Category Archives: racism

Some real shock and awe: racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit

Shoshana Hebshi writes:

Silly me. I thought flying on 9/11 would be easy. I figured most people would choose not to fly that day so lines would be short, planes would be lightly filled and though security might be ratcheted up, we’d all feel safer knowing we had come a long way since that dreadful Tuesday morning 10 years ago.

But then armed officers stormed my plane, threw me in handcuffs and locked me up.

My flight from Denver landed in Detroit on time. I sent a text message to my husband to let him know we had landed and I would be home by dinner. The plane stopped on the tarmac, seemingly waiting to have the gate cleared. We waited. I played on my phone, checking Facebook, scrolling through my Twitter feed. After a while of sitting there, I decided to call my husband to tell him the plane was being delayed and I would call him when I got off the plane.

Just as I hung up the phone, the captain came over the loudspeaker and announced that the airport authorities wanted to move the airplane to a different part of the airport. Must be a blocked gate or something, I thought. But then he said: Everyone remain in your seats or there will be consequences. Sounded serious. I looked out the window and saw a squadron of police cars following the plane, lights flashing. I turned to my neighbor, who happened to be an Indian man, in wonderment. What is going on? Others on the plane were remarking at the police as well. Getting a little uneasy, I decided the best thing for me to do was to tweet about the experience. If the plane was going to blow up, at least there’d be some record on my part.

Stuck on a plane at Detroit airport…cops everywhere

Soon the plane was stopping in some remote part of the airport, far from any buildings, and out the window I see more police cars coming to surround the plane. Maybe there’s a fugitive on the plane, I say to my neighbor, who is also texting and now shooting some photos of the scene outside. He asks me to take a few, as I have a better angle from my window seat. A few dozen uniformed and plainclothes officers are huddled off the side of the plane. I don’t see any guns, and it isn’t clear what’s going on.

So I continued to tweet:

A little concerned about this situation. Plane moved away from terminal surrounded by cops. Crew is mum. Passengers can’t get up.

Then what looked like the bomb squad pulled up. Two police vans and a police communication center bus parked off the road. I started to get nervous and rethink my decision to fly on 9/11.

Cops in uniform and plainclothes in a huddle in rear of plane.

We had been waiting on the plane for a half hour. I had to pee. I wanted to get home and see my family. And I wanted someone to tell us what was going on. In the distance, a van with stairs came closer. I sighed with relief, thinking we were going to get off the plane and get shuttled back to the terminal. I would still be able to make it home for dinner. Others on the plane also seemed happy to see those stairs coming our way.

I see stairs coming our way…yay!

Before I knew it, about 10 cops, some in what looked like military fatigues, were running toward the plane carrying the biggest machine guns I have ever seen–bigger than what the guards carry at French train stations.

My last tweet:

Majorly armed cops coming aboard

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained. [Continue reading…]

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Israel plans to evict 30,000 Bedouin from their homes

Haaretz reports:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet on Sunday approved a plan to relocate tens of thousands of Bedouin from their unrecognized villages into settlements with official state status.

The plan emerges from the Prawer Report, drafted to find a solution to the problem of unrecognized villages in the Negev.

As part of the plan, some 20,000 to 30,000 Bedouon will be relocated to recognized settlements including Rahat, Khura and Ksayfe. The plan also includes financial compensation for those relocated, as well as alternate plots of land. The program is estimated to cost the state NIS 6.8 billion.

Opponents of the plan have accusing the government of evacuating people from their homes for no justified reason and against their will.

Bedouin representative called the decision “a declaration of war,” and some 150 members of the community gathered outside the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem on Sunday to protest the decision.

“This stupid government will be responsible for a Bedouin Intifada in the Negev,” said Arab MK Taleb al-Sana, who took part in the protest.

Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, slammed the government’s approval of the plan as a major violation of basic rights, pointing out that it would result in the uprooting of tens of thousands of people and the demolition of many Bedouin villages.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel in June submitted its objections to the Prawer Report and argued that the conditions it sets for recognizing Bedouin villages are prejudicial.

These include meeting minimal levels of population density, contiguity and economic sustainability. The criteria established, the organization maintains, flout principles of equality and justice in the distribution of resources. “If the same criteria were applied to the Jewish population, whole settlements – including community settlements, observatories, kibbutzim and moshavim – would be doomed,” the association notes.

Moreover, according to its claims, Bedouin villages are planned without considering the needs of the population, which is largely agrarian and rural, not urban. The association also opposes making any planning for the Bedouin conditional on settling disputes over land ownership.

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Plight of sub-Saharan Africans in Libya

The BBC reports:

“Justice” does not know where the young men came from nor whose side they were on.

All he knows is that they were aggressive and demanding money. When he tried to tell them he had nothing to give them, not a penny, they stabbed him in the stomach and then they sped away.

Justice, a Nigerian in his early 50s, is lucky to be alive. He was treated in a Tripoli clinic and now has a huge scar across his stomach.

Like thousands of sub-Saharan Africans, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when Libya’s civil conflict erupted earlier this year.

Many Africans were accused by pro-Gaddafi loyalists and by the opposition rebels of being paid mercenaries, and were persecuted for that.

While, there is evidence that many so-called foreigners did take up arms in this conflict, the vast majority were unjustly accused and now find themselves trapped in a foreign land without money and with few friends.

The group of as many as 2,000 Africans I came across were living in a dilapidated fishing port on the outskirts of Tripoli.

Sleeping in disused warehouses or under the meagre shade given by abandoned fishing boats, Ghanaians, Malians, Nigerians and many others told of their desperation.

“We need help,” said a 24-year-old Ghanaian man.

He denied accusations that some people at the camp had been fighters but readily admitted that many were immigrants who had come to Libya in recent years looking for work.

“We are poor, with no food and it’s so dangerous that the men here don’t sleep at night,” said the man.

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‘Libyans don’t like people with dark skin, but some are innocent’

Patrick Cockburn reports:

Yassin Bahr, a tall thin Senegalese in torn blue jeans, volubly denies that he was ever a mercenary or fought for Muammar Gaddafi.

Speaking in quick nervous sentences, Mr Bahr tries to convince a suspicious local militia leader in charge of the police station in the Faraj district of Tripoli, that he is a building worker who has been arrested simply because of his colour. “I liked Gaddafi, but I never fought for him,” Mr Bahr says, adding that he had worked in Libya for three years laying tiles.

But the Libyan rebels are hostile to black Africans in general. One of the militiamen, who have been in control of the police station since the police fled, said simply: “Libyan people don’t like people with dark skins, though some of them may be innocent.”

Going by Mr Bahr’s experience, any black African in Libya is open to summary arrest unless he can prove that he was not a member of Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

Fathi, a building contractor who did not want to give his full name and was temporarily running the police station, wanted to know why Mr Bahr had a special residence permit that an immigrant worker would not normally obtain. “You must have been fighting for Gaddafi to have a permit like this,” he said. Mr Bahr said that three years earlier he had walked through the Sahara and crossed the Libyan border illegally with other West Africans looking for work. They had been picked up by the Libyan police, but he had eventually bribed them to get a residence permit. He had been watching television with nine other African immigrants when they were arrested, though no arms were found in the house.

Racism against black Africans and Libyans with dark skin has long simmered in Libya. Before the war there were estimated to be a million illegal immigrants in the country, which has a population of six million and a workforce of 1.7 million.

In 2000 there were anti-immigrant riots in which dozens of workers from countries like Ghana, Cameroon, Niger, Chad, Nigeria and Burkina Faso were killed. The war has deepened racial hostility. The rebels claim that many of Colonel Gaddafi’s soldiers were black African mercenaries. Amnesty International says these allegations are largely unproven and, from the beginning of the conflict, many of those arrested or, in some cases, executed by the rebels were undocumented labourers caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Anti-Arab sentiment in Israel

Eli Ungar-Sargon writes:

Over the past three years, my wife Pennie and I have been working on a documentary film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During our second production trip to the region, one of the many remarkable people we encountered was Uri Davis. He is one of a handful of Israelis who has built a life for himself among the Palestinians of the West Bank. This made him a very interesting subject for our film, which examines the practical and moral failings of the two-state solution.

During our interview with Davis, one of the questions we asked was whether he had encountered any anti-Semitism in the West Bank. The question was motivated by a desire on our part to address a narrative — prevalent among American and Israeli Jews — which claims that anti-Semitism is an obvious feature of Palestinian culture.

As these two groups are an important part of our target audience, we felt that it was our responsibility to address this perception. Who better to ask about the veracity of this narrative than a Jew living among Palestinians? Davis answered by saying that although Palestinian anti-Semitism does exist, it is a marginal phenomenon, while anti-Arab sentiment among Israelis is a mainstream phenomenon. Shortly after the interview, it occurred to us that we could either substantiate or disprove Davis’s provocative statement with our cameras.

Trailer for the upcoming documentary “A People Without a Land”:

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Since 9/11 the overwhelming majority of terrorism in the US has been homegrown

Charles P. Pierce pieces together the fragments of the story of homegrown terrorism in the United States over the last decade starting with an event that barely made the news — the placing of an IED in Spokane, Washington, that had it exploded during Martin Luther King Day celebrations in January — as its maker intended — would have killed and maimed dozens of men, women and children.

At the beginning of this year, not long after they’d found the bomb on the bench in Spokane, a journalist named David Neiwert put together a list of nearly thirty acts of right-wing political violence that had taken place, or had been foiled, in the United States since the summer of 2008 — or roughly since Barack Obama’s presidency began to be seen as a genuine possibility. The list began with Jim David Adkisson, who killed two people in a Unitarian church in Tennessee because he was angry at how “liberals” were “destroying America.” It included two episodes in April 2009, one in Pittsburgh and one in Florida, in which men who were sure that Barack Obama’s government was coming for their guns opened fire on law-enforcement officers who had come to investigate them on other matters.

Some of the crimes on the list were briefly sensational — Scott Roeder’s murder of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, or Joseph Andrew Stack‘s flying his small plane into a building in Austin in protest of the Internal Revenue Service, or the incoherent array of violent crimes committed by the “Sovereign Citizens Movement.” But most of them barely made the national radar at all. In December 2008, a woman in Belfast, Maine, named Amber Cummings shot to death her sleeping husband, James, who’d been savagely abusing her. Upon arriving at the Cummings home, investigators found Nazi paraphernalia and a stash of chemicals indicating that was preparing to make a “dirty bomb” that he planned to detonate at Obama’s inauguration. Except in the local media, that aspect of the case disappeared completely. James Cummings and his bomb had nothing to do with Scott Roeder’s handgun or Joe Stack’s airplane.

It is a fertile time for such things. The country elected a black president with an exotic name. The economy, wrecked by a rigged game at the highest levels, continued to grind through a jobless recovery. The national dialogue grows coarser and wilder, and does so at a pace accelerated by technology. People sense the fragmentation — things are falling apart — even while they take refuge in those fragments of life that seem safest and most familiar.

But there is something about fragments that nobody talks about. It is a property first harnessed in 1784 by an officer of the artillery in the British army. He surmised that if you filled an artillery shell with fragments, you could wreak havoc far in excess of what would occur if the shell simply exploded. The destruction would breed upon itself. Propelled with sufficient force, the fragments would make new fragments of whatever they hit — a cart, a tree, a human femur — and, in turn, these new fragments would fly off to do their own damage. The officer’s name was Henry Shrapnel.

The bomb in the bag on the bench in Spokane was a shrapnel bomb, a direct descendant of Henry Shrapnel’s original brainchild. It was specifically designed and carefully placed to create an expanding killing zone, a sideways rain of lethal fragments. A child could have been killed by the blast itself, or by a piece of the bench, or by a chunk of the child’s own father. After all, shrapnel is nothing more than undifferentiated fragments with sufficient force applied.

That the bomb did not do what it was designed to do was a combination of luck and human agency. (It was a triumph for public employees, to put it in the context of our current political argument.) That the events of January 17 largely have faded from the news has nothing to do with luck at all. That is all human agency — how a fragmented country gathers the pieces of an event like this and tries to construct from them, not necessarily the truth of what happened, but a story that the country can live with, one more fragment among dozens of others that the country has remembered to forget.

On March 9, 2011 in Addy, Washington, 55 miles north of Spokane, the FBI arrested an Army veteran named Kevin Harpham and charged him with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and possession of an unregistered explosive.

The Southern Poverty Law Center says:

The emerging picture suggests 36-year-old Kevin William Harpham is a “lone wolf’’ with a military ordnance background and apparently increasingly extreme radical-right views that may have prompted the attempt to carry out a mass murder on the late civil rights leader’s birthday. He is also a man who has joined a neo-Nazi group, apparently posted to racial extremist websites and worried that the 9/11 attacks were actually a government conspiracy.

The domestic terrorism suspect faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted of the initial two charges he faces: attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and possession of an improvised explosive device. Other federal charges could come when a federal grand jury in Spokane reviews the case on March 22.

“This one is very serious,” federal defender Roger Peven said outside the courtroom, moments after he was appointed to represent Harpham.

The backpack bomb, reportedly containing shrapnel dipped in rat poison to enhance bleeding, was spotted moments before hundreds of people were to march by it. Authorities rerouted the parade immediately.

At some risk, a bomb squad defused the device and kept it intact — likely leading the FBI to capture a windfall of forensic evidence, possibly including fingerprints and DNA that could have identified Harpham as the suspect.

The affidavit of probable cause used to affect the suspect’s arrest is sealed from public inspection — another indication of the secrecy surrounding the 51-day investigation by the FBI’s Inland Northwest Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Despite the official secrecy, Harpham has left Internet fingerprints and other public records that give a glimpse of him.

Internet postings believed to be those of the former Army artillery soldier suggest he had an interest in old cars, metal fabrication, the neo-Nazi National Alliance and conspiracy theories associated with the attack on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

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The danger of Jewish women being attracted to Arab men

Ynet reports:

The Organization for Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land (Lehava) has decided to start “defending the daughters of Israel” on the country’s beaches.

According to the organization, many Arab men are posing as Jews, courting and harassing the beautiful women. In response, a “coast guard” aimed at fighting the alleged phenomenon has been set up.

In recent weeks, Lehava members have been handing out dozens of leaflets to Jewish women on the beaches of Bat Yam, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Caesarea and Eilat, asking them to maintain their Jewishness and not to give in to the non-Jewish men’s appeals.

The organization decided to do something after receiving complaints from many women who claimed to be harassed by non-Jewish men on the beach.

“Last year we discovered that there are many gentiles arriving at the beaches, but not in search of the sun or water,” said Benzi Gopstein, one of Lehava’s leaders.

“Due to the multiple complaints,” he explained, “we decided to promote a campaign at the start of the bathing season this year in order to prevent situations in which girls discover that the ‘Yossi’ they are dating is actually ‘Yusuf’, prevent sexual harassment and assimilation.

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Alice Walker on ‘the freedom ride of this generation’

Jesse Rosenfeld interviewed American author, Alice Walker, as she waits to depart as a passenger on The Audacity of Hope heading for Gaza.

Reflecting on her years of activism, it is clear that Walker sees a connection between civil rights in America, liberation from apartheid in South Africa and the Palestinian cause.

“Without the international community coming to the aid of the South African people they may very well still be under apartheid, and [without the support of progressive white people] we might still be under segregation in the United States.”

The comparison doesn’t end there: “settlers are the Klan,” she says definitively, referring to the notorious white supremacist terror organization. “They don’t have their white sheets because I guess they don’t need them.”

I mention to her that the leaders of the Palestine’s Arab Spring are discussing a campaign of attempted freedom rides on settler busses in the West Bank.

“I’m very pleased to hear that,” she says breaking into a big smile.

She then returns to the freedom ride conversation from the previous day. “I think the tactic on the Palestinian side is to draw attention to the Klanishness. It’s been so difficult for the world to understand who the settlers are and the problem with them taking more and more of the land,” she says, arguing that it’s a modus systemically rooted in the way Israel was founded.

“That’s the history of the settlement of Palestine; it started in 1948 and is continuing,” she adds connecting Israel’s creation of 750,000 Palestinian refugees in the founding of the state and current settler evictions of Palestinian families in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Although blunt and unequivocal in her analysis, Walker switches gears, once again displaying her optimism. In a recent article, she details commitments and sacrifices made by white Jewish Americans in the civil rights movement. She says she detailed these to send a message directly to Israelis.

“It’s a way to remind them that their Jewishness can stand for something else, it doesn’t have to stand for beating up people, taking their land and destroying their culture,” she says. “[Israeli’s Jewish identity] could actually be about something very fabulous.’’

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“Price tag” pogroms go under the radar

Yossi Gurvitz writes:

When a post mortem on the collapse of Israeli democracy will take place, there’s a good chance that the “Ha’Kol Ha’Yehudi” will be considered Israel’s Radio Rwanda, which encouraged and led the murderers to the victims during the genocide there.

The site (Hebrew), whose name means “The Jewish Voice”, is operated by the Yehudim Smechim (“Happy Jews”) Association (Hebrew), which is the active front of the students of the “Od Yoseph Khai” yeshiva in Yizhar. Led by Yizhak Ginzburg, this is in all likelihood the most extreme yeshiva around. It became famous, or rather infamous, when two of its rabbis wrote “Tortah Ha’Melekh”, a treatise on the proper way according to Jewish law of killing gentiles. The Ministry of Education even stopped funding it for a while after that.

Ha’Kol Hayehudi reports steadily and enthusiastically about the pogroms carried out by settlers under the code name of “price tag”. One wonders how involved is the site in those activities: When me and Itamar Sha’altiel tried to find out, two months ago, why price tag activity went drastically down for some two weeks, we found these weeks correlated to the time the yeshiva was on Passover vacation.

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Dubai’s skyscrapers, stained by the blood of migrant workers

Nesrine Malik writes:

Visiting Dubai on a work trip, I was wandering the resplendent hallways of my a hotel searching for an ATM when a commotion occurred. Some of the hotel staff were scurrying about, looking obviously distressed. I asked one of them if there was any trouble and he responded with a glossy smile. There was no trouble, madam, and was there anything he could help me with?

A few hours later, I discovered that there had indeed been trouble. A man – an Indian worker – had jumped from Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world, and a symbol of Dubai’s prowess. It is a needle-shaped skyscraper which impales the bleak Dubai sky.

Originally known as Burj Dubai, the building was planned during the city’s orgiastic construction phase, where the sky was the limit, but completed after the bubble had burst. It was then renamed in honour of Abu Dhabi’s ruler, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, who rescued Dubai from its debt crisis.

Gossip about the suicide was horrifyingly callous. “It only took 10 months” [after the opening of the hotel], one person said. “He’s inaugurated the building,” another almost laughed. “Why did he jump?” I asked. People shrugged. He’s probably an expatriate worker, I was told – it’s usually them.

There is nothing remarkable about people being desensitised to suicides. London commuters on the underground can probably understand, but when the suicides are almost exclusively from one minority working in certain jobs, it is nothing short of inhumane. The dark underbelly of Dubai is never far away and sometimes we see the effect of this uglier side lying lifeless on a pavement.

The man, apparently an Indian cleaner who had been denied a holiday, was scraped off the floor on which he landed on and life went back to normal. Tourists and expats lapped up the luxury and sunshine, while workers from south Asia, little moving dots on the facades of the buildings under construction throughout the city, were ferried in buses to and from their living quarters. A couple of days later, another Indian man jumped from Jumeirah Lake Towers.

The Indian consulate in Dubai has since revealed that at least two Indian expats commit suicide each week. The consul-general stated that most are blue-collar workers who are either semi-skilled or skilled.

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The racist entity that is taking over Israel must be toppled

Sefi Rachlevsky writes:

The wretchedness of the law in the face of Rabbi Dov Lior has many meanings, and Lior’s refusal to be interrogated over his support for “The King’s Torah – The Laws for Killing Gentiles” – only marginally gets at the heart of the matter.

Thirty years ago, the terrorist organization known as the “Jewish Underground” was set up with the purpose of killing Arabs. The group’s head of operations, Menachem Livni – who was convicted on multiple counts of murder before being pardoned by the regime – testified at the time that the living spirit, the initiator, the religious instructor and the coordinator of the murders was Lior.

This was true for the murders the underground carried out, and was also true for the pressure he put on the murderers to blow up buses and their passengers. The law states that someone who dispatches murders should receive multiple life sentences, along with additional time for organizing the crime. But thanks to instruction from higher up, Lior was never imprisoned, put to trial and or even properly interrogated.

And so he continued: Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994, saw Lior as his rabbi and counselor. After the Tomb of the Patriarchs massacre, Lior declared that “Baruch Goldstein was holier than the saints of the Holocaust.” The living spirit behind the religious edicts against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, which lead to his 1995 assassination, was also, according to testimonies, Lior. Rabin’s assassin frequented Hebron, where he used to see Lior.

Rabbi Lior is not in prison. He currently serves as a municipal rabbi, the head of a Jewish court and the dean of a large IDF yeshiva. He also heads the Judea and Samaria rabbis committee. Thousands adhere to his commands, hundreds of thousands are taught his ideology, tens of thousands of shekels are paid to him by the Israeli taxpayer every month.

This utter aberration is no accident. The regime chose Lior. Tel Aviv is a dream world. The actual reality that has been instilled in Israel is Lior. Under King Lior, Israel has built a world where the Jews are citizens and the Arabs are not, both in the occupied territories and in Jerusalem; where a Jewish man is a citizen and his Arab neighbor is not. Most Jewish first-graders attend ultra-Orthodox and religious schools. The majority of them are educated along the lines of “The King’s Torah.” A Jew is human. A non-Jew is non-human. “Thou shalt not kill” does not apply to non-Jews. And this is not delivered in the form of incitement, but as a simple statement of a fact. As simple as calling a chair a chair.

There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. Either you’re with Lior or you’re against him. The rabbis who chose him are Lior. The education minister – who visited the Tomb of the Patriarchs hand in hand with the convicted terrorist Livni, whom he seeks to put in charge of educating the children who will be brought to Hebron – is Lior. The prime minister, who enslaves Israel to the racist world of the settlements, is Lior.

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Rescuing the white people from Tripoli

Ben Plesser spoke to the CBS’s Early Show about the situation at Tripoli’s airport:

“There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people packed into the terminal, mostly foreign workers. They’re Egyptians, they’re Turks, they’re from Southeast Asia. Every once in a while you see a western face.

“They are living on the floor, wrapped in dirty blankets, they’ve been there for days. And they’re the lucky ones, because they have a roof over their heads,” he said.

Plesser said airport workers were wearing face masks due to concerns about infectious diseases, because no one has had access to facilities or showers, and are living off of whatever scraps or trash they can find. “And these people are basically the lucky ones,” Plesser said.

“Outside the terminal, there are thousands more people trying to inch their way into the terminal. There are policemen with sticks and whips keeping them in line, keeping them away from the terminal doors. There are fights breaking out. They’re living in the trash from days of sitting outside the terminal, just waiting for an opportunity to get out of the country.”

Plesser notes the few “Western” faces in the airport — which, to be blunt, means white people. What else are we to suppose defines a Western face in a crowd of brown faces other than a pale complexion?

There are about 6,000 Americans in Libya, but most hold dual Libyan citizenship, so, according to State Department spokesman PJ Crowley, it’s up to the Gaddafi government whether they will be allowed to leave. Had any managed to reach the airport, Plesser’s snap survey would have overlooked those invisible Westerners.

The New York Times reported:

The scramble by foreigners to leave the country began several days ago, but the number of commercial flights could not keep up with demand. Many countries have been mobilizing military and chartered ships and planes.

After landing in Malta on a flight chartered by the British government, Sam Dewhirst from Leeds who had been teaching English in Libya, described the situation in the Tripoli airport as “hellish.”

While he and other Britons had been able to “jump the queue,” he said, scores of North Africans were still waiting to leave or had abandoned their suitcases on the tarmac in a mad scramble to get on flights. “It was heartbreaking,” he said.

No explanation on how these Britons were able to jump the queue.

And then there’s the inexplicable, inexcusable case of a Canadian flight that landed in Tripoli, found no Canadian’s waiting to get out and so returned to Jordan without a single passenger!

“There were no other citizens from like-minded countries who needed the flight,” said a Canadian government official.

The airport is full of like-minded people — everyone wants to get the hell out of Libya and probably wouldn’t be too choosy about their destination. What is this club of like-minded countries to which Canada belongs? The white club?

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Jewish youth screaming “death to Arabs” murder Palestinian in Jerusalem

Joseph Dana reports:

Amid the revolutionary cheer that was emanating from Egypt last week, a group of Israeli Jews attacked and killed a Palestinian in the heart of West Jerusalem. 24-year-old Palestinian Hussam Rwidy was killed by a group of nationalist Jewish youth screaming “death to Arabs” as he was walking home from work. The Israeli government quickly put a media blackout on the case fearing a violent reactions from Palestinians in Jerusalem, Israel and the West Bank. Once the media blackout was lifted, select Israeli media outlets covered the story as a “drunken brawl turned bad” and the story was largely ignored.

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The escalation in racism among Israeli students

Ynet reports:

Three weeks after the publication of a petition calling on Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar to take action against racism spreading within schools and the general public, teachers told Ynet about the harsh reality they are forced to face daily.

In one case, a 12th grade student of a northern Israeli school wrote “Death to the Arabs” on a test in civics class. In another case, a high school student from Tel Aviv stood up during class, and to the horror of his teacher declared that his dream is to volunteer for the Border Guard, “so that I can spray Arabs to death.” His friends welcomed the announcement with applause.

Moreover, civics teachers around the country have been finding graffiti on the walls of their classrooms, bearing slogans ranging from “Kahane was right” to “A good Arab is a dead Arab.” Other statements incite against the ultra-Orthodox sector and against refugees.

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Ashamed to be an Israeli

Amnon Danker, former editor of Israel’s popular Hebrew newspaper, Maariv, writes:

… I have felt lately that it has become shameful to be an Israeli, and a decent person must feel this shame and blush deeply and clear his throat and whisper to himself the question, what should we do, what should we do, for heaven’s sake, and perhaps even reach far-reaching conclusions.

Because it is fairly clear already that if our life here continues as it has been developing, then decent, moderate, balanced and humane people will not be able to live here. Before our eyes, with growing speed, Israeli society is changing, the political culture is changing, balances are disrupted and checks are tossed to the blazes, in the terrible wind that is blowing in our lives and quickly colouring them in darkening shades of black.

It seems that things that were bottled up in the Israeli soul, well hidden due to the shame, are suddenly erupting with a sense of release and capering in a disgraceful manner in full view. It is now permissible to be a racist, and permissible to take pride in it, and it is permissible to kick democracy and take pride in that, and it is permissible to cause injustice and exploitation and trample people’s rights, if the people in question are Arabs, and it is permissible to take pride in this too. There are MKs [members of Israel’s parliament] that engage in all this with great skill, and with smiles that cannot fail to send a shiver down one’s back. There are entire parties whose colour and music arouse shocking and horrific memories.

Sometimes I try to do the following exercise: To think that I went to sleep sometime in the 1980s or 1990s, and what I have been experiencing here recently is no more than a nightmare. After all, this cannot be. Not here. Not among Jews. And yet—it is happening.

When people comment on this venomously around the world, we object almost instinctively and say, no, that is too much already. It is only anti-Semitic hate propaganda. But with a hand on the heart — are we not becoming, from year to year, more and more like our monstrous caricature, which is drawn by our worst enemies? For really, where are we going? Think for yourselves, as unpleasant as this may be: Are we becoming more or less racist? More or less democratic? More or less decent? And alas, in our decline to brutality, within this terrible deterioration, if only we could at least take comfort in the fact that we were perhaps becoming worse and more contemptible, but also safer and better protected. But once again, with a hand on the heart: Is this true, or is it exactly the opposite?

For it is not only a disgrace to be an Israeli today, it is also deathly frightening. [Continue reading…]

[H/t Ann El Khoury.]

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Lieberman: ‘I am the mainstream’

Newsweek refers to Avigdor Lieberman as “Israel’s most popular politician,” but then calls him its “far-right” foreign minister. He is indeed, but since he is also — in his words — “the mainstream,” it’s time the American mainstream media desist from portraying him as being on the political fringe.

Lieberman is a mainstream politician in a far-right country.

Racism has been normalized in what should now be universally recognized as a racist state — Israel cannot claim to be nor should be characterized by others as a liberal democratic state. Were it such, Lieberman could not possibly have risen this far.

Lieberman talks about his plan to strip at least 10 percent of Israelis of their citizenship:

You’re talking about drawing a line so that how many Israeli Arabs will no longer be part of Israel?

At least half.

Polls suggest that 90 percent or more of Israeli Arabs don’t want that.

You have 20 percent of the population that’s the Arab minority. You have 80 percent that’s Jewish. From 80 percent of the Jewish population, 70 percent support this idea.

So even if a resident of [the Israeli Arab town] Umm al-Fahm, for instance, doesn’t want to become part of Palestine, if a majority in the country says he has to, he has no choice?

He can continue to live in his property, his house, his land [and become a citizen of Palestine], or he can move to Israel.

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