SUMMARY: First, three local events to put on your calendar. Second, a brief summary of news highlights and what they mean. Finally, an extensive discussion with activist Dr. Nancy Murray of the recently released 575-page Goldstone Report, its stark content, its solid integrity, its significance, and its brazen dismissal by the Obama administration, most of Congress, and U.S. corporate media.
SCRIPT: Good morning everyone, and welcome to "This Week in Palestine," a weekly forty-five minute segment of news from Palestine, and discussion of issues relevant to the Palestinians' struggle for freedom from Israel's brutal military occupation and colonization of their homeland. This program presents news and analysis from the Palestinian perspective, a perspective we do not get from the mainstream media.
We ask our listeners as we do every week: were you involved last week in the Palestine-Israel peace movement and the Palestinians' struggle for freedom from Israel's savage military attacks against them to force them out of their homes and annex their properties into Israel? Did you speak out on the atrocities Israel is committing every day in Gaza and the West Bank? If not, what is your reason not to?
It is Sunday, September 27th, 2009. We begin with three very important event announcements:
First: a Freedom March for Gaza is being organized to break the siege of Gaza on December 31st, 2009. Citizens of the world are called upon to join ranks with Palestinians in the March to break the murderous siege of Gaza once and for all. More volunteers are being sought. Please visit: www.gazafreedommarch.org to learn how you can volunteer to join this historic march and have your organization sponsor it. Time is running short. Airline reservations for travel to Egypt where the march will proceed need to be made soon.
Human Rights Watch has called the siege of Gaza a "serious violation of international law." Internationally known jurist Richard Goldstone issued a UN report on Israel's military attack against the civilian population of Gaza from December 27th, 2008 to January 18th, 2009. The Freedom March and the Goldstone report will be discussed at a fundraising event at the Palestine Cultural Center for Peace on Thursday, October 8th at 7:00 pm. The Palestine Center is located at 41 Quint Avenue in Allston. Speakers will include Dr. Susan Akram, Clinical Professor of Law at Boston University and international human rights expert; Dr. Nancy Murray, Founder and President of the Gaza Mental Health Foundation; Sarah Roche-Mahdi, Scholar, author and Code Pink Cambridge Organizer, who traveled to Gaza in March and to Israel/Palestine in June; and Jeff Klein, longtime union leader and peace and justice campaigner who traveled annually to Palestine since 2004. Please mark your calendars for this very important event: October 8th at 7:00 pm at the Palestine Cultural Center for Peace. Refreshments will be served. Donations are gratefully accepted.
Second: the Third Boston Palestine Film Festival will open on October 16th and extend over a period of two weeks through November 1st with a focus on Gaza. The opening party will be held on Friday, October 16th from 7:00 pm to 11:00 pm at The Center for the Arts at the Armory, located at 191 Highland Avenue in Somerville. The event will feature live performances by Maysoon Zayid and Remi Kanazi. There will be live music; food; a Multi-Media art installation designed by Elle Flanders and Tamira Sawatzky; a Youth Visions of Jerusalem Exhibit; as well as works by photographer Rania Matar and original creations by Palestinian jewelry designer Hiam Rouhana. Please mark your calendars for this iconic Boston event: Friday, October 16th at 7:00 pm at the Center for the Arts at the Armory, located at 191 Highland Avenue in Somerville. For further information on the film program please visit the website: www.bostonpalestinefilmfest.org.
And third: a nationwide Campus Conference on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against the state of Israel will be held from Friday, November 20th at 6:00 pm through Sunday, November 22nd, at 9:00 pm. The Conference will be hosted by the Hampshire Students for Justice in Palestine and will take place at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Participants will include students, faculty, and staff from around the country who are involved in Palestine solidarity activism. This conference has three key goals:
1) To co-educate and share resources amongst campus organizers on the process of initiating BDS campaigns on campuses 2) To strategize tactics to address the needs of different campuses in carrying out BDS campaigns 3) To bring together Palestine-solidarity campus groups that have or have not met under a larger network in order to strive towards a coordinated national BDS campaign.
For further information, please write to hampshiresjp@gmail.com, and visit the website: www.hsjp.org.
This is an extremely important conference and we strongly encourage all Palestine solidarity activists to attend it: Friday, November 20th at 6:00 pm at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.
Now for a brief summary of news highlights and what they mean:
Last Tuesday, September 22nd, President Obama met with Israeli PM Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, separately, and together in New York. His public comments after the meetings could have been written by Israeli PM Netanyahu. As usual, the blame was put on the Palestinians for the lack of progress in peace negotiations while the Israelis were portrayed as having made positive steps. "The Palestinians," Mr. Obama declared, "have strengthened their efforts on security, but they need to do more to stop incitement and to move forward with negotiations. Israelis have facilitated greater freedom of movement for the Palestinians and discussed steps to restrain settlement activity." So, the good guys, the Israelis, are attacking Palestinian civilians daily, but it is the Palestinians who are guilty of incitement, while the Israelis are discussing steps to restrain their criminal activities! These remarks were substantially repeated by Mr. Obama during his speech to the United Nations.
Israeli PM Netanyahu's speech to the UN was primarily aimed at burnishing the image of eternal victimhood of Jews which Israel badly tarnished by its savage war against Lebanon in July, 2006, and its barbaric attack against the helplessly imprisoned Palestinian population in Gaza in December, 2008. He started, predictably, with the Holocaust. He brandished the minutes of a meeting of Nazi officials plotting to exterminate Jewish people and the original Nazi construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He talked about members of his family who perished during the Holocaust.
He portrayed Israel's removal of its settlements in Gaza as a gesture of peace, although the whole world knows that the real aim of the Gaza withdrawal was "freezing the peace process" as publicly admitted by former PM Sharon's senior advisor, Dov Weissglas in October, 2004, who said: "when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state." Netanyahu defended Israel's attack against Gaza by likening the largely ineffective primitive home made rockets thrown haphazardly into Israel in retaliation for Israel's killing of innocent civilians to the advanced Nazi rocket attacks against British cities in World War II. "During that war," he said, "the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties." He added that this was a fact that was the product of, in his words, "great and honorable men." Israel, he hinted, was more circumspect. Only 1,400 Palestinians died, and only 5,000 were wounded. It's the old, long rejected, relative morality argument: ‘we could have dropped an atom bomb but we only killed and wounded a few thousand.' And he rejected the Goldstone report as blaming the victim.
Mr. Obama went one step further. He instructed our UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, to criticize the Goldstone report as "unbalanced, one-sided, and unacceptable" and prevent the report from reaching the UN Security Council.
What amazes us is not only the straight faced assaults the UN speeches of both Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu launched on the true realities on the ground but, even more so, the frightening passivity with which the international community swallows their representations which it knows are colossal lies!!
Now, it is true that President Obama's speech at the UN included the words: "The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians." But those who hang their optimism hat on that sentence will most likely be disappointed. Throughout his brief presidency, Mr. Obama has displayed a mistaken belief that he can finesse or talk his way out of any issue in addition to displaying an unsettling willingness to retreat or compromise on virtually everything. Notably absent has been the firm hand of leadership. Mr. Obama cannot be effective in pushing for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East without confronting head on the deeply entrenched official Jewish structures in the U.S. Unfortunately, the ability to confront is a character trait we find singularly lacking in Mr. Obama. He talks a great talk but is incapable of walking the walk.
As foreboding a harbinger as Mr. Obama's limpness is, Mr. Netanyahu's relentless mission to push the U.S. and Europe into a war against Iran threatens the entire world. Israel needs another war to re-awaken the near-psychotic fear of existential threat that resides in many Jews, a fear that it has cynically manipulated throughout its history, and one that, in the shadow of its recent criminal behavior, it is anxious to re-ignite to reclaim Jewish victimhood; rally the troops; re-unite the global Jewish community in blind support of Israel; and open the spigots of money into Israel.
A microcosm of the international discussions now taking place on Iran occurred at an event attended by the Israeli Consul General at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government on September 16th. The event featured such luminaries as well known super hawk Elliott Abrams, now a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations; Harvard Professor Nicholas Burns; and Professor Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. What was strikingly significant at that event is that the whole discussion was based on the suspicion that Iran was developing nuclear arms on the sly. When asked what evidence they had to talk about possible attacks against Iran, all Mr. Abrams could say is that the British, the Chinese, the Russians and the Indians believed that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon – and this questioner was summarily dismissed. In other words, what fueled the discussion was merely a suspicion that Iran was developing a nuclear weapons arsenal, and if a sufficient number of people suspected Iran, well then it must be true. There is not a shred of evidence to be found anywhere on which to anchor the discussion. Indeed, intelligence reports in 2003 and 2004 indicated that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapons program.
Yet, the lack of evidence has not stopped the international community from issuing increasingly truculent accusations and threats of sanctions against Iran. We see a dark parallel to the 2003 march toward war against Iraq. We hope cooler heads will prevail, and we can not help but wish that the international community could be but one-tenth as vocal about Israel's behavior when the UN has received ample proof of the war crimes and the crimes against humanity that Israel committed during its military assault against Gaza.
Here to talk to us about Justice Goldstone's report to the UN, and about the Gaza Freedom March, we are very pleased to welcome Dr. Nancy Murray to our program. Dr. Murray is the founder and President of the Gaza Mental Health Foundation and is on the Steering Committee of the Gaza Freedom March.
Good morning, Nancy. Thank you for being our guest today at such an early hour.
1. Please talk to us about Justice Goldstone's report to the UN on the Gaza conflict and its significance. (Goldstone is a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda; is generally pro-Israel; has ties to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Can not be accused of anti-Semitism or anti-Israel bias. Report submitted on September 15th, 2009. Conducted 2 field visits to Gaza between May 30th and June 6th, and one to Amman on July 2nd and 3rd. Field investigations conducted by staff between May 22nd and July 4th. Public hearings were held in Gaza and in Geneva. Repeatedly sought Israel's cooperation to no avail. Extensive investigation into the actions of all parties, including Hamas. 188 interviews. In Gaza, the Mission investigated 36 incidents.) (Earlier Human Rights Watch investigated "White Flag Deaths" which resulted in the killing of 11 innocent civilians, including 5 women and 4 children deliberately killed while carrying white flags.) 2. What can you tell us about the Gaza Freedom March? (Event October 8th at the PCCP)
Thank you so much Dr. Nancy Murray for being our guest today. It was a pleasure to have you with us.
And that does it for today. On the occasion of the Jewish New Year which started on September 19th heralding the beginning of the year 5,770, we wish our Jewish friends a Happy Rosh Hashanah, and wish our Muslim friends a Happy Eid El Fitr which started last Monday, September 21st. We wish everyone a pleasant and restful weekend and look forward to having you with us next Sunday, same time. Until then, this is Sherif Fam signing off for "This Week in Palestine."
This Week In Palestine (a weekly part of Truth and Justice Radio) is (normally) a three-quarter-hour segment of news from Palestine and discussion of issues relevant to the Palestinians' struggle for freedom from Israel's brutal military occupation and colonization, and now bombing, devastation, imprisonment, and murder, of their homeland, thanks in part to U.S. taxpayer funding.
It's part of Truth and Justice Radio, aired Sundays 6-9:30am ET on WZBC 90.3FM, Newton, MA, streaming (and also archived for two weeks) at wzbc.org. Our website, truthandjusticeradio.org, links to audio archives of 2008/2009 editions of This Week In Palestine; most editions are also obtainable from radio4all.net by typing "This Week In Palestine" into the search box.
The most important message we repeat is that all caring humans must GET INVOLVED!
![[help]](/images/question.gif "[help]")
![[Public Domain]](http://creativecommons.org/images/public/norights.gif "[Public Domain]")