On 25 August we sent an email to the NZ Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters, essentially similar to those already emailed to Jacinda Ardern and Ron Mark, concerning the Ministry of Defence proposal to purchase $9 million-worth of military equipment from Israel, and asking that the order be cancelled. The responses from Jacinda Ardern’s Office and Ron Mark can be seen in previous blogs.
On the 27 August we received an email from Ron Mark in answer to our emails of 24 July and 1 August, regarding the purchase of military equipment from the Israeli company Robo-Team. We have replied to the Defence Minister expressing disappointment that he had failed to respond to deal with the particular points we had raised in our earlier emails. We asked Ron Mark to clarify the final three paragraphs of his response as follows:
Following email exchanges with the Prime Minister’s Office featured in the previous blog, which included an email sent to both Ron Mark and Jacinda Ardern, we have yet to receive any response from the Defence Minister.
On 24 July this email was sent by Marian and I to our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern: “The crimes committed…
The New Zealand Green Party MP, Golriz Ghahraman, has upset the Jewish Council here because she described Joseph and Mary,…
According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, the term anti-Semitism means “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews”. It defines Semite as: “A member of any of the peoples who speak or spoke a Semitic language, including in particular the Jews and Arabs. From modern Latin Semita, via late Latin from Greek Sēm ‘Shem’, son of Noah in the Bible, from whom these peoples were traditionally supposed to be descended.”
The summary of a report prepared by the Secretariat of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development on the economic costs of the Israeli occupation for the Palestinian people noted: “Throughout history, colonisation and occupations have always had economic dimensions. This is also the case in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, where the occupation imposes heavy economic costs on the Palestinian people and their economy.”
On 23 May, news broke that Israel had agreed to pay compensation to two photo-journalists who had been attacked by two Israeli soldiers four years ago, in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh. One of the assailants was a commissioned officer. The Israeli Army claimed that the journalists had led what it called “violent riots” that day.
In New Zealand, the Israel Institute’s co-director, Dr David Cumin, on behalf of Israel and its US ally, is calling for “a moratorium on any further Kiwi taxpayer funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)”. In trying to divert attention from Israel, Cumin makes unfounded allegations of “corruption, antisemitism and extremism” against the UN agency’s hard-working officials and frontline workers.
In a Press Release published on 28 April, ACT MP David Seymour took our Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt, to task because he had “failed to condemn” what he asserted was “the anti-Semitism of UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn.