FT.com / UK - US faces dilemma on race conference »
Posted By dissent 8 months, 2 weeks ago in NewsA United Nations conference on fighting worldwide racism and xenophobia opens in Geneva on Monday with the US still undecided as of yesterday about whether or not to attend.
The controversy over US participation in the so-called Durban Review Conference has seen Barack Obama, US president, come under pressure from pro-Israel groups to boycott a rerun of what was branded an anti-Semitic "hate-fest" at a previous summit in South Africa in 2001.
At the same time, the US's first African-American president has been urged by black American lobbyists to send a representative to Geneva to affirm his administration's opposition to all forms of racial discrimination. They plan a protest in New York's Harlem district on Monday if the White House backs out.
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dissent
we live in a culture of war.
let's make it a culture of peace.
"my country is the world. and my religion is to ...
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hyperbola8 months, 2 weeks ago
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Well, we will see whether the zionist lobby in the US can still force our government to support the profoundly racist, anti-american ideology of the zionist state. Here is an israeli jew, and IDF veteran, that lays out the truth clearly.
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Why Israel Has No "Right to Exist" as a Jewish State
By OREN BEN-DOR
.... In our world, a world that resisted Apartheid South Africa so impressively, recognition of the right of the Jewish state to exist is a litmus test for moderation and pragmatism. The demand is that Palestinians recognise Israel's entitlement to constitutionally entrench a system of racist basic laws and policies, differential immigration criteria for Jews and non-Jews, differential ownership and settlements rights, differential capital investments, differential investment in education, formal rules and informal conventions that differentiate the potential stakes of political participation, lame-duck academic freedom and debate....
...The Jewish state could only come into being in May 1948 by ethnically cleansing most of the indigenous population--750000 of them. The judaisation of the state could only be effectively implemented by constantly internally displacing the population of many villages within the Israel state...
... The Right of Return of Palestinians means that Israel acknowledges and apologises for what it did in 1948. It does mean that Palestinian memory of the 1948 catastrophe, the Nakbah, is publicly revived in the Geography and collective memory of the polity. It does mean that Palestinians descendants would be allowed to come back to their villages. If this is not possible because there is a Jewish settlement there, they should be given the choice to found an alternative settlement nearby. This may mean some painful compulsory state purchase of agricultural lands that should be handed back to those who return. In cases when this is impossible they ought to be allowed the choice to settle in another place in the larger area or if not possible in another area in Palestine. Compensation would be the last resort and would always be offered as a choice. This kind of moral claim of return would encompass all Palestine including Tel Aviv...
...The path of two states is the path of separation.Its realisation would mean the entrenchment of exclusionary nationalism for many years. It would mean that the return of the dispossessed and the equality of those who return and those non-Jew-Arabs who are now there would have to be deferred indefinitely consigned to the dusty shelved of historical injustices.Such a scenario is sure to provoke more violence as it would establish the realisation and legitimisation of Zionist racism and imperialism.-
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hyperbola8 months, 2 weeks ago
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The same moral intuition that brought so many people to condemn and sanction Apartheid South Africa ought also to prompt them to stop seeing a threat to existence of the Jewish state as the effect caused by the refugee 'problem" or by the "demographic threat" from the non-Jew-Arabs within it. It is rather the other way round. It is the non-egalitarian premise of a Jewish state and the lack of empathy and corruption of all those who make us uncritically accept the right of such a state to exist that is both the cause of the refugee problem and cause for the inability to implement their return and treating them as equals thereafter....
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... We must see that the uncritically accepted recognition of Israel right to exist is to accept Israel claim to have the right to be racist or, to develop Massad's brilliant formulation, Israel's claim to have the right to occupy to dispossess and to discriminate....
To claim such a right to be racist must come from a being whose victim's face must hide very dark primordial aggression and hatred of all others.How can we find a connective tissue to that mentality that claims the legitimate right to harm other human beings? How can this aggression that is embedded in victim mentality be perturbed?
The Annapolis meeting is a con. As an egalitarian argument we should say loud and clear that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state.
Only a single egalitarian and non sectrarian state over all the whole of historic
Palestine will achieve justice and peace.
http://www.counterpunch.org/bendor11202007.html
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