Archive for the 'UK' Category

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Boycotting the boycott

Published on May 26, 2007 in Israel, Middle East, Palestine and UK. 0 Comments

Steven Weinberg, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, had been invited to Imperial College in July to speak in honour of a Pakistani physicist, Abdus Salam, and to deliver a talk at a conference on particle physics.

But he’s decided to cancel. And the reason? The NUJ boycott of Israel. He’s boycotting all of Britain because of the union’s boycott, apparently.

Presumably then, he believes the NUJ’s action is worse than Israel’s 40-year-long occupation of Palestine and the Human rights abuses that have accompanied it; illegal house demolitions, equally illegal settlements in the occupied territories, so-called targeted assassinations which kill civilians, torture and indefinite detention without charge.

Weinberg also believes that the boycott can only be attributed to anti-Semtiism. This in the same letter where he said the only other reason he could imagine for the boycott was the NUJ’s “desire to pander to the growing Muslim minority in Britain”. Hmmm.

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Union of Jewish Students recruiting for the Israeli army

Published on May 26, 2007 in Israel, Middle East and UK. 0 Comments

The Bonsoir blog, reports that the Union of Jewish Students (a british students society) is publishing advertisements recruiting to the Israeli army (well more accurately you need to pay £99 for the privilege of cleaning tanks). Akram Awad at Bonsoir makes the following noteworthy observations:

Although it is not a crime for a British citizen to serve in a foreign army, The Foreign Enlistment Act 1870 makes it a crime for a British subject to enlist in the army of a foreign nation that is at war with any country that the UK is at peace with. On the other hand Israel – since its foundation in 1948 – has been in a continuous state of war with the Palestinians (or more accurately against them), the Lebanese and Syrians (whom Israel is occupying part of their lands since 1967) and with most Arab countries.
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I need not to say, but I will do, that it does not need me to be dictated by the British law to make me realise that it is a betrayal to my humanity to proudly serve in an army which evolved from Zionist terrorist groups which was responsible for hundreds of massacres against the Palestinians in 1948 and 1949 and for the displacement of half of the Palestinian nation from their homeland. It does not need laws to forbid an English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh (whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or atheist) from involving in the repair and maintenance of the Israeli army artillery which is directly responsible for the killing of thousands of Palestinians and for jeopardising the lives and well being of millions of Palestinians through its practices which include, but are not limited to, hundreds of checkpoints, invasions, curfews, imprisonment of more than 10,000 Palestinians (Men, women and children and quarter of the Palestinian Parliament), building the apartheid wall (including its 40-meter wide electrified fence and 8-meter high concrete wall parts), the ongoing construction of Israeli settlements among Palestinian communities in the Occupied West Bank and the continuous judaisation of the holy city of Jerusalem by demolishing Arab properties and replacing them with Jewish communities.

It is a shame that while only half of the Jewish Britons consider themselves as Zionists (based on a survey pubished by IJV), Zionists still insist to hijack every institution which is supposed to serve the followers of Judaism regardless of their political stances (including UJS and the Board of Deputies) and to silence every Jewish voice which speaks against Zionism or the Zionist regime and its racist and apartheid policies and practices.

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Protesters acquitted of sabotaging US bombers

Published on May 23, 2007 in Iraq, Middle East and UK. 1 Comment

From today’s Guardian, Protesters acquitted of sabotaging US bombers:

Two protesters who broke into an RAF base to sabotage US B-52 bombers by clogging their engines with nuts and bolts were acquitted yesterday after arguing that they were acting to prevent war crimes in Iraq.

Toby Olditch, 38, and Philip Pritchard, 36, both from Oxford, expressed delight and relief after a Bristol crown court jury unanimously found them not guilty of conspiring to cause criminal damage at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on the eve of the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

…The court heard that the pair entered the base on March 18 2003, the day before bombing commenced at the start of the Iraq war. They were armed with bottles of red and brown coloured liquid along with bags of nails and staples which would have been poured into the planes’ engine bays. The pair were arrested after being spotted by patrolling Ministry of Defence police.

On the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, the two aquitted protestors explain their successful defense:

On the face of it we were guilty; our intention to damage B-52 bombers on 18th March 2003 was explicit and not one we ever sought to deny. We knew that the information we were carrying with us when we went into the base gave the prosecution all the evidence necessary to pursue charges.

However the law makes provision for the fact that a person may do something that would otherwise be criminal while acting to prevent a greater crime or while trying to protect the property of another.

Therein lies the nub of it; the lawful excuse that allowed a jury to acquit having listened to a week of evidence on the consequences to Iraqis of “Shock and Awe” and the indiscriminate nature of cluster munitions and depleted uranium.

We should like to believe that in reaching their decision, the thoughts of the jury went far beyond the bounds of the court, to a country that has been laid waste by an unprovoked war and that in finding us not guilty they were also sending a message of sympathy and support to the millions of people who’ve been affected by the war in Iraq and in particular by the weapons used.

…Although the verdict is fantastic for us the feelings we come away with are bitter sweet for us as ordinary soldiers and the people of Iraq are still in a war zone due to the recklessness of our government. This might be the closest Britain ever gets to a ruling in a domestic court on the Iraq war.

We would far rather never have found ourselves in a position where taking non-violent direct action is necessary. We will always regret not having been able to stop the use of these weapons. However we hope that by communicating our motivation and the moral and legal justifications for this action we are able to provide some balance to unchecked executive power.

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