Friday, October 19, 2012

Former Israeli Air Force combat pilot evades coast guards to get on Gaza-bound boat



Former Israeli Air Force combat pilot evades coast guards to get on Gaza-bound boat

Swedish Ship to Gaza

Former Israeli Air Force combat pilot boards Gaza-bound boat
Came by motor boat, evading Greek coastguard, greeted with cheers
"Estelle" due at Gaza shore Saturday or Sunday
Activists on board:"Determined to reach Gaza, consent to UN inspection"

Israeli peace activist Yonatan Shapira, who had been a combat pilot in the Israeli Air Force and refused to take part in the bombing of Palestinian cities, has arrived on board the Swedish boat "Estelle" which is making her way towards the coast of Gaza. When the Estelle passed near the shores of Greece, Shapira and other activists made their way in a motor boat, evading vessels of the Greek Coast Guard which sought to bar their way. "Along with the Greek Coast Guard  we saw a ship which seemed very much like an Israeli Navy vessel, though it did not fly a flag" said Shapira. He was received with cheers by activists already on board. Shapira had taken part in a similar sailing last year, being taken off by Israeli Navy Commandos near the Gaza shore and spending time in police detention, but not charged with any criminal offence. 


Meanwhile, Israel's Ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor has sent a letter calling on the United Nations to stop the Estelle from reaching her destination. To this activists on board respond: "If this means that Israel has decided to cede control over Palestinian territorial waters to the UN, this would actually be a step forward.
The UN and many other representatives of the International Community have for years characterized the siege of the Gaza strip as inhuman and incompatible with International Law.
Ship to Gaza Sweden assumes that that UN will not take over the implementation of this policy, by itself preventing a peaceful vessel from delivering humanitarian supplies.
Ship to Gaza and the Freedom Flotilla have never opposed lawful inspections of cargo and vessel by representatives of the UN, as well as  by national authorities in the ports and waters we have passed through. We welcome further inspections of this kind by the UN, once we have anchored at Gaza City. What we refuse to accept is something which also the UN and the majority of The International Community oppose: The illegal siege of the Gaza Strip, with its devastating humanitarian results.  

The Estelle has now set course to Gaza and, weather permitting, is due to get there on Saturday.

Adam Keller, Spokesperson of Gush Shalom, who is in ongoing contact with the Estelle activists, says that Israel's Prime Minister and Defense Minister still have some forty-eight hours' grace to make a wise and courageous decision, avoid another show of Israeli brute force in international waters and let the Estelle dock at the Port of Gaza – while implementing a thorough UN inspection of her cargo, to which the activists  specifically consent.

Satellite phone to Estelle: +870773234011

Ship to Gaza-Sverige
Spokespersons:
Dror Feiler: +46 702855777
Mattias Gardell: +46 703036666
Ann Ighe: +46 709740739
Victoria Strand + 46 727356564
Media coordinator:
Mikael Löfgren: +46 707983643


Gush Shalom

Spokesperson

Adam Keller , +972 542340749


Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Un film dérangeant essentiel, Inch’Allah




[Quebec Movie, "In Cha Allah" is one of the best western movies spoke about the Palestine desperation  
so please search for it and see it;


Auteur: Pierre Jasmin | Le 30 septembre 2012, 14h14

Synopsis : Obstétricienne québécoise submergée par son travail dans une clinique des Nations-Unies en Cisjordanie aux côtés d’un médecin français désabusé et vieillissant,Chloé, étouffée par la chaleur et la poussière, y est accaparée journellement par une clientèle hétéroclite de mères ados ou alors d’autres moins identifiables en niqab ou tchador. La clinique, située dans un secteur soumis à des fouilles abusives de soldats israéliens, est assiégée en permanence par des foules bruyantes dominées par les fumées odorantes de motos et d’outils pétaradants. Les enfants, lorsqu’ils ne deviennent pas des résistants martyrs en lançant des roches et même parfois leurs pauvres petits corps contre des jeeps ou tanks israéliens, cherchent obstinément des objets à récupérer dans un dépotoir accoté au fameux mur. Au pied du mur, une exception ; un enfant solitaire déguisé en Superman à la cape rouge loqueteuse qui ne trouve rien d’autre à faire que d’y cogner tap-tap-tap des cailloux au lieu de les balancer à la tête des soldats, comme ses camarades. Cet enfant est le frère du héros du film le Sacrifice d’Andreï Tarkovsky, qui arrosait son arbre mort tous les jours avec patience et ténacité comme le lui avait enseigné son père…
Sa journée finie, Chloé retraverse le check-point où travaille son amie soldate israélienne Ava et l’accompagne, pour oublier la dureté abrutissante de leur travail respectif, s’étourdir dans des discothèques, l’alcool et la cigarette au bec, et des baises occasionnelles sur une plage, non loin de Tel Aviv. Grâce à des moments de répit au téléphone skype avec sa mère monoparentale qui vivant au bord du fleuve St-Laurent devine vaguement son désarroi et grâce à une amitié naissante pour une palestinienne nommée Rand partageant avec Ava le même rouge à lèvres cerise intense faisant ressortir leur beauté méridionale, Chloé « équilibre » ainsi tant bien que mal sa vie, qui dérape dès lors qu’elle rencontre de plus près le frère de Rand : ce dernier l’entraîne dans la nuit palestinienne éclairée aux bougies ou aux feux de bois clairsemés dans la magie de chants aux mélopées lancinantes. Elle l’entraîne à son tour en expédition, avec sa famille entière sur les ruines de leur village d’origine en territoire israélien, ce qui a l’heur de provoquer des réactions opposées, selon l’intransigeance mâle ou l’appétit de bonheur féminin (carpe diem) des individus qui la composent.
« TU ES DE TOUS LES CÔTÉS, DONC TU N’ES D’AUCUN ».
Brutalement, son nouvel amant, militant engagé, lui jette le reproche suivant, que l’observateur à la recherche permanente d’un regard objectif de paix reçoit de plein fouet aussi: « Tu es de tous les côtés, alors tu n’es d’aucun ». On croirait entendre Pierre Falardeau, en dénonciation de la posture d’artiste pour la paix que nous maintenons coûte que coûte, malgré les secousses d’un dialogue tendu permanent : ou bien face à la guerre israélo-palestinienne rester froid comme la justice et adopter l’objectivité d’un regard sans larmes pour favoriser les pistes de paix (comme ma médiation tentée l’été dernier entre deux camarades de Pugwash: l’ambassadeur iranien à l’Agence internationale d’Énergie Atomique et un ex-dirigeant du Mossad israélien), ou alors nous succombons à une compassion humaine pour des victimes qui ne peuvent, qui ne doivent pas laisser insensibles des artistes vibrants comme Daniel-Jean Primeau et Martin Duckworth allés de nombreuses fois à leur rencontre. Et pourtant, je vous préviens que ma question sera perverse, la compassion, réflexe de nombreux Québécois, ne serait-elle pas plus naturelle aux Angloquébécois (comme le terroriste Richard Bain ?) minoritaires dans un Québec entouré de pays anglophones de tous côtés, comme Israël est entouré d’Arabes ? Perverse, parce qu’on ne peut absolument pas comparer le niveau économico-politico-socio-culturel de ces deux « minorités »…
Bref, si on excepte des moments de grâce comme la démarche commune des APLP avec l’ontarienne Margaret Atwood, nous voilà aussi désemparés face à la question que l’héroïne du film : comment réagirions-nous dans sa situation, sur l’émotion du moment ? D’autant plus qu’elle est également confrontée par le constat d’Ava « ce n’est pas ta guerre » qui résoudrait facilement son dilemme, notre dilemme, en nous ramenant paisiblement (!) à notre confort-indifférence.
UN CHEF D’ŒUVRE SUSCITE PLUS DE QUESTIONS QUE DE RÉPONSES
La violence s’excuse-t-elle ? Non, mais elle s’explique : un personnage attachant du film meurt, tant pis si ce n’était par la froide observation de son acte irréfléchi, qu’ « un p’tit crisse », ou traduit par Chloé au médecin français, « un p’tit con ». Et la cinéaste, plutôt que de capitaliser sentimentalement comme l’auraient fait 99% des cinéastes sur les pleurs des proches de l’enfant, zoome aussitôt sur une photocopieuse en couleurs produisant implacablement à la chaîne la photo entourée de drapeaux palestiniens du « martyr », bref sur l’instrumentalisation en faveur de la Cause du décès du malheureux gosse.
Et voudrions-nous nous distancer d’un tel fanatisme que nous viendraient à l’esprit les façons sans nuances de certains de nos concitoyens
- d’amoindrir la bêtise de manifestants masqués jetant des pierres aux policiers pendant le printemps érable,
- de canoniser les frères Rose après la Crise d’Octobre plutôt que de réfléchir à leur pourcentage de responsabilité dans la défaite du dernier référendum,
- ou même de réagir, comme l’a fait un éditorialiste de Vigile.net, en traitant M. Dorion de « traître » parce qu’il remet en question la charte de la laïcité endossée par Djemila Benhabib. Écoutez d’ailleurs la passionnante confrontation Benhabib-Dorion à l’émission de Paul Arcand sur www.lautjournal.info : du grand journalisme où chaque côté marque des points !
DES ACTRICES AU TALENT PEU COMMUN
N’est-il pas temps de rendre hommage à Évelyne Brochu et aux deux autres membres du trio remarquable d’actrices, Sivan Levy et Sabrina Ouazani, particulièrement cette scène d’accouchement inouïe d’intensité, qui restera une immortelle pièce d’anthologie, près d’un check-point où se joue un face à face mortel entre le frère de Rand et un jeune soldat israélien qu’il cherche à amadouer en partageant avec lui « le talent purement défensif de Puyol du Barça Football Club », et ainsi tenter de lui faire oublier le contexte de guerre et le convaincre de laisser passer son groupe vers l’hôpital?
Et pourtant, ces actrices pourront difficilement gagner des prix, car même si elle exploite bien leur extraordinaire talent, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette ne cherche nullement à les mettre en valeur. Ce qui l’intéresse n’est pas la narration de destins humains aussi admirablement scénarisée qu’Incendies de Mouawad-Villeneuve (qui le pourrait ?) ; ce n’est pas non plus accompagner de son regard une héroïne, comme le réussit avec une actrice-témoin exceptionnelle, Rachelle Mwamza, Rebelle filmé au Congo par le courageux Kim Nguyen (dont le film précédent, la Cité, était par contre à mon avis bien mieux ficelé); Barbeau-Lavalette cherche – grâce à deux atouts majeurs dans sa quête, un décor reconstitué fabuleux d’authenticité et le naturel des enfants du film qui portent la lumière du futur -, à nous montrer la société à la manière d’un documentaire, avec la poussière et le dénuement, les ânes et la crasse, la machine implacable de guerre entre frères ennemis sur qui elle ne cherche nullement à provoquer notre apitoiement, comme l’ont fait avec tant de maladresse nombre de films moralisateurs ou carrément colonisateurs sur le Moyen-Orient ayant atterri sur nos écrans depuis trois ans.
Il est urgent, à la suite de ce film remarquable, de marginaliser un peu BHL avec ses additions intellectuelles bancales, au profit de l’artiste cinéaste ABL qui procède au contraire par soustraction : on a l’impression que le montage du film a coupé bien des scènes pour arriver à cette épure. Le regard d’ABL ne cille pas, et, comme dans son premier film le Ring, ne se laisse pas distraire par le human interest (j’entends Falardeau ou Chartrand…) et son héroïne ne hurle jamais, se gardant d’interférer avec notre émotion qui s’en trouve ainsi décuplée. Des critiques peu clairvoyantes le lui ont reproché, alors que le ressort épique de son film réussit, sans complaisance hollywoodienne, à restituer dignement et parfois même, avec l’indignité nécessaire, le tragique de la situation palestinienne.
P.J.


Monday, October 8, 2012

Why I Dislike Israel




By Philip Giraldi

October 06, 2012 "
Information Clearing House" -   Even those pundits who seem to want to distance U.S. foreign policy from Tel Aviv’s demands and begin treating Israel like any other country sometimes feel compelled to make excuses and apologies before getting down to the nitty-gritty. The self-lacerating prologues generally describe how much the writer really has a lot of Jewish friends and how he or she thinks Israelis are great people and that Israel is a wonderful country before launching into what is usually a fairly mild critique.
Well, I don’t feel that way. I don’t like Israel very much. Whether or not I have Jewish friends does not define how I see Israel and is irrelevant to the argument. And as for the Israelis, when I was a CIA officer overseas, I certainly encountered many of them. Some were fine people and some were not so fine, just like the general run of people everywhere else in the world. But even the existence of good upstanding Israelis doesn’t alter the fact that the governments that they have elected are essentially part of a long-running criminal enterprise judging by the serial convictions of former presidents and prime ministers. Most recently, former President Moshe Katsav was convicted of rape, while almost every recent head of government, including the current one, has been investigated for corruption. Further, the Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away.
The most recent outrage is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s direct interference in U.S. domestic politics through his appearance in a television ad appearing in Florida that serves as an endorsement of Republican candidate Mitt Romney. The Netanyahu ad and his involvement in the election has been widely reported in the media and has even beencondemned by several leading Jewish congressmen, but it has elicited no response from either Obama or Romney. Both should be condemning in the strongest terms the completely unprecedented intervention by a foreign head of government in an American election. That they are saying nothing is a testament to the power that Israel and its friends in Congress and the media have over the U.S. political establishment. Romney might even privately approve of the ads, as he has basically promised to cede to Netanyahu the right to set the limits for U.S. policy in the Middle East.
And why is Benjamin Netanyahu in such a lather? It is because President Barack Obama will not concede to him a “red line” that would automatically trigger a U.S. attack on Iran. Consider for a moment the hubris of Netanyahu in demanding that Washington meet his conditions for going to war with Iran, a nation that for all its frequently described faults has not attacked anyone, has not threatened to attack anyone, and has not made the political decision to acquire a nuclear weapon in spite of what one reads in the U.S. press. At the U.N., Netanyahu’s chart showing a cartoon bomb with a sputtering fuse reminiscent of something that might have been employed by an anarchist in the 1870s failed to pass any credibility test even for the inevitable cheerleaders in the U.S. media. If the U.S. is to go to war based on a Netanyahu cartoon then it deserves everything it gets when the venture turns sour, most likely Iraq Redux, only 10 times worse.
Even more outrageous, and a lot less reported in the media, were the comments made by Patrick Clawson, director of research for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), an organization founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). WINEP is widely viewed as a major component of the Israel Lobby in Washington and is closely tied to the Israeli government, with which it communicates on a regular basis. Clawson heads WINEP’s Iran Security Initiative. At a briefing on Sept. 24 he said, “I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States … uh … president can get us to war with Iran.… The traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests.”
Note that Clawson states his conviction that initiating a crisis to get the U.S. involved in a war with Iran and thereby fooling the American people into thinking that it is the right thing to do is actually a “U.S. interest.” He cites Pearl Harbor, Fort Sumter, the Lusitania, and the Gulf of Tonkin as models for how to get engaged. Which inevitably leads to Clawson’s solution: “if the Iranians aren’t going to compromise it would be best if someone else started the war … Iranian submarines periodically go down. Some day one of them may not come up…. We are in the game of using covert means against the Iranians. We could get nastier at that.” Clawson is clearly approving of Israel’s staging an incident that would lead to war, possibly even a false-flag operation carried out by Israel that would implicate the United States directly, or he is urging the White House to do the job itself.
Clawson not surprisingly has never served in the U.S. military and has a Ph.D. in economics from the New School for Social Research, which would at first glance seem to disqualify him from figuring out how to set up a covert operation to sink a submarine and thereby start a war. He might be seen as moderately ridiculous, but like many of his neoconservative colleagues he is well wired into the system. He writes regularly for The Washington PostThe New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal; appears on television as an “expert”; and is a colleague at WINEP of the ubiquitous Dennis Ross, sometimes called “Israel’s lawyer,” who was until recently President Obama’s point man on the Middle East. Clawson is a useful idiot who would be registered as an agent of the Israeli government if the Justice Department were doing its job, but instead he is feted as a man who tells it like it is in terms of American interests. The distortion of the foreign-policy decision-making in this country is something that can be attributed to Clawson and his host of fellow travelers, all of whom promote Israel’s perceived interests at the expense of the United States. And they do it with their eyes wide open.
I will deliberately avoid belaboring another Israel Firster Pamela Geller and her New York subway posters callingPalestinians savages and Israelis civilized, as I am sure the point has been made about how any lie that can serve the cause of Israel will be aggressively defended as “free speech.” A poster excoriating Jews or blacks in similar terms as “savages” would not have seen the light of day in New York City, another indication of the power of the Lobby and its friends to control the debate about the Middle East and game the system.
And then there are the reasons to dislike Israel and what it represents that go way back. In 1952’s Lavon Affair, the Israelis were prepared to blow up a U.S. Information Center in Alexandria and blame it on the Egyptians. In 1967, the Israelis attacked and nearly sank the USS Liberty, killing 34 crewmen, and then used their power over President Lyndon Johnson to block an investigation into what had occurred. In 1987, Jonathan Pollard was convicted of spying for Israel with investigators determining that he had been the most damaging spy in the history of the United States. In the 1960s, Israelisstole uranium from a lab in Pennsylvania to construct a secret nuclear arsenal. And the spying and theft of U.S. technology continues. Israel is the most active “friendly nation” when it comes to stealing U.S. secrets, and when its spies are caught, they are either sent home or, if they are Americans, receive a slap on the wrist.
And Israel gets away with killing American citizens — literally — in the cases of Rachel Corrie and Furkan Dogan of theMavi Marmara. And let’s not forget Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians which has made the United States complicit in a crime against humanity. Tel Aviv has also played a key role in Washington’s going to war against Iraq, in promulgating a U.S.-led global war on terror against the Muslim world, and in crying wolf over Iran, all of which have served no U.S. interest. Through it all, Congress and the media are oblivious to what is taking place. Israel is a net recipient of over $123 billion in U.S. aid and continues to get $3 billion a year even though its per capita income is higher than that of Spain or Italy. No one questions anything having to do with Israel while Congress rubber-stamps resolution after resolution virtually promising to go to war on Israel’s behalf.
I have to admit that I don’t like what my own government is doing these days, but I like Israel even less and it is past time to do something about it. No more money, no more political support, no more tolerance of spying, and no more having to listen to demands for red lines to go to war. No more favorable press when the demented Benjamin Netanyahu holds up a cartoon at the U.N. The United States government exists to serve the American people, no more, no less, and it is time that our elected representatives begin to remember that fact.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and executive director of the Council for the National Interest.
his article was originally posted at AntiWar