Several reporters, one of them pregnant, were required to take off their underwear during security check ahead of Netanyahu speech; others, including Washington Post bureau chief, forced to remove trousers; Foreign Press Association: We will decline further invitations unless given assurances this will not recur
Earlier today, YNET reported how Israeli security services tried literally strip-searching a pregnant Al-Jazeera reporter, Najwan Simri Diab, ahead of a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. According to Simri Diab, after she was already made to wait for half an hour and stripped to her underwear, the guards decided to go even further:
“After the [female] security guard checked my bra under my undershirt, she told me to take off the bra. I asked her why, but she insisted. Later her superior came over and supported her. I refused, but she said “Everyone took it off, and so will you.” I said, “I’m not taking it off and I’m not coming in,” and she said, “So you won’t come in.”
Simri-Diab said that the location where the strip search took place was far from out-of-bounds for male security detail.
“A spokesman from the office saw me and asked what was going on. When I told him, he said, “don’t be dramatic.” The girl told him I’m refusing to be searched. They put me aside for 20 minute and would not give me any of my things, checking every paper and document in my purse. Later they gave me back everything all messed up in a box.”
According to YnetNews,
The General Security Service stated in response, “All guests were subjected to a security check in accordance with the customary security procedures in such events.”
Well, turns out the GSS wasn’t lying – Simri Diab was far from the only one grossly humiliated by their staff; she shared her experience with many of the guests, including several other reporters and the Chief of the Washington Post bureaue in Jerusalem. The Foreign Press Association, representing all foreign media in Israel, put out the following statement, which we bring to you in full:
“The Foreign Press Association is outraged over the treatment members received at the hands of Israeli security personnel during Tuesday night’s invitation-only gathering with the prime minister. While we appreciate the need for security, it is not remotely acceptable to invite people for cocktails at a five-star hotel and then make them undress at the door.
Several members were forced to remove their underwear, waiting for as long as 20 minutes in this humiliating situation while security checked their documents. Others, including the bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, were strip-searched and forced to take off their pants. A number of members walked out of the event in disgust following this despicable treatment.
It is incomprehensible that anyone would think such humiliating treatment is necessary at such an event. All GPO card holders are known to authorities and have already undergone extensive background checks. All participants emptied their pockets, submitted their equipment to inspection and went through metal detectors to enter.
The Shin Bet has its responsibilities but it must also operate within reasonable parameters. In a democratic country security services are not permitted to do as they please. For a government trying to usher in a new era of relations with the foreign media, it is a peculiar way to start. We are confident the prime minister would not accept such abusive security checks for his friends or family.
We ask for assurances that this will not happen again or we will respectfully decline further invitations.”
Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 11:48PM Gilad Atzmon
A few minutes ago, I came across a press release written by Left Israeli MK Nitzan Horowitz.
Horowitz, a member of Mertz Party, disclosed the new suggestions made by the McCarthyite Knesset Commission of Inquiry into Human Rights Organizations.
According to Horowitz, the commission is now considering the following measures:
· New bills and regulations restricting the entry to Israel of anyone who may be affiliated with left activity. This may take place without the need for court.
· Putting an end to foreign citizens status, including parents who are married to Israelis
· Reducing drastically the rights of prisoners and detainees – along with new initiatives of minimum prison terms, increased enforcement, penalties and so forth
· Denial of Israeli citizenship from an increasing numbers of Israelis convicted of various offences
· Stripping Knesset members of their rights.
· Giving judicial powers to administrative proceedings; for example, the establishment of a clerical tribunal for foreigners
· Preventing the entry of Arab communities
· Seize funding to cultural institutions that are promoting ‘leftist materials’
· Eliminating tax exemption on donations to human rights organizations
· Cancellation of contracts with public bodies associated with human rights organizations.
· Allocated assigning posts for civil service volunteers to human right associations will be cancelled.
· Restricting access to the websites of human rights organizations and public institutions
· Preventing the entry of representatives of human rights organizations to educational institutions
I guess that the picture is clear.
Israel turns against itself. Its days are numbered.
Friday, January 7 2011|+972blog
By: Rechavia Berman
Demonstrators holding up a blood-stained Israeli flag, in a protest following the death of Bil’in’s Jawaher Abu-Rahmah (photo: Lisa Goldman)
I have a little something (little for a certified graphomaniac, of course) to say about the contemptible inquiry committee passed yesterday in Israel’s Knesset by MK Faina Kirshenbaum (Kremlin agent Evet Lieberman’s doll). But before I begin, a technical note:
The shameful step taken by Israel’s laughingstock of a parliament yesterday is, at least for now, political circus and nothing more. This “Inquiry Committee” has no real authority. It has no power of summons and no power to punish. One may comfortably ignore any summons from it and one may, like the wonderful Mikhael Manekin, accept the summons in order to spit its foul temerity right back in its face. But to repeat the main issue of this note, the headline reads: The Gestapo is not yet at the door. That may yet happen, and this pathetic circus may be the high water mark after which the slime will recede. Now, having said that, let us for a moment address the issue as though Michael Ben Ari’s fantasy has any actual teeth, and respond as follows:
If being an Israeli means to forever rule another people, steal its land, deny it basic rights and trample upon its dignity, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means to strive for ethnic cleansing as a means of escaping the tightening death trap of occupation, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means to steel the lands and crops of dirt-poor subsistence farmers, while ignoring one’s own Supreme Court, to suppress with beastly brutality non-violent demonstrations held with almost unimaginable restraint in the face of ongoing slaughter, and then lie about it when the slaughter happens, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means dismantling all facets of civil society, education, infrastructures, healthcare, all the while subsidizing a primitive culture of sloth that even the greatest rabbis of history would retch to behold, leaving the people of said culture trapped in a lack of self-sufficiency, captive to the rule of rabid rabbis, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means sending brave men and women to combat a wildfire without basic gear, leaving the poor periphery to ignorance and neglect, all the while spending vast fortunes on apartheid settlements in the occupied territories in the name of the Jehovah cult’s ideology, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means leaving 20 percent of the population in an ever-worsening state of second class citizenship, forbid them to import schoolbooks in their own language, speak their ostensibly official language in mixed schools, spread irrational fear of them “stealing our women”, condition their employment as teachers to their own children upon approval of the Shin Bet-Stasi, not building a single new settlement for them or approving zoning plans and then conducting a smear campaign about their “illegal construction”, or launching a reprehensible witch hunt when they choose not to build illegally and come to live in “our” towns, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means signing a “blood alliance” with the Druze minority, and then letting the sewage run free in their villages, discriminate against them in any setting out of uniform, form a unit with an overwhelming Druze majority and after fifty years feel oh-so-enlightened because we deigned to appoint a Druze as its commander, bar it from any career opportunity outside their pale of settlement except that of jack-booted thugs to do our dirty work for us, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means accepting a parliament in which a party, whose head undermines our legitimacy every time he opens his filthy mouth, launches a witch hunt against perfectly transparent “funding sources” of organizations who save what’s left of out tattered international respect, while the same kangaroo parliament refuses to investigate clear debacles by it inhabitants, let alone reach personal conclusions following fiascoes that have levied a toll in blood, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means subscribing to the superiority of the Jew by virtue of birth as such and placing at the heart of the collective identity the persecution, victimization and woe-is-me attitude in a manner that Hitler himself would have viewed as a historical victory and vindication, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means treating the persecuted and the sanctuary seeker the same way we cried foul over when directed at us back when we were in their shoes, then yes – such an Israel I shall betray.
If being an Israeli means calling yourself “the state of the Jews” while actively discriminating against the denominations of Judaism to which the absolute majority of the world’s Jews subscribe, rendering them invisible and illegitimate, then yes, indeed – such an Israel I shall betray.
I shall betray it openly and without a shred of guilt. I shall advertise its shame the world over, and take the largest hatchet I can find to its false pretense of legitimacy. I shall hand over the names of its criminals – from general and minister to corporal and private, to anyone who will bring them to justice. I shall make sure you cannot set foot anywhere a civilized person would want to go. I shall do all this and more, and you can investigate me to your putrid hearts’ content.
I shall betray such an Israel because I am loyal to a very different Israel. An Israel of a people proud and unafraid. An Israel that shall accord full and true equality to all its citizens. An Israel that does not wish to rule another people for decades in the name of its traumas and fears, and definitely does not wish to use these fears as an excuse to steal that people’s land and colonize it. An Israel guided by the morals of the prophets and not by the racism of the Talmud. An Israel of “Blessed be my people Assyria, blessed be my people Egypt”, and not of “You are called man and they are not called man.” And I know I will not be alone in this betrayal, because as the Reverend Martin Luther Ling Jr. said: “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Now, can I get an Amen?
Rechavia Berman is an Israeli journalist and Blogger. This post originally appeared in Hebrew on Rechavia’s blog
