brutality
Mandela’s grandson calls Lammy ‘apologist for genocide’
Shadow Foreign Secretary blasted after claiming anti-apartheid hero would have condemned student pro-Gaza campus protests, as Mandela’s grandson calls for students worldwide to join protests
Zwelivelile Mandela, Nelson Mandela’s grandson, has reacted with outrage to comments by David Lammy, Keir Starmer’s Shadow Foreign Secretary, suggesting that Nelson Mandela would have opposed the campus protest movement of students opposing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Lammy, like his boss, has consistently provided political cover for apartheid Israel’s racist mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, overwhelmingly women and children.
Zwelivelile responded to Lammy’s comments by describing Lammy as an “apologist for genocide” and calling on students worldwide to join the protests:
We call on students all over the world to emulate the student protest encampments on USA University Campuses.
[Friday, 10th May 2024] marks 30 years since the inauguration of President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela on the 10th May 1994. I dedicate the memory of this day to the students protesting on USA University campuses calling for an immediate ceasefire of the genocide of Gaza and supporting the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom.
We recall Madiba’s historic words on this day when he said: “We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in this country and the rest of the world who sacrificed in many ways and surrendered their lives so that we could be free.”
Contrary to what David Lammy, the Labour MP in the UK would like us to believe, Madiba acknowledged the heroes in the Civil Rights Movement in the USA and campuses all over the world who regularly protested for our freedom.
He himself was of that generation of South African youth who called for the armed struggle in the face of increasing state brutality in dealing with peaceful protest against Apartheid.
The youth on USA campuses are emulating and following in the brave footsteps of the youth of 1968 who came out openly protesting against the war in Vietnam.
On countless occasions acknowledged the role of the student protests of 1976 Soweto Uprising for playing a seminal role in our march to freedom.
From his prison cell he echoed the call to the students of the 1980s to make South Africa ungovernable.
David Lammy mustn’t be an apologist for Apartheid Israel and for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He must echo President Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela’s commitment to the Palestinian struggle which he affirmed during his visit to Gaza in 1995 when he said: ” Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinian people.”
We call on David Lammy to stop being an apologist for genocide and instead encourage all students on UK and European university campuses to emulate their fellow students in the USA in their call for a ceasefire in Gaza and support the struggle of the Palestinian people for freedom.
Youth are the conscience of our world and their voices are the moral compass that guide us to a better future. Rather than brutalize them and criminalize their protest actions, we must encourage them to continue to stand for justice, human rights and dignity for all humanity. You are our heroes, we salute you.
Zwelivelile is right. Lammy could not be more wrong. Free Palestine.
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International dockworkers meet in Liverpool with message for UK unions: stop hiding over Gaza
‘Peace IS union business’, leading trade union figures tell UK unions there’s no excuse for claiming it’s not their core purpose to prevent genocide – and that having members in the defence industry is no bar to taking action
Maritime Union of Australia deputy national secretary Warren Smith at Liverpool’s Casa on Saturday
Leading trade unionists from Australia, Asia and South America gathered at Liverpool’s famous dockworker-founded Casa on Saturday to discuss international action, solidarity, the dangers facing trade unionists in many countries and, especially, support for Palestinians against Israel’s genocide. And there was a strong message for UK trade union leaders: get behind the people of Palestine and stop making excuses, and that having members in the defence industry is no excuse for not taking action.
Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) members and officers gave inspiring accounts of how their union – and the ex-pat Palestinian communities in Australia – have played a leading role in protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and have successfully impeded shipments to Israel, despite Australian laws criminalising protest at major facilities, and pledged that they would continue to do so. And they spoke of the plea from union activists in Palestine to get behind the boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) campaign against Israel’s occupation and apartheid. The union is holding a day of action on 25 May in every major Australian port in solidarity.
The union representatives also told of their government’s shame in its decision to suspend anti-discrimination laws so it can enact laws specifically targeting Australia’s First Nation people – and how they have agreed, as part of the AUSUK defence treaty the union is fighting, to take nuclear waste from the UK and US that will be dumped in First Nation territory.
And the common thread through all these stories was summed up in a refrain taken up by several speakers:
Peace is union business.
Leaders of several UK unions have been criticised for their lack of support for the Palestinian people against genocide, occupation and apartheid – often against the democratic decisions of their members – and for prioritising defence jobs over the imperative of preventing mass murder.
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Video: students walk out of graduation in protest against Gaza genocide
University of Michigan graduates walk out holding Palestine flags
Student graduates at the University of Michigan have walked out of their graduation ceremony, holding Palestinian flags an challenging Israel ‘How many kids have you killed today?’, in protest at Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The protest is part of a growing trend of students protesting at their graduation that has been added to the student encampment movement, holding placards and calling out the horrors being perpetrated on Palestinian civilians despite increasingly brutal state repression of students, including many Jewish students who are playing a prominent role in the demonstrations, for exercising their freedom of speech.
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Breaking video: LA police smash UCLA camp, violently arrest peaceful students
US state mobilises to break protest after taking hours to act against violent pro-Israel mob last night
Los Angeles police have stormed the pro-Gaza protest camp set up by peaceful student protesters at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
Riot-clad police are violently arresting students and faculty taking part in the protest against the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocide – which has killed well over 40,000 civilians, mostly women and children – and is smashing up tents and makeshift buildings, despite free speech and association rights being guaranteed by the US Constitution:
Video by Middle East Eye
Solidarity with the people of Gaza and with students everywhere demonstrating against genocide and for peace.
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Fry equated pro-Palestine demo to nazism. In ’08, he said Israel founded on terrorism
Stephen Fry’s ‘alternative’ Christmas message appeared to equate UK protests against the slaughter of Palestinians with ‘1930s Europe’. But fifteen years ago he was prepared to put his name to the most direct condemnation of the very founding of Israel
Stephen Fry has rightly been widely criticised for his supposedly ‘alternative’ Christmas message, produced by a pro-Israel production company, that has been described as minimising the horrific suffering of Palestinian women and children at the hands of the genocidal Israeli regime – and which appears to equate UK protests against the genocide with the rise of nazism in the 1930s.
Fry’s more than six-minute video builds to his claim that:
I’m glad [my Jewish grandparents] aren’t alive now to read newspaper stories that would have reminded them of the 1930s Europe that they left.
As one former ardent fan put it:
To hear him conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism has shocked me… Smashed windows vs carrying your dead child?
By contrast, Jewish comedian Alexei Sayle’s ‘alternative alternative’ Christmas video, standing in solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide – and pointing out that he confidently and safely marches regularly for Palestinian human rights alongside thousands of other Jewish people – was watched millions of times and received overwhelmingly positive comment.
But Fry’s message in 2023 is starkly at odds with his position just fifteen years ago – when he was prepared to put his name to a letter, on the occasion of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, that condemned the apartheid regime as one ‘founded on terrorism’, a reference to the 1948 ‘Nakba’ or catastrophe of the violent expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the massacres that marked it.
The full letter read:
In May, Jewish organisations will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel. This is understandable in the context of centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Nevertheless, we are Jews who will not be celebrating. Surely it is now time to acknowledge the narrative of the other, the price paid by another people for European anti-semitism and Hitler’s genocidal policies. As Edward Said emphasised, what the Holocaust is to the Jews, the Naqba is to the Palestinians.
In April 1948, the same month as the infamous massacre at Deir Yassin and the mortar attack on Palestinian civilians in Haifa’s market square, Plan Dalet was put into operation. This authorised the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of the indigenous population outside the borders of the state. We will not be celebrating.
In July 1948, 70,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in Lydda and Ramleh in the heat of the summer with no food or water. Hundreds died. It was known as the Death March. We will not be celebrating.
In all, 750,000 Palestinians became refugees. Some 400 villages were wiped off the map. That did not end the ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians (Israeli citizens) were expelled from the Galilee in 1956. Many thousands more when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Under international law and sanctioned by UN resolution 194, refugees from war have a right to return or compensation. Israel has never accepted that right. We will not be celebrating.
We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land. We cannot celebrate the birthday of a state that even now engages in ethnic cleansing, that violates international law, that is inflicting a monstrous collective punishment on the civilian population of Gaza and that continues to deny to Palestinians their human rights and national aspirations.
We will celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.
Fry’s name appeared among more than one hundred Jewish signatories – many of whom have maintained to this day their principled opposition to Israeli apartheid, occupation, brutality and ethnic cleansing, such as Michael Rosen, Rica and Jo Bird, Diana Neslen, Sayle and many more.
Mr Fry, despite Israeli ministers’ boasts that they want their slaughter in Gaza to be a ‘Nakba 2023’, has not – and has now equated opposition to Zionism with antisemitism. What happened to him?
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Video: Israeli police kick journalist repeatedly in head – now hospitalised with ‘serious’ injuries
Yet more brutality from apartheid regime
Turkish photojournalist Mustafa Haruf has been kicked repeatedly in the head, without provocation, by Israeli police in occupied East Jerusalem, leaving him hospitalised in a serious and not yet stabilised condition.
Haruf, who works for Turkish news agency Anadolu, was first struck in the head with a rifle then yanked to the ground and set on by two uniformed thugs as others looked on and others tried to prevent filming:
Mr Haruf was subsequently able to speak to colleagues from his hospital bed. In Gaza, an Israeli airstrike killed Al Jazeera journalist Samer Abu Daqqa today and wounded Wael Al-Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera reporter whose family was killed in a targeted airstrike early in Israel’s genocidal assault, as they reported on yet another UN school being bombed.
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