Edward Snowden should not face trial, says UN human rights commissioner

The United Nations's top human rights official has suggested that the United States should abandon its efforts to prosecute Edward Snowden, saying his revelations of massive state surveillance had been in the public interest.

Navi Pillay

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, credited Snowden, a former US National Security Agency contractor, with opening a global debate that has led to calls for the curtailing of state powers to snoop on citizens online and store their data.

"Those who disclose human rights violations should be protected: we need them," Pillay told a news conference.

"I see some of it here in the case of Snowden, because his revelations go to the core of what we are saying about the need for transparency, the need for consultation," she said. "We owe a great deal to him for revealing this kind of information."

The United States has filed espionage charges against Snowden, charging him with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorised person.

Pillay declined to be drawn on whether President Barack Obama should pardon Snowden, saying he had not yet been convicted. "As a former judge I know that if he is facing judicial proceedings we should wait for that outcome," she said. But she added that Snowden should be seen as a "human rights defender".

"I am raising right here some very important arguments that could be raised on his behalf so that these criminal proceedings are averted," she said.

Pillay was speaking after issuing a report on government surveillance, The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age (pdf), which says governments must accept stronger checks on their data surveillance powers and companies must do more to stand up to the state's demands for data.

Revelations of mass US surveillance based on documents leaked by Snowden sparked outrage among American allies including Germany, Brazil and Mexico. He has sought asylum in Russia.

The leaked documents revealed massive programmes run by the NSA that gathered information on emails, phone calls and internet use by hundreds of millions of Americans.

Mona Rishmawi, head of the rule of law branch of Pillay's office, said: "In this particular case, the way we see the situation of Snowden is he really revealed information which is very, very important for human rights. We would like this to be taken into account in assessing his situation."

All branches of government must be involved in the oversight of surveillance programmes, and completely independent civilian institutions must also monitor surveillance, Pillay says in her report. Checks on government must also be clearly understandable by the public.

The report, which will be debated at the UN general assembly later this year, says any collection of communications data or metadata is potentially a breach of privacy.

Governments often force internet and telecoms firms to store metadata about their customers, which was neither necessary nor proportionate, Pillay said, adding that companies should always be ready to challenge government requests.

"This can mean interpreting government demands as narrowly as possible or seeking clarification from a government with regard to the scope and legal foundation for the demand; requiring a court order before meeting government requests for data; and communicating transparently with users about risks and compliance with government demands," she told reporters.

She added: "I would say there are serious questions over the extent to which consumers are truly aware of what data they are sharing, how, and with whom, and to what use they will be put.

"And for how long is this data going to be out there? I would say that the same rights that people have offline must be protected online."

An emergency data collection law being rushed through the British parliament may not address concerns raised by the European Court of Justice and is difficult to justify, Pillay said. More

 

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Palestinian factions reportedly set 10 conditions for 10-year truce with Israel

Reports in Israeli and Palestinian media say that the two Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad have set forth ten conditions for a ceasefire and ten-year truce with Israel.

Israel’s Maariv said that an unnamed "senior Palestinian official" passed it a copy of the demands, which have been transmitted by the factions to Egypt.

They include an end to all armed hostilities, the end of the siege of Gaza, and the construction of internationally supervised air and seaports.

Palestinians sleep in UN school

While Hamas has not as yet officially stated these demands, they are in line with the group’s long-standing policy of offering Israel a multi-year truce.

The reported conditions come after nine days of Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 200 people, injured close to 1,400, and destroyed the homes of 8,200 others. Almost 80 percent of the dead, who include more than thirty children, are civilians, according to the UN.

Yesterday, Hamas refused to respond to a unilateral "ceasefire" declared by Israel that would have left the situation of siege on the Gaza Strip unchanged.

Airport, seaport and an end to violence

The ten conditions were translated by The Electronic Intifada from an Arabic version published by Ma’an News Agency:

• Mutual cessation of the war and withdrawal of tanks to previous locations and the return of farmers to work their land in the agricultural border areas.
• Release of all the Palestinians detained since 23 June 2014 and improvement of the conditions of Palestinian prisoners, especially the prisoners from Jerusalem, Gaza and Palestinians of the interior [present-day Israel].
• Total lifting of the siege of Gaza and opening the border crossings to goods and people and allowing in all food and industrial supplies and construction of a power plant sufficient to supply all of Gaza.
• Construction of an international seaport and an international airport supervised by the UN and non-biased countries.
• Expansion of the maritime fishing zone to 10 kms and supplying fishermen with larger fishing and cargo vessels.
• Converting the Rafah crossing into an international crossing under supervision of the UN and Arab and friendly countries.
• Signing a 10-year truce agreement and deployment of international monitors to the borders.
• A commitment by the occupation government not to violate Palestinian airspace and easing of conditions for worshipers in Al-Aqsa Mosque.
• The occupation will not interfere in the affairs of the Palestinian government and will not hinder national reconciliation.
• Restoration of the border industrial areas and their protection and development.

"Should have been met years ago"

Dr. Ramy Abdu, chair of the independent group Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights (euromid.org, told The Electronic Intifada from Gaza City this morning:

I believe that these requirements should have been met years ago. The core of these requirements are not political but purely humanitarian and legally binding. The international community has called many times for their implementation. Palestinians have the right to move in and out freely like others in the world. They have the right to import and export, to control their borders and airspace. Israel argues that it left Gaza, so it should stop controlling the lives of Palestinians.

Abdu noted that his organization recently published a detailed proposal to establish a maritime link from Gaza to the rest of the world with an international role that could "alleviate security concerns." More

 

 

 

© 2014

How Politics and Lies Triggered an Unintended War in Gaza

In the flood of angry words that poured out of Israel and Gaza during a week of spiraling violence, few statements were more blunt, or more telling, than this throwaway line by the chief spokesman of the Israeli military, Brigadier General Moti Almoz, speaking July 8 on Army Radio’s morning show: “We have been instructed by the political echelon to hit Hamas hard.”

That’s unusual language for a military mouthpiece. Typically they spout lines like “We will take all necessary actions” or “The state of Israel will defend its citizens.” You don’t expect to hear: “This is the politicians’ idea. They’re making us do it.”

Admittedly, demurrals on government policy by Israel’s top defense brass, once virtually unthinkable, have become almost routine in the Netanyahu era. Usually, though, there’s some measure of subtlety or discretion. This particular interview was different. Where most disagreements involve policies that might eventually lead to some future unnecessary war, this one was about an unnecessary war they were now stumbling into.

Spokesmen don’t speak for themselves. Almoz was expressing a frustration that was building in the army command for nearly a month, since the June 12 kidnapping of three Israeli yeshiva boys. The crime set off a chain of events in which Israel gradually lost control of the situation, finally ending up on the brink of a war that nobody wanted — not the army, not the government, not even the enemy, Hamas.

The frustration had numerous causes. Once the boys’ disappearance was known, troops began a massive, 18-day search-and-rescue operation, entering thousands of homes, arresting and interrogating hundreds of individuals, racing against the clock. Only on July 1, after the boys’ bodies were found, did the truth come out: The government had known almost from the beginning that the boys were dead. It maintained the fiction that it hoped to find them alive as a pretext to dismantle Hamas’ West Bank operations.

The initial evidence was the recording of victim Gilad Shaer’s desperate cellphone call to Moked 100, Israel’s 911. When the tape reached the security services the next morning — neglected for hours by Moked 100 staff — the teen was heard whispering “They’ve kidnapped me” (“hatfu oti”) followed by shouts of “Heads down,” then gunfire, two groans, more shots, then singing in Arabic. That evening searchers found the kidnappers’ abandoned, torched Hyundai, with eight bullet holes and the boys’ DNA. There was no doubt.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately placed a gag order on the deaths. Journalists who heard rumors were told the Shin Bet wanted the gag order to aid the search. For public consumption, the official word was that Israel was “acting on the assumption that they’re alive.” It was, simply put, a lie.

Moti Almoz, as army spokesman, was in charge of repeating the lie. True, others backed him up, including Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon. But when the truth came out on July 1, Almoz bore the brunt of public derision. Critics said his credibility was shot. He’d only been spokesman since October, after a long career as a blunt-talking field commander with no media experience. Others felt professional frustration. His was personal.

Nor was that the only fib. It was clear from the beginning that the kidnappers weren’t acting on orders from Hamas leadership in Gaza or Damascus. Hamas’ Hebron branch — more a crime family than a clandestine organization — had a history of acting without the leaders’ knowledge, sometimes against their interests. Yet Netanyahu repeatedly insisted Hamas was responsible for the crime and would pay for it.

This put him in a ticklish position. His rhetoric raised expectations that after demolishing Hamas in the West Bank he would proceed to Gaza. Hamas in Gaza began preparing for it. The Israeli right — settler leaders, hardliners in his own party — began demanding it.

But Netanyahu had no such intention. The last attack on Gaza, the eight-day Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012, targeted Hamas leaders and taught a sobering lesson. Hamas hadn’t fired a single rocket since, and had largely suppressed fire by smaller jihadi groups. Rocket firings, averaging 240 per month in 2007, dropped to five per month in 2013. Neither side had any desire to end the détente. Besides, whatever might replace Hamas in Gaza could only be worse.

The kidnapping and crackdown upset the balance. In Israel, grief and anger over the boys’ disappearance grew steadily as the fabricated mystery stretched into a second and third week. Rallies and prayer meetings were held across the country and in Jewish communities around the world. The mothers were constantly on television. One addressed the United Nations in Geneva to plead for her son’s return. Jews everywhere were in anguish over the unceasing threat of barbaric Arab terror plaguing Israel.

This, too, was misleading. The last seven years have been the most tranquil in Israel’s history. Terror attacks are a fraction of the level during the nightmare intifada years — just six deaths in all of 2013. But few notice. The staged agony of the kidnap search created, probably unintentionally, what amounts to a mass, worldwide attack of post-traumatic stress flashback.

When the bodies were finally found, Israelis’ anger exploded into calls for revenge, street riots and, finally, murder.

Amid the rising tension, cabinet meetings in Jerusalem turned into shouting matches. Ministers on the right demanded the army reoccupy Gaza and destroy Hamas. Netanyahu replied, backed by the army and liberal ministers, that the response must be measured and careful. It was an unaccustomed and plainly uncomfortable role for him. He was caught between his pragmatic and ideological impulses.

In Gaza, leaders went underground. Rocket enforcement squads stopped functioning and jihadi rocket firing spiked. Terror squads began preparing to counterattack Israel through tunnels. One tunnel exploded on June 19 in an apparent work accident, killing five Hamas gunmen, convincing some in Gaza that the Israeli assault had begun while reinforcing Israeli fears that Hamas was plotting terror all along.

On June 29, an Israeli air attack on a rocket squad killed a Hamas operative. Hamas protested. The next day it unleashed a rocket barrage, its first since 2012. The cease-fire was over. Israel was forced to retaliate for the rockets with air raids. Hamas retaliated for the raids with more rockets. And so on. Finally Israel began calling up reserves on July 8 and preparing for what, as Moti Almoz told Army Radio, “the political echelon instructed.”

Later that morning, Israel’s internal security minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch told reporters that the “political echelon has given the army a free hand.” Almoz returned to Army Radio that afternoon and confirmed that the army had “received an absolutely free hand” to act.

And how far, the interviewer asked, will the army go? “To the extent that it’s up to the army,” Almoz said, “the army is determined to restore quiet.” Will simply restoring quiet be enough? “That’s not up to us,” he said. The army will continue the operation as long as it’s told.

The operation’s army code-name, incidentally, is “Protective Edge” in English, but the original Hebrew is more revealing: Tzuk Eitan, or “solid cliff.” That, the army seems to feel, is where Israel is headed. More

Contact J.J. Goldberg at goldberg@forward.com

 

© 2014

Is the Foreign & Commonwealth's Cayman Governor Suggesting Media Censorship?

Gov’s office argues media ‘unregulated and uncontrolled’

Governor Kilpatrick

Records related to the Operation Tempura police corruption investigation in the Cayman Islands should not be released, partly because those who might report them are not regulated or controlled with regard to the publication of such claims, according to the governor’s office arguments put forward in submissions to Cayman’s information commissioner.

Precisely what type of regulations or controls should exist in the Cayman Islands news media – at least in the view of the governor’s office - were not discussed in a decision Acting Information Commissioner Jan Liebaers released Friday. That decision ordered the governor’s office to make public nearly all of a 2010 complaint filed over the investigation by Operation Tempura’s former legal adviser and the then-governor’s subsequent evaluation of it.

The governor’s submission to Mr. Liebaers in arguing against disclosure of the Operation Tempura records noted that the dangers of releasing a complaint that it believed would falsely undermine the Cayman Islands judiciary were greater because "the dissemination of allegations through the media in the Cayman Islands is wholly unregulated and uncontrolled."

"There is substantial risk that the coverage of the allegations will not be properly balanced by the findings contained in the lengthy report [which evaluated the complaint]," the governor’s office submission stated. Mr. Liebaers said previous rulings from the information commissioner’s office had dealt with this subject.

"Questions of access to a record held by government cannot be concerned with how that record might be used in the future," Mr. Liebaers noted, quoting from a previous open records case that was appealed before the information commissioner’s office. "This would be a shortcut to censorship and would contradict the fundamental objectives of the Freedom of Information Law.

"Either a record is exempt under the law or it is not, but in either case, any presumed future use of a record can have no bearing on its disclosure."

Mr. Liebaers went on to state that in a democratic society like the Cayman Islands, the press "has every right to express their views freely" including views that might be critical of government.

"It seems futile to wonder how this case would play out if the media were ‘regulated and controlled’," the information commissioner continued. "No doubt this would reduce the disclosure of information by government considerably and increase the number of articles in the media favorable to government, but that is not the constitutional and statutory framework within which this reconsideration is taking place." More

 

Freedom of Expression part of our Bill of Rights under the Constitution of the Cayman Islands

Expression

11.—(1) No person shall be hindered by government in the enjoyment of his or her freedom of expression, which includes freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference, and freedom from interference with his or her correspondence or other means of communication. (2) Nothing in any law or done under its authority shall be held to contravene this section to the extent that it is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society— (a) in the interests of defence, public safety, public order, public morality or public health; (b) for the purpose of protecting the rights, reputations and freedoms of other persons or the private lives of persons concerned in legal proceedings, preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, maintaining the authority and independence of the courts, or regulating telecommunications, posts, broadcasting or other means of communication, or public shows or entertainments; or (c) for the imposition of restrictions on public officers in the interests of the proper performance of their functions.

 

© 2014

Tribal, aggressive, skilled at violence: why the British army tortured Iraqis to death

The long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan cannot be explained as the work of a few 'bad apples'.

Set up to investigate alleged human rights abuses of Iraqis by British troops in the aftermath of a firefight in 2004 and costing over £22 million, the al-Sweady public inquiry is set to report in the autumn.

Citing a lack of evidence, in March lawyers representing Iraqi families withdrew their claim that British troops had killed unarmed Iraqis they had captured and brought back to their army base in southern Iraq.

However, while the headline allegation has been dropped, the inquiry has unearthed some shocking behaviour.

One British soldier testified that his sergeant fired around 30 rounds into a "pile" of Iraqi bodies: "He put a full magazine of bullets into both bodies that had been twitching but he also fired into the bodies of the other dead gunmen in the ditch. The bodies of the two twitching gunmen stopped twitching."

The soldier went on to note that he witnessed two other soldiers punch and kick Iraqi prisoners, with one of them stamping on the head of a dead Iraqi several times.

Faced with these types of allegations the British government and military have repeatedly tried to downplay their significance, effectively labelling the perpetrators as "bad apples."

As the then armed forces minister Bill Rammell said in 2009: "Only a tiny number of individuals have been shown to have fallen short of our high standards."

However, the cold facts suggest a far less comforting reality. In 2010 the army’s most senior legal adviser in Iraq revealed that at least eight Iraqis had died in British custody since the invasion in 2003.

Included in this shameful number is Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel worker who was beaten to death in September 2003 while being held by the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. It also includes Tarik Mahmud, who reportedly died in a helicopter while a captive of the RAF Regiment.

In Iraq the British army was using what are known as the five techniques of interrogation — hooding, stress positions, noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink — even though they had been banned by the Heath government in 1972.

In January 2005, photos showing abuse of Iraqis at Camp Breadbasket were released. These showed soldiers from the 1st Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers mistreating Iraqi prisoners, including British soldiers forcing Iraqis to strip bare and simulate oral and anal sex.

A year later the News of the World released a video from 2004 showing several soldiers from the 1st Battalion The Light Infantry beating unarmed teenage Iraqis who they had captured during a proteIn 2010 investigative journalist Ian Cobain reported on abuse allegations at interrogation centres under the command of the Intelligence Corps that hundreds of Iraqis passed through.

According to Louise Thomas, a former member of the Ministry of Defence inquiry team set up to look into the allegations, videos of the interrogations show prisoners being abused, beaten, humiliated and threatened.

After watching footage of around 1,600 interrogations Thomas, a former police officer, said: "I saw a really dark side of the army. The videos showed really quite terrible abuses."

By 2012 Cobain was reporting that the Ministry of Defence had paid out £14 million in compensation to 400 Iraqis who had complained they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces. So rather than "a few bad apples," it is clear the abuse was widespread, perpetrated by members of several regiments.

The abuse must have directly involved hundreds of soldiers with a much greater number — thousands, surely — likely aware of the mistreatment.

And it’s important to remember the examples of mistreatment listed above are just the main stories the media has reported on.

"The abuses uncovered are only the tip of the iceberg," David Buck, a member of Veterans for Peace UK who served in the British Army in Iraq, told me."A lot will have gone on that has been covered up, brushed under the carpet and kept amongst themselves never to be spoken about."

So why did British soldiers abuse Iraqi prisoners?

Much of the debate in the mainstream media about causes and solutions has focused on legal and cultural reforms.

For example, Phil Shiner, the lawyer who has done more than anyone to bring attention to British abuse in Iraq, made a number of suggestions last year: "Introduce a new fitness-for-service test for all would-be soldiers (as with British police, soldiers must be able to pass a straightforward test on the relevant law)… address the loss of moral compass so evident in the behaviour of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, rewrite the relevant rules of engagement for various conflict situations so that the golden thread of legal compliance shapes all acts of force, bin the UK’s interrogation policy, introduce a lawful one and train those responsible to use it correctly."

These proposals are all well and good but the long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan suggests the problem is far deeper and requires action that gets to the root of the issue.

For Joe Glenton, an Afghan veteran and the author of Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return To The War On Terror, the problem goes back to recruitment and training.

"The UK military virtually depends on what, by polite societal standards, are bad apples," he explains.

"It looks for rough kids who are desperate, poorly educated, with limited prospects. It then socially engineers them through the process known as Basic or Phase 1 Training to make them tribal, aggressive and skilled at violence."

Military training and military life also engenders a strong "us -versus-them" group mentality, which is only heightened when troops are deployed to an unfriendly foreign land and start taking casualties.

Time and again those alleged to have brutalised prisoners have talked about their anger after one of their friends has been killed or injured by the enemy.

In addition, soldiers, like the general public, are subject to war-time propaganda that demonises and dehumanises the enemy."Soldiers have the mindset that they are superior to the population of the country they occupy … they see them as subhuman, their lives are irrelevant," Buck explains.

Glenton links this sense of superiority to the fact of the occupation itself.

"You cannot effectively occupy a particular people by force and at the same time view those people as your equal," he argues . "You simply have to think of them as lesser. At best, as primitive feckless creatures to be marshalled for their own good — at worst as alien, treacherous, uppity niggers or similar. That is what occupation looks like."

Conservative MP Rory Stewart, previously the Coalition Provisional Authority deputy governorate co-ordinator in Maysan province in Iraq, agrees with Glenton that the central problem was the military occupation itself.

"The problem wasn’t the way that this was implemented, the problem was that we were there at all," he noted about British forces in Iraq in a BBC Radio 4 documentary last year.

The problem was so deep that if we hadn’t made those mistakes we would have made other mistakes. It was a wrecked intervention from the beginning, from the very moment we arrived on the ground." More

Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press.

 

 

© 2014

Kill the Messenger: Israel orders dismantling of camera that captured murder of Palestinian boys

On 15 May, Israeli security forces fatally shot Nadim Nuwara, 17, and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, 16, at a demonstration near the Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank village of Beitunia. Four days after the killings, on 19 May, Defence for Children International—Palestine (DCI-Palestine) released footage from Zayed’s security cameras that showed the boys walking slowly in a calm scene when they were shot.

Now the Israeli military has ordered Fakher Zayed, the man whose security cameras captured the closed circuit TV footage that shows Israeli security forces shooting the two teenaged boys, to dismantle his cameras within 24 hours or face legal proceedings (The footage and an earlier interview with Zayed can be seen in the DCI-Palestine video above).

The Israeli military had already confiscated Zayed’s recording equipment on 22 May, and on 13 June seized all other recording equipment in the area — such as that owned by other shopkeepers. They now demand that Zayed remove his security camera as well, from which a live stream can be watched but not saved for subsequent viewing or examination.

On 22 May, CNN released its own footage from the day’s events showing an Israeli security officer shoot in the direction of Nuwara. The soldier caught firing the gun in that footage was suspended. On 11 June the autopsy on Nuwara was completed. It indicated the boy had been killed by live ammunition, confirming all other physical evidence and eyewitness reports.

In the face of the autopsy and video footage, the Israeli military continues to claim that the footage was doctored and that no live ammunition was fired. It is currently conducting its own investigation into the killings.

“You are nothing”

According to statements given to Human Rights Watch (HRW) and DCI-Palestine, on the afternoon of 17 June, four Israeli military vehicles and over twenty Israeli soldiers arrived at Zayed’s carpentry shop in Beitunia while he was making deliveries, and warned an unnamed witness, “if [Zayed] is not here in five minutes we are going to burn this carpentry shop down.”

When Zayed returned, the Israeli soldiers “confiscated his identification document, told him and his employees that he was not being arrested but taken for questioning, and drove him to the nearby Ofer military base,” as DCI-Palestine and HRW reported.

At the military base, the military officers repeated their original allegation that his footage was forged; and told Zayed that he was “up against a very powerful force.” He said that they told him, “We will squish you like a bug, you are nothing” and threatened to “unleash dogs on my children.”

The videos prompted international attention and outcry. After reviewing the footage, witness statements, and photographs, Human Rights Watch called the shootings a “willful killing of civilians” and a “war crime.” But it must be noted: while the attention these killings garnered is exceptional, the use of lethal force by the Israeli military during demonstrations by Palestinians is not: in February, Amnesty International published “Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank,” a report that documented Israel’s use of force against Palestinians protesters. In 2013 alone, for example, 22 people were killed, 14 during demonstrations.

Speaking about his interrogation by the Israeli military, Zayed told HRW and DCI-Palestine:“They told me that the video I gave to the press was fabricated, that everything I said and all my testimonies are a lie, that this is a serious violation of the law, and that I made the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] look bad and caused a lot of problems.”

On 13 June, the Israeli military, led by “Sabri” (the same commander that detained Zayed this Tuesday) came to Beitunia and confiscated all video recording equipment in the vicinity of Zayed’s shop.

DCI—Palestine and Human Rights Watch have stated that these actions suggest the military is not conducting “good faith investigations” into the killings.

Israeli impunity has always been guaranteed by the military’s insistence on conducting internal investigations — for most of which the findings have yet to be revealed. Clearly, Zayed’s camera poses a threat to this impunity. More

© 2014

Israel elected to leadership of UN committee on “Decolonization”

Just when it appeared that the United Nations could not be more ineffective in protecting Palestinian rights and holding Israel accountable for violating them, here comes the news that Israel has been elected as vice-chair of the UN Special Commitee on Decolonization – which deals among other things with matters related to Palestinian refugees.

Palestinians examine the ruins of
buildings demolished by Israeli
occupation forces in eastern Jerusalem,

According to UN minutes, the representative of Israel, the world’s last settler-colonial power, received 74 votes for the post, despite strong opposition from the Arab Group of UN member states.

Qatar, speaking on behalf of the Arab states, described Israel as a “State that violated the United Nations Charter and international law. Because its track record was rife with murder and its occupation had lasted more than 66 years, Israel was not qualified to preside over questions pertaining to Palestinian refugees, peacekeeping and the investigation of its own illegal practices.”

The Arab states had demanded a recorded vote, an unusual step, prompting objections from the ambassador of the United Kingdom which is a member of the Group of Western European and Other States that nominated Israel.

The Balfour Declaration

Canada took the opportunity to express its “unflinching support for Israel” and the United States said it “unequivocally supported Israel’s election.”

Saudi Arabia – whose own membership of the UN Human Rights Council has drawn much criticism – said that Israel’s election was “the moral equivalent of placing the apartheid regime of South Africa in charge of a committee to end racism.”

Theater of the absurd

Israel thanked its supporters, but perhaps its actions spoke louder than words. While this theater of the absurd was playing out in New York, Israeli occupation forces stepped up demolitions of Palestinian homes to make way for colonial settlements.

Its election comes just weeks after Israel announced yet another massive expansion of illegal colonies in the occupied West Bank.

On Wednesday alone, Israeli demolitions left seven Palestinian families homelessin the West Bank.

And take a look at the photostory by Silvia Boarini documenting Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouins in the southern Naqab (“Negev”) region of present-day Israel.

These latest measures of ethnic cleansing come amid Israel’s assault on West Bank cities over the past week, allegedly in search of three missing colonial settlers. Israel has so far abducted more than 300 Palestinians, raided 750 homes as well as dozens of charities and the Birzeit University campus.

If there were a UN Committee on How to Occupy and Colonize, Israel would indeed be the best candidate to lead it. More

The British are at the root of the Palestinian's problems as they, via the illegal Balfour Declaration, allowed the Jews to settle in Palestine (there was no israel then). And they did so while running the southern part of the ex-Ottoman Empire under a Mandate from the League of Nations. A mandate to govern the State of Trans-Jordan and Iraq on behalf of the citizens thereof. Editor

 

© 2014