Highlights include:
From Johannesburg to Jerusalem: Anti-Apartheid Organizing in the US
What:
Showing of critically acclaimed film "Have you heard from
Johannesburg?" followed by a discussion with David Wildman of the
United Methodist Church and Mahmoud Mamdani of Columbia University
When: Monday, March 2, 7pm
Where: St Mary's Episcopal Church, 521 West 126th St, NYC
The Art of Resistance: Culture and the Boycott of Israel
What:
Panel discussion with best-selling author Ahdaf Soueif, Palestinian
activist and political analyst Omar Barghouti, and NYC poet Remi
Kanazi; moderated by Brooklyn College Professor Mustafa Bayoumi
When: Friday, March 6, 7pm
Where: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, NYC
If you're not in New York, check out http://apartheidweek.org/ to find events near you.
I see many cities apparently participating in Apartheidweek but no schedule or list of events at the Apartheidweek website.
You people are just anti-semites in disguise. Why aren't you holding rallies to stop the genocide in Darfur, or for the UN to oust evil dictator Robert Mugabe, or to resolve the conflict in Sri Lanka, or to stop the killings in Cambodia, or to stop the Egyptians shooting in cold blood African refugees seeking asylum in Israel that get too close to the Egyptian border? The list of atrocities in the world goes on, yet you choose to focus on one small regional conflict.
My auntie works in the emergency unit in Shaare Tzedek hospital, Jerusalem, and at least half of her patients, if not more, were Palestinians injured in the air-strikes during the war. Are these the actions of an apartheid state? Would an apartheid nation dismantle its own cities for nothing in return, as Israel did in Gush Katif? Would they warn the Palestinian civilians to leave their homes before they carry out an air-stike? Would they allow the representation of a people hostile to their nation to be represented in their government as with Balad or Chadash? In contrast with your misguided and frankly racist views, Israel is the only free, democratic society that encourages freedom of speech and expression in a sea of Arab dictatorships. Only in Israel can there be a gay rights rally, a pro-religious rally, an Arab protest and trade unionist rally all in the same city on the same day.
The truth is that your organisation is a racist organisation whose real agenda is to express your inconceivable hatred of Jews through the political platform of "anti-Zionism". It was not sixty years ago when people exactly the same as you were parading through the streets of Germany under Nazi banners.
They are not in disguise. They are open about their hatred. Philip is quite famous in Stormfront circles.
The week is not against Israel Democracy, it is against Isreal Apartheid.
Western coutries are sensitized to racism precisely because we know how quickly racism degenerates to mass murder. We are responding to lessons of Holocaust.
We, as in western civilisations, must clean mess on our own doorstep before we start teaching the rest of the world about human rights and democracy. Please don't think that some of westerners don't feel responsible for Palestinian plight because they feel, rightly, that they damaged Jewish psyche so badly in Europe 60 years ago.
But being responsible for someone's hurt does not imply letting them get away with murderouos racism two generations later.
Ewa, I am not an ethnic Pole, but I have studied the history of Poland as well as that of ethnic Poles and Jews (both ethnic Ashkenazim and ethnic Tatars).
I really cannot see where ethnic Poles should feel much guilt with regard to Jews. For a good number of centuries ethnic Poles and ethnic Ashkenazim benefited from a partnership of sorts.
Then Poland became the first failed state of the modern period with the result that there was a lot of backbiting among the numerous ethnic groups of historic Poland.
For anyone interested, Remi Kanazi had very different reactions to Zohan, which I discuss in Zohan Offends for One State. This particular blog entry was recently recommended reading for a course at the University of Washington.
Yes, certainly no reason to feel guilty about assisting Hitler enact his final solution, and certainly no reason to feel guilty over the second holocaust enacted by the Poles when those few Jews tried to return to their homes in Poland.
No reason to feel guilty over the hundreds of years of explicit polish antisemitism.
300,000 Chechnyans killed by Russia. No outrage.
Over 1,000,000 Africans killed by Muslims. No outrage.
Tibet destroyed by the Chinese. No outrage.
Why no outrage?
Julian, of course all sensible human beings are outraged by massacres occurring in other countries. But Israel's massacres and rogue behaviour affect us more because over time, through our various governments, we have been forced to be a party to those crimes. That's one reason I can give you as to why this one is personal.
RE: "Why no outrage?"
A holocaust perpetrated by Leopold II of Belgium (with the banking assistance of the Rothschild family)
From Wikipedia – The Congo Free State was a corporate state privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians through a dummy non-governmental organization, the Association Internationale Africaine. Leopold was the sole shareholder and chairman, exploiting the state for rubber, copper and other minerals in the upper Lualaba River basin. The state included the entire area of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo and existed from 1885 to 1908, when it was annexed by the government of Belgium. Immensely profitable, the Congo Free State eventually earned infamy due to the brutal mistreatment of native peoples and plunder of natural resources……
Death toll
….In the absence of a census (the first was taken in 1924),[12] it is even more difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Casement's 1904 report set it at 3 million for just twelve of the twenty years Leopold's regime lasted; Forbath, at least 5 million[13]; Adam Hochschild, and Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, 10 million[14][15]; the Encyclopædia Britannica.[citation needed] and Fredric Wertham's 1966 book "A Sign For Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence"[16] estimate that the population of the Congo dropped from 30 million to 8 and 8.5 million, respectively, in that period. Similarly, the New York Times reports that "Under the reign of terror instituted by King Leopold II of Belgium (who ran the Congo Free State as his personal fief from 1885 to 1908), the population of the Congo was reduced by half — as many as 8 million Africans."…..
SOURCE –
Berel is so predictable in his Jewish fanaticism and racism.
By my standards Yad Vashem is not much for scholarship, but it does admit that absolutely and relatively more Poles — despite complete certainty execution if the they were caught by the Occupation — attempted to protect Jews from the German Nazis than members of any other ethnic group.
I have often wondered about the reason. Ethnic Poles in formerly Austrian and German Poland had a lot of cause for grievance against ethnic Ashkenazim because ethnic Ashkenazim worked so hard to serve the occupation governments as native collaborators and were fully engaged in exploitation of the native Polish peasantry/serfs.
The Czarist government was less interested in using ethnic Ashkenazim as native collaborators but was concerned that Jewish exploitation of the Polish peasant/serf population (including white slaving) was contributory to violent instability in Russian-occupied Poland.
During the 1930s many Poles in formerly Russian Poland were quite aware both of the mistreatment of the Polish minority within the Soviet Union and also of the Soviet ethnic Ashkenazi role in setting and perpetrating the alienization policy, which included mass murder.
During the Russian occupation of Poland, Soviet Jewish (and to a lesser extent Soviet Latvian) officials took the lead in arrests and executions of Polish political, intellectual, military, and spiritual leaders. (See Truth About the Katyn Massacre?.)
I theorize that ethnic Poles made such exceptional efforts to save Jews from German Nazi persecution in part to spite the German Nazis, who were trying to crush Polish nationalism, and because of the strength of Polish Catholic feeling, which lead even many Polish Catholic Jew-haters to conclude that German Nazi treatment of Jews was beyond the pale of toleration.
As for Kielce, it is far from clear exactly what happened, but I have read practically all the primary materials available in Polish, Russian and Yiddish. (There may still be unreleased materials in Israeli and Russian Federation state archives.)
Initially, Roma were blamed for the alleged kidnapping of an ethnic Polish child.
Some of the interviews in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Jewish riots suggest that the local NKVB/MGB agents possibly with the aid of local Zionists shifted suspicion onto returning Jews because Soviet policy at that time period encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine as part of Soviet policy of destabilizing the British mandatory regime in Palestine. According to this hypothesis Soviet security personnel may have made sure that their Zionist counterparts/collaborators were killed during to riot.
I could not help noticing that the available information indicated that all the Soviet agents in Kielce at the time were Jewish yet suffered no casualties.