Britain: Irish Travellers fight Dale Farm eviction in Essex

Julie Hyland

[More images here] The resort to scapegoating Roma, other travellers and Muslims for declining living standards bears more than a passing resemblance to the Nazi period in Germany.

The High Court in London is to rule on Friday whether Irish traveller families on a site in Essex can be evicted by Basildon Council.

Dale Farm, near Basildon in southeast England, is the largest illegal Irish travellers’ site in the UK. It has been settled for 10 years on a six-acre site owned by the travellers, but only half the site has planning permission.

In the last months, Basildon Council set out to evict 80 families living on the 51 unauthorised pitches in one of the largest mass evictions ever carried out in England. Many of the residents have refused to leave. They have been forced to pitch illegally, they argue, because planning departments and councils systematically discriminate against travellers.

If Council threats to cut off electricity and send in bailiffs to forcibly eject residents and remove their caravans are acted upon, it will gravely affect the health and welfare of the community.

Children on the site will lose their schooling, and families will lose access to health and social facilities. There are a number of seriously ill people, including cancer patients and one woman, Mary Flynn, who relies on a nebuliser (used to administer medication in the form of a mist inhaled into the lungs).

Hundreds of campaigners—including many students—have turned out to support the travellers, helping to build barricades around the farm. Young people have padlocked their necks to doors, to prevent bailiffs gaining access.


Progressive Chosenness

Gilad Atzmon

Some Palestinian solidarity campaigners are excited this morning about Rabbi Eric Yoffie's pearls of wisdom. The outgoing President of the Union for Reform Judaism, wrote in a recent blog post:

“I care about humankind, but I love my own group a bit more. I am more comfortable with them. I care more about them, just as I care more about my family than other families.”

People who understand the full extent of Jewish tribalism shouldn’t be taken by surprise. Rabbi Yoffie is genuine and coherent. Consequently, his support of The Two State solution is consistent with his Jewish belief system.

“Without a two-state solution.” Says Rabbi Yoffie,

“Israel will not longer be a state for my group; it will be a bi-national state without a clear Jewish identity. That is not the kind of place where I, or most Israeli Jews, will want to live.”

As a supporter of the One State Solution I myself explored this exact issue at the Stuttgart One Democratic State Conference last year. Needless to say, that the five German ‘progressive’ Jews who attended the conference insisted on my removal from the Conference’s protocol.


Solders Riding on an Israeli Public Bus

Charles E. Carlson

How Israeli Propagandists Transform Dead Soldiers Into Civilians

On August 18, high noon, Arabs operating from Egyptian territory attacked, killed and wounded an unknown number of Israeli soldiers on a bus that the world was made to believe carried only civilians.

The highway from the Red Sea port city of Eilat, Israel, north to Beer Sheva and on to Tel Aviv goes through some of the most desolate and deserted landscape this bus rider has ever seen, deserted except for camps of Arab Bedouins who live in the wadis. I rode this same Egged bus on this very route near the end of March 2002 on my way to Gaza.

Egged is owned by the state of Israel and is dirt cheap to ride. About a third of the passengers on my bus were Israeli soldiers, male and female. All were dressed in field gear; many carried slung carbines with banana clip magazines in their belts. At times on this long route, there were so many soldiers onboard that some had to stand in the aisles.

Before my bus left Eilat station, I had the answer to one of the questions that had brought me to Gaza ... why do Palestinian human bombs so often pick "public buses" as targets? Not one news report I had ever read told the simple truth: every Israeli bus is a military transport; therefore, for any Palestinian who considers himself to be at war with the IDF, every Israeli bus is a legitimate military target.

I was to suffered a somewhat amusing minor injury from Israeli militarism on that Egged bus. A female IDF soldier, getting off the bus in Tel Aviv, bent 90 degrees at the hip to pick up her travel bag, and in so doing, she clumsily swung her downward slung carbine barrel up behind her, hitting me in the face with her sight blade as I was stooping in the crowd to look for my own bag. She inflicted a welt on my forehead, and she knew it, but she made no apology and was totally indifferent to me once she saw I was still alive and standing.

I consider my minor injury a symbolic scar in the war for Palestinian rights, and I wish I could have kept the Israeli-inflicted wound long enough to show it off back home!


Obama: An American Tragedy

Gilad Atzmon

Obama made a grave personal mistake yesterday. But it is Americans, Israelis and Palestinians that will pay the price.

Ynet’s Washington reporter, Yitzhak Ben-Horin, produced last night a clear and succinct reading of Obama’s recent UN General Assembly address:

“Likudnik in the White House."
“Netanyahu could not have written it better.”
“Obama at this point, is in line with the Likud party.”
“Obama is a pro-Israel president …Since January 2009, he provided Israel with all its needs both in diplomacy and in terms of security.”

Obama is not performing too well in the polls. He clearly needs the Jewish Lobby on his side. The American president ‘provided’ yesterday and the lobby was quick to react- “Israel has no better friend in the world today," wrote the president of the National Council of Jewish Democrats, David Harris.

According to Ynet, Hours before his UN General Assembly Address Obama sought to ensure that prospective Jewish voters pay close attention to his speech.

“Three of Obama's aides held a conference call with the president's Jewish supporters and community leaders. The advisers, all Jewish themselves, asked the supporters to "spread the word" that Obama will give a pro-Israel speech which reflects his own genuine positions and implored them to pay close attention to the president's UN address.”

The three Jewish advisers

“stressed that the Republicans intentionally distort Obama's statements to portray him as an anti-Israel president, when in fact their arguments are baseless.”

If anyone was foolish enough to believe that America could ever be a broker for peace in the Middle East, the truth is now unavoidable. American political world is clearly hijacked by a foreign lobby that represents foreign interests. America cannot rescue itself. What we see in front of our eyes is basically a tragedy.


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