alanjjohnstone
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"There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone's connected to Hamas, everyone gets a salary from Hamas, and all the activists trying to challenge us and breach the border are Hamas military wing activists." said Israel's nationalist Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman.I don’t know who he is, a photographer, not a photographer – whoever operates drones above IDF soldiers needs to understand that he is endangering himself,' said Avigdor Lieberman. The Israel Defense Forces said they are not aware of any use of drones by Palestinians during last Friday’s demonstration near the fence along the Gaza border.
Maureen Lipman, who was among the demonstrators, said she was “a disenfranchised socialist” and identified with a placard reading “Corbyn made me a Tory”.She attacked the Labour leader for attending a Passover Seder organised by left-wing Jewish group Jewdas, saying it was “the absolute cherry on the top of Jeremy Corbyn’s behaviour. He is standing with elements who are against everything that we stand for; hardworking, decent Jewish people of whom I am incredibly proud,” Ms Lipman said.https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-demonstration-headquarters-labour-maureen-lipman-a8295096.htmlSo reading between the lines of her statement…if you aren't on her list of "approved" Jews…you aren't hard-working or decent…something lesser than what a "real" Jew is…Disgraceful that this prejudice is not condemned
It is detailed but it is also misleading
Quote:So far, it’s the only country willing to try.As the article itself demonstrates, it is only an experiment for a select few at the moment."…Last year, the government passed new restrictions on unemployment payments, penalizing people who refuse positions that are below their education and experience levels or within a certain distance from their homes…to provide Finns with the level of financial security they enjoy under their current system, basic income payments would have to be at least twice those of the trial. And to pay everyone, the country would have to change its tax structure…"
Roy Hattersley, Labour’s former deputy leader, has reignited the party’s feuding by claiming it is “in danger of disintegration” as extremists take over.Labour is in “a much more dangerous situation” than during the Militant Tendency insurgency of the 1980s because left-wing activists are “increasingly in control” he claimed.“the people behind Jeremy will take over the party and run it in a way which we find unacceptable” – putting hopes of an election win “in difficult trouble”.Moderate party figures with “sense” had to speak out, he argued, describing it as a “tragedy for the Labour Party” that they remained silent about what was going on.https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-latest-danger-disintegration-roy-hattersley-warns-a8294721.html
I noted today that the BBC gave prominence to Blair's opinion on Brexit and Northern Ireland on their website. He is treated by the media not as a war criminal who even at the most generous of interpretations failed to understand the intelligence about Iraq WMDs but as a respected statesman to be heeded.I would not be surprised if he makes a re-entry into UK politics and attempts to be PM again once peoples' memories forget the past and the media re-invents the future.
Is this related to the proposed new party in this topic?https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/another-political-party-horizon
The underlying trigger that erupted the Gaza nonviolent protest movement at this time is the living conditions. The question is, ‘What do we have to lose?’ In the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian population has reached the point where there is nothing more to lose. Gazans are on the brink of one of the worst humanitarian disasters…70% living in Gaza are registered refugees….. Sami Awad, the executive director of the Bethlehem-based Holy Land Trust, whose organization trains leaders in nonviolence tactics, explained, “The Israeli military and political establishment knows and understands fully the power of nonviolent resistance and has in the past. This establishment will do anything in the future to stop, discourage or undermine Palestinians who engage in nonviolence. “The violent deadly response of the Israeli army, as painful as it is, only shows the threat to Israel that nonviolence brings,”Palestinians in Gaza have shown that nonviolent protests can do more to shake up Israel and the world community than more violent means of protests. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/04/palestine-gaza-west-bank-differences-protests-noviolence.html
Quote:the line between criticism of Israel and prejudice against Jews is both fine and blurred. In Israel too, these accusations are weaponised against politicians and activists that step out of line. Tamar Zandberg, the brand new leader of Israel’s leftist Meretz party, criticised the “trigger happy” response to the marches by the Israeli military, and called for an internal inquiry in a message to her Twitter followers. The tweet attracted responses that saw Zandberg dubbed Tamar “Abu” Zandberg, arabising her name and implying she could not be Jewish (or Israeli) while holding anti-government views. Other comments depicted Zandberg not as a politician attempting to legitimately guide her state, but as part of an international campaign to humiliate Israel and undermine the legitimacy of its existence. Minister for Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan replied that he regretted that the Israeli left “cannot even provide essential support to the IDF against an organisation that desires the destruction of Israel”…Every military encounter with Palestinians, then, is said to be about the existence of Israel itself, and not the specific context in which events occur. Dismissing the plight of the Palestinians, even to the very basic extent of ignoring crises in basic amenities like electricity, helps to reinforce this. Criticism falls on deaf ears, then, because of a kind of moral exceptionalism: when Israel is under threat, politicians and activists alike must accept the army doing whatever it takes to ensure the state’s existence.And here is why Corbyn might be the one singled out for vilificationhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jeremy-corbyn-israel-killings-palestine-gaza-border-violence-a8293881.html"Jeremy Corbyn has condemned Israel’s killing of at least 27 Palestinians on the Gaza border as an “outrage” and attacked Western “silence” about the deaths."
Ministers will face a backlash against reform to the benefits system when millions of claimants moving on to universal credit realise their income will be cut, the government’s most senior welfare adviser, Paul Gray, chairman of the independent social security advisory committee, said.https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/07/universal-credit-backlash-millions-lose-out
Tell a lie often enough and it gets taken as truthHalf of the electorate believes that there are at least pockets of antisemitism in the Labour party, according to a poll.A third of voters also believe that Jeremy Corbyn is among those in the party who hold antisemitic views.Throw mud and it stickshttps://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/apr/08/labour-antisemitism-opinion-poll
’Tselem, the respected Israeli human rights NGO, began a media campaign today urging Israel Defense Forces soldiers posted on the Gaza border to disobey “patently illegal” shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed protesters. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/04/06/btselem-calls-israeli-soldiers-defy-shooting-orders-lest-they-commit-war-crimes
Quote:“Patently illegal” is an Israeli military concept, coined after the 1956 Qafr Qassem Massacre, when soldiers of the Border Police murdered 47 Israeli Palestinians after receiving an order to kill anyone outside his house after an impromptu curfew was announced. The defendants claimed they were duty-bound to follow a legal order. The judges found that there are “patently illegal” orders, which may be recognized as “a black flag flying over the order, saying ‘it’s forbidden!’”. They continued:We’re not dealing with a formal, hidden or not, illegality, not one seen only by scholars of law, but a clear and obvious illegality, a certain and essential illegality of the order itself […] illegality which pierces the eye and enrages the heart, assuming the eye is not blind and the heart is not made of stone or corrupt.”While the words are stirring, the nature of a “patently illegal” order was always debated. Soldiers are taught that their duty is to obey a merely illegal order, but that they legally obligated to disobey a “patently illegal” one.Our blog has added a new post on the topic following the format of previous ones…copy and paste of past articles from the Standardhttp://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/2018/04/another-message.html
http://news.trust.org/item/20180405202453-2crv3/The new law, allowing abortions when women's lives are in danger or if a fetus is unviable or the result of rape, was welcomed by rights groups in a region with some of the world's most restrictive abortion laws. It legalised abortion for the first time in Chile, one of several Latin American countries that had a total ban. Women and girls in Chile, including rape victims, will find it harder to access legal abortions as the government has started allowing clinics to deny services on moral grounds, campaigners said. Campaigners say the move, which has revived debate on abortion in the Catholic nation, marks a set back for women's reproductive rights as it places barriers in their way to receiving a legal abortion. women and girls in small communities where there are few healthcare providers will struggle to find services, said Lidia Casas, law professor at Chile's Diego Portales University.
