verbalresistance:

Turkish judges approve demand for a sentence of a combined 18.000 years for former IDF chief of staff and other officers allegedly responsible for deaths aboard the Mavi Marmara cruise ship in 2010.

A Turkish court on Monday formally pressed charges against members of Israel’s military for the killing of nine people aboard a Turkish ship trying to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza in 2010, Turkey’s state-run news agency said.

The court in Istanbul voted unanimously to approve an indictment against Israel’s former military chief Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, along with the former heads of its navy, air force intelligence,  and military intelligence,  Eliezer Marom, Amos Yadlin, and Avishai Levi, the Anadolu Agency said. They face nine consecutive life terms in prison for “inciting to kill monstrously, and by torturing,” the agency added.

It is unlikely Israeli military members will be brought before Turkey’s judicial system, since Israel does not regard them as criminals. If they are convicted in absentia at the end of the trial process, which could take months if not years, the Turkish court could issue an order for their arrest, but such a move would be symbolic and not binding.

A week ago, the Turkish newspaper “Sabah” first reported the upcoming indictments; however Israeli officials refused to comment on the reports until they were endorsed by the Turkish government, or until the indictments were delivered to the court.

The move comes just a few days ahead of the second anniversary of the May 31 raid. The ship had been part of a flotilla sailing toward Gaza to protest Israel’s blockade.

The court also agreed to press charges against several unidentified soldiers who raided the ship, the Turkish news agency said. No trial date has been set. Turkey has tried without success to get Israel to apologize for the attack, and to compensate those killed as a precondition for normalizing relations. Israel has solely expressed regret for the loss of lives.

Israel says its troops opened fire after coming under attack by activists wielding axes, knives and metal rods. It says soldiers rappelled on to the deck armed with non-lethal paintball guns as their primary weapons, and only resorted to using handguns after they were assaulted.

The indictment rejected Israeli claims that Israeli commandos who boarded the Mavi Marmara acted in self defense, saying that Israeli commandos used disproportional force by firing with heavy weapons and automatic rifles on passengers who only carried “plastic flag masts, spoons, and forks.”

The indictment said some of the victims were shot dead from close range and from the back, the agency reported earlier.

According to Turkish news agencies, nine life sentences were demanded - one for each of the casualties aboard the Mavi Marmara – as part of the indictment, which calls for a combined 18,000 years of imprisonment for the four former officers, punishment for crimes committed during the raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla. The indictment includes 490 victims and complainants, among them 189 were injured during the raid.

The charges against members of the Israeli military, included commandeering vehicles, voluntary manslaughter, attempted murder, persecution and causing damage to the ship, the agency said Monday.

A United Nations probe into the incident found Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza legally imposed “as a legitimate security measure” but added that the killing of eight Turkish activists and a Turkish-American was “unacceptable.”

Turkey has rejected the report’s findings, saying Israel had no right to raid the ship in international waters and said it would never recognize the blockade’s legitimacy.

Turkey has also slapped a series of sanctions on Israel, once a top military trading partner, which included expelling senior Israeli diplomats and suspending all military deals. It has also vowed to back the Palestinian bid for recognition of their statehood at the United Nations.

Haaretz

(via stay-human)

verbalresistance:

I lived in Tel Aviv for 14 years, and having been back in America for almost as long, still miss it every day. At Passover, that longing becomes an almost physical weight in my chest.

The smells of springtime Chicago aren’t right, and neither is the culture. I want to be surrounded by people who know why I’m frantic in the lead-up to the Seder, bus drivers wishing me a hag sameah, and neighbors asking “where are you for the holiday?” I want to be home.

But I’m not home. Instead I’m in the gentle exile of American suburbia—a self-imposed, political exile that I undertook for the sake of my children.

When the second intifada broke out, my Jerusalemite husband and I were temporarily in the US as I worked toward my Masters degree at the University of Chicago. We assured everyone (over and over) that we would be back in Israel by the time our just-born son went to kindergarten—it would be easier, we figured, if he started school in the country where he’d be growing up.

But then the intifada ground on. And Israel responded with increasing violence, and a steadfast refusal to admit any culpability, or need to make good on past promises, or understanding that the Palestinians were reacting as we would, had we been occupied for decades on end.

For a year my husband and I wrestled with our fears, not even sharing them with each other—then one day, when home for a visit with our son, we began to talk, and realized: We didn’t want to raise children in that place. The Jewish State was no longer a place in which we wanted to build a family—“for the time being.”

In the meantime, “the time being” has become our lives. The boy was joined by a girl, birthdays have come and gone, and nothing about Israel in the past decade has convinced us that our Israeli children should leave the galut.

On the contrary: As Israel has become more deeply entrenched in the settlement enterprise, more dedicated to an increasingly violent and dehumanizing occupation, and indeed, increasingly less democratic toward even those with the good fortune to be Jewish, we’ve come to realize that we’re not likely to ever move back.

I don’t know if our children are any physically safer here than there, but I do know this: They’re not being groomed for service in a military now devoted less to the defense of the state, than to the oppression of another people. They’re not caught in an educational system made small and narrow by lack of funds, even as the government pours funds into settlements built illegally on stolen land. They’re not being lied to daily by leaders who mouth platitudes about peace, even as their actions do nothing but undermine the possibility of peace.

They think of Israel as home, too. We speak Hebrew in our house, are active members of our Conservative shul, and visit about once a year.

And when we’re there, between laughter on the beach and overnights on their cousins’ kibbutz, we teach them things they don’t learn about in Hebrew school: We show them road blocks, strewn across the West Bank. We gaze at the Separation Barrier snaking through Palestinian land, and ask how they would feel if soldiers came and threw them out of their home. We march in East Jerusalem.

And if I ever doubted the wisdom of our decision, a video emerged from Israeli television this week to wipe any doubts away: Asked for reactions to the recent traffic accident deaths of a group of Palestinian children, teenager after teenager responded with nauseating levels of animosity: “They’re whores, not people, and they don’t deserve to live,” one young man said. “They can be the future of terrorist attacks.” When the reporter pointed out that the dead were but 4 or 5 years old, the boy responded: “Little kids, so what?”

Lest we be tempted to think that these kids are simply bad apples – in 2010, nearly half of Israeli teens surveyed said they didn’t support equal rights for Israel’s Arab citizens. More than half would deny them the right to be elected to the Knesset.

A society that has become centered on protecting, maintaining and furthering the oppression of another people produces and indeed rewards hate. This is not unique to Israel or Israelis—it’s human.

But I will not raise the two humans who matter most to me in such an atmosphere. I will protect them from what Israel has become, and I will raise them to know the Jewish values of human dignity and the sanctity of life.

And every year at this time, my heart will ache as I say “Next year in Jerusalem.” Because I know that next year, I’ll be right here.

The Daily Beast

mehreenkasana:

Rockets fired at parliament building and embassies in apparently co-ordinated assault on government and diplomatic areas

Just in: “God. About 10 grenades just now in diplomatic area of Kabul #Kabulattack” via @Amiefr_Reuters.

Horrible.

(via taqwaacore)

stay-human:

April 7th, 2012

GAZA CITY (Ma’an) — The ministry of interior in the Gaza Strip said two convicted murderers and a man found guilty of treason were hanged early Saturday.

Gaza City’s military court sentenced one man for collaboration with Israeli intelligence and involvement in a murder.

Another was found guilty of premeditated murder by a court in Deir al-Balah, and the third of kidnapping, raping and killing a boy under 16 by a Khan Younis court.

The ministry of interior said relatives of the victims did not agree to an amnesty for the death penalty sentences.

Ma’an

verbalresistance:

The 50p tax rate anticipated a contribution from the richest of £3bn a year. Osborne is happy to let them off with £500m

A Porsche: just the thing to mop up that £42,500 annual reduction in tax.

A budget that rewards work? A budget for recovery? No, this was a budget for Porsche dealers. At the heart of George Osborne’s third budget were benefits for the super-rich – specifically the 300,000 or so people who earn more than £150,000 a year. A banker on £1m will save £42,500 in income tax next year once the 50% band is cut to 45% – enough to cover the cost of a new entry-level Porsche.

The chancellor said the tax only raised £100m, far less than the £3bn originally projected in 2009 when it was first announced.. And he explained that new measures on tax avoidance plus a rise in stamp duty would raise five times the sum lost from cutting the 50% rate. The result is that the rich, who in 2009 faced a £3bn raid on their income, can now only expect to cough up £500m.

The standard response to anyone complaining about paying 50% tax was always: “Hey mate, you need a better accountant.” It looks like the accountants won, and the government has thrown in the towel over trying to squeeze the rich for more tax. Meanwhile, Clegg’s “tycoon tax” vanished without trace.

The rise in the personal allowance to £8,105 in April and then £9,000 next year is, superficially, good news for the poor. What no one expected was that much of the cost of providing it would be taken from pensioners.

One-third of all adults will receive no benefit from the increase in the allowance at all, because they already earn too little to pay any income tax. Part-time workers on less than £10,000 will even see some welfare benefits withdrawn as their net pay rises.

In reality, the higher allowance will mostly benefit the 20 million standard-rate taxpayers, who will on average see an extra £220 a year.

But the scrapping of the higher personal allowance for the over-65s will raise £3.25bn for the government and was, predictably, condemned as “an outrageous assault on decent middle-class pensioners” by the over-50s group Saga. Younger voters, who have seen the older generation benefit from one tax break after another, may see it as the first fightback in an intergenerational war.

Tax credits, so beloved of Gordon Brown when chancellor, were conspicuously absent. They are messy, complex and bureaucratic, but they benefit the poor much more directly than fiddling with the personal allowance. What’s more, they are beginning to disappear. Osborne failed to mention a whole raft of changes coming into force on 6 April this year, where couples in which one partner works between 16 and 24 hours a week are particularly hard hit. Some on just £14,000 a year could lose £1,000.

Families in the “squeezed middle” will cheer the new £60,000 limit at which child benefit will be withdrawn (it will start being reduced on incomes above £50,000). Yet Osborne is dragging ever more of middle England into the 40% tax band – possibly up to two million more by the next election.

Back in the 1970s, when Labour chancellor Denis Healey was (supposedly) squeezing the rich until the pips squeaked, the number of households paying more than the standard rate of tax was around 700,000. But since moving into 11 Downing Street in June 2010, Osborne has pushed around one million more people into 40% tax, with at least another million to come in the next two tax years, as the starting level for the band falls from £42,275 to £41,450. By the next election, the total number of people drawn into the 40% bracket could total five million, according to analysis by accountants Grant Thornton.

Mindful of the credit rating agencies, Osborne stuck to the austerity schtick of recent budgets – belt-tightening, deficit-reducing, and a perma-squeeze on the public sector. But the background music was more upbeat: the economic forecasts are brighter, exports are soaring, growth is getting – very slowly – back on track.

Good news? Undoubtedly. But what happens to interest rates, petrol prices, rents and house prices matter more than anything said in today’s budget. No one really expects a rise in base rates this year, but if money markets start pricing in expectations of an increase, the impact will be felt in fixed-rate and discount mortgages.

Britain’s personal finances still rest on a bed of nitroglycerine – £1.2 trillion in personal debt, much of it in the form of mortgages – and the interest-rate clock is ticking.

The Guardian

verbalresistance:

Anti-fascist demonstrators outnumber defence league members at Aarhus rally by more than 20 to 1

Anti-fascist demonstrators outnumbered far-right supporters more than 20 to one in Denmark as an English Defence League-led attempt to form a pan-European movement was humiliated.

Estimates suggested as few as 160 defence league members from several countries gathered at the inaugural far-right summit in Aarhus for the European counter-jihad meeting, devised to “send a clear message to the leaders of Europe” that Islamism would not be tolerated.

EDL leader Tommy Robinson admitted only 15 supporters from England made the trip, despite earlier speculation that hundreds might attend. By comparison, an anti-fascist demonstration in the same city, to protest against the arrival of the EDL, attracted up to 4,000 people.

Fears of violence had seen local police mount their biggest operation on the Jutland peninsula with the tense atmosphere amplified by the start of the trial this month of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist and anti-Islamist who confessed to the murder of 77 people in Norway last July.

A cohort of the Norwegian Defence League travelled to Aarhus. Although none condoned Breivik’s actions, some said they shared his frustrations. One, who gave his name only as Simon, from eastern Norway, said: “He had some important points. There are people who share his thinking, if not his methods.”

The low turnout in Aarhus is in fact the second time the EDL has travelled abroad to try to forge alliances. Its first attempt, in Amsterdam in 2010, was widely dismissed as a “damp squib”, attracting about 60 supporters who were met with fierce opposition from Ajax football fans and anti-racist supporters. Robinson, the main attraction at the Aarhus summit, was unrepentant despite even fewer of his followers appearing, saying: “Just wait until there are hundreds of us coming in.”

Numerous brief scuffles throughout the day between the two groups led to more than 80 arrests as protesters hurled rocks and bottles at each other.

The Guardian

Follow-up on the xenophobic ridiculousness I spoke about earlier;

Growing though (the very real and overlooked) threat of the far-right across Europe is… it’s reassuring to know that, for now at least, the public aren’t completely bought into the stupidity (or at least don’t see it worth their time and effort, to go out of their way and parade their bigotry before the eyes of the world).

God bless the Anti-Fascists.

politicaldove:

George Galloway’s colourful political career took another unexpected turn last night when he won a stunning victory at the Bradford West by-election.

Standing for the Respect party, which he formed after being expelled from Labour, Mr Galloway won 18,341 votes, a 56% share and over 10,000 votes more than the Labour candidate.

Labour “must stop imagining that working people and poor people have no option but to support them if they hate the Tory and Liberal Democrat coalition partners,” he said after winning the contest.

“They have to stop supporting illegal, bloody, costly foreign wars because one of the reasons why they were so decisively defeated this evening is that the public don’t believe that they have atoned for their role in the invasion and occupation of other people’s countries and the drowning of those countries in blood.”

The scale of the victory over Labour in what should be a safe seat for the opposition party is humiliating for Ed Miliband, who has enjoyed a successful couple of weeks in the face of several government gaffes.

But many analysts believe the result was primarily due to young voters turning out to support Mr Galloway, who offered a radical alternative to the mainstream agenda of the three main parties.

Others credited the area’s large Muslim community, who warmed to Mr Galloway’s long track record opposing military interventions in the Middle East.

Deputy Labour leader Harriet Harman said: “There had been active campaigning over a long period of time, but something did go very badly wrong and our connections, roots and engagement with the local community and people up and down that constituency obviously were not deep enough, not strong enough.

“But the idea we were simply neglectful and absent is not the case, it’s actually more complicated than that.”

The Labour candidate left the counting hall in the middle of the night without making a speech.

Bradford East Liberal Democrat MP David Ward said: “This was the Asian community within Bradford, really, who are in some ways punishing the Labour Party for abusing them and using them in the past.”

The victory will see Mr Galloway return to the House of Commons for the third time, capping a truly remarkable and colourful political career.

He originally represented the Glasgow Kelvin seat, then returned to Westminster after a bitter fight for the seat of Bethnal Green and Bow.

Labour won 8,201 votes, the Conservatives won 2,746 votes and the Liberal Democrats came fourth with 1,505.

verbalresistance:

Sixteen people killed in Sabha, the latest of at least 147 deaths since truce between Toubou and Arab tribes broke down.

Fighting between rival militias in the desert city of Sabha has left scores of people dead over the past week [Reuters]

At least 147 people have been killed during a week of clashes between Tobou fighters and Arab tribespeople, the Libyan prime minister and defence minister said in a news conference.

At least 16 people were killed in clashes on Saturday in the southern Libyan desert oasis of Sabha, after a ceasefire brokered the previous day fell apart.

The fighting first erupted on Monday after Arab tribespeople accused the Toubou of killing one of their people.

More than 395 people have been injured throughout the week, the country’s premier Abdurrahim El Keib told media on Saturday afternoon in Tripoli, the capital. 

He said that the transitional government hoped a new ceasefire would be reached soon.

Al Jazeera’s Omar Alsaleh attended the press conference in Tripoli, reporting that:

“The defense minister said they established an emergency military command operation in Sabha, they took control of the airport, as well as other important government buildings.”

A doctor at Sabha hospital, treating Arab casualties, said eight people were killed and another 50 wounded in fighting between early Saturday morning and noon. A Toubou tribal source said eight of their people were also killed.

“We haven’t slept since yesterday. The Toubou have been attacking Sabha since three in the morning, and they very nearly took the city. Al the residents have taken up arms to defend it,” Dr Abdelrahman al-Arish said.

Adem al-Tebbawi, a local Toubou official, spoke of eight dead and “several wounded” on his side.

“We have respected a truce and we want reconciliation, but the other tribes - especially the Awled Suleiman - have not stopped attacking us for several days. We have been deprived of both water and power.”

On Friday, Toubou chief Issa Abdel Majid Mansur, a former opposition activist against the former government of Muammar Gaddafi, called for international intervention to halt what he called “ethnic cleansing”.

“We demand that the United Nations and European Union intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Toubou,” Mansur said …

Read More: Al Jazeera