30 March 2009

ELDER ABUSE BY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

Mannie De Saxe, Member of Lesbian and Gay Solidarity, Melbourne

PO Box 1675,

Preston South,

Vic 3072

Email: josken1_at_pacific_net_au

29 March 2009

Minister for Human Services

Senator Joe Ludwig

Re: Media Release: Government launches ‘Couples are Couples’ same sex information campaign

There are certain matters which need to be addressed by the Federal Government’s same-sex legislation in relation to Centrelink’s new guidelines:

1) Same-sex relationships have no legal recognition by the Federal government, which means discrimination, inequality, homophobia and other abuses in an ongoing pattern.

2) The Attorney General and you have persisted in stating, ad nauseam, that the gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS (GLTH) communities have had 15 months to adjust to the new legislation and grandfather clauses are therefore not warranted. This is patently not the case.

3) A minimum of publicity in the media has meant that there are probably hundreds, if not thousands of these communities who are unaware of the changes and/or the effects they will have on them, because the Federal government has failed to publicise the changes in the media.

4) From 30 March 2009 to 1 July 2009 is three months, not 15 months as you are all claiming, and Centrelink has even now, by 29 March 2009, not sent News for Seniors to Seniors informing of the changes – and in fact from 15 months ago to the present, there has not been one word uttered in that paper about GLTH communities and possible changes mooted by federal legislation.

5) It should be pointed out that the Australian community is an ageing community, and that includes members of the GLTH communities as well. You will be aware of the inequities in pensions to couples where a couple receives pension benefits which are NOT equal to two single pensions. We now live in the 21st century, and it is many years since women are supposed to have achieved wage equality with men (which of course in practice is very often still not the case.) It is therefore ludicrous that two pensioners in a couple, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual – or whatever the genders of the partners - do not each receive single pensions, considering how costs and expenditures have risen over the years to the extent that many, if not most, households need two incomes in order to survive in the modern world.

6) To then refuse a grandfather clause to same-sex couples who have very often been forced to remain closeted, who have been abused, and treated with homophobia and discrimination merely perpetuates this discrimination. Your laws of the past forced us to hide our relationships and now you think equating us with de factos will suddenly get rid of religious bigotry and hate!

7) As your government has failed to investigate the numbers who will be affected by the legislative changes, costs to government will be minimal – all pensioners pay tax – the gst ensures that – but those who will be most affected by the changes will be people in their 70s, 80s and older, who are amongst the most vulnerable members of the community. The intrinsic homophobia in the federal parliament ensures that these people will be so seriously affected that same-sex partners – when outed by your government by whatever means you and Centrelink employ – will stand to lose up to $100 each per fortnight, reducing their spending ability and for those who have to pay rent for accommodation will now become the new poor below the breadline. This is what you are setting out to achieve.

8) Until such time as there is legal recognition in the form of some sort of federal registration of partnerships, it is unclear whether your legislative changes are, in fact legal, and may well be able to be challenged. Who defines what is a “couple” and in fact what actually is the meaning of “couple” in the context of the government’s legislative changes?

9) Finally, it is worth noting that, although many of us are already in our 80s and are therefore able to be defined as geriatrics, we are not all suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, are not demented and still have the ability to vote. A federal election is due in approximately 18 months time, and we will vote.

The proposed changes have been mishandled from the start, consultations with the GLTH communities have been limited and restricted, and many voices have gone unheard. In fact, Lesbian and Gay Solidarity was never consulted about the de facto status and when we phoned the number in your media release for the community information kit, the staffer didn’t know what we wanted. So how good is your staff education for telephone operators? The GLTH communities have suffered from state and federal governments and their homophobia for the last 100 years, and the forthcoming changes will not bring equality. When we attain equality in every aspect of the law, we will no longer have grounds for complaint.

In the mean time, homophobic comments and actions by federal parliamentarians such as Gillard and Roxon go unchallenged by the prime minister and his government which has staunch allies in the Coalition.

It would be a good idea for all parliamentarians to see a new US documentary on the sorts of discriminations which will shortly be entrenched. The documentary is called simply “For my wife."

A letter in the Sunday Age on 29 March 2009 about Centerlink concludes “. . . . . . never mentioned the humiliating experience of dealing with Centrelink. Even the design of Centrelink offices, where everyone in the long queues can hear about your personal life, only seems to shame the unemployed.” Imagine the situation of 70, 80, 90-year-old age and/or disability pensioners, possibly also hard of hearing and possibly also closeted for a lifetime, standing in such a queue at a Centrelink office and having to disclose the most intimate details of their lives. Is there no end to the humiliations to be heaped upon some of the most vulnerable people in the country?

Mannie De Saxe, member of Lesbian and Gay Solidarity, Melbourne

ANTONY LOEWENSTEIN THREATENED BY ZIONIST THUGS

Standing alongside the Palestinians

psw1

I was sent the following email earlier in the week, in Hebrew - “I am a Jewish Australian- Israeli student at Melbourne Uni. I served as a tank commander in the IDF, with pride - and my friend translated the message:

Dear Mr. Loewestein,

I couldn’t ignore your posters that are all over the university. It’s a shame that a Jew like you humiliates his people and foments so much anti-Semitism. It is people like you who are the cause of so much hatred towards Israel. Even the left in Israel wouldn’t think of committing a crime such as yours.

It is you, the Socialist group, weak and ignorant, that are using emotional manipulation via selective information.

My dear Antony, there has arisen a new group at the university called ISF [Israel Stands Forever], whose aim is to fight and shut the mouths of people like you.

In every place that you’ll be. We’ll be there too.
In every place where sprout your dirt, we’ll sprout back. [a Hebrew slang roughly meaning "ruin someone's name" or "say something bad about them with no good reason"]
In every place where you’ll talk, we’ll talk back.

Of course this is all in the spirit of politics and civility.

A Jewish friend commented:

I’m struck by the explicit goal to “shut the mouths” of people they don’t agree with. I mean, it’s such a bizarre and explicit totalitarian reaction and they have no consciousness at all of their mirroring fascist mentality.

23 March 2009

THE LOBBY FALTERS - A CRACK IN THE US ISRAEL LOBBY

This arrived by email on 22 March 2009 and is reproduced in full:


http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n06/mear01_.html


The Lobby Falters

John Mearsheimer
London Review of Books, 26 March 2009

Many people in Washington were surprised when the Obama administration tapped Charles Freeman to chair the National Intelligence Council, the body that oversees the production of National Intelligence Estimates: Freeman had a distinguished 30-year career as a diplomat and Defense Department official, but he has publicly criticised Israeli policy and America’s special relationship with Israel, saying, for example, in a speech in 2005, that ‘as long as the United States continues unconditionally to provide the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.’ Words like these are rarely spoken in public in Washington, and anyone who does use them is almost certain not to get a high-level government position. But Admiral Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence, greatly admires Freeman: just the sort of person, he thought, to revitalise the intelligence community, which had been very politicised in the Bush years.
Predictably alarmed, the Israel lobby launched a smear campaign against Freeman, hoping that he would either quit or be fired by Obama. The opening salvo came in a blog posting by Steven Rosen, a former official of Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, now under indictment for passing secrets to Israel. Freeman’s views of the Middle East, he said, ‘are what you would expect in the Saudi Foreign Ministry, with which he maintains an extremely close relationship’. Prominent pro-Israel journalists such as Jonathan Chait and Martin Peretz of the New Republic, and Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, quickly joined the fray and Freeman was hammered in publications that consistently defend Israel, such as the National Review, the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard.
The real heat, however, came from Congress, where Aipac (which describes itself as ‘America’s Pro-Israel Lobby’) wields enormous power. All the Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee came out against Freeman, as did key Senate Democrats such as Joseph Lieberman and Charles Schumer. ‘I repeatedly urged the White House to reject him,’ Schumer said, ‘and I am glad they did the right thing.’ It was the same story in the House, where the charge was led by Republican Mark Kirk and Democrat Steve Israel, who pushed Blair to initiate a formal investigation of Freeman’s finances. In the end, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, declared the Freeman appointment ‘beyond the pale’. Freeman might have survived this onslaught had the White House stood by him. But Barack Obama’s pandering to the Israel lobby during the campaign and his silence during the Gaza War show that this is one opponent he is not willing to challenge. True to form, he remained silent and Freeman had little choice but to withdraw.
The lobby has since gone to great lengths to deny its role in Freeman’s resignation. The Aipac spokesman Josh Block said his organisation ‘took no position on this matter and did not lobby the Hill on it’. The Washington Post, whose editorial page is run by Fred Hiatt, a man staunchly committed to the special relationship, ran an editorial which claimed that blaming the lobby for Freeman’s resignation was something dreamed up by ‘Mr Freeman and like-minded conspiracy theorists’.
In fact, there is abundant evidence that Aipac and other hardline supporters of Israel were deeply involved in the campaign. Block admitted that he had spoken to reporters and bloggers about Freeman and provided them with information, always on the understanding that his comments would not be attributed to him or to Aipac. Jonathan Chait, who denied that Israel was at the root of the controversy before Freeman was toppled, wrote afterwards: ‘Of course I recognise that the Israel lobby is powerful and was a key element in the pushback against Freeman, and that it is not always a force for good.’ Daniel Pipes, who runs the Middle East Forum, where Steven Rosen now works, quickly sent out an email newsletter boasting about Rosen’s role in bringing Freeman down.
On 12 March, the day the Washington Post ran its editorial railing against anyone who suggested that the Israel lobby had helped topple Freeman, the paper also published a front-page story describing the central role that the lobby had played in the affair. There was also a comment piece by the veteran journalist David Broder, which opened with the words: ‘The Obama administration has just suffered an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the lobbyists the president vowed to keep in their place.’
Freeman’s critics maintain that his views on Israel were not his only problem. He is said to have especially close – maybe even improper – ties to Saudi Arabia, where he previously served as American ambassador. The charge hasn’t stuck, however, because there is no evidence for it. Israel’s supporters also said that he had made insensitive remarks about what happened to the Chinese protesters at Tiananmen Square, but that charge, which his defenders contest, only came up because Freeman’s pro-Israel critics were looking for any argument they could muster to damage his reputation.
Why does the lobby care so much about one appointment to an important, but not top leadership position? Here’s one reason: Freeman would have been responsible for the production of National Intelligence Estimates. Israel and its American supporters were outraged when the National Intelligence Council concluded in November 2007 that Iran was not building nuclear weapons, and they have worked assiduously to undermine that report ever since. The lobby wants to make sure that the next estimate of Iran’s nuclear capabilities reaches the opposite conclusion, and that would have been much less likely to happen with Freeman in charge. Better to have someone vetted by Aipac running the show.
An even more important reason for the lobby to drive Freeman out of his job is the weakness of the case for America’s present policy towards Israel, which makes it imperative to silence or marginalise anyone who criticises the special relationship. If Freeman hadn’t been punished, others would see that one could talk critically about Israel and still have a successful career in Washington. And once you get an open and free-wheeling discussion about Israel, the special relationship will be in serious trouble.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Freeman affair was that the mainstream media paid it little attention – the New York Times, for example, did not run a single story dealing with Freeman until the day after he stepped down – while a fierce battle over the appointment took place in the blogosphere. Freeman’s opponents used the internet to their advantage; that is where Rosen launched the campaign. But something happened there that would never have happened in the mainstream media: the lobby faced real opposition. Indeed, a vigorous, well-informed and highly regarded array of bloggers defended Freeman at every turn and would probably have carried the day had Congress not tipped the scales against them. In short, the internet enabled a serious debate in the United States about an issue involving Israel. The lobby has never had much trouble keeping the New York Times and the Washington Post in line, but it has few ways to silence critics on the internet.
When pro-Israel forces clashed with a major political figure in the past, that person usually backed off. Jimmy Carter, who was smeared by the lobby after he published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was the first prominent American to stand his ground and fight back. The lobby has been unable to silence him, and it is not for lack of trying. Freeman is following in Carter’s footsteps, but with sharper elbows. After stepping down, he issued a blistering denunciation of ‘unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country’ whose aim is ‘to prevent any view other than its own from being aired’. ‘There is,’ he continued, ‘a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government.’
Freeman’s remarkable statement has shot all around the world and been read by countless individuals. This isn’t good for the lobby, which would have preferred to kill Freeman’s appointment without leaving any fingerprints. But Freeman will continue to speak out about Israel and the lobby, and maybe some of his natural allies inside the Beltway will eventually join him. Slowly but steadily, space is being opened up in the United States to talk honestly about Israel.

John Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

22 March 2009

WHO SAID NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO THAT ISRAEL WAS AN APARTHEID STATE?

Ronnie Kasrils has kindly given permission for his article on Israel and Palestine to be reproduced in full. Here it is:

Who said nearly 50 years ago that Israel was an Apartheid State?

by Ronnie Kasrils

"...a colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, most clearly has its parallels in Palestine."

At the onset of international “Israel Apartheid Week” in solidarity with the embattled Palestinian people, I want to start by quoting a South African who emphatically stated as far back as 1963 that “Israel is an apartheid state.” Those were not the words of Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu or Joe Slovo, but were uttered by none other than the architect of apartheid itself, racist Prime Minister, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd.

He was irked by the criticism of apartheid policy and Harold Macmillan’s “Winds of Change” speech , in contrast to the West’s unconditional support for Zionist Israel.

To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolised rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines - even both countries marriage laws designed to safeguard racial “purity”.

The so-called “non-whites” in apartheid South Africa, indigenous Africans, others of mixed race or of Indian origin - like second or third class non-Jews in Israel - were consigned to a non-citizenship status of Kafkaesque existence, subject to bureaucratic whims and the laws prohibiting their free movement, access to work and trade, dictating where they could reside and so forth.

Verwoerd would have been well aware of Israel’s dispossession of indigenous Palestinian in 1948 - the year his apartheid party similarly came to power - of the unfolding destruction of their villages, the premeditated massacres and the systematic ethnic cleansing.

Within a few short years the apartheid regime was ruthlessly clearing South Africa’s cities and towns of so-called “black spots” - where the “non-whites” lived, socialised, studied and traded - bulldozing homes, loading families onto military trucks, and forcibly relocating them to distant settlements. Unlike the “native reserves” - soon to be reconstituted as Bantustans - not too far away from industrial areas because the economy thrived on a quota of cheap black labour.

Whilst he did not live to see the division of Palestinian territory after the Six Day War, and the subsequent creation of miniscule Bantustans in the West Bank and Gaza, he would have greatly admired and approved of the machinations that enclosed the Palestinians in their own ghettoised prisons. This after all was the Verwoerdian grand plan, and the reason why Jimmy Carter could so readily identify the Occupied Palestinian Territories as being akin to apartheid. In fact the Bantustans consisted of 13% of apartheid South Africa, uncannily comparable to the derisory, ever shrinking pieces of ground Israel is consigning to the Palestinians.

A further comment about the Bantustans. When I visited Yasser Arafat in his virtually demolished headquarters in Ramallah as part of a South African delegation in 2004, he pointed around him and said “See this is nothing but a Bantustan!” No, we responded, pointing out that no Bantustan, in fact not even our townships, had been bombed by warplanes, pulverised by tanks. To a wide-eyed Arafat we pointed out that Pretoria pumped in funds, constructed impressive administration buildings, even allowed for Bantustan airlines to service the Mickey Mouse capitals in order to impress the world that they were serious about so-called “separate development.”

What Verwoerd admired too was the impunity with which Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way, without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key among them the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to admire in Israel, and seek to emulate in the southern African region, was the way the Western powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military with impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the rising tide of Arab nationalism in its neighbourhood..

After the Six Day War, Verwoerd’s successor John Vorster, infamously stated: “The Israelis have beaten the Arabs before lunchtime. We will eat the African states for breakfast.” But it was not only the racial doctrine of Israel that excited apartheid’s leaders, it was the use of the biblical narrative as the ideological rationale to justify its vision, aims and methods.

The early Dutch pioneers, the Afrikaners, had used Bible and gun as colonisers elsewhere, to carve out their exclusive fortress bastion in South Africa’s hinterland. Like the biblical Israelites they claimed to be “God’s chosen people” with a mission to tame and civilise the wilderness; disregarding the productivity and industriousness of people who had tilled the soil and traded for centuries - claiming it was only they who would make the land flow with milk and honey. They invoked a covenant with God to deliver their enemies into their hands and to bless their deeds. Until the advent of South Africa’s democracy, the racial history books generally taught that the white man arrived in South Africa more or less as the so-called “Bantu tribes” from the north were wandering across the Limpopo - South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe - and that they the were pioneer settlers in a land without people.

Such a colonial racist mentality which rationalised the genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australasia, in Africa from Namibia to the Congo and elsewhere, most clearly has its parallels in Palestine.

What is so shameless about this anachronistic colonial barbarism is that Zionist Israel has been permitted by the West to aspire to such a goal even into the 21st Century.

It is by no means difficult to recognise from afar, as Verwoerd had been able to do, that Israel is indeed an apartheid state. Verwoerd’s successor, Balthazar John Vorster visited Israel after the 1973 October War, when Egypt in a rare victory regained the Suez Canal and Sinai from Israel. After that Israel and South Africa were virtually twinned as military allies for Pretoria helped supply Israel militarily in the immediacy of its 1973 setback and Israel came to support apartheid South Africa at the height of sanctions with weaponry and technology - from naval ships and the conversion of supersonic fighter planes to assistance in building six nuclear bombs and the creation of an arms industry.

For the liberation movements of southern Africa, Israel and apartheid South Africa represented a racist, colonial axis. It was noted that people like Vorster had been nazi sympathisers, interned during World War II - yet feted as heroes in Israel and incidentally never again referred to by South African Zionists as an anti-semite!. This did not surprise those that came to understand the true racist nature and character of Zionist Israel.

Time and space does not allow further elaboration, but it is instructive to add that in its conduct and methods of repression, Israel came to resemble more and more apartheid South Africa at its zenith - even surpassing its brutality, house demolitions, removal of communities, targeted assassinations, massacres, imprisonment and torture of its opponents, collective punishment and the aggression against neighbouring states.

Certainly we South Africans can identify the pathological cause, fuelling the hate, of Israel’s political-military elite and public in general. Neither is this difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand the way in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions against even defenceless civilians - women, children, the elderly amongst them. In fact was this not the pathological racist ideology that fuelled Hitler’s war lust and implementation of the Holocaust?

I will state clearly, without exaggeration, that any South African, whether involved in the freedom struggle, or motivated by basic human decency, who visits the Occupied Palestinian Territories are shocked to the core at the situation they encounter and agree with Archbishop Tutu’s comment that what the Palestinians are experiencing is far worse than what happened in South Africa, where the Sharpeville massacre of 69 civilians in 1960 became international symbol of apartheid cruelty.

I want to recall here the words of an Israeli Cabinet Minister, Aharon Cizling in 1948, after the savagery of the Deir Yassin massacre of 240 villagers became known. He said: “Now we too have behaved like the Nazis and my whole being is shaken.”

Recently the veteran British MP, Gerald Kaufman, long time friend of Israel, was reported as remarking that a spokeswoman of the Israeli Defence Force, talked like a Nazi, when she coldly dismissed the deaths of defenceless civilians in Gaza - many women and children amongst them.

It needs to be frankly raised that if the crimes of the Holocaust are at the top end of the scale of human barbarity in modern times, where do we place the human cost of what has so recently occurred in Gaza and against the Palestinians since 1948 in the ‘nakba’ (catastrophe) they have endured?

How do we evaluate the inhumanity of dropping bombs and blazing white phosphorous on civilian populations, burning people alive, gassing them in a Gaza ghetto under relentless siege with no place to run or hide. For 22 days relentless bombardment whole families vaporised before the horrified eyes of a surviving parent or child.

Guernica, Lidice, the Warsaw Ghetto, Deir Yassin, Mai Lei, Sabra and Shatilla, Sharpeville are high on that scale - and the perpetrators of the slaughter in Gaza are the off-spring of holocaust victims yet again, in Cizling’s words, behaving like Nazis. This must not be allowed to go unpunished and the international community must demand they be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. For the lesson is that if apartheid Israel is not stopped in its tracks these crimes will get greater and spread not only to engulf the entire Middle East and Iran, but indeed anywhere that Israel is challenged . Like the apartheid security forces the hand of Mossad stretches very far indeed. And of course with Israel a key ally in the USA’s “War on Terror” and all the motives for that onslaught, oil resources included, there will be no end to this bloody saga - with the Palestinians targeted to go the way of the extinct peoples of the former colonial era.

But such a fate must not and will not happen, if together with the unconquerable Palestinian people we share the resolve and determination to halt this insidious Zionist project, and its Great Power backing and encouragement.

Once more, let me turn to our South African experience.

There, as with other struggles such as Vietnam, Algeria, the former Portuguese colonies, the just nature of the struggle was the assurance for success.

With that moral advantage, on the basis of a just liberation struggle, we learnt the secret of Vietnam’s victory and strategised according to what we termed our Four Pillars of Struggle: Political mass struggle; reinforced by armed struggle; clandestine underground struggle; and international solidarity.

At times any one of these can become predominant and it is not for outsiders to direct those at the frontline of struggle what and how to choose but to modestly provide the lessons of our experience pointing out that the unity of the struggling people is as indispensable as the moral high-ground they occupy. For the Vietnamese the military element was generally primary but always resting on popular mass support.

In South Africa the mass struggle became the primary way, with sabotage actions and limited guerrilla operations inspiring our people. It all depends on the conditions and the situation.

But unquestioningly, what helped tip the balance, in Vietnam and South Africa, was the force and power of international solidarity action. It took some 30 years but the worldwide Anti-Apartheid Movements campaigns - launched in London in 1959 - for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions - not only provided international activists with a practical role, but became an incalculable factor in (a) isolating and weakening the apartheid regime (b) inspiring the struggling people (c) undermining the resolve of those states that supported and benefited from relations with apartheid South Africa, (d) generated a change of attitude amongst the South African white public generally, and political, business, professional, academic, religious and sporting associations in particular. Boycott made them feel the pinch in their pocket and their polecat status everywhere - whether on the sporting fields, at academic or business conventions, in the world of theatre and the arts they were totally shunned like biblical lepers.

There was literally no place to hide from universal condemnation backed by decisive and relentless action which in time became more and more creatve.

To conclude: we must spare no effort in building a world-wide solidarity movement to emulate the success of the Anti-Apartheid Movement which played such a crucial role in toppling the apartheid regime in South Africa. Nelson Mandela stated after South Africa attained democratic rule that “ we South Africans cannot feel free until the Palestinians are free.” A slogan of South Africa’s liberation struggle and our trade union movement is “An injury to one is an injury to all!“ That goes for the whole of humanity. Every act of solidarity demonstrates to the Palestinians and those courageous Jews who stand by them in Israel - that they are not alone.

Israel has lost in Gaza. Whilst many Palestinians have lost their lives the Palestinians have not been conquered or cowed. Repression generates resistance and that will grow. Israeli aggression stands exposed. A turning point has been reached in humanity‘s perception of this issue. The time is ripe for us to drive home the advantage. When 150,000 Palestinians within Israel itself demonstrated against the carnage in Gaza; when Jewish women staged a sit-in in at the Israeli Consulate in Toronto; when Norwegian tram drivers stopped their transport in sympathy; when municipalities and colleges decide to divest like Hampshire college in the USA (the first that took this step against apartheid South Africa), when Durban dockworkers refused to unload a ship with Israeli cargo; joining with the countless thousands around the world, from Australia to Britain to Belgium to Canada to Cairo, Jordan, Indonesia and the USA we know the times are changing and Zionist hegemony is fast losing control. BDS represents three words that will help bring about the defeat of Zionist Israel and victory for Palestine. Like South Africa this can mean, must mean: freedom, peace, security, equality and justice for all - Muslim, Christian and Jew. That is well worth struggling for!

----------------------------------------------------- * Address by Ronnie Kasrils: "Israel Apartheid Week"
Source: by courtesy & © 2009 Ronnie Kasrils

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90 years old, political gay activist, hosting two web sites, one personal: http://www.red-jos.net one shared with my partner, 94-year-old Ken Lovett: http://www.josken.net and also this blog. The blog now has an alphabetical index: http://www.red-jos.net/alpha3.htm

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