bus and told she wouldn't be allowed into Israel."

During the village's protests, Israeli forces would often scream Ahed's name and shout curses at her. "Look! It's Ahed Tamimi. Shoot her!" Bassem recalled one soldier as saying.

The family was often scared for their daughter, he added: "Whenever the soldiers recognise her, they do something to make her life difficult. Every time she left the house, we were scared something would happen to her." Ahed was even forced to stay at her cousin's home in Ramallah, where she attends school, to avoid the danger of passing through Israeli checkpoints on her way from Nabi Saleh.

She began attending protests at Nabi Saleh when she was nine. Here she is when she was young enough to be half the size of the armed soldiers she confronted: 

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Spotlight on Iran and Donald Trump: Is war coming?

Alexander Mercouris
The Duran

The conflict between the US and Iran is not rooted in any grand plan for Iranian control of the Middle East. It is the result of US concern about the system of alliances Iran has built up to prevent a repeat of the disaster of the Iran-Iraq war.

If since coming to office the new Trump administration has been making tentative moves towards repairing the US's fraught relations with Russia, towards Iran it has been acting with heightened hostility. It has blamed Iran for a missile attack on a Saudi frigate carried out by Yemeni forces, criticised Iran for its missile tests, and slapped more sanctions on the country. President Trump has made no secret of his strong disagreement with the Iranian nuclear agreement Iran agreed with the Obama administration, and he has also called Iran "the number one terrorist state".

What are the reasons for this hostility?

I should say first of all that I do not agree with the criticisms of Iran which are commonly made. Many of these assume an Iranian grand strategic plan to take over or dominate the Middle East by supposedly manipulating Palestinian and Shia Muslim grievances, and by waging war on Israel. There is in fact extraordinarily little evidence of such a plan, and I don't believe it exists.

As anyone who has had any dealings with Iranians knows, the central event in defining Iranian attitudes on foreign policy was the long and terrible war waged against Iran in the 1980s by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
This was a clearcut war of aggression, launched by Saddam Hussein in order to capture territory and to establish Iraq as the leading state in the Arab world. Like all of Saddam Hussein's adventures it miscarried disastrously, ending in a terrible war of attrition in which hundreds of thousands of people died, and which Saddam Hussein fought in his usual ruthless way, with chemical weapons, indiscriminate bombing of Iranian cities (including Tehran) and plans to develop nuclear weapons, which were only aborted as a result of the war he fought with the US over Kuwait in 1991.  

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“Je suis Ali Abbas”: The Forgotten Victims of State Terrorism

Dr. David Halpin
Global Research

Massive terrorist attacks were hatched back soon after the pretext of cinematographic ‘terrorist’ attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001.

The state broadcaster in the UK pumped out the propaganda for these with all vigour and its usual guile.  The people of Afghanistan were first in line, that winter bombing and invasion had been planned for some months before smoke billowed up from the Twin Towers.

Iraqi humans were to be next.  Perle, Wolfowitz, Edelman, Bolton and other Zionists were sitting in our homes as bold as brass.  People like Tom Mangold frightened the old ladies with stories about the nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo tube and how Sarin in a bursting light bulb could kill in seconds.  ‘Free speech, fraternitė, and democracy’ were in the mix, but only a small part of broadcasting time was given over to speakers who were against terrorism by states.  They naively thought the Nuremberg protocols and the Charter of the UN had meaning in international law.

The psychopathic cabal in No 10 got the cogs turning in the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and MI6.  A ‘dossier’ was produced in September 2002 but it turned out to be a ridiculous cut and paste job of a PhD ‘thesis’ from LA.  To laugh in the faces of those with any power of analysis is usual.  And there were the anthrax attacks in the ‘land of the free’.  Those were surely false flags, and lo, Perle claimed that they originated from Iraq.

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Brian Eno: Today I saw a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic bag of meat: it was his son

stopwar.org.uk

Dear All of You:

I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more.

Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.
  I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.

Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it.

What is going on in America? 

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