Tutu backs Israeli-settlement funding boycott

Aljazeera                  02 Aug 2014

Archbishop who fought apartheid joins global campaign calling on firms profiting from occupation to withdraw funds

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, the South African activist who fought to end apartheid, has joined a worldwide campaign calling on corporations profiting from Israel's occupation of Palestinian Territories to pull out their funding.

Tutu is among 1.5 million people who have joined the initiative, launched by the global campaign organisation Avaaz, as Israel continues its offensive against the Gaza Strip.

The campaign targets companies including Hewlett Packard, G4S, Caterpillar, ABP and Veolia, which are either directly or indirectly financing activities in the occupied territories that serve Israeli settlements which are illegal under international law.

Tutu said: "The withdrawal of trade with South Africa by multinational corporations with a conscience in the 1980s ultimately brought the apartheid state - bloodlessly - to its knees. "Those corporations understood that by contributing to South Africa's economy, they were contributing to the repression of black South Africans.

"So they cut off apartheid's oxygen supply. Where the world's political and diplomatic leaders had failed, civil society succeeded.

"The crisis we are witnessing in Gaza today is not a Jewish or a Muslim crisis. It is a human crisis. "Those who continue to do business with Israel fund the perpetuation of a profoundly unjust status quo.

"Those who withdraw their business are saying Israelis and Palestinians are equally entitled to dignity and peace. Gaza is going to test who believes in the worth of human beings."

The call for divestment comes after several public pull-outs in recent months.

Dutch pension fund PGGM withdrew tens of millions of euros from Israeli banks, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation divested from security firm G4S, and the US Presbyterian Church divested an estimated $21m from HP, Motorola Solutions, and Caterpillar.

It also follows warnings issued earlier in July by 17 EU governments urging their citizens to avoid doing business in or investing in illegal Israeli settlements.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2014/08/20148213053785268.html

Ireland and Oz

Ian Harris           Otago Daily Times             July 25, 2014

On the same day recently there surfaced two very different perspectives on a Christian presence in the life of modern communities, one full of promise, the other searing.

 The morning mail brought the magazine of St Mary’s-in-Exile in Brisbane, celebrating five years since two priests and their Catholic congregation marched out of their parish church to model an alternative way of being Christian in our 21st-century world. It is a story of courage, community and hope. In the evening the movie Calvary told of the excoriating experience of a priest in a remote village on Ireland’s Atlantic coast.

 The title, recalling the site of Jesus’ execution, suggested this could be another Hollywood blockbuster about the crucifixion, along the lines of Mel Gibson’s gratuitously violent The Passion of the Christ. Thankfully, not so. John Michael McDonagh’s screenplay is far subtler, and in its own way carries an even greater punch through its setting among people of today.

 In both Brisbane and the Irish village the priests are good men intent on living with integrity and compassion in the spirit of Christ. In Brisbane this led priests Peter Kennedy and Terry Fitzpatrick to move beyond the mildewed doctrine and ritual of another era to foster a communal experience that is truly shared and life-affirming.

“A spiritual bond of love and friendship, compassion and celebration has replaced traditional Catholic ritual,” says one layman. And another: “We have changed the liturgical expressions not to be different from those of the Catholic church, but to better reflect the 21st century and our continuing struggle to live the life of Jesus, in all our doubts, queries and limitations of understanding of ‘who – and where – is God.’ ”

In the Irish village, people are still reeling from the scandals of clerical sexual abuse that have shamed the Irish church. Yet all acknowledge that James Lavelle is a good priest – which puts him in striking contrast to everyone else. Indeed, it is his very goodness that leads one of his parishioners to tell the priest during confession that he intends to kill him one week hence. As a young boy he was sexually abused by a priest, his innocence destroyed. Now he wants revenge, which he misconstrues as justice. But there would be no point in killing a bad priest, he says. Only a good priest would do.

 This is obviously a distorted echo of the church’s traditional teaching that only the death of a divinely good man could ensure forgiveness for sinners. And sin, as estrangement from good, abounds in the village. Father James tries valiantly to stop the butcher beating his wife, to deter her from finding solace in adultery, to counsel the young man bent on either killing himself or joining the army so he can kill somebody else, to help the man of property detached from wealth, life and family and desolate in guilt.

 Quite beyond the priest’s reach are the cynical doctor motivated by “one part humanism, nine parts gallows-humour”, the blatantly promiscuous gay man, the arsonist who burns down the church, the Buddhist publican who takes to James with a baseball bat, the unknown who slits his dog’s throat.

 They all delight in mocking the priest’s faith and rubbing his nose in the church’s scandals, though he is innocent of them. He absorbs the derision, visits a serial killer in prison, cares for an elderly writer. He can also be sharp with a greenhorn fellow-priest, and at one point drinks too much when the burden of his role weighs him down. And over all the action lies the haunting threat of James’s murder with which the film opens.

There are softer moments, but even they have a darker tinge. Before becoming a priest, James was married, and his daughter is now a troubled teenager. She is resentful that when her mother died, he left her for the church. So now she says: “I belong to myself, not anybody else.” That is the polar opposite of any sense of community.

 Yet amidst the village’s trail of bleak and corrosive relationships, only James and his daughter find moments of warmth in each other’s company. As James says in another context, “Forgiveness is highly under-rated.”

 In the manner of a parable, Calvary holds up a mirror to a contemporary community living without the binding virtues of trust, hope and love. St Mary’s-in-Exile puts its effort into making those virtues central in in its common life, and projecting them into the surrounding community. Give me that option any day.

 

 

Eight hundred dead Palestinians. But Israel has impunity

Robert Fisk                             Independent/UK                                 25 July 2014

Impunity is the word that comes to mind. Eight hundred dead Palestinians. Eight hundred. That’s infinitely more than twice the total dead of flight MH17 over Ukraine. And if you refer only to the “innocent” dead – ie no Hamas fighters, young sympathisers or corrupt Hamas officials, with whom the Israelis will, in due course, have to talk – then the women and children and elderly who have been slaughtered in Gaza are still well over the total number of MH17 victims.

And there’s something very odd, isn’t there, about our reactions to these two outrageous death tolls. In Gaza, we plead for a ceasefire but let them bury their dead in the sweltering slums of Gaza and cannot even open a humanitarian route for the wounded. For the passengers on MH17, we demand – immediately – proper burial and care for the relatives of the dead. We curse those who left bodies lying in the fields of eastern Ukraine – as many bodies have been lying, for a shorter time, perhaps, but under an equally oven-like sky, in Gaza.

Because – and this has been creeping up on me for years – we don’t care so much about the Palestinians, do we? We care neither about Israeli culpability, which is far greater because of the larger number of civilians the Israeli army have killed. Nor, for that matter, Hamas’s capability. Of course, God forbid that the figures should have been the other way round. If 800 Israelis had died and only 35 Palestinians, I think I know our reaction.

We would call it – rightly – a slaughter, an atrocity, a crime for which the killers must be made accountable. Yes, Hamas should be made accountable, too. But why is it that the only criminals we are searching for today are the men who fired one – perhaps two – missiles at an airliner over Ukraine? If Israel’s dead equalled those of the Palestinians – and let me repeat, thank heavens this is not the case – I suspect that the Americans would be offering all military support to an Israel endangered by “Iranian-backed terrorists”. We would be demanding that Hamas hand over the monsters who fired rockets at Israel and who are, by the way, trying to hit aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. But we are not doing this. Because those who have died are mostly Palestinians.

More questions. What’s the limit for Palestinian deaths before we have a ceasefire? Eight hundred? Or 8,000? Could we have a scorecard? The exchange rate for dead? Or would we just wait until our gorge rises at the blood and say enough – even for Israel’s war, enough is enough. It’s not as if we have not been through all this before.

From the massacre of Arab villagers by Israel’s new army in 1948, as it is set down by Israeli historians, to the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Lebanese Christian allies of Israel murdered up to 1,700 people in 1982 while Israeli troops watched; from the Qana massacre of Lebanese Arabs at the UN base – yes, the UN again – in 1996, to another, smaller terrible killing at Qana (again) 10 years later. And so to the mass killing of civilians in the 2008-9 Gaza war. And after Sabra and Shatila, there were inquiries, and after Qana there was an inquiry and after Gaza in 2008-9, there was an inquiry and don’t we remember the weight of it, somewhat lightened of course when Judge Goldstone did his best to disown it, when – according to my Israeli friends – he came under intense personal pressure.

  http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/

Nigerians seethe at the government’s failure to rescue abducted schoolgirls

Lola Okolosie                                     Guardian/UK                    22 July 2014

A hundred days ago, 276 school girls from Chibok were rounded up during their exams and spirited away into the forests of north-east Nigeria. The kidnappings threw the militant group Boko Haram, which opposes education and secularism, into the global spotlight.

For Nigerians, it was further evidence of how corruption and incompetence continue to wreak havoc in the lives of ordinary women, children and men. How could a once ragtag clutch of extremists reach this level of sophistication and coordination, completely unchecked by the state?

Much of the answer lies in the authorities’ slow response to any kind of crisis. Yesterday, the Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, finally met parents and survivors. Spurred into action by last week’s visit from 17-year-old humanitarian, Malala Yousafzai, Jonathan felt it appropriate “to personally comfort ... and reassure them” that his government is doing “all within its powers to rescue their daughters”, a claim that might be more credible had it not taken three months for him to deliver it.

The facts speak for themselves: despite international support from Britain, China and the US, among others, Nigeria remains unable to unite the stolen girls with their families. Thankfully, 51 managed, without state help, to escape captivity and return home. But Boko Haram maintains the stranglehold on the region that it established long before the kidnappings. Indeed, killings, fear and destruction appear to have become the new normal in the north-east. In the first two months of 2014, at least 25 women and girls were abducted. In June, reports emerged that a further 60 women and girls, and as many as 30 boys had been taken.

It is particularly disturbing to note that Boko Haram’s tactics partly reflect those of the Nigerian state in its fight against terrorism. In 2012, in order to destabilise the organisation, the arrest of wives and children of militants became government practice. Intent on not being outdone, the group’s then leader, Abubakar Shekau, vowed that kidnapped women would become “servants”, their fate being conscription, rape and forced marriage.

The social media campaign to #BringBackOurGirls had Nigerians at home and abroad shaking their heads in continued disbelief at how little their government was able or willing to do. The government’s response – to hire a US PR firm, Levick – speaks volumes. A better solution would be the recovery of those taken by militants and serious measures to prevent it happening again.

At every step the president and his supporters have shown themselves to be disconnected from their citizens. It took Jonathan nearly three weeks to make a public statement about the kidnappings and even then, he criticised traumatised parents for not doing enough to aid search and rescue efforts.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the government appears to have been harassing key figures in the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, most recently the former education minister, Obiageli Ezekwesili. Image seems to be the highest priority for an administration too incompetent to mount an effective rescue mission.

Frustrated campaigners have been portrayed as opposition party stooges. A presidential statement argued: “Those who would manipulate the victims of terrorism for their own benefit are engaging in a similar kind of evil: psychological terrorism.” Harsh words to level at activists merely demanding the government fulfil one of its most basic duties – protecting its citizens.

A functioning democracy should be transparent and its leaders accountable. These three sorry months have shown us how far Nigeria still has to go. There is heightened security, but the authorities have been vague about what is being done to secure the victims’ release.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to the somnolent response of Nigeria’s government. But in order for it to prompt meaningful action, the rage will have to be sustained and cannot be restricted to the desperate fate of the Chibok girls. So many more are suffering with them.

[Abridged]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/nigerians-goodluck-jonathan-boko-haram

Britain will never be a champion of democracy while it sells arms to tyrants

Owen Jones                                Guardian/UK                       23 July 2014

Attention is focusing on British-made weapons being sent to Moscow, and understandably so. Vladimir Putin was once a friend of Britain, given cover by Tony Blair as he razed Chechnya to the ground, but now – in the typically Orwellian manner of British foreign policy – he has been transformed into enemy number one. And yet David Cameron's definitive claims that an absolute arms embargo has been put in place against Russia have been torpedoed: according to a cross-party group of MPs, there are more than 200 licences in place to sell arms to Putin's government.

If you have even a shaky belief in British foreign policy as a force for democracy, even a cursory glance at the list of destinations for British arms should swiftly lead you to part with your illusions. Israel has now killed close to 600 people in Gaza, including 149 children; its land-grabbing settlements place it in violation of international law. Other countries might be deemed pariah states for such actions, but not Israel, which Britain has supplied with parts for sniper rifles, military aircraft, unmanned drones and small arms.

Saudi Arabia is one of the most repressive regimes on earth and bans political parties, trade unions and all forms of dissent; deprives women of many of their most basic rights; kills "witches"; has recently declared atheists to be terrorists; and persecutes LGBT people. And yet this is the biggest market for British arms, with our government approving £1.6bn worth of exports, ranging from equipment for machine guns to "components for military equipment for initiating explosives."

Bahrain's dictatorship doesn't just have Saudi Arabia's totalitarian despots to help defend it from democratic protesters; Britain's own arms sales to the regime are a crucial display of solidarity.

Egypt's junta has killed hundreds of protesters, sentenced many more to death and imprisoned journalists. And yet it is the proud recipient of British arms ranging from assault rifles to components for military aircraft.

The killing fields of Sri Lanka have received all too little attention in the British media, with up to 70,000 Tamil civilians massacred at the end of the 2009 civil war: but this does not serve as a deterrent for British arms sellers.  According to the British MPs, new Labour awarded five export licences to Syria for chemicals that could be used for weapons. They call it a "highly questionable" decision.

We sold Muammar Gaddafi weapons, both before 1985 and then again when Blair befriended him, even signing a defence co-operation agreement in 2007. When British leftwingers like the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn were lonely voices against Saddam Hussein's murderous regime in the 1980s, our government was happily flogging it weapons.

This dictator-arming industry is heavily propped up by our government; while other industries were told to sink-or-swim with disastrous consequences, each defence export job in Britain receives a de facto £13,000 subsidy. But Britain has a shortage of engineers. Instead of promoting an industry that arms murderers and torturers, we should surely be promoting the renewable energies of the future and reskilling army industry workers to help save the planet.

In the meantime, our arms trade serves as a reminder that Britain's claim to be a promoter of democracy is a myth. As long as it is promoted and sanctioned by the government, our country will remain the trusted ally and friend of tyrants. Doesn't it make you proud to be British?     [Abbrev.]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/britain-champion-democracy-arms-trade-tyrants-russia