MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Rogue state of Israel vs Palestine: The Great March of Return II

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O Mossad, serviço secreto israelense, é conhecido por seus crimes. A lista de palestinos mortos em sua campanha de assassinato sistemático de palestinos que se sobressaem no exílio é longuíssima. Suspeita-se que a última vítima desses homicidas sionistas seja Fadi al-Batsh, professor palestino de 35 anos e membro do Hamas, que, no sábado, sucumbiu instantaneamente às balas de dois atacantes desconhecidos em um bairro residencial de Kuala Lumpur, capital da Malásia onde ensinava.

Youtube Jackals Removed This Video. Israel Murders Gaza’s Children;

Israeli forces have shot dead four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, as more than 10,000 gathered in a mass demonstration in the besieged Gaza Strip demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health said on Friday that at least 729 people protesting near the border with Israel were wounded by Israeli gunfire, needed treatment for tear gas inhalation or suffered other injuries.
Palestinian officials identified those killed as Mohammed Ibrahim Ayyoub, 15, Ahmed Rashad, 24, Ahmed Abu Aqil, 25 and Saad Abdul Majid Abdul-Aal Abu Taha, 29.
The mass marches, which have been backed by several Palestinian factions, are also fuelled by growing desperation among Gaza's two million residents.
The border blockade has trapped nearly all of them within the territory, gutted the economy and deepened poverty. Gaza residents typically get fewer than five hours of electricity a day, while unemployment has soared above 40 percent.
Mahjoob Zweiri, an associate professor in contemporary history of the Middle East at Qatar University, told Al Jazeera that the Israelis feared the independent "discourse of the protest movement".
"This is a movement created by the people who have lost faith in the Palestinian leadership - for that reason Israel is very fearful of them."The Israelis pushed the Egyptians to mediate, but the movement was disinterested, and so for this reason, they could continue using live ammunition against them until they stop".

As people keep asking me about the truth concerning Syria, this much I know: someone is lying about the reported use of chlorine gas to kill dozens of Syrian civilians this month in a rebel-held enclave on the outskirts of Damascus.
Either forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria once again committed a war crime, by dropping gas cylinders on a residential building in the town of Douma on the final day of a bloody campaign to drive out a terrifying Islamist rebel group; or, as Syria’s ally Russia claims, the volunteer rescue workers who sounded the alarm about the attack staged distressing images of its victims in order to prompt air strikes by the United States, Britain, and France.
As accusations continue to swirl nearly two weeks after the attack I chose to answer to another question people keep asking me, about the White Helmets. This is because their unethical behaviour must be denounced, which Roger Waters did during a Barcelona concert on April 13 and most people didn't understand why he did it.
Roger Waters denounced the Syrian White Helmets as “a fake organization that exists only to create propaganda for jihadists and terrorists,” because that's what they are. Warning that the groups’ unverified claims about chemical weapons attacks across insurgent-held territory were aimed at triggering Western military intervention, Roger cautioned his audience, “If we were to listen to the propaganda of the White Helmets and others, we would encourage our governments to start dropping bombs on people in Syria. This would be a mistake of monumental proportions for us as human beings.”
In fact, Roger had first hand experience with the powerful pro-war PR operation behind the White Helmets. Back in October 2016, a public relations firm representing the White Helmets called The Syria Campaign attempted to recruit the Pink Floyd star by inviting him to a lavish dinner organized by a Saudi-British billionaire, Hani Farsi. The rock legend and renowned activist was told that by signing on to the organization’s mission, he could help “elevate the voices of Syria’s peaceful heroes”.
Just days before his recent concert in Barcelona, Roger was lobbied again to support the White Helmets, this time by an eccentric French photojournalist affiliated with what he described as a “very powerfull [sic] syrian network.” He demanded to join Waters on stage and deliver a message for the “children of syria.”
Roger Waters did not respond to either request.
These Emails solicitations from White Helmets representatives and activists demonstrate how the organization’s well-funded public relations apparatus has targeted celebrities as the key to the hearts and minds of the broader Western public.
Unlike many other A-listers, however, Roger Waters took time to research the White Helmets and investigate its ulterior agenda.
“I was quite suspicious after I was invited to that [White Helmets] dinner. And now my worst suspicions have been confirmed.”
The October 2016 dinner invite was delivered to Roger Waters by a representative for the Corniche Group, an international holding company belonging to the family of the London-based Saudi billionaire Hani Farsi. Farsi was seeking Waters’ presence at a fundraising dinner he had organized on behalf of The Syria Campaign.
The Syria Campaign is a well-funded public relations front established to promote The White Helmets as a group of heroic rescuers who require the protection of Western militaries. Through series of petitions and public demonstrations, The Syria Campaign has unsuccessfully pushed for a No Fly Zone in Syria that would have likely resulted in the kind of Western military intervention that toppled Libyan President Moammar Qaddafi and destabilized Libya.
The slick PR firm has also resorted to astroturfed public stunts like a pro-White Helmets flash mob and orchestral performance at New York City’s Grand Central Station where participants were paid up to US$600 each.
Farsi’s relationship to the The Syria Campaign had been kept private until now. A Syrian-British oil tycoon named Ayman Asfari has taken a much more vocal role with the PR group, providing it with seed money to advance his mission to stimulate US and UK support for regime change in Syria. Waters was informed that Asfari’s wife, Sawsan, would be on hand for the 2016 White Helmets fundraising dinner.
Over the past two years, The Syria Campaign has secured endorsements of the White Helmets’ work from actors including George Clooney, Aziz Ansari, Ben Affleck, and pop stars like Coldplay and Justin Timberlake. The Syria Campaign also helped orchestrate the production of an Oscar-winning Netflix documentary about the White Helmets in 2017. In the email to Roger Waters, a Corniche Group staffer urged the singer to watch that film and provided him with a link to its trailer.
“I would encourage the celebrities who’ve signed to endorse the White Helmets to stop supporting them because we know what they are. I don’t blame them for having bought in to it. On the face of it, it felt plausible that the White Helmets were just good people doing good things. But now we know they’re trying to encourage the West to drops bombs and missiles illegally in Syria,” explained Roger Waters. He also concluded that The Syria Campaign — the PR firm behind the White Helmets — was not simply the humanitarian voice it purported to be, but a corporate outfit that represented much more prosaic interests.
The Syria Campaign’s top funder, Asfari, was described by the UK Independent as one of the “super rich” Syrian exiles poised to oversee the rebuilding of the country if Assad were removed, and to presumably reap lucrative contracts in the process.

'Russian bots" Ian 56 completely refutes UK government's malicious

The reality of the White Helmets is much more disturbing than its hired PR guns have cared to admit. Not only have the White Helmets operated exclusively alongside Islamist extremist insurgents, including the local Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS, its members have participated in several documented public executions, and helped extremists dispose of beheaded corpses of those they’ve killed.
Unable to discount the documented facts about the White Helmets’ ties to jihadist insurgents, The Syria Campaign published a lengthy report last year dismissing all critical reporting about the organization as the result of a vast Kremlin-directed conspiracy.
In its email to Roger Waters, The Syria Campaign took credit for having “helped these rescue workers attract more than $15 million in government funding and turned them into household names.”
In fact, since the White Helmets were founded in Turkey by a former British MI5 officer named James Le Mesurier, the group has received at least $55 million from the British Foreign Office, US$23 million or more from the United States Agency for International Development’s Office of Transition Initiatives — the State Department’s de facto regime change arm — and untold millions from the Kingdom of Qatar, which has also backed an assortment of extremist groups in Syria including Al Qaeda.at the time Qatar was a friend of Saoudi Arabia.
The White Helmets are routinely relied upon by the governments that fund them as a primary source on alleged chemical attacks, including the most recent incident in Douma. When Defense Secretary James Mattis cited “social media” in place of scientific evidence of a chemical attack in Douma, he was referring to video shot by members of the White Helmets. Similarly, when State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert sought to explain why the US bombed Syria before inspectors from the OPCW could produce a report from the ground, she claimed, “We have our own intelligence.” With little else to offer, she was likely referring to social media material published by members of the White Helmets.
In the days leading up to Roger Waters’ April 13 concert in Barcelona, an assistant received an email from a French photojournalist named Pascal Hanrion who described himself as “a militant with the syrian white helmets to denounce crimes against humanity in syria,” and part of a “very powerfull [sic] syrian network.” Unlike the corporate PR professionals of The Syria Campaign, Hanrion appeared to be a freelance activist.
Back in July, 2016, Hanrion ran a marathon-style race through the Swiss Alps wearing a white helmet presented to him as a gift by rescue workers from the town of Jisr al-Shugour, which is located in the Al Qaeda-controlled Syrian providence of Idlib. According to journalist Jenan Moussa, the homes of original Jisr al-Shugour residents have been handed over by Al Qaeda’s local affiliate to Chinese Uighur jihadists and their families.
In his email, Hanrion requested to join the Pink Floyd star on stage so he could send a message to the “children of Syria” reminding them, “you are not forgotten!”
Instead of allowing the propagandist on stage, Roger Waters delivered a message of his own, urging his audience to deconstruct the wall of pro-war narratives brick-by-brick.
“What we should do is go and persuade our governments not to go and drop bombs on people,” Waters implored the crowd, inspiring gales of applause. “And certainly not until we have done all the research that is necessary so that we would have a clear idea of what is really going on. Because we live in the world where propaganda seems to be more important than the reality.”
Clooney, Ben Afflek and the others should search reliable information before jumping into a rotten boat. They should support the BDS, for instance.

By the way, Israel is crediting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Natalie Portman’s refusal to receive an award in Jerusalem.
On Thursday, the Genesis Prize Foundation announced it was canceling its 2018 award ceremony after the Oscar-winning actor had informed it that “recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel.”
Portman’s representative told the foundation that “she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony.”
“After decades of egregious human rights violations against Palestinians, Israel’s recent massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza has made its brand so toxic that even well-known Israeli-American cultural figures, like Natalie Portman, now refuse to blatantly whitewash, or art-wash, Israeli crimes and apartheid policies,” the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) said in a statement welcoming the news.
The Genesis Prize is promoted as the “Jewish Nobel” and is awarded by committees including far-right anti-Palestinian figures such as Eli Groner, the director of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bureau; and Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian-Jewish anti-Palestinian activist and former lawmaker who Netanyahu attempted to appoint as Israel’s ambassador to Rome.
As the prize winner, Portman had been awarded $2 million to donate to philanthropic causes of her choosing.
Another extreme-right Israeli politician, culture minister Miri Regev, stated, “I was sorry to hear that Natalie Portman fell into the hands of the BDS supporters.”
“Portman, a Jewish actress born in Israel, joins those who tell the successful, wondrous founding of the State of Israel as ‘a tale of darkness and darkness,’” Regev added.
Oren Hazan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud Party with a history of violent and racist incitement, and harassment of female and Arab lawmakers, demanded that Portman’s Israeli citizenship be revoked.
It is a considerable embarrassment that even Portman, known for roles in the Star Wars movies, is unwilling to associate her name and image with Israel.
In 2015, Portman publicly expressed her opposition to Netanyahu’s government, but said she would not use her “platform” to “you know, shit on Israel.”
While Portman did not specify which “recent events” she found unpalatable, there is little doubt that this was a reference to Israel’s weeks of calculated violence directed at unarmed protesters in the besieged Gaza Strip that has killed 39 Palestinians so far, including four children and a journalist, and injured thousands.
The International Criminal Court prosecutor has warned Israeli leaders that they could face trial over the lethal crackdown.
But as Great March of Return rallies continued for the fourth week, Israel appears still to be ignoring such warnings.
This Friday, Israeli occupation forces killed four Palesitnians, including a 14-year-old boy, and injured hundreds more amid protests along the Gaza-Israel boundary fence.

The BNC, the steering group for the global BDS campaign, appears more than happy to take the credit that Israel is offering.
“The Palestinian-led, Nobel Peace Prize-nominated boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights has been growing in the cultural mainstream in the last few years,” the BNC noted. “Of the 26 Oscar nominees in 2016, none has accepted an all-expense-paid Israeli propaganda junket.”
The BNC also praised Portman for following the lead of Lorde, the New Zealand pop singer who generated global headlines and a fierce backlash from anti-Palestinian groups for her decision last December to cancel a performance in Tel Aviv.
“As was the case in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, the BDS movement calls on all artists and cultural figures to respect the nonviolent Palestinian picket line and stay away from apartheid Israel until the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people are fully respected,” the BNC added.
These mild statements are at least an acknowledgment of the grassroots pressure Democrats have been facing, particularly from young American Jewish activists who have been protesting – and getting arrested – at lawmakers’ offices to demand they speak out.
Growing grassroots outrage is also pushing a few more US politicians to break the near-silence on Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Last week Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said she was “deeply concerned about the deaths and injuries in Gaza” and urged Israeli occupation forces to “exercise restraint and respect the rights of Palestinians to peacefully protest.”
She did not go as far as the handful of her Democratic congressional colleagues who have urged Israeli soldiers to defy illegal orders to shoot at unarmed protesters. And while hardly a full-throated condemnation, and lacking any call for accountability, Warren’s statement contrasts with how the progressive lawmaker fled from questions about Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza in 2014.
IfNotNow, a Jewish activist organization that has been spearheading these protests, welcomed Natalie Portman’s announcement as another sign that the “tide is turning.”
Portman joins comedian Sarah Silverman to become the second major American Jewish celebrity to speak out in recent weeks against Israel’s abuses of Palestinians, the group noted.
IfNotNow asked: “Who will be the next Jewish celebrity to reject the status quo of endless occupation and repression for Palestinians?”
I ask the same question.

PALESTINA
Prisoners' Day, 17 April

On the occasion of Palestinian Prisoners Day, Human Rights Association salute the continued struggle of the over 6,000 Palestinian political prisoners currently being held in Israeli prisons. Every year Israel arrests thousands of Palestinians in an attempt to suppress the will to self-determination and continue its colonization. The result: approximately 800,000 Palestinians arrested since 1967.
As of 1 March 2018 there were 6050 Palestinian political prisoners being held in Israeli prisons. This includes 427 administrative detainees; 356 children; 62 female prisoners; and 7 members of the Palestinian Legislative Council. The situation of the prisoners continues to deteriorate as they face a continued campaign of violations and suppression. Detainees and prisoners, including children and women, continue to suffer from ill-treatment and torture on a systematic basis. These policies have resulted in the death of 72 prisoners from torture since 1967.

The commemoration first began on April 17, 1979, five years to the day after the first prisoner exchange between Israel and the Palestinians. The day has since spread to honor former prisoners, including Ahmad Saadat, Georges Abdallah, and Rasmeh Odeh, who wasinitially sentenced to 18 months in a U.S. prison in 2015 before her appeal.

The conviction rate of Palestinians in Israeli court cases in the West Bank is virtually 100 percent, with only 33 percent of appeals by defendants accepted. As of February 2018 roughly 6,500 Palestinians are detained in Israeli prisons, with almost 2,000 of those being imprisoned in 2018 of alone, reports The Palestinian Prisoners Society. Included in this is the incarceration of Palestinian children, which in 2017 reached over 400.

“Ninety-five percent of imprisoned children have been subjected to brutality during their arrest and interrogation,” said Issa Qaraqe, the director of the Commission for Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, to the Middle East Monitor last year. “The occupation government has adopted a systematic policy of detaining children, torturing them and placing them in inhumane conditions.”

Across social media, one name has rang loudly as an international face for the movement to free Palestinian political prisoners: Ahed Tamimi.

Tamimi, the young activist who recently spent her 17th birthday in an Israeli prison, was incarcerated in December of 2017 and has since inspired a series of protests and demonstrations both in Palestine and around the world.

Video footage was recently leaked showing Israeli interrogators attempting to use wildly inappropriate conduct to coerce a confession from Tamimi, with Ahed’s lawyer filing a complaint of “inappropriate conduct” including sexual harassment. While Ahed’s father was able to obtain only two hours of footage, “during the first 10 days of her detainment, Ahed was continuously interrogated, sometimes for 12 hours at a time,” reported Yumna Patel and Akram Al-Wa’ra.