SCOTTISH TRADE UNION CONGRESS JOINS CAMPAIGN AGAINST ISRAEL WITH BDS

Received by email on 27 April 2009:


Breaking news....

Scotland today joined Ireland and South Africa when the Scottish Trade Union Congress, representing every Scottish trade union, voted overwhelmingly to commit to boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. This is the third example of a national trade union federation committing to BDS and is a clear indication that, while Israel can kill Palestinians with impunity and Western support, it has lost the battle for world public opinion. It is now seen to be a state born out of ethnic cleansing and still expanding through the violent dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Speaker after speaker expressed intense anger at Israel’s butchery of 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza over the New Year, as well as the much longer history of Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The vote followed a visit to Israel/Palestine by an STUC Delegation in March which heard from a wide range of trade union and other bodies and returned with a unanimous recommendation that the parent body adopt BDS.

The STUC move to a position of BDS followed debate on the Delegation report with affiliated unions as well as consultations across Scotland. There were written and oral submissions from Zionist as well as human rights bodies.

The commitment to BDS was made despite aggressive lobbying by Zionist groups, including an absurd warning that a commitment to active support for Palestinian human rights would lead to attacks on Scottish Jews, and the parachuting into Scotland of the Histadrut’s Head of Communications from Israel.

The STUC’s new position is a dramatic breakthrough which has the potential to greatly accelerate the boycott campaign already underway in Scotland against, for example, Israeli companies and sporting or cultural visits. The Scottish Government earlier in the year yielded to public concerns and cancelled a trade delegation to Israel.

It will also make easier the task of building a mass boycott campaign across the land surface of Scotland, in every town and small community, in every supermarket and every sporting and cultural event.

Israel’s New Year mountain of corpses in Gaza, together with its frequent murder of unarmed civilians across Palestine was only the latest in a long series of Israeli massacres. We may be unable to stop the next one, but our job of building the sort of mass BDS campaign that can confront Israeli violence with a countervailing force has just become easier. An aroused world opinion is increasingly ready to ensure that all don’t die in vain.

We can only offer hope to the hard-pressed Palestinians that their freedom is coming, however long Israel and its allies work to delay it.


Speaking prior to the debate, STUC General Secretary, Grahame Smith, said: “The STUC General Council is recommending support for boycott and calls for sanctions against Israel because of its attacks on the human rights of Palestinian people and its breaches of international laws.
Mr Smith continued: “On our recent visit to Israel and Palestine we witnessed the human rights violations experienced by ordinary Palestinians on a daily basis. We saw how restrictions on movement and checkpoints prevent people from going to work, to school and to visit their families – even when they are sick and dying.”
“We heard powerful arguments from the Palestinian Human Rights Organisation, Al-Haq, outlining how Israel is in breach of the Geneva Conventions, and the need for other signatories to international laws to hold Israel to account.”
“Our delegation also met with the leadership of Israeli trade union centre, Histadrut, and the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions. The STUC has carefully considered the complex issues involved, and we believe that we have a moral obligation to show solidarity to Palestinian people.” Read full STUC Press Release


View the STUC General Council Recommendation on BDS passed at Congress today in Perth. The significant paragraphs are:


6.1 The General Council is recommending that Congress should take a position of:

*
supporting boycotts and disinvestments against lsrael,
*
calling for sanctions against lsrael,
*
encouraging positive investments in the occupied territories.

6.6 The STUC acknowledges its relationship with both PGFTU and Histadrut and supports the development of a constructive dialogue between them. The STUC will explain its position on BDS to Histadrut, and will, over the next 12 months, raise with them Histadrut positions in relation to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The STUC will review its relationship with Histadrut in this context.

Join the discussion - join the campaign!

Executive Member of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade
Unions: Manawel Abdelall speaking in Scotland this week.

Thursday 23 April, 7.30pm: Glasgow
with Keith Hammond, BRICUP
STUC building, 333 Woodlands Road

Friday 24 April, 6pm: Edinburgh
Augustine Church Centre, George IV Bridge







Join Scottish PSC- we are all volunteers with no paid staff - or make a financial donation to help us continue campaigning work:
Send a cheque to:

Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign

c/o Peace & Justice Centre
2 Princes Street
Edinburgh EH2 4BJ



secretary@scottishpsc.org.uk
www.scottishpsc.org.uk
SPSC is affiliated to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (UK) www.palestinecampaign.org

ANTI-SEMITISM AND SELF-HATING JEWS

ANTI-SEMITISM AND SELF-HATING JEWS

22 April 2009

The second United Nations conference on racism, generally known as Durban II because the first one in Durban some years ago created an international storm about anti-semitism, and will probably be known as Durban I, has had some fairly predictable outcomes.

Two of the fall-guys for this conference are, of course, predictably in one case, the president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, and in the second case Ban Ki Moon, United Nations secretary general, who is being attacked for hosting such a conference in the first place!

Now holocaust deniers such as Ahmadinejad lose their credibility when they attack such countries as Israel, because Iran is a racist, sexist, homophobic intolerant society, and a dictatorship of the mullahs, by the mullahs for the mullahs. Oppression, imprisonment, murder of homosexuals and other opponents of the state hardly make for a credible, tolerant society, and Iran is very low on the scale of countries which command respect in world forums because of their human rights abuses

When it comes to Israel, one is hard put to restrain oneself from accusations of a similar nature. It must be admitted at this stage that Israel dos not incarcerate its homosexual communities, nor does it yet murder them, but with the government it has recently elected to power, including the fascist Boris Lieberman, the future looks bleak indeed, unless some moderation can be achieved by other members of Israel’s parliament.

Certainly in the occupied territories such as the West Bank and Gaza, those who are potentially the governing politicians, Fatah and Hamas, are dangerously homophobic and those who live in those territories who are homosexuals probably have to live largely closeted existences in order to survive, much as in many other fanatical Islamic countries.

That, though, is a diversion from racism, which is at the core of this discussion.

The countries which either boycotted the conference or walked out during Ahmadinejad’s speech are countries in which racism has long been a feature of their politics. Germany and South Africa have been held up as examples of pariah states for much of the 20th century, but a proper analysis of the racist history of that century will show that before, during and after the second world war, the Jews were not wanted in those countries now throwing up their hypocritical arms in horror, and mostly were not allowed into them, even when their positions became so dire because of Nazi Germany’s assaults on Europe’s Jewish communities.

Countries such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and most of the European countries such as France, were not prepared to take in Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany. However, Zionists working behind the scenes with many of these governments managed to make deals in some cases to let Jews escape – provided they went to Palestine to help setting up a Zionist state on Arab land.

So, anti-semitism was rife, and the Zionists who worked to subvert the refugee problem were in effect self-hating Jews – ready to sacrifice those Jews such as the Bundists in eastern Europe who were anti-zionist, and not prepared to submit to being shipped off to a country such as Palestine which didn’t want them and which they didn’t want!
Now we have the situation around the world that some of those countries thought they could overcome their feelings of guilt due to their allowing the holocaust to occur by ensuring that the Jews have a “homeland” where Jews from around the world can go and live. The Israeli law of return means that Jews from anywhere, even possibly those with criminal convictions, such as some of the Russian post-USSR era Jewish mafia businessmen who made crooked fortunes in the collapse of the Soviet Union, can enter Israel because they are Jews.

Now we come to the real self-hating Jews. Israel, the country which is now guilty of war crimes, genocide, and every human rights abuse known to man – white phosphorus, cluster bombs, carpet bombing, closing borders to starve into submission those whose land they are anxious to steal – is supported by all those countries whose racism and human rights abuses are not any less than those of the Israelis.

Living in these countries are half the world’s Jewish population of about 13 million, and they wield disproportionate power on the governments of the countries in which they live. Many of these Jews hate vehemently those Jews who have seen through the whole Zionist enterprise and believe it should be stopped now.
They accuse those Jews of being self-hating, but they are the ones themselves who are hypocrites and liars – they are the ones who live safe and secure and comfortable lives in the USA, UK, Australia and other countries, but don’t have the courage of their convictions to go and live in Israel and fight for what they supposedly believe in – the Zionist Jewish state of Israel – the racist non-democratic state in the middle of the middle east!

The United States of America, the state that is terrorism personified, is the country that invaded Afghanistan and Iraq without provocation, which sponsors Rendition, Water-boarding, Torture of people held in its custody in defiance of the Geneva Convention which it has ignored, has covered up and protected its president and other members of his circle from the war crimes prosecutions which should have come from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the concentration camp in Cuba (what is the USA doing in Cuba anyway?).

The United States of America, with a population nearing 300 million contains about 6 million Jews who are US citizens. This tiny percentage of Jews controls much of the US foreign policy, much of it dictated by the US oil interests and therefore control in the Middle East, and is therefore the protector of Israel under all circumstances.
These are the Jews who help Israel propagate anti-semitism in the idle hope that it will drive Jews out of their countries of residence to migrate to Israel and thus strengthen the Zionist Jewish population in the hope that they will be able to outnumber the Palestinians. The reverse is actually what has happened as many Israeli citizens have fled the country to seek peace and quiet in other countries around the world.

The USA sees that Israel is armed to the teeth, that everybody denies its nuclear capability – Vanunu and the joint South African-Israeli nuclear device exploded during the South African apartheid years in the South Atlantic, and is determined to continue the holocaust propaganda endlessly to drive home to the world that Israeli Jews must be able to protect themselves from those terrorists armed by Iran – Hezbollah and Hamas and any others of their ilk (organizations originally supported by the USA in order to split the Arab/Muslim forces in the middle east and ending in the reversal of their plans.

The Jews in the USA who belong to the propaganda arms of Israeli policy are determined to silence any and all opposition to Israel’s human rights abuses by ensuring that these vocal anti-zionists are driven out of their positions in US universities and academic institutions.

Somehow Noam Chomsky still seems to have maintained tenure, but two of the main opponents of the state of Israel and its Zionist propaganda and expansionist policies who have been sacked because of what they have said and written are (http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/) Norman Finkelstein and (http://joelkovel.org) Joel Kovel. They have stated that Israel is a failed state and that there is no possibility of a two-state solution, only a one-state secular state in Palestine. This ‘heresy’ is unacceptable, so removing them from their employment will send a message to others of their ilk to toe the Zionist party line.

Australia – that toady of the USA - has recently been host to an Israeli academic Professor Jeff Halper who is outspoken about Israel’s brutal behaviour in Gaza and Lebanon and his tour of Australia was marred by certain Jewish (Zionist) organizations to refuse to give him a platform. He was hosted in Australia by organisations such as Independent Australian Jewish Voices – Antony Loewenstein and others, and the Australian Jewish News (aka Israel Zionist times) refused to countenance announcements about meetings and talks at which the visiting professor would utter sounds anathema to the local 100,000 (not so) strong Jewish community which is supposed to be a united front but is anything but that!

Now all of this leads to the same conclusion – these Zionists are their own worst enemies, are anti-semites – they hate other Jews who don’t agree with them, and these Zionist self-hating Jews continue to call Toorak and Rushcutters Bay home, and not Tel Aviv and Rechovot. These are the heroes who are destroying the Zionist dream by their own actions and are not aware of the damage they are doing because they are so besotted by Israel – right or wrong!

ELDER ABUSE - FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ATTACKS SOME OF THE MOST VULNERABLE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY

Mannie De Saxe
PO Box 1675
Preston South
Vic 3072
Phone: 03 9471 4878
Web: http://home.zipworld.com.au/~josken/inters8.htm

7 April 2009

ELDER ABUSE
Federal Government attacks some of the most vulnerable members of the community

Elder abuse has been well documented in recent years, covering areas such as abuse in nursing homes, abuse by carers, abuse by partners such as domestic violence, abuse by institutions and abuse by those responsible for management of care for the elderly, frail, sick, disabled.

Elder abuse of the gay, lesbian, transgender and HIV/AIDS (GLTH) communities has also started to be documented in recent years, and horror reports by researchers such as Dr Jo Harrison, researcher of gay and lesbian gerontology, have uncovered instances of abuse to which those in local government and other governmental levels have turned blind eyes in many instances, or in fact have been guilty of inflicting themselves.

Now, in 2009, the Federal Government is about to inflict a new method of elder abuse on the GLTH communities, particularly those least able to defend themselves against this new form of discrimination, homophobia and other forms of abuse by targeting same-sex aged, disabled and other disadvantaged most vulnerable people.

This new abuse inflicts outing, public declarations, income reduction and other disadvantages on these groups because the Government refuses to provide a grandfather clause in the legislation which provides improvements in conditions for same-sex partnerships with changes to nearly 100 pieces of legislation.

In effect, this elder abuse means inflicting hardship on people who have lived their lives with the hardships imposed by the homophobic world in which they have lived, a world which has denied them the same human rights which heterosexual members of the community have taken for granted as their right in our society.

Because so many have remained living as homosexuals in secret, the psychological and physical impacts as well as the other impacts of outing them are too numerous to contemplate. These are people who have had to try to finance their plans for old age in ways which would be foreign to heterosexuals, and who in many instances will now have their support structures torn away from them because of the new legislation.

This is elder abuse writ large and for which the government will be held responsible for the awful situations inflicted on those least able to protect themselves, all this at a time of financial crisis in local and global economies which will affect us all.

All these hardships will be avoided by the inclusion of a grandfather clause to assist some of the most disadvantaged of our elderly GLTH population – those already in their 70s, 80s and older.

You wouldn’t do this to your own families, would you?

Mannie De Saxe

COPIES SENT TO:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd – contact form
Attorney General Robert McClelland – R.McClelland.MP@aph.gov.au
Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services & Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin – contact form
Minister for Resources and Energy, Minister for Tourism Martin Ferguson – Martin.Ferguson.MP@aph.gov.au
Minister for Human Services Senator Joe Ludwig – contact form

Leader of the Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown - senator.bob.brown@aph.gov.au
Leader of the Opposition Malcolm Turnbull – Malcolm.Turnbull.MP@aph.gov.au

Australian Senior (Victoria) - smiceli@thesenior.com.au
Fifty~Plus News – contact@fiftyplusnews.com

Ausqueer – AusQueer@yahoogroups.com
glbti_ageing – glbti_ageing@yahoogroups.com.au
ozhomohist – ozhomohist@yahoogroups.com

MCV – editormcv@eevolution.com.au
Sydney Star Observer – editor@starobserver.com.au

Dr Jo Harrison – GLTH Gerontologist – jamms@ozemail.com.au

EUTHANASIA

Palliative care delays inevitable

March 27, 2009

A SIGNIFICANT proportion of deaths under palliative care are actually a form of extended euthanasia involving the escalating use of increasing levels of painkillers that are fatal above a certain dose. Doctors do this gradually to avoid prosecution. The dying patient then suffers an extended period of incapacity, needlessly delaying the inevitable. Alternatively, the patient is kept in a drugged state without sustenance while their body starves to death.

The real problem is the unholy alliance between religious fundamentalists and well-meaning do-gooders who wish to deny rational people the right to end their lives with dignity when faced with a debilitating death. The gutlessness of politicians in not giving people a choice is another obstacle. Rational individuals must be allowed a choice without resorting to subterfuge.

Greg Angelo, Balwyn North

Cruel way to find dignity

IT IS cruel to make brave people such as Angie Belecciu ("Angie's choice", 25/3) jump through such hoops to achieve a dignified death. A person is as much their spirit as their body and surely it is wrong to keep the body alive at such emotional and financial cost when the spirit longs for death. Are we not upsetting the rhythm and joy of life by trying to endlessly defer death?

The gift of being able to choose the time and manner of our death would be as much a gift to future generations as to ourselves.

Roz McNaught, Tonimbuk

Do I own my body?

THE Belecciu affair raises a fundamental philosophical question: if I do not own, have responsibility for and control of my body, who does? I would be interested in an answer to this question.

Geoff Sheldon, Watsonia

Path cannot be taken

KEITH McEwan and Evert de Graauw (Letters, 26/3) ignore the consistent experience in other countries and throughout history that diminishing the value of life with euthanasia (even when "voluntary") opens the door to abuse. It is impossible to make laws that prevent this because anyone who gets abused will not be around to complain. Painful death is certainly not good, but giving evil people the means to kill others — and get away with it — is much worse and would be unavoidable. A civilised society will not — indeed, cannot — take this road.

Mark Rabich, Heathmont

Risk worth taking

THE comment by Keith McEwan (Letters, 26/3) that the "penalty for importation of Nembutal without a permit is up to 25 years' imprisonment or $550,000 fine" is misleading. Angie drank one bottle of the drug (concentration: 100 millilitres, 60 milligrams/millilitres, 6 grams). The indictable amount for importing this drug is 10 grams. Exit International legal advisers tell us that the penalty, had she been prosecuted, would likely have been a fine of a few hundred dollars. Exit knows of more than 400 elderly Australians who have decided to take this risk.

Philip Nitschke, director, Exit International, Doncaster

Take look at law reform

PERHAPS the most notable aspect of Angie's choice was that she declined the other choice — palliative care — and she an experienced palliative care nurse. Her experience would have confirmed Professor Michael Ashby's observation that "bone pain and psychological pain" are particularly difficult to control. Angie's comments make it clear that her psychological pain was relieved by obtaining "the knowledge". It is such a pity that Angie was forced to die alone, and that her death had to be so public in her effort to bring Parliament to reality. The least it could do is refer this issue to the Law Reform Commission for an unbiased report on options for dying with dignity. Its report on abortion law reform was a model for responsible law reform.

Dr Rodney Syme, Toorak