William Hanna

“Traditional ethical thinking assumes that this sacred canopy provides the context for all of human life. God's authority is the ultimate justification for any ethical norms. All things are created by God and have a set place and purpose in the universe. Every being has a nature or an essence that defines its purpose in the grand scheme of things. The ultimate standard of human behaviour is to fulfil this purpose. By fulfilling this purpose, each individual human will realise his or her full potential and be the best human that he or she can be. Behaviours and habits that fulfil this purpose are known as virtues while those that frustrate this purpose are known as vices. For traditional ethics, the idea that a behaviour helps a person to be the best they can be and live the good life is the ultimate justification for a moral norm. Traditional ethics tends to be expressed in a series of prohibited activities which ‘thou shalt not’ do and a series of virtues that point a person in the direction of the best possible life.”

(http://sanctasapientia.hubpages.com/hub/The-Difference-Between-Modern-and-Traditional-Ethical-Thinking)

“We must expel Arabs and take their places.”

David Ben-Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

Because the above quoted opinion by David Ben-Gurion — the primary founder and first Prime Minister of Israel — has always been and still is central to Zionist ideology, you might wonder just how much more the Apartheid state of Israel can do to achieve that goal apart from what has already been done starting with the 1948 cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinians that terrorised another 750,000 of them into fleeing from their homes and abandoning their land; apart from subjecting these otherwise peaceful indigenous people to every form of inhumanity in violation of their natural and legal rights; apart from subjecting them to barbaric Israeli ethnic cleansing so as drive them out and illegally expropriate (steal) more of what little is left of their land; apart from unilaterally (selfishly) appropriating virtually all safely usable water while leaving only that which is too briny or polluted for the Palestinians to drink or to use for agricultural activity; apart from imposing a monstrous air, sea, and land blockade of the Gaza Strip — a concentration camp that is far bigger than anything the Nazis could have imagined or achieved — that prevents the free movement of Palestinians and the import of essential foods, medical supplies, and construction materials necessary for maintaining a social infrastructure for the 1.9 million Gaza population; apart from subjecting Palestinians — who do not have a single tank, warship, or warplane with which to defend themselves — to periodic full-scale invasions by one of the world’s foremost high technology weapons equipped military forces in the world; and apart from using those same invasions as an opportunity to test — on Palestinian “guinea pigs” — weapons newly developed by Israel’s burgeoning weapons industry.

(http://vimeo.com/65082874)

So what else can a murdering and plundering Apartheid Israeli state do in “self-defence” to make life for Palestinian people even more hellish and unbearable to the point of oblivion?

Apartheid Israel can and does train, equip, and support savage, selfish, hate-filled, religious extremist settlers who are then allowed with impunity to vent their inherent racist spleen “we are God’s chosen people” against an unarmed Palestinian population whom they regard as being subhuman. These morally bankrupt sadistic settler savages — mostly young masked marauders on the lookout for vulnerable West Bank Palestinian farmers to attack with stones, clubs or rifles while burning their olive groves (a source of income for 100,000 Palestinian households in the West Bank), fields, schools, mosques and homes — constitute a unique feature of an already barbaric conquest by military force of another people and the illegal and brutal occupation of their homeland with officially sanctioned subjugation that includes house demolitions, expulsions, and blatant theft of Palestinian land. This decades-long reign of terror on unarmed Palestinians by Jewish thugs backed by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) — much vaunted by Israel as “the most moral army in the world” — is tolerated not only by Israel, but also the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and the rest of the world. The reality of the IDF’s morality is quite different to that propagated by its Apartheid government:

“I was shocked to see IDF soldiers dragging a bleeding young Palestinian in the streets of Hebron. The shocking image showed our soldiers as sadist who rejoice over the killing of a young man, and drag his body to our settlers to rejoice, dance, exchange candy and kick the not yet dead body. It reminds me of hyenas, which kill and drag their prey. The problem is that these animals kill to survive. Our soldiers kill to maintain an occupation, an apartheid system.”

An ex-IDF soldier mentioned in the Jewish daily Haaretz in January 2001.

(http://electronicintifada.net/tags/settler-violence)

In keeping with its arrogant disregard for international law — “Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the state of Israel on trial” Ariel Sharon — Israel continues to violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits any occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory; from undertaking any permanent changes that are not a military necessity in the strictest sense of the term; and from the establishment of settlements which lead to violations that infringe on the rights to self-determination, equality, property, an adequate standard of living, and freedom of movement. By creating a complex legal and bureaucratic mechanism, Israel has taken control of more than fifty percent of the land in the West Bank which was mostly used establish settlements and earmark land reserves for more settlement expansion that fragments Palestinian territory and renders a future two-state solution impossible.

Since 1967, consecutive Israeli governments have invested vast resources — provided mostly by U.S. taxpayer aid and donations from Jews in diaspora — in establishing and expanding Occupied Territory settlements so that more than 500,000 Israeli citizens now live on such settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This has been achieved with a consistent and systematic government policy designed to encourage Jewish citizen migration to these areas by providing significant financial benefits and incentives that include IDF protection and virtual immunity from prosecution for the heinous settler crimes continually perpetrated against the Palestinian people. A new report recently published by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) outlines the nature of institutionalised discrimination in a legal regime currently operating in the West Bank whereby two systems of law are applied in a single territory with one being a civilian legal system for Israeli citizens, and a second being a military court system for Palestinian residents.

“Two residents of the Hebron area have an altercation within the territory of the West Bank and both are arrested. One of them, a Jewish resident of Kiryat Arba, is taken to a nearby police station, is immediately interrogated by a police officer and is brought within 24 hours to a hearing before the Jerusalem Magistrates Court. In this hearing, the judge decides to order his release on condition of bail; this is not a very severe case, and the defendant pleads self- defence.

“The second person, a Palestinian resident of Hebron, is arrested for 96 hours before being brought before a military judge. He is de facto interrogated only once during this period of time, under suspicion of committing an assault based on nationalistic motivations, which is deemed as a security offence, and he is tried before a military court, where he faces a penalty of extended incarceration.”

A passage from the report.

The discriminatory nature of such a legal system tends to encourage rather than discourage Jewish settler violence which according to B’Tselem — The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories — includes “price tag” reprisals in response to actions by Israeli authorities that are perceived as harming the settlement enterprise, or follow violent Palestinian reaction to settler crimes. There is a definite contradiction — that constitutes betrayal — between these Jewish settlers and the ethical nature of the Judaic religion to which they claim to belong. Even the supremacist indoctrination of their children, as is evident from the photographs in the following link, is chillingly reminiscent of the Hitler Youth Movement:

(http://www.radioislam.org/photos/jew_settlers/jew_settlers.htm)

“Jews should live in and around every Arab population centre . . . Jews should not leave a single place where they don't live and have freedom of movement.”

Ariel Sharon, who in the 1970s championed illegal Jewish settlement building and in the early 1980s enhanced his reputation as a war criminal with the Sabra and Shatila Massacre.

(http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2010/10/28/sabra-shatilla-massacre/)

Furthermore, the irrefutable fact that Israel is an Apartheid Zionist state, repudiates its not so kosher propaganda claim — swallowed willingly hook, line, and sinker by the West in particular, and the world in general — to being the “only democracy in the Middle East.” This barefaced lie has been further repudiated by the dangerously raving lunatic Benjamin Netanyahu and his government cohorts — recently forced to call an election — who are still bent on pushing forward a new Basic Law to “legally anchor” Israel's status as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” [and to hell with the Palestinians who have lived there for centuries.]

The West’s double standard tolerance — verging on patronage — for Israel’s undemocratic racist policies is due not only to the failure of the mainstream media which for some sixty years has helped to maintain Israel’s increasingly violent subjugation of the Palestinians by avoiding challenge or condemnation, but also by the dormant but nonetheless still inherent racism within the West. It is no surprise that Israel’s biggest Western benefactor and supporter — right or wrong — is the United States of America whose deeply rooted racist tendencies have recently come under scrutiny because of police brutality against Black Americans who have taken to the streets with protest slogans of “BLACK LIVES MATTER” and “I CAN’T BREATHE.”

Instead of using its full potential to honestly inform and educate, the highly mobilised, financed, and effectively controlled mainstream media instead continues to serve as the mechanism for total global domination, oppression, and the emergence of a “new society” wherein governments are increasingly imperialistic abroad and militaristic at home with the establishment of police states disguised as “homeland security” for the protection of the people against terrorism, but actually designed to offer the rich and powerful protection against the struggling masses.

“That until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there is no longer any first-class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the colour of a man's skin is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes; that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race — until that day, the dreams of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained.”

H.I.M. HAILE SELASSIE I in a February 1968 California speech.

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William Hanna is a freelance writer with a recently published book the Hiramic Brotherhood of the Third Temple. Purchase information, sample chapter, other articles, and contact details at: (http://www.hiramicbrotherhood.com/)