By the request of the non-governmental organization – the Odessa Association of African Refugees (OAAR) and the residents of the Center for Temporary Accommodation of Refugees (CTAR); a mission of the Regional UNHCR office had arrived in Odessa and held a meeting with recognized refugees, asylum seekers and former refugees, who have neutralized in the Ukrainian society on 25 February 2010.This meeting was led by the commission of the Regional UNHCR office Mrs. Kate Pooler – a protection advisor and Mrs. Anna Kuznyetsova – resettlement service assistance. This meeting has been recorded on six video discs and can render you at any time.
For a period of six years, me as a general secretariat of the OAAR informed the Regional UNHCR office, the authorities of the Ukrainian government, national and international humanitarian organs and diplomatic sector in Ukraine and around the world about what is going on here in Odessa . Odessa is ruled by Mafia model.
We understand very well, that Ukraine is a week country to give an asylum for those, who arrive here. Understanding this we tried to live here searching appropriate circumstances, but even though we closed our eyes, mouth and ears for the xenophobia, racial discrimination and hating the so highly corrupted authorities of Odessa didn’t give us the possibility to survive as a human being. We are considered here as wild animals. To mention some points:
- Asylum seekers are forced to pay a large amount of bribe for the interpretation service, which they are supposed to get. For this, the administration of the migration department established a mafia structure. The main intermediaries in this structure are recognize refugees and neutralized former refugees, who are living in the CTAR. Money is rendered to this people and will be transferd to others later.
- Asylum seekers are forced to pay for the dormitory where they live.
- Asylum seekers are punished with food, since the authorities announced that the country is poor and has no means to feed them. After so many months of famine the UNHCR decided to fund the food consumption, but the authorities of the CTAR aren’t cooperative to supply this. Food supplies are distributed only when a delegate or a commission arrives in the CTAR – for show.
- Asylum seekers Are asked to collect money for deliberately broken water pipes, toilet and kitchen device and even for repairing the building. On this meeting residents of the CTAR have informed the representatives of the regional UNHCR office how the staff of the CTAR remove a working device and implanted it later the old one, when the residents collect and give the asked amount of money.
- Asylum seekers are subjected to travel four hours by foot every month (only one way) – to reach the court, where their cases are supposed to be hear. This is because almost all didn’t have an income.
- Asylum seekers are not able to renew their residence, because the visa and registration department is too far and it is madness to start to go by foot to reach it.
- Asylum seekers, who are women even didn’t have a possibility to buy hygiene materials during their menstrual period.
- Asylum seekers who are Africans are subjected to free and frequent work in the territory of the CTAR and out of it.
- Asylum seekers are subjected to live in darkness, since the light is working only from 6:00 to 10:00 morning and 16:00 to 22:00 night. All the rest of the day, light will be put-off.
- Asylum seekers complained repeatedly, that there is no supply of hot water even in the winter time, thus the rooms are too cold and aren’t even able to take shower.
- Asylum seekers complained repeatedly, that the heating device, which they are using to heat water are usually collected by the administration of the CTAR and destroyed. The representatives of the regional UNHCR office Mrs. Kate Pooler – a protection advisor and Mrs. Anna Kuznyetsova – resettlement service assistance have been a witness on an occasion (25 February 2010), when the deputy director of the CTAR broke a heater of a resident.
- Asylum seekers complained that the electrical device, which they used to cook food are deliberately broken down by the staff of the CTAR, since this is a way how they are able to ask a financial assistance from the government and the UNHCR regional office. Even after getting assistance they will fix the old one and will never buy a new one. Individual device are not allowed, thus families with children and residents who have a job are subjected to wait too long time to send them to school and go to their job in time respectively.
- Asylum seekers and recognized refugees complain that there is no futurity in this country, since the possibility to marry a Ukrainian woman is zero. The ultimate goal of life is to found a family and give a generation, but this goal became only a vision because we are considered in the society like garbage; and no woman wants to be a wife for garbage. Even those Ukrainian women, who have found a family with African citizens, are very sorry of their decision. Many fled leaving their children with their father. This is because most of the population didn’t accept their decision; often they hear insult on their children and their address.
- Asylum seekers who used to complain are asked to reach the commission, which determine whom to live and whom to evict and are warned, terrified and even evicted. The laws of Ukraine on refugees, which propose that refugees and asylum seekers have the right for individual and collectively complain, fail to work, because the law of the state committee on migration, nationality and religion, which declare that an asylum seeker has a right to live in the CTAR only for three months of time. Residents, who close their mouth and live are allowed to live an infinite period of time, whereas people who insist their right are asked to leave the CTAR.
Dear Sir/Dear Madame,
Countries, which signed the human right convention and convention of UNHCR on refugees and its protocol, did many things for the adaptation of refugees and asylum seekers. Refugees got the appropriate respect. Even in this period of crisis refugees and asylum seekers are able to survive in these countries. People, who are trying to change their life, have enormous possibilities for survival. In most of these countries law and regulations are practical. People have a guarantee in their life. Even though there are some problems, the society in these countries is welcomed for refugees and asylum seekers.
Ukraine became a week country. This weakness came not because the country didn’t have the potential, but mainly because of the authorized personals. They deliberately form a mafia network. Especially in towns like Odessa this network is highly sophisticated. The human right convention and convention of UNHCR on refugees and its protocol are not practical at all. There is no integration of refuges. African citizens didn’t have respect at all. It is impossible to survive in this country. We are not able to survive here, because we are supposed to pay everywhere bribes; especially for the police forces. Law and regulations of the country are practical only if you have money.We don’t have a guarantee not only in our future life, but also in the present time. We and our children might become a victim of a skinhead attack or any other bandits. Since the society fall in a deep poverty they are looking us like an enemy, as if the causes of all these problems are foreigners.
In this period, even those neutralized compatriots of ours are very sorry, because they took the citizenship of Ukraine .Being a citizen they are supposed to expense all in all from their pocket and which is impossible. Looking them, many refused to be neutralized. There is a reported case that an asthmatic man, who has been neutralized and have an asthmatic child fall in a great problem, since the father is not able to buy even a flacon for asthmatic attack both for him and for his 14 years daughter. This man was not able to come on a very serious meeting, because he wasn’t having 4 UAH (Half a Dollar). We are very sorry that being a Ukrainian; people fall in such a great problems. The authorities, who were supposed to build a suitable circumstance for the better integration of refugees in the Ukrainian society didn’t do that, because they are running to make a large mount of money. By their concept a refugee itself is money, thus especially in Odessa some refugees are not able to get a decision in a court for even 14 years; whereas it is permitted to stay in the CTAR only for three months. Where asylum seekers can stay 14 years in Ukraine , where you can’t get a job or any other income? This is a corrupted system, where every member of this system is supporting each other or blackmailing those, who are dangerous for them. The court system itself is well corrupted with the migration department. There is a conspiracy in between them not to reject an asylum seeker more than two times. If an asylum seeker got a rejection three times, then he has a great possibility to be resettled to a third country.That means the number of asylum seekers might fall dawn and the income will be minimal. Very sadly to recognize that we became commodities.
Dear Sir/Dear Madame,
Again a mission of the Regional UNHCR office had arrived in Odessa and held a meeting with recognized refugees, asylum seekers and former refugees, who have neutralized in the Ukrainian society on 12 March 2010. This meeting was led by the commission of the Regional UNHCR office Mrs. Kate Pooler, Meliha Hadziabdic and a representative of the state committee of Ukraine in refuges, minority and religion Mrs. Natalie. This meeting has been recorded on four video discs and can render you at any time.
On this meeting residents openly declared for whom they rendered money as a fee for interpretation, how they arrive in Odessa, How they have been attacked by skinheads and the criminals all released paying a money for the police, about the corruption in the police departments, humiliation in the CTAR, how the administration, mainly the deputy director violate their human right and about all what was stated on the meeting, which was held on 25 February 2010.
Even though the representative of the state committee of Ukraine in refuges, minority and religion Mrs. Natalie announced that the administration of the CTAR will not evict anyone in the future 2 months of period; arriving the CTAR after the meeting, some residents are asked to leave the CTAR today, however many are informed to be on the commission, which will be held today on 15 March 2010. This must not be done. The residents of the CTAR and other refugees are very depressed, exhausted, distorted and with out any good sense inside, thus potentially they are very dangerous. They can do what ever a person can’t imagine. Their expressions were very serious and notable and before a tragedy came we must hear what they want and change all in all the staff of the migration department starting from its director Mr. Suprunovsky Ivan Petrovitch and all of the administration of the CTAR. If this will not be done this family business which is run by these people may cause a very serious damage.
Even though refugees and asylum seekers are trying to close their eyes, mouth and ears for the xenophobia, racial discrimination and hating the so highly corrupted authorities of Odessa didn’t give us the possibility to survive as a human being and to integrate in the Ukrainian society. The concept integration is used to close our mouth and no more. There might not be integration in a country, where recognized refugees and even neutralized former refugees with a Ukrainian passport are hurrying to be accommodated in the accommodation center for refugees. We are in danger because we are organized; we are in danger because we are blacks; we are in danger because we talk to insist our right: we are in danger in all aspects.
There is a necessity to resettle all Africans from this country, since it is impossible to integrate here.
We are waiting your cooperation and no body must be evicted from the CTAR today.
The situation of the Guarani tribe of southern Brazil is one of the worst of all indigenous peoples in the Americas, says a new report by Survival to the UN.
The release of the report coincides with the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on 21st March.
The Guarani suffer high rates of suicide, malnutrition, unfair imprisonment and alcoholism, and are regularly targeted and killed by gunmen hired by the ranchers who have taken over their land.
The denial of the Indians’ land rights is singled out in the report as the main cause of this explosive situation.
The report warns that the growing demand for ethanol as an alternative to gasoline will take more land from the Guarani and further worsen the situation.
Despite living in one of the wealthiest states in one of the world’s largest emerging economies, many Guarani live in dire poverty. Some live under tarpaulins on the side of busy highways, others in chronically overcrowded ‘reserves’ where they are reliant on government handouts.
One Guarani community living on the roadside, who have seen three of their leaders killed by ranchers’ gunmen, said, ‘We are growing impatient with the excessive delay of land demarcation. It is slowly killing us and exposing us to genocide’.
Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘This report exposes the appalling situation which the Guarani face. It is the Brazilian government’s moral and legal responsibility to ensure that the human rights abuses and the racial discrimination which the Guarani are suffering is stopped. If swift and efficient action is not taken, many more Guarani will suffer and die’.
Some facts
1. Violence: the Guarani suffer from violent attacks and many Guarani leaders have been assassinated. 42 Guarani were killed in Mato Grosso do Sul in 2008 because of internal and external conflicts.
2. Suicide: the suicide rate amongst the Guarani is one of the highest in the world. More than 625 Guarani have committed suicide since 1981 (almost 1.5% of the Guarani population), and in 2005, the Guarani suicide rate was 19 times the national rate. Guarani children as young as nine years old have taken their own lives.
3. Malnutrition and poor health: many Guarani suffer from malnutrition, and their infant mortality rate is more than double the national average, whilst life expectancy is more than 20 years lower than the national average.
4. Unfair imprisonment: Guarani are often wrongly imprisoned, with little or no access to legal advice and interpreters. They serve ‘disproportionately harsh sentences for minor offences’.
5. Exploitation of manual labourers: many Guarani are forced to work cutting sugar cane for the ethanol factories which now occupy their land. They earn pitiful wages and are exposed to inhumane working conditions.
Prominent immigrant advocates launched their most sharply worded public critique yet of the Obama administration’s immigration policy.
Advocates who spoke at a press conference Monday in Washington, D.C. angrily pointed to statistics that showed a significant acceleration in immigration enforcement over President Bush’s last year, with over 387,000 immigrants deported since Obama’s inauguration.
As a result, livelihoods were lost, local economies affected, and families split apart, the advocates said.
“These are the same enforcement practices that we marched against during the Bush administration,” said Angelica Salas, director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.
On any given day, Salas added, over 32,000 immigrants are under detention in jails and prisons around the country awaiting deportation.
The advocates said they felt betrayed by an Obama administration that promised to take their concerns into account and then became more aggressive than its predecessor in cracking down on immigrants.
Brent Wilkes, executive national director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC, a Latino civil rights group, recalled candidate Barack Obama’s promise at a LULAC event to reform the country’s immigration laws in his first year in office.
Wilkes said many LULAC members believed this promise, which hasn’t yet been fulfilled.
“But one thing they never believed in their wildest dreams is that President Obama would have a record like this, where he surpassed the Bush administration in deportations,” Wilkes said. “It is unconscionable to have over 387,000 deported in the first year of an Obama presidency, and our community is angry.”
A video of the event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. is available for streaming at C-Span 2 The advocates called on President Obama and Congress to halt deportations until the system gets an overhaul.
The press conference came on the same day President Obama was scheduled to meet with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in an effort to nudge immigration legislation forward.
One of the presenters today was a schoolgirl named Beatriz whose family was targeted by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement inquiry. She tearfully described how federal agents trailed her in order to investigate her parents.
Wilkes said roughly 5.5 million U.S. citizen children nationwide have at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant and that deportations inevitably lead to broken households.
“This administration seems proud to out-enforce the Bush administration,” added Pramila Jayapal, executive director of the Seattle-based OneAmerica group.
The advocates also contended that the immigration audits or “paper raids” that have replaced workplace raids under Obama are just as damaging to immigrant communities and the businesses that depend on them.
The advocates, part of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement coalition, plan to join other advocacy coalitions as well as labor and faith groups in a pro-immigration march on Washington, D.C. March 21.
Protest by the Iranian Afghan comitee "8th of March" against women opression in Iran and agaist imperialist agression against the people of Iran on 8th of March 2010 in Bremen (Germany)
Further Advance the Rights, Lives and Freedoms of Women Migrants, Immigrants and Refugees! Let Us Strengthen the Global Movement of Resistance against Imperialism!
The International Migrants Alliance celebrates the 100th year of the International Working Women’s Day by further advancing the causes of our struggling women migrants, immigrants and refugees and joining the growing international people’s movement against imperialist war and plunder, exploitation and oppression.
As we speak, thousands, nay millions, of women migrants, immigrants and refugees the world over are suffering. As abject poverty and the need to survive push them out of their countries and find work abroad, they are further subjected to the most despicable forms of abuse, maltreatment and violence.
Foreign domestic workers, mostly women, continue to be denied of their rights and freedoms. They work more than eight hours a day but are receiving subhuman wages. Days off and rest days are unheard of in many countries with the likes of Malaysia instituting this right only last year. At the receiving end of racial slurs, physical and even sexual abuse, they are the epitome of modern-day slavery as domestic work remains to be unrecognized as work.
Owning half the sky yet receiving the utmost abuse, women migrant workers are most vulnerable. In Central America, women migrants, whether young or old, are raped while they are in transit. They become vulnerable to HIV, like the Bangladeshi women in Arab states. They become easy prey for human trafficking and smuggling.
Women refugees are stripped off their health rights as they are forced to pay high fees to enjoy medical attention. Many of the children they bear are not recognized by the state and henceforth rendered stateless. Most of them even continue to be persecuted not only by governments of their mother countries but of their host countries as well. The planned crackdown in Thailand, for example, aims to target Burmese women refugees as well.
The continued existence of the Global Forum on Migration and Development does not only ignore this abject state of women migrants, immigrants and refugees but justifies it. Ever since its inception in 2007, the GFMD placed labor migration at the center of the neoliberal globalization agenda which only meant one thing: workers are to be exported at the cheapest rate yet without even an iota of rights.
International conventions protecting the rights of women migrants, immigrants and refugees are like dust to continued blows of host governments imposing virulent and oppressive border control policies like that of Fortress Europe. Racial discrimination is being fanned frantically as like those in Italy become easy targets for race-related crimes.
Such conditions strengthen the foundation of why we struggle, of why we need to organize, of why we have the International Migrants Alliance.
There is greater urgency to build organizations for and by women migrants, immigrants and refugees on the ground. With a calibrated attack on our rights, lives and freedoms, we can confront such with collective strength. Victories in the past struggles of women migrants, immigrants and refugees have proven that by collectively asserting our rights and demands, we can prevail.
As the attacks become global, let us strengthen the movement of resistance at the international level. Let the women members of the IMA contribute greatly to the formation of the International Women’s Assembly that shall happen August this year.
The 100th year of the International Working Women’s Day is a reminder that the struggle continues and will be pursued until all structures that oppress and exploit women being perpetrated by imperialism are dismantled.
Editors' Note: This article is excerpted from Norman Finkelstein’s important new book about the Gaza conflict, “This Time We Went Too Far” published this month by OR Books. To purchase a copy of the complete book please visit OR Books. This book is not available from bookstores or other online retailers.
Public outrage at the Gaza invasion did not come out of the blue but rather marked the nadir of a curve plotting a steady decline in support for Israel. As polling data of Americans and Europeans, both Gentiles and Jews, suggest, the public has become increasingly critical of Israeli policy over the past decade. The horrific images of death and destruction broadcast around the world during and after the invasion accelerated this development. “The increased and brutal frequency of war in this volatile region has shifted international opinion,” the British Financial Times editorialized one year later, “reminding Israel it is not above the law. Israel can no longer dictate the terms of debate.”
One poll registering the fallout from the Gaza attack in the United States found that American voters calling themselves supporters of Israel plummeted from 69 per cent before the attack to 49 per cent in June 2009, while voters believing that the U.S. should support Israel dropped from 69 per cent to 44 per cent. Consumed by hate, emboldened by self-righteousness, and confident that it could control or intimidate public opinion, Israel carried on in Gaza as if it could get away with mass murder in broad daylight. But while official Western support for Israel held firm, the carnage set off an unprecedented wave of popular outrage throughout the world. Whether it was because the assault came on the heels of the devastation Israel wrought in Lebanon, or because of Israel’s relentless persecution of the people of Gaza, or because of the sheer cowardice of the assault, the Gaza invasion appeared to mark a turning point in public opinion reminiscent of the international reaction to the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in apartheid South Africa.
In the Jewish diaspora official communal organizations with longstanding ties to Israel predictably lent blind support. But, at the same time, newly minted progressive Jewish organizations distanced themselves to a lesser or greater degree. Whereas in the past mainstream Jews actively supported Israeli wars, most registered ambivalence during the invasion, apart from a contracting older minority that came out swinging in Israel’s defense, and an expanding younger minority that scathingly denounced it. Between the increasing estrangement of younger Jews from Israeli bellicosity and the increasing qualms of Jews generally about supporting it, the Gaza massacre signaled the break-up of hitherto blanket Jewish support for Israeli wars. In addition, whereas the antiwar demonstrations in most Western countries were ethnically heterogeneous (including significant numbers of Jews), the “pro”-Israeli demonstrations were composed almost exclusively of Jews. The fact that active opposition to Israeli policy, say, on college campuses, has spread beyond the Arab-Muslim core towards the mainstream, whereas active support for Israel has shrunk to a fraction of the ethnic Jewish core, is a telling indicator of where things are headed. The era of the “beautiful” Israel has passed, it seems irrevocably, and the disfigured Israel that in recent years has replaced it in the public consciousness is a growing embarrassment. It is not so much that Israel’s behavior is worse than it was before, but rather that the record of that behavior has, finally, caught up with it.
The truth can no longer be denied or dismissed. The documentation of the Arab-Israeli conflict set out by respected historians fundamentally conflicts with the version popularized in the likes of Leon Uris’s Exodus. The evidence of Israeli human rights violations compiled by respected mainstream organizations cannot be reconciled with its vaunted commitment to “purity of arms.” The deliberations of respected judicial and political bodies cast severe doubt on Israel’s avowed commitment to a peaceful resolution of the conflict. For a long while Israel’s “supporters” deflected the impact of this accumulating documentary record by wielding the twin swords of The Holocaust and the “new anti-Semitism.”
It was proposed that Jews could not be held to conventional moral/legal standards after the unique suffering they endured during World War II, and that criticism of Israeli policy was motivated by an ever-resurgent hatred of Jews. However, apart from the inevitable dulling that comes of overuse, these weapons proved much less efficacious once criticism of Israel broke into the mainstream of public opinion. Unable to deflect criticism of Israel, apologists now conjure bizarre theories to account for its ostracism. Reaganomics guru George Gilder posits that a free-market system singularly unleashes human potential, and that under such a system Jews are and must be “represented disproportionately in the highest ranks” because they are the most gifted.
Inversely, if Jews do not rule the roost, it must be because a less-than-ideal economic system holds sway. Anti-Semitism springs from resentment of “Jewish superiority and excellence” and “the manifest supremacy of Jews over all other ethnic groups,” while the hatred of Israel springs from the fact that it has evolved (under the inspired tutelage of Benjamin Netanyahu) into the perfect free-market system that “concentrates the genius of the Jews,” making it “one of the world’s leading capitalist powers” and the envy of the world: “Israel is hated above all for its virtues.”
If Jews figure prominently among critics of Israel, it is because they “excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals in the arena of anti-Semitism.” The West in turn must preserve and protect Israelis from the “world of zero-sum chimeras and fantasies of jihadist revenge and death” and the “barbarian masses” because Jewish endowments have enabled humanity to “thrive and prosper”: Jews are “crucial to the human race.”
Indeed, “if Israel is destroyed, capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy”; “Israel is at the forefront of the next generation of technology and on the front lines of a new racial war against capitalism and Jewish individuality and genius”; “Just as free economies are necessary for the survival of the human population of the planet, the survival of the Jews is vital to the triumph of free economies. If Israel is quelled or destroyed, we will be succumbing to forces targeting capitalism and freedom everywhere.”
Across the Atlantic, Robin Shepherd, director of international affairs at the London-based Henry Jackson Society, asserts that Israel has come under strong criticism in the West not because of its human rights record but because it is a democratic, capitalist state fighting on the front lines alongside the U.S. against the “civilizational” threat posed by radical Islam: “Israel had become an enemy not because of anything it had done” but “because it was on the wrong side of the barricades.” The “primary energizing platform in the West” for this “tidal wave of hysteria, deception and distortion against the Jewish state” consists of totalitarian Marxists and left-liberal fellow travelers who, disappointed by the Western proletariat and Third World liberation struggles, have made common cause with “militant Islam” to destroy the liberal-capitalist world order. Although these critics of Israel are not anti-Semitic in the traditional “subjective” sense of despising Jews per se, they are guilty of “objective” anti-Semitism because Israel is so central to Jewish identity in the contemporary world.
Although such explanations for Israel’s isolation lack credibility, it cannot be doubted that Israel’s stock has fallen precipitously. Whereas Israel won many adherents in the West after its lightning victory in June 1967, in recent years it has been reduced almost to the status of a pariah state, especially in Europe. A 2003 poll of the European Union named Israel the biggest threat to world peace. A 2008 survey of global opinion named Israel the biggest obstacle to achieving peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In a BBC World Service poll taken on the eve of the Gaza invasion, fully 19 of the 21 countries surveyed held a predominantly negative view of Israel.
Meanwhile, under the title “Second Thoughts about the Promised Land,” the Economist reported in 2007 that although “most diaspora Jews still support Israel strongly. . . their ambivalence has grown.” Dissenting Jewish voices have begun to coalesce in Great Britain, Germany, and elsewhere, challenging the hegemony of official Jewish organizations that parrot Israeli propaganda. In the United States the overall picture and trends are perhaps not as pronounced but are no less noteworthy. Judging by poll data it can broadly be said that Americans have consistently viewed Israel favorably and have sympathized much more with Israel than with the Palestinians. But Americans also overwhelmingly support an evenhanded U.S. approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, and most recently have expressed “equal levels of sympathy” for both sides, while a substantial minority believe that U.S. policy tilts (or tilts too much) in favor of Israel; a robust majority of Americans “think Israel is not doing its part well in making efforts to resolve the conflict”; and Americans have occasionally supported the use of sanctions to rein in Israel.
Significantly, a majority of Americans have also supported a two-state settlement on the June 1967 borders, meaning full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the June war. “Yes, the polls show strong support for Israel,” M. J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis for the Israel Policy Forum observed in 2007 apropos of recent trends; however, “that support for Israel, such as there is, is broad but it is not very deep.” This phenomenon can be seen almost every day in “Letters to the Editors” columns. Every time an op-ed about Israel appears, especially if it is critical, there are a slew of letters to the editor. Most support the Israeli position. And almost without exception, they are written by Jews. That vast majority [of non-Jewish Americans] out there which supposedly is so supportive of Israel virtually never chimes in. According to a 2007 poll by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) the favorable opinion of Americans towards Israel is markedly less than their favorable opinion toward Great Britain and Japan, while roughly equal to their favorable opinion of India and Mexico. Nearly half of the respondents believe that the U.S. should work with “moderate” Arab states “even at the expense of Israel.”
Half or more of Americans polled held Israel and Hezbollah equally to blame for the summer 2006 Lebanon War and supported a (more) neutral U.S. stance. In addition, in recent years, influential religious constituencies such as the Presbyterian Church USA, the World Council of Churches, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church have all supported initiatives, including corporate divestment, to force an end to Israel’s occupation. A 2005 survey by Jewish pollster Steven M. Cohen found that “the attachment of American Jews to Israel has weakened measurably in the last two years . . . , continuing a long-term trend.” Respondents were less likely than in comparable earlier surveys to say they care about Israel, talk about Israel with others or engage in a range of pro-Israel activities.
Strikingly, there was no parallel decline in other measures of Jewish identification, including religious observance and communal affiliation. The survey found 26 per cent who said they were “very” emotionally attached to Israel, compared with 31 per cent who said so in a similar survey conducted in 2002. Some two-thirds, 65 per cent, said they follow the news about Israel closely, down from 74 per cent in 2002, while 39 per cent said they talk about Israel frequently with Jewish friends, down from 53 per cent in 2002. Israel also declined as a component in the respondents’ personal Jewish identity. When offered a selection of factors, including religion, community and social justice, as well as “caring about Israel,” and asked, “For you personally, how much does being Jewish involve each?,” 48 per cent said Israel matters “a lot,” compared with 58 per cent in 2002. Just 57 per cent affirmed that “caring about Israel is a very important part of my being Jewish,” compared with 73 per cent in a similar survey in 1989. A 2007 American Jewish Committee poll found that 30 per cent of Jews felt “fairly distant” or “very distant” from Israel. “In the long run,” Cohen predicts “a polarization in American Jewry: a small group growing more pious and attached to Israel, while a larger one drifts away.”
A 2006 poll found that, among American Jews under 40, fully one-third felt “fairly distant” or “very distant” from Israel, while a 2007 poll found that among Jews under 35 fully 40 per cent registered a “low attachment” to Israel (only 20 per cent registered a “high attachment”). Astonishingly, less than half responded affirmatively that “Israel’s destruction would be a personal tragedy.” The former chairman of the Jewish Agency recently sounded the alarm that “less than 24 per cent of young Jews in North America belong to Jewish organizations. Less than 50 per cent of North American Jews under the age of 35 feel a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Less than 25 per cent of North American Jews under age 35 define themselves as Zionists.”
On the nation’s campuses support for Israel is confined not only to Jewish students but also mostly to the Zionist faithful gathered in the Hillels. “Jewish college students are clearly less attached to Israel than in previous generations,” a study commissioned by Jewish advocacy organizations reports. “Israel is losing the battle for the hearts and minds of this cohort.” Indeed, of the nearly half million Jewish students attending institutions of higher education, “only about five per cent have any connection to the Jewish community.”
Ambivalence towards Israel verging on disaffection can also be discerned among influential sectors of American society, ever the bellwethers of U.S. intellectual life, and the reading public. A recent poll found that a majority of opinion leaders in the U.S. view support for Israel as a “major reason for discontent with the U.S.” around the world.31 In a 2003 New York Review of Books essay, the Jewish historian Tony Judt asserted that “Israel today is bad for the Jews” and he doubted both the viability and desirability of a Jewish state. John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School coauthored an influential paper in 2006 debunking the idealized image of Israel’s history and asserting that Israel has become a “strategic liability” for the United States. A book by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, provocatively titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, deplored Israeli policy in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and put the blame for the impasse in the peace process squarely on Israel.
Yet Carter’s book landed on the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for months, selling an estimated 300,000 copies in hardback. Although snubbed by Brandeis University’s president, Carter still received standing ovations from the student body when he came to speak at the historically Jewish institution. (Half the audience walked out when Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz rose to answer Carter.Mearsheimer and Walt negotiated a book deal with the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and their book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, also went on to become a Times bestseller.
It is further testament to Israel’s waning fortunes that, during Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s term of office, even Foxman and perennial Israel supporter Elie Wiesel took to publicly rebuking Israel for its failure to pursue peace.The simmering public discontent with Israeli policy in recent years reached a boiling point of indignation during the Gaza invasion. Despite Israel’s carefully orchestrated propaganda blitz; despite the overwhelmingly “pro”-Israel bias of mainstream media coverage, especially during the first few days of the attack; and despite official support in the West for the assault—despite all this, large popular protests throughout Western Europe (Spain, Italy, Germany, France, and Great Britain) dwarfed in size demonstrations supporting Israel.
A wave of student occupations swept across Great Britain including Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Birmingham, London School of Economics, School of Oriental and Asian Studies, Warwick, King’s, Sussex, and Cardiff. Even in traditional bastions of support for Israel such as Canada, where the “pro”-Israel bias of the extreme right-wing political establishment and media is unusually intense, a plurality of public opinion disapproved of the assault and the Canadian Union of Public Employees passed a motion calling for an academic boycott of Israel.
Declaring after the ceasefire that “the events in Gaza have shocked us to the core,” a 16-strong group of the world’s most experienced investigators and judges—including Antonio Cassese (First President and Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Head of the U.N. Inquiry on Darfur) and Richard Goldstone (Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda and Chairman of the U.N. Inquiry on Kosovo)—called for an “international investigation of gross violations of the laws of war, committed by all parties to the Gaza conflict.”
Unsurprisingly, Israel’s apologists attributed the widespread outrage at the Gaza invasion to anti-Semitism. It might be posited as a general rule that the lower the depths to which Israel’s criminal conduct sinks the higher the decibel level of the shrieks of anti-Semitism. Jews are confronting “an epidemic, a pandemic of anti-Semitism,” Abraham H. Foxman declared. “This is the worst, the most intense, the most global it’s been in most of our recent memories.” Such fear-mongering was nothing new from Foxman, who had portended back in 2003 that anti-Semitism was posing “as great a threat to the safety and security of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s.”
Nonetheless it is most probably true that the execution by a self-proclaimed Jewish state of consecutive murderous rampages in Lebanon and Gaza, and the vocal support lent these rampages by official Jewish organizations around the world, caused a regrettable—if entirely predictable— “spillover” whereby Jews generally were in some quarters held culpable. If, as the Israeli Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism asserted, there was “a sharp rise in the number and intensity of anti-Semitic incidents” during the Gaza massacre; and if “with the ceasefire there has . . . been a marked decline in the number and intensity of anti-Semitic incidents”; and if “another flare-up in the region, similar to the Gaza operation, will probably lead to an even more severe outbreak of anti-Semitic activity against communities worldwide,” then an efficacious method to fight anti-Semitism would appear to be for Israel to stop committing massacres.
It is also true that the growing gap between official support of Israeli war mongering and popular revulsion against it might feed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. In Germany for example the political establishment and mainstream media do not brook any criticism of Israel because of the “special relationship” growing out of Germany’s “historic responsibility.” Chancellor Angela Merkel surpassed other European leaders in her embrace of Israel during the Gaza invasion. Yet recent polls have shown that 60 per cent of Germans reject the notion of a special German obligation to Israel (70 per cent of young people reject it), 50 per cent believe that Israel is an aggressive country, and 60 per cent believe that it pursues its interests ruthlessly.
More generally, Gideon Levy recalled “the surreal scene at the height of the brutal assault on Gaza when the heads of the European Union came to Israel and dined with the prime minister in a show of unilateral support for the side wreaking the killing and destruction.” And although it was Israel that broke the ceasefire and launched the invasion European leaders parleyed with the U.S. (and Canada) on how to thwart rearmament not of the perpetrators but of the victims. It is only a matter of time before Europeans begin to wonder—if they haven’t already—at whose behest their foreign policy is being made. The ascription of popular Gentile outrage over the Gaza massacre to anti-Semitism appeared all the more preposterous in the face of widespread and vocal Jewish dissent. Whereas established communal Jewish organizations issued statements supporting Israel, ad hoc Jewish organizations and petitions deploring the invasion proliferated.
Most significantly, Jews prominent in communal Jewish life criticized Israel, albeit generally in muted language. As Israel stood poised to launch the ground offensive after a week of aerial attacks, a group of Britain’s most distinguished Jews, describing themselves as “profound and passionate supporters” of Israel, expressed “horror” at the “increasing loss of life on both sides” and called on Israel to cease its military operations in Gaza immediately. On a more acerbic note, British MP and former shadow foreign minister Gerald Kaufman declared during a House of Commons debate on Gaza, “My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.” He went on to indict the Israeli government for having “ruthlessly and cynically exploit[ed] the continuing guilt among Gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians.”
Meanwhile in France the popular Jewish writer Jean-Moïse Braitberg called on the Israeli president to remove his grandfather’s name from the memorial at Yad Vashem dedicated to victims of the Nazi holocaust “so that it can no longer be used to justify the horror which is visited on the Palestinians.” In Germany Evelyn Hecht-Galinski, daughter of a former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, wrote, “Not the elected Hamas government, but the brutal occupier . . . belongs in the dock at the Hague,” while the German section of European Jews for a Just Peace issued a statement headlined “German Jews Say NO to Israeli Army Killings.” In Canada eight Jewish women occupying the Israeli consulate called on “all Jews to speak out against this massacre,” and celebrated Canadian pianist Anton Kuerti declared, “The unbelievable war crimes that Israel is committing in Gaza . . .make me ashamed to be a Jew.”In Australia two award-winning novelists and a former federal cabinet minister signed a statement by Jews condemning Israel’s “grossly disproportionate assault.
The Bush administration and the U.S. Congress lent unqualified support to Israel during the invasion. A resolution laying full culpability on Hamas for the resulting death and destruction passed unanimously in the Senate and 390 to 5 in the House. Much of the mainstream media in the U.S. likewise shamelessly toed the Israeli party line. “By New Year’s Day, Israel’s cheering squad had turned the opinion pages of major American newspapers into their own personal romper room,” the journalist Max Blumenthal observed. “Of all the editorial contributions published by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times since the Israeli war on Gaza began, . . . only one offered a skeptical view of the assault.”
The New York Times’s conception of op-ed balance was achieved by juxtaposing Jeffrey Goldberg’s reverie on the unregenerate evil of Hamas with Thomas Friedman’s counsel to Israel that it inflict “heavy pain on the Gaza population.” Its hometown rival the New York Daily News ran an op-ed by Rabbi Marvin Hier that urged world leaders “not . . . to rebuild Gaza again” even though “many civilians will suffer” because “terrorists and those who support them are not entitled to receive VIP booty for their inhumanity, misdeeds and silence.” Hier is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance. In the midst of this lynch-mob atmosphere even human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch reserved their strongest condemnations for Hamas.
These venomous elite outpourings notwithstanding, public opinion polls showed that, although harshly critical of Hamas, only about 40 per cent of Americans approved of the Israeli attack, while among those voting Democratic (the party affiliation of most Jews) approval dropped to 30 per cent . In a dramatic display of independence reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s authorship of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, liberal icon Bill Moyers rebuked Israel on his popular public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, albeit in a context that also took Hamas to task: “By killing indiscriminately the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals, Israel did exactly what terrorists do.”
Like Carter, Moyers immediately came under fire from Abraham H. Foxman, who accused him of “racism, historical revisionism and indifference to terrorism,” and Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz who decried Moyers’s “false moral equivalence” between Hamas terrorism and the Israeli army that “inadvertently kill[s] some Palestinian civilians who are used as human shields by Hamas.” But again like Carter, Moyers managed to stand his ground and, as fellow liberals rose to his defense, to emerge unscathed after the fusillade of slanders.
As the Gaza invasion unfolded, and the shocking images of the carnage transmitted live by Al-Jazeera could no longer be ignored, cracks started appearing in the moderate mainstream. Under the ominous title “Time Running Out for a Two- State Solution?” the most-watched U.S. news broadcast 60 Minutes aired a devastating segment on Jewish settlers in the West Bank, which included a harrowing scene of “Arabs [who] are occupied inside their own homes” by Israeli soldiers. The right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by law professor George E. Bisharat under the headline “Israel Is Committing War Crimes.” The normally staid New York Times columnist Roger Cohen confessed in a pair of columns to being “shamed by Israeli actions.” In the second piece Cohen speculated that “Israel’s continued expansion of settlements, Gaza blockade, West Bank walling-in and wanton recourse to high-tech force” was “designed precisely to bludgeon, undermine and humiliate the Palestinian people until their dreams of statehood and dignity evaporate.”
Former editor of the New Republic and conservative writer Andrew Sullivan judged that the Israeli attack was “far from a close call morally. . . . This is an extremely one-sided war,” and he labeled “thugs” the rightwing Jewish apologists for “the terrible human carnage now being inflicted by Israel (and paid for in part by Americans).” Philip Slater, author of the sociological study The Pursuit of Loneliness, declared, “The Gaza Strip is little more than a large Israeli concentration camp, in which Palestinians are attacked at will, starved of food, fuel, energy—even deprived of hospital supplies. . . . It would be difficult to have any respect for them if they didn’t fire a few rockets back.”
Meanwhile the City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts, a liberal enclave and home to Harvard University, adopted a resolution “condemning the attacks [on] and invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military and the rocket attacks upon the people of Israel,” and a group of American university professors launched a national campaign calling for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. A poll of American Jews found that 47 per cent strongly approved of the Israeli assault, but—in a sharp break with the usual wall-to-wall solidarity—53 per cent were either ambivalent (44 per cent “somewhat” approved or “somewhat” disapproved) or strongly disapproved (9 per cent ).
Experienced observers of the American Jewish community pointed to a “post-Gaza sea change.” Apart from “the more conservative segment of the pro-Israel community,” M. J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum noted, “there was little show of support for this war. In New York, a city where crowds of 250,000 have come out for ‘solidarity’ rallies in the past, only 8,000 came to Manhattan for a community demonstration on a sunny Sunday.” In a public clash with the traditional Jewish leadership, mainstream if less-established Jewish organizations such as J Street staked out a middle ground that “recognize[d] that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong,” and called for “shedding a narrow us-versus-them approach to the Middle East.”
Founded in 2008, J Street projects itself as a liberal counterweight to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It is too soon to predict whether J Street—which currently hews to a vaguely progressive political agenda, although it also defines itself as “closest” to Kadima, the Israeli political party headed by Tzipi Livni— will calcify into a “loyal opposition” or escalate its criticism of Israeli policy as the gulf dividing American Jewry from Israel widens.
Meanwhile “American Jews for a Just Peace” circulated a petition calling on “Israeli Soldiers to Stop War Crimes,” “Jews Say No” demonstrated outside the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency offices, and “Jews against the Occupation” dropped a banner over New York City’s West Side Highway declaring “Jews Say: End Israel’s War on Gaza NOW!” In the liberal Jewish intellectual milieu only perennial apologists for Israel, most of whom came on board right after the June 1967 war and are now in their 70s, ventured a full-throated defense of the invasion.
It was obvious to moral philosopher Michael Walzer that Israel had exhausted nonviolent options before it attacked and that Hamas bore responsibility for the ensuing civilian deaths. To Walzer the only “hard question” was whether Israel did all it possibly could to reduce these casualties.
It was obvious to Alan M. Dershowitz that Israel made “its best efforts to avoid killing civilians” and that it failed because Hamas pursued a “dead baby” strategy of forcing Israel to kill Palestinian children in order to garner international sympathy.
It was obvious to New Republic editor Martin Peretz from his scrutiny of the Palestinians’ footwear that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was benign: “You have to look closely at the sneakers, seemingly new and, of course, costly.” It was obvious to writer Paul Berman that if a “possibility” exists that Hamas might threaten Israel someday in the future with genocide “if Hamas were allowed to prosper unimpeded, and if its allies and fellow-thinkers in Hezbollah and the Iranian government and its nuclear program likewise prospered,” then Israel would have the right to launch an attack now.
On such an accumulation of hypotheticals stacked on conditionals, it is hard to conceive what country in the world would be safe from arbitrary attack, and what country would not be justified in arbitrarily launching an attack. If, apart from this coterie of Israel defenders, Jewish liberals recognized that the Israeli onslaught was morally problematic, they could not yet abide their dirty laundry being aired in front of the goyim. Magazines and journals of opinion pitched to the upscale and urbane Jewish public such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books accordingly sat out the Gaza massacre.
The symbolism could scarcely be missed. Whereas diehard apologists for Israel such as Walzer, Dershowitz, and Peretz clambered aboard the Zionist ship while in their youth, the generation of youthful Jewish public intellectuals now making their names on the Internet has been jumping off it.“I pity them their hatred of their inheritance,” Peretz hissed. “They are pip-squeaks.” Here are the pip-squeaks in their own words. Ezra Klein (age 25; blogger for American Prospect) posted on Day 2 of the invasion, “The rocket attacks were undoubtedly ‘deeply disturbing’ to Israelis. But so too are the checkpoints, the road closures, the restricted movement, the terrible joblessness, the unflinching oppression, the daily humiliations, the illegal settlement— I’m sorry, ‘outpost’—construction ‘deeply disturbing’ to the Palestinians, and far more injurious. And the 300 dead Palestinians should be disturbing to us all.”
Adam Horowitz (age 35; blogger for Mondoweiss) posted on Day 4 in response to Benny Morris’s op-ed in the New York Times, “It is clear he can only see the reactions, but not the cause. He lists the responses to Israel and to Israel’s ongoing Jewish colonization of historic Palestine, without mentioning the elephant in the room, that the walls closing in on Israel are all self-made.” Matthew Yglesias (age 28; blogger for Think Progress) posted on Day 6, “While Israel has stated a desire to leave the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically unviable enclave, the [2005] ‘disengagement’ from Gaza has never entailed letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be treated like an Indian reservation.”
Dana Goldstein (age 24; blogger for American Prospect) posted on Day 12, “I want to believe that the collective, historical experience of Jewishness and Zionism leads to something better—something more humane—than what we’ve witnessed in the Middle East this past week.” Glenn Greenwald (age 42; blogger for Salon.com) posted on Day 13, “This is not so much of a war as it is a completely one-sided massacre,” and on 30 January 2009, “It’s just not possible to make real progress in the domestic aims of restoring the Constitution and reversing our military and intelligence expansions if we are simultaneously enabling and blindly supporting Israel’s various wars (and therefore dragging ourselves into those wars).”
On 20 February 2009 Greenwald responded to an insinuation by Jeffrey Goldberg that he was a Jew-hating Israelbasher, “People like Jeffrey Goldberg . . . have so abused, overused, manipulated and exploited the ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘anti-Israel’ accusations for improper and nakedly political ends that those terms have become drained of their meaning, have almost entirely lost their sting, and have become trivialized virtually to the point of caricature. . . . Indeed, people like Goldberg are becoming extra rancid and reckless in their rhetoric precisely because they know that these rhetorical devices have ceased working.” “There is a definite sea change when it comes to American policy debates toward Israel,” Greenwald concluded. “They no longer possess the ability to stifle dissent through thuggish intimidation tactics and they know that, which is why they can now do nothing but turn up the volume on their name-calling attacks. The Israeli devastation of Gaza and its trapped, defenseless civilian population—using American bombs, arms, money and diplomatic cover—was so brutal and horrific to watch that it inevitably changed the way people view that Middle East conflict.”
The generational metamorphosis regarding Israel was most evident on college campuses. “A shift toward more visible pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel sentiment has been profound on some campuses,” Inside Higher Ed reported, “prompted, in part, by the winter war in Gaza.” Large halls filled to overflow for lectures deploring the Gaza massacre. Whereas “pro”- Israel groups used to protest inside or outside such lectures, they were now barely seen.
Students at Cornell University lined pathways with 1,300 black flags commemorating the dead in Gaza. (The display was later vandalized.)
Students at University of Rochester, University of Massachusetts, New York University, Columbia University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Hampshire College held petition drives, protests, and sit-ins demanding financial support for Palestinian students and divestment from arms companies and companies doing business with the illegal Jewish settlements. Hampshire College students successfully pressured the college’s trustees to divest from American corporations that directly profit from the occupation.
Although “pro”-Israel organizations alleged that “college and university campuses . . . have become hotbeds of a virulent new strain of anti-Semitism,” at many campuses Jewish students have played a leading role on the local “Students for Justice in Palestine” committees, and creative and dedicated young Jewish activists in Birthright Unplugged and Anarchists Against the Wall, alongside individuals such as Anna Baltzer, author of the memoir Witness in Palestine, have gone from school to school offering personal testimony on the daily horrors unfolding in Palestine.
The bonds of solidarity being forged between young Jews and Muslims opposing the occupation—the core group on many campuses consists of secular Jewish radicals and observant Muslim women—give reason for hope that a just and lasting peace may yet be achieved. After speaking on the Gaza massacre at a Canadian university, the sponsors presented me with a button reading “I ♥ GAZA.” I pinned the button to my backpack and headed for the airport. As I stood on the queue to board the plane, a passenger behind me whispered in my ear “I like your button.” Hmm, I thought, the times they are a-changing. A couple of hours later I asked the airline attendant for a cup of water. Handing me the cup he leaned over and whispered “I like your button.” Hmm, I thought, there’s something happening here.
Norman Finkelstein is author of five books, including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Beyond Chutzpah and The Holocaust Industry, which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions. This article is a chapter from his new book “This Time We Went Too Far – Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion.”
Prof. Jose MarÃa Sison was born on 8 February 1939 in the Philippines.
He has been living for more than 23 years in Utrecht, The Netherlands first as Utrecht University research consultant since 1987 and then as a political refugee since 1988.
Yet, he is NOT allowed:
1. to have permanent residence 2. to have a living allowance or to have a job 3. to have housing under his name 4. to have regular health insurance as refugee 5. to have social insurance and old age pension 6. to travel freely outside of the country, particularly in Europe GRANT PERMANENT RESIDENCE TO PROF. SISON!
Let Prof. Sison live a normal life! Grant permanent residence! Let him have basic human rights!
Joma Sison is a recognized political refugee under the Geneva Refugee Convention, specifically under its Article 1 A.
He has lawfully and peacefully lived in The Netherlands for more than 23 years.
He has never committed any criminal act against the public order and national security of the Dutch state or any other European state. The European Court of Justice has ruled that he is not a terrorist and has removed him from the blacklist of the European Union.
Because of his staunch opposition to the Philippine government, his passport was canceled while visiting the Netherlands in 1988. Since then, he has been requesting the Netherlands to grant him asylum and a residence permit.
Just like other long-time residents of the Netherlands, he should be granted a residence permit. He must be granted his basic rights and fundamental freedoms. He must be allowed to practice his profession as a political science teacher. He must be allowed to contribute his best in the peace negotiations between the National Democratic Front of the Philippines and the Government of the Republic of the Philippines.
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