Israeli policies against Palestinians amount to apartheid, Amnesty International report says
There have been better replies to this nonsense than I can give but think I should note that there IS a lot of apartheid in the Middle East. Most Arab countries have official discriminatory policies against non-Muslims. That is where the real apartheid lurks. All inhabitants of Israel, by contrast, have equal rights under Israeli law.
It is true that Arabs in Erez Israel suffer hardships in various ways but such problems are self-inflicted. Israel has to protect its people from the actively hostile attitudes to Jewish Israelis that are common among Palestinians. Israel has had to deal with murderous attacks from Israeli Arabs so wall-building and other measures have been imposed
Amnesty International has accused Israel of subjecting Palestinians to a system of apartheid founded on policies of "segregation, dispossession and exclusion".
The London-based rights group said its findings were based on research and legal analysis in a 211-page report into Israeli seizure of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer of people and denial of citizenship.
Amnesty argued those measures, as well as restrictions on Palestinian movement in Israeli-occupied territory, underinvestment in Palestinian communities in Israel, and preventing the return of Palestinian refugees, created a system of "oppression and domination" over Palestinians.
"We didn't come to this conclusion lightly," Amnesty's director for the Middle East and North Africa Heba Morayef said.
"What that means is that Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group, and they are kept that way."
Mr Morayef said Amnesty International spent four years forensically researching the report based on Israeli policies, documents and directives.
The report is the second by an international rights group in less than a year to accuse Israel of pursuing a policy of apartheid, after Human Rights Watch came to a similar conclusion in April.
Previously Israel has been accused of apartheid in occupied Palestinian territory, but the scope of this report goes further and includes any Palestinian anywhere in Israel.
The report drew a swift and sharp rebuke from Israel, which said the report "consolidates and recycles lies" from hate groups and was designed to "pour fuel onto the fire of anti-Semitism".
"This report crosses the line because it undermines the existence of the State of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people," Lior Haiat, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, told the ABC.
"This is a pure anti-Semite report," he added.
In a statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said: "Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy committed to international law and open to scrutiny." He added that the country had a free press and a strong Supreme Court.
"I hate to use the argument that if Israel were not a Jewish state, nobody in Amnesty would dare argue against it, but in this case, there is no other possibility," he said.
On the other hand, the report drew praise from Palestinians.
Bassam Al-Salhe, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said it "confirms and supports the long-standing Palestinian position towards the nature of the Israeli occupation measures. It reflects the real status on the ground."
Israel has cited security concerns in imposing travel restrictions on Palestinians, whose uprising in the early 2000s included suicide bombings in Israeli cities.
Palestinians seek a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza, with Jerusalem as its capital. Gaza, a tiny coastal strip that Israel also took in 1967 but left in 2005, is run by Hamas, considered by the West to be a terrorist group.
Israel and Egypt have imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza since 2007.
The last round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014.
Amnesty said the UN Security Council should impose an arms embargo on Israel for killing scores of civilians during weekly protests on the border with Gaza in 2018-19.
Israel has said those protests included attempts by Palestinian militants to breach its border fence.
Amnesty also called on the International Criminal Court to consider the accusation of apartheid in its investigation into possible war crimes committed by both sides during several bouts of conflict in the Palestinian territories.
*****************************************
French journalist, 34, is given police guard over her report on radical Islam in town where shops sell FACELESS DOLLS, restaurant has cubicles for women to eat and Muslim who spoke out was threatened with beheading
Poisonous Islam in metropolitan France
A French journalist has been given police protection after fronting a documentary about the impact of radical Islam on a poor town in the north of the country.
Ophélie Meunier, 34, has received death threats in the wake of documentary Zone Interdite - or 'Restricted Zone - that aired in France on January 23 looking at the influence of hardline Islamic views in the town of Roubaix, on the Belgian border.
Meunier found a restaurant where women are given cubicles to eat away from men, and a toy shop selling faceless dolls to comply with strict interpretations of Islam that forbid depicting facial features.
She also spoke to Amine Elbahi, 26, a Muslim lawyer from Roubaix who helped expose an educational institution that received £53,000 of public money to teach poor children, but was accused of spreading Islamic teachings instead.
Elbahi spoke out against the influence of radical Islam in the film, and has now been branded an 'infidel' and threatened with beheading. He is also under police guard.
News that the pair have been threatened has caused outcry in France, where many feel the secularism on which the modern-day republic was founded is under threat from religious ideologies brought in by overseas migrants.
Emmanuel Macron, a centrist who is gearing up to fight a presidential election in April where he is likely to face off against a right-wing challenger, has been accused of being soft on immigration and of failing to defend French values.
Eric Zemmour, a far-right commentator and Macron rival who has twice been convicted of hate crimes for statements about Islam, was quick to align himself with Meunier after it emerged she had been threatened.
'Ophélie Meunier is in mortal danger,' he tweeted on Saturday, as the documentary began garnering widespread attention.
'This is what happens when you show the French the Islamization of our country. Millions of patriots thank her for her courage.'
Valerie Pecresse, another right-wing challenger to Macron, tweeted: 'Full support for Ophélie Meunier threatened and placed under protection after the courageous investigation on Islamism.'
In a clip shared on Zone Interdite's official Twitter page ahead of the release of the full documentary, specialist in radical Islam Professor Bernard Rougier holds the faceless dolls and teddy-bears as he explains: 'It's a way to show that from childhood, you will be a better Muslim than others, and implies, others are not good or true Muslims.
'And so it is the introduction of an ideological principle into the world of childhood... in that sense it is quite worrying, yes.'
The hidden-camera footage shows the undercover reporter going into the shops selling the dolls, which also offer books with the same imagery.
A Muslim lawyer from Roubaix, Amine Elbahi, who spoke out about radical Islam in the programme, has also been placed under police protection after saying he was threatened with decapitation.
Mr Elbahi, 26, appears in several sequences of Zone Interdite - translating to Restricted Zone - which aired on the private French TV channel M6.
He has told French news channel BMFTV that his phone number circulated on social media, and 'several murder calls were broadcast'.
'I am threatened with beheading, slitting, attacking me because I held a speech of truth with my face uncovered, and in particular on the inaction of the mayor of my commune', he said.
'What I said upset people. Given the threats I am receiving my aim must have been right.'
Books for sale in the toy shop in Roubaix included titles such as 'who is Allah?' and 'Zayd, the little prince' which also featured faceless depictions of human characters
But interpretations of Hadith and what exactly constitutes a depiction likely to attract worship vary widely between different branches of Islam and between scholars and clerics.
The most hardline interpretations teach that any depictions of humans are haram - or forbidden. In Afghanistan, clerics recently declared shop mannequins to be haram and ordered that they be beheaded so as to remove the faces.
And during ISIS's 2014 conquest of vast areas of Syria and Iraq, fighters were often seen defacing religious monuments of other Islamic sects which they believed to be idolatrous.
But others take a more-relaxed view.
Shia Muslims, who ISIS and other extremists view as apostates, sometimes depict Husayn - grandson of Mohammed - though not the prophet himself.
Mr Elbahi tipped off the criminal investigation into Roubaix-based 'association' featured in the programme by M6, Ambitions et Initiatives pour la Réussite (Ambitions and Initiatives for Success).
His lawyer, Mr Jean Tamalet, says that Mr Elbahi received threats on social media, particularly on Twitter, but also texts, WhatsApp messages, and voice recordings.
In the threatening messages, he is described as 'Kafir', which translates to 'nonbeliever' or 'infidel' in Arabic.
'Kafir' has been a word used by supporters of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other Islamic extremist groups, to refer to 'Muslim and non-Muslim adversaries' through 'various propaganda materials', according to the Counter Extremism Project.
Lawyer Jean Tamalet told AFP: 'He is told that he is going to be beheaded and slaughtered. We won't let a single threat pass.
'We will file a complaint against anyone threatening this gentleman.'
Three members of the charity association, which received the council payout of €64,640, accused by prosecutors as being used for offering Islamic education, are to appear in court alongside the mayor of Roubaix on Wednesday.
French legislation states that public bodies are prohibited from contributing to religious charities, a law which is designed to uphold the secular values and views of the state.
*************************************************
Affirmative action has not helped us one bit
Affirmative action should be done away with once and for all, Pastor Brooks says
CHICAGO – On the 72th day of his 100-day rooftop vigil to build a community center designed to provide opportunities for his community, Pastor Corey Brooks wished to share his thoughts on the two affirmative action cases pending before the Supreme Court.
What follows has been lightly edited. We strongly encourage you to watch the accompanying video so you may hear the pastor in his own words:
Today, I want to talk about a controversial topic: affirmative action. And I know some of you are asking, "what the heck does affirmative action have to do with my community?" Well, I'm here to tell you, a whole lot.
Right now, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear two cases challenging admissions policies, one involving Harvard and the other involving the University of North Carolina. I'm not going to go into all the details of both cases because that is not the point of this Rooftop Revelation. But both cases generally ask if racial preferences can be used in college admissions. My answer is a simply flat out no.
For those of you wondering, no, I have never used affirmative action. I've never benefited from it. I'm one of those folks in the 2019 Pew Research Center poll that found that 62% of blacks said that race should not be used in college admissions. We all know it's a sham. I'm proud that I got to where I am because I worked hard and gave it all that I had. I know that many of my fellow brothers and sisters feel the same way.
My problem with affirmative action is that it helps nobody in our community. Our schools are so bad that even our smartest students struggle to get the education that they rightfully deserve.
What bothers me about affirmative action is that it is essentially the government saying, "we will help you when you're 18. You can struggle from pre-K to 12th grade in a crappy school, and we will not help you. But when you apply to college and turn 18, we are here to help you."
How in the world does that make any sense at all? We're so far behind in this neighborhood that it's not funny. When they graduate 12th grade, some [students] are really at ninth grade levels [or worse]. So we give them affirmative action, and all of a sudden, our students are years behind in college.
Many of these students aspire to be doctors or scientists. They choose those majors in college, but many simply cannot compete with students from other schools and what happens? They drop out or they switch to easier majors.
Why are we doing this? We could have easily had those same students take a slower path upward, community college, state college and then graduate school. Let them catch up. Let them keep their dreams.
Several years ago, I saw a documentary called "How Jack Became Black." (Full disclosure, Rooftop Revelations producer Eli Steele made this film.) What struck me about the documentary is that it explained that the original purpose of affirmative action. The original purpose was to go into poor, underdeveloped communities and provide better teachers, better funding, a pathway to opportunities. The problem was that this development would take time, though.
University presidents wanted blacks on their campus now so they [could] show diversity, and they switched from the original purpose of affirmative action to racial preferences. They wanted blacks no matter what. They wanted blacks no matter where they came from, and the ugly truth is that most blacks that benefited were middle to upper class blacks, not the blacks from this neighborhood.
So affirmative action has not helped us one bit.
Here's an even uglier truth. The top colleges in America are fighting over a small pool of very talented black applicants who could have gotten into colleges on their own. These colleges had no interest in development. They wanted the quick, easy fix. They wanted to look good and brag about how many blacks they had on campus. It's simply tragic. Tragic. We need better schools, not affirmative action. We don't need handouts anymore.
The Bible says you reap what you sow. Because our nation chose the path of racial preferences, we're now in a racial war of sorts. What bothers me about these lawsuits is how they discriminate even against Asians. I've been discriminated against, and I would not wish that on any person, not even my worst enemy.
Why in the world would they discriminate against Asians that have worked hard and paid their dues? What kind of America are we becoming?
See, what I'm getting at [is that] affirmative action is poisonous because it uses race as its primary principle. This has allowed Americans to overlook underdeveloped black communities. This has allowed Americans to discriminate against Asians simply because they look different, the color of their skin.
This is why we need to do away with affirmative action for once and for all. And if we do, then we will have nothing between us and our problems. We won't have the lies. We won't have the lies, the lies, the lies of affirmative action to hide behind.
The problems will be all naked and right in front of us. We will have to address them for once and for all. And that is why I support banning affirmative action.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/rooftop-revelations-affirmative-action-has-not-helped-us-one-bit
**********************************************Company Loses 40,000 Customers After CEO Called All Republicans “Racist”
Over the last couple of years, there has been a growing number of companies who have gone woke and it usually leads to more problems than benefits.
Too often they think that this is a good thing and that they’re on the right side of history by standing with liberals who live in a fantasy world of what they want to believe is true.
I genuinely hope that all businesses that go woke and treat people who don’t agree with them poorly would go out of business. I mean that with every fiber of my being.
If they want to embrace hateful behavior and speech, I want them to lose that business because that’s not how you become successful. I don’t care if it’s a liberal company not serving “cis” men, or a conservative business not serving black people. Both are hateful and ignorant.
However, this is basically what one company in Wisconsin did and now they are suffering majorly for it.
Last month, Penzeys Spices CEO Bill Penzey sent out an email in which he called all Republicans racists.
“Remember how Republicans, going against a mountain of evidence to the contrary, once again lied and said BLM wasn’t a peaceful movement but instead terrorists inciting violence throughout the country and then raced out to buy a crapload of guns because maybe they were finally going to get their chance to sh**t a Black person? What a bunch of racists,” the email said.
Penzey also claimed that the Republican Party “does everything it can to make it harder for Black people to vote.”
As a result, the company lost 40,000 subscribers instantly which makes up approximately 3% of their base. I think more will unsubscribe as more people learn about this as well.
Now the company is begging customers to purchase gift cards in order to try and save their sinking ship.
Some people are just idiots. Why would you alienate half of your customers? It’s a stupid thing to do from a business standpoint.
It just goes to show you how far from reality these liberals really are. They honestly live in a world of delusion where they have convinced themselves of what we are as conservatives regardless of our words and actions.
*******************************************
The rise of the new autocracy
Taki -- at Gstaad
Dinner parties are no longer verboten here, so I posed a question to some youngsters my son had over: did any of them feel morally entitled to their privilege? The problem with talking about privilege is that the discussion goes around in circles, original thoughts get lost, and what emerges says more about those conversing than about the subject at hand. Ditto when I posed the question to my son’s friends. There were no straightforward answers.
Let’s face it, privilege is so enjoyable that the beneficiaries are mostly seen as undeserving, spoilt lightweights — by the underprivileged, that is. Envy has always been around, as has the urge to take away wealth from those not seen as having earned it. After the defeat of communism, socialism has become the goal, and a war against the affluent is being waged, led by the American mainstream media and academia. In this, hacks and academics are aided and abetted by Silicon Valley freaks who pose as humanity’s saviours rather than acknowledging that they are among those reaping the benefits of economic inequality.
My son’s friends’ answers did not surprise me. They were all in their late thirties, well off, educated and girl-crazy. And they kept it very light: ‘Privilege means an immense pressure to be incredibly charming and funny. I don’t think the strain is sufficiently recognised,’ said one charming Italian. A Frenchman decided that privilege is literally being above the law. A Monaco resident said: ‘An American once told me he’d be able to perform wonders with my name,’ and that was the last time he spoke to Jeffrey Epstein. The response I liked most came from an Italian, a noble one at that, Raimondo Gaetani, nephew of a great friend of mine who is no longer with us: ‘The bottom line is that no one does anything worthwhile with their privilege.’ The dinner deteriorated as we all got pissed, and one youngster proclaimed to this privileged group that ‘if someone has slept rough for the last six months, he is a bum’. But the response that intrigued me was the one I got when I rang Austrian Countess St Julien-Wallsee, who happens to be my daughter: ‘I have two screaming children and a large freezing house and no time for your mind games.’
OK, enough already, as they say in the Bagel. Personally I don’t care to comment on privilege because I see it as the luck of the draw. Some are born ugly and others beautiful, some weak and others strong, some smart and some dumb; Lady Luck is to blame. But is there luck involved when it comes to who among us reaps the benefits of our economic system? The left screams to high heaven that the dice are loaded in favour of the few. Serious people know otherwise. Enterprise and hard work will almost always win, even under communism or African dictatorships. The trouble is that envious lefties depict enterprise and success as privilege. When was the last time you saw a movie where the rich character was a goodie?
Never mind. It gets better. Those who are lucky enough to inherit must be listed as the baddies. At least according to a hack writing in the Bagel who categorised them as the ‘ostentatious bad rich’, as opposed to the ‘good rich’ who earned their moolah. From experience, I can state that it is the other way round: ostentation is a mark of the nouveau riche. Economic disparity exists everywhere, nowhere more so than in China, Russia and the United States. Which brings me to the point I’m trying to make.
In the January issue of the best monthly in America, The Spectator World, our very own Dominic Green has come up with a real winner. An article by Joel Kotkin signalling the end of democracy really hit home (read it at www.spectator.co.uk/endofdemocracy ). Unlike the ludicrous Bagel Times, which lures readers via envy — by playing on a fabricated sense of victimhood on the part of the not so rich — Kotkin points out that very few multi-billionaires — down to 26 from around 400 five years ago — own half of the world’s assets. The writer calls it the end of democracy, and I agree. The digital economy is 90 per cent controlled by a few overlords and ‘curates’ the news. Small businesses are disappearing, including nearly half of all black-owned enterprises. According to Kotkin, climate-change policies will nurture the new autocracy, with huge opportunities for mega-billionaires such as Elon Musk and the three witches, Dorsey, Bezos and Zuckerberg.
The new policy of ‘degrowth’ will hit the poor and enrich the already mega-rich. In no time, surveillance technology will make us westerners more like our Chinese cousins. Big Brother is here and he’s staying. While fools like the Bagel Times and the networks are forever chasing non-existent racists, our digital elites are anointing themselves as our masters, deciding what news we are allowed to read and hear, as they cement their powers. The green economy that is being shoved down our throats does not have the technology to sustain it. But the Silicon Valley oligarchs are fixing the news in order to achieve their top-down progress.
Although I am what the French call ‘parti pris’, I think this is the most important and revealing article I’ve read since the Rolling Stones still had their own teeth. The freaks are pulling a number on us while we sit around discussing privilege. We’ll still be talking about it when the freaks have got us exactly where they want us.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/01/high-life-134
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
No comments:
Post a Comment