Archive for January 27th, 2021
Colonial powers insist on Not punishing apartheid Israel and supporting all its policies and anti-semitic definition
Posted on: January 27, 2021
EU anti-Semitism chief stands by blatant lie
Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 22 January 2021
This is a story about how European Union officials evade accountability when they are caught in a blatant lie for the benefit of Israel.
Earlier this week I wrote about a major legal victory for supporters of Palestinian rights in Spain.
In 2015, activists from the group BDS País Valencià (Palestinian Boycott, Divestiture, Sanctions of Israel settlement products) called on a music festival to cancel a performance by Matthew Paul Miller, the singer who uses the stage name Matisyahu, because he had made anti-Palestinian statements and had helped raise money for the Israeli occupation army.
This month, a court in Valencia threw out hate crime accusations against the activists. The judges found that they were only contesting Miller’s presence in the festival because of his alleged views on Israeli policy, “not because of his Jewish status, religion or any other circumstance.”
The Spanish court also affirmed last June’s landmark ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that calling for boycotts of Israel because of its crimes against Palestinians is not anti-Semitic and is protected political expression.
Although the facts about the incident in Spain have been clear from the start, the recent ruling is a total vindication of the activists by impartial judges.
Yet in recent years, the European Union has smeared the activists, falsely claiming that they only protested Miller because he is Jewish.
This false charge of anti-Semitism was made by Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU’s anti-Semitism coordinator, at a 2019 conference launching an Israeli government report smearing the Palestine solidarity movement.
It is repeated in a recently published EU “handbook” promoting the so-called IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.
This misleading definition, backed by Israel and its lobby, conflates criticism of Israel’s racism and war crimes against Palestinians, on the one hand, with anti-Jewish bigotry, on the other.
Evasion
While I was writing my story, I emailed von Schnurbein asking whether she would retract the false claims she made about the 2015 Matisyahu incident.
The reply came after I had already published my article, but not from von Schnurbein herself.
Instead, Christian Wigand, a spokesperson for the European Commission – the EU’s executive branch – wrote to me:
“We do not comment [on] court judgments in our member states. As for the Commission’s – and in fact the European Union’s – position on the BDS movement, which was reiterated by our coordinator Ms. von Schnurbein at the event you mention, our position is very clear and has not changed.”
I can give credit to Wigand for a masterful example of bureaucratic evasion, but not for much else.
I had not been seeking a comment on the court judgment per se, but asked whether von Schnurbein stood by her own statements grossly mischaracterizing the 2015 Matisyahu incident.
Nor had I asked for the EU’s position on the BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – movement.
The opinionated von Schnurbein
Yet even if I did want a comment on the court decision itself, the last person who can claim that she does not speak about such matters is Katharina von Schnurbein.
As her Twitter feed shows, von Schnurbein has regularly commented on court cases – some of them while they were ongoing
The highly opinionated von Schnurbein also regularly comments on decisions by the governments and elected assemblies of EU member states and their local authorities.
She has even been taken to task for publicly criticizing an elected member of the European Parliament – a flagrant breach of the neutrality she should observe as an unelected civil servant.
The citizens of EU states deserve better than to be bullied, smeared and lied about by bureaucrats in Brussels who appear to answer only to Israel and its lobby.
Adonis Diaries 
Tidbits #93
Posted by: adonis49 on: January 27, 2021
Tidbits #93
The big Baobab tree preserves large quantity of fresh water in its trunk. The baobab can reach 30 meters high, live more than 1,000 years and won’t need rain for 10 years to survive. Tribes learned to excavate an entrance in the trunk in order to extract badly needed water in dry seasons. The baobab is as good a source as aquatic wells.
As the dry season starts, chameleons all die. The hidden eggs in the deep soil will have to fend for themselves.
In the period between the first vaccine injection of Covid and the second inoculation the immune system drops dangerously. My conjecture is that the many varieties of Covid surfaced during the secret testing of the vaccine. Lebanon is the turntable of all the family varieties of Covid flocking from UK, South Africa, Israel and Danmark…
“The Israeli army arrested 41 Palestinians last week in 17 raids carried out across the West Bank in one night. Of those detained, 24 were from Mugayir and Kafr Malik, two adjacent villages northeast of Ramallah whose residents demonstrate every week against their lands being taken over by Israeli settler outposts.”– Amira Hass
Biden said what amount to: “we are Not going to demand from nations to do what we cannot give and apply as examples to follow”. Sure, Biden has the habit of Not quoting sentences that impress audiences. Hoping that older age agrees with good pronouncement.
Impotence is covering your violent heart with a cloak of nonviolence rhetorics.
“Traînée de poudre”, spreading Covid like wildfire: Lebanon actually reached contamination of 10,000 per day, the highest rate per number of population. Most of the cases, as everywhere else, are located in disinherited people living in crowded camps and shantytowns.
When 30% of the “working force” are employed in government institutions and most of them barely show up to work, and yet get paid…how can this State surmount its economic and financial deficits?
The worst among enemies (religious sects) are those branded “heretics” by the dominant religious sect. This label extends to political parties and ideologies. Most of the savage wars around the world and empires were conducted under the excuse of fighting heretics
Though most “Protestants”, of so-called Christian sects, adopt the Jewish mythological stories and barely rely on the New testament, they considered the “Jews” living in ghettos as “heretics”, and vice versa. Pogromes and persecutions had a deep connotation for the common people as Jews being heretics to the dominant religion in every nation.
Trump refused to fool the US voters that he learned to act as a President to all: he preferred to position himself as the Leaders of the hooligan factions
It was thanks to the campaign efforts of Obama and Sanders to rally the Democrats and select Biden as the party candidate to confront Trump. They figured out that this “lukewarm candidate” cannot be attacked convincingly by Donald as “communist” or left leaning. Obama had to settle in California in order to rally his supporters to vote for Biden as Dem. candidate as Biden was already considered the biggest loser in the initial primaries.
I agree with George Orwell: “If you cannot write, you cannot think (properly), and others will think for you”. I assume that Orwell meant: If you cannot observe (consciously observe what is going around you) and note down accurately what roil your set of values…then you are Not fit to write for others to think clearly.
Historical question if there are data: During the “Spanish Flu” pandemics that reaped over 20 millions within 2 years, I wonder when people started to wear the masks and how masks decreased the level of contamination.
General knowledge is important to know the context of speeches, articles and books, when context is Not directly provided. Without understanding of the context, what we hear or read fall within the abstract domain and is Not retained.
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