Between xenophobic rhetoric and human tragedy by Hassan Imran

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Multiple political, security, economic or religious factors are behind these waves of uprooted refugees and immigrants fleeing their home country for countries they have only heard of. Political and security reasons include genocide and ethnic cleansing, as was the case with Palestinian refugees in 1948 and the Rohingya refugees nowadays. 

Continue reading at https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/between-xenophobic-rhetoric-and-human-tragedy-25273

“66 years the genocide carries on with the whole world watching supine.”

To the U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide,

Israel was initially accepted by your organisation on condition it adheres to the 67 borders and on instituting the Right of Return for Palestinian refugees; Neither of these two conditions have been adhered to, and 66 years on, the genocide carries on with the whole world watching supine. How much longer are you going to pretend to be representing the people? How many more have to die before you are spurred into concrete action? It is through your ineffectiveness that the blood of countless innocents taint your hands.

Sandra Watfa
London, United Kingdom

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TAKE ACTION now and write your own letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.

Israel’s War on Palestine: It’s Bad, but is it Genocide?

Photo by Charles Davis

“It’s important to remember that you don’t need millions of dead bodies and a Nazi industrial system of extermination to constitute genocide under the relevant convention,” writes Sam Husseini of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a Washington-based media watchdog. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines “genocide”as inflicting on a group “conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” As the very title of the treaty suggests, a genocide need not be anywhere near completed—the destruction need not be “in whole”—for genocidal behavior to merit the label. What matters is the motivation, not the body count.

“While conflict has many causes, genocidal conflict is identity-based,” says the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, an expert on such things. “These conflicts are fomented by discrimination,” as well as “hate speech inciting violence.”

Now, consider: Israel is a state that openly discriminates on the basis of identity, denying Palestinian refugees the ability to visit their old villages in what is now Israel while granting citizenship to anyone with a Jewish mother who wants it. Israel is a state where the deputy speaker of parliament openly calls for replacing the indigenous population of Gaza with Jewish settlers, and where a leading newspaper just published an article titled “When Genocide Is Permissible.” It’s the sort of place where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu feels comfortable calling the 20 percent of the population that isn’t Jewish—the indigenous people who weren’t pushed out—a “demographic threat” to apartheid, their continued reproduction posing a serious challenge to continued ethnic supremacy west of the Jordan River. So why are people afraid to use that word: “genocide”?

Continue reading at http://www.vice.com/read/israels-war-on-gaza-is-it-genocide-813

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.

Fidel Castro, Alice Walker, Bolivian president condemn Israel, join Latin American boycott call, Condemn “genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people”

We express our absolute repulsion at the genocide being carried out against the Palestinian people by a state founded on dispossession and the colonial occupation of Palestinian territories… We condemn the imperialist role of the United States that politically, financially and militarily sponsors and backs Israel, in the face of the extraordinary inaction of the UN Security Council whose resolutions on the question of Palestine are systematically violated with complete impunity by Washington. The United States is once again demonstrating the hypocrisy and cynicism with which it has acted throughout history, threatening sanctions and interventions against the peoples of Latin America, Africa and Eurasia who defend their sovereignty at the same time as its backs the actions of Israel. We denounce the complicity in what is occurring, by default in some cases, of the governments that make up the European Union, as well as the unconditional subordination of the media oligarchs to Washington’s dictates. Enough of calling it a war when in fact it is a genocide being perpetrated by one of the best equipped armies in the world against a people whose defensive resources are infinitely inferior in quantity and quality!

We encourage you to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against the terrorist state of Israel, as it is time for active and creative solidarity that goes beyond statements of condemnation. We have failed the more than 1600 people killed in Palestine over the last few weeks, as well as the more than 9000 injured since the start of the terrorist operation hypocritically named “Protective Edge.”

We demand an end to apartheid and genocide, as well as to the walls and illegal settlements. We call on the governments of the world to demand that Israel complies with UN Security Council resolutions that oblige it to withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, return to the borders that existed prior to the “Six Day War” (1967) and guarantee the right of return for Palestinian refugees, as per Security Council Resolution No. 242, November 22, 1967, a resolution that has been consistently ignored by the state of Israel.

Continue reading at http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/jimmy-johnson/fidel-castro-alice-walker-bolivian-president-condemn-israel-join-latin-american

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.