1 arrest at Israeli tennis player demo
One protester was arrested today around midday, as a Global Peace & Justice Auckland protest against Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer's presence at the Auckland tennis tournament finished. Demonstrators had used a loudhailer to chant messages for a boycott of Israeli athletes in international events to pressure Israel to respect the human rights of Palestinians.
As protesters were leaving, police asked for an assurance they would not use loudhailers or drums to make noise in the future. Surprised protesters said no, so police demanded the loudhailer be given to them. Police then arrested the man holding the loudhailer when he did not hand it over.
Blogger No Right Turn has already highlighted how these police actions are a blatant breach of the right to protest, and are very similar to the police efforts to sweep protest 'out of sight and hearing', rendering any demonstration ineffective.
Another demonstration by Global Peace & Justice Auckland will take place against Shahar Peer tommorrow at 11am at Auckland tennis centre on Stanley St, CBD, Auckland.
Comments
Shahar Peer Tennis Demo: excellent!
Shahar Peer Tennis Demo: excellent!
Police taking loudhailer: knuckleheads
I can see the scenario...
Cop: Ummm, give me your stuff
Public: No.
Cop: Ummm, give me your stuff
Public: Why?
Cop 2: Stop obstucting
Public: Obstructing what?
Cop 2: Your under arrest.
End
Shouldn't we be pushing for a
Shouldn't we be pushing for a material boycott of the Jewish State? I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure their tennis players don't provide significant financial support to the occupation.
Even if they can't play tennis they've still got guns.
BDS of Israel
Olly - yes, the demo is part of the wider Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) campaign to try force Israelis to confront their apartheid political & economic system. So there is a need for material sanctions - especially the US and British weapons supplies - but also for boycotts of 'leading' Israeli's. It was the boycott of people that hugely pushed South Africa's apartheid regime to crumble.
Shahar Peer has happily served her compulsory military service (she was a 'top shot') and she says she is happy to 'serve her country' (represent Israel at tennis). As an official face of Israeli sport - sport that Palestinians cannot take part in because of the Zoionist apartheid regime - Peer is a legitimate target for protest.
Instead of making excuses, she should be critical of her nation Israel's war criminals (the Knesset, and the military she is a part of) who slaughtered over 1,300 Gazans last summer while she flounced around a tennis court.
please excuse the rant
Well then what are we doing other than boycotting Israeli tennis players?
I just feel like this is protesting simply for the sake of protesting... what is it actually going to achieve?
Having participated in and helped organize several protest actions against Israeli apartheid in the last 6 months I have to admit I'm feeling pretty damned disillusioned. We go and wave banners and yell and make ourselves wildly unpopular with the majority of the people we encounter and then slap each other high fives... but what the hell have we actually changed for the Palestinians? I mean are we just doing this stuff to make ourselves feel good?
The NZ Palestine google group has been set up for yonks and yet there seems to be absolutely no discussion about collaboration on a national level. What good are we gonna do when we're unable to extend our activism beyond random localized actions?
Anyway I don't want to be a dick, I think its great that you're atleast doing something and that dude shouldn't have been arrested. But just because we're all concerned about combatting the Jewish state it doesn't mean we should just blindly march on forward using tactics which aren't achieving anything.
yep, need for wider thought on Palestine demos
I happen to agree with ya Olly. It is disheartening to go to isolated demos (especially for those who get arrested on ridiculous police intimidation charges) and feel there is no change happening.
On Palestine, this is IMHO, because:
* Palestine/Israel is a long way from NZ, so we only get limited targets occassionally
* The number of activists is small in NZ
* Sympathy for Jewish people (as distinct from the Israeli state) is high because of the Holocaust, but people often conflate Israel with Judaism and the Jewish people.
* poor planning from those of us (at times) involved in NZ Palestine activism
* a lack of a realistic set of goals for Palestinian human rights & self-determination to be achieved.
The last point is crucial, I feel. Most activists want to assist indigenous peoples gain self-determination, not impose it from outside. So this requires the Palestinians to decide what they want, which is tricky when they are under continual attack (especially leaders being murdered by Israel), and when even the most modest of Palestinian proposals are rejected!
The best I can suggest is that a lot more ground work needs to be done prior to Palestine demos, so that locals understand where Palestinians and we are coming from, and why we are targetting some people/companies/politicians/etc for demos.
For example, talk to Tennis Auckland before next year's tournament about Israeli players and the propoganda role they play in normalising Israel, comparing it with the South African Springbok situation. Try persuade them to voluntarily exclude any Israeli who does not at least sign a refusenik pledge.
Thoughts?
bored kiwis
cant you go pick on someone else?
like sheep for example.
Honestly I think the best
Honestly I think the best thing we can do is carry out a prolonged and thought out education campaign, since the BDS campaign isn't really going to work in NZ the same it would work in places like the UK where there are far more Israeli products to be boycotted. This would require us to actually sit down and discuss what we want to achieve and how we're going to go about doing that, because unless we actually start thinking about some kind of coherent strategy I'm worried that all of this will simply be in vain.
Really though you have to seriously consider the possibility that a large number of NZers don't have a clue why you're doing what you're doing and are therefore largely unsympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. This isn't necessarily your fault, its just an unfortunate fact when lots of people learn about this conflict through the 6 o'clock news and some crappy excuse for a news paper.
Also sorry to hear you guys got arrested again. Guess the police can be pretty harsh when a bunch of rich folk can't watch their precious tennis in peace!
I don't think tennis Auckland
I don't think tennis Auckland will do that to be brutally frank... not simply because you ask them nicely anyway. However some kind of campaign around getting Israeli sports people to sign refusenik pledges could be a good start and maybe we should all start discussing something along those lines.
Hell, if we get one person to become a refusenik then thats a pretty damned good victory.
Confused...
In Reply to "Tennis Comrade":
You said:
"Most activists want to assist indigenous peoples gain self-determination, not impose it from outside."
Who says the 'Palestinian Arabs' are the "indigenous peoples". I thought 'Palestinian Jews' were there thousands of years earlier. Can you please provide evidence to support your assertion that the 'Palestinian Arabs' are the "indigenous peoples" and not the 'Palestinian Jews'.
Thanks
Dave
That's right Aussie Dave. One
That's right Aussie Dave.
One of the tactics these nazis use is to erase any Jewish connection to their ancestral land. A part of that is to erroneously claim that it is the palestinian arabs that are the indigenous people of that land, when in fact that has zero basis in factual history or reality. And ofcourse they NEVER provide any proof.
Jews have a nearly 4000 year history in the Land of Israel, but that is ignored.
Arafat invented palestinian nationalism in the early 60's and neo-nazis in the west parrot the same propaganda to further their own fascist agenda.
The so called "palestinians" are a colonial power, and a brutal occupying force over an indigenous people (Jews).
There Is No "Palestine"
There Is No "Palestine"
Over and over again, the Anti-Semitic news media, speaks of a "Palestinian" people. Where does this term come from?The term was originally invented by the Roman Emperor Hadrian to symbolize the permanent destruction of any Jewish presence in the native land of the Jews, the Land of Israel. Hadrian mispronounced the name of the Philistines, Israel's ancient bloody enemies who were notorious for throwing their children into the fire as human sacrifices to their pagan god. Today these same barbaric animals, “Palestinians”, still use their own children as shields and shoot from behind them. This proves how cowardly Arabs/Muslims are and also what immoral Nazis they are. The term "Philistines" comes from the Hebrew word plishim, which means "foreign invaders." For the Philistines were universally known to be foreign trespassers who had no right to the land which they had conquered. Ironically, by adopting this name, the foreign Arab Nazi terrorist invaders in Israel today are effectively acknowledging that they too have no right to the land. For nearly 2,000 years, the Jews were forcibly exiled from their holy and historic G-d-given homeland. Despite this, there was always a Jewish presence in the land even during the darkest periods of the Muslim conquests/occupation, the Mongolian invasions, the Crusades, the Turkish Ottoman occupation and finally the British occupation in the earlier part of this century. Over-all, however, the land was largely desolate. The British census figures showed that in the latter part of the 19th century, there were only 200,000 residents in all of what today is Israel as well as all of what today is the artificial state of "Jordan." And roughly a fifth of those residents were Jews.
The Arab claim that there are now some 10 million "Palestinians" is an absurdity.
There are no "Palestinians" and there is no "Palestine." The vast majority of the Arabs who currently reside in the State of Israel immigrated to the land from Egypt in the first half of this century in order to obtain employment and other economic opportunities from the growing Jewish community
. "There is no Palestine in history, absolutely not," said Dr. Hitti, the official spokesman for all of the Arab nations and for the Arabs living in Israel, while testifying before the Anglo-American Commission in 1946. In 1948, the Arab League, representing the entire Arab world, declared before the United Nations that there was no "Palestine" and that all of Israel was "part of southern Syria."
All of a sudden, in the 1960s, the Arabs decided to invent the myth that a separate Arab nation called "Palestine" once existed.
The ultimate symbol nowadays of these fascist Arabs is the PLO Nazi mass murderer and the father of International Terrorist Yasser Arafat. Arafat was born, raised and educated in Cairo, Egypt. Like almost all of the Arabs who claim to be part of this mythical people, he is in every respect an Egyptian.
The obvious purpose of this blatant fabrication is to legitimize the Arab Nazi drive to push the Jews into the sea while delegitimizing the eternal Jewish connection to the Jewish homeland.
Needs a lot more thought?
First of all, Tennis Aukland can't exclude any qualified player from an "open". The only way I can see this working is by not holding a NZ Open but holding just an "invitational" instead. Then exclusion becomes possible. When referring to back in the days of the campaign against South Afrika you had best understand how was done (what people were willing to do).
Other possibilities (to exclude but not lose the "open" designation) would be for NZ to deny visas to all Isrealis (so not possible to claim a ploy just to deny the entry of an individual Israeli to an "open" tournament.
But on a more general question whay hard to organize in NZ and why there are doubts about real motivations. Forgetting for just a moment arguments about who is or is not indiginous to the land of Isreal there is more than a little problem trying to explain why you are concerned about dispossession of indigenes in some distant part of the world when you don't appear to be in the least concerned that you are foreign occupiers/dispossessers at home. Or am I mistaken and the people we see here objecting to an Israeli playing in the NZ Open are Maoris?
what makes you think
It turns out that these
It turns out that these protests are actually helping Shahar Peer win her matches! Seems she gets extra motivated when she hears these neo-nazis chanting their death slogans just outside.
So keep on beating your drums of bigotry and fascism.
BTW, speaking of Apartheid. Arabs live, work and murder EVERYWHERE in Israel, including Judea and Sammaria (called "westbank" in the ancient language of the palestinian occupiers).
Jews on the other hand though are not allowed to live in gaza and in most places in Judea and Sammaria, simply because the genocidal bigots called Arabs can't bring themselves to live alongside ANY other people or religion.
ALSO...if you want to talk about apartheid let's talk about the fact that ONLY racist Muslims are allowed to pray at Judaism's holiest place, the Temple Mount, where the Jewish Temples once stood.
Why are other people not allowed to pray there? Jews belong to the only religion in the world who are not allowed to pray at their holiest site due to OCCUPATION of a foreign people/religion (namely ARABS/MUSLIMS).
Why are only Muslims allowed to pray at the Temple Mount?
END THE APARTHEID.
Islam is a hate crime.
The NZ Govt had no problems
The NZ Govt had no problems in imposing travel bans on Fijians who had not, nor had their Government, nor current dictatorship, been involved in committing acts of genocide for which the Israeli Government has.
This shows that the NZ puppet Govt is again having its strings pulled by the real sovereign of this country, the mighty denario.
The NZ Government saying that as long as your method of governance is labelled a democracy then you have carte blanc to commit any attrocity you so desire including the scorched humans technique used on the people of Gaza during the 2006 holocaust by way of fire and brimstone being rained upon the civilians of Gaza from Israeli artillery shells, killing hundreds, and scorching thousands with napalm type burns.