Comment on Govt Press Release regarding Education Minister’s visit to Israel
The New Zealand Government issued a Press Release on 1 October 2016 concerning what it called Education Minister Hekia Parata’s significant visit to Israel in which she extended her education visit in order to represent New Zealand at the state funeral for Shimon Peres. According to the Press Release, Hekia Parata commented: “It was a privilege to mark the passing of a national and international leader whose long life was committed to the service of his country, and to the relentless pursuit of peace”. To say that Peres had committed his life to peace is an assertion detached from reality enough, but to embellish such a claim with the term ‘relentless’ is to venture further into fantasy. It is difficult to believe that our Education Minister could be unaware of a history so replete with inhumanities.
Nuclear weapons and ethnic cleansing
Shimon Peres introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East and the Zionist state remains the only-nuclear-armed power in the region. It was Peres who fostered Israel’s collusion with the UK and France to invade Egypt in 1956. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote of the:
“zeal Peres showed under Ben-Gurion’s guidance and inspiration to Judaize the Galilee. Despite the 1948 ethnic cleansing, that part of Israel was still very much Palestinian countryside and landscape. Peres was behind the idea of confiscating Palestinian land for the purpose of building exclusive Jewish towns such as Karmiel and Upper Nazareth and basing the military in the region so as to disrupt territorial contiguity between Palestinian villages and towns. This ruination of the Palestinian countryside led to the disappearance of the traditional Palestinian villages and the transformation of the farmers into an underemployed and deprived urban working class. This dismal reality is still with us today.”
Bloody barbarity
An eyewitness to one of Peres’s contributions to peace, journalist Robert Fisk, remembered entering a UN camp in Lebanon sheltering civilians that had been attacked during an offensive ordered by Peres. Fisk reported:
“When I reached the UN gates, blood was pouring through them in torrents. I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue. There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without bodies. A man’s body was hanging in two pieces in a burning tree. What was left of him was on fire. On the steps of the barracks, a girl sat holding a man with grey hair, her arm round his shoulder, rocking the corpse back and forth in her arms. His eyes were staring at her. She was keening and weeping and crying, over and over: “My father, my father.” If she is still alive – and there was to be another Qana massacre in the years to come, this time from the Israeli air force – I doubt if the word “peacemaker” will be crossing her lips.”
“I saw the results: babies torn apart, shrieking refugees, smouldering bodies. It was a place called Qana and most of the 106 bodies – half of them children – now lie beneath the UN camp where they were torn to pieces by Israeli shells in 1996. I had been on a UN aid convoy just outside the south Lebanese village. Those shells swished right over our heads and into the refugees packed below us.”
Peres tried to evade responsibility, saying “we did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.” But that was a lie, Fisk tells us:
“The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published in The Independent. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with refugees.”
The man of peace posture
There is more, much more concerning the inhumanities perpetrated by Shimon Peres in pursuit of the Zionist ambition in the Middle East. But thanks to the mainstream news media and Western-aligned politicians the world knows only of the record of Shimon Peres in association with the Oslo Accords and the so-called peace process. There are reasons why the Accords have achieved nothing but the loss of even more Palestinian land and liberty. The American Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Richard Falk, Special UN Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, tells us that:
“Peres never even wanted to reach a sustainable peace agreement with the Palestinians, but he fooled many people, including the committee in Oslo that selects the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He was unyielding in his refusal to grant Palestinians dispossessed in 1948 any right of return. He early favoured, in fact helped initiate, and never really confronted the settlement movement as it encroached upon the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He consistently pretended to be more peace-oriented than he was.”
The ‘peace process’ has provided nothing more than a cover for Israel’s expansionist designs that rely on a total denial of equality to Palestinians in their own land. In 1993, Richard Falk heard Peres speak at Princeton, not long after the famous handshake on the White House lawn between Rabin and Arafat. Falk remembered that Peres had observed that the ‘Palestinians’ were ‘Arabs’ and that it was for the 22 Arab countries to absorb the Palestinian refugees. Falk noted a tone of racism in Peres’s voice when said his plans for normalising conditions in the Middle East would involve a plan to benefit the region in which “Israel would supply the brains, while the Arab would supply the brawn, and the combination would be a productive regional body politic.”
Shocking. Parata’s ignorance of world events is no surprise.
“According to the Press Release, Hekia Parata commented: “It was a privilege to mark the passing of a national and international leader whose long life was committed to the service of his country, and to the relentless pursuit of peace”. To say that Peres had committed his life to peace is an assertion detached from reality enough, but to embellish such a claim with the term ‘relentless’ is to venture further into fantasy. It is difficult to believe that our Education Minister could be unaware of a history so replete with inhumanities.”
What do they say? Brown skin, white heart, white mind?
I think with Parata that would be a fitting description. She is in fully behind the line the PM sets for his government, loyalty to Obama, to the US, to Wall Street and to all that comes from the elite circles in politics and economic dominance there.
And as Israel has such a strong lobby in the US, naturally she will sing from the same song sheet as the others.
Once upon a time people would call her a TRAITOR, as Maori have hardly much to celebrate after having been taken to the cleaners by Anglo Saxon economic and social dominance, and it still continues, despite of “settlements” that admittedly benefited some, but mostly were the inevitable legal solution, as otherwise the fig leaf of ethics and pretences to follow the rule of law and common law would have dropped off, leaving New Zealand stark naked in a changing world.
Hypocrisy is another word that comes to mind. Would Maori feel more sympathetic to the Zionist state or the ones it “removed” in their majority, to “free up” the land for their adventures?
Quoted from above:
“Fisk reported:
“When I reached the UN gates, blood was pouring through them in torrents. I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue. There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without bodies. A man’s body was hanging in two pieces in a burning tree. What was left of him was on fire. On the steps of the barracks, a girl sat holding a man with grey hair, her arm round his shoulder, rocking the corpse back and forth in her arms. His eyes were staring at her. She was keening and weeping and crying, over and over: “My father, my father.” If she is still alive – and there was to be another Qana massacre in the years to come, this time from the Israeli air force – I doubt if the word “peacemaker” will be crossing her lips.” ”
With this, and much more of ruthless killings, murder and ethnic cleansing, how can “the west”, how can any other people, express their “outrage” at beheadings by the admittedly equally misled extremists that have taken control of parts of Iraq and Syria?
Murder, violence and genocide lead the the creation of pain, fury and wish for retaliation, which is the Middle East of today.
Sanctimonious, lying and hypocritical “leaders” in east and west go on and talk about morals, justice, “human rights” and “freedom of expression”, where was that offered to the people of Palestine, I wonder?
All smoke and mirrors, no-one wants to know history, that would just interfere with the agenda. To know and understand the atrocities that humans do to humans in their pursuit of territory, power and control. Insignificant politicians do great harm while trying to bolster their importance.
Ngati Kahungunu in the Hawkes Bay also look very kindly on Israel and their policies. Ironically they have great respect for the Israeli handling of water issues.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/hawkes-bay-today/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503462&objectid=11560896
and, of course, Israeli respect for indigenous cultures and their languages.
https://www.maoritelevision.com/news/regional/israeli-language-expert-offers-advice-ngati-kahugnunu
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/hawkes-bay-today/news/article.cfm?c_id=1503462&objectid=11305252
Interestingly Ngati Kahungunu appear to not have any interest whatsoever in how Palestinians manage to survive with their land and water under constant threat.
Well how nice for Njati Kahungunu to learn from Israelis how to better use water resources and how to revitalise a language. I take note the photo in that first article shows a desalination plant, I suppose that is what they will build in Auckland then, once the nearly doubled population will face shortages, given the Waikato Regional Council will refuse more water take by Auckland’s Watercare. Such plants do not come cheaply, and that will add a few more billions to the Aucklander’s future infrastructure costs.
Israel needs desalinated water due to shortage of water, they also ensure that settlements on the West Bank have access to water, while Palestinians get much less per capita. Then it also disadvantages Palestinian farmers, who cannot grow crops, while crops in Jewish Settlements grow nice gardens or orchards of crops.
As for the Palestinians, well, that is another story, I suppose, “losers” may be the word they may have for them, but at least Arabic is not under threat of becoming an extinct language.
Just a few stories:
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.726132
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/14/west-bank-villagers-battle-water
Birds of a sick psychopathic feather do flock together.
How insane that we are so out of touch and lacking real knowledge of what is going on. What hypocrites Parata and Jonky donky and his pathetic govt. are. And we taxpayers funded that insane trip and her ridiculous allegiance to the criminal Peres. NZ is loosing her way and needs new leadership.
Still using that dishonest graphic Leslie?
Did you actually read the words or are you simply trying divert attention? Apologists for Zionism are taught to do that. You failed to counter the barbarity carried out in the UN refugee camp, the duplicity of Peres and his racism. The Oslo Accords masquerade has enabled Israel to grab more and more Palestinian land. What part of annexation don’t you understand? For your information I did not choose the graphic! There are countless graphics, photographs and videos that show the full horror of Zionist atrocities.
“Comment on Govt Press Release regarding Education Minister’s visit to Israel”
Okay then, I will make comment.
“Please leave Hekia in Israel”