He added: "We must not be afraid to call something what it is." Brockmann stressed that it was important for the United Nations to use the heavily-charged term since it was the institution itself that had passed the International Convention against the crime of apartheid.
Israel's ambassador to the UN earlier called Brockmann an "Israel hater" for hugging Iran's President Ahmadinejad. Further evidence that one cannot criticize Israel without being dubbed an anti-semitic.
The Tel Aviv District Court today sentenced eight gang members to various prison sentences for crimes like assault, conspiracy to commit a crime, and racial incitement.
The court stated that the phenomenon revealed during the investigation of the case is extremely severe, shocking and horrifying - particularly in light of the fact that the suspects were all youths and immigrants from the Commonwealth of Independent states. According to the original indictment, filed last September, the eight defendants - mostly immigrants from the former Soviet Union between the ages of 17 and 20 - perpetrated violent hate crimes against Asians, religious Jews, drug addicts and homosexuals.
So, ok. Let me see if I can just wrap my head around this. You are from countries that 60 years ago were under Nazi occupation. Countries where your grandparents were possibly killed because they were Jews. And then your parents got the good sense to get the heel out and move you to the only Jewish state in the world. Which is when you join a neo-Nazi gang.
My readers may remember me writing about the beleaguered city of Hebron in the West Bank. I visited it this summer and noted the forced segregation between Israeli and Palestinian residents, the curfews that only applied to the latter, and the ubiquitous anti-Muslim graffiti. 650 Israeli residents in this city of 180,000 Palestinians are guarded by Israeli troops in fortified enclaves in order to maintain their position.
In April of 2007, an Israeli family confiscated a house in Hebron which, at that time, was occupied by a Palestinian family. The Israeli family claimed they were the real owners of the house and, against the wishes of the original residents, began living in the house. Almost immediately, the house became known as Beit Hameriva, House of Contention. Last week, that's November of 2008, Israel's High Court found that the Israeli occupants of Beit Hameriva had forged ownership documents and ordered them to vacate the property by noon of the following Wednesday. Of course, they didn't leave, and nobody made them.
The Palestinian residents of Hebron were not happy and since, again, Israel has blocked Palestinians from pursing their rights through legal channels, tensions have been high this week. However, according to government spokesmen, it was not Palestinians who were responsible for this week's wave of violence.
The Defense Ministry said it would avoid the use of force in the evacuation and would try to urge the settlers to leave on their own accord. By late Wednesday, the house was still not evacuated and the settlers' protests grew hotter throughout the city.
During the protests, some settlers began to attack Palestinian locals while others wounded an IDF soldier by spraying turpentine at him as he tried to stop them from throwing stones at Palestinians.
Activists also punctured the tires of police and military jeeps stationed nearby.
The settlers also scribbled graffiti around Hebron, including spraying 'Mohammed Pig' on the walls of a local mosque and on Palestinian homes nearby.
To see a Ha'aretz article from when the Beit Hameriva was born, including information about the legalities, go here.
Back in this post, I interviewed members of an organization called Zochrot, which seeks to bring the story of the Palestinian Nakba to the Israeli public. Zochrot member Ranin Geries told me that Israelis think "the blood of the Palestinian is very cheap" and this sentiment was echoed last week by the sentencing of Avraham Tomer in Tel Aviv.
In October of 2006, Tomer and a few other Border Police officers detained Iyad Abu Ra’iyeh and two other Palestinian men at the construction site where they worked, on suspicion of living in Israel illegally. The men were detained in a small room on the construction site and beaten while they were questioned.
Israeli Human Rights group B'Tselem reports on the case and Judge Oded Mudrik described the events in his verdict:
The three PSIs [Palestinians] were forced to sit with their backs to the wall, and the defendant was posted to guard them. The defendant cocked his rifle, which was lying on his shoulder in the “cross” position, while aiming it at one of the PSIs, Iyad Tawfiq Abu Ra’iyeh (hereafter: “the deceased”). In this situation, as he was cocking the rifle, the defendant absent-mindedly pressed the trigger. A bullet was fired from the weapon of the defendant and it struck the neck of the deceased, causing his death.
For "absent-mindedly" pressing the trigger of his gun, Tomer was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to one year in jail. You can go to the B'Tselem page if you have any interest in reading Judge Mudrik's justification for the sentence he handed down.
I'm breaking my self-imposed radio silence to share this story with you.
Teen shot after slashing cop in face with broken bottle
A policeman shot a teen in the leg during a clash in Ramat Gan early Saturday after the teen had slashed him in the face with a broken bottle.
The incident occurred when police apprehended a group of Russian-speaking teens, aged between 16 and 17, who had allegedly attacked a couple in the central town after returning from a night out.
The article goes on but all you need to know is there. First of all, When I saw the headline, I knew that the teen was not a native Israeli. That variety is usually given much more latitude from the police. A sabra would not be shot for assaulting a police officer, even if he had a gun. Israelis feel strongly about protecting their own.
Second, when I read the first sentence in the article, I knew the teen was not Palestinian. If he were, he would have been shot in the chest or the head, not the leg. He also was not likely a mizrahi, a dark skinned Jew, because he may have been mistaken for Palestinian in this case.
This left me with one guess: he was Russian. And the next sentence confirmed my hypothesis.
Israel can parrot all it wants about being the only free democracy in a sea of corruption, but if its policies toward racial interaction are so obvious to an outsider, none of it means much.
