Last Thu-Fri Aug 26-27, police and military violently repressed public school teachers who have taken to the streets for almost 3 weeks to demand, among other things, that the Pepe Lobo regime return some $200m that were taken from INPREMA, an institution that manages teachers’ pension funds, after the military-oligarchic coup against Pres Zelaya on Jun 28 2009. The 6 teachers’ unions that form the umbrella organization FOMH, representing 63,000 teachers nation-wide, believe that the funds taken from this institution were used to fund the military regime after the coup headed by Roberto Micheletti and Gen Velasquez, which repressed and terrorized the pro-democracy movement critical of the coup and its perpetrators.
The education system in Honduras has been in crisis for the last 4 months, particularly in August when university students occupied the National Autonomous University demanding the reinstatement of 180 workers fired from their positions and the resignation of the university director, Julieta Castrellano. Five fired workers remain on hunger strike on the university grounds, some now surpassing 126 days without eating. During the occupation of the university, police attempted to enter the grounds and were run off by the protesters. The stand-off between the students and police occurred while the US State Dept’s Maria Otero was visiting Honduras to investigate the human rights situation, another attempt by the US government to whitewash human rights violations such that Honduras might be readmitted to the OAS. Although the university students and the public school teachers have different immediate focuses and demands, they both claim that the form in which the Lobo regime is handling the teachers’ struggle and the education system in general reflects the oligarchic-governmental desire to privatize the public education system in Honduras. This massive teachers’ strike converges with and complements the ongoing struggle of the National Popular Resistance Front as well as the preparatory stages of a mass general strike involving the three major umbrella unions to which all unionized Honduran workers belong: the Unitary Confederacy of Workers of Honduras, the Confederacy of Workers of Honduras, and the General Head Office of Workers.
Last Friday, Aug 27, teachers were violently evicted twice from the area around the National Pedagogical University, first when they occupied the boulevard and second when teachers were regrouping and meeting inside the university. Police arrived at the university, located across from a business shopping centre, with 2 water cannons and fired more than 100 tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at the teachers and members of the resistance movement in and outside the university grounds. Protesters were chased and beaten with no regard for the presence of children and the public in this busy area of the city or for the peaceful form in which the teachers were protesting. From a black Toyota four-runner parked on the street in front of the university, a man opened fired at the protesters with a 9mm gun. Although no one was shot, the car was later identified as belonging to the National Congress. Over 100 people were captured and ‘guarded’ by police against a fence outside the university. They were later released after human rights representatives arrived and negotiated with the police. Many teachers and resistance members were trapped inside classrooms, where they suffered from severe exposure to tear gas. Over 7 people were injured from the gas and from police beatings, including a journalist from Globo TV/Radio Globo.
On Thursday, the previous day, teachers had been violently evicted after occupying a street close to the Presidential Palace in Tegucigalpa. Six teachers were reported injured from tear gas and police brutality. These two days last week were merely the icing on the cake to the violence inflicted against the teachers’ movement on Aug 20, when police and military again evicted the movement and brutally beat 3 union leaders and a teacher, who had apparently been pre-selected for said treatment and whose locations were apparently indicated to police by individuals who had infiltrated the marches. The major media outlets owned by the oligarchy meanwhile continue their campaign to portray the teachers as violent elements unconcerned with education in Honduras. At the writing of this article, the teachers are gathered in their daily assembly to discuss an agreement recently negotiated between the government and the leaders of the teachers’ movement. The teachers will announce today whether they accept the proposal or not.
When I went into the Jewish religious book emporium, Pomeranz, in central Jerusalem to inquire about the availability of a book called Torat Ha’Melech, or the King’s Torah, a commotion immediately ensued. Tthe owner, M Pomeranz, asked me half-jokingly:
Are you sure you want it? The Shabak is going to want a word with you if you do.
As customers stopped browsing and began to stare in my direction, Pomeranz pointed to a security camera affixed to a wall, and told me:
230 pages on the laws concerning the killing of non-Jews, a kind of guidebook for anyone who ponders the question of if and when it is permissible to take the life of a non-Jew.
According to the book’s author, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, non-Jews are “uncompassionate by nature” and should be killed in order to “curb their evil inclinations.” Shapira insisted:
If we kill a gentile who has has violated one of the seven commandments, there is nothing wrong with the murder.
Citing Jewish law as his source, or at least a very selective interpretation of it, he declared:
There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such a situation they may be harmed deliberately, and not only during combat with adults.
In January, Shapira was briefly detained by the Israeli police, while two leading rabbis who endorsed the book, Dov Lior and Yaakov Yosef, were summoned to interrogations by the Shabak. However, the rabbis refused to appear at the interrogations, essentially thumbing their noses at the state and its laws. And the government did nothing. The episode raised grave questions about the willingness of the Israeli government to confront the ferociously racist swathe of the country’s rabbinate. Israeli commentator Yossi Sarid remarked with astonishment:
Something like this has never happened before, even though it seems as if everything possible has already happened. Two rabbis summoned to a police investigation, and announce] that they will not go. Even settlers are kind enough to turn up.
In response to the rabbis’ public rebuke of the state’s legal system, the Israeli Attorney General and PM Netanyahu kept silent. Indeed, since the publication of Torat Ha’Melech, Netanyahu has strenuously avoided criticizing its contents or the author’s leading supporters. Like so many prime ministers before him, he has been cowed into submission by Israel’s religious nationalist community. But Netanyahu appears to be particularly impotent. His weakness stems from the fact that the religious nationalist right figures prominently in his governing coalition and comprises a substantial portion of his political base. For Netanyahu, a confrontation with the rabid rabbis could amount to political suicide, or could force him into an alliance with centrist forces who do not share his commitment to the settlement enterprise in the West Bank. On Aug 18, a pantheon of Israel’s top fundamentalist rabbis flaunted their political power during an ad hoc congress they convened at Jerusalem’s Ramada Renaissance hotel. Before an audience of 250 supporters, including the far-right Israeli Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari, the rabbis declared in the name of the Holy Torah that would not submit to any attempt by the government to regulate their political activities, even and especially if those activities included inciting terrorist attacks against non-Jews. As one wizened rabbi after another rose up to inveigh against the government’s investigation of Torat Ha’Melech until his voice grew hoarse, the gathering degenerated into calls for murdering not just non-Jews, but secular Jews as well. Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, head of the yeshiva in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, bellowed:
The obligation to sacrifice your life is above all others when fighting those who wish to destroy the authority of the Torah. It is not only true against non-Jews who are trying to destroy it but against Jewish people from any side.
The disturbing philosophy expressed in Torat Ha’Melech emerged from the fevered atmosphere of a settlement called Yitzhar, located in the northern West Bank near the Palestinian city of Nablus. Shapira leads the settlement’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva, holding sway over a small army of fanatics who are eager to lash out at the Palestinians tending to their crops and livestock in the valleys below them. One of Shapira’s followers, US immigrant Jack Teitel, has confessed to murdering two innocent Palestinians and attempting to the kill the liberal Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell with a mail bomb. Teitel is suspected of many more murders, including an attack on a Tel Aviv gay community center. Despite its apparent role as a terror training institute, Od Yosef Chai has raked in nearly$50,000 from the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs since 2007, while the Ministry of Education has pumped over $250,000 into the yeshiva’s coffers between 2006 and 2007. The yeshiva has also benefited handsomely from donations from a tax-exempt US non-profit called the Central Fund of Israel. Located inside the Marcus Brothers Textiles store in midtown Manhattan, the Central Fund transferred at least $30,000 to Od Yosef Chai between 2007 and 2008.
Though he does not name “the enemy” in the pages of his book, Shapira’s longstanding connection to terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians exposes the true identity of his targets. In 2006, Shapira was briefly held by Israeli police for urging his supporters to murder all Palestinians over the age of 13. Two years later, according to Haaretz, he signed a rabbinical letter in support of Israeli Jews who had brutally assaulted two Arab youths on the country’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. That same year, Shapira was arrested under suspicion that he helped orchestrate a rocket attack against a Palestinian village near Nablus. Though he was released, Shapira’s name arose in connection with another act of terror, when in January, the Israeli police raided his settlement seeking the vandals who set fire to a nearby mosque. After arresting ten settlers, the Shabak held five of Shapira’s confederates under suspicion of arson.
Despite his longstanding involvement in terrorism, or perhaps because of it, Shapira counts Israel’s leading fundamentalist rabbis among his supporters. His most well-known backer is Dov Lior, the leader of the Shavei-Hevron yeshiva at Kiryat Arba, a radical Jewish settlement near the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron and a hotbed of Jewish terrorism. Lior has vigorously endorsed Torat Ha’Melech, calling it “very relevant, especially in this time.” Lior’s enthusiasm for Shapira’s tract stems from his own eliminationist attitude toward non-Jews. For example, while Lior served as the IDF’s top rabbi, he instructed soldiers:
There is no such thing as civilians in wartime. A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail!
Indeed, there are only a few non-Jews whose lives Lior would demand to be spared. They are captured Palestinian militants who, as he once suggested, could be used as subjects for live human medical experiments. Otherwise, Lior appears content to watch Palestinians perish as they did at the muzzle of Dr Baruch Goldstein’s machine gun in 1994. Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 in a shooting spree while they prayed in Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs mosque, was a compatriot and neighbor of Lior in the settlement of Kiryat Arba. At Goldstein’s funeral, Lior celebrated the massacre as an act carried out “to sanctify the holy name of God.” He then extolled Goldstein as “a righteous man.” Thanks to Lior’s efforts, a shrine to Goldstein was constructed in center of Kiryat Arba so that locals could celebrate the killer’s deeds and pass his legacy down to future generations. Though Lior’s inflammatory statements resulted in his being barred from running for election to the Supreme Rabbinical Council, according to journalist Daniel Estrin, the rabbi remains “a respected figure among many mainstream ZIonists.” By extension, he maintains considerable influence among religious elements in the IDF. In 2008, when IDF chief rabbi Brig-General Ronski brought a group of military intelligence officers to Hebron for a special tour, he concluded the day with a private meeting with Lior, who was allowed to revel the officers with his views on modern warfare: “no such thing as civilians in wartime.”
Besides Lior, Torat Ha’Melech has earned support from another nationally prominent fundamentalist rabbi: Yaakov Yosef. Yosef is the leader of the Hazon Yaakov Yeshiva in Jerusalem and a former member of Knesset. Perhaps more significantly, he is the son of Ovadiah Yosef, the former chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas Party, which forms a key segment of Netanyahu’s governing coalition. Yaakov Yosef has brought his influence to bear in defense of Torat Ha’Melech, insisting at the Aug 18 convention in Jerusalem that the book was no different than the Hagadah that all Jews read from on the holiday of Passover. The Hagadah contains passages about killing non-Jews and so does the Bible, Yosef reminded his audience. He asked:
Does anyone want to change the Bible?
Only days before direct negotiations in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority planned for early September, Yaakov Yosef’s 89-year-old father Ovadiah delivered his weekly sermon. With characteristic vitriol, he declared:
All these evil people should perish from this world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.
The remarks have sparked an international furor and earned a stern rebuke from Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who remarked:
While the PLO is ready to resume negotiations in seriousness and good faith, a member of the Israeli government is calling for our destruction.
Palestinian Israeli member of Knesset Jamal Zehalka subsequently demanded that Israeli Attorney General Weinstein put Yosef on trial for incitement, saying:
If, heaven forbid, a Muslim spiritual leader were to make anti-Jewish comments of this sort, he would be arrested immediately.
Here was a perfect opportunity for Netanyahu to demonstrate sincerity about negotiations by shedding an extremist ally in the name of securing peace. All he had to do was forcefully reject Yosef’s genocidal comments, a feat made all the easier by the White House’s condemnation of the rabbi. But Netanyahu ducked for political cover instead, issuing a canned statement which read:
Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef’s remarks do not reflect Netanyahu’s views, nor do they reflect the position of the Israeli government.
By refusing to cut Yosef loose, his party remains a central actor in the Israeli government. Thus the statement by Netanyahu was not only weak. It was false.
This person should have been sentenced to make a pilgrimage to Buchenwald by measuring his length on the ground every two meters and kissing it, while local rabbis beat him with birch twigs – RB
A 20-year-old cook was found guilty Tuesday of beating an Israeli teenager while yelling ”Jewish swine!” in the Saxony-Anhalt town of Laucha. Despite the accused man Alexander P’s denial that the crime was anti-Semitic, Judge Martina Zufall found him guilty of assault and two counts of causing bodily harm. She gave him a suspended sentence of eight months’ jail. Zufall accepted the prosecution’s case that Alexander P, who belonged to the far-right scene and had two previous convictions for causing bodily harm, had shouted “Jewish swine!” during the assault on Noam Kohen, 17, at a bus stop on Apr 16. She rejected Alexander P.’s claim that he was simply drunk and had been provoked. Alexander P told the court in the town of Naumburg:
I flipped out in my severe state of drunkenness when I saw him because he offered my cousin drugs.
According to a June report in weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Alexander P punched Kohen in the face without warning and yelled:
Go back where you came from, you Jewish pig!
Kohen tried to flee but his attacker followed him, grabbed him by the jacket, threw him to the ground and continued punching and kicking him. The case also appears to raise questions about whether bystanders did enough to intervene. Die Zeit reported that the police file recorded that six witnesses saw the attack and tried to stop Alexander P “verbally” but did not physically intervene. Alexander P told the court that the crime had been seen by several witnesses and that he was acquainted with some of the people waiting at the bus stop. When asked whether anyone had intervened, he replied:
Of the others, no one dared approach me.
It was not until a driver stopped his car and intervened that Kohen, who moved from Israel to Laucha with his mother and brother eight years ago, escaped the assault. The court closed the trial to the public after the accused gave evidence to protect the identities of minors giving evidence, including the victim. State prosecutor Gudrun Anacker said the crime was motivated by anti-Semitism and called for an eight-month suspended sentence in juvenile detention, while the defence asked for a six-month suspended sentence. Anacker also demanded a monetary fine that would go towards the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial.
Two Yemeni men who flew from Chicago to Amsterdam and were detained Monday in the Netherlands on suspicion of planning a terrorist act do not appear to be involved in any conspiracy and did not know each other before they were arrested, according to two US law enforcement officials. The officials said suspicions that the men were involved in an attempt to test the security of the aviation system with fake bombs appeared misplaced. Rather, they said, the two became the focus of an international terrorism scare as a result of a series of odd events and the fact that both were from Yemen, where an affiliate of al-Qaeda has been increasingly active. One law enforcement official said:
It doesn’t look like a conspiracy or a test run. And these guys don’t show up on any of our lists.
US officials said they have not closed the book on the investigation because they still want Soofi to explain why he taped various items together. But they said the explanation of some of his relatives that he used the tape to separate different things for different relatives in Yemen could be plausible. A second law enforcement official said:
We see a lot of strange stuff in luggage.
Dutch officials said the men will have to appear before a judge before they can be released.
Niqnaq 