During its recent bombing of Gaza Israeli forces also deliberately bombed a soccer stadium where young men were playing soccer. Once again President Obama and other leaders who defend Israel even when Israel knowingly murders civilians have been made accomplices in Israel's War Crimes and Crimes Against humanity.
"We are informed that on 10 November 2012 the Israeli army bombed a sports stadium in Gaza, resulting in the death of four young people playing football, Mohamed Harara and Ahmed Harara, 16 and 17 years old; Matar Rahman and Ahmed Al Dirdissawi, 18 years old. We are also informed that since February 2012 two footballers with the club Al Amari, Omar Rowis, 23, and Mohammed Nemer, 22, have been detained in Israel without charge or trial.above quote from:Israeli Measures Fuel International Anti-Israeli Soccer Protests by james Dorsey at Huffinton Post 12/04/2012
"It is unacceptable that children are killed while they play football. Israel hosting the 2013 UEFA Under-21 European Championship, in these circumstances, will be seen as a reward for actions that are contrary to sporting values," the 62 players of predominantly Arab and African origin, some of whom rank among the world's most prominent, said in their statement. Signatories of the statement that ran on the website of player Frederic Kanoute included Didier Drogba and Eden Hazard.
Journeyman film compares Israel Apartheid with South African Apartheid.
Some of the more outspoken Israeli Jewish citizens who have made this comparison are Jews who had been involved in the struggle in South Africa to end Apartheid and now they see Israel going down the same path and treating all Palestinians as if they were not quite human.
Roadmap to Apartheid - Trailer for the 90 minute documentary
Published on 5 Dec 2012 by journeymanpictures
Watch the full film on youtube:
Or on Journeyman here:
For downloads and more information visit:
With a comparison between apartheid South Africa and the Israel/Palestine conflict, this doc traces the future of one conflict from the past of another. Weaving the history of apartheid into the complex issues facing Israelis and Palestinians, it highlights the frighteningly similar laws and tools used by Israel and apartheid-era South Africa. It's a dark picture of the present but offers hope based on the peace that South Africa eventually found.
Palestinian Prisoners: Administrative Detention in Israel - excerpt from Roadmap to Apartheid
A clip from the feature length documentary film Roadmap to Apartheid about Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and the abused policy of Administrative Detention, which is detention without charge or trial.
Here is an article about the practice by the film's director Eron Davidson:
"How detention without charge links Israel and apartheid South Africa"
http://electronicintifada.net/content/how-detention-without-charge-links-isra...
Israel Gaza War
Published on 4 Dec 2012 by Robert Harris
This is a remix compilation of the tragic events that have been going on during the 2012 war between Israel and Gaza. This video is meant to entertain and educate all that will listen. It has no affiliation to the derivative works and the use of the works is under for fair use to bring attention to a global issue that is impacting millions.
Israeli missiles warning shots 'roof knocking'
Published on 4 Dec 2012 by AussieNews1
Al Jazeera investigates practice whereby Israel fires warning shots at homes before blowing up with missiles.
Source, credit to Aljazeera- http://www.aljazeera.com/video
Bombing a soccer field even this act of murdering young people playing soccer (football ) in a stadium in Gaza Obama and others pay no attention to or make excuses for the IDF and Israel ie "Collateral Damage" . Israel and America may see no big deal in bombing and shooting innocent civilians but most reasonable people do.
Maimed, mangled, murdered civilians in Gaza are human beings and are victims not merely "Collateral Damage". Where are the civilians supposed to go when the Israelis bomb or invade Gaza . It is a small strip of land with 1.6 million inhabitants who are suffering daily due to Israel's blockade .
Is the IDF being encouraged to harass Palestinians along the Gaza/Israeli border to eventually cause Hamas or individual Gazans to react violently so Israel can shoot and bomb more Gazan civilians. If it wasn't for Obama and other leaders who continue to support Israel unconditionally maybe the more reasonable Israeli leaders and citizens could have been forced to come to terms with the reality of the situation and accept that in some cases it is Israel that is the bully and the oppressor and that in these cases Israel cannot reasonably claim to be the victims. As Obama said what people or nation would put up with being bombed and not respond to the bombing and so it is Gaza which is under siege and its people suffering not the Israelis.
Israeli Measures Fuel International Anti-Israeli Soccer Protests by James Dorsey at Huffinton Post 12/04/2012
A series of Israeli measures against Palestinian soccer culminating in an attack on a stadium in Gaza during last month's confrontation with Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian group that controls the heavily populated strip along the Mediterranean, has fueled growing international soccer opposition to the Jewish state's policies.--
In the latest expression of discomfort, 62 professional players have called for depriving Israel of the right to host European soccer body UEFA's 2013 Under-21 championship. Israel has already employed the championship to counter the image of being an area dominated by war and conflict that was reinforced by last month's hostilities with Hamas that killed more than 150 Palestinians and five Israelis.
"In June we have the Under-21 here in Israel. I hope that everything will be quiet until then and we can show the different sides of Israel," said Maccabi Tel Aviv defender Omer Vered in a BBC interview.
The statement by the players follows protests earlier this year by world soccer body FIFA, UEFA and players' group FIFPro against Israel's handling of a hunger strike of an imprisoned Palestinian player, Mahmoud Sarsak, accused of being a member of militant group Islamic Jihad, and the arrest of two other players suspected of involvement in violent anti-Israeli actions.
"We are informed that on 10 November 2012 the Israeli army bombed a sports stadium in Gaza, resulting in the death of four young people playing football, Mohamed Harara and Ahmed Harara, 16 and 17 years old; Matar Rahman and Ahmed Al Dirdissawi, 18 years old. We are also informed that since February 2012 two footballers with the club Al Amari, Omar Rowis, 23, and Mohammed Nemer, 22, have been detained in Israel without charge or trial.
"It is unacceptable that children are killed while they play football. Israel hosting the 2013 UEFA Under-21 European Championship, in these circumstances, will be seen as a reward for actions that are contrary to sporting values," the 62 players of predominantly Arab and African origin, some of whom rank among the world's most prominent, said in their statement. Signatories of the statement that ran on the website of player Frederic Kanoute included Didier Drogba and Eden Hazard.
When it comes to military operations such as those incursions into Gaza the IDF and the government censor the information so that most Israelis know less than people in other countries who can if they wish see news coverage of the conflict from various points of view . In America the mainstream Media does all it can to stick to the party line coming out of Washington which is simple that Israel is the victim and the Palestinians are down right evil though this has little to do with the reality and facts on the ground. Are young men playing soccer really an existential threat to Israel and so must be blown to pieces.
Stories From The Gaza Border, Where Donkeys And Carts Are Potential Threats To Zionist Security By Eva Bartlett In Gaza Blog at CounterCurrents.org, Dec. 04,2012
The Israeli army killed a Palestinian civilian in the southern Gaza Strip and wounded 42 civilians, including 7 children along the border fence in the Gaza Strip from Nov 22-29 (source: PCHR)
“The Israeli soldiers saw us. They were speaking at us, but they didn’t tell us to leave,” says Haithem Abu Dagga. “About eight soldiers moved past the electric fence and towards the interior fence about 30 metres inside Palestinian land, where we were standing. After only a few minutes they began shooting.”
The Israeli soldiers were by this point roughly 5 metres away, he says.
Haithem, a lean young man from Abassan, a rural farming area east of Khan Younis, speaks in short sentences as he tells his story of being shot point-blank by an Israeli soldier. He relates the shooting with no drama, as though he’s speaking of an everyday event. Which, unfortunately, for Gaza’s farmers is more or less true. His audience, a number of solidarity activists who have come to Gaza explicitly to meet people like Haithem, listen rapt to his quiet words.
“We were looking at the fence and the soldiers beyond. When the shooting started, I didn’t realize at first I had been shot. Then the pain came. Everybody else was running, and because the Israeli soldiers continued shooting, no one could reach me. It was a couple of minutes before friends got back to me. The Israeli soldiers kept shooting at us as my friends carried me off to where the ambulance could reach me.”
As is often the case in Gaza with border region injuries (Israeli army shootings, shellings, flechette bombs…), Palestinian ambulances cannot usually reach the wounded: Israeli soldiers also attack medics and ambulances (see Defend the Rescuers for cases of Israeli soldiers targeting Palestinian medics).
This usually means a life-and-death gamble for the injured, as civilians nearby try to carry he/she, sometimes hundreds of metres, to an accessible road. If it is an artery would, the window of time before bleeding out is less than 10 minutes.
When Mohammed Le Braim was shot in February 2009, although he was already 500 metres from the border, neither cars nor an ambulance could reach him. His fellow farm-labourers picked him up to haul him away, tripping immediately over a row of cacti and dropping the injured young man.
Israeli economic miracle not so much for the 2 milliom citizens in Israel living in poverty.
The current leaders in Israel are the equivalent to the GOP /Tea Party Gang and Neocons and have made Israel a meaner harsher place in which to live that is for all citizens of Israel including Jewish and Arab Israelis. Poverty has increased while the Netanyahu regime slowly works to dismantle Israel's Social Safety Net . Netanyahu is more concerned with increasing military spending and ensuring that the top 1% get everything they want while dismantling programs or underfunding such programs which gave aid to those who are poor and the working poor.
But these uberconservatives do not necessarily represent all Israelis. There have been massive protests by Israeli citizens angered over the government attacks on the Social Safety Net.
Report: One-quarter of Israelis—and 37 percent of kids—live in poverty By Ben Sales at JTA.org News,December 4, 2012
TEL AVIV (JTA) – The numbers tell a consistent storyline: Nearly one in four Israelis lives in poverty.
A report last week by Israel’s National Insurance Institute showed that 1.8 million of Israel’s 8 million people live below the poverty line.
In 2011, the year for which the report was issued, more than 36 percent of Israeli children were poor, a jump of 1 percentage point from the previous year. Poverty afflicts more than 400,000 Israeli families – including almost 7 percent of families with two working people.
Among developed countries, these numbers are unusually high. Israel has the second-highest poverty rate in the developed world, behind only Mexico, according to statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD.
“There’s a very large segment of the Israeli population that isn’t receiving tools they can use in the modern economy,” said Dan Ben-David, executive director of Israel’s Taub Center, a think tank that released its “State of the Nation” report last month -- which analyzed Israeli socioeconomic policy. “It’s not only bad for them, it’s also become a huge problem for the country over time. They’re dragging down our productivity and growth.”
Israel’s relatively high poverty rate stems in large part from two sectors of the population that are especially poor: Israeli Arabs and haredi Orthodox Jews, who have poverty rates of 53 and 54 percent, respectively. Israeli Arabs constitute about a quarter of all Israelis, while approximately 10 percent of the country is haredi.
The Israeli government defines the poverty line as individuals who have expendable income of about $9,500 annuall after taxes – which is approximately 50 percent of the median Israeli expendable income. Exactly 24.8 percent of Israelis, or 19.9 percent of families, live in poverty.
By comparison, the United States is fourth-highest on the OECD’s list, with a family poverty rate of about 17 percent, according to the OECD's standard. Twenty-three percent of U.S. children live in poverty.
In Israel, poverty usually does not mean starvation. Unemployment in Israel is at 6 percent, and one of the country’s socialist legacies is a strong safety net for the poor, sick and elderly. Israeli economic policy has, however, turned more conservative in recent years.
Shlomo Yitzhaki, Israel’s government statistician, says higher-than-average birthrates among haredi and Arab Israelis is the principal reason for their high poverty rates.
“If you look at income by family size, as the families get bigger, from five members and up, total family income gets lower,” he said.
Arabs and haredim are also exempt from Israel’s compulsory military service, which makes it harder for them to find work in a culture where army service often serves as a career starting point, allowing people to network and in some cases gain specialized skillsets.
Ben-David says Israel’s problems aren’t limited to minorities and that the state needs to invest in education and transportation infrastructure.
In the summer of 2011, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest the high cost of living and growing wealth inequality in the country, which were seen as hurting the middle class. Though the issue has gotten a lot of attention in Israel’s current election campaign, it does not dominate headlines the way it did during the 2011 protests.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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