I woke up this morning to initial elation at the news that Israel and Hamas are apparently close to a ceasefire deal. The proposal involves the return of 33 hostages and Hamas’ removal from power, in exchange for the release of several hundred Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, Israel’s withdrawal from eastern Gaza and a ceasefire in stages.
But a bilateral ceasefire means among other things the release of the hostages. In my initial jubilation at the proposed deal I assumed as a matter of course that the remaining hostages would also be released in subsequent phases of the ceasefire. Not so. My illusions were shattered by further research, confirming that 33 hostages only will be released: https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-798797
I speak now directly to John Minto, Neil Scott and the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa: will you extend your admirable concern for human life to “the other side” and speak out now for the 90 desperate human beings held captive deep underground in Gaza, who face imminent abandonment by their own government? You have called for a ceasefire for months. Presumably you meant a bilateral ceasefire. Will you call for Hamas to free the hostages?
Will you hold a protest down Queen Street this weekend condemning Hamas? Will you wave Israeli flags, just as I wore a Palestinian flag several times to your protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza?
It is tika (right) for you to highlight the ongoing atrocities committed against civilians in Gaza. For example, no-one could question that the use of “dumb bombs” in which missile targets are selected by artificial intelligence which is subject to technological glitches which result in the deaths of innocents is abhorrent.
Yesterday in Khan Younis a kura (school) was bombed in order to eliminate a terrorist who was present there. In the process Israel killed children who were playing football. The shocking incident was captured live on camera:
https://twitter.com/IhabHassane/status/1810802673769210239
Israel’s practice of administrative detention (see for example the case of Layan Nasir: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/13/shhh-or-ill-shoot-you-family-of-jailed-christian-woman-tell-of-israeli-raid) and extrajudicial killings in the West Bank is deplorable. Every human being has the right to a fair trial and a rōia (lawyer), and where hara (guilt) is established, the right to proportionate punishment. Palestinian tamariki (children) who have been imprisoned indefinitely for (say) throwing a stone should be released immediately.
But will the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa also protest human rights abuses on the other side?
I speak now directly to John Minto, Neil Scott and the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa: will you extend your admirable concern for human life to “the other side” and speak out now for the 90 desperate human beings held captive deep underground in Gaza, who face imminent abandonment by their own government? You have called for a ceasefire for months. Presumably you meant a bilateral ceasefire. Will you call for Hamas to free the hostages?
Will you hold a protest down Queen Street this weekend condemning Hamas? Will you wave Israeli flags, just as I wore a Palestinian flag several times to your protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza?
It is tika (right) for you to highlight the ongoing atrocities committed against civilians in Gaza. For example, no-one could question that the use of “dumb bombs” in which missile targets are selected by artificial intelligence which is subject to technological glitches which result in the deaths of innocents is abhorrent.
Yesterday in Khan Younis a kura (school) was bombed in order to eliminate a terrorist who was present there. In the process Israel killed children who were playing football. The shocking incident was captured live on camera:
https://twitter.com/IhabHassane/status/1810802673769210239
Israel’s practice of administrative detention (see for example the case of Layan Nasir: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/13/shhh-or-ill-shoot-you-family-of-jailed-christian-woman-tell-of-israeli-raid) and extrajudicial killings in the West Bank is deplorable. Every human being has the right to a fair trial and a rōia (lawyer), and where hara (guilt) is established, the right to proportionate punishment. Palestinian tamariki (children) who have been imprisoned indefinitely for (say) throwing a stone should be released immediately.
But will the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa also protest human rights abuses on the other side?
9 comments:
I totally reject correspondence with quasi maori claptrap included .Is the writer so confused they will not speak as a New Zealander in english. All Asian , Europeean, South American and others all have their own customs and celebrate them excitedly individually without pushing their customs down a readers throat.
Shame on you David Farrar for contaminating Breaking Views excellence.
David
Surely you wrote this article with tongue in check when you chucked Maori words in your article.
Hopefully you did.
Otherwise, ditto Basil.
They just keep coming. On the weekend, Israel launched another devastating air strike on Gaza, killing at least 90 Palestinians and wounding hundreds more, including women, children and rescue workers.
Once again, Israel targeted refugees displaced by its earlier bombs, turning an area it had formally declared a “safe zone” into a killing field.
And once more, western powers shrugged their shoulders. They were too busy accusing Russia of war crimes to have time to worry about the far worse war crimes being inflicted on Gaza by their Israeli ally - with weapons they supplied.
The atrocity committed at al-Mawasi camp, packed with 80,000 civilians, had the usual Israeli cover story – one rolled out to reassure western publics that their leaders are not the utter hypocrites they appear to be for supporting what the World Court has described as a “plausible genocide”.
Israel said it was trying to hit two Hamas leaders – one of them Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s military wing – although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed uncertain as to whether the strike was successful.
No one in the western media appeared to wonder why the pair preferred to make themselves a target in an overcrowded, makeshift refugee camp, where they were at huge risk of being betrayed by an Israeli informant, rather than sheltering in Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.
Or why Israel deemed it necessary to fire a multitude of massive bombs and missiles to take out two individuals. Is that Israel’s new, expansive redefinition of a “targeted assassination”?
Or why its pilots and drone operators continued the strikes to hit emergency rescue crews dealing with the initial destruction. Was there intelligence that Deif was not just hiding in the camp, but had hung around to dig out survivors, too?
Or how killing and maiming hundreds of civilians in an attempt to hit two Hamas fighters could ever possibly satisfy the most basic principles of international law. “Proportion” and “distinction” require armies to weigh the military advantage of an attack against the expected toll on civilian life.
Biblical vengeance
But Israel has torn up the rulebook on war. According to sources within the Israeli military, it now considers it acceptable to kill more than 100 Palestinian civilians in the pursuit of a single Hamas commander – a commander, let us note, who will simply be replaced the moment he is dead.
Even if the two Hamas leaders were assassinated, Israel could not have been in any doubt that it was perpetrating a war crime. But it has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke.
I agree entirely with you Basil. If he wants to convey something in te reo, convey the whole thing. To just convert a handful of nouns is just pathetic and insulting virtue signalling.
Before launching forth, Farrar should first identify his audience. If it were targetting that highly likely non-existent person who only understands te reo, his article would read non-sensically "Aotearoa tika kura foia hara tamariki." A word salad even Chloe Swarbrick might struggle with.
In sum, he has just gone down significantly in my estimation. Shame, indeed!
It's seems to be an axiom of Jewish propaganda that one must support Israel and advocate for the interests of Israel and the Jewish people in general, above all other things. Of course, the obvious question is "why?"
The Israelis are like that guy who goes around acting in the most appallingly arrogant and self-serving manner, but then, when this inevitably puts others' noses out of joint and it blows up in his face, they clasp their hands and ask "why is everyone always picking on me?" The question contains its own answer.
Why the poauau (stupid) mixing of languages?
Marxists like Minto are anti-Semitic because their mentor, Marx—by birth a Jew—identified Jews as in essence the capitalist archetype.
One biographer, Jonathan Sperber, notes that Marx’s correspondence is “filled with contemptuous remarks about Jews.”
Even his hagiograper, Francis Wheen, who habitually defends nearly everything about Marx, admits that he “sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee.”
Of one contemporary, Marx blasted his “cynical, oily-obtrusive, phony-Baronial Jew-manners.”
Particularly loathsome to Marx was anyone he suspected of part Jewish and African roots.
Marx referred to his fellow German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle as a “greasy Jew,” “the little kike,” “water-polack Jew,” “Jew Braun,” “Yid,” “Izzy,” “Wily Ephraim,” “Baron Itzig,” and “the Jewish Nigger [Marx was also extremely bigoted against black people].”
One of Marx’s worst expressions of anti-Semitism was his
1844 essay “On the Jewish Question.”
“What is the worldly cult of the Jew?” asked Marx. His answer: “Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money.” He growled, “Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may exist…. The bill of exchange is the actual god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.”
The Jew, Marx snarled, had become “impossible.” The German chillingly concluded, “The emancipation of the Jews, in the final analysis, is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”
We can only speculate as to how he anticipated this might be achieved.
In his seminal edited volume on Karl Marx and religion, Saul Padover said that Marx — who was, ironically, an ethnic Jew — had “learned to despise and hate the people from whom he originated.
This was an expression of what the Germans call Selbsthass (self-hate), a trait which Karl Marx displayed throughout his whole life.”
Passover was astonished by “the extent and virulence of Marx’santi-Semitism.”
Karl Marx summed it up plainly in a letter to his longtime friend Arnold Ruge in 1843: “the Israelite faith is repulsive to me.”
I rest my case.
@ Anonymous 5:47PM. Are you sure you're not conflating Marx's hatred for the Israelite Faith with a hatred for the Jewish Talmudic Faith. They're two very different things. One comes from God and his teachings up until the time of Moses and the other originates during the Babylonian captivity where the true faith was abandoned by many Pharisees, whose successors continue distorting the truth through the Talmud today.
I would like - David Farrar - to explain to the Readers of articles on this Blog Site -
"How he got to know about and also attend a Conference held in Odessa, Ukraine, that he seemed to 'take great delight in informing us he was a secret mission and could not reveal details, due the secrecy of this event'- and then regaled us with -
- a coverage with photos of Odessa,
- a slimmed down version of events.
The reason I aske this question, is why no other NZ MSM Reporter attended, so what made David special, nor have I found anything thru Google in regards to "the event" he attended.
The other matter David - please "tells us why you hate Donald Trump so much"?
As to this article - "codswallop".
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