"The Israeli operations were carefully planned in all their phases as a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise the civilian population,"

a war crime, is a war crime, is a war crime.

encourage the US government to suspend all military aid to israel and support the BDS movement in opposition to this racist regime that acts w/ impunity upon the weak and innocent.

http://bdsmovement.net/

...peace...

"Israel's Investigations of Gaza Conflict Inadequate, Say UN Experts"
_______________________

You don't say!

In all fairness, maybe Israel skimped on this one because they're diverting all of their investigators to find out what the hell actually happened to all the credit cards, luggage, and equipment pillaged by the IDF during the Gaza Flotilla caper.

Once again, talk of "proportionality" is entirely moot, as Israel wasn't "responding" to anything. It initiated the violence, in the full knowledge of its impunity, and its ownership of the US political/media complex.

There is no supreme being that's going to deliver us from this monstrosity; we are going to have to do it ourselves.

But of course Hamas' investigation was impeccable and evenhanded, revealing that any and all crimes of war were committed by Israel.

What was Hamas' internal inquiry?

A lot of the munitions used during the Gaza Massacre almost certainly came from the naval weapons depot across the bay from my little town of Port Townsend, in northwest Washington.

These arms would include cluster bombs, white phosphorus, and weapons using depleted uranium.

A couple years ago, the former depot commander told local Chamber of Commerce members that "Israel is one of our best customers."

You bet. And they use U. S. taxpayer dollars for those weapons, too.

Israel gets $3.1 billion dollars in U. S. taxpayer aid yearly--more than any other country on earth--and up to 75 percent of it must be used for the purchase of U. S.-made military weapons and equipment.

Pretty sweet deal for everybody, except of course the U. S. taxpayer and those 1,400 Palestinian civilians killed by those weapons, 400 of them women and children.

Our chief executive, lawmakers and courts do nothing when we ask them to stop using our money for war crimes. The wall between U. S. citizens and our corporate-run government is as tall and thick as the wall that makes Gaza the world's biggest open-air concentration camp.

Here in Port Townsend and Jefferson County, some of us thought of a nonviolent tactic that might work better than useless voting, sending emails to our "representatives," or holding signs and chanting slogans.

We started a BDS movement.

The first thing we did was initiate a boycott proposal, asking our local food co-op board to consider a boycott of products from Israel.

This scared local Zionists and "Progressive-except-Palestine" liberals so much that a screaming campaign was immediately invoked in order to try to silence and shut us down.

We were repeatedly called "anti-semitic," "self-hating Jews," "racist," and other names. One person screamed at us as we were sitting at our co-op-designated table outside the co-op: "IF THERE'S EVER A HOLOCAUST HERE AND YOU'RE THE TARGET, I HOPE THEY TAKE YOU DOWN!"

Anti-boycott talking points were quickly spread around and repeated like Tea-Bagger mantras: "Why pick on Israel?" "What about China?" "Why not boycott the U. S. for its war crimes?" "Keep politics our of my co-op!" "I just want good food!" "Stop being divisive!" "If this boycott passes, I'm going to quit the co-op!"

When we held our ground, calmly trying to encourage dialogue instead of argument, shouting and threats, and began to gather a lot of supporters and media attention, Stand With Us, a national pro-Israel organization, was called in to lend support to the local anti-boycott effort.

Then it got even better. Gideon Lustig, the Deputy Consul General of Israel for the Pacific Northwest, showed up.

He gave a talk in the Sanctuary of the local Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, in which he denied that apartheid exists in Israel--in fact he said he was "offended" by the insinuation, and in his best diplomat-speak finished his talk by saying the boycott "could be perceived as anti-semitic."

Lustig also tried to meet in closed-session with the co-op board, and the board president was all in favor of that--in fact, she asked board members to convene for the meeting. But when word of the plot got out, and it was pointed out that a closed-door meeting would be a violation of co-op principles, the board president chose to meet alone with Lustig (this also in contravention of co-op principles).

The Consul General also tried to meet (and may have met) with the Port Townsend city manager, perhaps to encourage the town to "Invest Rather Than Divest," a message Lustig tried to sell during his public talk, neglecting to point out that there's a lot of private U. S. investment already going on, much of it from evangelical Christian churches, to help build and sustain the illegal armed settlements in the West Bank.

It gets even thicker.

At a quiet local free-wifi site, I witnessed, unnoticed, the Consul General and a consulate attache hunkering down over linked computers for more than an hour with the Seattle Stand With Us representative, composing a public statement and developing strategy for meetings with the board president and city manager, and arranging and rehearsing for an upcoming interview with a local reporter.

There were no local boycott opponents present at that session: it was all outsider-driven.

Bottom-line: a highly placed representative of a foreign power intervened in the political affairs of a small (8,000 pop.) northwest American town. . . .

What are they afraid of?

I think they're afraid of the truth. They want to dim or snuff out the light being shed on Israel's crimes against humanity.

Last night--surprise, surprise--the co-op board of directors voted 4-2 against the boycott, but the truth will not go away and neither will BDS--not here in Port Townsend, nor anywhere throughout the world.

BDS is a movement that is growing rapidly, and a nonviolent tactic that is vastly more powerful than phony peace talks or, for that matter, those weapons across the bay from where I'm now sitting in Port Townsend.

Karma Tenzing Wangchuk
Port Townsend Food Co-op Member-Owner
Jefferson County BDS
http://jeffcowabds.com

Correction to Website.

Jefferson County (Wash.) BDS
http://jeffcowabds.wordpress.com/

Tenzing

The "State" of Israel - the only true Kleptocracy in the Middle East

Gaza And The Warsaw Ghetto

same place

different time

while the world stands by

genocide

live