Month: September 2009

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Ziocolony’s war crimes confirmed by Goldstone Report

The wailings and bleatings of Segev since the release of the Goldstone Report on the perfidious attack on the people of Gaza are a sure sign the Ziocolony is flustered and paranoid that it will be dragged into an endless mire of litigation. Already, the blustering Ziocolony is refusing to countenance an independent enquiry as recommended by Goldstone. It is unlikely, given the usual US veto used to prevent civilised censure of its favourite pet and collaborator in oppression, that the Ziocolony will be referred to the ICJ to account for its abominations. Furthermore, the Ziocolony does not assent to that court’s jurisdiction. The ICJ does have jurisdiction to investigate the Ziocolony’s crimes against humanity and breaches of the Geneva Conventions to which the Ziocolony is a signatory. Goldstone’s report details why the Ziocolony has committed the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, against the Palestinian people.

Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza in the years before the war amounted to “collective punishment intentionally inflicted by the government of Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip”.

Israeli actions depriving Gazans of means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, and denying their freedom of movement, “could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, had been committed”.

Even if Israel’s long awaited appearance at the international courts at Le Hague is stymied by its mutually parasitic unprincipled protector, the painstakingly prepared 574 page report appears to have laid rock solid grounds for a truckload of civil prosecutions.

The Goldstone Report is available for download from the UN Human Rights Council.

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Sabra and Shatila – Israel’s massacre of Palestinians remembered

From Pulse:

The atrocities committed in the camps of Sabra and Shatila should be put in the context of an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people. The MacBride report found that these atrocities “were not inconsistent with wider Israeli intentions to destroy Palestinian political will and cultural identity.” [17] Since Deir Yassin and the other massacres of 1948, those who survived have joined hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fleeing a litany of massacres committed in 1953, 1967 and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the killing is still going on today. Thus were the victims and survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacre gathered up in the perpetual nakba of the slaughtered, the dispossessed, the displaced and the discarded – a pattern of ethnic cleansing perpetrated under the Zionist plan to finally and forever extinguish Palestinian society and its people.

This is why we must remember Sabra and Shatila, twenty-five years on.

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Australia’s Educational Divide Widening

Excellent article on educational trends in Australia toward social inequity on Inside Story by Chris Bonnor which should ring alarm bells for anyone concerned about democratic values:

The evidence is getting harder to avoid. The education consultant Barbara Preston has shown the changing ratio between low and high income families in schools. In 1996 there was an average of thirteen low-income for every ten high-income students in public school playgrounds. Now there are sixteen for every ten. The opposite trend occurred in private schools.

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The schools that the middle class leave behind have a higher concentration of the most disadvantaged students, with an obvious impact on the academic profile of the school – and their position on any league table. Apart from the shameful impact on our most disadvantaged students this trend has significant implications for communities and social cohesion. It also makes harder the job of lifting the achievement of low-achieving students. Increasingly there is no one at school who can show the strugglers how it is done.

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Feminism and choice

Feminism helped me gain an education, power, and equal opportunity to men (still some way to go here in Australia). I have been able to choose my own life, my careers, my directions, my appearance, whether or not to breed and with whom, my words and thoughts without some patriarchal monster or dogma condoned by society deciding for me.

I don’t feel obliged to pursue behavioural individual or group models touted by others – thanks to my feminist mother I learned to rely on my own rational brain. I remember the first lesson my mother gave me in feminism – she showed me her old watch, which lacked the second hand typical for men’s watches. Why was it not important for women to tell the time precisely as well as men?

It is up to individual women to choose what they want to wear and whether they want to wear things to please themselves, men, purveyors of social discipline or any combination of these. The Quran’s original intention in instructing women to cover up outside the domestic domain was intended to define status and protect women – ironically in western countries, such traditional islamic garb now puts some women at risk and subject to criticism even by some who label themselves feminists. The obsession with dress reflects a pervasive materialism – what of women who attract men because of the depth of their intelligence and wit – should they hide those lights under a bushel as well in order to forestall crass male predations? Should women who hold views which conflict with those who champion burning the burkha be pilloried into submission?

If women are to be supported in their choices whatever they may be, then it is the assumptions of those who interfer with the expressions of those choices which deserve scrutiny.