The religious right in Israel are promoting a bill in the Knesset that would   amend the country's basic law to include "the Jerusalem municipality is authorized to bar parades and processions on the grounds that they disturb public order, offend the public's sentiments or on religious grounds."

This is intended to enable the banning of the annual Gay Pride March which is the subject of a concerted hate campaign. The wording of course would enable any protest over matter of controversy to be banned, including the mass protests over the Prime Minister's performance in the Lebanon War.

On Sunday, the bill passed its first hurdle when a committee of ministers approved it. It will now go to the Knesset for consideration. Haaretz speculates that:

    The bill's approval by the committee could indicate that the (ruling) coalition will vote for it. Kadima Ministers Jacob Edery and Gideon Ezra both supported the bill, as did Tourism Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch (Yisrael Beiteinu).

At various times during discussion of Israel and Palestine on Daily Kos, pro-Israelis will come up with a reference to the European Union having a definition of antisemitism and claiming that it has been officially adopted by the "European Commission".

The matter is fudged on Wikipedia under the entry for "New antisemitism" (in part}

In September 2004, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, a part of the Council of Europe, called on its member nations to ensure that anti-racist criminal law covers antisemitism. In 2005, the EUMC offered a definition of antisemitism, [98] one that the British government was urged to adopt by a 2006 all-party parliamentary inquiry. Some contemporary examples included, but were not limited to:

There then follows a list of actions.

This set me off further investigating as those of you who know anything of European and EU institutions will know that the Council of Europe is not an EU body. Having tried to navigate the EU's sometimes labarynthine web sites, not helped by a change in the name of the body, I contacted the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights. Today I received an answer to my email which states quite simply at the end:

Finally I stress once again that "working definition" is part of an ongoing process with no legal basis whatsoever.

Today there is a meeting at Ben Gurion University in Israel to discuss the use of computers in terrorism and counter-terrorism, sponsored by NATO. One Jewish professor from California, the Director of one of the largest artificial intelligence research labs in the U.S. will not be there. He had been invited but was then "dis-invited" in light of his political views.

Last week the British University and College Union (UCU) held its first conference and passed a motion which is falsely represented as "boycotting Israeli academe". One comment made in reports compared the impact of such a boycott on Israel to the impact that the Anti-Apartheid sporting boycott had on South Africa. Judging by the hysteria that has flowed from both Israel and Jewish supporters of Israel in the USA, this characterization hit the spot.

Like some aging pop star, Blair is on his "Farewell Tour". This week he is in Africa. On Thursday he goes to South Africa and on Tuesday dropped in to Libya to sell some arms to his old mate Gaddafi, in the name of the War on Terra you understand.

It is his Wednesday stopover that should be noted tho as it goes towards understanding why he got involved in Iraq. It is in Sierra Leone where he has his greatest popularity, wildly so. He was installed with the honorary title of Paramount Chief and was greeted with the sort of welcome that Rumsfeld must have imagined Bush would have in a "liberated" Iraq

On Wednesday the Blair government lost a case in the Court of Appeal. If it is not successfully appealed in the House of Lords or Supreme Court, it will enable the Chagos Islanders to return to their homeland. The best know of the islands is Diego Garcia and it was to build that US air base, sometimes called the Indian Ocean Guantanamo, that the islanders were illegally evicted.

The islanders will not be able to go to Diego Garcia itself, in the same way the Cubans cannot enter Gitmo, but they should be able to return to the other islands.

Channel 4 in the UK has broadcast couple of documentaries on Israel/Palestine to mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank. The pair were personal investigations of the history and current situations by the two presenters, Rod Liddle, a former senior BBC journalist and Paddy Ashdown.

Liddle concentrated on investigating whether the occupation of the West Bank has eroded Israel's claim to be a democracy. Ashdown focused on Jerusalem. Most importantly, he proposed a series of five elements essential to bring about peace. These would involve changes in the present orthodoxy of the need to follow the Olso and Camp David processes.

I had the timerity to point out inaccurate reporting in a diary written by a member who can be considered a member of the "Zionist" lobby on Kos. He claimed records released which included Nazi camp records would silence Holocaust deniers. I pointed out a couple of matter that meant I though that this was over optimistic and that any records would only reduce the range of estimates of deaths.

Of course this they took to be a Holocaust denial, presumably in an attempt to silence someone they see as anti-Israeli and therefore by extension anti-semitic. The usual tactics of character assassination by selective quotes, invented references etc are being employed by the usual suspects.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/16/62951/6424

I'd just like to flag up two British sporting heroes who were in the news this weekend. Both in their own ways are inspirations. One is comparatively little known outside Britain or their own specialist field, the other is becoming successful and should be known worldwide, perhaps even gaining a championship this year.

Ten years ago today as dawn broke over London a helicopter delivered Tony Blair and his wife to a victory rally on the South Bank. Later he would go to Buckingham Palace to be invited to become Prime Minister. This was a moment for his party to savor.

As the various characters we came to know and love know embarrassed themselves to various degrees with their attempts to dance, the loudspeakers blared the campaign song "Things can only get better". There was undoubtedly an air of excitement. The Thatcher years ended with her sobbing in the back of her car as she left Downing Street, a sight at which only those with a heart of stone could fail to shed a smile. Her successor, John Major, although basically a fairly decent man was surrounded by his "bastards". At the end, the country was just tired of the Tories.

Ten years on and we are on the eve of a new set of elections and change is again in the air. Now the country is just tired of Blair.

The exploitation in workshops that make consumer goods for the west is well known. The use of forced labor in China is in the Congressional record. After allegations of abuse, Apple investigated a factory in China making iPods and found abuses but not child labor.

What they did not do is to investigate the sources of the raw materials where China has "outsourced" its child labor to Africa. The rape of that continent for its mineral wealth is fast approaching the worst excesses of the 19th century European empires.

The World Bank (or specifically the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and the International Monetary Fund have their origins in the Bretton Woods agreement during WWII. The stated aims are: "The nations should consult and agree on international monetary changes which affect each other. They should outlaw practices which are agreed to be harmful to world prosperity, and they should assist each other to overcome short-term exchange difficulties."

In practice US dominance of the system means it has been a means of spreading policies of opening up internal markets to foreign (ie US) trade and removing "barriers" to this trade. Countries faced with renegotiating debts would be obliged to follow the latest IMF ideas of how "prosperity" could be increased. Abandoning social policies in favor of selling off national assets became the norm in the Reaganomics/Thatcherite vision.

Particularly in South America, the two became an arm of US foreign policy. Withholding credit could bring down governments. Now all this is being challenged.

Diplomacy is a subtle art. Don't publicize your behind the scenes efforts and you can get accused of doing nothing but doing the reverse can put those you are trying to help in danger of their liberty or even lives. The CIA know that, which is why the USA has laws about maintaining secrecy about covert agents. It's not only their lives that are at risk but also those of their contacts.

Now for you and me that would seem to be blindingly obvious. Not for the US State Department though. A report, "Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The US Record 2006" slipped out over the Easter/Passover weekend. While puffing up State's efforts in Zimbabwe, it gives ammunition, both metaphorical and literal, to Robert Mugabe to attack his opponents.

(While I am focusing on Zimbabwe in this diary, no doubt others may wish to look at the reports on other countries to critique the State Department's performance. The section on Lebanon for example includes the classic doublespeak "The United States continued to help Lebanon rebuild as a sovereign and independent country...") 

In Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, police have moved in with officials from the local council to demolish informal stalls used by small traders. Footage  on Al Jazeera shows one big demolition effort in the market off Cha Cha Cha Road.

I noted the plans to start such a program in a diary in March on Daily Kos.  The initial report on the Al Jazeera web site did not give me much cause for concern:

The government has said it intends to destroy all illegal and unplanned homes and shops, starting in Lusaka where many impoverished informal settlements infringe on roads, railways, power lines and government-owned land.

But it had earlier assured.

Most of the the houses were still under construction and not yet inhabited.

The market stalls shown today were certainly not still under construction. I had browsed round them myself in 2001. They were now on AJ being destroyed with the stock still inside.

In March 2003 the dictator of Zimbabwe welcomed a comparison of him with Hitler. Ahead of elections he is widely considered to have stolen by intimidation, bribery and violence he had been likened to Hitler by the British press. In the middle of a campaign of brutality and arrests of opposition politicians from the Movement for Democratic Change he said:

"This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources.

If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold."

Today Mugabe is even more like Hitler in his final days. Surrounded by cronies too afraid to let him know the real position and mired in megolomania, he is like Adolf about to descend into his bunker for the last time. Even worse, his country is almost as devastated as Germany in 1945. When his rule ends it will even be as difficult to find enough fuel to burn his political corpse as it was to cremate the Feurer. If he is lucky he will haul his sorry self into exile to enjoy the wealth he has stolen from his country. I do not wish him luck. The evil that men do lives after them. It will take years for Zimbabwe to recover.