British Jews condemn Zionist's aggression.

[nino_savatte]

Moono: Before taking that line you should research the issue a little. You might want to keep a tad bit quiet about Israelis screwing with the environment seeing as how they laid a billion plus [US] agricultural industry completely at the feet of Gazan Arabs only to have them totally destroy it within 6 weeks. Took 30 years to build and 6 weeks to completely and utterly destroy.

Still peddling those stereotypes, I see.

 

[tangentlama]

Why Aren’t American Jewish voices of Protest Being Heard?

Tangent: You are incorrect. I am listening closely. Whether those 300 are pro or con they are representative of nothing but their own egos. Eveyone is entitled to their own opinion but an opinion is only that...

'it's all ego' is just a psychobabble avoidance of 'truth'.
i retort with 'you're in denial, dude, you're not listening!'

The answer is simple: the forces that support Israel’s government no matter what it does have successfully united and created ÅIPAC as their primary spokesgroup. But the forces that critique Israeli policy and yet wish to Israel secure and safe have refused to unite their energies. Instead, they find minor points to disagree with each other and then use that as their basis for insisting that a unified alternative to AIPAC will not be created with their participation.

We in the Tikkun Community have repeatedly called for this kind of coalition to work together and create a progressive alternative to AIPAC. We recognize the legitimacy of groups saying that there need to be some clear guidelines so that this alternative to AIPAC is not dismissed as part of the anti-Israel forces whose real agenda is to dismantle the state of Israel altogether, nor part of the “Palestinians are always victims and Israelis are always evil” propaganda machine. Similarly, it should not be a technocratic peace voice that talks only in terms of why peace is in the interests of the Jewish people-it must affirm the humanity of the Palestinian people and acknowledge that their human rights are important to us also, not only instrumentally as a way to maximize the best interests of Jews.

You can do something about this. Challenge those who support these peace groups and insist that they get their organizations to work together with Tikkun and with each other to form a united progressive middle path voice in Washington, D.C. While recognizing that each group has legitimate needs in terms of fundraising and getting their own groups’ ego needs met, it’s also important to recognize yet a higher need: to be effective in challenging policies that are immoral and self-destructive. Insist to the people who support these organizations that they work with Tikkun, Jewish Voices for Peace, MeretzUSA, and other peace groups that support a two state solution.

The primary obstacles to putting this kind of coalition together with each other and with Tikkun have been:

1. Brit Tzedeck ve’Shalom
2. Americans for Peace Now
3. Israel Policy Forum
4. Churches for Middle East Peace

If these 4 groups would join with each other and with the Tikkun Community/NSP and with Jewish Voices for Peace to create a unified voice in Washington D.C. and a unified annual mobilization, the peace voices would be greatl strengthened. Take, for example, one instance of this: the recent National Advocacy Days of Brit Tzedeck v’Shalom, last week. In their recent national communication they proudly announce that they brought 100 activists to D.C. In our last visit, Tikkun had brought some 300 activists. We say this NOT to say we are stronger, but to say that 400 activists together would have been even better, and had we cooperated with each other and with the other groups mentioned above we probably could be bringing between 1,000 and 2,000 people at a time—and that would have a far greater impact. The differences between these groups are far less important than the similarities, and the urgency of having a coherent voice for Middle East peace should be sufficient grounds to turn attention away from the differences to focus on the similarities.

http://www.tikkun.org/

 

[Structaural]

And also, here's the ad, in case I forgot to post it earlier
http://www.jfjfp.org/indexfiles/Gaza ad_times.pdf

My work blocks that site - what's that all about (I work for an american company in holland)?

 

[tangentlama]

Political censorship via spam filtering

My work blocks that site - what's that all about (I work for an american company in holland)?

Here is a rather disturbing email about political censorship on the Internet send out by a well known anti-Zionist Israeli peace activist.

Political censorship via spam filtering
Letter by Moshé Machover
Published: 04/05/05

Dear Friend,

The issue I am writing to you about is of the utmost importance and seriousness: it involves a grave threat to our freedom of expression and communication. In brief, it concerns a sinister imposition of US-based,
but world-wide, political censorship in the guise of “filtering of spam”.

As we all know, the problem of spam (unwanted email, some of it distasteful or noxious) has reached enormous proportions and has become not only a nuisance, but—by clogging the email system—a real danger to free email communications.

Faced with this situation, various remedies are being tried.

One of the simplest and safest is a filter built into certain email software packages that a user has in his/her own computer. For example, Eudora, the email software I use on my computer, has an in-built device for segregating incoming messages suspected as spam.

(This software assigns a “spam score” to each incoming message, and you can fix a threshold such that messages assigned score above it are segregated from the rest.) These are filed in a separate in-box, where
they can be rapidly inspected; the false positives (ie messages falsely suspected as spam) can be transferred to an ordinary in-box, and the remaining ones (real spam) deleted.

Conversely, the false negatives (spam messages undetected as such by the filter) can be transferred into the spam box. This clever piece of software can “learn” from experience: in future it will reduce the “spam score” of messages similar to those you have detected as false positives, and increase the “spam score” of messages similar to those you have detected
as false negatives.

This solves your problem, as email user. But there remains a big problem for internet service providers (ISPs). Your ISP is the service through which you get and send your email. In many cases you can tell a user’s ISP from his/her email address. For example, you can see from my email address that my ISP is KCL: King’s College, London. (To be precise, it is the Information Services and Systems—ISS—unit at KCL.)

All ISPs are nowadays inundated by gigantic quantities of spam addressed to their clients. In order to overcome this overload, ISPs are resorting to filtering spam, so that it is blocked by them before reaching you, the user.

These filters are of two kinds. The more benign kind sends the suspected spam to a “quarantine” (usually managed by a commercial company, not by the ISP itself), where you, the addressee, can still inspect it (via an internet browser, eg Netscape or Explorer) and release the false positives, which are then sent to your in-box as originally intended by the sender.

You can also delete the remaining real spam; or, if you don’t, the manager of the quarantine will delete it after a period of a few days. In other words, this kind of filter works much like a filter of the mail software in your own computer, except that you have to go to the internet to sort out the false positives from the real spam. And you still get a few false negatives—real spam that your ISP’s filter fails to detect as such. This kind of filter is used by my ISP at KCL. The commercial firm that manages the filtering is Spam Manager, and is based in the US.

The less benign form of filtering is that whereby the ISP simply blocks the suspected spam message and dumps it into a black hole (cyberspace’s virtual Guantanamo Bay). You, the addressee, cannot get it released by any simple procedure. You don’t even get to know that it has been blocked, unless you are informed by the sender (who may get a “bounce” notice saying that the intended addressee has not received the message). America on Line (AOL), an IT mega-giant, uses this kind of filtering. If AOL is your ISP, this is how some of the email addressed to you gets blocked.

Over the last few weeks, since my ISP has started to use the Spam Manager filter, I began to notice something rather disturbing: quite consistently, the false positives that I found in my quarantine box (at the Spam Manager website) were messages sent to me by human rights and peace groups. These were newsletters sent by these groups to subscribers only, of whom I am one. It appeared that these groups—or some material included in their newsletters—are classified by the filter as “offensive” and quarantined as “spam”.

The most outrageous instance of this was a message sent to me by Amnesty International, to whose newsletter I subscribe. The message, whose subject line was “One year after Abu Ghraib, torture continues” and was dated 29 April 2005, was quarantined by Spam Manager as “suspected spam”!!! Other cases included newsletters sent to me by Israeli peace/human-rights groups, and by a journalists’ club based in London (established in 2003 to support those journalists, cameramen and photographers throughout
the world who risk their lives in the course of their work).

I then noticed another strange thing. I often send to my friends material concerning human rights, especially in connection with the Middle East. In particular, I forwarded to these friends some newsletters from the human rights and peace groups mentioned above—messages I released from the Spam Manager quarantine. I soon received a “bounce” notice from AOL, telling me that those of my friends who have AOL as their ISP had not received my messages, as they were classified as “spam”. (These friends were told nothing by AOL; they did not know my messages to them were blocked until I informed them of this.)

It appeared that these human rights and peace groups—or something included in their messages—had been put on a black list used by both Spam Manager and AOL. Moreover, the reason for blacklisting was evidently political.

By careful controlled experiments with sending such material to one of my friends who has an AOL email address, we discovered that—at least in some cases—what was blacklisted was not the email address of the original sender (an Israeli peace/human-rights group) nor the main text of the message, but the URL (internet address) of the original sender’s web-site, which was included as a clickable link in the message. When I tried to forward to him the original message intact, it was blocked by AOL; when I removed the
link, the message got through. QED.

After some frustrating email exchanges with the person in charge of my ISP, I had a face-to-face meeting with two of the very senior people in that unit.

They confirmed that not only Spam Manager and AOL, but other ISP spam filters world-wide, use the same black list, which is US-based. It also transpired that the whole drive for this had come from the US administration. (I understand that the US has applied pressure on all concerned to use that US-based black list.) This black list is fed into a program that automatically filters and defines as “spam” message containing blacklisted item.

Apparently, the black list consists of “offensive” email addresses, URLs (addresses of websites), words and phrases. Of course, most of these are really politically neutral and their presence on the black list quite legitimate, or at least acceptable.

But the black list evidently also contains items whose presence there is politically motivated. The two senior people whom I met were unable to tell me what exact criteria are used for blacklisting: apparently this is a Great Commercial Secret, which is a sealed book even to them.

But they confirmed that it would be possible for some malicious person (or, more likely, group of persons), motivated by political hostility, to complain to their ISP that, say, some website contains “offensive” material, thereby causing the URL of this website to be blacklisted.

Or—even more disturbing—Big Bushy Brother Himself can order an item to be blacklisted. Undoubtedly, this is used to stifle and muzzle “inconvenient” political discourse, mainly concerned with the violation of human rights and displaying disrespect to BBB.

Once an item gets blacklisted, it is very hard indeed to get it whitelisted. It is a matter of “guilty until proven innocent”. And you can imagine how hard it is to prove innocence. Apparently, you have to provide impossibly stringent guarantees for the future good behaviour of, say, the owner of the blacklisted URL. Might as well forget it, I was told (not in so many words, of course).

Now, what can you do about this outrage?

First of all, make it widely known. Evil triumphs when decent people stay silent.

If you feel as I do, please forward this message to your friends.

Second, make sure that your ISP does not simply dump “suspected spam” addressed to you. If it does, complain. If this doesn’t help, move to another ISP, one that uses no filtering at all or the relatively more benign kind.

Third, if you get a “bounce” message telling you that a message you sent has been blocked as “spam”, let the addressee know about it.

Finally, be prepared for the next phase in the battle for free speech and communication. My hunch is that BBB will eventually apply enormous pressure on all ISPs to use the less benign form of “spam filtering”.

Best wishes,

M Machover

http://list.nowar-paix.ca/pipermail/nowar/2005-May/000411.html[/quote]

 

[rennie]

That's one hell of a cut n paste!

 

[tangentlama]

My work blocks that site - what's that all about (I work for an american company in holland)?

What is Israel Doing?

A Call by Jews in Britain​

WE WATCH WITH HORROR, the collective punishment of the people of Gaza/ Everything reasonable must be done to secure Corporal Gilad Shalit's safe release, but nothing Israel is doin contributes to that aim. Instead, it is using it's enormously superior military might to terrorise an entire people.

DESTRUCTION OF THE FRAGILE Gaza infrastructure will not release Shalit. Bombing power stations and cutting off fuel supplies deprives people of electricity, refrigeration, pumped drinking water and sewage disposal services. It holds hostage hospital patients on life support systems, or undergoing dialysis. It brings the threat of epidemics and starvation.

AS GIDEON LEVY WROTE, in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, this is "not nly pointless, but ... blatantly illegitimate". Gilad Shalit has become a pawn in the Israeli government's ongoing battle to topple the democratically elected government of the Palestinians.

PRESENTING THIS AS AN ISOLATED hostage-taking incident ignores Israel's regular snatching of Palestinians from thir homes. Thousands are held in administrative detention without trial, women and children amongst them.
A doctor and his brother - civilians - were kidnapped from their home in Al Shouka, near Rafah, the daybefore Corporal Shalit was captured. Like him, they need to be returned to their families, in the established practice of prisoner exchange. And all elected MPs, punitively imprisoned by Israel in recent days, must be immediately released.

FOR THE US AND IT'S ALLIES merely to call for "retraint" is desparately inadequate - and evidently ineffective. This is a situation that requires determined action by the International Community.

SUPPORT THOSE ISRAELIS protesting against their government's destructive actions.

WRITE TO YOUR MP to demand that the British Government act to achieve an immediate ceasefire.

WRITE TO THE ISRAELI EMBASSY. Explain how you understand their actions to wrong, and their explanations unconvincing.

. ORGANISED BY JEWS FOR JUSTICE FOR PALESTINIANS . PO BOX 46081 . London W9 2ZF . http://www.jfjfp.org .

 

[rachamim18]

Tangent: I am not listening? Have you even ever been to Israel? I am saying this not to denigrate you . It is just that I find this assuredly curious when to my knowledger you have never been there and I myself besides being Israeli have just returned. I certainly AM aware of the political climate in the nation.


As I have stated in the past [more than once], every nation has an opposition. Spme nations, like Israel, are fully democratic and offer protection of speech and opinions so that the opposition is far from muted. however, this in no way says anything about the majority opinion of the nation.

People express such things, in such socieities, at the polls. Kadimah, a Centrist party won the last national election. This translates into most Israelis wamting peaceful coexistence [nothing new] but with a strong and proactive military emnsuring this peace.

As for Tikkun, what a joke. I find it amazing. the so called right wing organisations and sirtes offer time for people of all convictions to express their thoughts and ideas but then when you look at these so called leftist entities like Tikkun and they try to beat down any dissention. Ad homs being the weapon of choice. Still, even those cretins are entitleds to spew their nonsense...it's their dime.

Peace Activists? But should not a person purporting to be for peace, be for peace for BOTH parties? Where are the ISM demos against HAMAS Qassams? Against PIJ suicide bombs? Nary a whisper. totally transparent. Tantgent, if that is who you choose to throw your lot in with, I feel for you. Personally I abhor hypocrisy and groups that blatant hypocrites.

 

[tangentlama]

That's one hell of a cut n paste!

I'll try to edit it.

It's ever so important though. I mean really really important.

 

[Structaural]

Professor Moshe Machover brought to notice in May 2005, after extensive research and testing, one reason for failure in Peace Activist News getting through to the USA. You say you have that problem viewing? OK. Well, look at the post after this one.

I work for a sub-contractor of TBWA - they've blocked this site using a Novell firewall. Managed to get through using a different browser so it could just be a mistake, but I wouldn't be surprised. The message was:

' Status : 403 Forbidden

Description : Organizational policies prohibit access to this page. '

Unbelievable.

 

[tangentlama]

Tangent: I am not listening? Have you even ever been to Israel? I am saying this not to denigrate you . It is just that I find this assuredly curious when to my knowledger you have never been there and I myself besides being Israeli have just returned. I certainly AM aware of the political climate in the nation.

omg, you're treating me like a child

 

[ViolentPanda]

omg, you're treating me like a child

True, but apparently he's not denigrating you.

 

[moono]

It's ever so important though. I mean really really important.

I added myself to the list and forwarded the link.

 

[CyberRose]

300? Wow! And pray tell, how many Jews actually live in the UK?

Technically, there are more Jedis in the UK than Jews!!

 

[tangentlama]

More than 300,000 self-identifying Jedis?

 

[CyberRose]

More than 300,000 self-identifying Jedis?

Yep!

 

[moono]

It was confirmed prior to the census that citizens were not liable for a fine in relation to question 10 (on religion).[7] In England and Wales 390,000 people (0.7%) stated their religion as Jedi on their 2001 Census forms, surpassing Sikhism, Judaism, and Buddhism, and making it the fourth largest reported religion in the country. The highest percentages of such responses were typically in cities with high student populations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon