The Three Greatest Crimes
Four members of Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends attended Martin Luther King Day celebrations in Detroit this past week, which included a fiery speech by Willie “Mukasa” Ricks and a march through downtown Detroit. Ricks was introduced by our friend Abayomi Azkikiwe (Pan African News Wire and Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality), who reminisced how impressed he was with this then youth from the 60’s and the Black Power struggle against war and imperialism in the South. Ricks advanced the slogan “Black Power” and pushed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to raise it.
Ricks’ enthusiastic presentation was well received by his audience, especially when he unexpectedly addressed the topic of the “evils” of Zionism. Readers are invited to listen to Ricks’ speech at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDM42JRxqS0 , from which we now quote (16:15 into the video):
The three greatest crimes that ever happened to the human race: What they did to the Native Americans here, the natives of this land, the genocide; the slave trade, the rape of Africa and robbing us out of Africa and scattering us all over the world; and what they’re doing to the Palestinians right before our very eyes. And I want you to know they made up that country “Israel”. That’s not “Israel”, that’s Palestine, that’s Palestine. And the Zionists and the Zionist movement is an evil movement. They do nothing but tell lies and trick people – and trick, trick, trick. They own ABC, CBS, the magazines and they got us under censorship. And they keep us from knowing the truth, not just about Palestine, but even about ourselves. We are under 100% censorship.
Helen Thomas, move over; we have a new “kid” on the block!
JWPF Members Get Published
… and speaking of Helen Thomas, Vigilers M and G responded to an Oakland Press editorial critical of her, and at the same time promoted our vigils in their letter published Thursday in the local A2Journal.com web-and-print newspaper:
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
“Published editorial was insensitive, superficial”
As members of Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, we cannot agree with A2 Journal’s insensitive, superficial, cookie-cutter editorial (from The Oakland Press) in the Dec. 30 paper vilifying the extraordinarily capable, fearless nonagenarian, Helen Thomas.
JWPF has been holding vigils in front of Ann Arbor’s Beth Israel Congregation every Saturday morning for seven years in every kind of weather, holding nicely-printed signs reminding drivers going by –who now give us thumbs up nine-tenths of the time — and synagogue-goers — who don’t — of Israel’s barbaric treatment of the Palestinians.
(The editorial stated) that one of Thomas’s “blatantly anti-Semitic” comments was that “Zionists own the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street.” You left out the one most important group that is owned by the Zionists. She actually said “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by Zionists.”
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Religious Freedom Day Q&A
The following link will take you to the Q&A following last week’s meeting at the Ann Arbor District Library. The vigils were misrepresented by the speakers, with no input allowed from members and supporters of JWPF, as reported last week. At the time of Imam Dawud Walid’s comment that “nine times out of ten, [passing traffic] will find you uncouth”, I raised my hand to correct him. AADL Director Josie Parker physically grabbed my hand and lowered it. We vigillers observe that, of the drivers who offer an opinion, nine out of ten actually support us with thumbs up, smiles, and waves, but the audience was spared this inconvenient testimony. Indeed, last week a passing motorist parked his car and walked up to thank us for our presence.
http://www.zshare.net/audio/85219752a79b79ce/
Local Peace Activist Passes
Gordon Crawford was a downtown Ann Arbor presence, a one-time Beth Israel vigiler and a regular attendee at the Saturday noon anti-war protest, which many JWPF members attend. Gordon was an intelligent man, a history buff, and an incredibly gentle person. He came to this writer’s aid when a local Zionist bully attempted to instigate a fight, and he always had a good word for his fellow protesters. He would also be seen attending the “other game in town”, the weekday 5:30 protest at the Federal Building.
Gordon was a fine man, and will be missed.
Will you worship God or the State?
Seven vigilers
Henry Herskovitz
Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends
Comments on this report? Submit them @https://blog.deiryassin.org/?p=417
Letter to the editor: Published editorial was insensitive, superficial
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
As members of Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, we cannot agree with A2 Journal’s insensitive, superficial, cookie-cutter editorial (from The Oakland Press) in the Dec. 30 paper vilifying the extraordinarily capable, fearless nonagenarian, Helen Thomas.
JWPF has been holding vigils in front of Ann Arbor’s Beth Israel Congregation every Saturday morning for seven years in every kind of weather, holding nicely-printed signs reminding drivers going by –who now give us thumbs up nine-tenths of the time — and synagogue-goers — who don’t — of Israel’s barbaric treatment of the Palestinians.
(The editorial stated) that one of Thomas’s “blatantly anti-Semitic” comments was that “Zionists own the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street.” You left out the one most important group that is owned by the Zionists. She actually said “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by Zionists.”
Nearly 100 percent of the 435 members of the House of Representatives and the 100 senators, with the exceptions, perhaps, of Ron Paul and a very few others, always support Israel, right or wrong, as dictated by the Zionist Lobby, AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which threatens them effectively with defeat if they don’t vote as AIPAC directs.
Congress members’ assistants have been heard to say at meetings that some members actually have AIPAC write their speeches for them regarding Israel/Palestine.
You ask, “What does that have to do with Israel?” And then you say, “People can criticize the politics of Israel as they do the politics in the United States and not be pegged as bigots.” Ha! The politics of Israel is Zionism. It’s not the kind views of the many Jews who help the Palestinians pick their olives at harvest time, refuse to participate in horrendous aggression against Palestinian villages, or work on rebuilding Palestinian homes that are constantly being bulldozed 24/7 by American-made Israeli bulldozers.
Mustafa Barghouti, the Palestinian Minister of Information during the short-lived Palestinian coalition government in 2007, estimated three years ago that over 60,000 Palestinian homes had been fully or partially demolished by Israeli bulldozers. As children, Jews were always taught that Jewishness means being moral and ethical.
To show that the views expressed or not expressed by White House bigwigs are strictly repeats of the Israeli lobby’s “Israel right or wrong” philosophy, did President Barack Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ever express one word of castigation of Israel over its massacre of Gaza during December 2008 to January 2009?
Imagine the Israelis slaughtering close to 1,400 innocent civilians and using white phosphorus grenades, with a burning temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, on Gazan adults and children without a word of complaint from America.
The editorial forgot to mentions that although Helen Thomas was born in Winchester, Ky., her parents immigrated from Lebanon, which Israel viciously attacked in 1982 and again in 2006, when it turned to rubble so much of the country that had built itself up to be the Paris of the Middle East. The feeling of extraordinary hurt is ever with a person whose country of origin is intensely violated.
But Zionism refuses to recognize any kind of Nakba (catastrophe) of the Palestinians. In fact, Zionists in this country and Israel believe in a revised history — really a mythology — of the Palestinians, as is summed up, for example, in a short, 103-page book, “History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression” by David Meir-Levi, a David Horowitz Freedom Center Book.
They don’t believe in al Nakba, the recognized butchery of Palestinian villages by Jewish gangs in 1948 at the time of Israel’s founding. In fact, prominent Zionists a year ago begged U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to remove the word Nakba from the U.N.’s lexicon.
They don’t think the small Palestinian village of Deir Yassin was massacred. They believe whole-heartedly that Egypt started the 1967 Six-Day War, when it was clearly Israel, with its vast repository of weaponry and its war-mongering leaders. They have a queer notion that there were no in-bred Palestinians — they were brought in from other countries; and, in fact, they do not recognize that the Palestinians are occupied.
Most of all, as is true if one listens to Israeli analyses these days of Israeli/Palestinian conflicts, Israel is always the victim, even with its 3 billion dollars a year of the most sophisticated U.S. weaponry. One only has to compare the scholarship of recent books documenting Palestine/Israel history, which Meir-Levi calls “mythology,” such as the three-volume series by Alan Hart, “Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews” or Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” to discern the truth.
And the editorial absurdly compares Thomas’ simple words to Al-Qaeda as far as promoting peace is concerned. Would she consider throwing acid in the face of a woman for showing a tiny patch of skin or keep girls from going to school or woman from working? Helen Thomas, for years and years a supporter of ethnic diversity, is a long-time inductee into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame and deserves all the honors that can be bestowed upon her.
H and M
Pittsfield Township
