Opinion Editorials, October 2010

Britain Hangs Out Welcome Sign to Israeli War Criminals

By Stuart Littlewood

Stuart Littlewood views the efforts of Israel’s stooges at the heart of the British government, William Hague and the Conservative Friends of Israel, to amend UK law so that Israeli officials accused of serious war crimes could visit Britain without fear of prosecution.

”[UK Foreign Secretary William] Hague's Zionist sympathies visibly ooze from every pore. [Tzipi] Livni appears to have him eating out of her hand. If Parliament passes his measures to weaken powers of arrest in order to harbour those wanted for crimes against humanity, doesn’t that make the whole British nation an accessory to those crimes?” (Stuart Littlewood)

The UK is to become a safe haven for Israeli psychopaths while they continue their brutal military occupation, colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Holy Land, and carry on bombarding blockaded Gaza and executing or abducting anyone bringing humanitarian help

That’s the British government’s latest contribution to Middle East peace.

The Zionist entity's Trojan Horse at the heart of our government – otherwise known as the Conservative Friends of Israel (FCI) – held a reception recently attended by our foreign secretary, William Hague.

Hague told the 400 guests:

We have had good discussions with Israeli ministers on  universal jurisdiction where the last government left us with an appalling situation where a politician like Mrs Livni could be threatened with arrest on coming to the UK...

We have agreed in the coalition about putting it right; we will put it right through legislation that will be introduced... The justice secretary will bring into the House of Commons adding to legislation going through the House of Commons later this year and I phoned Mrs Livni amongst others to tell her about that and received a very warm welcome for our proposals.

Who can forget that Tzipi Livni, Israel’s former foreign minister, was largely responsible for the terror that brought unspeakable death and destruction to Gaza's civilians nearly two years ago?

And who’d have believed a British government minister would undermine our justice system in order to make the UK a safe haven for the likes of her?

Showing no remorse and with the blood of 1,400 dead Gazans (including 320 children and 109 women) on her hands, and thousands more horribly maimed, Livni’s office issued a statement saying she was proud of Operation Cast Lead (the murderous blitz she had unleashed). And speaking later at a conference at Tel Aviv's Institute for Security Studies, she said: "I would today take the same decisions."

Few of us would want to touch such a person with a barge-pole. But Hague is so smitten  that he said it was "completely unacceptable" that someone like Tzipi Livni  felt she couldn't visit the UK. "We cannot have a position where Israeli politicians feel they cannot visit this country. The situation is unsatisfactory [and] indefensible. It is absolutely my intention to act speedily," Hague said.

He even tried to make Livni's monstrous crime look good by claiming, as reported on the CFI website, that "the immediate trigger for this crisis [the war on Gaza] was the barrage of hundreds of rocket attacks against Israel on the expiry of the ceasefire or truce". It is well known that the ceasefire didn't expire. It was deliberately breached by an Israeli raid into Gaza that killed several Palestinians with the intention of deliberately provoking a response that would re-ignite the violence and provide an excuse to launch Operation Cast Lead, which the Israelis had been preparing for months.

The foreign secretary concluded his talk to the CFI by encouraging stronger business links between Israel and Britain and saying he intended to visit Israel in coming weeks.

One of the delights awaiting Hague is a meeting with his opposite number, Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in an illegal squat on stolen Palestinian land and is a wanted criminal on that score alone. He is also pushing for 1.3 million Arabs currently living in Israel to be stripped of citizenship and forcibly transferred outside Israel's future borders.

To that end Israel's military and civil authorities have just finished an exercise rehearsing a crushing response to the riots this latest “ethnic cleansing” programme will inevitably cause.

Few individuals are more obnoxious than former club bouncer Lieberman, who is a convicted child-beater and described even in Israel as "a virulent racist" and "a certified gangster". He is also reported to be under investigation for corruption. All the same, Hague wants him freely walking the streets of London with Livni. No doubt the media will soon be sprouting propaganda photos of Hague and Lieberman triumphantly shaking hands, smirking, embracing and doing whatever else two crazies do when they get together.

A masterclass in grovelling

The " universal jurisdiction" fuss flared up again last year after Israeli top brass, including Ehud Barak, Livni and retired general Doron Almog, cancelled engagements in London for fear of being arrested. Israel complained bitterly. The then British foreign secretary, David Miliband, apologized and, according to a press report, “promised Lieberman to begin working immediately to change the UK laws that enable the issue of arrest warrants against Israeli officials accused of war crimes”.

Outraged members of the public were immediately asking who Miliband thought he was, grovelling in their name to Israeli thugs who had the temerity to whinge about the perfectly proper operation of British law, especially when the warrants were issued to answer well-founded charges.

Under universal jurisdiction all states that are party to the  Geneva Conventions are under a binding obligation to seek out those suspected of having committed grave breaches of the Conventions and bring them, regardless of nationality, to justice. There should be no hiding place for those suspected of crimes against humanity and war crimes. Applications can be made to a court for private arrest warrants, and this has been happening because the government itself shirks its duty under the 1949  Fourth Geneva Convention and drags its feet until the bird has flown.

Livni bleated: "It's about the entire State of Israel and our ability to go on working together against common threats."

The threats Israel faces are caused by its racist expansion, land theft, general lawlessness and hateful attitude towards its neighbours, and by the nuclear threat Israel itself poses to others in the region and the Islamic world generally. To suggest we have anything in common is an insult.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's office butted in with this arrogant statement: "We will not agree to a situation in which [former Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert, [Defense Minister] Ehud Barak and [opposition leader and former Foreign Minister] Tzipi Livni will be summoned to the bench. We utterly reject the absurdity that is happening in Britain."

And the Israeli ambassador in London, Ron Prosor, had the cheek to chastise the British foreign secretary, telling him it was time the British government took action.

Miliband obligingly called the warrants intolerable and said he had asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Justice Minister Jack Straw to find an urgent solution.

Dancing to Tel Aviv’s tune

The solution is simple enough. If Israel wants talks in London they send people with clean hands. There should be no concessions, anyway, to a regime that shows such contempt for international law and normal codes of conduct.

Instead Brown, a patron of the Jewish National Fund, said Livni was "most welcome in Britain any time", and our Ministers of the Crown are dancing to Tel Aviv’s tune. No moves were made by Labour in their last days in office, but it seems the incoming Conservatives and their Liberal-Democrat partners are planning to put the director of public prosecutions in charge of issuing arrest warrants. This turns what should be a strictly judicial process into a political one that keeps any warmongering child-killer our ministers happen to admire out of the clutches of the UK’s courts.

William Hague was recruited into the Conservative Friends of Israel at the worryingly tender age of 15.

In 2007, while shadow foreign secretary, he said: "We will always have strong economic and political ties with Israel. We will always be a friend of Israel."

In 2008 he declared:

The unbroken thread of Conservative Party support for Israel that has run for nearly a century from the Balfour Declaration to the present day will continue. Although it will no doubt often be tested in the years ahead, it will remain constant, unbroken, and undiminished by the passage of time.

Hague told the Jewish Chronicle in an interview: "We don't approve of expanding settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem because it makes the two-state solution more difficult." Not because it’s a barbaric crime to dispossess Arabs of their lands, homes and livelihoods – he doesn’t approve because it's a bit awkward politically.

"I've travelled across the country,” he continued. “I've stood on the Golan Heights and swam in the Sea of Galilee. I've stood on the part of the West Bank where you can see the Mediterranean, where you really understand Israel's strategic fragility."

If he had stood in the rubble of Gaza and seen the devastation to homes and infrastructure and visited the shattered schools and hospitals there – if he had stood in Bethlehem, imprisoned on all sides by the evil separation wall, and made his way on foot with Palestinian workers (those with permits) through the sinister steel barriers and holding pens of the Israeli checkpoint – a process that can take hours – before beginning the journey to Jerusalem, he might have understood how the Israeli jackboot chokes the life out of the Palestinian people.

Hague's Zionist sympathies visibly ooze from every pore. Livni appears to have him eating out of her hand. If Parliament passes his measures to weaken powers of arrest in order to harbour those wanted for crimes against humanity, doesn’t that make the whole British nation an accessory to those crimes?

And before MPs approve such measures they should reflect on how it would be the lowest thing they could do.

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editor@aljazeerah.info & editor@ccun.org