Justice for Oxfam’s Anti-Israel Bigotry?
Minnie Driver has stepped down from her role as Oxfam Ambassador because of allegations that staff for the charity — in Haiti and other countries — paid vulnerable people for sex.
In 2014, Oxfam threw Scarlett Johansson under the bus because of her association with SodaStream, an Israeli company that employed hundreds of Palestinians and served as a bellwether for peaceful co-existence between Palestinians and Jews.
Johansson refused to be bullied, and likewise stepped down from her Oxfam position. I am proud to have worked directly with Scarlett’s people during that fiasco.
A bit of justice for Oxfam? Perhaps. But no justice for Haitians who were abused — or for Palestinians who lost jobs and friends they treasured.
Is Refusing Israeli Help Worth a Drought?
Akoob claims that maybe South Africa can learn from Israel while simultaneously boycotting Israel — simply by taking Israeli design specifications, but never interacting with Israeli scientists or engineers.Melanie Phillips: Poland unleashes its own inner demons
Again, Akoob gets it wrong: according to a whole range of scientists, experts, and engineers (as summarized in this report from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs), there is simply no substitute for working together when it comes to water.
Based on all these misstatements of fact, Akoob concludes:
South Africa does not need the help of Israel to solve our drought.
And just to make her point, Rumana Akoob is — apparently — willing to bet the very safety of the South African people on her views.
If Poland wants to demonstrate it really did have nothing to do with the Holocaust, it’s going a mighty strange way about it.
A new law passed by the Polish parliament criminalizing any suggestion that Poland was involved in the Holocaust has produced a crisis in Polish-Jewish relations described as the most serious since the fall of communism in 1989.
Poland is well known for its sensitivity to the false description of Nazi concentration camps on its soil as being “Polish camps.” But the new law goes much further.
It makes it a criminal offense for anyone to accuse Poland of being “responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich... or other crimes against peace and humanity or war crimes...”
This is in effect to criminalize telling the truth about Polish history. For there is ample evidence of Polish complicity in the extermination of the Jews.
Poles often shopped Jews to the Nazis; the historian and survivor Emanuel Ringelblum has noted that Polish police “played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland... [and were] enthusiastic executors of all the German directives regarding the Jews.”