zaterdag 16 augustus 2014

Daily Mail

The world’s not been this dangerous for 30 years and the West’s arrogance is to blame writes DOMINIC SANDBROOK

The leaders of the free world were on holiday this week. David Cameron enjoyed a relaxing break in Portugal, while Francois Hollande disappeared to Provence with his family.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama left Washington for two weeks on the golf course. He was looking forward, he told reporters, to not wearing a suit for a while.
But while the leaders of the West were sipping cocktails and basking in the sunshine, the world burned.
Scroll down for video 
As Iraq continued to slide into blood-drenched anarchy, thousands of people remained trapped in the mountains by the advance of Islamic State militants 
As Iraq continued to slide into blood-drenched anarchy, thousands of people remained trapped in the mountains by the advance of Islamic State militants 
The picture allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) murdering dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members
The picture allegedly shows militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) murdering dozens of captured Iraqi security forces members
Twelve days ago, we remembered the outbreak of the First World War, the conflict that was supposed to end all wars.
Yet despite the pious hopes of the centenary services, this has been a summer of mayhem, slaughter and terrifying instability.
As Iraq continued to slide into blood-drenched anarchy, thousands of people remained trapped in the mountains by the advance of Islamic State militants.
In North Africa, Libya’s parliament begged on Wednesday for foreign intervention to protect civilians from rival warlords, whose feuding has already killed well over 1,000 people.
In Ukraine, as Russian convoys of aid and armoured cars rolled over the border, government forces pounded the rebel-held cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, where water, food and electricity have long since run out.
Masked armed men wearing uniforms with the emblem of the Berkut, Ukraine's bisbanded elite riot police force, block the road near the police station in the centre of Donetsk
Masked armed men wearing uniforms with the emblem of the Berkut, Ukraine's bisbanded elite riot police force, block the road near the police station in the centre of Donetsk
And in Syria the bloody civil war, which has already claimed a quarter of a million lives, reached a horrifying new low when an Islamic State fighter posted a picture online of his six-year-old boy holding a severed head.
With every day bringing new atrocities, you might have thought that the leaders of the West would be locked in talks, discussing how to resolve the conflicts that have brought such horrors to the shores of the Mediterranean and the edge of Europe.
Yet not until Thursday did Mr Cameron break off his holiday to return to London. Despite plans to send RAF helicopters to help refugees in Iraq, Parliament has not been recalled.
And, across the Atlantic, Mr Obama evidently believes that practising his putting is far more important than the chaos in the Middle East.
For my part, I am staggered that our leaders have reacted to these months of crisis with such blithe insouciance.
For when future historians look back, they may well see the summer of 2014 as a watershed marking the end of the post-Cold War order, and the birth of a new and far more dangerous era of religious extremism and regional instability.
In the long term, the roots of the current crisis on Europe’s borders, from the cities of eastern Ukraine to the deserts of the Middle East, lie in the hubris and folly that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, a quarter of a century ago.
When the Wall came down in the autumn of 1989, it marked the end of a long, dangerous but relatively stable stalemate between the democratic West and the communist East.
When the Wall (Checkpoint Charlie in the Wall) came down in the autumn of 1989, it marked the end of a long, dangerous but relatively stable stalemate between the democratic West and the communist East
When the Wall (Checkpoint Charlie in the Wall) came down in the autumn of 1989, it marked the end of a long, dangerous but relatively stable stalemate between the democratic West and the communist East
To the politicians of the day, capitalism had been vindicated, while Marxism had spectacularly failed.
Yet what is now clear is that in the following 25 years, the nations of the West, giddy with naive triumphalism, palpably failed to lay lasting foundations for the future.
To take an obvious example, instead of working to establish a stable democracy in post-communist Russia, the US and Britain allowed Russia to slide into anarchy under Boris Yeltsin and then towards autocratic tyranny under Vladimir Putin.
Instead of working to establish a democracy in post-communist Russia, the US and Britain allowed Russia to slide into anarchy under Boris Yeltsin and then towards autocratic tyranny under Vladimir Putin (above)
Instead of working to establish a democracy in post-communist Russia, the US and Britain allowed Russia to slide into anarchy under Boris Yeltsin and then towards autocratic tyranny under Vladimir Putin (above)
And in the Middle East — by far the most fractured, dangerous and strategically important region on the planet — Western policy during the 1990s and 2000s now looks like a disaster.
Instead of coaxing stable but authoritarian regimes such as Egypt and Syria towards democracy, the West preferred to prop up elderly tyrants like Hosni Mubarak and Hafez al-Assad, the father of the current Syrian president. That was folly enough. Even worse, however, was the catastrophically reckless decision by George W. Bush and Tony Blair to topple the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein without carefully laying the foundations for a post-Saddam regime.
Deposing Saddam Hussein was a catastrophically reckless decision by George W. Bush and Tony Blair
Deposing Saddam Hussein was a catastrophically reckless decision by George W. Bush and Tony Blair
Alas, we all know the result: an unending saga of car-bombings, sectarian uprisings and bloody massacres.
And now that Islamic State militants have carved out their own territory in western Iraq, the very survival of the country seems highly unlikely.
Mr Blair may deny any responsibility for the carnage in Iraq, but he is in a minority of one.
As his former protégé David Miliband admitted last week, it is ‘clearly the case’ that the bungled occupation of Iraq undermined the foundations of the state, shattered any legitimate authority, and played a key role in creating the carnage we are seeing today.
It is little wonder, then, that so many people in the West have turned inwards, preferring the comforts of isolationism to the hard choices that come when you engage with the world.
And perhaps it is not surprising that Barack Obama and David Cameron, reacting to the shameful hubris of the Blair-Bush years, would rather order a new round of drinks than order their troops into battle.
But, as history shows, you simply cannot wish the problems of the world away.
The last great age of isolationism, after all, was the 1930s, when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were in their bloody pomp. We all know how that turned out. Indeed, while Mr Obama’s mantra — ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ — may sound like an understandable reaction to his predecessor’s oafish blundering, it is no substitute for a foreign policy.
The last great age of isolationism, after all, was the 1930s, when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were in their bloody pomp
The last great age of isolationism, after all, was the 1930s, when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were in their bloody pomp
The last great age of isolationism, after all, was the 1930s, when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were in their bloody pomp
The last great age of isolationism, after all, was the 1930s, when (left to right) Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were in their bloody pomp
As his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, recently put it: ‘Great nations need organising principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organising principle.’
If you are wondering, by the way, what Britain’s organising principle is, then I am afraid I don’t have an answer.
Ever since David Cameron came to office in May 2010, he has swung from one extreme to another.
At first, he seemed an avowed anti-interventionist, insisting that democracy could not be ‘dropped from the air by an unmanned drone’.
Yet when revolution broke out in Libya in 2011, the Prime Minister promptly sent in the RAF to bolster the rebels, claiming that the alternative would be to ‘pull up the drawbridge’. Similarly, Mr Cameron was a passionate advocate of intervening in the Syrian civil war, despite the glaring absence of either credible allies or a plausible exit strategy.
As his former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, recently put it: ‘Great nations need organising principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organising principle’
Indeed, when Parliament blocked his bid to intervene, he sounded uncannily like Tony Blair, snapping that his opponents would ‘have to live with the way that they voted’.
The odd thing, though, is that for all Mr Cameron’s rhetoric, his Government has spent the past four years cutting our Armed Forces.
Despite the growing crises to Europe’s south and east, the Government remains intent on trimming Britain’s regular Army from 102,000 soldiers to just 80,000.
Only a few months ago, the former head of the Army, General Lord Dannatt, warned that ‘with a resurgent Russia, this is a poor moment for the U.S.-led West to be weak in resolve and muscle’.
Alas, I fear that ‘resolve and muscle’ are the last things that Vladimir Putin sees when he contemplates Britain today.
What makes all this even more worrying is that I believe the world is a more dangerous place today than at any time since the early 1980s, when West confronted East across the stark frontiers of the Cold War.
In Russia, for example, I believe there are disturbing parallels with the events that followed the end of World War I in Germany. Of course Vladimir Putin is not Hitler and Russian nationalists are not the Nazis.
But like Germany in the 1930s, Russia seethes with resentment at its perceived humiliation at the end of the Cold War.
And just as many Germans found reassurance in Hitler’s promises of renewed greatness, so many ordinary Russians, their minds warped by the Kremlin’s propaganda, are itching for revenge against their supposed enemies in the West.
So many ordinary Russians, their minds warped by the Kremlin¿s (above and St Basil's Cathedral) propaganda, are itching for revenge against their supposed enemies in the West
So many ordinary Russians, their minds warped by the Kremlin’s (above and St Basil's Cathedral) propaganda, are itching for revenge against their supposed enemies in the West
Given Russia’s vast gas reserves, enormous army and fearsome nuclear arsenal, all that makes for a genuinely terrifying combination.
And if the parallel with the 1930s holds, then I can barely bring myself to contemplate what might happen next.
The terrible events in Syria, Libya and Iraq are part of a pattern, too.
The story beneath the recent revolutions in the Middle East is a toxic combination of a surging population, a stagnant economy, an authoritarian political culture, deep sectarian tensions and a festering sense of anti-Western resentment.
Our politicians had no excuse for not knowing this was coming. Indeed, as long ago as 1994, I remember reading a controversial article in the U.S. magazine The Atlantic Monthly, by foreign policy thinker Robert D. Kaplan, entitled The Coming Anarchy.
Mr Kaplan argued that far from ushering in a liberal utopia, the end of the Cold War would be seen as the beginning of something much more dangerous.
In the long run, he argued, ‘scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease’ would make the world a far deadlier place.
Given that he specifically mentioned Syria, Egypt and Iraq as future trouble-spots, Mr Kaplan deserves a pat on the back for his prescience.
By and large, I am not a great fan of military interventions abroad. Our recent history, after all, is littered with disasters, from Suez (above, Port Said during the crisis) in 1956 to Iraq in 2003
By and large, I am not a great fan of military interventions abroad. Our recent history, after all, is littered with disasters, from Suez (above, Port Said during the crisis) in 1956 to Iraq in 2003
The tragedy, though, is that the leaders of the West were not paying attention.
I do not believe they are really paying attention now, either. If they were, they would have acted much more decisively when President Putin snatched Crimea and incited his thugs into rebellion in eastern Ukraine, and they would certainly have acted more quickly in Iraq.
By and large, I am not a great fan of military interventions abroad. Our recent history, after all, is littered with disasters, from Suez in 1956 to Iraq in 2003.
It is sheer hubris to believe that we are policemen to the world, and sheer naivety to believe that every story can have a happy ending.
But when they have clear objectives and a universally agreed exit strategy, interventions can work.
We were right to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein in 1991 and right to stop Slobodan Milosevic’s massacres in Kosovo in 1999, just as we were terribly, shamefully wrong to have sat on our hands in Bosnia.
The truth is that Western foreign policy has not had a clear direction or decisive leadership since the end of the Cold War.
President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were reckless to topple Saddam Hussein without having any apparent idea what to do with a post-Saddam Iraq
President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair were reckless to topple Saddam Hussein without having any apparent idea what to do with a post-Saddam Iraq
Putting aside Tony Blair’s messianic waffle about reordering the world in our own image, we have no idea what our governments stand for, what their priorities are, and where and when they think it necessary to intervene.
In the past, leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — or, indeed, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt — spelled out their priorities with absolute moral clarity.
True, you may well argue that things were easier for them because the issues were clear-cut: a straight choice between good and evil.
But history suggests that true statesmanship lies precisely in setting out that choice: in taking a moral stand and lifting the fog of ambiguity.
That was what Churchill did when he warned of the horrors of Nazism, and what Reagan did when he called the Soviet Union an evil empire.
What we need now are leaders of the same stamp — men and women with a clear sense of moral conviction, but also a keen awareness of the balance between caution and inaction, idealism and realism, decisiveness and recklessness.
Unfortunately, we have somehow landed ourselves with a generation of political leaders who are more interested in enjoying their holidays than in securing the future of the West.
And so, one day, some future historian may write that even as thousands were massacred in Syria and Iraq, even as rockets rained down in Gaza and Ukraine, even as the world staggered towards anarchy, the most powerful man on the planet was working on his golf swing. 


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2726372/The-world-s-not-dangerous-30-years-West-s-arrogance-blame-writes-DOMINIC-SANDBROOK.html#ixzz3AaEAkOgU
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Zionist Fascism 205

Terwijl de Nederlandse mainstream blijft zeveren over antisemitisme, beseft men in het buitenland dat er iets heel anders aan de gang is.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2014/08/europe-and-israel

The Economist | Blogs
August 15th 2014, 14:09

Righteous in Holland and Gaza

by M.S. | AMSTERDAM

HENK ZANOLI is a 91-year-old retired Dutch lawyer whose personal history encapsulates the reasons why the Netherlands and Israel have had such friendly relations since the foundation of the Jewish state in the wake of the second world war. Mr Zanoli's family was, as the Dutch put it, "right in the war" -- i.e. members of the resistance. In 1943, Mr Zanoli escorted an 11-year-old Jewish boy from Amsterdam, Elchanan Pinto, back to the family home in the village of Eemnes, where he and his mother Johanna hid him for the rest of the war. (His father, Henk Senior, had already been sent to a concentration camp for his resistance activities; he would die at Mauthausen.) Mr Pinto subsequently emigrated to Israel. Three years ago, the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem awarded its "Righteous Among the Nations" medal, given to non-Jews who rescued Jews from the Nazis, to Mr Zanoli and (posthumously) his mother.

On August 11th, Haaretz's Amira Hass reports, Mr Zanoli sent Yad Vashem its medal back. Mr Zanoli's great-niece, Angelique Eijpe, is a Dutch diplomat, deputy head of the country's mission in Oman, and her husband, Ismail Zi'adah, is a Palestinian economist who was born in Gaza's al-Bureij refugee camp. On July 20, the Zi'adah family house in al-Bureij was hit by an Israeli bomb, killing six members of the extended family, including the family matriarch, three of her sons, and a 12-year-old grandson. In an elegant and sorrowful letter to Israel's ambassador in The Hague, Mr Zanoli explained that he could not in good conscience keep the Israeli medal.

   "I understand that in your professional role, in which
   I am addressing you here, you may not be able to express
   understanding for my decision. However, I am convinced
   that at both a personal and human level you will have
   a profound understanding of the fact that for me to
   hold on to the honour granted by the State of Israel,
   under these circumstances, will be both an insult
   to the memory of my courageous mother who risked
   her life and that of her children fighting against
   suppression and for the preservation of human life
   as well as an insult to those in my family, four
   generations on, who lost no less than six of their
   relatives in Gaza at the hands of the State of Israel."

It is the style of Mr Zanoli's letter, as much as its content, that is most striking. His graceful acknowledgement of the professional limitations that govern his correspondence with the ambassador seems to come from a different era, the years when the modest, correctly dressed, multilingual members of the Dutch educated class threw themselves into an effort to build a peaceful postwar order. The phrase that animated Jews and Zionists in those years was "never again"; the corresponding Dutch postwar phrase, dat nooit meer, has a more prosaic ring, a sense of simple horror and exhaustion. The dignity and generosity of those postwar generations of Dutch won the country worldwide respect, and encountering them remains such a pleasure that it erases the less wholesome impression some of the Netherlands' more recent politicians have created. Mr Zanoli's voice seems to come straight out of those postwar years, which were also the period when the equally impressive first generation of Israeli leaders were winning Europe and America's support to establish their country as part of the new international order.

This makes it all the more striking to read of the evolution of Mr Zanoli's views on the Israel-Palestine question.

   "After the horror of the holocaust my family strongly
   supported the Jewish people also with regard to their
   aspirations to build a national home. Over more than
   six decades I have however slowly come to realize
   that the Zionist project had from its beginning a
   racist element in it in aspiring to build a state
   exclusively for Jews. As a consequence, ethnic
   cleansing took place at the time of the establishment
   of your state and your state continues to suppress
   the Palestinian people on the West Bank and in Gaza
   who live under Israeli occupation since 1967. The
   actions of your state in Gaza these days have already
   resulted in serious accusations of war crimes and
   crimes against humanity ... The only way out of
   the quagmire the Jewish people of Israel have
   gotten themselves into is by granting all living
   under the control of the State of Israel the same
   political rights and social and economic rights
   and opportunities."

This is a call for a one-state solution to the Palestine-Israel question, rather than the two-state one still supported by most Europeans. The longer Israel fails to close a deal on a two-state solution, and the more suffering and death its occupation of the West Bank and periodic wars in Gaza inflict on Palestinians, the more it risks convincing Europeans that the very idea of a separate Jewish state is by nature racist and oppressive. This is the prospect of "delegitimisation" about which we wrote earlier this month. The practical consequences for Israel of provoking such European enmity are serious, but the moral consequences are more serious still. Israel has always been a state whose legitimacy is founded on a moral narrative, that of the escape from anti-Semitic persecution, of "never again".

In Nathan Englander's short story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," a secular Jewish couple in Florida and an ultra-orthodox one from Jerusalem find themselves playing a drinking game they call "Who Will Hide Me?" The game, which soon turns bitterly serious, is to run through one's acquaintances and decide: if the Holocaust were to happen again, who would hide you, and who would turn you in? With Mr Zanoli, you don't need to ask. You know he would hide you because he did. He was 20 years old when he took Elchanan Pinto on the train back from Amsterdam, where Anne Frank was still hiding in her attic. The political cost to Israel of its bombardment of Gaza and its occupation of the West Bank is that it may be delegitimised among Europeans who once supported it. The moral cost, though, is that it loses the sympathy of those rare people whose ethical compasses run so true that they will defy social consensus even at risk of death, the people Yad Vashem correctly calls the righteous.
______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.haaretz.com/news/world/.premium-1.610682
Haaretz
Aug. 15, 2014

Dutch nonagenarian returns Righteous Among the Nations medal after six relatives killed in Gaza

Henk Zanoli, who helped save a Jewish child from deportation to concentration camps, said holding on to the medal would be an 'insult to the family.'

By Amira Hass

A 91-year-old Dutch man who was declared a Righteous Among the Nations for saving a Jew during the German occupation on Thursday returned his medal and certificate because six of his relatives were killed by an Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip last month.

In 2011, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum declared Henk Zanoli and his late mother, Johana Zanoli-Smit, Righteous Among the Nations for having saved a Jewish child, Elhanan Pinto, during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Pinto, born in 1932, was hidden by the Zanoli family from the spring of 1943 until the Allies liberated Holland in 1945. His parents perished in Nazi death camps.

In hiding a Jewish child, the Zanoli family took a double risk, because it was already under Nazi scrutiny for having opposed the German occupation. Zanoli's father was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1941 due to his opposition to the occupation, and he subsequently died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in February 1945. Henk Zanoli's brother-in-law was executed because of his involvement in the Dutch resistance, and one of his brothers had a Jewish fiancée, who was also killed by the Nazis.

Zanoli's great-niece, Angelique Eijpe, is a Dutch diplomat who currently serves as deputy head of her country's diplomatic mission in Oman. Her husband, economist Isma'il Ziadah, was born in the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. The couple has three children. Ziadah's parents were born in Fallujah, on whose lands the [Israeli] town of Kiryat Gat now sits. His father died in 1987.

On Sunday, July 20, an Israeli fighter jet dropped a bomb on the Ziadah family's home in al-Bureij. The bomb killed the family matriarch, Muftiyah, 70; three of her sons, Jamil, Omar and Youssef; Jamil's wife, Bayan; and their 12-year-old son, Shaaban. The bombing thus orphaned Jamal and Bayan's other five children, four daughters and a son, while bereaving Omar's two sons and Youssef's three sons and a daughter of their fathers. The bombing also killed Mohammed Maqadmeh, who happened to be visiting the family that day.

Zanoli, an attorney by profession, heard about the killing of the Ziadah family from his niece. As a way of expressing his shock and pain, he decided to return the medal and certificate that were awarded to him and to his mother (posthumously) as Righteous Among the Nations. Because of his age and poor health, he did not do so in person, but sent them by messenger to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague -- the same place where he received them in an official ceremony three years ago.

In the accompanying letter, addressed to Ambassador Haim Davon, Zanoli began by describing the price his family paid for resisting the Nazis and their successful effort to save a Jewish child.

"Against this background it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel," he wrote.

"The great- great grandchildren of my mother have lost their [Palestinian] grandmother, three uncles, an aunt and a cousin at the hands of the Israeli army ... For me to hold on to the honour granted by the State of Israel, under these circumstances, will be both an insult to the memory of my courageous mother who risked her life and that of her children fighting against suppression and for the preservation of human life as well as an insult to those in my family, four generations on, who lost no less than six of their relatives in Gaza at the hands of the State of Israel."

Noting that Israel's actions in Gaza "have already resulted in serious accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity," he continued, "as a retired lawyer it would be no surprise to me that these accusations could lead to possible convictions if true and unpoliticized justice is able to have its course. What happened to our kin in Gaza will no doubt be brought to the table at such a time as well."

The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson's Unit did not answer Haaretz's questions as to whether the Ziadah home was bombed by mistake, or if not, who in the house was a target and whether the IDF's legal department considers the death of six civilians to be legitimate collateral damage. Its response said merely that the IDF invests great efforts in trying to avoid civilian casualties, is currently working to investigate all allegations of irregular incidents and will publish its conclusions after this investigation is completed.
______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/16/world/middleeast/16dutchman-letter.html
The New York Times
August 16, 2014

Award Returned ‘With Great Sorrow'

In a letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, Henk Zanoli returned his medal as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Mr. Zanoli had saved a Jewish boy from the Nazis in 1943.


Ambassador Haim Davon
Embassy of Israel
Buitenhof 47
2513 AH The Hague

The Hague, August 11 2014

Subject: Return of medal of honour

Excellency,

It is with great sorrow that I am herewith returning the medal I received as an honour and a token of appreciation from the State of Israel for the efforts and risks taken by my mother and her family in saving the life of a Jewish boy during the German occupation of The Netherlands.

My mother and her nuclear family risked their lives fighting the German occupation. My mother lost her husband who was deported to Dachau as early as 1941 because of his open and outspoken opposition to the German occupation. He eventually perished in Mauthausen Concentration Camp. My sister lost her husband who was executed in the dunes of The Hague for his involvement in the resistance. In addition to this, my brother lost his Jewish fiancée who was deported, never to return.

My steadfast and heroic mother nevertheless continued the struggle, amongst others by taking in an 11 year old Jewish boy in her home, risking both her own life and that of her children. This boy survived the war under the wings of my mother and eventually moved to Israel.

Against this background it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel.

The great- great grandchildren of my mother have lost their grandmother, three uncles, an aunt and a cousin at the hands of the Israeli army. Their family apartment building in Bureij Refugee Camp in Gaza was bombed on July 20 from an Israeli F16, turning the four-storey building to rubble, leaving every single family member inside it dead.

I understand that in your professional role, in which I am addressing you, you may not be able to express understanding for my decision. However, I am convinced that at both a personal and human level you will have a profound understanding of the fact that for me to hold on to the honour granted by the State of Israel, under these circumstances, will be both an insult to the memory of my courageous mother who risked her life and that of her children fighting against suppression and for the preservation of human life, as well as an insult to those in my family, four generations on, who lost no less than six of their relatives in Gaza at the hands of the State of Israel.

On a more general note the following. After the horror of the holocaust my family strongly supported the Jewish people also with regard to their aspirations to build a national home. Over more than six decades I have however slowly come to realize that the Zionist project had from its beginning a racist element in it in aspiring to build a state exclusively for Jews. as a consequence, ethnic cleansing took place at the time of the establishment of your state and your state continues to suppress the Palestinian people on the West Bank and in Gaza who live under Israeli occupation since 1967.

The actions of your state in Gaza these days have already resulted in serious accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. As a retired lawyer it would be no surprise to me that these accusations could lead to possible convictions if true and unpoliticized justice is able to have its course. What happened to our kin in Gaza will no doubt be brought to the table as well.

The only way out of the quagmire the Jewish people of Israel have gotten themselves into is by granting all living under the control of the State of Israel the same political rights and social and economic rights and opportunities. Although this will result in a state no longer exclusively Jewish it will be a state with a level of righteousness on the basis of which I could accept the title of 'Righteous among the Nations' you awarded to my mother and me together with the medal.

Today I am a 91 year old man who does not expect radical change with regard to the current sad reality within my, most likely, still limited lifetime. If your state would be willing and able to transform itself along the lines set out above and there would still be an interest in granting an honour to my family for the actions of my mother during the second world war, be sure to contact me or my descendants.

Sincerely,

H.A. Zanoli

______________________________________________________________________________
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/world/middleeast/henk-zanoli-israel-gaza-holocaust-ziadah.html
The New York Times
August 16, 2014

Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic.

By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE and ANNE BARNARD

Aug. 15, 2014

[PHOTO]: Henk Zanoli, second from right, with his family in 1942. A year later, he smuggled a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the family's home in a Dutch village and helped hide him through the war.

THE HAGUE -- In 1943, Henk Zanoli took a dangerous train trip, slipping past Nazi guards and checkpoints to smuggle a Jewish boy from Amsterdam to the Dutch village of Eemnes. There, the Zanoli family, already under suspicion for resisting the Nazi occupation, hid the boy in their home for two years. The boy would be the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust.

Seventy-one years later, on July 20, an Israeli airstrike flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing six of Mr. Zanoli's relatives by marriage. His grandniece, a Dutch diplomat, is married to a Palestinian economist, Ismail Ziadah, who lost three brothers, a sister-in-law, a nephew and his father's first wife in the attack.

On Thursday, Mr. Zanoli, 91, whose father died in a Nazi camp, went to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague and returned a medal he received honoring him as one of the Righteous Among the Nations -- non-Jews honored by Israel for saving Jews during the Holocaust. In an anguished letter to the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands, he described the terrible price his family had paid for opposing Nazi tyranny.

[PHOTO]: Hassan al-Zeyada, a Palestinian psychologist in Gaza, whose brother Ismail Ziadah is married to Mr. Zanoli's grandniece. (Photo: Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times)

"My sister lost her husband, who was executed in the dunes of The Hague for his involvement in the resistance," he wrote. "My brother lost his Jewish fiancée who was deported, never to return."

Mr. Zanoli continued, "Against this background, it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza. Murder carried out by the State of Israel."

His act crystallizes the moral debate over Israel's military air and ground assault in the Gaza Strip, in which about 2,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have been killed. Israel says the strikes are aimed at Hamas militants who fire rockets at Israeli cities and have dug a secret network of tunnels into Israel.

Mr. Zanoli transformed over the decades from a champion to a critic of the Israeli state, mirroring a larger shift in Europe, where anguish over the slaughter of six million European Jews led many to support the founding of Israel in 1948 as a haven for Jews worldwide.

But in the years since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza during the 1967 war, Europeans have become more critical. Israel blames anti-Semitism, which has grown in Europe with the rise of right-wing politicians. Some European protests against Israeli military action have been marred in recent weeks by open anti-Semitism, blurring the line between criticism of Israeli policy and hate speech against Jews. But many other critics, like Mr. Zanoli, say their objection to Israeli policy is not anti-Jewish but consistent with the humanitarian principles that led them to condemn the Holocaust and support the founding of a Jewish state.

"I gave back my medal because I didn't agree with what the state of Israel is doing to my family and to the Palestinians on the whole," Mr. Zanoli said in an interview Friday in his spare but elegant apartment, adding that his decision was a statement "only against the state of Israel, not the Israeli people."

"Jews were our friends," said Mr. Zanoli, a retired lawyer who uses a motorized scooter but remains erect and regal, much as he appears in a yellowing 1940s photograph archived at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Mr. Zanoli said he had never publicly criticized Israel "until I heard that my family was the victim."

In Gaza, Mr. Zanoli's in-laws say his gesture is a fitting response to the losses of their family and others who have lost multiple relatives in strikes on homes. Those in-laws include Hassan al-Zeyada, a psychological trauma counselor who is an older brother of Ismail Ziadah. Their mother, Muftiyah, 70, was the oldest family member to die in the bombing.

Like Mr. Zanoli, Dr. Zeyada, 50, who works to treat the many Palestinians in Gaza traumatized by war and displacement, has given much thought to the fact that Israel was founded after the Holocaust, one of history's greatest collective traumas.

Dr. Zeyada, who transliterates his family name differently from his brother, said Friday that he admired Mr. Zanoli and his family for their struggle in World War II against "discrimination and oppression in general and against the Jews in particular."

"For them," he added, "it's something painful that the people you defended and struggled for turn into aggressors."

Marian Propstra

VVD-statenlid Marian Propstra pleit voor moslimghetto’s

We hadden gisteren al een VVD-bestuurder met alle begrip voor Breivik, en vandaag hebben een statenlid dat dit zegt:
Sniegoehe
Sniegoehe

Wordt het niet eens tijd dat het OM deze terreurorganisatie genaamd “Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie” (sic, what’s in a name) eens gaat oprollen? Of moet ik BP Schut of R Hoogland stijl zeggen, “elimineren tot de laatste man”? Want dat schijnt tegenwoordig allemaal te kunnen.
- See more at: http://www.krapuul.nl/overig/nieuws/201384/vvd-statenlid-marian-propstra-pleit-voor-moslimghettos/#sthash.b5qToCHN.dpuf

In het land waar tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog procentueel twee maal zoveel joodse burgers met steun van de Nederlandse staat achter hekken werden geplaatst en vervolgens werden vermoord vraagt Marian Propstra zich publiekelijk af of dit keer de moslims niet achter hekken moeten verdwijnen. Niet alleen in Israel, maar ook in Nederland neemt het fascisme toe. 




U kunt haar ook een brief schrijven: 

Hanedoesstraat 75, 2597 XD Den Haag 

Marian Propstra
drs Sociale Wetenschap
Namens VVD lid Provinciale Staten van Zuid-Holland 2012 – heden
http://zuidholland.vvd.nl/statenfractie_5370/5775/