Free Palestine Melbourne - Freedom and Justice for Palestine and its People.

Media Release: Free Palestine Melbourne statement on Israeli apartheid and forthcoming Australian Federal election

by Admin

Amnesty’s report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, demonstrates how Israel violates numerous basic rights of 1.9 million Israeli Palestinians, 5.2 million Occupied Palestinians and 8 million Exiled Palestinians, and in particular for 55 years has denied Occupied Palestinians the chance to vote for the ‘democratic’ government ruling them.

The Report has provoked disingenuous Zionist allegations of lying and anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarians critical of Israeli human rights abuses.

Amnesty International joins other human rights specialists (Human Rights Watch, and Israeli B’Tselem and Yesh Din), human rights activists, and Jewish and non-Jewish South African anti-apartheid heroes (notably Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) in exposing and condemning Israeli apartheid. 

Anyone denying the entrenched reality of Israeli apartheid is challenged to demonstrate how the repressive laws, regulations and the enforcement of these applying only to Palestinians in areas as diverse as (e.g.) marriage, travel and property can otherwise be explained. In Amnesty’s words, the Report “documents how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention… Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem, Hebron, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights.” *

Denial of Israeli apartheid is notably espoused by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) to which Australia shamefully belongs with Coalition and Labor support. The IHRA’s weaponising of Holocaust denial to shield Israel from scrutiny and frank assessment has discredited its voice, and over 40 anti-racist Jewish organizations have condemned the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. 

Denial of Israeli apartheid, notably by the Australian and US governments and the Murdoch media though airy claims to ‘democracy’ and comparisons with nasty dictatorships, is unacceptable. The measure of whether or not Israel is an apartheid state is what is happening on the ground and Amnesty’s careful and detailed assessment clearly demonstrates that it is apartheid.

Decent anti-racist folk world-wide must (a) speak out to everyone they can, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel for its flouting of the international statutes on apartheid.  

In the 2022 Federal election, decent, anti-racist Australians should question all candidates about their position on Israeli apartheid, and vote accordingly.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/




2022-06-24 01:28:28.000000
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ISRAEL’S APARTHEID JACKBOOT IS ON THE NECK OF PALESTINIANS AND THEY CAN’T BREATHE

by admin

by Jerome Irwin

All human beings, like all living beings on this earth, deserve respect! It’s a basic fundamental right of life that cannot be denied at the peril of all of humanity and the earth!

Just as George Floyd once couldn’t breathe until he died gasping under the knee of an American Minneapolis policeman so, too, now, as they have been suffering since the Nakba Catastrophe in 1948, the Palestinians slowly continue to die under the oppressive boot of Benjamin Netanyahu, his IDF Forces and every Jewish bully-who follows their lead; pressing down ever harder, listening with gleeful anticipation for those last dying Arab gasps they long to hear.

Like the American policeman who didn’t respect George Floyd’s human rights, as so many other mean-spirited Americans over the course of time have done with Black-Brown-Asian-Native Americans they likewise have denied the same right to live as they would, so, too, the Jewish settlers in Occupied Palestine willingly and quite happily now march through the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, the West Bank or wherever else a vulnerable Palestinian family is to be found, knowing full-well that they have the protected right to chant, ”Death to the Arabs!”. Jewish gang rage, its members bound by a common religion, race and place of residency, know they have the full protection of Israeli politicians and military forces to rage against whatever unsuspecting Palestinian they may find. In the end, another ugly ‘Rodney King’ bashing, Jewish-style, gets played out on live TV.

What an abomination! What an outrage! Is this what the United States and the rest of the so-called ‘free’ Western World once fought a second world over, and so selflessly died while trying to save the whole human race, especially Jewish people, from the Nazi gas chambers of the Holocaust?

Now, with U.S. President Biden’s blatantly-unshakable and unequivocal allegiance, along with every Democrat and Republican politician or American voter who have aligned themselves with Israeli PM Netanyahu and the Likud Party’s racist, apartheid debacle in Occupied Palestine, doesn’t that equally make them all terrorist partners-in-crimes against humanity? Don’t they all, equally, have blood on their hands, no different from the crimes the Nazi and their allies once committed? Shouldn’t they hate the Israeli fascists and defend the world against them as much as they once did against the hated Nazi fascists? Shouldn’t President Biden be choking on his own words when he once declared, “If Israel hadn’t ever existed we would have had to create one”? Or when Biden declares, “Israel has an inherent right to protect ourselves”, yet says nothing about the Palestinian people’s same right to defend themselves? Aren’t their rights the same as all the Brown-Black-Yellow-Red peoples of America whose same inherent human rights and entitlements have been violated for so long?

The ugly racist violence now wending its way throughout Occupied Palestine, busting into dwellings of innocent Palestinians, violating men, women and children, evicting them from their homes with no place to live other than the rubble of the streets and wastelands of their former spiritual homelands, continues unabated; while Israel’s apartheid regime and a hamstrung, if not blind or indifferent United Nations Security Council, is repeatedly blocked from doing anything by Biden and America’s racist veto powers that continue to deny Palestinians any remote guarantee of common, basic human justice and equality.

The on-going human indignities occurring in Israel in 2021 are no different than so many other ugly scenes from a century or two ago, up to the present day, in the United States where Black, Brown Asian Americans and Native Americans still find themselves in the same predicament. As in American history, it’s now Israel’s turn, as America’s proxy in the Middle East, to act as yet another giddy apartheid regime that has gone berserk over its power to achieve near total control of the entire area between the Jordon River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Heartbreaking, terrifying, reprehensible violence, intended to unequivocally assert Jewish Zionist-American Christian supremacy in the region, reigns supreme as: airstrikes employing the latest in tactical aerial bombardment payloads, courtesy of American taxpayer monies, are strategically dropped in residential areas on buildings that house Hamas political leaders or Arab and world media outlets alike; and journalists who attempt to tell the world the truth of what actually is going on in their midst in Gaza, or the West Bank are blocked at every turn; while stun grenades, again courtesy of American taxpayers monies and American arms manufacturers, continue to be hurled into crowds of protesting Palestinian youth or those praying in their mosque; Israeli citizen-soldiers supremely confident that their Israeli commanders and Likud Party henchmen-bureaucrats will cover for them to continue to uphold an apartheid system that remains all but invisible to the outside world.

In the end, after all the latest violence has subsided, and Palestinians can crawl from out of the rubble of their lives, if one can call their existence ‘lives’ that shouldn’t be wished upon one’s worst enemies, the Jews will return, virtually unscathed, to reclaim their white privileged lifestyles in neighborhoods formerly inhabited by Palestinians, who instead will have now been even further reduced to homeless refugees in their own lands, forced to take up residency in one of the Jews new ‘stalag compounds’, forever pinned down by the jackboots of their oppressors.

Yet, once upon a time, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed, in 1948, that “It is essential, if man is not compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, their human rights should be protected”.

But who exactly is it who will now ensure justice and quality of life for the Palestinians, with the same rights as the Jews to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, with the freedom to learn, dream and love as is the desire in life for every human being? Will it be U.S. President Biden a Cheshire Cat politician whose alliance with Israeli Zionism goes back to the beginning of his political career? Or will it be a re-elected PM Benjamin Netanyahu, a former elite IDF commando, resolute hard-liner, who is about to stand trial in a Jerusalem District Court for bribery, fraud and breach of trust or, with luck, may even stand trial for apartheid by the United Nation’s International Criminal Court of Justice (ICC)? Or perhaps Israel’s new leader will be Ben-Gvir, a lawyer notorious for his anti-Palestinian rhetoric, who is a disciple of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, a violent anti-Arab once considered so repugnant that even Israel banned him from parliament and the U.S. listed his party as a terrorist group? Or maybe it will be Moshe Ya’alon, a staunch opponent of the two-state solution, much beloved in what some call the right-wing Likud Party and Israel’s Sudentenland in Occupied Palestine, where Palestinians are forever targeted?

Meanwhile, the results of any vote may have to await the outcome of an Israeli-Palestinian Civil War bloodbath that presciently seems just around the corner.

Bio Note: Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer who once upon a time in university was a Criminology student while working in one of America’s local police departments. For decades, Irwin has especially sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by a host of environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting world philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America that has led to numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & the U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; the many violations constantly being waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul

jerome_irwin@yahoo.com




2022-06-24 01:28:28.000000
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Campaign: As UN meets, urge investigation of Israeli apartheid

by Admin

from bdsmovement.net email:

Representatives of governments from around the world are meeting this week at the United Nations headquarters in New York for the UN’s 75th General Assembly (UNGA). Palestinians and supporters of their rights need your help to ensure that the UNGA responds to the Palestinian demand for freedom, justice and equality.

Today, more than 450 global civil society organizations – unions, movements and political parties from tens of countries around the world – released a letter calling on the UNGA and its Member States to launch international investigations into Israel’s apartheid regime over the Palestinian people, and to impose targeted sanctions by all States to stop Israeli apartheid and illegal annexation of Palestinian land.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity, and States are responsible for bringing the illegal situation to an end. The United Nations investigated apartheid in South Africa and imposed sanctions on the apartheid regime there, contributing to ending it. It’s past time for the UN to do the same with Israel.

Make sure UNGA President Volkan Bozkir hears the demand that the UN investigate Israeli apartheid by sharing it on social media

Palestinians and supporters of human rights are organizing a week of action to give visibility to this civil society call opposing Israel’s regime of colonialism and apartheid, and we hope you can join in.
  • Tuesday, September 22nd: Launch of the week of action. Share the open letter to the UNGA and spread this global call for the UN to investigate Israeli apartheid
  • Wednesday, September 23rd: Knowledge is power! Stay tuned and check out the list of resources we will be sharing on social media, and #EducateAgainstApartheid.
  • Thursday, September 24th, 4-6 PM Palestine time: Join a twitterstorm highlighting corporate and government complicity in Israeli apartheid. We will email the tweets with images that day.
  • Friday, September 25th: Launch of video: “Lives under apartheid.”
  • Monday, September 28th: Launch of video “Global Response to Israeli apartheid: Together we prevail.” Look for an email from us that day.
Join us and take action against racism, discrimination and apartheid. Save the date for the Thursday twitterstorm, from 4-6 PM Palestine Time.

In solidarity,
Palestinian BDS National Committee and Free Palestine Melbourne



2022-06-24 01:28:28.000000
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