Allan Wolman to The Star

Riao Costa writing  “FIFA – The Final Straw” certainly got his timing right as well as the title of his piece and perhaps this latest scandal is the final straw for FIFA.

 

The subject of his piece was however Palestinian football, and if its not a “village in the Galilee”, or “remembering the Nakba”, or “no greening over the Palestinian purge” or if its “Tuesday it must be Belgium” … Is there no end to the space that the Independent Group will continue to give this subject almost every week, contrary to what it’s chairman emphatically claims is impartiality.

 

Now the opinion pages of Independents papers never miss the opportunity to highlight Israel’s human rights violations. And indeed there are human rights violations in that country as there are in every single country in the world. It’s only a matter of the degree and how human rights violations are measured.

 

Measuring such violations must be comparative, so do we compare mud schools and teachers striking in South Africa (yes a human rights violation) to the teaching of Palestinian children a curriculum of hatred? Or do we measure the killing of the Paris and Sydney terrorist against those terrorists from Gaza – is one a violation and the other not?? What about the gunning down of 40 striking miners compared with the jailing of Palestinians intent on killing Israelis? Do we measure the human rights violation that happens in Israel to those in Syria and the rest of the Arab world?

 

Riao Costa writing about football players cites one Zakaria Issa a footballer arrested as member of Islamic Jihad. Costa tells us that he died shortly after his release from an Israeli prison! But a quick check with Google (on a Palestinian site, mind) and we discover that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, but your readers are left thinking that he died as a result of his incarceration! Nothing like a bit of subterfuge dressed up as honest journalism. How can one therefore believe anything else in his long diatribe? Give that man a red card.

 

Don Krausz: RE: FIFA – THE FINAL STRAW! – BY RIAO COSTA.

It has been told that when the first giraffe was landed in England around 1850, one of the stevedores that had helped put the creature onto the quayside then looked it over carefully and pronounced: “There ain’t no such animal!”

His name was not Riao Costa, but might well have been.

Selective reporting has become an art, and repeated lies will eventually be believed.

Jews in their ancestral land have been attacked and murdered by so-called Palestinians for more than a century. I say “so-called” because the term was invented by Europeans.

Costa points out that under the UN and Fifa, Palestine is not a fully recognised state, while Gaza is still at war with Israel, cf. yesterday’s rocket attack. The evil culprits?

Israel, which refused a visa to the Gaza team. So what if Gaza has been launching 14,000 missiles at civilian targets in Israel proper for over nine years? The fact that after WW2 Germany was not permitted to send a sports team abroad for five years must not apply to Gaza!

Next we are informed that this team can only play “on what is left of Palestine, the Gaza Strip.” Now that is a shame, but perhaps if the Palestinians had not refused the UN partition into two states and attacked Israel instead, those young soccer players would not have had this problem.

The terms “Ugly Occupation” and “Crimes of Israel” are bandied about. But why should a reader think otherwise? The fact that for the past century Jews living in their ancestral land have been attacked and murdered is never mentioned. Or that when the UN allocated part of their 3,000 year old country to those Jews as a State, that they were attacked by the Palestinians and seven neighbouring Arab lands is also not known. Tiny Israel suffered 6,000 plus dead and 30,000 wounded in that totally unprovoked attack – 1% of its population. (cf. British Encyclopaedia p.142). Equivalent to South Africa losing 500,000 citizens.

So the mentioning by Costa of the suspicion with which Palestinians are regarded by Israelis is hardly surprising. When a Gazan woman who has been under long-time care for burns at an Israeli hospital finally arrives with a suicide belt. When a Security Wall has had to be erected to reduce the 1,000 victims of suicide murderers by 90%. When separate roads are built to prevent drive-by shootings.

When the men, women and children in a tiny Israeli village called Sderot one km from Gaza only have 15 seconds warning to reach shelter from the thousands of missiles fired at them from Gaza, has schools with double roofs to resist impact and shelters in front of every housing block, then are you surprised that the poor Palestinians may not be the only ones to be “subjected to both mental and physical torture on a regular basis?”

Monessa Shapiro to The Cape Times

A quick google search reveals the quote to which Raoul Fleishman is referring and yes it is not a fabrication.   It is though a distortion of the truth, and has been quoted without any context.

The quote comes just after the kidnapping and cold-blooded murder of the three Israeli boys.  Shaked begins by saying that the “Palestinian people have declared war on us.”  It is angry and venomous but she does not call for the destruction of the Palestinian people as a people – that would be genocide.   She blames the Palestinian people for the brutal terrorism that Israelis face, not just the terrorists but their mothers and fathers who laud their actions, their teachers who indoctrinate them with hate and teach them that the murder of Jews is righteous and correct, and their Imams who preach the benefits of martyrdom.  She blames their government which erects statues in honour of murderers.

Interestingly on 6 July, after the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdar the young Arab boy, she had this to say on Facebook:  “Killers who murder children, women and men in cold blood – should spend the rest of their lives in prison.  We do not yet know the conclusions of the murder investigation of the boy from Shu’afat. Whether this murder’s motive was nationalistic or criminal – the consequence for the killers should be the same as should be given to the killers of Shelly Dadon and all the rest of the heinous murderers: Life imprisonment without parole.”

Doesn’t sound like she advocates genocide of the Palestinians, now does it?

Allan Wolman to the Saturday Star

“Battered Gaza on brink of collapse” a World Bank report published in The Saturday Star 23 May. The report cites conflict, internal divisions, embargoes and more importantly poor governance, as contributing factors to the dire state of the Gaza economy.

 

This report details that the economic deterioration has accelerated since 2006 when Hamas took control of that territory, and goes on to highlight the internal division between Hamas and Fatah. Obviously the ongoing conflict with Israel also being a factor.

 

Gaza is and has been for many years the greatest recipient of aid and donor funds in the world, far surpassing any country in Africa or Asia. In October last year a donor conference raised an additional $5bn for the reconstruction and redevelopment of Gaza in the aftermath of the recent war. Where has all this money gone? Why is the economy is tatters given the huge sums of money that Hamas receives and why have there been no reconstruction to date?

 

This must raise the question why Hamas would deliberately precipitate war with the only super power in the region? Hamas would have no hope of any military victory, the economic cost well known, and their only gain would be world sympathy knowing that Israel would retaliate. Just how Hamas paraded their dead and wounded in front of the world media must surely be a crime against humanity as well as a war crime. To scarify the lives of your own people and destroy your economy must surely be one of the great evils of modern times!

 

Allan Wolman to the Cape Times

If requesting the right to cross-examine a witness in what is purported to be a “tribunal” is viewed as disrupting proceedings, then every courtroom in the land is subject to such disruption.

 

But to set the record straight, a request to cross examine was made to Mr. Crawford-Browne (C-B) in writing, prior to the start of his ‘tribunal’ and not by any demonstrators that he describes in this somewhat fictitious account of his Russell Tribunal on Palestine. (RToP)

 

This “tribunal” described as “a charade of bias dressed up as impartiality” by a leading South African Jurist. A ‘tribunal’ as C-B tells us how “”we brought almost 30 witnesses” to Cape Town. Indeed 30 selected witnesses some even from Israel. And yes that “gangster state”, but he managed to find any number of gangster citizens to “testify” to his narrative, strange indeed that in this oppressive gangster state there are people who oppose the government and they are not only allowed freedom of expression but allowed to travel freely to give ‘evidence’ against their own country without fear of retribution. Thank you sir for highlighting that fact. One must wonder if this would be allowed in any Arab country?

 

Crawford-Brown’s witnesses to a man (or woman) all had well documented records of hostility against Israel. Therefore why would he deny the right of cross-examination in his courtroom? Was he afraid that his witnesses might not be able to stand up to cross-examination? Oh yes, almost forgot – he did invite the Israeli government to participate, they declined that kind invitation therefore that was grounds enough to prevent any other cross-examination in his courtroom, he then invites his readers to study the RToP reports but shouldn’t he also invite those readers to study and satisfy themselves as to the impartiality of his witnesses and those who authored those reports? 

Don Krausz: RE: THE CORRESPONDENCE RE. RONNIE KASRILS. – RUSSIA IN WW2.

I find both Kasrils’ and Cator’s accounts comprehensive, except that Kasrils presents a typical communist viewpoint. We who lived through the period described will remember how one could not criticise Germany to a Jewish communist for as long as the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact existed. Vicious anti-Semitic Nuremburg Laws not withstanding, the Party was always right.

Kasrils lists Palestinians as beneficiaries of Russia’s “unstinting internationalism.” Sure, especially during the 1973 war when Egypt with Russian equipment and guidance almost succeeded in destroying Kasrils’ fellow Jews in Israel.

Kasrils opines that the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki were unnecessary. After the US military’s experience fighting the Japanese, their commanders estimated that trying to conquer the Japanese mainland could cost the US a million lives. The Atom bombs obviated that. But that may not be significant to a communist like Kasrils, as Cator points out with regard to “Stalin’s monstrous waste of Russian lives at Stalingrad, according to Khruschev.”

Kasrils states that there is no acceptable reason for the West to boycott the Moscow celebrations. The Crimea and Ukraine he has not heard of?

There can be no doubt whatsoever that it was Russia that destroyed Nazi Germany and broke the back of its murderous army. Britain and the USA elected to fight. Russia took up arms by default.

As an ex concentration camp inmate I am fully aware of the heroic role played by communists in the camps. Often they were the only ones to stand up to the SS, either directly or surreptitiously. I and many others owe our lives to their protection.

But I am also aware that when the brave young female Russian prisoners of war in our camp eventually were repatriated to their beloved motherland they were sent to the gulag as they may have become contaminated through contact with Westerners.

My mother was befriended by a Czech communist who had been a party secretary. She rendered us enormous help. They exchanged forwarding addresses for after the war. My mother wrote to her in Communist Czechoslovakia. She received a short reply stating that the recipient was well and asking my mother to please not write to her again.

That remarkable brave and compassionate woman had exchanged the hell of the Nazis for the terror of the Communists.

Rene Sacks to the Saturday Star

 

Dear Sir

 

I would like to thank the Saturday Star for highlighting in its picture on the front page, the terrible dilemma Israel faces when trying to defend herself

from both Hamas and Fatah, i.e. when  both Hamas and Fatah choose to put young children upfront in any conflict.

As they say- a picture is worth a thousand words.

 

While thousands are dying and millions are being displaced in the Middle East, while many parts of the world are in turmoil, the Saturday Star had the courage

and honesty to tell the truth on its front page.

Thank you.

 

Yours sincerely

Rene Sacks.

Allan Wolman to the Cape Times

Emma Daitz writes under a number of different banners, “Jews for a Free Palestine”,  “ Jewish Voices for a Just Peace” and others.

 

She penned a letter published in The Cape Times on 18 May, condemning Terry Crawford-Brown’s (C-B) detractors for labeling him an anti-Semite. She however does concede, “some objections to Zionism draw on anti-Semitic tropes to gain traction”, and goes on to say that she finds “no evidence of this in C-B’s writing”.

 

Calling Israel a “gangster state” (April 2014) paints all its citizens with the same brush, and isn’t Israel where the Jews are? But Ms. Daitz, you imbued with a sense of justice as a supporter of Jewish voices for a just peace with the emphasis on “just” means that you respect that word and would naturally have a healthy respect for justice?

 

Now C-B whom you defend as an ally, committed to the high values you describe, as secretary of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, a Tribunal that sat in Cape Town in November 2011, denied the right of cross-examination of his selected “witnesses”. If you call a tribunal by its name – if you conduct a tribunal as such – surely it must quack like a duck? But not in C-B’s courtroom.

Felicia Levy to The Star

The Letters Editor.

The Saturday Star.

18 May 2015

Dear Sir,

The front page of the Saturday Star (May 16 2015) had three colour photographs  of a young Palestinian boy, no more than seven or eight years old, throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and then running for cover. The last line of the caption under the photographs states that “…a dozen Palestinians were injured in the clashes with the Israeli forces.” Clearly this young boy was in a dangerous war zone!

This begs the glaringly obvious questions: Is this not a form of child abuse? Where were the parents? What responsible, loving parent allows, or dare I say encourages, his child to be in a place in which his life is likely to be threatened? Where is the outcry from the Human Rights groups and NGO’s, particularly those concerned with protecting children, condemning the endangerment of children’s lives for political expediency?

Shame on the Saturday Star for being complicit in this exploitation by falling into the propaganda trap.  

Felicia Levy.

Monessa Shapiro to The Star

How do you respond to something as noble as a group of concerned Jews undertaking a trip to Palestine to gain insight into the plight of the Palestinians?  Of course it must be seen as true altruism.  As Jews, we are taught to help the victim, prevent suffering and to stand up boldly and courageously for human rights abuses.

But as Jews we are also taught honesty and integrity.  And herein lies the problem of Daitz’s visit to Palestine.   For as magnanimous as her to decision to visit Palestine was, so too was her deceit in her total disregard for an alternative narrative.  She writes that the aim of her visit was twofold: to gain insight into the plight of the Palestinians, and to participate in a ceremony in the South African forest.   Why not threefold?  Why did she choose not to visit Israel and gain insight into her problems and suffering as well?  Was she afraid that a visit to Israel might blur her preconceived perceptions, might provide her with a different, more balanced perspective?  

Ms Daitz writes of the 800,000 Arab refugees ethnically cleansed during the 1948 war.  As a doctoral student she must know that in excess of 800,000 Jews were forced to flee Arab lands where they had lived for centuries, in retribution for Israel’s establishment?   Of course we don’t hear of these refugees today because, unlike the Arabs who were made to languish in refugee camps by their host Arab countries, the Jewish refugees were absorbed into Israeli society.  

Let’s consider the term Daitz so effortlessly bandies about – ‘ethnically cleanse’.  A term replete with evil, emotive connotations.   Perhaps Daitz should explain why if Israel had intended to ethnically cleanse the Arabs from her midst, this self same Arab population has grown exponentially from159,000 in 1949 to 1,730,000 in 2015.  In fact in a recent pole conducted by the Statnet research institute, and headed by the Israeli Arab statistician Yousef Makladeh, 77% of the Arabs living in Israel, including Judea and Samaria, would rather live under an Israeli government than under the Palestinian Authority (PA). So much for ethnically cleansing!  

Ms Daitz and her group visited the forest built on the ruins of Lubya.     Lubya, (obviously Daitz and her group failed to research it), was the headquarters of the ALA (Arab Liberation Army) in Central Eastern Galilee, and therefore a place of major fighting in the 1948 war, a war not of Israel’s making but rather one thrust on her by all her neighbours, hell-bent on driving the Jews into the sea.  It was not, as Ms Daitz fraudulently asserts, merely ‘depopulated…and subsequently destroyed.’  In addition the forest was built 16 years after the fall of Lubya.  Had Israel wanted to hide the fact that the area was once an Arab village would she have waited 16 years to cover the evidence?

Ms Daitz asks that Jews ‘participate in fostering the hospitality of the struggle.’  I’m unsure exactly what she means by this.  But of one thing I am sure:  if Ms Daitz and her group of concerned Jews are truly concerned about the Palestinians then their starting point should be one of honesty and integrity.  It is so much easier to move forward once the truth is known and integrated, Ms Daitz.