ISRAHELL BANALITY: Israel accused of dooming Ethiopian baby boom (white zionist fertility control of black jews)

A feminist movement has accused the Israeli government of adopting a racist policy towards the country’s Ethiopian Jews.
Activists believe black women are deliberately being given a controversial contraceptive drug to bring about a drop in the population – a claim the government denies.

Thousands of Ethiopians have immigrated to Israel since the 1980s, but their Jewish heritage has been questioned, while their social status continues to suffer.

For nearly four years, Racheli Mangoli has been running a youth center in one of Israel’s poorer communities. Forty-five Ethiopian families live here, but throughout that entire time, only one Ethiopian baby has been born in this neighborhood, and that has alarmed Racheli.

She says: “I smelt something not good. I know about the discrimination here – when I am going with the children, I feel this even when I am going to the supermarket. One women said to me ‘I don¹t know how you can stand next to people like this. When they give me money – I am going and washing my hands.’”

After some investigation, Racheli discovered that many Ethiopian women, keen to avoid getting pregnant while setting up life in a new country, had been placed on a controversial contraceptive, Depo-Provera, a drug few Israeli women have heard of, let alone use.

One woman was first put on it four years ago, and underwent repeated injections every three months. She says it has left her with such terrible pains in her hands and back that she can no longer work. She insists she was never told about its side effects or offered an alternative. Like many Ethiopians in Israel, she’s afraid she will be deported if she questions the authorities.

Dr Factor is reluctant to give the contraceptive to his patients. He says it is known to delay fertility for months after women come off it. In some cases it can cause permanent infertility.

“At least 10 per cent develop substantial side-effects – side-effects like irregular bleeding, the period may disappear, they may have heavy periods. And it is impossible to reverse these side-effects, and until it has worked itself out of the system you can’t reverse these. So it’s possible although the contraception works for 3 months at a time, the side-effects may last for two years – three years – four years – five years,” he says.

In 2004, the American Food and Drug Administration warned against the dangers of the drug, but the World Health Organization refused to restrict its use.

Hedva Eyal has tried unsuccessfully to draw attention to the fact that Ethiopian Israelis are given the drug without being warned of the risks. She claims it is her government’s policy and is nothing short of racism.

She told RT: “They don’t want poor or black children and Depo-Provera gave them the opportunity to have control. If she [a patient] keeps taking an injection every three months, she is not going to have children – you know it is a 100 per cent secure from children I think.”

Hedva says the policy is working – the number of black babies in Israel is decreasing, but there are no official statistics to back up her claim. For community workers and Ethiopian women here, statistics are unnecessary – they feel their reality speaks for itself.

The Health Ministry admits it issues the drug, but says it was never its policy only to administer it to Ethiopian women and reduce the number of black babies in the country.

In their defense, Jewish agencies involved in immigration say they offered several types of contraceptives to the Ethiopian women, and that all of them participated voluntarily in family planning.

Dr. Yee-fat Bitton from the Israeli Anti-Discrimination Legal Center “Tmura”, says it’s not a matter point of view, but of the statistics.

“The statistics are, that 60 percent of the women receiving this contraceptive, this controversial one, are Ethiopian Jews,” Bitton told RT. “And you have to understand that Ethiopians in Israel… […] consist of up to only 1 per cent of the population, so the gap here is just impossible to reconcile in any logical manner that would somehow resist the claims of racism.”

Professor Zvi Bentwich, an immunologist and human rights activist from Tel-Aviv, doesn’t think there is any ground to suspect a certain negative official policy towards Ethiopian Jews.

“I’m not against looking and inquiring into the claim. If there is a claim, one should investigate,” Bentwich told RT. “But when asked about official attitudes, official policy, official medical policy, I am very reluctant that that is indeed a policy of racism on that part.”

REf: Russia Today

Ethiopian students affair shows prevalent racism in Israel

All of a sudden, we can say “racism.” A shock wave has struck complacent Israeli society. A few dozen Ethiopian children were not accepted to religious schools in Petah Tikva. That is truly terrible, everyone tsked-tsked at the heart-rending picture of Aschalo Sama, a boy without a school. Even President Shimon Peres expressed shock. Everyone is permitted to be shocked; it is politically correct.

Oh, how beautiful we are, how enlightened we seem to ourselves. Look how we fight racism, undaunted and uncompromising. And yet, in a twinkling, this shame will be forgotten, and we will be left with the many other manifestations of society’s racism, to which we remain sleepily indifferent.

That’s the way we are. From time to time, when the sewage overflows, and the stink spreads everywhere and we can no longer hold our noses, we all cry out against injustice until, once again, the cover is closed. The water underneath continues to froth and stink, but it will be covered and repressed.

It is difficult to know, for example, how many self-righteous and tsking parents would have agreed to register their children in a class with a majority of children of Ethiopian origin. And how many would rent an apartment to an Arab student? But far be it for them to count that as racism. And how many parents are shocked by the nightly selection at the clubs where their adolescent children go for a good time? Routinely, young “others” are excluded – Ethiopians, Arabs, Druze, and sometimes Mizrahim, too. Foreigners are barred for having dark skin, and no protest is heard.

Every day security guards check people entering Ben-Gurion International Airport on whether their accent sounds Arab, and no one complains. That is not racism. It’s how we have organized for ourselves an ethical code of double and triple moral standards. We fight against a few manifestations and close our eyes to other, far worse, examples.

The case of the Petah Tikva pupils is the tip of the racism iceberg. Children engender special feelings; shameful revelations about the school system will always yield a scandal. But the very week the country was in a huff over the Ethiopians, Nir Hasson reported in Haaretz that Jerusalem invests NIS 577 a year in a pupil from East Jerusalem and NIS 2,372 in a pupil from West Jerusalem. Four times less, only because of the child’s ethnicity. That does not count here as racism. Neither does the fact that East Jerusalem lacks about 1,000 classrooms, only because its residents are Palestinian. No one howls against these revelations, no one is infuriated by them, including the president, who fights against racism.

Now that we can use the term “racism,” the time has come to admit our society is absolutely racist, that all its components are racist. The legal system, for example, is no less tainted than Petah Tikva’s Morasha school. In many cases there is one law for a Jew and another for an Arab. The Bank of Israel, a state institution no less than the Morasha school, with 900 employees, has always been “clean” of Arab employees except sometimes one or two. Some 70,000 Israeli citizens, all Arab of course, are living in unrecognized villages, without electricity or running water, without an access road and sometimes without a school. Why? Because they are Arabs. Every week at soccer matches we hear racist epithets and chants, the kind teams in Europe are severely penalized for. Here, the referees do not even bother reporting them.

The latest incident occurred last week at the Doha Stadium in Sakhnin in a match between Bnei Sakhnin and Beitar Jerusalem.

And we have said nothing yet about the attitude toward foreign workers, the occupation (the greatest racist curse) nor about the attitude toward Mizrahim since the founding of the state. The list is long and shameful.

When the children of Petah Tikva have all found schools to attend , even though their skin is black, society will not stop being racist. It will return very quickly to business as usual and self-satisfaction. See how there was racism here, we fought it and it disappeared without a trace.

Ref: Haaretz

From Durban II With No Love

News of Western diplomats walking out during a speech made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, in protest over his criticism of the State of Israel and its Zionist culture made me pause. A day before the conference convened, the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Ahmadinejad, declared that he won’t negotiate with the Palestinians until they accept and recognize Israel as a Jewish State for the Jewish people. If this is not racism, I do not know what is.

Ahmadinejad is a controversial figure for denying the Holocaust and other remarks. His unusually extensive list of sworn enemies around the globe range from Israel and the US to Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and from gay rights activists and hippies to neo-cons and war mongers. But I do not like how the media has turned him into the mascot for Israel bashing. Under this model, now, you either support Israel’s inhumane policies or risk being counted as a sidekick for Ahmadinejad, resurrecting the President Bush’s with us or against us rhetoric.

Thanks to Ahmadinejad a good conference to discuss racism — a serious issue — was turned into a media love fest where the Israeli narrative went unquestioned. Although no country is perfect, no other country can have it both ways as Israel does — an oasis of democracy that has institutionalized racism and is beyond reproach. Israel does struggle with racism — Sephardic Jews make less money and have lower levels of education than the European Jews; Russian Jews’ bona fides are questioned; Ethiopian Jews are treated with skepticism; and yes, Arab citizens of Israel are viewed as traitors and treated as second class citizens. Unfortunately, the Western counties do not see any of that, and accept the Israeli narrative of how anti-Semitism is the root of all evil–but can the death of 1500 Palestinians (Semitic people) in Gaza recently be condemned as anti-Semitic behavior?

Obviously European and American leadership chose not to lead on the issues of racism because they do not have much to offer on the subject. After all, given their history of racism, colonialism, and imperialism, third world countries have plenty to say on those subjects. But Europeans and Americans who perfected the art of slavery chose to be no-shows and not to take part in the conference on racism. The old boys club avoided the guilt trip and opted out and instead chose to defend one of their own, Israel — a European colonial settler state. Unfortunately those who had hoped to talk about their experience with racism — much like Candidate Obama did in his much hailed Philadelphia speech — were denied a forum.

I think the president of Iran was wrong regarding Israel and its people, even though what he said is on par with what some of the new members of the Israeli government have said about Ethiopian Jews. Although there are many justified criticisms of the Israel’s discriminatory policies, it’s not helpful to have Ahmadinejad point them out. However, I think he would have done better to avoid the anti-Israel rant and talk about racism and prejudice suffered by blacks and North Africans in countries like France and South Asians in the United Kingdom.

It seems to me that the West is much harsher on those that criticize Israel, but look the other way when Israel carries out an offensive and innocents are killed by the scores. Having said that, the West usually make things right and I just hope that in the Palestinian case it does not take too much more time.

Most of the forty Western diplomats who walked out accused Ahmadinejad of incitement against Israel come from the same group of countries either carried out the racist Holocaust, financed or failed to stop it. Yet serving another slice of hypocrisy pie by condemning those who are too weak and too dysfunctional to do harm to Israel of being insensitive. I am left with one unanswered question, why did none of those “courageous ” diplomats walk out during the UN meetings in the days leading to the Iraq war in 2003?

Ref: Huffington post

Apartheid in Petah Tikva (Israel)