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capybaracorn · 3 months

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Israel’s ‘anti-Zionists’ brave police beatings, smears to demand end to war

Some have been jailed for refusing to serve in the armed forces while others face threats and harassment from right-wing groups.

An antiwar protest in Tel Aviv during municipal elections [Mat Nashed/Al Jazeera]

(9 Mar 2024)

Tel Aviv/West Jerusalem – In 2015, Maya, a Jewish Israeli, travelled to Greece to help Syrian refugees. At the time, she was an exchange student in Germany and she had been deeply moved by the pictures she saw of desperate people arriving there in small boats.

That was where she met Palestinians who had been born in Syria after their parents and grandparents fled there during the founding of her own country in 1948.

They told her about the Nakba – or “catastrophe” – in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes to make way for the newly established Israel. Maya, 33, who had been taught that her country was born through “an independence war” against hostile Arab neighbours, decided that she needed to “unlearn” what she had learned.

“I never heard about the right of return, or Palestinian refugees,” she told Al Jazeera.

“I had to get out of Israel to start learning about Israel. It was the only way I could puncture holes in what I was taught.”

Maya, who asked that her full name not be used for fear of reprisals, is one of a small number of Israeli Jewish activists who identify as “anti-Zionists” or “non-Zionists”.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, a pro-Israeli group with a stated mission of fighting anti-Semitism and other forms of racism in the United States, Zionism means supporting a Jewish state established for the protection of Jews worldwide.

However, many anti-Zionists like Maya and the people she works with view Zionism as a Jewish supremacist movement which has ethnically cleansed most of historic Palestine and systematically discriminates against the Palestinians who remain, either as citizens of Israel or residents of the occupied territories.

But since Hamas’s deadly attack on Israeli civilians and military outposts on October 7, in which 1,139 people were killed and nearly 250 taken captive, Israeli anti-Zionists have been accused of treason for speaking about Palestinian human rights.

Many have called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to stop what they view as collective punishment and genocide of the Palestinian people.

“I think [anti-Zionists] always claim that Jewish supremacy is not the answer and it is not the answer to the [October 7] killings,” Maya said.

“Israelis don’t understand how the Palestinian story is all about the Nakba, refugees and the right of return. If we are not able to deal with that then we are not going anywhere.”

Perceived as ‘traitors’

Since October 7, Israeli anti-Zionists have described living in a hostile political and social environment. Many say the police have violently cracked down on anti-war protests, while others have received threats from far-right-wing Israelis.

Roee, who, like Maya, did not give his last name for fear of reprisals from Israeli society or authorities, is also a Jewish Israeli activist. In October last year, he attended a small demonstration of a couple of dozen people a few days after Israel began bombing Gaza. The demonstrators were calling on Hamas to free all Israeli captives and on Israel to stop the war.

“The police pushed all of us [out] violently in just two minutes,” Roee, 28, told Al Jazeera at a cafe in West Jerusalem.

Weeks later, Roee and his friend, Noa, who also did not want her full name to be revealed, attended another silent demonstration outside a police station in Jerusalem. They put tape over their mouths to denounce the sweeping arrests of Palestinian citizens of Israel who had also called for an end to the war on Gaza.

But again, police chased down the Israeli protesters and beat them with batons.

“I think it is very clear that the police recognise us. It doesn’t matter the signs we hold. They know us. They know we are leftists and that we are ‘traitors’ or whatever they call us,” Noa told Al Jazeera.

Many Israeli antiwar activists have also been smeared or “doxxed” – a term given to people whose identities and addresses are made known on social media by those hoping to intimidate them into silence.

Maya said that a right-wing activist had accused her romantic partner of cooperating with Hamas by informing them of the whereabouts of Israeli positions in Gaza. The activist published photos of her partner on Instagram with captions detailing the fabricated accusations.

“We were afraid that our address would be exposed, but luckily it wasn’t. Even before October 7, [these groups of extreme right-wing people] tried to obtain addresses of people to ‘dox’ them and taunt them. Some of our friends had to leave their apartments. That was our main worry,” Maya said.

Conscientious objectors

While most Israelis are required to enlist in the army after high school, antiwar activists have refused to take part in their country’s continuing occupation of the West Bank, where raids and arrests have been intensified since October, or in the war on Gaza. Two young Israelis who publicly refused to join the army are now serving short sentences in military prison.

Einat Gerlitz, a “non-Zionist” and a member of Mesarvot, a non-profit organisation providing social and legal support to Israeli conscientious objectors, said that more people may have refused military service since the war on Gaza began, because not everyone goes public.

“The army does not release the numbers … because the army’s interest is to make sure [refusing service] is not a topic spoken about in the public sphere. The government and army work really hard to glorify army service, so they want minimal attention on conscientious objectors,” the 20-year-old said.

Einat Gerlitz is a 20-year-old peace activist and a conscientious objector. She spoke about her peace activism in a cafe in Tel Aviv [Al Jazeera/Mat Nashed]

Gerlitz added that the October 7 attack did not make her reconsider her peace activism, but she is very concerned for friends and peers who were quickly deployed to Gaza.

“I was worried for them, but I was also worried about some of the commands that they may need to fulfil,” she told Al Jazeera, referring to her worries that soldiers may be ordered to commit atrocities or violate international law.

Over the past five months, Israeli soldiers have razed entire neighbourhoods in Gaza, bombed universities, hospitals and places of worship, and shot at crowds of starving Palestinians lining up for food aid.

Rights groups say that these attacks amount to war crimes and may collectively amount to a campaign of genocide.

‘We need greater empathy’

Many anti-Zionist Israelis say that their aim is to make fellow Israelis recognise the humanity of the Palestinians.

However, they say it has been difficult to counter the messaging of Israeli politicians, some of whom have called Palestinians in Gaza “animals”, “subhuman” or “barbarians” in order to rally support for the war. Some of these statements were singled out by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which issued an emergency order in January on the genocide case brought against Israel by South Africa.

Israeli society also expresses little empathy for Palestinians in Gaza, several Israeli activists told Al Jazeera. They explained they believe this is partly due to Israeli media rarely reporting on the army’s probable war crimes, nor on the catastrophic humanitarian crisis brought on by Israel’s war.

Maya recalls going to a demonstration in Tel Aviv to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza in late October. About 50 people attended, with many holding up photos of children killed by the Israeli army. But when Israeli children saw the photos, they claimed they were fake.

“[Young Israeli kids] pointed at a photo of a father holding a dead baby in Gaza and said, ‘How can you believe this? It’s not real. He is acting’,” Maya said.

“[Another child] pointed to a different dead baby and said, ‘This is a doll’.”

Addam, an anti-Zionist Israeli and a graffiti artist, who did not disclose his full name, was also at the protest. He said that an Israeli woman called the demonstrators “traitors” and said that her own brother had died fighting for Israel in Gaza.

While Addam was heartbroken to hear about her loss, he said he believes that the government is weaponising Israeli grief to commit atrocities in Gaza. He added that he tries to humanise Palestinians through his art and spoke about one project where he photographed the physical scars that Palestinians and Israelis bore from past conflicts.

“Once there is empathy, it creates an entirely different foundation to begin engaging in reality,” he told Al Jazeera. “It should be a given that people in Gaza are human beings with families, dreams and jobs.

“But, for many factors, there is this ongoing process [in Israel] of dehumanising Palestinians.”

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eretzyisrael · 5 months

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The October 7 attack and its aftermath have finally brought the disparate elements of this struggle against Jews to the surface, its participants surging into the streets and onto social media—suggesting that Hamas knew something important about the world that many of us didn’t see, or didn’t want to.

When I was a reporter for an international news agency at the time of the Hamas takeover in Gaza in 2007, I discovered that it was impolitic to mention what Hamas clearly announced in its founding charter from 1988: Namely, that “our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious,” and the Jews were “behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions, and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”

This didn’t sound like “Free Palestine.” But as a rule, on the rare occasions that Western news organizations felt compelled to mention the document, they left those parts out.

The historical examples from the charter suggest that in the war against Judaism, the ideologues of Hamas understand themselves to be operating in a broad coalition and carrying on a long tradition. This is true. “Islam and National Socialism are close to each other in the struggle against Judaism,” Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and one of the fathers of the Palestinian national movement, said in 1944. This was in a speech to members of an SS division he helped raise, made up of Bosnian Muslims. “Nearly a third of the Qur’an deals with the Jews. It has demanded that all Muslims watch the Jews and fight them wherever they find them,” he said, an idea that would reappear four decades later in the Hamas charter. When the mufti testified before a British commission of inquiry in 1936, he quoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Tsarist forgery describing a global Jewish conspiracy, which is also the source for parts of the Hamas charter and remains popular across the Middle East. (I once found the book for sale at a good shop near the American University of Beirut.) The Hamas army, known as the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, is named for one of the mufti’s most famous proteges.

The movement became savvy enough to water down its charter a few years ago, but its leaders have remained honest about their intent. “You have Jews everywhere,” one former Hamas minister, Fathi Hammad, shouted to a crowd in 2019, “and we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing, with God’s will.”

In the liberal West, no sane person would own up to believing The Protocols. (At least not yet; things are moving fast.) But an Italian can hold a prominent U.N. job, for example, after saying she believes a “Jewish lobby” controls America, and you can hold a tenured position at the best universities in the West if you believe that the only country on earth that must be eliminated is the Jewish one.

My experience in the Western press corps was that sympathy for Hamas was not just real but often more substantial than sympathy for Jews. In Europe and North America, as we’ve now seen on the streets and on campuses, many on the progressive left have arrived at an ideology positing that one of the world’s most pressing problems is the State of Israel—a country that has come to be seen as the embodiment of the evils of the racist, capitalist West, if not as the world’s only “apartheid” state, that being a modern synonym for evil.

Jews could no longer officially be hated because of their ethnicity or religion, but can legitimately be hated as supporters of “apartheid” and as the embodiment of “privilege.” The pretense that this is a critique of Israel’s military tactics, or sincere desire for a two-state solution, has now largely been dropped.

#hamas #wisdom #gaza #jews #antisemitism #hamas charter

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starjxsung · 24 days

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hey star, thank you for being vocal about the collab and palestine and giving us the space to be too.

it’s such an overwhelming situation for most of us from what i’ve seen on here. i also saw skz and stayblr as kind of a safe space to get away from my life problems. and seeing everything in shambles is very hurtful. but necessary nonetheless, im glad that this debacle is sparking important conversations.

i have always had kind of a resistance to getting too into kpop. (shinee,bts and skz have been the groups that i’ve spent most energy in but specially skz). bts and skz content really helped me overcome difficult af times in my life. and seeing this unwind is just crazy. i’ve always been aware of the requirements of moral ambiguity that kpop has. and it’s always been something i criticize but didn’t really feel until these latest skz situations like, cc, tommy hilfiger and then zionists are just too much. skz is also my last hope within stanning kpop groups. i’d love to think they’re just being repressed by jype and can’t speak out on it (and i bet that to certain degree this is the case) but at the end of the day, i think ignorance is mostly it. as you said, they’re just rich men too.

i’m also constantly dreading the fact that i don’t have the platform to spread awareness or be able to get messages through, because with such a passionate fanbase as many celebrities have, i would try to move mountains for social justice. i hate the fact that skz can’t (and/or won’t) speak about the issue, id hope it would be bc of repression but tbh idek anymore.

im really disillusioned with everything too. i’m very vocal of my support for the free palestine movement and protests (and everyone in my life have been very supportive as well) but seeing stays and skz openly prom tic zionists is too intense.

tbh, im not even that excited for skz @ lolla anymore (for the time being at least). i’ll still continue to support then but it’s definitely with a more careful perspective. and in all honesty im just on here to send you asks and read other people voicing their activism. not even looking forward to any skz content rn.

thank you for putting the energy you spent on skz into palestine. using your voice for good is so necessary <33

i love you angel, i hope you’re well despite everything.

-🐈‍⬛

The amount of big accounts I’m seeing who are just retiring their pages altogether or taking an indefinite hiatus is crazy. I just saw one of the biggest skz streaming event accounts announce that they’re halting all streaming parties and won’t be supporting any skz content right now until further notice. Like this is a HUGE deal, I really hope people understand the severity of all of this

10000% agree with you on the resistance for getting into kpop. A huge part of how I feel is like… these companies are trying to hard for expansion into the west, and in the west it’s really expected of people nowadays to take a stance and made their morals transparent to audiences. Times are simply changing, and the same should be applicable to kpop idols. Yeah they’re usually under contracts and whatnot, but that just shouldn’t be the norm anymore. And there are idols taking a stance and making a difference! Suho from EXO is organizing an entire fundraising event for palestine and has openly said it’s for the people of Gaza and he’s still heavily under an SM contract. These idols have more power than they lead us to believe, many of them just want to be comfortably ignorant

Also totally feel you on the lolla part. I’m seeing some people say they’re planning on giving skz a black ocean at all upcoming festivals which is practically unheard of in skz events. I hope people understand that these issues can’t just be swept under the rug with a new album and some tour announcement. It’s really sparked a larger conversation about the obligations of rich and influential people to use their platforms

I love you so much and I’m feeling all the same of what you’re feeling :( it just sucks. What a weird time to be so annoyed with your main form of escapism. I’m sending you all my love and I’m always here for you if you need to vent or talk about any of it. 🫶💓💗💕💘🩷

#🐈‍⬛ anon #ask

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sylvielauffeydottir · 3 years

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Hello, it is I, your friendly neighborhood historian. I am ready to lose followers for this post, but I have two masters degrees in history and one of my focuses has been middle eastern area studies. Furthermore, I’ve been tired of watching the world be reduced to pithy little infographics, and I believe there is no point to my education if I don’t put it to good use. Finally, I am ethnically Asheknazi Jewish. This does not color my opinion in this post — I am in support of either a one or two state solution for Israel and Palestine, depending on the factors determined by the Palestinian Authority, and the Israeli Government does not speak for me. I hate Netanyahu. A lot. With that said, my family was slaughtered at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I have stood in front of that memorial wall at the Holocaust memorial in DC for my great uncle Simon and my great uncle Louis and cried as I lit a candle. Louis was a rabbi, and he preached mitzvot and tolerance. He died anyway.

There’s a great many things I want to say about what is happening in the Middle East right now, but let’s start with some facts.

In early May, there were talks of a coalition government that might have put together (among other parties, the Knesset is absolutely gigantic and usually has about 11-13 political parties at once) the Yesh Atid, a center-left party, and the United Arab List, a Palestinian party. For the first time, Palestinians would have been members of the Israeli government in their own right. And what happened, all of the sudden? A war broke out. A war that, amazingly, seemed to shield Benjamin Netanyahu from criminal prosecution, despite the fact that he has been under investigation for corruption for some time now and the only thing that is stopping a real investigation is the fact that he is Prime Minister.

Funny how that happened.

There’s a second thing people ought to know, and it is about Hamas. I’ve found it really disturbing to see people defending Hamas on a world stage because, whether or not people want to believe it, Hamas is a terrorist organization. I’m sorry, but it is. Those are the facts. I’m not being a right wing extremist or even a Republican or whatever else or want to lob at me here. I’m a liberal historian with some facts. They are a terrorist organization, and they don’t care if their people die.

Here’s what you need to know:

There are two governments for the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. In April 2021, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed planned elections. He said it was because of a dispute amid Israeli-annexed East Jerusalum. He is 85 years old, and his Fatah Party is losing power to Hamas. Everyone knows that. Palestinians know that.

Here’s the thing about Hamas: they might be terrorists, but aren’t idiots. They understand that they have a frustrated population filled with people who have been brutalized by their neighbors. And they also understand that Israel has something called the iron dome defense system, which means that if you throw a rocket at it, it probably won’t kill anyone (though there have been people in Israel who died, including Holocaust survivors). Israel will, however, retaliate, and when they do, they will kill Palestinian civilians. On a world stage, this looks horrible. The death toll, because Palestinians don’t have the same defense system, is always skewed. Should the Israeli government do that? No. It’s morally repugnant. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. It’s hurting people without the capability to defend themselves. But is Hamas counting on them to for the propaganda? Yeah. Absolutely. They’re literally willing to kill their other people for it.

You know why this works for Hamas? They know that Israel will respond anyway, despite the moral concerns. And if you’re curious why, you can read some books on the matter (Six Days of War by Michael Oren; The Yom Kippur War by Abraham Rabinovich; Rise and Kill First by Ronen Bergmen; Antisemitism by Deborah Lipstadt; and Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis). The TL;DR, if you aren’t interested in homework, is that Israel believes they have no choice but to defend themselves against what they consider ‘hostile powers.’ And it’s almost entirely to do with the Holocaust. It’s a little David v Goliath. It is, dare I say, complicated.

I’m barely scratching the surface here.

(We won’t get into this in this post, though if you want to DM me for details, it might be worth knowing that Iran funds Hamas and basically supplies them with all of their weapons, and part of the reason the United States has been so reluctant to engage with this conflict is that Iran is currently in Vienna trying to restore its nuclear deal with western powers. The USA cannot afford to piss off Iran right now, and therefore cannot afford to aggravative Hamas and also needs to rely on Israel to destroy Irani nuclear facilities if the deal goes south. So, you know, there is that).

There are some people who will tell you that criticism of the Israel government is antisemitic. They are almost entirely members of the right wing, evangelical community, and they don’t speak for the Jewish community. The majority of Jewish people and Jewish Americans in particular are criticizing the Israeli government right now. The majority of Jewish people in the diaspora and in Israel support Palestinian rights and are speaking out about it. And actually, when they talk about it, they are putting themselves in great danger to do so. Because it really isn’t safe to be visibly Jewish right now. People may not want to listen to Jews when they speak about antisemitism or may want to believe that antisemitism ‘isn’t real’ because ‘the Holocaust is over’ but that is absolutely untrue. In 2019, antisemitic hate crimes in the United States reached a high we have never seen before. I remember that, because I was living in London, and I was super scared for my family at the time. Since then, that number has increased by nearly 400% in the last ten days. If you don’t believe me, have some articles about it (one, two, three, four, and five, to name a few).

I live in New York City, where a man was beaten in Time Square while attending a Free Palestine rally and wearing a kippah. I’m sorry, but being visibly Jewish near a pro-Palestine rally? That was enough to have a bunch of people just start beating on him? I made a previous post detailing how there are Jews being attacked all over the world, and there is a very good timeline of recent hate crimes against Jews that you can find right here. These are Jews, by the way, who have nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. They are Americans or Europeans or Canadians who are living their lives. In some cases, they are at pro-Palestine rallies and they are trying to help, but they just look visibly Jewish. God Forbid we are the wrong ethnicity for your rally, even if we agree.

This is really serious. There are people calling for the death of all Jews. There are people calling for another Holocaust.

There are 14 million Jews in the world. 14 million. Of 7.6 billion. And you think it isn’t a problem the way people treat us?

Anyway (aside from, you know, compassion), why does this matter? This matters because stuff like this deters Jews who want to be part of the pro-Palestine movement because they are literally scared for their safety. I said this before, and I will say it again: Zionism was, historically speaking, a very unpopular opinion. It was only widespread antisemitic violence (you know, the Holocaust) that made Jews believe there was a necessity for a Jewish state. Honestly, it wasn’t until the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting that I supported it the abstract idea too.

I grew up in New York City, I am a liberal Jew, and I believe in the rights of marginalized and oppressed people to self-determine worldwide. Growing up, I also fit the profile of what many scholars describe as the self hating Jew, because I believed that, in order to justify myself in American liberal society, I had to hate Israel, and I had to be anti-Zionist by default, even if I didn’t always understand what ‘Zionism’ meant in abstract. Well, I am 27 years old now with two masters degrees in history, and here is what Zionism means to me: I hate the Israeli government. They do not speak for me. But I am not anti-Zionist. I believe in the necessity for a Jewish state — a state where all Jews are welcome, regardless of their background, regardless of their nationality.

There needs to be a place where Jews, an ethnic minority who are unwelcome in nearly every state in the world, have a place where they are free from persecution — a place where they feel protected. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with that place being the place where Jews are ethnically indigenous to. Because believe it or not, whether it is inconvenient, Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. I’ve addressed this in this post.

With that said, that doesn’t mean you can kick the Palestinian people out. They are also indigenous to that land, which is addressed in the same post, if you don’t trust me.

What is incredible to me is that Zionism is defined, by the Oxford English Dixtionary, as “A movement [that called originally for] the reestablishment of a Jewish nationhood in Palestine, and [since 1948] the development of the State of Israel.” Whether we agree with this or not, there were early disagreements about the location of a ‘Jewish state,’ and some, like Maurice de Hirsch, believed it ought to be located in South America, for example. Others believed it should be located in Africa. The point is that the original plans for the Jewish state were about safety. The plan changed because Jews wanted to return to their homeland, the largest project of decolonization and indigenous reclamation ever to be undertaken by an indigenous group. Whether you want to hear that or not, it is true. Read a book or two. Then you might know what I mean.

When people say this is a complicated issue, they aren’t being facetious. They aren’t trying to obfuscate the point. They often aren’t even trying to defend the Israeli government, because I certainly am not — I think they are abhorrent. But there is no future in the Middle East if the Israelis and Palestinians don’t form a state that has an equal right of return and recognizes both of their indigenousness, and that will never happen if people can’t stop throwing vitriolic rhetoric around. Is the Israeli Government bad? Yes. Are Israeli citizens bad? Largely, no. They want to defend their families, and they want to defend their people. This is basically the same as the fact that Palestinian people aren’t bad, though Hamas often is. And for the love of god, stop defending terrorist organizations. Just stop. They kill their own people for their own power and for their own benefit.

And yes, one more time, the Israeli government is so, so, so wrong. But god, think about your words, and think about how you are enabling Nazis. The rhetoric the left is using is hurting Jews. I am afraid to leave my house. I’m afraid to identify as Jewish on tumblr. I’m afraid for my family, afraid for my friends. People I know are afraid for me.

It’s 2021. I am not my great uncle. I cried for him, but I shouldn’t have to die like him.

Words have consequences. Language has consequences. And genuinely, I do not think everyone is a bad person, so think about what you are putting into the world, because you’d be surprised how often you are doing a Nazi a favor or two.

Is that really what you want? To do a Nazi a favor or two? I don’t think that you do. I hope you don’t, at least.

That’s all. You know, five thousand words later. But uh, think a little. Please.

#jumblr #free palestine #zionism #gaza #signal boost #antisemitism #jew tag

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jewishhgirl · 3 years

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Written by a friend:

I'm not asking anyone to take my side, or the side of Israel, but I am asking you to think critically about the news you get from CNN and the BBC and AlJazeera or whatever station you watch

If we were colonizers, we would be actively planning wars, and TAKING land, not giving it away for PEACE. ( SINAI, Lebanon, Gaza strip...all relinquished, after being won, fairly, in a war, which we did not start. And yet still given away, in the promise of PEACE, which we have not gotten in return)

If we were committing genocide, then the population of Gaza and the West Bank would not have GROWN since 1967, but rather gotten smaller..no? Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank 1967: less than 1 million. Arabs in those areas today: 5 million)

That is not GENOCIDE! You cannot have 500% population growth in a genocide.

The definition of genocide is:

" The deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group"

Does it look like we've destroyed anyone or are aiming to?

Point of fact, we do not engage unless engaged with. And even then, our engagements are military, warnings in advance to clear the area and no civilian engagement whenever possible.

Which brings me to the next part:

War Crimes. Do you see in Israel rocket launchers on residential streets, missiles hidden under hospitals and schools (yes, even UNWRA schools got in on the deal)!! Do you see 5 year Israeli old martyrs with hand grenades, and children trained with automatic weapons, or calls to behead all Arabs from the pulpits of our synagogues, wherever we can find the "enemy"? No, you do not.

That is what our army faces against daily. And our CIVILIAN population is faced with daily, hourly....the WAR CRIMES of HAMAS and the Palestinian Authority.

If we wanted to flatten all of Gaza and turn it into a parking lot, we have the weapon power to do it in 3 minutes. Why in the world do you think we haven't? After 10,000's of rockets and missiles have been fired indiscriminately at our cities and schools and homes, after Israelies have been killed and maimed and attacked....the reason is because we value HUMAN LIFE. Because we are trying to save the lives of the people of Gaza and the West Bank. We introduced water and power infrastructure to their villages. Before Israel, they had none.

Next, the claims that Gaza is an open air prison, or a death camp etc. Ask yourself, how poor Gaza, that the BBC and NYT likes to claim is cut off from the world, and has no access to supplies...can import or import the materials to make thousands of rockets and missiles and rocket launchers --but can't import food, or medicine? Ask yourself where all of the cement and supplies to build schools and hospitals went...when instead there are hundreds of miles of cement and steel reinforced underground terror tunnels built every year.

Finally, ask yourself how the leaders and government of poor Gaza have enough money to have a Billionaires Gaza Yacht Club with multi-million dollar yachts, and facilities, luxurious 5 star hotels, shopping malls filled with Gucci and Chanel and Polo shirts -- while their people literally starve and beg for help.

And that is the main point. Israel does not govern GAZA. Israel is not in GAZA. Israel does not control GAZA. Gaza controls GAZA. So whatever the War Crime is for shelling your own population (430 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel have actually fallen within Gaza hurting and killing their own people) , for putting rockets and missiles under their homes, for stealing their food and international aid -- you should know who to blame. The same Gazan leadership the Free Palestine movement funds and supports.

And now, think again critically about this situation. Do you honestly think that "Free-ing Palestine", and turning Israel over to these same folks that currently run GAZA or Ramallah so well is the solution to anything? Will provide more food or medicine or opportunity or freedom to ANYONE? Free Palestine hangs gay men from the tops of buildings and drags their bodies through the streets. Free Palestine supports honor killings of young women who have been raped or abused or shamed. Free Palestine calls for the elimination of all Jews. Free Palestine is in reality, nothing more than a thuggish, brutal, facist military regime, dressed up like a woke, liberal western project with nice slogans and catchy protest tunes.

Like with most things, just follow the money and see what Free Palestine is really all about before lending your voice or your funds or support.

Again, you don't have to wave an Israeli flag from your flagpole, but if you care about justice, real justice, and peace, freedom and security, think critically about the information you receive and then ask yourself what rings true.

Israel has been attacked by more than 1400 rockets and missiles in the last 48 hours alone. What country would allow that, what population should have to suffer that before saying to their leaders...ENOUGH... just turn Gaza into a parking lot and let's be done with this.

You want restraint? We show it every single time a rocket or missile is fired at our homes.

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danwhobrowses · 4 years

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America, We Need to Talk

For some reason in these past years the concept of ‘Reason’ and ‘Sense’ has departed your country, I’ve hissed, I’ve simmered, I’ve hit my head against the wall hoping that in the end IN THE END the collective mass of the American People will open their eyes, stop making excuses and realise that for 4 years, America has not become ‘Great Again’ I’ve resisted the urge to unload many a time, but news that Donald Trump is to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is just too much, because this is literal horseshit. For some part it feels like they’re only trying it just so Republicans can force a rhetoric as if Trump did a better job than Obama - who won in 2009 for easing religious tensions, preventing Nuclear Weapons distribution and profiting, working towards fixing climate change and assisting with the UN - as people die of COVID, cities burn and violence against peaceful protests continue to ravage your country.

I have to say that again, Ravage, because I feel as though some people are blind to the matter at hand. Donald Trump will say something and his cult of followers will believe it, when someone disagrees and presents evidence it’s deemed irrelevant or forged, if a Democrat says something on the contrary they need a full powerpoint presentation to prove it, somehow this mentality has poisoned the American society when the louder people will say something in confidence only for the rest of the world to read and think it’s one of the dumbest shit they’ve ever read. This isn’t just coming from a Brit, this is coming from family in Chicago, a co-worker who moved out of America and worked in the army, Italians, Greeks and someone who was in Hong Kong during the riots. The people who believe in Democracy, Majority Vote, Free Healthcare, Fair Wage, Equal Rights AND international peace that doesn’t look towards World War Fucking Three look at your country in shame because the state of your leadership and how it’s been allowed to continue with ridiculously boneheaded and stubborn reluctance to see the truth. So let’s start with the boiling point shall we, a Nobel Peace Prize Nomination? Have you learned anything from the last year? Or has the far-right got the prize so by the balls that this nomination is used as a cheap add-on to coincidentally peacock the Trump administration in its build to an election. The nomination to Trump has been cited to be in favour of the following things; Israel-UAE relations (aka ‘Saving the Middle East), Serbia-Kosovo deal (aka ‘Saving the ‘Middle East’’), Inter-Korea relations and likely the support of Jerusalem and Hong Kong, and in face value that may sway the common person who knows nothing about these deals. But a simple amount of research cuts most of these at the legs. Let’s talk Serbia and Kosovo, since it’ll directly involve Israel, relations were tense but they have not been at war, they are peacefully not talking to each other. The media will have you think that Peace has been brokered by Trump only in this but in reality Serbia still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence, the tensions are still there you can just travel there now. This is an agreement that’s been build up since the economic and trade agreement in 2013. If that year isn’t surprising you that is 3 years before Trump was elected, when Barrack Obama was in office - Republican Public Enemy Hillary Clinton was at the forefront of that when she was Secretary of State. So no, Trump hasn’t saved the Middle East by this deal, mainly because Kosovo and Serbia are in Europe, they have been part of the EU for quite some time and the deal is already jeopardized since Serbia won’t build an embassy in Jerusalem if Israel recognize Kosovo as independent - which was part of the original deal. Also for all the Republicans’ use of ‘fear by Communism’ to slander their opponents they sure love to rub shoulders with countries also rubbing shoulders with Russia and China. So this segues into Israel-UAE, the Arab Nations have mainly been reluctant to recognize Israel as independent. On the 13th August a deal was struck called the Abraham agreement establishing Diplomatic Relations. Except, this was in the making since 2012 and only delayed to help progress Israeli-Palestine conflicts (which Trump’s actions with Israel led to Palestine cutting ties with the administration and his ‘Peace Plan’ falling apart 3 years after announcing it). UAE and Israel had been in conversation before Trump was signed in, but only made headway when the FDD - already funded by the UAE - took over. For 3 years USA did little for the relations, UAE and Israel doing it themselves, it’s only now do the US mediate a peace agreement, which meant that Trump didn’t really do much in terms of convincing both sides, he just made sure things didn’t get out of hand - which was never close to happening since there is little tensions. It was Kushner who requested the meeting and Mossad also had a huge part in it. Also I want to add that the US are only buddied with these two out of fear of Iran - you know, that country that Trump almost goaded into war in January after bombings and the death Assassination of General Soleimani who helped the US in the wake of 9/11 track and hunt down the Taliban, as well as fighting ISIS, how peaceful was that? The Middle East is still in Civil and Proxy Wars, no saving has been done there, the US just were there for Israel and UAE to confess that they’re friends. Which leads me to Korea. The Olympics helped more than Trump did, a shared effort where both countries had to travel and accommodate each other. Tensions may’ve eased in 2016 but they were far from resolved and in 2020 not much is better. Korea still antagonize one another and the North still antagonizes the US, any ‘peace’ the Trump Administration will claim to towards Korea faded quickly. And finally, Hong Kong, the US may be supportive and rightly so but this is again fear of Communism, it should’ve happened sooner but the US was hoping for that big and meaty trade deal with China. And this isn’t months I’m talking about it’s years, the proposal first took place after the Umbrella Movement...in 2014, it was annually brought up in Congress but postponed until the Senate decided to. And after Trump signed it he said he might veto it in favour of the China trade deal

“We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I'm also standing with President Xi: he's a friend of mine." - Donald Trump, November 2019

So really, this Nobel Peace Prize is the product and efforts of other people that set events in motion that Trump was there just to sign his name on. Meanwhile, in the country he is President of, the COVID Death toll has officially risen to 190 Thousand. 20% of COVID deaths are in the United States. Tear Gas/Pepper Spray - which is a recognized chemical weapon not allowed to be used in warfare - is used by Trump Supporters along with paintballs to attack peaceful protesters and Trump calls that peaceful because ‘Paint is not bullets’ - as someone who has been hit with Paintballs from safe range, they will hurt like a bitch and if you don’t wear protective gear they can do enough harm to crack and sometimes even break bone, the asthmatic co-worker I aforementioned that was in Hong Kong also notes that Tear Gas is awful, it may not kill you but it is far from peaceful. In the same breath Trump refuses to condemn a 16 year old carrying an AR and shooting someone in the head. He has also refused to condemn Epstein’s financier Ghislaine Maxwell and ‘hopes that she’s well’...the sex trafficker, but when you mention late Civil Rights leader John Lewis and his words are ‘can’t say one way or the other...he didn’t come to my inauguration’. This is your leader. The embodiment of the standards the country upholds itself to, it baffles me and many many others that the American People Chose a racist, bigoted, misogynistic, careless, self-important, naive, power-mad, severally-bankrupted, reality tv personality man-child, who is also intending to use US Taxpayers money to cover lawsuit fees against him alongside all his other golf trips. The man literally said that no other president has done more for Black People than he has, this is while he profusely condemned Kaepernick taking a knee to protest Police Brutality against Blacks and POC only for years later the world support it as BLM protests still happen because action has not been taken. We’ll also see what happens on the 14th regarding the Felony Hearing of the officers in Buffalo who pushed over Gugino and gave him a brain injury which he is still rehabilitating from after Trump tried to sell him as an Antifa member. Just in case you’re unaware, antifa stands for anti-fascist but Trump will paint that again in ‘Fear of Communism’. If you actually look up this stuff, the web of Trump’s lies unravel, and yet people just forget about. The man is a pro at gaslighting I’ll give him that, I mean leaking e-mails that condemned Clinton right at election time was some cutthroat stuff, but a man who needs to rely on preying on xenophobia, paranoia, fear, racism and invests mainly on smear tactics and dismantling, is not someone who can lead a country to prosperity, the amount of leeway this man gets from his supporters just hurts my head. So let me ask you America, truly, what is it that you want? Because it can’t be this, can it? Protests, Riots, people refusing to wear a simple face mask to limit the spread of a deadly virus because they think it’s a fake thing that the entire world decided to get in on with WHO just to spite Trump? Teenagers carrying guns? Refugees refused asylum and kept in cages? Do you want to keep spending your savings just to go to the doctors? or do you think that ‘Patriotism’ is blindly defending your country’s flaws and clinging to archaic and outdated thinking because centuries ago your country prospered in it? I’ll tell it to you straight: America is not the greatest country in the world, it hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t know what your history books tell you; that Native Americans were fine with slaughter, that the US won WW2 with the military might they always had, that Vietnam was a moral victory, but the present day should tell you that your country is a mess, and the man who has been at the helm for 4 years will not fix it in another 4. There’s only so much of Obama’s policies he can plagiarize as his own; he has left the UN, left the Paris Agreement for cleaner air and energy and all his original campaign members have been arrested, an alarming amount of people associated with him are facing criminal charges - is that not a red flag? Don’t let your thoughts that as a patriot you have to support your country no matter what, true patriotism is not just the love of your country but the hope and strive to better it because you can love it but accept that it has flaws. I mean even I’ll admit that the UK has a lot of its own shit to deal with, doesn’t mean I hate where I live I just know it can be better. If this were anyone else, hell if this were a Democrat the Republican party would be booking them a flight to the other side of the world with the stuff Trump has done and let to continue on with afterwards, through him you went from the United States to an Absolute State and the rest of the world wonder if this will either lead to World War 3 or a Second American Civil War You don’t have to like Joe Biden, but he clearly looks like the lesser of the two evils here, and at least in 4 years time America under him won’t be on fire. If you still don’t like him someone new could be elected after, but right now you are on a downward spiral and need someone who can put you back into a stable place, that man is not Donald Trump. The man who wants to intercept mail-in voting and outcry its ‘risk’ of tampering when he himself voted by mail is not a truthful leader, the man who tried to cancel the World Health Organization when they simply asked to not call COVID a racist name that incited xenophobia after decrying cancel culture is not a moral leader, and the man who said that COVID would peter out and suggested injecting disinfectant into the lungs to combat it only to now suddenly buy out all the experimental treatment so that they can try and engineer a cure in time for the election campaign, is not a wise leader. All the stuff you see in these coming months is just an attempt to win your vote, for the most part it’ll be Trump stamping his name on something other people worked on for years and claiming that he did all the work. So make sure you actually check the truth of these things, research and fact-check yourself with valid, neutral sources. Take off the blinders, take a breath and actually see the full picture. And please, as well as not letting this man have the Nobel Peace Prize Don’t give this guy have a Second Term

#politics #political rant #let sense prevail for all our peace of mind

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yds4bds-blog · 7 years

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YBDS

Whether I become YDS Co-Chair or an At-Large member, I plan on ensuring every YDS chapter we have across the country organizes for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel on their respective campuses. YDS as the student section of DSA must be at the forefront of working on meaningful international solidarity and true intersectional work. We have the potential to do this not just through supporting Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), but providing our own organizing, skills with the understanding that repression of SJP chapters across the country is part of the general increase in repression of leftist student organizing on campus.For YDS, I want to put forth the talking points and concrete steps we need to take to achieve a successful BDS campaign on campuses across the country in continuing posts on this blog. For now, let me explain in short how it is that Israel is violating Palestinian human rights, what BDS for those who don’t know, and a summary of how YDS can champion this cause and be the socialist organization that can put a dent in longstanding American imperial policy I know we can be.

Israel is an imperial backed settler colonial project intentionally created through the ethnic cleansing of the non-Jewish Palestinian community from what is now known as Israel proper, known first as the Nakba and continuing in various forms since, including the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, continuing today. It is an ethno-nationalist state that sees it current minority Palestinian population who survived the Nakba as a “demographic threat”, while continuously engaging in acts of military brutality against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, such as Operation ‘Protective Edge’, which murdered 2000 people in what the UN recognizes as the world’s largest open air prison, including 500 children; the administrative detention of Palestinians accused of crimes in a military court, which includes 500-700 children per year, while Israeli settlers in the West Bank are tried in a separate civilian court; 2016 being the deadliest year for West Bank Palestinian children, who were killed in military raids and unarmed protests; and most recently, how Gaza is under siege by Israel and the Israel backed Palestinian Authority, with electricity cuts and bombed infrastructure creating a medical and drinking water crisis that’s set to make Gaza unlivable by next year rather than 2020 like the UN originally predicted, as well as the de facto annexation of Jerusalem by Israel that attempted to place restrictions on Palestinian Muslims and Christians entering Jerusalem, and who have just today murdered Palestinians practicing the right to protest and civil disobedience. Israel is breaking multiple international laws every day; recently a UN report by the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia was issued officially designating Israel as an apartheid state, with the head of that commission choosing to resign rather than adhere to pressure to retract the report. Israel’s apartheid wall, separate legal systems, occupation, and refusal to allow Palestinian refugees the right to return all breaks international law, and they do so with consistent US support.

BDS is a nonviolent economic resistance movement primarily aimed at targeting corporations that profit from Israeli occupation and settlements, disrupting normalization of Zionism with speakers brought on campus, and cutting United States aid to Israel, which over the next decade is set to amount to $38 billion dollars, with the overall goal being to force Israel to start complying with international human rights law. The most notable companies are HP, Sabra Hummus, Sodastream, G4S and Caterpillar, all which have business deals with colleges throughout the country. The successful BDS campaigns we’ve seen on campuses throughout the US involve deshelving those products and passing bylaws that prohibit student funds from going towards companies or products associated with Israeli occupation. We have also seen campaigns to deplatform figures such as the ambassador to Israel from giving speeches meant to act as public relations for the Israeli state. This has been smeared as a violation of free speech even as Alissa Wise, a Jewish woman was just banned from entering Israel because of her support for BDS.

My vision for YDS is students organizing for true liberation for all, and making the connection clear between US violence here and imperialism abroad. We are told there is no money for single payer for our children here while giving billions to Israel’s military that regularly hurts children abroad. Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) regularly trains US police officers, with the same tear gas canisters being used against protestors in Ferguson and Palestine. As socialists we must stand against ethno-nationalist states, against imperialism and for global socialism. I see YDS shutting down Israeli politicians the way we supported Richard Spencer getting shut down. I see YDS doing sit-ins in food courts until Sabra Hummus is off the shelves, passing out flyers on BDS around school, protesting their school board in ways that make contracts with HP too expensive/inconvenient to be worth it. I see us in YDS as standing against bills like the recent Senate proposal that would make BDS work a crime punishable by up to 20 years jail time and a $200,000 fine that none of the Turning Point USA nerds seem to think is a violation of free speech or the “free market”. I see us rejecting antisemitism and anti-Arab racism in this work to fight for a future in the region where Jews of all colors (there is much to fight against within Israel with how Mizrahi, Sephardic and Ethiopian Jews are treated as inferior to Ashkenazi Jews) and Palestinian Arabs can live side by side in peace. I see my role as learning about each YDS chapter and school that comes before me and helping to coordinate these actions, and working on a Palestine 101 and a BDS workshop as political education for its members and the general student body. I believe in us enough to know we won’t just pass that resolution on BDS and then do nothing with the excitement and momentum we’ve generated. We want to defend ourselves as being for the global oppressed and not just for white guys with beards in Brooklyn? This convention, let’s prove it.

Your comrade,

Rawan

#dsa #yds #bds

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vhalyria · 7 years

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Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump - a dangerous parity?

I’m worried. I’m so worried that I can barely sleep at night, and it’s giving me stomach cramps. Because we’ve been here before, and we need to talk about this.

So, my unprofessional, biased ass sat down for a few hours and tried to collect everything it knew about Hitler and Trump, in order to see if it’s just a bad feeling that I’m having, or if my fear is justified.

As I said, I am not a journalist or anything else, I simply did some research alongside the stuff I still remembered from my history classes and books. Sources can be seen at the end, although many of them are in german, sorry.

I won’t go much into the reasons behind Hitler’s and Trump’s behavior, because I don’t care what turned them into the people they were/are. Also, I tried to keep this as neutral as possible, only relying on facts (and no, those aren’t alternative). There are probably a few things I’ve forgotten about, but feel free to add them!

1.) Where did they come from?

Hitler: Adolf Hitler was the oldest of three siblings, born in Austria in 1889. Growing up, he started to care less and less about school and eventually dropped out without graduation. After that, he applied for a place at an art school, multiple times, but got rejected every time. He has spent a few years in poverty until he joined the army in WWI. After that, he joined the NSDAP and eventually became their leader. The rest should be known.

Trump: Donald Trump was born in 1976, as the fourth of five children. His father, the son of german immigrants, was a real estate businessman. After graduating from High School, Trump studied economics and eventually took on his father’s business. He joined the Republicans in 1987, and became their candidate for the election in 2015.

2.) How was it possible for them to become so popular/get voted?

Hitler: Hitler made the people like him because he was using their anger and their fears for his own means. After WWI, Germany was financially and socially destroyed. The Treaty of Versaille asked them to pay a lot of money for reparation, they had to reduce their military force to an absolute minimum and due to the high sanctions and the new yorker stock crash, an inflation came over the country, causing many people to lose their homes and all their savings. The people were scared about their future and felt betrayed by the government, because it was them who had to pay for everything. Radical groups arised and Hitler not only recognized those fears; he built his policy on them. He promised to create many new jobs, that the countries that won the war will pay them back because they were the guilty ones in his eyes, that no one will have to be homeless and hungry anymore. He promised to take revenge on those countries, even if that meant starting another war. Hitler promised to “give Germany its pride back”, and people believed him.

Trump: The rich are getting richer, the poor are losing what little they have left. That’s how people in the US felt when Trump got voted. They didn’t trust their government, even having multiple jobs wasn’t enough to pay the rent anymore and on top of that, terrorists kill people all over the world. The citizens were afraid and worried, they wanted to find a way out of their misery and feel safe. And that’s what Trump promised to provide them; he promised to make “America great again”, to create work for the american people so that no one has to be poor anymore. He said he would lead the fight against terrorism, and his people wouldn’t have to be scared anymore. Trump promised “America comes first”, and the people believed him.

3.) Personality traits that made people like them

Hitler: The one thing that every history book and every documentation about Hitler never leave out; he was a great rhetoritian. He was able to inspire to people, to make them believe everything, to cheer for anything he says. He was confident and determined.

Another thing that made him popular, was that he gave his people someone else to blame for their misery than themselves or the government; the jews. According to Hitler, they were at fault for everything bad that has ever happened in Germany, and people felt comforted by that thought. It takes the blame from them by assigning it to someone else; it made living easier.

By that, Hitler also managed to make the germans feel like a community; united by hate towards a minority, but united, still. He fed them the illusion that he would lead them to wealth and happiness, and that everything will be turning out greatly for them, as long as they’re supporting him.

Trump: Trump is a rich man, someone who calls himself a successful businessman. He made it to the top, and that inspired the people. He makes the American Dream seem still alive, and on top of that, he promises that he will be the one to lead the United States into a bright future, with lots of work, wealth and unity. He is a confident person and by talking like the common people, he makes them feel like they could relate to him. Like Hitler, he uses the fear of the people and unites them in hate towards minorities; the mexicans are to blame, the people of color and the muslims. They are the reason for misery in the US, but he can change that, he can throw these people out of the country and “make America great again”.

4.) A list of the exact things they promised:

Hitler:

- “Deutschland über alles” (”Germany above everything”)

- to overturn the Treaty of Versailles and stop reparation payment

- to “give Germany its pride back”

- to re-arm Germany and to enlarge their military force

- to create jobs (by expanding the army)

- a strong government and stability

- a better life for the lower and the middle class

- to make Germany “a power country” again

Trump:

- “America First”

- “Make America great again”

- to cancel Obamacare to reduce costs

- to build a wall to Mexico

- to send immigrants back to their countries so that american citizens can have their jobs

- to send troops back into war zones and to enlarge the military force

- banishment of muslims

- tax reduction

- to bring back manufacturing jobs

- to step back from several international trading agreements

- to lead the fight against ISIS

5.) Foreign policy

Hitler: Hitler wanted Germany to become a global leading power again and to expand the german territory. He worked on an intense connection to fascist Italy, while he had an anti-russia policy. Promised other countries freedom while already planning to take over Europe, Hitler eventually declared war to Poland, which led to WWII.

Trump: Trumps goals when it comes to foreign policy are to work together closely with Russia, to step back from several international trade agreements, to impose penalties on several branches of import, to fight against ISIS and to support Israel in their conflict with Palestine, to name a few of the endless plans he talked about

6.) The role and value of women

Hitler: Hitlers policy understood women as barely more than birth machines. His propaganda made it look like being mother to (the more, the better) aryan children is the best thing to ever happen to a woman. It was socially unacceptable for a woman to go to work, they needed to stay at home to look after the children and to keep the house clean for their husbands. Women were a thing to be owned, their opinion didn’t matter. Emancipation was seen as something “evil” that the jews brought into Germany.

Trump: Trump treats woman without respect and like a thing to be owned. According to him, a woman’s worth it determined by her attractiveness and they should feel honored when he gropes them or makes obscene comments about them. Trumps policy is anti-abortion, he wants to take the right to decide over their bodies and lives away from american women.

7.) The treatment of minorities

Hitler: Hitler used the jews as scapegoats for everything bad that happened. It was their fault that people lived in poverty, that women wanted to have a say about their lives, that germany lost the war etc. His party supported and encouraged violence against jewish people (the ”Kristallnacht”, for example), and they got socially seperated from the rest of the society. Sad peek of Hitler’s anti semitism was the torture and killing of millions of jews, within Germany and from other countries, in concentration camps. Over six million jews had to die.

Homosexuals and people with disabilities often got the same treatment.

Trump: Not only once did Trump say what he thinks about Mexicans; they are rapists, criminals, they’re bringing drugs and misery into his country. “Some sure are nice, though.”, he says. He’s using them the same way Hitler used the jews; he blames them for everything. They are stealing jobs from americans, they are endangering the public safety, all they do is create chaos and crimes.

His opinion about people of color isn’t better; he stated that he doesn’t support the Black Lives Matter Movement. “If Black lives matter, go back to Africa”, is what he said. He also believes that racism would not exist anymore. On several occasions he has encouraged his supporters to verbal and physical attacks towards people of color. He also claims that the era of slavery was a good time for the US and ignores police brutality towards poc’s.

Trump wants to ban muslims from entering/staying in the US. As we all know he already tried to do that a few days ago, but fortunately, a court declared his action to not be legal. Trump also made fun of people with disabilities.

8.) How they deal with the media

Hitler: Adolf Hitler knew how to use the media for himself. “The press is an instrument for education to bring 70 million people to an unified world view”, is one of the things he said. The principle was easy; every newspaper or radio station that wasn’t supporting him by reporting what he wanted them to report about, got banned. Resisting journalists and leader of companies got fired and also arrested in some cases. Hitlers party used the media for their propaganda, freedom of speech and press didn’t mean anything anymore.

Trump: Trump hates the media. While he enjoys the attention given to him, he can’t deal with negative reports. He calls those journalists “liars”, claims that they are spreading “alternate facts”, that only his point of view is the truth. Trumps party sees journalists as “part of the opposition”, and says they should “just shut up and listen”. Apparently, there were already plans made to ban the press from the White House. During Trump’s inauguration, the first journalists already got arrested.

(Personal) Conclusion:

Their differences:

- Hitler knew how to make the media work for him, Trump doesn’t (yet)

- Trump grew up wealthy and with academic success, Hitler grew up poorly and dropped out of school without graduation

- Trump’s politic is pro-russia, Hitler’s was anti-russia

- Hitler wanted to expand the german territory while Trump want to build a wall

- Hitler’s policy aimed to start a war

And, most importantly:

Their similarities:

- Power hungry, radical, racist, misogynistic

- use prejudices against minorities, support violence against them

- “America First” and “Germany above everything” are the same damn thing

- Unite people through hate

- mainly voted by people who aren’t wealthy, scared for their future

- creating jobs by extending the military, taking “stolen” jobs “back” from immigrants/women

- wanting their countries to be the first in everything, don’t care what it takes

- against freedom of speech and press

- enforcement of military power, getting ready for war

- give their people a minority to blame for all the existing misery

- aggressive, short tempered, determined

- no respect for human life

I don’t know about you, but I think this is terrifying.

Like I said, I have probably forgotten about a lot. Feel free to add!

Sources: x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x

#never again is now #donald trump #adolf hitler #anti donald trump #trump and hitler #tw holocaust #tw hitler #tw antisemitism #tw racism #politics #comparison #i needed to get this out #we need to talk about this #also i'm not an expert so let me live please #now i'm too sad to continue staying awake #good night

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xtruss · 3 years

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Is Coming to Where It Belongs, the U.S

— Philip Weiss | June 2, 2021

I’m grateful to Joe Biden for what he said about his commitment to Israel at a press conference on May 21.

“Until the region says unequivocally they acknowledge the right of Israel to exist as an independent Jewish state, there will be no peace.”

Wait, that sounds like a threat. And I thought Biden wanted to end U.S. involvement in forever wars in the Middle East. No: We will continue to pour weapons into your region and bomb neighboring countries till you accept Israel as a Jewish state.

Not so different from Trump last year: “The fact is, we don’t have to be in the Middle East, other than we want to protect Israel.”

I’m grateful because Biden and Trump’s comments speak to a root cause of this conflict: American support for the project of a Jewish state in Palestine. Without that imperial support, Israel and the Palestinians would have come to terms many years ago. With superpower support, the little Jewish state has punched way above its weight forever. It has gotten immunity for all its war crimes in international forums, including the settlements and regular slaughters in Gaza. Lately it has gotten the support of some Arab nations, too – bribed by the United States to support Israel, just like we bribe Egypt and Jordan. And by the way, Israel got nuclear weapons 50+ years ago thanks to the U.S., nukes that only increase its power to defy its neighbors and oppress the non-Jewish subjects of the Jewish state.

Is it in the “American interest” to support a Jewish state – with the threat of war – in a land where half the people don’t want a Jewish state? Of course it isn’t.

It goes against our “moral” and democratic claim that we oppose colonialism and believe in the self-determination of peoples. It goes against our material interest, in stability and trade.

Supporting Israel has required massive expenditures of arms and diplomatic capital and belligerence that I don’t care how cynical or leftwing you are, do not serve any notion of imperial interest. Truman’s secretary of state said he wouldn’t vote for Truman if he recognized Israel, as doing so would plunge the Middle East into turmoil for decades to come; and 73 years on, Biden assumes the Truman role and says, Oh, let the decades of unrest continue.

So we are back to root causes. Why is it American policy to support a project of a Jewish state in a land where half the people do not like that concept? Why is it a Democratic president’s policy? I answer that question as I have before: Because of the importance of the Israel lobby in the Democratic Party – those Jewish organizations that are mouthpieces for Israel and have carte blanche to come in and out of the White House, because the Democratic Party is so dependent on Israel-supporting donors. The elephant in the room, per the New York Times. Like Lyndon Johnson letting Israel get nukes when he was so dependent on the Krims.

That is what has changed this week. That is the great news of the last Israeli onslaught on Gaza. There is finally someone else at the Democratic table beside the Israel lobby: the progressive left, led by the Squad, people who support nonviolent means of ending apartheid; and their presence is what is driving a wedge in the Democratic Party. That movement is what will change American policy.

A new Arab American Institute poll shows that more than half of Democrats have a favorable view of Palestinians (51 percent) but only 46 percent have a favorable view of Israelis. That’s a shift. And by 43 to 16, Democrats say that Israel used “too much force” in Gaza lately, as opposed to the “right” amount of force.

Those numbers are why Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez are stepping away from Israel.

The Israel lobby is terrified by the prospect that Israel will finally be politicized, and progressive Democrats will get a say. This is truly an “existential threat” to Israel.

“This [wedge factor] is very bad news for Israel and for the Jewish people. Israel and Biden must urgently collaborate to defuse it,” an Israeli businessman laments in Tom Friedman’s column the other day. That’s how the lobby works: an Israeli tells us how to conduct our politics, given the platform by a nakedly pro-Israel columnist who says the U.S. must preserve the Jewish state for the sake of “world Jewry.”

It isn’t working this time. The lobby is losing its hold inside the Democratic Party because of the reality, the fact that Israel’s only answer to Gaza being a ghetto for refugees is to massacre civilians for the fifth time in the last 12 years. It is now inevitable, given the “Jewish state”‘s rightward shift and indifference to Palestinian rights, that a block of the Democratic Party will come out for BDS targeting Israel. Because that’s how you deal with an apartheid state, You boycott it. And to be sure: there are plenty of young Jews in that progressive block.

Tom Friedman is upset and warns that the “one state reality” is going to “blow up” the Democratic Party, and every Jewish organization and congregation. (Tom Friedman who has a multimillion-dollar foundation in the U.S. and a nice American life but supports the 30-year-long bait-and-switch to Palestinians of a “two-state solution” so that “world Jewry” will keep its fantasy of a Jewish refuge nearly 6000 miles away.)

But what goes around comes around. This conflict has been cultivated by the superpower, and that conflict will come to the United States before it is resolved. The Democratic Party must divide — and come together — over this question. The Jewish community must break up, and abandon its longtime policy of “We are one” with Israel.

There are many signs that these changes are happening, including the large protests in the U.S. and Free Palestine banners where we never saw them before. And the puerile hysteria from Israel supporters over the New York Times daring to publish the photos of slain Palestinian children.

Joe Biden has two good reasons to try to staunch these politics, 2022 and 2024. Israel and Palestine are the graveyards of presidencies. Jimmy Carter thought he got only one term because he took on Israel (writes his Jewish liaison Stu Eizenstat). George H.W. Bush evidently had the same regret, for taking on settlements in 1991– and as Tom Friedman said, Republicans vowed never to be out-Israel’d again. Barack Obama spent eight years having to listen to Benjamin Netanyahu lecture him about Jerusalem. “You’re fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day,” he famously told the French president with a hot mic.

In public, though, Obama went along with Netanyahu’s lie that he wanted to create a Palestinian state. Now Obama hand Ben Rhodes confesses that he feels ashamed about that.

“We pretended to my shame at times in the Obama administration that he was interested in that. When I don’t think he was, ever.”

It was an important lie. World powers had come up with a plan 30 years ago to resolve the conflict by establishing two states, and Israel destroyed the plan; and American presidents and columnists too protected Israel from the fallout.

Now the consequences are inescapable, apartheid, and world opinion is moving toward new ideas, democracy and equal rights in the entire land (as even Carnegie says). A significant portion of the Democratic Party will come out for equality before long.

Tom Friedman is sloppy but he’s shrewd, and when he says the one state reality is going to “blow up” things in America, the darkness is meaningful.

Every phase of Israel’s existence has been marked by the violence of a settler colonial state unwanted by many of its subjects. Israel has had a dozen or so wars, and its visions of its future are not idealistic. Conflict is “the price we pay to be home. And it’s the price we’ll continue to pay if we have to,” Daniel Gordis says. So Israel brutalizes children merely for flying a Palestinian flag.

Israel has often exported that violence. To Egypt in the Lavon affair in the 50s, to Iraq and the Baghdad synagogue attacks in that era, to the U.S.S. Liberty in international waters in ’67, to a terrorism campaign in Lebanon in the 80s,to the killing of 10 Turks on the Mavi Marmara in the Mediterranean in 2010. To the killings of Iranian scientists inside Iran in recent years.

The last time Zionists had a colonial minder with misgivings, they carried out many terrorist acts against the British. They blew up the King David hotel, they assassinated the British minister Lord Moyne in 1944 for his opposition to a Jewish state, and an Israeli prime minister later bluntly justified the assassination. They killed idealists in their own ranks, from Chaim Arlosoroff to Jacob de Haan, and they killed the U.N. mediator in 1948 because he wanted to internationalize Jerusalem.

Israel and its lobby will not give up lying down on the historical dream of a Jewish state. They have come to believe that this is the way to keep Jews safe, and they are willing to fight for that delusion. The outcry over the spike in antisemitism in our country is a symptom of this attachment. The pro-Israel community is thinskinned and pugilistic. And now it is now aroused by “virulent anti-Zionism” — the mere portraits of its victims in the New York Times.

The Algerian colonial war was resolved in the colonial power. The war ended after the violence went to France, and the politics of France changed. I believe that is an eventuality here, as the Democratic Party becomes the latest “existential threat” to the Jewish state.

Which makes me even more dedicated to the nonviolent campaign to change Israel’s racist policies: BDS. Some day, even Joe Biden will come around.

— Source: Mondoweiss

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studentofrhetoric-blog · 7 years

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Part 2, Monday, April 17th, 2017

International News:

--- "Mothers Noha, a Shi'ite, and Samira, a Sunni, were besieged for nearly two years on each side of Syria's civil war. At the weekend they finally escaped the suffocating blockades under an evacuation agreement - but their ordeal was not over. As they waited at two transit points miles apart outside Aleppo, a bomb attack hit Noha's bus convoy, killing more than 120 people including dozens of children. After ambulances rushed off the wounded, new buses arrived and the two convoys eventually reached their destinations - one in government territory and the other in rebel territory. In the hours leading up to Saturday's attacks, the two women spoke to Reuters about what they had left behind, their families being split up, and the likelihood they would never return home. Reuters was not allowed back past security to try to find Noha after the blast, and lost contact with Samira after speaking to her earlier on another evacuee's phone. "We've lost everything. We hope to go back one day, but I don't expect we will," said Noha, 45, asking not to be identified by her last name. Noha left al-Foua, one of two Shi'ite villages besieged by Syrian insurgents in Idlib province with her two youngest children and 5,000 other people under a deal between the Syrian government and armed opposition. In exchange, 2,000 Sunni residents and rebel fighters from the government-besieged town of Madaya near Damascus - Samira's hometown - were given safe passage out, and bussed to Idlib province, a rebel stronghold, via Aleppo."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-displaced-idUSKBN17J0ZJ?il=0

--- "Hundreds of Palestinians in Israeli jails began a hunger strike on Monday in response to a call by prominent prisoner Marwan Barghouti, widely seen as a possible future Palestinian president. Palestinians termed the open-ended strike a protest against poor conditions and an Israeli policy of detention without trial that has been applied against thousands since the 1980s. Israel said the move by the prisoners, many of whom were convicted of attacks or planning attacks against Israel, was politically motivated. The protest was led by Barghouti, 58, a leader of the mainstream Fatah movement of the Palestine Liberation Organization, serving five life terms after being convicted of murder in the killing of Israelis in a 2000-2005 uprising. The strike, if sustained, could present a challenge to Israel and raise tensions between the two sides as the 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip approaches in June. Israeli troops and settlers pulled out of the Gaza Strip, now run by Hamas Islamists, in 2005, but peace talks on the creation of a Palestinian state collapsed with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2014."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-prisoners-idUSKBN17J0XZ?il=0

--- "Islamic State is talking to al Qaeda about a possible alliance as Iraqi troops close in on IS fighters in Mosul, Iraqi Vice President Ayad Allawi said in an interview on Monday. Allawi said he got the information on Monday from Iraqi and regional contacts knowledgeable about Iraq. "The discussion has started now," Allawi said. "There are discussions and dialogue between messengers representing Baghdadi and representing Zawahiri," referring to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi and Ayman al Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda. Islamic State split from al Qaeda in 2014 and the two groups have since waged an acrimonious battle for recruits, funding and the mantle of global jihad. Zawahiri has publicly criticized Islamic State for its brutal methods, which have included beheadings, drownings and immolation. It is unclear how exactly the two group may work together, Allawi said."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-islamic-state-idUSKBN17J1DT?il=0

--- "Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron urged French voters on Monday to turn the page on the last 20 years and bring a new generation to power, as he stepped up attacks against resurgent far-left and conservative rivals six days before voting day.Presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron urged French voters on Monday to turn the page on the last 20 years and bring a new generation to power, as he stepped up attacks against resurgent far-left and conservative rivals six days before voting day. Macron, a 39-year-old pro-EU centrist who would become the youngest French leader since Napoleon if elected, said recent leaders had betrayed the post-war generation which had rebuilt the country, leaving France unreformed and sclerotic. "What has been proposed to the French in the last 20 years is not liberation or reconstruction, but a slow, unavowed acceptation of unemployment, state impotence and social breakdown," he told a cheering crowd of at least 18,000 people in the Bercy arena in Paris. Investors are glued to the outcome of France's most unpredictable election in decades. Polls suggest growing numbers of voters are turning away from mainstream parties because of disenchantment with the establishment and frustration at years of economic malaise."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-macron-idUSKBN17J1J0?il=0

--- "Far-right leader Marine Le Pen on Sunday sought to mobilize her supporters six days ahead of France's most unpredictable presidential election in decades by pledging to suspend all immigration and shield voters from "savage globalization." Opinion polls have for months shown Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron qualifying on Sunday for the May 7 run-off, but the gap with conservative Francois Fillon and far-leftist Jean-Luc Melenchon has been tightening. "I will protect you. My first measure as president will be to reinstate France's borders," Le Pen said to wide applause and cheers from the crowd of about 5,000, prompting the National Front's (FN) traditional "This is our home!" chant. Slamming her rivals, whom she said wanted "savage globalization," she said hers was the camp of patriots. "The choice on Sunday is simple," she said. "It is a choice between a France that is rising again and a France that is sinking." While no polls have shown Le Pen missing out on the run-off, they are now within the margin of error and any two of the four top candidates have a shot at qualifying. Polls have consistently shown her losing that second round."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-election-pen-idUSKBN17J1FU?il=0

--- "Turkey extended its state of emergency on Monday by three months starting from Wednesday, its third such extension after a coup attempt last July, a deputy prime minister said. The decision came after the National Security Council advised extending it, Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus told reporters in a press conference in Ankara."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-emergency-pm-idUSKBN17J1MU?il=0

--- "U.S. Vice President Mike Pence told business leaders in Seoul on Tuesday that the Trump administration will review and reform the five-year-old free trade agreement between the two countries. Pence said the U.S. trade deficit has more than doubled in the five years since the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement began and there are too many barriers for U.S. businesses in the country. Pence's meeting in Seoul with business leaders comes before he heads to Tokyo later on Tuesday, where he will meet Japan's Finance Minister Taro Aso and kick off talks that Washington hopes will open doors for U.S.-made products. U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to narrow big trade deficits with nations like China and Japan, saying he would boost U.S. manufacturing jobs. "That's the hard truth," Pence told an American Chamber of Commerce meeting in Seoul. "We have to be honest about where our trade relationship is falling short", said Pence, adding the Trump administration would work with businesses on reforms."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-usa-pence-idUSKBN17K01C?il=0

--- "U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Tuesday the United States was eager to strengthen its trade relations with Japan, after meeting his Japanese counterpart in Tokyo. Asked about a possible free trade agreement, Ross told reporters: "It's a little bit early to say just what forms things will take, but we are certainly eager to increase our trade relationships with Japan and to do so in the form of an agreement." He added: "We made good progress in terms of establishing the overall issues and frame of reference for continuing dialogue." Japanese Trade Minister Hiroshige Seko, also speaking after their meeting, told reporters he had a "detailed, frank and practical" discussion with Ross. Separately, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will meet with Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso on Tuesday, kicking off talks in Tokyo that the White House hopes will open doors in Japan for U.S. products and attract Japanese investment in U.S. infrastructure projects."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pence-asia-japan-ross-idUSKBN17K08U?il=0

--- "U.S. Marines began arriving in Australia's tropical north on Tuesday for a six-month deployment during which they will conduct exercises with Australian and visiting Chinese forces. The 25-year annual deployment program started by former U.S. President Barack Obama in 2011 is part of the U.S. "pivot" to Asia at a time of increased assertiveness by China. "I think that the commitment that we've taken to put a task force here with a conversation to get larger over the years says that we do think this is an important region," said Marines' commander Lieutenant Colonel Brian Middleton after the first troops arrived in Darwin in the Northern Territory. "Being close to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, the Indo Pacific position has always been important." Middleton said the marines would conduct an "important exercise alongside our Chinese partners" and Australia. The strength of this year's deployment at 1,250 troops lags well behind the initial plan for the deployment to reach 2,500 Marines this year, but it will see the largest U.S. aircraft contingent to Australia in peacetime history."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-usa-defence-idUSKBN17K09N?il=0

--- "Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Tuesday diplomatic means must be used to resolve tensions on the Korean peninsula, where North Korea has vowed to continue with its nuclear and missile programs in defiance of U.N. sanctions. Wang, speaking at a news conference in Beijing, urged all sides to find a peaceful solution."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-usa-china-idUSKBN17K093?il=0

Domestic & International News:

--- "Advisers to President Donald Trump will meet on Tuesday to discuss whether to recommend that he withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, a White House official said on Monday. The accord, agreed on by nearly 200 countries in Paris in 2015, aims to limit planetary warming in part by slashing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Under the pact, the United States committed to reducing its emissions by 26 to 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. Trump has said the United States should "cancel" the deal, but he has been mostly quiet on the issue since he was elected last November. Environmental groups want Washington to remain in the Paris agreement, even if the new administration weakens U.S. pledges. A White House official said Trump's aides would "discuss the options, with the goal of providing a recommendation to the president about the path forward." The meeting comes before a summit of the Group of Seven wealthy nations in late May, the deadline for the White House to take a position. White House officials, led by the National Economic Council, have recently been asking publicly traded energy companies for advice on whether to stay in the agreement."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-climatechange-idUSKBN17J1DN?il=0

--- "U.S. President Donald Trump called Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan to congratulate him on winning a referendum expanding his authority, sources in Erdogan's palace said on Monday. Turkey voted on Sunday to switch to a presidential system, greatly increasing Erdogan's powers. Unofficial results, which the opposition said it would challenge, showed a narrow victory for him with 51.4 percent of votes cast in favor."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-election-usa-idUSKBN17J1M3?il=0

--- "On his first trip as U.S defense secretary to parts of the Middle East and Africa, Jim Mattis will focus on the fight against Islamic State and articulating President Donald Trump's policy toward Syria, officials and experts say. His trip may give clarity to adversaries and allies alike about the Trump administration's tactics in the fight against Islamic State militants and its willingness to use military power more liberally than former President Barack Obama did. One of the main questions from allies about Syria is whether Washington has formulated a strategy to prevent areas seized from militants from collapsing into ethnic and sectarian feuds or succumbing to a new generation of extremism, as parts of Iraq and Afghanistan have done since the U.S. invaded them. U.S.-backed forces are fighting to retake the Islamic State strongholds of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and questions remain about what will happen after that and what role other allies such as Saudi Arabia, can play. There are signs that Trump has given the U.S. military more latitude to use force, including ordering a cruise missile strike against a Syrian air base and cheering the unprecedented use of a monster bomb against an Islamic State target in Afghanistan last week...Arriving in the region on Tuesday, his stops include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and Israel."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-mideast-mattis-idUSKBN17J1RA?il=0

--- "U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday will sign an executive order directing federal agencies to recommend changes to a temporary visa program used to bring foreign workers to the United States to fill high-skilled jobs. Two senior Trump administration officials who briefed reporters at the White House said Trump will also use the "buy American and hire American" order to seek changes in government procurement practices to increase the purchase of American products in federal contracts. Trump is to sign the order when he visits the world headquarters of Snap-On Inc, a tool manufacturer in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The order is an attempt by Trump to carry out his "America First" campaign pledges to reform U.S. immigration policies and encourage purchases of American products. As he nears the 100-day benchmark of his presidency, Trump has no major legislative achievements to tout but has used executive orders to seek regulatory changes to help the U.S. economy. The order he will sign on Tuesday will call for "the strict enforcement of all laws governing entry into the United States of labor from abroad for the stated purpose of creating higher wages and higher employment rates for workers in the United States," one of the senior officials said. It will call on the departments of Labor, Justice, Homeland Security and State to take action to crack down on what the official called "fraud and abuse" in the U.S. immigration system to protect American workers."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-visa-idUSKBN17K02U?il=0

Domestic News:

--- "President Donald Trump's appointee Neil Gorsuch on Monday showed himself to be a frequent and energetic questioner during U.S. Supreme Court arguments in his first day hearing cases as a justice, at one point even apologizing for talking too much. Gorsuch, whose confirmation to the lifetime job restored the court's conservative majority, exhibited composure and confidence, sitting on the far right of the bench in the ornate courtroom, alongside liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor. He appeared relaxed, gingerly sipping from a disposable coffee cup. The justices, with the exception of the usually silent Clarence Thomas, are known for their aggressive questioning, and Gorsuch showed no qualms about jumping right in. Eight times during the course of three one-hour arguments Gorsuch peppered attorneys with a series of pointed questions...The Coloradoan came across as temperamentally different from the sometimes hard-edged New Yorker Scalia, offering respectful but firm questioning even when the lawyer facing his queries seemed evasive."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gorsuch-idUSKBN17J0NZ?il=0

--- "Mini motorcycle and go-kart maker Monster Moto made a big bet on U.S. manufacturing by moving assembly to this Louisiana town in 2016 from China. But it will be a long ride before it can stamp its products "Made in USA." The loss of nearly one out four U.S. factories in the last two decades means parts for its bike frames and engines must be purchased in China, where the manufacturing supply chain moved years ago. "There's just no way to source parts in America right now," said Monster Moto Chief Executive Alex Keechle during a tour of the company's assembly plant. "But by planting the flag here, we believe suppliers will follow." Monster Moto's experience is an example of the obstacles American companies face as they, along with President Donald Trump, try to rebuild American manufacturing. U.S. automakers and their suppliers, for example, have already invested billions in plants abroad and would face an expensive and time-consuming transition to buy thousands of American-made parts if President Trump’s proposed “border tax” on imported goods were to become law. When companies reshore assembly to U.S. soil – in Monster Moto’s case that took two years to find a location and negotiate support from local and state officials – they are betting their demand will create a local supply chain that currently does not exist...Their experience has shown Americans’ patriotic shopping habits have limits, namely when it comes to price. Take Monster Moto's bikes, which sell for between $249 to $749. Keechle, the CEO, says he can’t raise those prices for fear his price sensitive prospective customers will turn to less expensive rivals made in China. "Consumers won't give you a free pass just because you put 'Made in USA' on the box," Keechle says. "You have to remain price competitive."Keeping a sharp eye on labor costs in their factory is one thing these U.S. manufactures can control. They see replacing primarily lower-skilled workers on the assembly line with robots on American factory floors as the only way to produce here in a financially viable, cost-competitive way. It’s a trend that runs against the narrative candidate Donald Trump used to win the U.S. Presidency."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-manufacturing-suppliers-idUSKBN17J0SY?il=0

--- "U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the Trump administration's timetable for tax reform is set to falter following setbacks in negotiations with Congress over healthcare, the Financial Times reported on Monday. Mnuchin told the Financial Times in an interview that the target to get tax reforms through Congress and on President Donald Trump's desk before August was "highly aggressive to not realistic at this point". "It is fair to say it is probably delayed a bit because of the healthcare," Mnuchin told the newspaper. Mnuchin also told the Financial Times he agreed with Trump's view that the dollar's strength in the short term was hurting exports, but said he saw the currency's strength over the long term as a positive. "As the world's currency, the primary reserve currency, I think that over long periods of time the strength of the dollar is a good thing," the Financial Times quoted Mnuchin as saying. Trump has signaled he wants to streamline the income tax system, cut federal regulations, reduce corporate income tax and add new taxes to prod companies to keep or move production to the United States."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-mnuchin-idUSKBN17J1LZ?il=0

--- "An Illinois lawmaker on Monday introduced a bill to ban the forcible removal of travelers from flights by state or local government employees after a United Airlines passenger was dragged from an aircraft last week. The Airline Passenger Protection Act, sponsored by Republican state Representative Peter Breen, came after Dr. David Dao, 69, was pulled from a United flight at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport to make space for four crew members. The treatment of Dao sparked international outrage, as well as multiple apologies from the carrier, and raised questions about the overbooking policies of airlines. Under Breen's measure, passengers could not be removed from flights unless they were presenting a danger to themselves or others, an emergency was taking place or the passenger had caused a serious disturbance, according to a copy of the bill introduced in the state capital, Springfield. "A commercial airline that removes validly seated customers without serious cause breaches the sacred trust between passengers and their airlines," the bill said. The legislation would also bar the state of Illinois from making travel arrangements, doing business with or having investments in any commercial airline that maintained a policy of removing paying passengers to make room for employees traveling on non-revenue tickets."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-illinois-airlines-ual-idUSKBN17J1JX?il=0

#international affairs #domestic affairs #source: reuters

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newstwitter-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on News Twitter

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CNN: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu meet at White House

Those were the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he dismissed last month’s Mideast peace conference in Paris as “useless,” instead focusing on the inauguration of US President Donald Trump just days later.

This new world, one both Trump and Netanyahu hope to create from what they see as the ruins of the previous presidency, will include not only the future relationship between Israel and the United States but the renewal of ties after eight years of perceived mutual loathing under President Barack Obama.

Netanyahu, enraged by the move, has made no secret of his dislike for Obama while championing the arrival of Trump.

“We have known each other for years, but this will be his first meeting since being elected as President of the United States and mine as Prime Minister of Israel,” Netanyahu said at this week’s Cabinet meeting.

The Iran deal, the peace process and the constant speculation over moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem are all likely to be on the agenda.

Here’s how the two men shape up on the big talking points ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.

Iran

Netanyahu’s view:

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — or Iran Deal — was inked in 2015. According to officials, the agreement extends the time it would take for Tehran to develop a nuclear weapon from two months to more than a year.

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany agreed to the deal that saw sanctions eased on Iran in return.

Netanyahu lobbied hard against the deal that sought to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, saying the agreement would only pave “Iran’s path to the bomb.” He presented his case before the UN General Assembly and went behind President Barack Obama’s back to present it to the United States Congress.

But as he has made clear on a number of occasions, Netanyahu sees Iran as an existential threat, hell bent on the destruction of Israel.

READ: Rouhani warns Iran will not be bullied

Trump’s view:

Netanyahu believes he has found an ally in Trump, who has been an outspoken critic of the Iran Deal, calling it “one of the worst deals ever.”

The new US President has already slapped sanctions on Tehran for a ballistic missile test but neither he nor Netanyahu have offered a clear alternative to the deal.

Members of Trump’s administration also have urged caution on scrapping the deal. During his confirmation hearings, Defense Secretary James Mattis said: “When America gives her word, we have to live up to it and work with our allies.”

Trump faces a conundrum whereby European allies want the deal to remain in place, while Israel wants a harder line.

Settlements

Netanyahu’s view:

One issue on which Israel virtually stands alone is settlements — the Israeli cities, towns and communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“On the issue of settlements, no one takes more care than me and the Likud government,” the Prime Minister said at his weekly Cabinet meeting on January 22.

“We will continue to take care of (the settlements) with wisdom and responsibility for the benefit of the settlements and the state of Israel.”

Six thousand new settler homes as well as a brand new settlement have been announced by Israel in the last four weeks.

The international community condemns settlements as illegal, which Israel disputes. Previous US presidents have described settlements as an “obstacle to peace.”

Last December, the UN Security Council issued its strongest condemnation to date, saying settlements have “no legal validity” and “constitute a flagrant violation of international law.” The US, which has veto power, abstained from the vote.

Following the decision, Israel accused the US and the Obama administration of betrayal.

Trump’s view:

In Trump, Israel hopes it will find a slightly more sympathetic ear.

Trump has previously donated to a settlement, Beit El, and nominated pro-settlement figure, David Friedman, to be the next US ambassador to Israel.

But in the last fortnight, the Trump administration has begun to make noises suggesting it wants Israel to put the brakes on settlement activity, calling recent expansion announcements “not helpful.”

In a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper, Trump described himself as “not somebody that believes that going forward with … settlements is a good thing for peace.”

But the pro-settler movement in Israel remains buoyant. Israel’s Knesset just passed a law, known as the Regulation Law, which serves to legalize many dozens of settler outposts built on private Palestinian land.

The law is now expected to be contested in Israel’s Supreme Court.

Peace process

Netanyahu’s view:

The bedrock of the peace process, as understood by the international community, is the two-state solution.

Successive US presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have supported this goal.

Equally, both Israelis and Palestinians have expressed their commitment to two states living side by side.

“In my vision of peace, there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbor’s security and existence,” said Netanyahu at Bar Ilan University in 2009.

Fast-forward to 2017 and many in the international community wonder whether Netanyahu’s actions on settlements mean he has any intention to stick to that position.

But Israel’s Prime Minister rejects such criticism. He says blame for the failure to move the peace process forward lies with the Palestinians and their refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Trump’s view:

Trump has called a successful resolution of the peace process “the ultimate deal.” But it’s eluded US presidents since the founding of the state of Israel almost 70 years ago.

He says he wants his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner to lead his diplomatic efforts in the region. But Kushner is untested in foreign policy and a largely unknown quantity in the Middle East.

Any efforts to broker peace will come up against entrenched positions.

Israel’s far right now talks openly about annexing the West Bank, a threat which Palestinians are taking seriously.

In response to the passing of the Regulation Law on settler outposts, Saeb Erekat, the Secretary General of PLO’s Executive Committee said: “All Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine are illegal and a war crime regardless of any law passed by the Israeli Parliament or any decision taken by any Israeli judge. The Israeli settlement enterprise negates peace and the possibility of the two-state solution.”

US Embassy

Netanyahu’s view:

It was only last month while speaking to his Cabinet that Netanyahu made the clearest declaration yet on the embassy question telling ministers: “Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, and it is proper that not only should the American Embassy be here, but all embassies should come here.”

If the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem, it would be seen as effectively recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

Such a move would overturn 70 years of international consensus, that Jerusalem’s status should be settled in a final peace agreement, and, some argue, would effectively signal the end of moves to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

As far as the international community is concerned, East Jerusalem is the capital of a future Palestinian state.

READ: Why moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is so controversial

Trump’s view:

During his campaign, Trump pledged to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but he appears to be tapping the brakes.

He hinted that the prospect of moving the embassy’s location would be part of a great peace deal but gave little specifics in an interview published by Israel Hayom on February 10. This is more in line with previous White House administrations, which have all exercised the presidential waiver over the 1995 Act of Congress which calls for the embassy to be moved.

“The embassy is not an easy decision. It has obviously been out there for many, many years, and nobody has wanted to make that decision,” said Trump. “I’m thinking about it very seriously, and we will see what happens.”

Significantly, in addition to being popular among many Israelis, Trump is also riding a wave of popularity among many Arab leaders, who felt neglected by the Obama administration.

These countries are urging Trump not to make a unilateral decision, fearing unrest on the streets throughout the Middle East.

Also important is the fact that Israel and a number of its Arab neighbors have enjoyed a warming of relations in recent years, built around a common enemy, Iran. This backroom diplomacy would likely take a hit if the US Embassy changed its address.

Syria

Netanyahu’s view:

Israel has been keeping a close eye on Syria’s six-year civil war from across the border in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights — which the international community considers to be occupied territory.

“I don’t know if we can resolve (the Syria civil war) but we can help mitigate some of the suffering. That’s the best that Israel can do. Of course we don’t let the Syrian war or aggression from Syria spill over into our territory you know our position, my red lines — we keep them stringently,” Netanayuhu explained in December.

Occasional spill over from the war has been met with force by Israel’s army.

READ: Injured Syrians find treatment in Israel

But Israel’s real concern isn’t the occasional rogue shell, it’s what the resurgence in the fortunes of President Bashar al-Assad might mean for arguably one of Israel’s most dangerous foes.

“Hezbollah is a main threat for the state of Israel. They are tied up in Syria today but they have not put down those arms that are pointing towards Israel,” says Israeli military spokesman, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner.

In return for supporting an ally, Israeli officials say, Syria is smuggling advanced weapons to Hezbollah. Several times in recent months, Syrian state media has reported alleged Israeli airstrikes near Damascus. They’re believed to be targeting arms bound for Lebanon. Israel never comments.

READ: Trump defends travel ban as Trudeau looks on

Trump’s view:

Trump has yet to set out any clear policy on what he wants to achieve in Syria in terms of ending the violence.

He has been praised by President Assad, who believes Trump could become an ally and help in the fight against ISIS.

In terms of refugees, last month Trump stated he will “absolutely do safe zones in Syria,” for refugees fleeing the violence.

But his travel ban, against seven Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, has caused huge controversy both at home and abroad.

During his first televised interview as President, Trump said that Germany and other European countries had made mistakes by allowing millions of refugees across their borders.

“I don’t want that to happen here,” he told ABC News.

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newstwitter-blog · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/16/cnn-donald-trump-and-benjamin-netanyahu-meet-at-white-house-14/

CNN: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu meet at White House

Netanyahu, enraged by the move, has made no secret of his dislike for Obama while championing the arrival of Trump.

The Iran deal, the peace process and the constant speculation over moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem are all likely to be on the agenda.

Here’s how the two men shape up on the big talking points ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.

Iran

Netanyahu’s view:

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany agreed to the deal that saw sanctions eased on Iran in return.

But as he has made clear on a number of occasions, Netanyahu sees Iran as an existential threat, hell bent on the destruction of Israel.

READ: Rouhani warns Iran will not be bullied

Trump’s view:

Netanyahu believes he has found an ally in Trump, who has been an outspoken critic of the Iran Deal, calling it “one of the worst deals ever.”

The new US President has already slapped sanctions on Tehran for a ballistic missile test but neither he nor Netanyahu have offered a clear alternative to the deal.

Trump faces a conundrum whereby European allies want the deal to remain in place, while Israel wants a harder line.

Settlements

Netanyahu’s view:

One issue on which Israel virtually stands alone is settlements — the Israeli cities, towns and communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“On the issue of settlements, no one takes more care than me and the Likud government,” the Prime Minister said at his weekly Cabinet meeting on January 22.

“We will continue to take care of (the settlements) with wisdom and responsibility for the benefit of the settlements and the state of Israel.”

Six thousand new settler homes as well as a brand new settlement have been announced by Israel in the last four weeks.

The international community condemns settlements as illegal, which Israel disputes. Previous US presidents have described settlements as an “obstacle to peace.”

Following the decision, Israel accused the US and the Obama administration of betrayal.

Trump’s view:

In Trump, Israel hopes it will find a slightly more sympathetic ear.

Trump has previously donated to a settlement, Beit El, and nominated pro-settlement figure, David Friedman, to be the next US ambassador to Israel.

In a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper, Trump described himself as “not somebody that believes that going forward with … settlements is a good thing for peace.”

The law is now expected to be contested in Israel’s Supreme Court.

Peace process

Netanyahu’s view:

The bedrock of the peace process, as understood by the international community, is the two-state solution.

Successive US presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have supported this goal.

Equally, both Israelis and Palestinians have expressed their commitment to two states living side by side.

Fast-forward to 2017 and many in the international community wonder whether Netanyahu’s actions on settlements mean he has any intention to stick to that position.

Trump’s view:

Trump has called a successful resolution of the peace process “the ultimate deal.” But it’s eluded US presidents since the founding of the state of Israel almost 70 years ago.

Any efforts to broker peace will come up against entrenched positions.

Israel’s far right now talks openly about annexing the West Bank, a threat which Palestinians are taking seriously.

US Embassy

Netanyahu’s view:

If the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem, it would be seen as effectively recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

As far as the international community is concerned, East Jerusalem is the capital of a future Palestinian state.

READ: Why moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is so controversial

Trump’s view:

During his campaign, Trump pledged to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but he appears to be tapping the brakes.

Significantly, in addition to being popular among many Israelis, Trump is also riding a wave of popularity among many Arab leaders, who felt neglected by the Obama administration.

These countries are urging Trump not to make a unilateral decision, fearing unrest on the streets throughout the Middle East.

Syria

Netanyahu’s view:

Occasional spill over from the war has been met with force by Israel’s army.

READ: Injured Syrians find treatment in Israel

But Israel’s real concern isn’t the occasional rogue shell, it’s what the resurgence in the fortunes of President Bashar al-Assad might mean for arguably one of Israel’s most dangerous foes.

READ: Trump defends travel ban as Trudeau looks on

Trump’s view:

Trump has yet to set out any clear policy on what he wants to achieve in Syria in terms of ending the violence.

He has been praised by President Assad, who believes Trump could become an ally and help in the fight against ISIS.

In terms of refugees, last month Trump stated he will “absolutely do safe zones in Syria,” for refugees fleeing the violence.

But his travel ban, against seven Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, has caused huge controversy both at home and abroad.

During his first televised interview as President, Trump said that Germany and other European countries had made mistakes by allowing millions of refugees across their borders.

“I don’t want that to happen here,” he told ABC News.

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

0 notes

newstwitter-blog · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/16/cnn-donald-trump-and-benjamin-netanyahu-meet-at-white-house-13/

CNN: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu meet at White House

Netanyahu, enraged by the move, has made no secret of his dislike for Obama while championing the arrival of Trump.

The Iran deal, the peace process and the constant speculation over moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem are all likely to be on the agenda.

Here’s how the two men shape up on the big talking points ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.

Iran

Netanyahu’s view:

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany agreed to the deal that saw sanctions eased on Iran in return.

But as he has made clear on a number of occasions, Netanyahu sees Iran as an existential threat, hell bent on the destruction of Israel.

READ: Rouhani warns Iran will not be bullied

Trump’s view:

Netanyahu believes he has found an ally in Trump, who has been an outspoken critic of the Iran Deal, calling it “one of the worst deals ever.”

The new US President has already slapped sanctions on Tehran for a ballistic missile test but neither he nor Netanyahu have offered a clear alternative to the deal.

Trump faces a conundrum whereby European allies want the deal to remain in place, while Israel wants a harder line.

Settlements

Netanyahu’s view:

One issue on which Israel virtually stands alone is settlements — the Israeli cities, towns and communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“On the issue of settlements, no one takes more care than me and the Likud government,” the Prime Minister said at his weekly Cabinet meeting on January 22.

“We will continue to take care of (the settlements) with wisdom and responsibility for the benefit of the settlements and the state of Israel.”

Six thousand new settler homes as well as a brand new settlement have been announced by Israel in the last four weeks.

The international community condemns settlements as illegal, which Israel disputes. Previous US presidents have described settlements as an “obstacle to peace.”

Following the decision, Israel accused the US and the Obama administration of betrayal.

Trump’s view:

In Trump, Israel hopes it will find a slightly more sympathetic ear.

Trump has previously donated to a settlement, Beit El, and nominated pro-settlement figure, David Friedman, to be the next US ambassador to Israel.

In a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper, Trump described himself as “not somebody that believes that going forward with … settlements is a good thing for peace.”

The law is now expected to be contested in Israel’s Supreme Court.

Peace process

Netanyahu’s view:

The bedrock of the peace process, as understood by the international community, is the two-state solution.

Successive US presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have supported this goal.

Equally, both Israelis and Palestinians have expressed their commitment to two states living side by side.

Fast-forward to 2017 and many in the international community wonder whether Netanyahu’s actions on settlements mean he has any intention to stick to that position.

Trump’s view:

Trump has called a successful resolution of the peace process “the ultimate deal.” But it’s eluded US presidents since the founding of the state of Israel almost 70 years ago.

Any efforts to broker peace will come up against entrenched positions.

Israel’s far right now talks openly about annexing the West Bank, a threat which Palestinians are taking seriously.

US Embassy

Netanyahu’s view:

If the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem, it would be seen as effectively recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

As far as the international community is concerned, East Jerusalem is the capital of a future Palestinian state.

READ: Why moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is so controversial

Trump’s view:

During his campaign, Trump pledged to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but he appears to be tapping the brakes.

Significantly, in addition to being popular among many Israelis, Trump is also riding a wave of popularity among many Arab leaders, who felt neglected by the Obama administration.

These countries are urging Trump not to make a unilateral decision, fearing unrest on the streets throughout the Middle East.

Syria

Netanyahu’s view:

Occasional spill over from the war has been met with force by Israel’s army.

READ: Injured Syrians find treatment in Israel

But Israel’s real concern isn’t the occasional rogue shell, it’s what the resurgence in the fortunes of President Bashar al-Assad might mean for arguably one of Israel’s most dangerous foes.

READ: Trump defends travel ban as Trudeau looks on

Trump’s view:

Trump has yet to set out any clear policy on what he wants to achieve in Syria in terms of ending the violence.

He has been praised by President Assad, who believes Trump could become an ally and help in the fight against ISIS.

In terms of refugees, last month Trump stated he will “absolutely do safe zones in Syria,” for refugees fleeing the violence.

But his travel ban, against seven Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, has caused huge controversy both at home and abroad.

During his first televised interview as President, Trump said that Germany and other European countries had made mistakes by allowing millions of refugees across their borders.

“I don’t want that to happen here,” he told ABC News.

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

0 notes

newstwitter-blog · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/16/cnn-donald-trump-and-benjamin-netanyahu-meet-at-white-house-12/

CNN: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu meet at White House

Netanyahu, enraged by the move, has made no secret of his dislike for Obama while championing the arrival of Trump.

The Iran deal, the peace process and the constant speculation over moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem are all likely to be on the agenda.

Here’s how the two men shape up on the big talking points ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.

Iran

Netanyahu’s view:

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany agreed to the deal that saw sanctions eased on Iran in return.

But as he has made clear on a number of occasions, Netanyahu sees Iran as an existential threat, hell bent on the destruction of Israel.

READ: Rouhani warns Iran will not be bullied

Trump’s view:

Netanyahu believes he has found an ally in Trump, who has been an outspoken critic of the Iran Deal, calling it “one of the worst deals ever.”

The new US President has already slapped sanctions on Tehran for a ballistic missile test but neither he nor Netanyahu have offered a clear alternative to the deal.

Trump faces a conundrum whereby European allies want the deal to remain in place, while Israel wants a harder line.

Settlements

Netanyahu’s view:

One issue on which Israel virtually stands alone is settlements — the Israeli cities, towns and communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“On the issue of settlements, no one takes more care than me and the Likud government,” the Prime Minister said at his weekly Cabinet meeting on January 22.

“We will continue to take care of (the settlements) with wisdom and responsibility for the benefit of the settlements and the state of Israel.”

Six thousand new settler homes as well as a brand new settlement have been announced by Israel in the last four weeks.

The international community condemns settlements as illegal, which Israel disputes. Previous US presidents have described settlements as an “obstacle to peace.”

Following the decision, Israel accused the US and the Obama administration of betrayal.

Trump’s view:

In Trump, Israel hopes it will find a slightly more sympathetic ear.

Trump has previously donated to a settlement, Beit El, and nominated pro-settlement figure, David Friedman, to be the next US ambassador to Israel.

In a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper, Trump described himself as “not somebody that believes that going forward with … settlements is a good thing for peace.”

The law is now expected to be contested in Israel’s Supreme Court.

Peace process

Netanyahu’s view:

The bedrock of the peace process, as understood by the international community, is the two-state solution.

Successive US presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have supported this goal.

Equally, both Israelis and Palestinians have expressed their commitment to two states living side by side.

Fast-forward to 2017 and many in the international community wonder whether Netanyahu’s actions on settlements mean he has any intention to stick to that position.

Trump’s view:

Trump has called a successful resolution of the peace process “the ultimate deal.” But it’s eluded US presidents since the founding of the state of Israel almost 70 years ago.

Any efforts to broker peace will come up against entrenched positions.

Israel’s far right now talks openly about annexing the West Bank, a threat which Palestinians are taking seriously.

US Embassy

Netanyahu’s view:

If the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem, it would be seen as effectively recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

As far as the international community is concerned, East Jerusalem is the capital of a future Palestinian state.

READ: Why moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is so controversial

Trump’s view:

During his campaign, Trump pledged to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but he appears to be tapping the brakes.

Significantly, in addition to being popular among many Israelis, Trump is also riding a wave of popularity among many Arab leaders, who felt neglected by the Obama administration.

These countries are urging Trump not to make a unilateral decision, fearing unrest on the streets throughout the Middle East.

Syria

Netanyahu’s view:

Occasional spill over from the war has been met with force by Israel’s army.

READ: Injured Syrians find treatment in Israel

But Israel’s real concern isn’t the occasional rogue shell, it’s what the resurgence in the fortunes of President Bashar al-Assad might mean for arguably one of Israel’s most dangerous foes.

READ: Trump defends travel ban as Trudeau looks on

Trump’s view:

Trump has yet to set out any clear policy on what he wants to achieve in Syria in terms of ending the violence.

He has been praised by President Assad, who believes Trump could become an ally and help in the fight against ISIS.

In terms of refugees, last month Trump stated he will “absolutely do safe zones in Syria,” for refugees fleeing the violence.

But his travel ban, against seven Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, has caused huge controversy both at home and abroad.

During his first televised interview as President, Trump said that Germany and other European countries had made mistakes by allowing millions of refugees across their borders.

“I don’t want that to happen here,” he told ABC News.

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

0 notes

newstwitter-blog · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/16/cnn-donald-trump-and-benjamin-netanyahu-meet-at-white-house-11/

CNN: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu meet at White House

Netanyahu, enraged by the move, has made no secret of his dislike for Obama while championing the arrival of Trump.

The Iran deal, the peace process and the constant speculation over moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem are all likely to be on the agenda.

Here’s how the two men shape up on the big talking points ahead of Wednesday’s meeting.

Iran

Netanyahu’s view:

The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany agreed to the deal that saw sanctions eased on Iran in return.

But as he has made clear on a number of occasions, Netanyahu sees Iran as an existential threat, hell bent on the destruction of Israel.

READ: Rouhani warns Iran will not be bullied

Trump’s view:

Netanyahu believes he has found an ally in Trump, who has been an outspoken critic of the Iran Deal, calling it “one of the worst deals ever.”

The new US President has already slapped sanctions on Tehran for a ballistic missile test but neither he nor Netanyahu have offered a clear alternative to the deal.

Trump faces a conundrum whereby European allies want the deal to remain in place, while Israel wants a harder line.

Settlements

Netanyahu’s view:

One issue on which Israel virtually stands alone is settlements — the Israeli cities, towns and communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“On the issue of settlements, no one takes more care than me and the Likud government,” the Prime Minister said at his weekly Cabinet meeting on January 22.

“We will continue to take care of (the settlements) with wisdom and responsibility for the benefit of the settlements and the state of Israel.”

Six thousand new settler homes as well as a brand new settlement have been announced by Israel in the last four weeks.

The international community condemns settlements as illegal, which Israel disputes. Previous US presidents have described settlements as an “obstacle to peace.”

Following the decision, Israel accused the US and the Obama administration of betrayal.

Trump’s view:

In Trump, Israel hopes it will find a slightly more sympathetic ear.

Trump has previously donated to a settlement, Beit El, and nominated pro-settlement figure, David Friedman, to be the next US ambassador to Israel.

In a recent interview with the Israel Hayom newspaper, Trump described himself as “not somebody that believes that going forward with … settlements is a good thing for peace.”

The law is now expected to be contested in Israel’s Supreme Court.

Peace process

Netanyahu’s view:

The bedrock of the peace process, as understood by the international community, is the two-state solution.

Successive US presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have supported this goal.

Equally, both Israelis and Palestinians have expressed their commitment to two states living side by side.

Fast-forward to 2017 and many in the international community wonder whether Netanyahu’s actions on settlements mean he has any intention to stick to that position.

Trump’s view:

Trump has called a successful resolution of the peace process “the ultimate deal.” But it’s eluded US presidents since the founding of the state of Israel almost 70 years ago.

Any efforts to broker peace will come up against entrenched positions.

Israel’s far right now talks openly about annexing the West Bank, a threat which Palestinians are taking seriously.

US Embassy

Netanyahu’s view:

If the US moved its embassy to Jerusalem, it would be seen as effectively recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

As far as the international community is concerned, East Jerusalem is the capital of a future Palestinian state.

READ: Why moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is so controversial

Trump’s view:

During his campaign, Trump pledged to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, but he appears to be tapping the brakes.

Significantly, in addition to being popular among many Israelis, Trump is also riding a wave of popularity among many Arab leaders, who felt neglected by the Obama administration.

These countries are urging Trump not to make a unilateral decision, fearing unrest on the streets throughout the Middle East.

Syria

Netanyahu’s view:

Occasional spill over from the war has been met with force by Israel’s army.

READ: Injured Syrians find treatment in Israel

But Israel’s real concern isn’t the occasional rogue shell, it’s what the resurgence in the fortunes of President Bashar al-Assad might mean for arguably one of Israel’s most dangerous foes.

READ: Trump defends travel ban as Trudeau looks on

Trump’s view:

Trump has yet to set out any clear policy on what he wants to achieve in Syria in terms of ending the violence.

He has been praised by President Assad, who believes Trump could become an ally and help in the fight against ISIS.

In terms of refugees, last month Trump stated he will “absolutely do safe zones in Syria,” for refugees fleeing the violence.

But his travel ban, against seven Muslim-majority countries, including Syria, has caused huge controversy both at home and abroad.

During his first televised interview as President, Trump said that Germany and other European countries had made mistakes by allowing millions of refugees across their borders.

“I don’t want that to happen here,” he told ABC News.

This post has been harvested from the source link, and News-Twitter has no responsibility on its content. Source link

0 notes