Green Party file 3
Green MP Keith Locke has been one of Parliament’s biggest supporters of the anarchists and maori radicals arrested in the October 15th anti terror raids.
Here he is addressing an “Urewera 17” support rally in Auckland on 27th October 2007
One of those arrested in the police raids was Omar Hamed, a young Auckland based anarcho-communist. Now Auckland University Students Association International Affairs officer, Hamed has since 2006, been a leading light in the university’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) branch. New Zeal has recieved allegations in recent days that a senior member of SJP was also to attend training camps in the Ureweras but was forestalled by the police raids.
Keith Locke, a long time supporter of the Palestinian cause has ties to SJP.
From the anarchist website Indymedia
Yesterday around 500 people took to the streets of Auckland to oppose Israel’s brutal attacks on the people of Gaza and Lebanon, which have already killed more than 300 innocent civilians. The day started with a rally in Aotea Square. Members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Palestine Human Rights Campaign (PHRC), Green MP Keith Locke and several others spoke condemning Israel’s terrorist actions against innocents. One of the SJP speakers got an awesome chant in Arabic going amongst Arabic speaking members of the crowd.
Keith Locke holding the SJP banner
Auckland SJP is now dominated by mainly Muslim students of Palestinian, Afghan, Indian and Pakistani extraction. It is regarded as one of the most militant groups on campus. But just how extreme is SJP?
In September 2006 Auckland University SJP published a magazine (with students association help) entitled Intifada.
Keith Locke contributed an article to the magazine in his capacity as Green Party Foreign Affairs spokesman.
Sometimes, when I support Palestinian rights, I am accused of not being “even-handed” in the Israel/Palestine dispute.
But what does “even-handed” mean when the situation on the ground is hardly “even”. There is only one occupying power (Israeli) and only one occupied people (the Palestinians).
Other contributors included SJP president Sahar Khumkhor, an Afghan refugee and Auckland University politics tutor, Omar Hamed and Asher Goldman, a Wellington anarchist, anti-Zionist Jew and close associate of “Urewera 17” arrestees Hamed and Urs Signer.
Another contributor was Rana Khumkhor, a female, presumably the sister of Sahar Khumkhor.
When death becomes a sacrifice
The following is a short story written by Rana Ghumkhor. It examines the motivations of a suicide bomber.
Some extracts
The Dead cannot ask for justice it is the duty of the living to do so. For my father and for my people the hunger of my hatred opens its mouth. Calling to me to avenge those who have fallen. Years ago my father gave his life for me. Tonight I die for Palestine.
I could start by telling you my name, but what would be the point? I’m just a face, in a sea of oppression, inflicted upon my people. For generations we suffered at the hands of the Zionists. Oh my insane rage vengeance will be ours, the clouds will clear and the sun will shine on us again. They think by uprooting our trees they can destroy our history? But our history is in our hearts and we will tell it to our children and they will tell it to their children. They cannot cut off our tongues…
Religion is what keeps us alive. It is what keeps us going, because in the mind of a freedom fighter fear of god is greater then the fear of death. The desire for paradise dominates our thoughts, reminding us that this wasn’t the way life was supposed to be…
Suddenly my train of thought comes to an abrupt halt as the bus comes to a stop I glance up to see cars lining up in front of the bus. I shrug it off as traffic. I know time is running out. I look outside the window and can barely make out my city of Jenin in the distance. I know this will be the last time I will see my home ever again. There is no turning back now, it is at the end of a person’s life when they realise how important the choices in her life are. Maybe my death won’t make a difference; maybe my people will continue to live in terror tomorrow. But maybe for just a moment, my enemies can feel what we feel when we lose a brother or a sister, a father or a mother, a daughter or a son. If they can feel what we feel for just a moment for just a fraction of a second, my death would have been worth something…
“We will be reaching Jerusalem in a few minutes “ I sit up straighter in my seat. It is now the time, I can wait no longer. I feel around in my pocket for the trigger that leads to the c4-tapped securely to my chest. I swallow the bile that had risen in my throat. I am afraid yes, I am afraid the bomb wont go off. There is no greater shame then failure and I have no desire to fail. I close my eyes imagining what it will be like. Will it hurt? Will I meet my maker upon my death? Or will I wait till the day of reckoning where we all shall be judged…
Oh lord forgive me for my sins. Forgive my father, forgive my family and most of all forgive my people. Shed some light on our oppression and free us.
I clutch the trigger in my hand. I take the time to acknowledge each person in the bus. I feel the walls in my heart closing up for I feel no pity where we received none. I look out the window for the last time. The bus is coming over a hill. There lies Jerusalem in all its glory. I close my eyes and take my last breath…. Freedom
Keith Locke, a senior Green Party MP has supported the organisation responsible for this material. He has lent his name to to what can only described as virulent anti-Israeli propaganda. Israel is a valued friend and trading partner of New Zealand. Either Keith Locke supports the militant anti Israeli views of SJP and their apparent sympathy for suicide bombers, or he has been stupidly sucked into supporting their propaganda.
Is such a ratbag/idiot fit to serve in our Parliament?
Green Party file 5 here
This blog is hilarious- being one of the people mentioned above i only find it fair to say that this really made my day. Note to self: google myself more often.
The Arab League’s recent Middle East peace proposal demands not only a right for any Palestinian Arab to make his home in the new Palestinian State that the peace plan proposes, but insists on an equal right for Palestinians to live in Israel proper.
This would require Israel to accept millions of Palestinian Arabs who would relocate into Israel itself, rather than making their homes in the newly created Palestinian State.
The 1948 war that led to the Palestinian Arab displacement began within hours of the historic United Nations decision to create a Jewish homeland and (it should be noted) the same Palestinian state that the Arab League now demands as the price of “peace.”
Israel was attacked without warning by five Arab nations who refused to accept an independent Jewish state in their midst. Despite repeated assurances from Jewish leaders that non-combatants would remain unmolested, many Palestinian Arabs fled to refugee camps in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, at that time part of Egypt.
They expected to return to their homes in a few days once the Arabs were victorious. But the unthinkable happened. The Jews won. Ever since that time, the Palestinian Arab leaders have kept their people trapped in squalid refugee camps as a political weapon, rather than encouraging them to migrate to other Arab countries where they could make new homes.
This demonstrates the late, unlamented Yasser Arafat’s mastery of a core Marxist-Leninist political tactic, “The National Question.” Based on the works of Lenin, Marxist-Leninists have for decades encouraged the independence aspirations of indigenous peoples and minority groups to bring about the overthrow of the existing social order, and eventual socialist control.
Arafat’s Soviet instructors helped him to see that world opinion could be mobilised behind his cause if the refugees became “Palestinians” rather than Arabs. By becoming “Palestinians,” the Arabs succeeded in turning the Arab-Israeli conflict from a war of annihilation against the Jews into a struggle of dispossessed natives against colonialist invaders.
The Arab League and the United Nations currently count some 4.3 million Palestinian Arabs as “refugees” or the descendants of refugees. This must rule out Arab claims of Israeli “genocide,” since the 700,000 Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948-9 have evidently multiplied by some 600% in less than 60 years.
It should also be noted that only a small minority of the refugees (and of the Palestinian Arab population in general) were actually land-owners. Most were tenant farmers or “fellahin.” Others were urban tradesmen, many of whom had arrived only recently in the area from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, drawn by the economic opportunities presented by the surging Jewish population in the early part of the 20th Century. The idea that the great-great-grandchildren of such arrivals possess any ancestral right to re-occupy homes and land in Israel is risible.
The Arab League’s insistence on a “right of return” shows that the Arabs still refuse to accept Israel as a sovereign nation entitled to control its own destiny. They are effectively demanding not one Palestinian Arab homeland, but two: one east of the Jordan, the other west of it.
The ludicrous “peace proposal” requires Israel to give up two of the basics of national existence: the right to control entry into the country, and the right to define citizenship.
Without that ability, Israeli sovereignty is rendered effectively meaningless.
Israel’s Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, clearly articulates the core issue. “Just as Israel is the homeland for 800,000 Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries, so a new state of Palestine should be the homeland for Palestinian Arab refugees.”
If the Palestinian Arabs will negotiate peace based on getting their own homeland, they get to decide who lives in their new state, but they don’t get to decide who lives in the neighbouring state of Israel. Why have a “two state solution” if the Palestinian Arabs insist upon a similar “right” to live in both states?
Israel’s current population of 7.1 million comprises 76 percent (5.396 million) Jews, 20 percent (1.42 million) Arabs, and four percent (284, 000) Christians and others. Based on current birth rates the Jewish majority is already shrinking because Arab families are reproducing almost three times faster than their Jewish counterparts.
The “right of return” demanded by the Arab League would soon lead to Jewish Israel being swamped demographically.
Admitting millions of descendants of displaced Palestinian Arabs means that within a few decades, Israel would cease to exist. An Arab majority would simply overrun the dwindling Jewish population, using the mechanisms of Israeli democracy to create a single, united Palestinian Arab state without even a shot being fired.
Israel is right to reject such a proposal.
Well Trevor, one of us is a friend and comrade of Omar, and it sure isn’t you, so I think I’d trust my version (which is also Omar’s) of what his politics are, no?
Omar was (and likely still is) an anarchist, and sometimes calls himself an anarchist-without-adjectives. His politics are certainly not anarchist-communist ones.
Either provide some proof for your false statement, or retract.
“Are you going to be telling her mum she was just unfortunate collateral damage, but the fight must go on?”
Nope, because I have nothing but contempt and fury for the sort people who put bombs in rubbish bins, or drop them from their aircraft or fire them from their missile silos.
Where as you, Trev, seem to be quite OK about violence providing it’s your mates in power who are employing it.
Cheers
Sam
I know there is a difference anon. That’s why i said your claim is bullshit.
No, not bullshit, Trevor. Omar was (and may still be, I haven’t asked him in a while) an anarchist, but he is not an anarcho-communist. There’s a difference.
Anonymous-Bullshit.
Sam-A question or two for you.
Thinking of that 3 year old girl you took spotty fishing last weekend.
Fast forward 3 or 4 years. She’s walking down Lambton Quay one Friday morning with her gran.
She’s got the morning off school to go to the orthodontist.
A bomb set in a rubbish tin by one of your mad mates goes off and blows her and granny to pieces.
Are you going to be the one shovelling up the bits?
Are you going to be telling her mum she was just unfortunate collateral damage, but the fight must go on?
You need to wake up to yourself, my friend .
Did you read this bit in the SJP ‘zine, Trev?:
“Views expressed in works printed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent views of individual members of Students for Justice in Palestine or any other group mentioned.”
Does the fact that I’ve written for the Dominion Post mean I’m lining up with neo-liberals?
Does Keith Locke writing for an SJP ‘zine mean he’s lining up with the anti-Hezbollah views expressed by Asher in the same ‘zine?
Actually, the answer to both questions is “no”.
On the other hand, this question has me stumped:
“Is such a ratbag/idiot fit to serve in our Parliament?”
Well, anyone who isn’t a ratbag/idiot would feel rather out of place in our parliament, so I’m not sure how to answer that one!
cheers
Sam Buchanan
Omar isn’t an anarcho-communist. Never has been either.