My Catbird Seat
Stuart Littlewood
Who is this Dan Senor, the organizer of Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s embarrassing jaunt to Israel?
Afif Safieh Speech on ‘Europe’s unplayed role’ and ‘the American dimension’
Afif Safieh, Deputy Commissioner for International Relations of Fatah was Palestine’s Ambassador in London and Paris and Washington DC, and the Vatican.
Stuart Littlewood
As the “political prostitution season” hots up, are Americans in the mood for another Israel-first Commander-in-Chief?
Who is this Dan Senor, the organizer of Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s embarrassing jaunt to Israel?
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| Image Credit: Daniel Hertzberg |
According toThe Tablet Senor not only interned at AIPAC but while in Jerusalem volunteered as an intern for Benny Begin, son of the terrorist Menachem Begin, chief of the Irgun, who in 1946 ordered the bombing of the British HQ at the King David Hotel murdering 91.
So the would-be US president appointed Senor as his “special adviser” on foreign policy. Romney, being a Mormon, is easy meat for the Zionist vultures. Mormons have a special relationship with Israel, a fantasy I don’t profess to understand or even care about. But it means that Americans would not be getting a president with impartial judgement on security matters and foreign affairs, and the western world would have a leader it couldn’t entirely trust.
Watching the spectacle Romney recently made of himself, Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank summed up the Jerusalem fiasco thus: “Romney’s obsequious remarks could only come from a thoroughly professional political prostitute, with utterly no concern for honesty and morality, or indeed, truth…
“This is the political prostitution season in America where the numerous political sluts in the land of Woodrow Wilson are vying for Shylock’s purse… How could 320 million Americans, considered among the smartest in the world, have allowed a few rich Jews to eviscerate America of its soul and moral values?”
The other day Senor popped up on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ programme to defend his boss’s claim in Jerusalem that Israel’s economic success at the expense of the Palestinians was due to a superior culture rather than 64 years of military occupation and dispossession. And no thanks, it seems, to the mega-contributions to Israel by American taxpayers and the preferential trading terms granted by the EU. Fromthe transcript here are some of the gems he came out with…
- “In the case of Israel, there’s no doubt the fact that there’s this enormous respect for rule of law, for private property, for freedom of the press…”
Israel’s contempt for international law, humanitarian law, United Nations resolutions and even the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, is a matter of public record and makes shocking reading.
ICAHD (The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) estimates that at least 24,813 Palestinian houses have been demolished in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza since 1967. “House demolitions and forced evictions are among Israel’s most heinous practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” And 2011 was a record year.
What says the UN?
“Palestinians are utterly frustrated by the impact of Israeli policies on their lives. They can’t move freely around their territory. They can’t plan their communities. They are evicted from their homes. Their homes are regularly demolished. I don’t believe that most people in Israel have any idea of the way planning policies are used to divide and harass communities and families. They would not themselves like to be subjected to such behavior.” – United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Baroness Valerie Amos, May 2011.
In 1947-48 at the time the Jewish state was founded, Jewish terrorists and Israeli militia forced some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and destroyed around 400 villages in their frenzied land-grab.
Today, Israel’s illegal Apartheid Wall cuts deep into Palestinian territory to annex prime Palestinian agricultural land and water resources. And Palestinian fishermen are denied access to their territorial fishing grounds because Israel is trying to steal Gaza’s marine gasfield.
Respect for law and property? I don’t think so.
- “They launch hundreds of rockets from Gaza, thousands since Hamas took over in to Israel.”
“I have walked on the streets of Sderot,” boasted Romney to the Jerusalem Foundation last week. In that case he ought to know Sderot was built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Najd, whose 600+ citizens were driven out at gunpoint in 1948 by Jewish terrorists. So Romney and Senor should quit whining about the garden-shed rockets fired from nearby Gaza where most of Najd’s families fled and have been refugees ever since.
Can Mr Senor tell everyone how many thousands of bombs, missiles, rockets, grenades and tank-shells have been blasted into the crowded city and towns of the Gaza Strip by Israel’s high-tech weaponry?
The right of self defence, as he knows, is not exclusive to Israel. Palestinians are equally entitled to do what they can to defend their citizens from armed aggression.
- “…Hamas who dominate the Gaza Strip which is in shambles… The chaos in Gaza is not because of the Israeli occupation. Israel has been out of Gaza for a few years.”
Israel’s troops were withdrawn from Gaza in 2005 but Israel still occupies Gaza’s airspace, airwaves and coastal waters, controls all land crossings (except now Rafah into Egypt) and has applied a crippling land and sea blockade since 2006. It has interfered with shipping on the high seas and even committed murder to maintain the illegal siege, turning the Gaza Strip into a hell-hole prison camp for its 1.5 million citizens.
In the winter of 2008/9 Israel intensively bombed Gaza for three weeks killing 1,396 Palestinians including 345 children, 110 women and 117 elderly people and injuring and maiming some 5,450 more. Israel also destroyed or damaged 58,000 homes (ICAHD puts it nearer 42,000 of which 4,247 were totally destroyed), 280 schools, 1,500 factories and water and sewage installations. And it used prohibited weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorus shells.
Israel has blocked necessary materials for reconstruction.
How would Boston, Massachusetts have looked?
Senor also talks disparagingly about the “culture” in Gaza. I’ll wager he knows nothing about Palestine’s sophisticated culture, much less any supposed difference in Gaza. And I’ll wager he’d wet his pants at the thought of going there to find out.
- According to the UN there were over 500 checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the West Bank last year plus nearly 500 ‘flying checkpoints’ per month on average. Most of them are within the West Bank and have nothing to do with checking people wishing to cross into Israel.
They seriously disrupt working, social and religious life, and obstruct emergency services. The Israelis use the checkpoints to abuse and humiliate the Palestinians, violate their human rights and sometimes kill them (by refusing to let ambulances pass, for example). They form an essential part of Israel’s ‘matrix of control’ designed to demoralize and crush the Palestinian untermenschen. For the Israeli psycho this is great fun. I have been through many of these checkpoints, including the notorious ones at Qalandiya, Bethlehem and Erez (into Gaza), and seen for myself.
Israel and its stooges like Senor always imply that Palestinians are terrorists and Israelis squeaky-clean. The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights, B’Tselem, keeps a close check on the death toll, which speaks for itself. For example, in the period between the start of the second Intifada (September 2000) up to Operation Cast Lead (26 December 2008) 4,836 Palestinians were killed by Israelis in the Occupied Territories, including 951 children. 581 Israelis, including 84 children, were killed by Palestinians in Israel.
That’s a kill rate of more than 8 to 1. When it comes to snuffing out children the Israelis are even more proficient. The Cast Lead blitzkrieg subsequently pushed the figures up to 11 to 1 and 14 to 1 respectively.
The Palestinians had no history of violence until their lands were threatened then partitioned and finally overrun by a brutal intruder whose greed is never satisfied. It is interesting that demands for Palestinians to cease their terror campaign (if you buy the idea that resistance = terror) are never accompanied by corresponding demands of Israel.
As for Hamas, their charter is objectionable and they are foolish not to have re-written it in tune with modern diplomacy. Nevertheless the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, within days of his party being democratically elected in 2006, offered long-term peace if Israel recognised Palestine as an independent state on the internationally recognised 1967 borders. Previously the PLO had unwisely “recognised” Israel without any reciprocal recognition of a Palestinian state. And the Oslo Accords were supposed to end the Occupation and give Palestine independence, but didn’t. “What we’ve got instead are more settlements, more occupation, more roadblocks, more poverty and more repression,” he said.
The US uses a perfectly good definition of terrorism with which to brand, outlaw and destroy people it doesn’t like. Under Executive Order 13224 Section 3, “terrorism” means an activity that (i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and (ii) appears to be intended
(a) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
b) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
c) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking.”
This definition fits Israel’s behaviour perfectly, but the irony is lost on the likes of Romney and Senor.
In his book ‘Terrorism: How the West Can Win’ Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu defines terror as the “deliberate and systematic murder, maiming and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends”. Cut to scenes of devastation, death and suffering during and after Israel’s ‘Cast Lead’ assault on Gaza… and to the frequent air-strikes ever since.
It’s like he’s signed his own arrest warrant.
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Romney and Senor… we can only marvel at the stupidity of such a liaison and the shameful things Senor apparently primed Romney to say and do during his trip. And the even sillier things he, Senor, said on ‘Morning Joe’.
It caused one editor to say: “I live in disbelief that men like this define my country, it is at all times a moral outrage.”
Afif Safieh Speech on ‘Europe’s unplayed role’ and ‘the American dimension’
Afif Safieh, Deputy Commissioner for International Relations of Fatah was Palestine’s Ambassador in London and Paris and Washington DC, and the Vatican.
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