Human Rights Glance
Earlier this week, Israel ordered Palestinian farmers in Deir Istiya, a major West Bank olive producing village, to uproot 1,400 trees by the end of this month. By comparison, this order is 400 more trees than the total number uprooted in all of 2011.
Since the Mamluk period, Deir Istiya has been one of the largest olive producing regions in the West Bank. But, even with 10,000 dunums of agricultural land, the village's full farming capacity is weakened by Israel's military and civilian occupation. Nearby, eight settlements are built on, or adjacent to, a total of 15,000 dunums of Palestinian land. "From my parents' house we can see were they built a settlement on our land," says Amal. And from the outposts, wastewater seeps into and is illegally dumped into a natural spring used by Palestinians producing olives. Amal says the wastewater flows down from the settlements like a river, "but it isn't a river." At times, the wastewater overflows from the dumping site to onto Palestinian orchards. Last fall, over 100 trees in Deir Istiya were destroyed by flooded wastewater.
A senior UN official in Geneva last week listed Israel among the countries that she says are restricting the activities of human rights groups.
One of the activists that were called over brought a history book, out of which he started reading out loud the names of villages demolished by the Nakba, on which the city of Tel Aviv was built. Policemen warned him that if he keeps on reading he will be arrested. After a moment or two they fulfilled this threat. As he was dragged to the police van he kept on reading. "Shayka Muwannis, Abu Kabir, Salama...." The reading continued, though, from the cards held by those inside the blockade, one by one the names were read, repeated by everybody "Ijlil Shamalyyia, Sawalima, Yazur..." When a couple of dozens were reading out the names the cops stood helpless.
Charles Taylor, the U.S.-educated guerrilla leader who fought his way to the presidency of Liberia, was convicted Thursday of crimes against humanity — including murder, rape and slavery — for his role in assisting a bloody rebel movement in neighboring Sierra Leone.
The retired top CIA officer who ordered the destruction of videos showing waterboarding says in a new book that he was tired of waiting for Washington’s bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives.
Over the weekend Lieutenant Colonel Shaul Eisner of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was filmed brutally striking a Danish activist in the face with the butt of his M-16 assault rifle in the Jordan Valley.
When did we decide that it was okay to treat very young school children as if they were terror suspects? When I was growing up, I don't remember a single time that the police ever came to my school and arrested anyone. But now police are being called out to public schools at the drop of a hat. All over America, very young school children are being arrested and marched out of their schools in handcuffs in front of all their friends. For example, down in Georgia the other day police were called out because a 6-year-old girl was throwing a tantrum. The police subdued her, slapped handcuffs on her and hauled her off to the police station. Instead of apologizing for this outrageous incident, the police are defending the actions of the officer involved. But this is not an isolated incident. All over the country young kids are being handcuffed and mistreated by police.
