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From Stalingrad to Winograd

FOR SOME days, the country looked like the Place de la Concorde in 1793. The entire public sat expectantly facing the guillotine, waiting for the tumbril to bring the marquis, for the marquis to lie down, for the blade to fall on his neck and for a soldier to hold up the bloody, severed head for the amusement of the spectators.

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[ 03 February 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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A Palestinian public sector strike, such as the one that began yesterday and is expected to continue today, is the type of news that here is considered a purely "internal Palestinian matter," lacking any media importance. But beyond the basic fact that the modest wage demands are a direct result of the policy of closure and economic attrition on the part of the true sovereign - Israel - the strike presents a genuine challenge to the stability and strength of Salam Fayyad's government, and demonstrates the erosion of its public credibility.

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Everything was ready for the arrival of the two guests: instructions for using the heaters, towels and linens, the phone number of a neighbor who is also a good friend, and who was supposed to meet them at the Qalandiyah checkpoint and escort them to my apartment in El-Bireh while I was away. Both landscape architects, the visitors had been invited to speak at an international academic conference at Bir Zeit University last November entitled "Conservation and Management of Landscape in Conflict Regions."

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A WISE person once said: "A fool learns from his experience. An intelligent person learns from the experience of others." To which one could add: "And an idiot does not even learn from his own experience."

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Behind the prize "for tolerance" hides intolerance

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With this letter I would like to officially withdraw as a member of the jury for the 2008 Prize of the Alex and Ruth Dworkin Foundation for the Promotion of Tolerance through Cinema (2008 Prix annuel de la Fondation Alex et Ruth Dworkin pour la promotion de la tolérance à travers le cinéma) at the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois, the annual festival featuring Quebec films held in Montreal.

For those who may not be aware, this prize, which includes a grant of $5000, "goes to a producer representing the production team which has best demonstrated, in the winning work, a message of comprehension and tolerance".

I accepted the invitation from the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québecois to join this year's jury in good faith. But after examining in more detail the political and financial basis of the prize I must refuse to have my name associated with it.

Behind this noble sounding "award for tolerance" hides a story of intolerance, division and discrimination.

Firstly, I quit the jury because the Prix annuel de la Fondation Alex and Ruth Dworkin is an initiative of the Congrès juif canadien, Région du Québec, an organization which I consider to be a vehicle for the Israeli propaganda machine and fundamentally intolerant of dissent and difference, particularly when it comes to Israeli government policies.

One case in point is the refusal of the national leadership of the Congrès juif canadian (CJC) to accept a recent membership application from the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians (ACJC).

ACJC members "joined together to create a cross-Canada alliance of Jewish anti-occupation forces [...] whose views are not represented by the government of Israel or by the uncritical positions taken by the leadership of the major Jewish organizations in Canada."

In an open letter to the Jewish communities of Canada signed by over 100 members and supporters the ACJC states: "Israel continues to pursue a primarily military strategy while claiming to speak in the name of Jewish people around the world. [...] Canadians, especially Jewish Canadians, seeking a peaceful resolution to the seemingly endless Israel-Palestinian conflict should no longer remain silent in the face of Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories."

Secondly, I quit the jury because I have discovered that Alex and Ruth Dworkin are major backers of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). On the JNF web site they are listed among a select group of people "who have demonstrated an enduring commitment to Israel and JNF" by contributing $1 million and above to this Zionist institution.

Much has been written about the role of the JNF, but suffice it to say that this organization, under the guise of reforestation and land purchase, has been used by the Israeli state to cover up and legitimize the massive displacement of the Palestinian people and the occupation of their land. One example is Canada Park, located a short distance from Jerusalem. In a documentary widely shown on Canadian television entitled "Park with no peace," it was revealed that this JNF-sponsored park, using tax-deductible money raised in Canada, was built on the remains of the Palestinian villages of Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba.

CBC TV's the fifth estate stated that some 10,000 Palestinians were forcibly removed by the Israeli armed forces from the land that was eventually turned into Canada Park. As a former member of the Israeli parliament who was interviewed put it, "Canadians were used to cover-up a war crime."

I cannot be associated with people who finance such forms of intolerance and oppression. This is particularly so as Israeli troops lay siege on the people of Gaza causing intolerable shortages of electricity, fuel, food and other basic necessities -- a situation which I protested along with hundreds of other Montrealers last Saturday.

I believe that the Rendez-Vous du Cinéma Québécois should drop its affiliation with the Alex and Ruth Dworkin Foundation and the CJC. This award and award money is tainted, thus casting a negative light on the Festival.

My desire to withdraw from the jury is not a comment on the films that have been nominated for the "prix de la tolérance". I am sure the selected films are a fine example of what the best of Quebec cinema has to offer and the filmmakers and producers were guided by a true sense of justice and tolerance. But I do hope that they will take into account the points I have raised in this letter and will be guided by their conscience.

Malcolm Guy
Filmmaker / Producer
Montréal
Tuesday, February 12, 2008

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EVERY PEOPLE elevate the profession in which they excel.

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A rogue regime, says I !

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East Jerusalem has 208,000 Palestinian residents and not 256,000 as previously thought, the director of the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics told Haaretz yesterday. Dr. Louis Shabaneh spoke after presenting the initial results of the Palestinian census for 2007, which showed a Palestinian population of 3.76 million, up from 2.89 million a decade ago.

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[ 17 February 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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When I hear Israelis propose that a Gazan neighborhood be obliterated, I see Yafa, 15, in her neighborhood. I've known her since she was a year old. Always-curious eyes, now behind thin-rimmed eyeglasses, a slightly husky voice, bouncy and quiet, persistent, good in English and math, helps out at home and tries to calm down her two younger sisters - balls of energy who, unlike her, are talkative. She likes to surf the Internet and chat with her friends online. Within a range of hundreds of meters from her home, in Gaza City's Tel al-Hawwa neighborhood, a few houses already have been obliterated by Israeli bombs.

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[ 17 February 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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The official answer: "Hamas denies Israel's right to exist." A ridiculous argument, which comes down to "we don't talk to our enemy because he is our enemy," or "we'd rather make peace with friends than with foes." Moreover, Hamas offers a long-term cease-fire, lasting years or even decades. Israel says "no" to that too. Why? The idiotic Israeli answer is that Hamas would use the time to rearm. As if Israel would use the time to make love. A pseudo-democracy run by the military is totally blind to the rational logic of creating a "temporary" peaceful atmosphere, boosting the parties' vested interest in a peaceful life, raising a new generation in prosperity and free of old hatreds, and so on. Better a war right now than decades of peace and a war – perhaps – afterwards. It surely is better – for the weapons industry, and for the graveyards.

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Israel is preventing four children in the Gaza Strip from joining their parents in Ramallah. The children, aged 3 to 16, have been alone in the Gaza Strip since September 2007 when their mother went to the West Bank for medical treatment and did not return.

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Not long ago the greengrocer in Ramallah recalled - between weighing locally grown zucchini and stripped hyssop leaves - that his family owns the land on which the gas station at the old entrance to the Jewish settlement of Beit El in the West Bank is located. He would not be surprised by the figure that the Peace Now movement has succeeded in officially extracting from the defense establishment, after more than a year of fighting for the freedom of information: About one-third of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank (44 out of 120) were built on privately owned Palestinian land that was seized, by means of confiscation orders, for "security needs."

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If the Land Isn't Private?

[ 20 February 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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"When millions of people erroneously believe that they are a nation, conduct themselves like a nation and fight like a nation - well, then they are a nation."

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For an entire day, the Israel Defense Forces raised the level of hysteria in Israel by announcing they were preparing for the possibility that thousands of Gazans would try to break through the checkpoints. It is easy now for the army to say that the breakthrough did not occur only because of the warnings that Hamas would be held responsible for the blood that would be shed. But anyone who is attentive to the Palestinians as an occupied people rather than as "an intelligence objective" (which openly provided the information that women and children would demonstrate against the siege on Monday), was aware they did not have a plan to topple the barriers at the Erez and Karni crossing points.

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The boys were playing near the Jabaliya refugee camp. The Israeli army said it had targeted a rocket-launching cell.

Later, two Hamas militants were killed by Israeli strikes in Beit Hanoun and on a security post near Hamas leader Ismail Haniya's home in Gaza City.

On Wednesday, a rocket fired by Hamas killed an Israeli student near Sderot, the first such death in nine months.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said "terrorists" in the territory would pay a very heavy price for the attacks.

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said that the Palestinian rocket attacks "need to stop".

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WE ISRAELIS live in a world of ghosts and monsters. We do not conduct a war against living persons and real organizations, but against devils and demons which are out to destroy us. It is a war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, between absolute good and absolute evil. That's how it looks to us, and that's how it looks to the other side, too.

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By now, Clemens Messer- schmid's friends in Ramallah and Jerusalem understand the message of his dagger-like stares when they're caught washing dishes with the tap water flowing nonstop. Even when he is not around, they close the tap, thanks to this 43-year-old hydrogeologist from Germany.

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This is not a joke (and this is not a week for jokes). It is a lesson in psychology. I was reminded of it when I read Ehud Olmert's statement that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst of joy in Gaza after the attack in Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva students were killed.

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THE MIDDLE EAST
The Gaza Bombshell
BY DAVID ROSE, Vanity Fair, April 2008

After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.

The Al Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty, fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the video.

It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. “I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,” he says. “Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.” (...)

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Senior Palestinian Authority officials can justifiably say that settlement construction continues despite everyone's protests and condemnations - not only theirs. Europe is protesting, Peace Now is protesting, the United Nations is protesting and even Condoleezza Rice protests occasionally, not to mention Israel's literary elite.

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[ 15 March 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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One day, Majda approached me saying: "Ms. Buttu, my son does not believe that Palestine is on the sea. He has never seen it and no matter how many times I tell him, he doesn't believe me. You are allowed to travel. Please, take some pictures of the sea. I need my son to know that Palestine is bigger than just our town and a few checkpoints." I took the camera in disbelief: Majda lived less than 10 miles from the sea.

"Have you been to the sea, Majda?" I asked.

"No. I have made requests to the Israeli authorities, but they have always been denied."

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Who Can See Palestine?

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On the near horizon, a de facto suspension of hostilities was taking shape. The Egyptians had made great efforts to turn it into an official cease-fire. The flame was already burning visibly lower. The launching of Qassams and Grads from the Gaza Strip into Israel had fallen from dozens a day to two or three.

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The US is now the only super-power on earth. It will remain so for quite some time to come. The decisions of the President of the United States affect every human being on this planet.

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TOMORROW WILL BE the 32nd anniversary of the first "Day of the Land" - one of the defining events in the history of Israel.

I remember the day well. I was at Ben Gurion airport, on the way to a secret meeting in London with Said Hamami, Yasser Arafat's emissary, when someone told me: "They have killed a lot of Arab protestors!"

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Independent Jewish Canadians meet to form alternative to Canadian Jewish Congress; Naomi Klein to kick off conference
OTTAWA, March 27 /CNW Telbec/ - More than 100 Jewish activists from across Canada will gather March 28-30th in Toronto at a conference to form a network of anti-occupation groups dedicated to building real peace and justice in the Middle East.
Convened by the Alliance of Concerned Jewish Canadians (ACJC), the conference will gather Canadian Jews belonging to 18 groups who are coming together to challenge the views of the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canada-Israel Committee and B'nai Brith, along with the Stephen Harper government - all of whom uncritically support the Israeli government's violations of international and humanitarian law.
Author Naomi Klein will kick off the conference this Friday evening with a talk entitled "The challenges facing us: Why we need a Canadian Jewish progressive movement". The meeting is being held at the Steelworkers' Hall, 25 Cecil St. in Toronto.
Participants share a common opposition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza as well as the Harper government's one-sided approach to the crisis in the region. The meeting will also include non-Jewish allies who share the ACJC's concern about what is happening n the West Bank and Gaza and who wish to work together with the ACJC in common pursuit of a lasting peace, based on justice for all of the peoples of the region. They include Katherine Nastovsky, Canadian Union of Public Employees; Deborah Bourke, Canadian Union of Postal Workers; Vicky Obedkoff, United Church; Khaled Moummar, Canadian Arab Federation; and Chris Jones, Canadian Peace Alliance.

Media are invited to hear Naomi Klein as well as a panel of representatives from iternational Jewish organizations that share ACJC's concerns about the Middle East including:

- Jewish Voice for Peace from the U.S.
- Brit Tzedek v'Shalom from the U.S.
- Independent Jewish Voices from the U.K.
- The International Jewish Solidarity Network
- European Jews For Just Peace

[ 30 March 2008: Message edited by: martin dufresne ]

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"Hey! Take your hands off Tibet!" the international chorus is crying out, "But not from Chechnya! Not from the Basque homeland! And certainly not from Palestine!" And that is not a joke.

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Whenever Amira Hass tries to explain her vocation as a journalist, she recalls a seminal moment in her mother's life. Hannah Hass was being marched from a cattle train to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen on a summer's day in 1944. "She and the other women had been 10 days in the train from Yugoslavia. They were sick and some were dying. Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'. It's as if I was there and saw it myself." Amira Hass stares at you through wire-framed glasses as she speaks, anxious to make sure you have understood the importance of the Jewish Holocaust in her life.

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[ 07 April 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 07 April 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

[ 07 April 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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NEXT MONTH, Israel will celebrate its 60th anniversary. The government is working feverishly to make this day into an occasion of joy and jubilation. While serious problems are crying out for funds, some 40 million dollars have been allocated to this aim.

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In several articles published by The Electronic Intifada, I claimed
that Israel is pursuing a genocidal policy against the Palestinians in
the Gaza Strip, while continuing the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank .
I asserted that the genocidal policies are a result of a lack of
strategy. The argument was that since the Israeli political and
military elites do not know how to deal with the Gaza Strip, they opted
for a knee-jerk reaction in the form of massive killing of citizens
whenever the Palestinians in the Strip dared to protest by force their
strangulation and imprisonment. The end result so far is the escalation
of the indiscriminate killing of Palestinians -- more than one hundred
in the first days of March 2008, unfortunately validating the adjective
"genocidal" I and others attached to these policies. But it was not yet
a strategy.

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Every year I marvel again at the genius of this ceremony. It unites the whole family, and everyone - from the venerable grandfather to the smallest child - has a role in it. It engages all the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. The simplistic text of the Haggadah, the book which is read aloud, the symbolic food, the four glasses of wine, the singing together, the exact repetition of every part every year - all these imprint on the consciousness of a child from the earliest age an ineradicable memory that they will carry with them to the grave, be they religious or not. They will never forget the security and warmth of the large family around the Seder table, and even in old age they will recall it with nostalgia. A cynic might see it as a perfect example of brain-washing.

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[ 26 April 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Our media discuss these questions dispassionately, as if they were equivalent options. Like a person in a showroom making a choice between two cars. This one is good, and so is the other one. So which should one buy?

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EVERY TIME I hear the voice of David Ben-Gurion uttering the words "Therefore we are gathered here…" I think of Issar Barsky, a charming youngster, the little brother of a girl-friend of mine.

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ONE DAY, I hope, a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission", on the South African model, will be set up here. It should be composed of Israeli, Palestinian and international historians, whose job will be to establish what really happened in this country in 1948.

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[ 16 May 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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Christians – the ancient self-designated heirs to the Jews – commemorate Christ's tormented way to resurrection and redemption in the weeks leading to Easter. Zionists – the modern self-designated heirs to the Jews – have their Lent after Passover, commemorating what they construct as their via dolorosa leading to the "Jewish State." In the weeks following Pesach the country indulges in a nationalistic orgy, hardly imaginable in any other modern state, reminiscent of a primitive tribe. If you want to understand how a whole nation is led to defy its own interests, to follow a corrupt, de facto military leadership wasting the nation's fortune and blood on unnecessary wars and immoral occupation for decades, pay a visit to Israel shortly after Pesach.

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Israel at Sixty

[ 16 May 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]

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LATELY WE are flooded with friends. The Great of the Earth, past and present, come here to flatter us, to fawn on us, to grovel at our feet.

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Jonathan Cook: As it has been doing for the past decade, Israel's Palestinian minority staged an alternative act of commemoration: a procession of families, many of them refugees from the 1948 war, to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. The villages were destroyed to ensure that the 750,000 Palestinians expelled from the state under the cover of war never return.

But in a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, this year's march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police. They clubbed unarmed demonstrators with batons and fired tear gas and stun grenades into crowds of families that included young children.

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Arab members of the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) were clubbed until bloody by baton-wielding police.

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... you don't send police on mounted horseback charging into a crowd of families and fire tear gas and stun grenades at them. It was totally indiscriminate and reckless." ....

"Later I found them with the baby retching, its eyes streaming and choking. It broke my heart. There were so many families with young children, and the police charge was just so unprovoked. It started from nothing."

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THE GERMANS call it "die Flucht nach vorne" - escaping forwards. When the situation is desperate, attack! Instead of retreating, advance! When there is no way out, storm ahead!

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Jimmy Carter says Israel had 150 nuclear weapons

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Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence. Nor do US officials deviate in public from that Israeli line.

[ 26 May 2008: Message edited by: Boom Boom ]

The Middle East's Only Democracy® is up to its old tricks:

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Norman Finkelstein, the controversial Jewish American academic and fierce critic of Israel, has been deported from the country and banned from the Jewish state for 10 years, it emerged yesterday.

Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust survivor who has accused Israel of using the genocidal Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actions against the Palestinians, was detained by the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, when he landed at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on Friday.

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US academic deported and banned for criticising Israel

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Finkelstein was also refused tenure last year at Chicago's DePaul University for attacking several staunch Israel supporters and academics such as Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the deportation of Finkelstein was an assault on free speech.

"The decision to prevent someone from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitarian regime," said the association's lawyer, Oded Peler

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[ 26 May 2008: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]