Massacre
Exclusive: Dublin airport rebrands Starbucks cafe – but still selling Starbucks products
Airport says Starbucks sales are a ‘temporary’ measure as critics point to boycott over Gaza and firm’s conduct toward unions
A ‘new’ cafe in Dublin airport’s Terminal 1 is still selling Starbucks products under a different brand name, Skwawkbox can reveal.
The airport announced the opening of its new ‘Vista’ cafe on Thursday in what is said was a unit ‘previously occupied by Starbucks:
But critics were quick to link the announcement to the boycott of Starbucks by many in response to the firm’s links to Israel and its ongoing anti-union activities in the US, with hundreds of responses like the examples below:
I think this is still Starbucks they've just rebranded the name of the café to try and avoid the ongoing boycott. If you zoom in you can see the Starbucks menu, plus they're still using Starbucks cups! There's also zero online presence for "Vista Coffee" – it doesn't exist!
— James M (@MamesJolloy) January 4, 2024
Why is there what looks like a @Starbucks logo in the corner of the left hand screen?
Can you clarify whether this is a rebranding of the existing outlet or has the new one stolen Starbuck's property?
Hope you can clarify; I'm sure you don't want to be associated with theft. pic.twitter.com/xipWJA1eTm— Brian (@LifeOfBOS) January 5, 2024
Starbucks has seen its share price hit since the boycott on sales, despite the company CEO issuing a statement that Starbucks ‘condemns violence, hate, lies and weaponised speech – he did not mention Israel or Gaza in the statement – and that Starbucks ‘stand[s] for humanity’.
Starbucks in the US has been engaged in a long campaign against unionisation by workers that saw leaked video in 2022 show the firm’s founder begging store managers to step up their anti-union activities – and the firm suing the union for trademark infringement. Boycott calls grew after a post went out on the Starbucks Workers Union official Twitter account posted a message of solidarity with Palestine after the widely-misrepresented Hamas raid last October and Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza that has killed over 30,000 civilians, more than two thirds of them children and women. Starbucks share price has fallen by around seven percent since the boycott. It is not the only global brand to see profits fall – McDonalds’ CEO has admitted that the business has taken a ‘meaningful’ hit.
A spokesperson for Dublin airport confirmed that the Vista cafe is using Starbucks products, but told Skwawkbox that both the brand and the product usage were temporary and that the Starbucks cafe closed because its contract had run out:
Vista is a temporary brand. Starbucks closed at the end of December as their contract expired. An exciting new local coffee brand will be permanently moving into this location in March. Until then, the new operator (using Starbucks’ products) is running the unit temporarily as Vista, ensuring passengers get their caffeine fix.
This change is part of a major overhaul of the food and beverage offerings in T1 and T2 at Dublin Airport which will happen over the coming months. Passengers will see several units operate on a temporary basis in the short term – under generic brands – while the fit-out works are completed.
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Israel and media ‘Hamas rape’ claims collapse under scrutiny
‘Eye-witness’ accounts contradict evidence – and earlier claims of the eye-witnesses – as yet another atrocity propaganda campaign falls apart. Warning: potential triggering or distressing content
The outraged reaction of the family of an alleged ‘Hamas rape’ victim to a newspaper’s con is just one of the ways in which the ‘Hamas rape’ narrative now being pushed hard by the Israeli regime and its apologists has fallen apart hard – like every other piece of atrocity propaganda Israel has tried to use so far to justify its genocide in Gaza.
The New York Times has published an article claiming to have evidence of the weaponisation of rape by Hamas during the 7 October raid, but the centrepiece of its claims was supposed ‘evidence’ that Israeli woman Gal Abdush was raped and murdered by Hamas fighters, quoting extensively from an interview with her family.
But her family has furiously insisted that there is no evidence that Ms Abdush was raped – and slammed the paper for misleading and manipulating them by telling them the interview was for a memorial about her and her husband and not mentioning anything about rape.
Speak Up, which fights violence against women, condemned the NYT investigation as ‘disgraceful’ ‘weaponisation’ of sexual violence for propaganda
The family – who appear to be hardline right-wingers perfectly prepared to propagate the already-discredited Israeli lines about beheadings and dismemberments, and therefore not inclined to discredit the rape report out of support for Palestinians – responded after the article was published. They pointed out, among other things, that there were only a few minutes passed between one message from their sister’s husband that they were at the Gaza border and another saying she had been shot – no time for the rape claimed by Israeli authorities and the NYT:
Gal Abdush’s family’s statement (translation by David Sheen and Electronic Intifada)
In fact, the family’s comment – though they don’t seem to have joined the dots – suggests that Ms Abdush and her husband were killed by Israeli forces determined, under the ‘Hannibal directive‘ of killing potential hostages rather than allowing them to be taken, since ‘at the border’ the Hamas fighters would only have been interested in getting them into captivity – and Hamas had no weapons capable of leaving bodies ‘totally burned’, while Israeli planes and helicopter gunships armed with missiles did and it is now well known in Israel, if ignored by UK and US media, that IDF forces killed Israelis in their determination to eliminate Hamas fighters holding them.
Another element of the atrocity propaganda to collapse are the lurid tales from supposed eye-witnesses who claimed that Hamas fighters – while trying to flee with their captives or fight Israeli troops – stopped to rape and dismember a woman and play catch with her body parts.
The ‘eyewitnesses’ have changed their stories. One was interviewed earlier and neglected to mention the claims of beheadings and games; another – coincidentally an Israeli ‘security consultant’ – had earlier admitted that he saw nothing because he was hiding with his head down the whole time, yet now claims he saw the same as the other witness.
Haaretz, 8 Nov 2023
Not only that, but Israeli lists of victims and their means of death do not claim to have found people at the site in question who had been beheaded or mutilated.
Another ‘eyewitness’ to a different supposed rape, Raz Cohen, happens to have recently been in the Democratic Republic of Congo, training DRC soldiers. While he claims to have seen the rape and to be haunted by the victim’s ‘screams without words’, shortly after the Hamas raid he filmed himself talking about the incident and published it on TikTok – where he seems upbeat and doesn’t mention any of the claims now attributed to him. Journalist Max Blumenthal analysed the changes in Cohen’s testimony:
While much of the NYT “mass Hamas rape” report relies on innuendo, it also purports to contain several credible eyewitness testimonies. One was delivered by a survivor of the Nova electronic music festival named Raz Cohen, who also happens to be an Israeli special forces vet who trains Congolese soldiers. Since his first interview on October 9, Cohen has altered his testimony several times.
Cohen told the NYT he personally witnessed a white van filled with Hamas militants pull up a mile from the Nova music festival, gather over a woman, and gang rape her: “I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.” He said they then butchered the woman with knives.
When Cohen was interviewed on October 9 about the attack on the music festival, however, he did not mention any act of sexual assault committed by Hamas militants. See here: https://twitter.com/i24NEWS_EN/sta… And here: http://tiktok.com/@lior.shapira9…
A day later, Cohen began to introduce vague suggestions of sexual assault into his testimony, but did not indicate that he witnessed any such acts taking place. “The terrorists captured women and hurt them in any way possible, and when they were done with them, they started butchering them in front of their friends,” Cohen told an Israeli publication: http://ashkelnayes.co.il/%D7%97%D7%A8%D…
Cohen was also interviewed by Canada’s CBC on October 10, but was not quoted about witnessing any rape: http://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/20…
The same day, Cohen offered lurid new details to PBS, claiming that “the terrorists” not only slaughtered women after raping them on October 7, but engaged in necrophilia as well: “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed — and after they raped, they — they did that.” http://pbs.org/newshour/show/…
Testimony he provided to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on October 11 differed slightly, and remained vague: “We see from there a lot of people and girls screaming and murdered by knives. And the girls, the terrorists rape them,” he stated abruptly and without apparent emotion. http://tiktok.com/@abcnewsaus/vi…
By this point, no Israeli media had reported that any rapes occurred on October 7. Cohen quickly fell off the media’s radar. He would not be heard from for over two months, when the Israeli government launched an international propaganda campaign accusing Hamas of mass rape in a transparent bid to maintain international support for its genocidal military assault on Gaza.
At this point, when the NY Times’ Jeffrey @gettleman interviewed Cohen, likely reaching him with assistance from the Israeli government, the “IDF” special forces soldier summoned for the first time a vivid account of a shocking gang rape on October 7.
How and why did Cohen’s story transform so dramatically over time, providing explosive new details at a moment of political urgency for the army in which he served? Was it plausible that a group of hardened Hamas commandoes suddenly paused their surprise attack, which was focused on taking as many captives as quickly as possible, stood in a circle and gang raped a woman, one after another, while Israeli forces mobilized to attack them?
Why did Hamas militants use knives to kill their victims, as Cohen alleged, when they carried rifles and grenades? Why did he drop his earlier allegation of necrophilia when speaking to the Times? And why did he mention seeing “a lot of people and girls” being raped to the ABC on October 11, but alter his testimony to refer specifically to a single female victim when interviewed by the Times?
Perhaps most importantly, why did Cohen’s friend, Shoam Gueta, who took shelter with him on October 7, not describe witnessing a gang rape when interviewed by the Times?
In his very first interview, with a US news station only two days after the Hamas raid, Cohen appeared mostly relaxed – and didn’t mention anyone being raped, as this clip aired recently on Grayzone shows:
Other Israeli mouthpieces have tried to bypass the eyewitnesses altogether, claiming it would be wrong to expect eyewitnesses to come forward and that ‘the corpses tell the story’. But they don’t, because the bodies were buried without evidence being taken, using Jewish burial practices to justify the failure to collect evidence – just as the huge number of cars incinerated by weapons Hamas does not possess were scrapped and buried without collecting evidence. Not one piece of actual evidence appears to have been put forward by Israel, yet the atrocity propaganda continues to be repeated by the so-called ‘mainstream’.
Yet again, Israel’s attempts to demonise Palestinian resistance to justify genocide have fallen apart under scrutiny – scrutiny that the so-called ‘mainstream’ press and broadcasters are simply not doing, or even reporting facts that media in Israel have already acknowledged, such as the mass killing of Israelis during the raid by Israeli media.
For full analysis and more video highlighting the collapse of yet another Israeli atrocity propaganda narrative, watch this video by Electronic Intifada and this by Grayzone.
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Starmer ‘planning attack on Corbyn’ in Bristol speech in desperate attention ploy
Best plan for left-wingers is to ignore feeble attempt to provoke backlash in pursuit of ‘MSM’ attention
Rent-free: Starmer can’t stop thinking about Corbyn and has nothing to offer than ‘I’m not him’
‘Labour’ ‘leader’ Keir Starmer is planning to make his planned speech in Bristol on Thursday an attack on Labour’s last real leader, Jeremy Corbyn, according to Labour sources.
The speech venue is being kept secret until the last minute in an attempt to avoid scenes of protests by large crowds outraged by Starmer’s support for Israeli genocide and apartheid, and disgusted by his adoption of Tory politics – and party insiders say that Starmer is frustrated at his inability to get the so-called ‘mainstream’ media’s attention and that his speech will be little more than another assault on Corbyn in an attempt to provoke an online reacton from left-wingers and get the media to give him airtime.
The best response from the left, therefore, is to treat Starmer’s feeble tactics with the disdain they deserve and ignore them while talking positively about the left’s vision and the hope it offers, rather than to engage and boost both his social media metrics and the chances of the media taking notice.
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Israel planning to transfer Palestinians to Congo
Ethnic cleansing plans outed further but still ignored by western ‘mainstream’ media
Image: ActionAid
Israel is negotiating with Congo – it is unclear from reports which of the two neighbouring Congos – and other African nations to transfer the Palestinian people, according to reports in the Times of Israel and its sister site Zman Israel.
Both the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) regularly see serious human rights violations, including massacres. A 2022 US Department of State report on human rights in the Republic, which is commonly known as Congo Brazzaville after its capital city to distinguish it from its neighbour – states that:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference
and more.
In the DRC, human rights groups have noted massacres and other human rights violations. Amnesty International said in 2022 that the DRC:
continued to experience serious human rights violations, including mass killings in the context of armed conflict and inter-communal violence, a crackdown on dissent and ill-treatment of detainees. People from regions affected by armed conflict, including eastern DRC, were particularly affected amid mass displacement and a deepening humanitarian crisis. The authorities continued to show a lack of political will to hold the perpetrators of human rights violations to account. The right to education was violated.
The Times quoted a ‘senior’ security cabinet source and comments by Israeli minister Gila Gamliel:
Israeli officials have held clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.
“Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others,” a senior source in the security cabinet tells [journalist] Shalom Yerushalmi.
Yerushalmi quotes Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel saying at the Knesset yesterday: “At the end of the war Hamas rule will collapse, there are no municipal authorities, the civilian population will be entirely dependent on humanitarian aid. There will be no work, and 60% of Gaza’s agricultural land will become security buffer zones.”
The UK government has disgraced itself by continued attempts to transfer desperate refugees to Rwanda, attempts continually blocked by the courts – but the Israeli regime was the first to do it, sending around 4,000 Black refugees fleeing war in Eritrea and Sudan to Rwanda between 2013 and 2018 before discontinuing what it called ‘voluntary’ departure – similar to the ‘voluntary emigration’ euphemism it uses for its ethnic cleansing plan, alongside ‘humanitarian migration’.
Israel has an appalling record toward Black people, even Black Jews – and last year threatened to deport them, too. The SAGE Race & Class Journal notes that:
Ethiopian Jews who have been brought into Israel in several mass transfer operations, have found themselves relegated to an underclass. They are not only racially discriminated against in housing, employment, education, the army and even in the practice of their religion, but have also been unwittingly used to bolster illegal settlements.
Now, as well as the already-outed plan to force huge numbers of Palestinians out of Gaza into the Egyptian desert, Israel is actively working on plans to force more out of the Middle East altogether and into Africa. The Israeli regime’s war crimes continue to pile up.
Despite the similarities with the UK’s racist government, at the time of writing the UK’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media have not reported Israel’s plan – as has been the case with much of Israel’s racism and criminality.
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Israel ‘kills several’ in two new attacks on Red Crescent HQ in Khan Younis
Occupier targets humanitarian group – again
Israel has killed ‘several people’ in two separate attacks on the Khan Younis HQ of the International Red Crescent humanitarian organisation in Gaza. The group, the sister organisation in Muslim areas of the International Red Cross, has not yet put a number on how many were killed and injured.
The attacks are the second and third times in just over a week that Israel has targeted the Red Crescent HQ – with the first attack taking place just after Christmas:
The bombings come om the day that the genocidal regime also destroyed buildings and killed civilians in a missile strike in Lebanese capital Beirut, claiming to have targeted a Hamas building to assassinatea single official of the Palestinian resistance group, Saleh Al Arouri, in yet another extra-judicial murder. The attack is likely to trigger retaliatory strikes by Lebanese forces, perhaps in the form of long-range rockets.
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In middle of Gaza genocide, 12 UK universities sign new research partnerships with Israel
Deaf ear to the suffering of Palestinian civilians as UK government gives away cash to incentivise partnering with Israel
Twelve universities across the UK have applied for and accepted government grants to undertake ‘a range of ‘mobility projects focussed on innovation and entrepreneurial skills development’ in partnership with Israeli universities.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is handing out the cash to pay for researchers to ‘hone their expertise via international collaboration’ with a focus on ‘entrepreneurship and Technology Readiness Levels’ (TRLs) ‘, according to the Universities UK website. The cash will also fund researchers to travel to Israel and will ‘further links with the Israeli ecosystem through existing research and innovation collaborations and open the door to new opportunities’.
At a time when students and activists around the world are demanding a boycott of Israeli products, services and institutions, the universities below have taken the cash – some of them twice:
- Aston University – Weizzman Institute of Science and Bar-Ilan University
- Edge Hill University – Tel Aviv University
- Queen Mary University of London – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University
- Royal Veterinary College – Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Teesside University – Tel Aviv University
- UCL – Tel Aviv University
- University of Exeter – Tel Aviv University
- University of Greenwich – Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- University of Kent – Technion
- University of Leeds – Tel Hai College
- University of Plymouth – Technion
- University of Surrey – Bar-Ilan University
The Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement has described Israeli universities as working closely with the Israeli state to develop weapons and systems that can be used to oppress and kill Palestinians:
Israeli universities are major, willing and persistent accomplices in Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.
They are involved in developing weapon systems and military doctrines deployed in Israel’s recent war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza, justifying the ongoing colonization of Palestinian land, rationalizing gradual ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians, providing moral justification for extra-judicial killings, systematically discriminating against “non-Jewish” students, and other implicit and explicit violations of human rights and international law.
To end this complicity in Israel’s violations of international law, Palestinian civil society has called for an academic boycott of complicit Israeli academic institutions. Refusing to normalize oppression, many academic associations, student governments and unions as well as thousands of international academics now support the academic boycott of Israel.
As Skwawkbox revealed yesterday, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting last week promoted – and visited in 2022 – an Israeli data company with close links to the Israeli military that is processing NHS test results. The founder of the firm is a ‘tech entrepreneur’ who has spoken and written about the importance of technology in fighting ‘terrorism’. Yet another occasion where the ‘Labour’ front bench is completely aligned with the views and behaviour of the Tories they are supposed to be opposing.
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Exclusive: Streeting uses NHS privatisation announcement to tout IDF-linked health firm
Health privatisation enthusiast ‘Labour’ health spokesman namechecks Israeli military-linked firm as glowing example of private involvement in NHS – and visited firm in Israel on LFI-paid junket
Image by ‘The Agitator‘
As the death toll of Israel’s genocide in Gaza climbed above 30,000 this week according to observers EuroMed Monitor, Wes Streeting used an Israeli private health data company as his shining example of successful ‘entrepreneurialism’ – ie privatisation – in the NHS as ‘a source close to Mr Streeting’ briefed the media about his plans to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private corporate provision if Labour gets into government.
The ‘source’ told the i:
Labour will encourage the spread of new technologies so private sector “innovators” have a clearer route to get their product into the NHS…
The best example on the tech side of ‘opening the door to entrepreneurs’ is where you’ve got a company or innovator of a product which works really well on the NHS. There’s an example of some at home kidney tests made by Healthy.io which were first sold into the NHS in 2021
But the link – and the Labour trolling of those outraged by the Gaza slaughter – goes much further. Healthy.io is owned and run by Yonatan Adiri, former Chief Technology Officer for the whole of Israel and an adviser to then-Israeli PM Shimon Peres. Adiri’s interests are not limited to private healthcare tech. His published works include Terror in the Court: Counter-Terrorism and Judicial Power in the Israeli Case Study and Counter Terror Warfare: The Judicial Front (2008), written for the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (2005).
Adiri’s interest in ‘counter-terror’ did not end in 2008. Just two months ago, shortly after the Hamas kibbutz raid, Adiri spoke to Bloomberg Technology ‘The importance of Intelligence in Israel-Hamas war’, comparing Hamas to ISIS and talking of the use of technology by intelligence services to defeat the Palestinian resistance organisation:
Skwawkbox did not find details of any involvement with Israeli spytech unit ‘Unite 8200’ – the cyberspy unit whose members reportedly paint an ‘X’ on their headsets for each Palestinian they help kill – in Adiri’s IDF service, but according to his bio page as a speaker for hire on allamericanspeakers.com, he remains a reserve captain in the ‘international operational negotiations unit’ and has acted as moderator at discussions held by the Israeli-government-sponsored Institute for National Security Studies on the use of drones and other technology for ‘national security’:
According to one article, Adiri acted for the IDF in negotiating a prisoner swap with Lebanese militia group Hezbollah.
Adiri also acted as senior national security ‘policy consultant’ for the Reut Institute, a right-wing Israeli think tank that now plays a key role in Israel’s attempts to counter the peaceful pro-Palestinian ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ movement.
And while Adiri may not have been a member of Unit 8200, he is – since at least March 2023 – an ‘industry mentor’ for the ‘LEAP’ initiative:
The LEAP website says that:
Leap was created in partnership with 8200bio, an organization of 8200 alumni working to promote the Israeli healthtech ecosystem. The program does strive to bring exceptional 8200 alumni into the healthtech domain, but the program is open to entrepreneurs of any background, according to the criteria described above.
Like its partner 8200 Impact, 8200bio is run by former members of what 8200 Impact calls the ‘elite IDF Signal Intelligence and Cybersecurity unit’. Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted in 2020 that:
Nor did Wes Streeting simply pull the name Healthy.io out of a hat without knowing the company’s links. In May 2022, according to right-wing pressure group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), Streeting visited Israel on LFI’s dime – and LFI said ahead of the trip that:
Streeting will also visit Healthy.io, a tech provider for the NHS and Boots.
Right-wing libel-merchant and ‘dauphin of phone hacking‘ Lee Harpin, writing for Jewish News rather than the Jewish Chronicle that he cost so much money in damages for smearing left-wingers, confirmed that the visit went ahead. Streeting told the NHS Confederation last spring that he had been ‘blown away’ by his trip.
Keir Starmer employs a Unit 8200 alumnus, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor members’ social media.
Wes Streeting has come out as an avid NHS privatiser – which will surprise no one who has been watching. That he chose to garnish his promise to ‘throw open the doors’ of the NHS to more private profit-taking by touting an Israeli – and Israeli military-linked – firm during Israel’s war crimes, mass slaughter of women, children, medics and teachers and the bombing of hospitals and schools, in Gaza makes the betrayal even worse.
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Video: Israel removing anaesthetics from aid supplies to Gaza
More than a thousand children have had one or more limbs amputated without anaesthetic
Doctors in Gaza have accused Israel of removing anaesthetic from aid supplies entering the territory. According to the Grayzone‘s Max Blumenthal, speaking to Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom channel, Israeli officials are targeting anaesthetics during the final inspection before aid – already woefully inadequate quantities – goes through, forcing more than a thousand Palestinian children to undergo limb amputations without pain relief:
At least one surgeon was forced to perform an amputation on his own child, who died in terrible suffering.
This week, South Africa filed a detailed genocide case against Israel with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for its actions in Gaza. As well as depriving children and other hideously wounded civilians of pain relief, Israel has killed more than 30,000 innocents, 70% of them women and children, and has blockaded food, water and energy and targeted homes, schools and hospitals, including UN-run facilities, for bombing and shelling, in what genocide experts say is a ‘textbook case’.
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Unite activists sign letter to Graham after ban on union banners at Palestine demos
Alleged management ban on exec members marching under Unite banners leads to angry letter denouncing lack of action and solidarity with slaughtered Gazans
Unite banners at a Manchester Gaza demo – but executive members say they have been banned from formal representation
Unite members and activists have issued an outraged letter to union general secretary Sharon Graham, after members of the elected executive were told not to attend, under a Unite banner, demonstrations against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The letter reads:
Dear Sharon Graham,
As a result of our letters of 30 October and 1 November and other representations, including from London and Eastern Region, you finally agreed, after nearly 4 weeks of an ongoing genocide by Israel, to issue a statement on November 3 calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The statement was however pitiably weak. There was no mention of genocide or ethnic cleansing. There was no mention of the war crimes perpetrated by Israel – the bombing of hospitals, the targeting and murder of journalists, academics and doctors to say nothing of the bombing of residential areas or the murder of children, which now stands at over 8,000.
There was no mention of the fact that Israel has imposed a food, water and fuel blockade on the Gaza strip resulting in starvation according to the United Nations. Collective punishment of a civilian population is a egregious breach of international law yet the statement treats the Palestinians and the Israeli state as equally responsible.
It is not Hamas which possesses an air force but Israel. It is the Israeli state which is carrying out the carpet bombing of Gaza with the intent of forcing Palestinians out altogether.
The statement treats the genocidal attack on the people of Gaza as equivalent to the break-out from the world’s largest open air prison on October 7. Israel has occupied the Gaza Strip for 56 years imposing a suffocating siege on it since 2007.
This report from Vatican News of 16 December gives just one example of Israel’s war crimes:
‘Israelis have opened fire on Gaza’s Christians. Following heavy bombardment overnight of the area around Holy Family Latin parish in Gaza City, dozens are reported dead… and reports continue to arrive that shooting by Israeli snipers continues during these hours. A statement released by the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem confirmed that an Israeli sniper murdered two Christian women inside the Holy Family Parish where the majority of Christian families have taken refuge since the start of the war.’
An even more horrifying massacre took place on 17 December. Al Jazeera reported that Israeli bulldozers have crushed Palestinians who were taking shelter in tents outside Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Dozens of Palestinians are reported to have been buried alive. These are Nazi-style massacres and yet you have said nothing and done nothing since issuing your statement. You were happy to wave the Ukrainian flag but you haven’t waved the Palestinian flag or expressed any sympathy with the thousands of murdered Palestinian civilians, not least children.
UN Secretary General António Guterres accepted that there was a context to October 7. Many Israeli civilians died at the hands of the Israeli military. See Israeli forces shot their own civilians, kibbutz survivor says.
Unite at its 2023 Policy Conference passed motions supporting Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and affirmed that Israel is practising the crime of apartheid. That should have informed Unite’s statement.
The statement treats one of the world’s most powerful militaries and the resistance of the Palestinians as equal. Your claim that Israel’s goal is to eliminate Hamas is untrue. Why bomb homes, schools and ambulances if this was the case? Were the dead children also Hamas ‘terrorists’?
The statement says nothing about what Unite intends to do. You have done nothing to publicise all the previous national demonstrations. Are you going to ignore the one on January 13 too? There has been no national Unite presence on the marches to date.
We demand that you publicise all future demonstration, that you provide the resources necessary for Unite members to attend, that Unite nationally is present on the march together with its banner and that Unite has a speaker at the rally.
A leaked Israeli intelligence document makes it clear that Israel’s intention is to repeat the Nakba in 1948 when ¾ million Palestinians were expelled.
If Israel succeeds this will be a prelude to ethnic cleansing on the West Bank where there has been a reign of terror in the past 6 months. Over 250 people have died since October 7. Vast areas of Area C have been ‘cleansed’ as Israeli settlers and the army attack farmers.None of this is recognised in your statement. Netanyahu has compared the Palestinians to ‘Amalek’ whom God instructed the Israelites to exterminate yet Unite’s statement ignores this. Open calls in Israel for the extermination of the Palestinians are being made and Israel’s army is doing just that.
By blocking fuel, babies on incubators and people on dialysis machines have already died.
It is time for Unite to show that the situation in Gaza is an urgent one and to mobilise its members. We give the Labour Party over £1m a year. We should be demanding that Keir Starmer makes way for someone who is not a ‘Zionist without qualification’. At the moment he is nothing more than Sunak’s echo chamber.
Yours sincerely
Sharon Graham had already infuriated supporters of Palestinian rights by remaining silent for many weeks at the start of Israel’s latest genocidal assault on Gaza – then making a grossly asymmetrical statement appearing to treat Israeli deaths more seriously than Palestinian and allegedly having the exec railroaded into accepting only her preferred wording when the statement was eventually issued.
Graham was also exposed using proxies to order the cancellation of showings of the film ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn/The Big Lie’, which exposes the political abuse of antisemitism accusations against left-wingers in the Labour party, and discussion of Asa Winstanley’s forensic book Weaponising Antisemitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. Proxies were similarly despatched to try, unsuccessfully, to cancel a Unite ‘fringe’ event at Labour’s conference earlier this month in support of Palestinians.
At the time of writing, the letter is still open for Unite members to add their signature via Google Docs. It will be submitted shortly after new year.
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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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