Glenn Greenwald writes: Each year, the U.S. State Department, as required by law, issues a “Human Rights Report” which details abuses by other countries. To call it an exercise in hypocrisy is to understate the case: it is almost impossible to find any tyrannical power denounced by the State Department which the U.S. Government (and its closest allies) do not regularly exercise itself. Indeed, it’s often impossible to imagine how the authors of these reports can refrain from cackling mischievously over the glaring ironies of what they are denouncing (my all-time favorite example is discussed in the update here).
In 2010, the State Department included a long section on the oppressive detention practices of China. The “principal human rights problems” of the tyrannical Chinese government include “a lack of due process in judicial proceedings” and “the use of administrative detention.” Indeed, “arbitrary arrest and detention remained serious problems. The law grants police broad administrative detention powers and the ability to detain individuals for extended periods without formal arrest or criminal charges.” Can one even find the words to condemn these Chinese monsters?
Time‘s Tony Karon today writes about the case of Khader Adnan, a 33-year-old Palestinian baker currently imprisoned without charges by the Israeli government on accusations that he is a spokesman for Islamic Jihad. To protest his due-process-free imprisonment and that of thousands of other Palestinians, Adnan has been on a sustained hunger strike and is now close to death. Karon writes:
Israel has not charged Adnan with any crime . . . Israel deals with such cases using a legal framework based on emergency laws left over from British colonial rule to detain any suspect for six months at a time without needing to provide evidence or lay charges against them. When a detainee’s six-month spell has expired, the detention can simply be renewed.
Writing today about the Adnan case in The National, Joseph Dana explains that Israel imprisons Adnan and so many like him pursuant to “a framework of laws and statutes to govern all aspects of life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” and “many, if not most, of the laws governing movement of Palestinians, freedom of speech and association are draconian in nature; none is more alarming than the administrative detention order. The order enables Israel to hold prisoners indefinitely without charging them or allowing them to stand trial.” [Continue reading…]
Reductum ad absurdum by the Regev’s reductum ad rectum.
The fact remains that the Holocaust has given Israel liscence to treat others weaker than itself behave like the Nazis. The terror is so great, Likud assumes, that if it behaves like what has terrorized them, then it won’t feel terrorized for the terror it exercises.
In Israel, Israelis vomit at all this crap from the “spokesmen” in their name spew. But the target audience is not them but American Jews on whose money and political influence to get Israel $10billions/yr. the Israeli Govt. depends. Can you imagine the shame Israelis feel still, after 63 years, having to depend on so much foreign cash “discretely” extracted from American tax payers without their knowledge. If I were a young Israeli now, I would be checking the want ads in the Western press for this bunch of shysters in command would make me feel as if I live in Mubarak-type Egypt, Jewish version. Why do “God’s chosen people” depend so much on money sneaked out of Americans’ pockets in order to survive? Does this not raise the very questions Pres. Carter raised about the “Jewishness” of Israel?