„Eine Außenpolitik der EU als Ganzes hat es im Grunde genommen nie gegeben. Das ist ein Mythos. Die EU-Mitgliedsländer haben unterschiedliche Interessen und unterschiedliche Geschichte ihrer Beziehungen zu Moskau… Frankreich muss eine unabhängige Politik betreiben und seine Interessen verteidigen – selbstverständlich in einem Bündnis mit anderen Ländern. Aber diese Allianz bedeutet ganz und gar nicht, dass man sich nach den USA oder den Baltischen Ländern und Polen mit ihren Ängsten richten muss“, betonte Myard.

The leader of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has urged the UK government to slap sanctions as scything as those being imposed on Russia against the Israeli state.

Labour has upped the pressure on the coalition to suspend arms exports to Israel amid renewed violence in Gaza. Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander urged the Government to publish its review of export licences and „act swiftly“ on the findings.

The documents show that FinFisher, a German surveillance company, helped Bahrain install spyware on 77 computers, including those belonging to human rights lawyers and a now-jailed opposition leader, between 2010 and 2012—a period that includes Bahrain’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. FinFisher’s software gives remote spies total access to compromised computers. Some of the computers that were spied on appear to have been located in the United States and United Kingdom, according to a report from Bahrain Watch.

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Montreal. August 7, 2014.

This afternoon, a group of Montreal Jews gathered in the lobby of the Federation CJA’s building to denounce the ongoing assault on Gaza and the organized Jewish community’s complicity in it. We hung a banner that read: “Massacre à Gaza: CIJA is complicit” and distributed flyers explaining the reasons for our presence. A yiddish resistance poem, ‘Es Brent,’ was read and an analysis of the current situation was provided.

The national chorus is trying to fake a victory. In the absence of many achievements, they’re also trying to fake the fall of Hamas. Previously it had faked “national unity,” “steadfastness” and of course the heroism and morality of the Israel Defense Forces. It has dismissed the volleys of global criticism as anti-Semitism.

For Gaza, the norm is a miserable existence under a cruel and destructive siege that Israel administers to permit bare survival but nothing more.

Rabbi Steve Gutow, Rabbi David Sapperstein, and Jerry Silverman and the organizations they lead – the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, and the Jewish Federations of North America – all support Israel‘s attack on Gaza. Join me in asking them for real moral leadership in this terrible time:

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Gideon Levy doesn‘t want to meet in a coffee bar in Tel Aviv. He is fed up with being hassled in public and spat at, with people not willing to share the table next to him in restaurants. And now he is fed up with the constant presence of his bodyguards, not least because they too have started giving him a hard time about his political views. So he doesn‘t go out much any more and we sit in the calm of his living room, a few hundred yards from the Yitzhak Rabin Centre.

(6. März 2013) In the majority of cases, the principal evidence against the child is the child’s own confession, in most cases extracted under duress during the interrogation. Sometimes the child is implicated in a confession given by another child. In some cases the children unknowingly sign a ‘confession’, written in Hebrew (which most Palestinian children do not understand), after being advised that ‘confessing’ is their only way out of the military detention system. Although many children reported providing confessions as a result of ill-treatment, few raise this matter before the court for fear that their complaints would lead to harsher sentences, even though international law prohibits the use of evidence obtained under duress by a court.

Ultimately, almost all children plead guilty in order to reduce the length of their pretrial detention. Pleading guilty is the quickest way to be released. In short, the system does not allow children to defend themselves.

(20. Juni 2013) New UN human rights agency report claims Israeli forces arbitrarily arrest Palestinian children in Gaza and West Bank, subject them to degrading treatment, exploit them to scope out potentially dangerous buildings and use them as shields to deter stone throwers.