From:
Hold Israel accountable with Leahy law
(The Hill) -- by Josh Ruebner --
Apologists for Israeli occupation and apartheid claim that advocates for holding Israel accountable for its human rights abuses of Palestinians are “singling Israel out for extra scrutiny” or “holding Israel to a higher standard than other countries.”
Yet, ironically, Israel’s supporters also claim that U.S. military aid to Israel is sacrosanct and, unlike every other governmental program on the chopping block these days, cannot be questioned due to the “special U.S.-Israeli relationship." Dan Carle, a spokesperson for Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), has noted correctly that you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
In response to an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz suggesting that the Vermont Senator will attempt to apply sanctions to certain units of the Israeli military for human rights violations, Carle explained that “the [Leahy] law applies to U.S. aid to foreign security forces around the globe and is intended to be applied consistently across the spectrum of U.S. military aid abroad. Under the law the State Department is responsible for evaluations and enforcement decisions and over the years Senator Leahy has pressed for faithful and consistent application of the law.”
The possibility of Senator Leahy consistently applying this eponymous legislation and holding Israel to the exact same standard as every other country has Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, whose office may have leaked the story in an effort to kill the initiative, in a tizzy.
The “Leahy Law,” as it is commonly known, prohibits the United States from providing any weapons or training to “any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross violations of human rights.” In the past, this law has been invoked to curtail military aid to countries as diverse as Indonesia, Colombia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Along with other provisions in the Foreign Assistance Act, of which it is a part, and the Arms Export Control Act, it forms the basis of an across-the-board policy that is supposed to ensure that U.S. assistance does not contribute to human rights abuses.
Ha’aretz reports that the Senator is looking to invoke this prohibition regarding “Israel Navy's Shayetet 13 unit, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the Israel Air Force's Shaldag unit.” The inclusion of specific units in the story may indicate that Leahy already has findings from the Secretary of State that these Israeli military units have committed human rights abuses.
If so, then this could be a much-overdue watershed in holding accountable Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid, for its gross misuse of U.S. weapons to commit systematic human rights abuses of Palestinians living under Israel’s illegal 44-year military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. During the last decade, on at least five occasions, Members of Congress have requested the State Department to investigate Israel’s misuse of U.S. weapons; to date, the State Department has failed to notify publicly the Congress about any such violation. The State Department also has refused to disclose documents related to these investigations in response to a long-standing Freedom of Information Act request filed by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:
It's way past time that organized Jewry be held to the same moral, ethical and behavioral standards as everyone else. Instead of advancing the human condition in the decades since the Holocaust, they've instead wrung their "victim" status for all its worth in order to advance their own, self-serving Judeofascist-racketeering agenda.
What has the West gotten in return for giving Jewry a post-WWII "pass" time and again no matter how atrocious its behavior, and for promoting it to such disproportionate representation in the highest echelons and institutions in America?
Endless wars, financial treachery and Wall Street rip-offs, gutter political "leadership," social and cultural pollution relentlessly spewed by Hollywood and mass media, Big Government corruption, cronyism and graft, Ponzi scheme, boom-bust economic cycles, corporatist job export and the hollowing out of the American economy, massive American debt hoisted on the shoulders of young Americans...the list just goes on and on.
Give these Judeofascists an inch, and they'll take ten miles...and then foreclose on the last 10 square feet on which they so "charitably" allowed you to squat.
1 comment:
I'm not getting my hopes up. Possibly ending aid to a few units isn't much, and I can imagine that any sanctions will be easily circumvented.
This reminds me of reading two articles in a local newspaper about a year into the current Iraq war. One article told of local military wives who were protesting because the military was refusing to pay combat overtime pay that their husbands had earned, and the other concerned Bush admin officials assuring Israeli leaders that they would get an increase in aid and further "loan" guarantees. That was priceless!
I doubt that the editors of the paper placed the articles together for comparing and contrasting, and I never saw any evidence from letters to the editors that anyone saw the irony, or that there was any anger in the community.
I'm not sure we have progresses enough over the last ten years to hod Israel or our own government to account.
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