🚀 go-pugleaf

BISHARAT, GEORGE MONDAY 090518
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ba.broadcast,ba.politics,ba.singles,ba.general,alt.california

Gaza Massacre* & World Law: Prof G.Bisharat Speaks SF 5/18 Monday
19:00 o'Clock

* HW's wording of Usenet headline.

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#1.)

{ http://tinyurl.com/offfhq

Lecture series "After Gaza: What next for Israelis and Palestinians?"
Various locations

May 18
The Occupation & The Attacks on Gaza:  The International Legal
Perspective
George Bisharat
Professor of Law, UC Hastings
American Conservatory Theater
405 Geary Street, San Francisco

$10-$29 donation requested - nobody turned away for lack of funds.
Wheelchair accessible.

All lectures take place from 7-9pm
For more information contact:
Jewish Voice For Peace
(510) 465-1777
www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org  }

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#2.)

http://tinyurl.com/ok9bnp

April 4, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Israel on Trial
By GEORGE BISHARAT

San Francisco

CHILLING testimony by Israeli soldiers substantiates charges that
Israel’s Gaza Strip assault entailed grave violations of international
law. The emergence of a predominantly right-wing, nationalist
government in Israel suggests that there may be more violations to
come. Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians also
constituted war crimes, but do not excuse Israel’s transgressions.
While Israel disputes some of the soldiers’ accounts, the evidence
suggests that Israel committed the following six offenses:

• Violating its duty to protect the civilian population of the Gaza
Strip. Despite Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza, the territory
remains occupied. Israel unleashed military firepower against a people
it is legally bound to protect.

• Imposing collective punishment in the form of a blockade, in
violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. In June 2007,
after Hamas took power in the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed suffocating
restrictions on trade and movement. The blockade — an act of war in
customary international law — has helped plunge families into poverty,
children into malnutrition, and patients denied access to medical
treatment into their graves. People in Gaza thus faced Israel’s winter
onslaught in particularly weakened conditions.

• Deliberately attacking civilian targets. The laws of war permit
attacking a civilian object only when it is making an effective
contribution to military action and a definite military advantage is
gained by its destruction. Yet an Israeli general, Dan Harel, said,
“We are hitting not only terrorists and launchers, but also the whole
Hamas government and all its wings.” An Israeli military spokeswoman,
Maj. Avital Leibovich, avowed that “anything affiliated with Hamas is
a legitimate target.”

Israeli fire destroyed or damaged mosques, hospitals, factories,
schools, a key sewage plant, institutions like the parliament, the
main ministries, the central prison and police stations, and thousands
of houses.

• Willfully killing civilians without military justification. When
civilian institutions are struck, civilians — persons who are not
members of the armed forces of a warring party, and are not taking
direct part in hostilities — are killed.

International law authorizes killings of civilians if the objective of
the attack is military, and the means are proportional to the
advantage gained. Yet proportionality is irrelevant if the targets of
attack were not military to begin with. Gaza government employees —
traffic policemen, court clerks, secretaries and others — are not
combatants merely because Israel considers Hamas, the governing party,
a terrorist organization. Many countries do not regard violence
against foreign military occupation as terrorism.

Of 1,434 Palestinians killed in the Gaza invasion, 960 were civilians,
including 121 women and 288 children, according to a United Nations
special rapporteur, Richard Falk. Israeli military lawyers instructed
army commanders that Palestinians who remained in a targeted building
after having been warned to leave were “voluntary human shields,” and
thus combatants. Israeli gunners “knocked on roofs” — that is, fired
first at corners of buildings, before hitting more vulnerable points —
to “warn” Palestinian residents to flee.

With nearly all exits from the densely populated Gaza Strip blocked by
Israel, and chaos reigning within it, this was a particularly cruel
flouting of international law. Willful killings of civilians that are
not required by military necessity are grave breaches of the Geneva
Conventions, and are considered war crimes under the Nuremberg
principles.

• Deliberately employing disproportionate force. Last year, Gen. Gadi
Eisenkot, head of Israel’s northern command, speaking on possible
future conflicts with neighbors, stated, “We will wield
disproportionate power against every village from which shots are
fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction.” Such a
frank admission of illegal intent can constitute evidence in a
criminal prosecution.

• Illegal use of weapons, including white phosphorus. Israel was
finally forced to admit, after initial denials, that it employed white
phosphorous in the Gaza Strip, though Israel defended its use as
legal. White phosphorous may be legally used as an obscurant, not as a
weapon, as it burns deeply and is extremely difficult to extinguish.

Israeli political and military personnel who planned, ordered or
executed these possible offenses should face criminal prosecution. The
appointment of Richard Goldstone, the former war crimes prosecutor
from South Africa, to head a fact-finding team into possible war
crimes by both parties to the Gaza conflict is an important step in
the right direction. The stature of international law is diminished
when a nation violates it with impunity.

George Bisharat is a professor at the University of California
Hastings College of the Law.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Courtesy Crosspost

My Comment:

For the sake of this exercise, I am going to pretend to be a student
enrolled in an on-line civics course offered by the City College of
Earth and taught by General Vo Nguyen Giap. Our class has an essay
question to focus on the topic raised by this event announcement and
about 1 hour of composition time (before my blessed Bay swim date this
afternoon).

I seem to recall that last year Professor Bisharat asked to be dropped
from my email circular list. This adverse action, together with his
access to the Sulzbergerz' NYT --that notorious flagship of JAPE*s
propaganda system-- suggests to me his status as an "Approved Arab" in
the eyes of the fanged critters of the WAshington Regime. Even so, his
talk promises to be the most interesting public event this week in a
generally parched climate here in Obamaland, home of the Dashing
Colored Man's wide grin over the planetary nest of killer drones.

I further have the impression that the host organization "Jewish Voice
for Peace" serves in reality as the front line defense for JAPE and
for Israel in particular. JVP is tasked to operate, of course, on the
all-important left flank of the political spectrum. Its specific duty
= to interface with and to retard the development of an effective
movement to punish war crimes on the part of the overwhelming -- > 96%
in the US -- normal alias "gentile" majority.

In order to bring peace to bleeding Gaza**, to the Middle East and to
our whole Home Planet, we will have to create something like "Normal
Folk For Justice". NFJ, as by the Gentle Reader's gracious leave we
will call it for the time being, will have to overcome in the first
place the ideology of Jewish supremacism and, secondly, the technical
destructive power of the Pentagon in order to defeat the regnant JAPE
clique. We will then immediately bring to trial on war crimes charges
all those still competent to appear in court who have conspired to
wage wars of aggression since 1945, the epochal year in which We the
World --manifested as the International Military Tribunal sitting
first in Nuremberg-- most emphatically outlawed this ancient obsession
of civilization as hereinafter the worst of all crimes known to our
human race.

{ http://tinyurl.com/83wmq5
JVP statement on Gaza attacks,
December 28, 2008:
 ....Israel's slow strangulation of Gaza through blockade has caused
widespread suffering to the 1.5 million people of Gaza due to lack of
food, electricity, water treatment supplies and medical equipment. It
is a violation of humanitarian law and has been widely condemned
around the world.

In resisting this strangulation, Hamas resumed launching rockets and
mortars from Gaza into southern Israel, directly targeting civilians,
which is also a war crime. Over the years, these poorly made rockets
have been responsible for the deaths of 15 Israelis since 2004.

Every country, Israel included, has the right and obligation to
protect its citizens.....Only a just and lasting peace, achieved
through a negotiated agreement, can provide both Palestinians and
Israelis the security they want and deserve.}
-------------------------------------------------

Why does JVP fail to mention the damning fact that the number of
Israelis killed by Gaza bottle rockets in the year prior to the
massacre was 0 [ zero ] ?
More importantly, JVP critically errs in numbering Israel among the
legitimate states of Earth each of which does indeed have "the right
and obligation to protect its citizens". The Jewish State of Israel,
on the contrary, constitutes an entirely criminal entity
which has even less of a claim to self-defense than a robber in a bank
would have in returning police fire. That's just the law and the
facts, mam. 'Tis a conclusion best read by the light of the blazing
guns of the Irgun (headed by Menachem Begin) as early in the morning
of April 9, 1948, they massacred the peaceful Arab village of Deir
Yassin as part of a general Jewish strategy to terrify the lawful
native inhabitants of Palestine into abandoning their ancestral homes
and fleeing for their lives. This conclusion can be reviewed in the
flickering gunlight of Lehi led by future Prime Minister of Israel
Yitzhak Shamir five months later on 17 September as they assassinated
by machinegunfire Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations' chief
negotiator for Palestine. From that day in Jerusalem until this
morning in Ni'lin 61 years later, 'tis the same finger on the trigger
and the same skull behind the smile. The shadow of King Kissinger
looms over Rahm Israel Emanuel as the latter hovers behind O in the O-
O.

For decades the NaZionists have moaned that the Palestinians and Arabs
generally wish to 'drive the Jews into the sea'. All the while the
mangled & resigned Palestinians were in reality simply trying to get
the NZ's to honor numerous U.N. resolutions
requiring them to return the territories robbed in the Six Day War of
June, 1967. But in truth, under the law, 'twould be letting the perps
off way too easy to 'driv'em innasea'
even were they entirely to surrender all the lands taken at
muzzlepoint since 1947. The reason being that the indicated maneuver
could be executed in such a pleasant style as tourists here in San
Francisco daily pay for***.  The 288 or more children whom the Jews
murdered last Winter fell because We the World
have so far failed to lay hands on and punish the bandits of the Deir
Yassin Massacre of 1948 and of all the many like atrocities since
then. Rather the killers have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams
precisely in establishing JAPE. Now the Graball makes the US Congress
to dance to their whistle like so many mangy monkeys.

Of course, at last it has come to pass that this peculiar culture
sucking on the life's blood of normal children & so rotten to the
marrow is devouring its own entrails. Every month Obomber & the Golems
shovel another $ trillion of fantastic cash into the gaping maw of the
international banksters. And put it on the tab of the Merkin Herd.

The first step in mobilizing the pop of the 3rd Rock = for our
dreamers, poets, visionaries, theoreticians and yes, even lawyers, to
agree on our goal. The first step to that consensus lies in telling
the truth about our history.

The Jesuits taught me the definition of the word "law" in high school
in Dallas while Ike --God bless his memory, with the exception of
crimes in Iran & in Guatemala!-- was in the White House: "An ordinance
for the common good duly promulgated by established authority."

The US court system in this Year of the Ox has only Bomb Breath. Law
lies in the hearts of the people of Earth.

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* = Jewish-American Planetary Empire (my coinage).
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** { http://tinyurl.com/ppuy7o
15-05-2009

International Solidarity Movement:

4:30pm: A 12-year old girl has been shot with 0.22 calibre live
ammunition in Ni lin by Israeli forces.

Summer Amira, was shot by Israeli forces as she was standing near the
window of her home. Amira was shot in her lower arm, near her elbow
around 4:30pm. Amira was taken to a hospital in Ramallah around
4:45pm.}

Ni'lin in the central West Bank is located 11 miles west of Ramallah;
its clock runs ten hours ahead of PDT ( Z or UTC + 3 hrs vs. Z -7). So
the Jews shot young Miss Amira before most of Senator Feinstein's
constituency woke up this morning.

{ Your search - "Summer Amira" ni'lin - did not match any documents.
(Google Image Page)}
..............................................................................................

*** http://www.bayquackers.com/

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A Personal Note: Mondays = my personal sabbath days, usually dedicated
to serious snoozing. In view of my reservations expressed above about
both the speaker and the host for this event, if left to my own
devices on the date in question then my lethargy may prevail over
civic impulses. Being also, however, very susceptible to good
influences,  should any Kindred Spirit be interested in getting
together with me to hear Professor Bisharat, then we could make a date
therefor. Although Google posting seems to maul eddresses, my contact
data's available via MySpace page.

A wee word of caution here: King Kissinger's Kosher Kabal really has
murdered many millions of victims Planetwide over many decades,
including President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert,
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, the 34 sailors of the USSS LIBERTY,
Princess Diana, 3K WTC-ers and Paul Wellstone. Without a doubt, JAPE
is gunning down and blowing up innocents somewhere even as the Gentle
Reader rolls her peepers across these very lines. Even I have been
honored to receive numerous public assassination threats from JJ or
joojingo psywar ops here on the Net, including also my family in
remote locations, and express death wishes by the bushel. 'Tis a long-
time given that all casual, so to speak, electronic communications to
me will be intercepted by the minions of the Mossadia as well as by
the lower-ranking long ears of Obama's NSA* presently under Lieutenant
General Keith B. Alexander.

While these quite obvious considerations may make palling (root here
rhymes with "shall") up with me rarer, the same actions by the same
token become proportionately more valuable. Surely our Seven Billion
Selves for the most part abhor the brazen JAPE atrocities in the
Middle East & elsewhere and also surely billions of heads are keeping
themselves down in order to prevent their souls from being flown up to
Heaven prematurely and fruitlessly. After all, as the sage Sun Zu has
anciently taught us, in war one aims before all else to preserve
oneself and only thereafter to destroy the enemy.

Thus we see that Despotism's bloody attempts at "full spectrum
dominance" have created a leadership vacuum for _homo sapiens_. Brave
captains such as Hugo Chavez, Hassan Nasrallah, Evo Morales, Cynthia
McKinney, Michael Collins Piper, Paul Craig Roberts, James Petras,
Gideon Polya and Alison Weir are giving hope to us all by their
efforts, successful in varying ways & degrees, to rise against this
oppression. Some of us here in NorCal may wish to put our shoulders
also to the revolutionary wheel, eh what? "Who Dares Wins," as some
Brits have been known to say.

My list of 7 dares = To know, dream, do, fight, win, rule & retire.

* http://www.nsa.gov/index.shtml

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Dept. of This Just Inbox ( @ 13:51 o'clock ):

{REMEMBERING THE NAKBA
61 years of Ethnic Cleansing*

Join the Palestinian community, their friends and supporters to
commemorate the Nakba (Arabic for Catastrophe), remembering the day 61
years ago, when the Apartheid State of Israel was created and more
than 750,000 Palestinians forced from their homes.

JOIN US in Upholding Human Rights!
and UN Resolution 194 - Demanding the Palestinian Right of Return!

Monday, May 18th, 2009,  at the
Israeli Consulate, 456 Montgomery St.
5:30PM

(Wear Black, Bring Black Flags, and your Palestinian scarves)

Visit www.calsjp.org for more information about our organization

Join us on Facebook at:
    http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=2200472824

Add news from Palestine to your Facebook profile:
    http://www.falafeed.org/ }
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* "Ethnic cleansing" = a good term permanently to lose. The first
word's a euphemism for "nigger" and the second implies that the
victim's "dirty". Suggested rewrite for this line =
" 61 Years of Mass Murder, Robbery & Lies" --HW.
Dept. of Tell It Like It Is & Watch Your Mouth Out.

From the OED entry for "ethnic":

{ [ad. Gr. {elenis}{theta}{nu}{iota}{kappa}-{goacu}{fsigma} heathen,
f. {elenisacu}{theta}{nu}{omicron}{fsigma} nation; in the LXX, hence
in N.T. and the Fathers, {tau}{gagrave} {elenisacu}{theta}{nu}{eta} =
the nations, Gentiles (rendering Heb. g{omac}y{imac}m, pl. of g{omac}
y, nation, esp. non-Israelitish or ‘Gentile’ nation).
  The Gr. {elenisacu}{theta}{nu}{omicron}{fsigma} was formerly often
imagined to be the source of Eng. HEATHEN; hence the confused forms
hethnic, HEATHENIC, which might be regarded as corrupt variants of
this word.]

    A. adj.

    1. Pertaining to nations not Christian or Jewish; Gentile,
heathen, pagan.}

Wiggle, O ye bookworms of the world! The OED's accessible on-line via
the Public Library, at least here in Panchoville.

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