FILM: Budrus at our September Meeting

September 9th, 2011 • Events, Film & Documentary, News
Tags: Budrus, documentary, meeting, september

“It takes a village to unite the
most divided people on earth.”

We’ll be showing the award-winning film Budrus, an inspiring film chronicling the peaceful protests of Palestinians in the West Bank, at our September meeting. Trailer:

When? 8pm Thursday 15th Sept 2011

Where? Room 3, RISC, London Street, Reading , RG1 4PS(above the Global Cafe)

Budrus is an award-winning feature documentary film about a Palestinian community organizer, Ayed Morrar, who unites local Fatah and Hamas members along with Israeli supporters in an unarmed movement to save his village of Budrus from destruction by Israel’s Separation Barrier. Success eludes them until his 15-year-old daughter, Iltezam, launches a women’s contingent that quickly moves to the front lines. Struggling side by side, father and daughter unleash an inspiring, yet little-known, movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that is still gaining ground today. In an action-filled documentary chronicling this movement from its infancy, Budrus shines a light on people who choose nonviolence to confront a threat.

• Find out more at the Official Website…
• Watch AJE’s Fabulous Picture Show on the Budrus

UK: 48 hours to Recognise Palestine

September 1st, 2011 • Action, News

via Avaaz.org

Call the Foreign and Commonwealth Office switchboard and ask for William Hague’s office.

020 7008 1500

Also try Hague’s Parliamentary office: 020 7219 4611

In less than 48 hours, the UK will decide if it recognises Palestine at a critical EU Foreign Ministers meeting. Our global petition has nearly 900,000 signers, 79,000 from the UK, but the Foreign Minister is still undecided. We can ramp up the pressure now to ensure the UK gets behind a Palestinian state.

Foreign Office officials have said the Minister could be swayed to make the right call, and his support for Palestine could provide the EU leadership needed to push the bid through at the UN. But to counter intense US and Israeli lobbying, he needs to hear from all of us now.

Let’s flood the Minister’s office with phone calls today and give him a public mandate to call for an independent state of Palestine, which could break the deadlock in talks and bring peace a little closer. The next few hours are critical — make an urgent call now.

Here is the number to call: Foreign and Commonwealth Office switchboard: 020 7008 1500 — ask for William Hague’s office. You can also try Hague’s Parliamentary office: 020 7219 4611

The talking points below will help guide you in what to say:

• 79,000 UK citizens and nearly 900,000 people across the globe have signed the petition for the UN to recognise Palestine.
  This is a moment for the UK to stand on the right side of history — this is a legitimate, non violent, diplomatic proposal to open a new path towards peace.
• This is a fragile time. If we support this proposal we could open up hope for the majority of Palestinians who want a peaceful resolution to the conflict. If we don’t support it, this could spiral into violence and will play right into the hands of extremists.
• The far-right Netanyahu government is making a return to peace talks harder by approving more settlement building in the West Bank, but most Israeli citizens want a two state solution. This is a opportunity to show that the world is serious about finding a solution where two peoples can live in peace side by side.
• The Arab Spring has opened the door to a new, exciting era of UK relations with the Middle East. We are supporting people across the region struggling for self-determination and freedom. This is the Palestinians’ call, and our response should be consistent. If the UK does not support the Palestinian bid at the UN, we could lose that momentum and be pushed back into the dangerous divisions of the last decade.
• This bid is consistent with European policy which has invested heavily in building the capacity of the Palestinian state. It would be contradictory to now oppose the founding of that state at the UN.

Remember to be polite — we’ll be far more convincing if we are reasonable and courteous. If you don’t get through, it probably means we’re jamming their lines — a good sign! Keep calling! If you do get through but they cannot transfer you, make sure your call is officially registered by the switchboard and follow up with an email to: ainagcorrespondence@fco.gov.uk and haguew@parliament.uk and private.office@fco.gsi.gov.uk

Most government offices work from 9am – 5pm — if you miss office hours please try again tomorrow.

FILM: Death in Gaza – Free Screening

July 1st, 2011 • Events, Film & Documentary, News
Tags: Basingstoke Activist Film Group, Death in Gaza, free, QMC, screening

Our friends at Basingstoke Activist Film Group will be showing the “Death in Gaza” this Saturday. A harrowing, Emmy award-winning, documentary that portrays the horror of conflict.

The film opens in the West Bank, moving to Gaza and eventually Rafah. It concentrates on 3 children (Ahmed, Mohammed and Najla), concluding with the tragic death of its director, James Miller.

Admission is FREE + free cake & homemade lemonade! To be followed by Q&A and discussion with BAFG and PSC.

Saturday 2nd July @ 10.30am – 1.30pm

Queen Mary’s College, Cliddesden Road, Basingstoke, RG21 3HF

(look out for BAFG members at the QMC Reception)

• Facebook Event Page
• ei review

*The film is rated 15, so may not be suitable for a young audience.

World Refugee Day: 1 in 3 Refugees is Palestinian

June 20th, 2011 • Awareness, Events, News
Tags: UNHCR, unrwa, World Refugee Day

On World Refugee Day, let us reaffirm the importance of solidarity and burden-sharing by the international community. Refugees have been deprived of their homes, but they must not be deprived of their futures – UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

A Palestinian refugee is a person whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period between 1 June 1946 and 15 May 1948 and those who both lost their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict (as defined by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, UNRWA).

One in every three refugees in the world is Palestinian.

There are approximately 7 million Palestinian refugees in the world and they can be categorised as:

• The original ‘Nakhba refugees’ and their descendants (4.5 million)
• The 1967 Six Day War refugees and descendants (1 million)
• ‘Low intensity population transfer’ refugees and other refugees

All refugees have the right to return to their homes and/ or receive compensation for the loss or damage of their properties. Israel has been deliberately denying the right to return of the Palestinian refugees which is a clear violation of international law.

‘We should do whatever it takes to prevent the Palestinians from coming back to their homes. The old will die and the young will eventually forget’ – words of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.

-

Related:

• UNHCR’s “Do 1 Thing” campaign
• UNRWA’s “Peace Starts Here” project – stories from the camps

via Stephen Sizer and PSC Thailand

Peace Campaigner Brian Haw: 1949-2011

June 19th, 2011 • News
Tags: Brian Haw, campaigner, Parliament Square, peace

Brian Haw, 1949-2011

Brian’s family announced that he died on June 18, after a long hard fight against lung cancer, while receiving treatment in Germany, aged 62.

Many of us have seen and met Brian at his Parliament Square Peace Campaign, which started on June 2 2001, a continuous round-the-clock demonstration opposite the Houses of Parliament against the UK’s policy in Iraq and elsewhere.

It was only after Boris Johnson obtained a high court order in March this year that Haw was moved on, ending a near-ten year vigil.

MP Jeremy Corbyn released a statement today:

He stood and camped in Parliament Square for ten years, challenged law and above all reminded MPs daily of the consequences of their decisions, easily made in the warm glow of moral superiority and jingoism, have consequences for our civil liberties and the lives of thousands of innocent people and generations that follow.

A statement on Brian’s website, BrianHaw.tv, said:

Brian showed great determination and courage during the many long hard years he led his Peace Campaign in Parliament Square, during which it is well documented that he was relentlessly persecuted by the authorities which eventually took its toll on his health.

Brian showed the same courage and determination in his battle with cancer.He was keenly aware of and deeply concerned that so many civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine did not have access to the same treatments that were made available to him.

Parliament, the police, and courts etc, should forever be ashamed of their disgraceful behaviour towards Brian.

News reports:

• AJE: ‘Unsung hero’: British anti-war activist will be remembered for his unyielding protest on behalf of children killed in conflict.
• BBC: Parliament Square peace campaigner Brian Haw dies
• The Independent: Protester became activists’ hero
• June 2, The Independent: Peace in our time? UK’s most famous protest passes a 10-year milestone
• Wikipedia: Brian Haw
• Brian’s Official website

Brian was voted Most Inspiring Political Figure at the 2007 Channel 4 Political Awards:

“Arabopaedophobia”: Are Palestinian children less worthy?

June 17th, 2011 • News
Tags: al jazeera, Joseph Massad, opinion

Opinion piece on Al Jazeera by Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University:

Are Palestinian children less worthy?

As Palestinian children endure lives of suffering, Obama’s love for their Israeli counterparts knows no limit.

During the first and second intifada, more than 700 Palestinian children were killed, and a further 313 children died in the Israeli shelling of Gaza in December 2008-July 2009

What is it about Jewish and Arab children that privileges the first and spurns the second in the speeches of President Barack Obama, let alone in the Western media more generally? Are Jewish children smarter, prettier, whiter? Are they deserving of sympathy and solidarity, denied to Arab children, because they are innocent and unsullied by the guilt of their parents, themselves often referred to as “the children of Israel”? Or, is it that Arab children are dangerous, threatening, guilty, even dark and ugly, a situation that can only lead to Arabopaedophobia – the Western fear of Arab children?

Innocence and childhood are common themes in Western political discourse, official and unofficial. While it is a truism to state that since the end of European colonialism the US and Europe have been, at the official and unofficial levels, friendly to and supportive of the Zionist colonial project and hostile to Palestinians and Arabs in their resistance to Zionism, the expectation would be that a West that insists rhetorically on the “universalism” of its values would show at least a rhetorical commitment to the equality of Arab and Jewish children as victims of the violence visited on the region by Zionist colonialism and the resistance to it. Yet, the only Western sympathy manifest is to Jewish children as symbols of Zionist and Israeli innocence. This Western sympathy is deployed primarily to denounce Arab guilt, including the guilt of Arab children.

Indeed, the only time Arab children received any sympathy at all in the West was a few years ago when Israeli and US propaganda outlets, official and unofficial alike, mounted a major propaganda campaign to save these children from their barbaric Arab and Palestinian parents, who allegedly trained them to commit violent acts, or who unlovingly placed them in the middle of danger, sacrificing them for their violent political goals. It was not Israel who was to blame for killing Palestinian children, but the children’s own uncaring and cruel parents who placed them in the path of Israeli Jewish bullets, which left Israeli Jews no choice but to kill them. This of course is an old Israeli casuistry used to justify Israel’s carnage of Palestinians. Golda Meir had famously articulated the workings of Israel’s Jewish conscience thus: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

In the official discourse of post-World War II US power, Jewish children have been often invoked to illustrate the innocence of Israel, a tradition carried faithfully by Barack Obama’s rhetoric. Refusing to even acknowledge Arab children as victims of Israel, on June 4, 2009, Obama told Arabs in his Cairo speech: “It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.” He reiterated this in his May 19, 2011 “winds of change” speech, declaring: “For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them.”

Read the full article at Al Jazeera…

Jewish-American Harassed, then Arrested, in Jerusalem

June 11th, 2011 • Action, Awareness, Film & Documentary, News
Tags: arrest, harass, jersualem, jewish american

from Youtube:

American-Jewish young man is being harassed and treated unfairly he is then arrested in Jerusalem for speaking out against the Israeli occupation. How sad ,he had the courage to speak out but then was arrested … so unfair.

Leave a comment if you know more about this story.

Stranglehold on Wadi Fuqeen Tightens

June 7th, 2011 • Film & Documentary, News
Tags: The Friends of Wadi Fuqeen, video, wadi fuqeen

Friends of Wadi Fuqeen sent us this video by Jakob Schiller and Lubna Sharief outlining the growing problems faced by the Palestinian village of Wadi Fuqeen, sandwiched between the illegal Jewish settlement of Beitar Illit and the illegal Apartheid Wall.

UK’s Israeli Ambassador Upset About Heckling

June 4th, 2011 • News
Tags: ambassador, ron prosor, war criminals

Following his Telegraph op-ed, “Israel and Britain are allies in the fight for democratic values“, Ron Prosor was interviewed by Radio 4′s Today Programme on his last day as Israel’s Ambassador to the UK. He seems upset about being called a War Criminal and heckled at UK University campuses, and states that Israel is “not above criticism”:

Media Lens on the Telegraph op-ed:

Interesting piece of propaganda, getting across the relevant Israeli messages using the ‘words that work’, as Greg Philo has been pointing out lately.

‘Tomorrow’s leaders are being educated in environments where visceral hatred of Israel is not the exception but the norm. NGOs such as Amnesty are happy to host speakers with dubious records of sympathy for militant groups.

[...]

‘A campaign is raging to drive a wedge between Israel and our natural allies. Extremists who despise democracy are abusing Britain’s institutions to demonise Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, out of the accepted family of nations. Ironically, the abuse of British tolerance has made it the Western headquarters of the assault on Israel’s legitimacy. The values we share, cherish and strive to defend are our soft underbelly, targeted and exploited by anti-Western, anti-democratic and, consequently, anti-Israeli radicals.

[...]

‘On a governmental level, relations remain warm. But bubbling below the surface, a toxic mix of delegitimisation and demonisation against the State of Israel risks undermining the relationship.

‘Our co-operation has never been more important. In a world facing the threat of Islamist extremism, we are natural allies in the fight for democratic values. As citizens in the Arab world rise up for freedom, it is crucial we prevent democratic movements being hijacked and snuffed out by Islamist fanatics, as occurred in Iran in 1979.’

• New Internationalist: Take my word for it
• Includes link to the fascinating Global Language Directory (pdf) from the Israel Project

‘Freedom For Palestine’ Released TODAY!

May 31st, 2011 • News
Tags: FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE, music

JUST 79p! ORDER TODAY ON iTunes & HMVDigital…

HELP US GET IT INTO THE UK CHARTS!

This month we have the opportunity to secure a chart position for a song called ‘Freedom for Palestine’ by a collective of musicians put together by Dave Randal. The song’s chorus has a South African gospel choir and members of the London Community Gospel Choir singing ‘Break down the wall – demand justice for all – Freedom for Palestine’

• Proceeds from the single will go to War on Want for projects in Palestine.
• BUY THE SINGLE ON ITUNES TO ENSURE IT GETS INTO THE UK CHARTS, JUST 79p!!
• Recently the BBC Radio 1xtra removed the word ‘Palestine’ when playing a song by artist, Mic Righteous.