by William C. Carlotti

The Jewish Zionist led, Christian Zionist supported Israeli government, with organizational and financial support from 30 branches of the World Zionist Organization in just as many countries, is engaged

in bombing, strafing, shooting the people of Palestine using depleted uranium coated bombs, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, dropped from supersonic jets,helicopter gunships, and armored tanks

they are using behemoth bulldozers supplied by Caterpillar to demolish more than a thousand Palestinian homes, countless Mosques and to eradicate hundreds of whole villages and towns;

they crush thousands of hectares of decades old olive and orange orchids;

they fly their supersonic jets low over the Palestinian population and break the sound barrier to create the sonic boom that has deafened hundreds of vulnerable Palestinian children;

they are building ghetto style armed Jewish settlements on the high ground of all of the territory of Palestine that is beyond their internationally recognized borders;

they restrict the water, the electricity, the medical care, the sewage, the education, the employment, the travel, the communications and every facet of the lives of the people of Palestine;

they make targeted assassinations of the selected and elected representatives chosen by the people of Palestine killing dozens of other people in the process;

they have confiscated court, land and title records that confirm the property rights of the people of Palestine;

they are building a wall to recreate their beloved ghetto existence armed to the teeth with nuclear bombs and chemical and biological weapons:

they have driven millions of the people of Palestine off of the land of their forbears:

Now read below what Robert L. Bernstein, the Jewish founder of Human Rights Watch, writes about Israel in a New York Times Op Ed and remember that what he describes are the characteristics that all racist colonizing societies provide for their own “racially” created citizenry.

Aside from the fact that all international news dispatches originating in Israel are monitored and subject to censor by agents of its government, Bernstein follows the pattern of Israeli defenders of justifying the invasion, occupation and absorption of the Palestine beyond the internationally recognized borders and vilifying the resistance to such by the people of Palestine.

The characteristics that Bernstein extols in Israel are reserved for the colonizer's own "racially" created citizenry just like the democratic characteristics of the French government as the racist colonizer of Viet Nam (remember Dienbienphu) and Algeria that Franz Fanon wrote about; just like the democratic government of Italy as the racist colonizer of Ethiopia and Libya; just like the democratic government of the Netherlands as the racist colonizer of the East Indies: just like the democratic government of Belgium as the racist colonizer of the Congo (remember King Leopold); just like the democratic government of Germany as the racist colonizer of East Africa; just like the democratic government of England as the racist colonizer of India (remember Ghandi) , Rhodesia and South Africa; just like the democratic government of Australia as the racist colonizer of its indigenous people and in its completed genocide of Tasmania; just like the democratic government of the United States as the racist, genocidal colonizer of its indigenous population and the African slave trade.

In fact, one of the historically verifiable, principal characteristics of all of the democratic states cited is their brutal racist colonizing perpetuated for centuries.

The horror only becomes apparent when the actions, the restrictions, the tactics that they use systematically and routinely against the people of the colonized countries is applied to the citizenry of the racist colonizer and then it is called fascism.

William C. Carlotti

October 23, 2009

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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR to the New York Times-October 20, 2009

Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast

By ROBERT L. BERNSTEIN

AS the founder of Human Rights Watch, its active chairman for 20 years and now founding chairman emeritus, I must do something that I never anticipated: I must publicly join the group’s critics. Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Leaders of Human Rights Watch know that Hamas and Hezbollah chose to wage war from densely populated areas, deliberately transforming neighborhoods into battlefields. They know that more and better arms are flowing into both Gaza and Lebanon and are poised to strike again. And they know that this militancy continues to deprive Palestinians of any chance for the peaceful and productive life they deserve. Yet Israel, the repeated victim of aggression, faces the brunt of Human Rights Watch’s criticism.

The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.

But how does Human Rights Watch know that these laws have been violated? In Gaza and elsewhere where there is no access to the battlefield or to the military and political leaders who make strategic decisions, it is extremely difficult to make definitive judgments about war crimes. Reporting often relies on witnesses whose stories cannot be verified and who may testify for political advantage or because they fear retaliation from their own rulers. Significantly, Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan and an expert on warfare, has said that the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza “did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare.”

Only by returning to its founding mission and the spirit of humility that animated it can Human Rights Watch resurrect itself as a moral force in the Middle East and throughout the world. If it fails to do that, its credibility will be seriously undermined and its important role in the world significantly diminished.

Robert L. Bernstein, the former president and chief executive of Random House, was the chairman of Human Rights Watch from 1978 to 1998

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William C. Carlotti