Ref JJ.

He is the biggest self serving prxxK I have ever come across on this comments section. If you want to be on his side as you put as part of the supporter of Israel group, all well and good for you. Hiding behind your coatails. What is this crap, that you are talking about. Old?? you have lost me. Get a life and let JJ fight his own battles. Or do you need each other.

You are in a minority, so get off the page you self righteous little Englander.

Mehdi Hasan, please do keep this up, it's an excellent source for people who want to quickly debunk the usual 'arguments' for attacking Iran.

These are the kind of simplistic statements that will probably be made by politicians during the debates in the HoC. (as if they weren't bad enough without adding war mongering)

The only down side to these articles is that the comments are becoming increasingly bizarre.

I do not know why you are getting so shirty just because we disagree JJ.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/ethiopian-students-affair-s...
All of a sudden, we can say "racism." A shock wave has struck complacent Israeli society. A few dozen Ethiopian children were not accepted to religious schools in Petah Tikva. That is truly terrible, everyone tsked-tsked at the heart-rending picture of Aschalo Sama, a boy without a school. Even President Shimon Peres expressed shock. Everyone is permitted to be shocked; it is politically correct.

Nobody kicked up a fuss when South Africa developed nuclear weapons...

Racism Report: Africans in Israel

by Adam Horowitz on February 1, 2012 13

On 30 January, the African Refugee Development Center (ARDC) submitted a report to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD).

This report demonstrates that Israel continues to ignore its international obligations towards asylum seekers and refugees and that various laws, policies and practices are racially discriminatory at their basis against this vulnerable population.

ARDC documents, among other things, how Israel maintains its harsh policy of detention; tolerates segregation in the education system in Eilat; tacitly condones discriminatory edicts by state-employed rabbis; allocates temporary group protection to over 90 percent of the asylum seekers who arrive; and has reluctantly granted refugee status to only 140 individuals.
http://mondoweiss.net/2012/02/racism-report-africans-in-israel.html

Thanks, Mehdi Hasan, for this great article! I hope he'll learn it and correct himself. But I doubt that will happen because we live in times when logic and facts mean nothing.

MACY GRAY BLACK SINGER TARGETTED BY ISRAELIS

The Israeli media is filled with reports about Macy Gray confirming her plans to perform in Tel Aviv in March. This should have been an occasion for Israelis to celebrate their continuing ability to behave as a normal society despite occupying millions of people, holding Gaza under siege, maintaining an apparatus of racism against its non-Jewish citizens. But in a poorly calculated stunt designed to wash her hands of human rights concerns, Gray had first asked her “fans” if she should perform despite what she called Israel’s “disgusting” treatment of the Palestinians. Within hours, thousands of people who had no prior interest in Gray or her music flocked to her Facebook page (they only had to “like” her page in order to post) to register their opinions. Gray, who appeared to have every intention of performing anyway, remarked after announcing her plan to go to Tel Aviv, that some of those urging her to boycott were “assholes.”

Under normal circumstances, Gray’s roundhouse attack on some supporters of BDS and her subsequent pledge to perform in Tel Aviv should have pleased nationalistic Israelis. However, her initial criticism of Israel’s occupation has invited a firestorm of racist, sexist and generally hateful diatribes from Israelis.

http://maxblumenthal.com/2011/01/israelis-target-macy-gray-with-racist-d...

me to fight the prejudice
Op-ed: Israel's Ethiopians suffer not only outright racism, but also indirect, concealed racism
Yael Rosen • Ynet

Over the past weeks, protests have spread throughout Israel calling for a response to racism targeted at the country's Ethiopian community. Sparked by a Channel 2 story on discrimination in Kiryat Malachi, citizens have taken to the streets to show their outrage at the status quo. Though the despicable slurs and actions that triggered these protests are blatant examples of these grievances, they conceal a deeper issue.

Beyond more overt examples, Ethiopian Israelis are often considered less desirable neighbors, and frequently have a harder time finding a job. They are perceived as a poor, underprivileged community and face the stigma of lacking the capability to contribute equally, even if this myth is belied by reality. While some of this is outright racism, the rest is symptomatic of a deeper and far more widespread prejudice – indirect or concealed racism.

Alexander and Julia in the same political camp. Who would have thought it. The days when you can silence the opposition are over.

Palestine is a never never land, never existed and Israel just gives Muslims one focus of hate over and above hating and killing each other.

SO there you have it; the wise one has spoken and Alexander as I have said all along despite hiding behind this Mr Reasonable exterior is cut from the same cloth.

I cannot imagine that anyone with a modicum of intelligence could find anything of note in what you have said. Bit by bit I have drawn you out, trapping you at every point; when finally you admit that you are just like Julia. I suspect many other NS readers could work out from the beginning which political world you inhabit.

NOW IS THAT NOT SOMETHING OF WHICH YOU CAN BE PROUD.

Extreme racism against black Jews in Israel Israel is often portrayed as the most close-knit society that has "integrated Jews from 140 countries with no discrimination." Yet racism exists within Israel unabashed, far more than in any other country of the world.Racism in Israel is an accepted norm even within the Jewish community .. Jews hating Jews. The big reality behind the myth of Jewish unity is the harshness faced by the Ethiopian Jews living in Israel. Although, unlike the European Ashkenazi Jews (or the fake Jews), these Ethiopian Jews are the original ones from Biblical times, yet they have been the victims of relentless discrimination since years by Israel's faked European Jews. The allies of Israel keep singing that ridiculous song about Israel being the "only democracy in the region," but the "democratic" Israeli government has done nothing to enhance nor protect the rights, dignity and self-respect of this very neglected community.

The Ethiopian Jewish community, now about 120,000, was allowed entry into Israel in 1985 and 1998 to save them from famine and civil war. That may sound good but it isn't. Racism against the black Ethiopian Jews in Israel persists even after death. Cemmeteries for European Jews strictly prohibit the burial of Ethiopian Jews within these premises.

Four years ago, anger within the Ethiopian Jews reached a boiling point when the Israeli Health Ministry displayed medieval signs of extreme racism by discarding donated Ethiopian blood. The Ethiopian Jewish organizers of this protest said they "won't allow their blood to be spilled like this. The Torah says that blood is the soul. How can this country treat us, fellow Jews, this way?” At least half a dozen protesters were also arrested. They demanded to speak with the then Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, but they weren't allowed and nothing was done to reverse the decision of discarding Ethiopian donated blood. A few European Israeli politicians promised to take up this matter in the Knesset, but their outwardly polite gestures turned out to be mere false promises.http://zainabslounge.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/extreme-racism-against-black-jews-in.html

@Andrew and parsie:

Your new messages simply prove my point. And I have as much right to be on this page as anybody else.

Ethiopian Black Jews Denounce Racist Israeli minister
http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-her...

Israeli racist birth control policy toward its Ethiopian population
http://www.ethiopianreview.com/articles/31493

Who gives a fxxk what you think Alexander. You talk garbage, most of the time. I wonder what you think you have to add to the debate. Go and play with JJ as Andrew said. Link up.

Why Demand Nuclear Transparency from Iran and Not Israel?

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&I...

Leave the chat to someone who has something to say. Yawn, I am falling asleep with your platitudes. Boring from Tunbridge Wells is what suits you best

IOver the years, Zionist militants have carried out hundreds of illegal actions against real or imagined "enemies," including many acts of vandalism and harassment, and countless threatening phone calls. What follows here, though, are details about some particularly spectacular criminal operations. While JDL responsibility for many of them has been conclusively established, in some cases precise responsibility could not be established.

On January 26, 1972, a JDL team firebombed the New York City offices of a US-Soviet cultural exchange agency. Killed in the fire was a 27-year-old secretary (who happened to be Jewish). Thirteen others were injured. One participant, Sheldon Siegel, confessed to police that he had made the bomb, and provided the names of the others involved in the crime. Several years later Kahane acknowledged JDL responsibility for the crime. However, the case against the JDL members who were charged in the incident was eventually dismissed on a technicality. (note 36)
In May 1972, ten JDL thugs broke into the Austrian consulate in Washington, DC, and beat Austria's ambassador to the US, Karl Gruber, as well as the building's janitor. (note 37)
In May 1974, JDL members attacked Arab-American community activist Dr. Mohammed Mehdi with a lead pipe, sending him to the hospital with a broken back. It took nearly a year for the police to make an arrest, even though a perpetrator had appeared on television to boast of the deed. A short time later, Mehdi's offices in Manhattan were almost totally destroyed in an apparent arson attack. (note 38)
On February 21, 1975, a US federal court found Kahane guilty of violating terms of a probation stemming from his 1971 felony conviction for manufacturing firebombs. He had been forbidden from having anything to do with bombs, dynamite or other weapons, or encouraging violence. Citing incriminating letters written by Kahane in which he had urged followers to assassinate Russian and Arab diplomats, the judge sentenced the rabbi to one year imprisonment. Kahane served eight months of this term in a Manhattan halfway house, which he was allowed to leave every day to eat in kosher restaurants. Kahane used this period of "imprisonment" to conduct JDL business. (note 39n 1975, 21-year-old JDL member David Kamaiko hijacked an executive helicopter in New York City, demanding $2 million ransom to buy guns for the JDL. Kamaiko shot the pilot before he was himself subdued. (note 40)
In 1978, Canadian JDL leader Joseph Schachter bombed the home of right-wing activist Donald Andrews. (note 41)
On April 11, 1982, JDL member Allan Goodman opened fire with a machine gun at a Muslim house of worship in Jerusalem, killing two Palestinian Arabs: an elderly man and a 20-year-old youth. After entering the mosque, he continued firing, critically wounding several people. Goodman, from Baltimore, Maryland, had received paramilitary training at the JDL's Camp Jedel in New York state. In an interview, Kahane said of the crime, "There was nothing wrong with what he did...the act was perfectly correct." (note 42)
In 1987, three members of the Jewish Defense League were arrested for their involvement in at least six bombing attacks carried out the New York area between 1984 and 1987. The accused were Jay Cohen, Sharon Katz and Victor Vancier, head of the JDL in the New York area. After admitting his role in the terror bombings, Vancier was sentenced in October 1987 to ten years imprisonment. Another JDL member, Murray Young, was sentenced to five years in prison. (note 43)
FBI officials believe that the JDL was behind the bomb blast in mid-August 1985 that killed Tscherim Soobzokov in Paterson, New Jersey, and a similar (although non-fatal) bombing attack in early September 1985 directed against Elmars Sprogis in Brentwood, New York. Soobzokov and Sprogis were falsely alleged to have been "Nazi war criminals." (note 44)
In January 1991, Kurt Haber -- identified in newspaper reports as a "Jewish Holocaust survivor" -- was charged with making criminal threats against the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. (note 45)

Extreme zionists involved in crime on an industrial scale

There are some on this page who have a clear agenda in pushing anti semitism and want to escalate the war agenda. Do you know what I mean and do you know who it is. Must be sad, must be lonely. Some people don't have nothing better to do than post endlessly about the need for war. I say get off this post now as you have had your say. It is now time for the in betweeners to have their say. Get a life.

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

The Pentagon's "Salvador Option": The Deployment of Death Squads in Iraq and Syria
- by Michel Chossudovsky - 2011-08-16

@Sir Michael

Dear Sir Michael,
Thank you for your kind words of support. My principal aim in posting on this blog is to show that the days when the pro-Israel lobby could monopolise and dominate the news agenda on Palestine, Israel or Iran are long gone. I think I speak for many who are tired of hearing the same old discredited arguments used to justify why Israel is right and eveybody else's opinion is wrong. The arguments used on this thread ranging from the mild to outright hysteria on Iran and Israel come in many guises. Many of their critiques as you know rely on personal abuse. I must point out that there are many Jewish people who have been subject to the same sort of vitriol if they dare to disagree with the hardline hawkish Israeli agenda.

The question then becomes do you ignore or do you challenge. Clearly they are not worth one second of aggravation, but I feel compelled to challenge their views. I have tried to do a bit of both, ignoring a lot of the stuff which is not worthy of comment and commenting on other stuff. I have also been accused of being too passionate in my defence of Palestinians. It seems that being a conviction person who speaks out against injudtice is a dirty word, I proudly wear that badge. Let it be so!!!!

But one thing is for sure: the Western mainstream media which portray Iran and its related events in the fixated, fossilized and petrified stereotypes of economic sanctions, terrorism and war threats don’t let you know about the rich legacy of Nowrouz and the people who observe it. They don’t want to let you know that Iran has a civilization which is matchless and unrivaled in the world. They don’t want to let you know that Iran is the owner of a 7,000-year-old delicate culture. They don’t want to let you know that Nowrouz exists, but as an Iranian citizen who loves all the people around the world, I want to tell you that Nowrouz is the messenger of peace and friendship sent by Iranians to the world citizens. Nowrouz is the ceremony of peace, brotherhood and faith. Nowrouz is unique and in its unity, Nowrouz is tantamount to love and beauty

The rants by Alexander together with the lengthy excerpts he is fond of copying do much to insult the intelligence of the NS readers. Face it the propoganda battle you are waging has been discredited and thoroughly trashed many years ago. The idea that anyone who criticises Israel should lie down and accept all that you propogate is akin to the totalitariansim, which you claim to be against.

May I remind the readers what Alexander said: Ther Palestinians are to blame for the dispossession and they have brought it on themselves * or words to that effect). I finally got him to admit that after making several requests. After making a statement of that kind, is this the sort of person who does no have an axe to grind.

As for winning the battle, I put to the Zionist diehards that mission accomplished puts you in very dangerous territory.