Editorial Note: The following news reports are summaries from original sources. They may also include corrections of Arabic names and political terminology. Comments are in parentheses.

 

British Capitulation to Israel:

Arresting Shaikh Raed Salah, While Allowing Israeli War Criminal Amir Peretz to Evade Arrest Warrant

Salah trial postponed, suspected Israeli war criminal flees country

PIC, [ 06/07/2011 - 02:41 PM ]

LONDON, (PIC)--

British authorities have postponed the appeal hearing of Shaikh Raed Salah, leader of the Islamic Movement in occupied Palestine (called Israel by Zionists and their slaves), due to the absence of a judge that has the power to decide in his case.

Shaikh Salah was detained a week ago under a travel ban that he learned about after entering the country to give a series of lectures.

Meantime, Israeli media sources say former Israeli Minister of Security Amir Peretz managed to evade an arrest warrant for war crimes issued in the UK as he was scheduled to lecture at the London University.

Shaikh Salah chose to remain in the UK to challenge the deportation decision which was based on allegations of anti-Semitism.

Authorities have allowed Salah legal visitation and his lawyers met with him for two hours without barriers in the Bedford immigration detention center.

Zahi Nujaidat, a lawyer and spokesman of the Islamic Movement in 1984-occupied Palestine, expressed optimism regarding Salah’s case. He said that if Salah wanted to comply with British orders he could have left for his country at any moment.

Nujaidat also said Salah wants to challenge not only the injustice that has happened to him personally, but the Zionist ideology that surrounds his persecution.

Salah’s arrest comes just months after the UK approved a law that would grant immunity to Israeli war criminals who travel to the country. The former law in England saw that arrest warrants would be issued against suspected war criminals who enter the country.

Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonoth said former Israeli security minister Amir Peretz was able to escape from England from an arrest warrant over charges of committing war crimes during Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon.

Peretz was in England to speak after being advised by the so-called Israeli justice and foreign ministries not to go as activists in the UK would push for an arrest warrant to be issued against him.

Despite that, Peretz ignored the warnings and traveled to London.

The source said he was forced to cancel the lecture at London University after learning that a warrant had in fact been issued.

He was able to evade arrest and flee the country before police got to him, according to the source.

Hamas condemns Britain for bowing to Zionist lobby

[ 06/07/2011 - 06:00 PM ]

GAZA, (PIC)--

Hamas strongly condemned the British government for overlooking the arrest of Zionist war criminal Amer Peretz, the former Israeli war minister, while fabricating pretexts to arrest Shaikh Raed Salah, the leader of Islamic movement in occupied Palestine.

It said in a statement on Wednesday that Peretz has been wanted for years by British and European courts over charges of committing war crimes.

“The British government’s behavior reflects its bias (actually servitude) to Israel and posed as a moral scandal that reflects its bowing to pressure to the Zionist lobby. It also reflected a double standard when it comes to the Palestine cause,” Hamas said.

The Movement called on human rights groups to expose this British policy and to press for the immediate release of Shaikh Salah.

Ra-ed Salah is not racist, the Zionists are

[ 04/07/2011 - 10:36 PM ]

By Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem

The arrest by the British authorities last week of Shaikh Ra-ed Salah, one of the prominent leaders of the 1.7 million-strong Palestinian community (in occupied Palestine, so-called now as Israel), is a real affront to the most elementary considerations of justice. It is also an indelible shame that should continue to haunt the British justice system for a long time to come.

Far from being motivated by any real violations of the law, the arrest seemed to have been prompted by a vindictive complaint by pro-Israeli Zionist circles in the British capital. Ultimately, the real motive behind the arrest is to silence one of the most outspoken defendants of Palestinian rights, the very man the Israeli intelligence has been persecuting, vilifying and even trying to assassinate.

I am not talking about someone I don't know. Since the late 1980s, I have met Ra-ed Salah many times. I visited him at his home in Um al-Fa'hm and I attended his lectures. And from my acquaintance with the man, I can solemnly attest to his honesty, religiosity, rectitude and clean credentials. He is a man who would rather be morally straight than politically correct, he wouldn't flinch from telling the truth (as he sees it) for fear of undesirable public reaction.

Shaikh Ra-ed Salah is therefore a man of sublime principles. He feels he is morally obliged to speak up against oppression, especially Israel's pornographic oppression that is meted out to his own people on both sides of the Green Line, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as Israel.

He does belong to that special category of people, which encompasses great men and women, who stand up in the face of power, throwing their moral weight on the side of the weak, the persecuted and the helpless.

Hence, ascribing racism to this man is an insult to truth, which can only be made by irredeemable ignoramuses or malicious liars.

Needless to say, the Israeli intelligence made every conceivable effort to vilify and incriminate, even criminalize, Shaikh Salah.

In October 2000, Shin Beth agents tried to insert a few grams of hashish into his pocket in the hope of besmirching his image among the Arab citizens in Israel. A few years later, he was accused of encouraging terror and endangering the security of Israel.

Interestingly, the "terror" charges came from a state that continues to embody and practice terror, even 63 years after its misbegotten birth which wouldn't have occurred had it been for the mass terror, ethnic cleansing and expulsion of the bulk of the true natives of the land of Palestine.

In the past decade, the Shin Beth became exasperated with Salah's focal and effective activism which centered around one main theme, saving Jerusalem 's Aqsa Mosque from Israeli conspiracies and hostile designs.

All sorts of charges were concocted against the man, ranging from contacts with a terrorist organization to giving flours, food and clothing to the children of "terrorists." Israel classifies all Palestinians into two categories: "terrorists" who oppose the nefarious Israeli occupation, even through peaceful means, who ought to be annihilated; and collaborators (or quislings) who either say nothing and do nothing, or agree to become informers on their own people.

Shaikh Salah and a few of his colleagues in the Islamic movement in Israel had to spend long prison terms on mainly frivolous charges that had very little substance. In any other country with a credible justice system, the charges would have been dismissed as fabricated and lacking in credibility.

However, we are talking about Israel, a country that calls itself the only democracy in the Middle East while in reality it commits adultery with the most elementary aspects of justice, such as the timeless judicial principle that the accused is innocent until he or she is proven guilty.

In Israel, especially when non-Jews, e.g. Palestinians, are involved, the principle is brashly reversed and the accused becomes guilty until proven innocent.

In recent years, the administration of justice in Israel, a country that is based on rampant injustice and oppression, has undergone a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. A Palestinian, even a man or woman who has never hurled a stone on or even toward an Israeli armored personnel carrier rampaging through his town or village, is treated as guilty even if proven innocent.

This is the reason why thousands of innocent Palestinians, including political leaders, elected lawmakers, college professors and professionals of all sorts, are languishing in Israeli dungeons and concentration camps on no other accounts than their thoughts, views and feelings.

To conclude this article, I want to address the collective conscience of the British people: By what standard of morality are people who never hurt anyone in their lives, like Ra'ed Salah, are arrested and persecuted for their views, while real war criminals like Ehud Barak, Moshe Ya'alon and Ariel Sharon, who bear on their hands so much innocent blood, are accorded stately treatment at the hands of the British authorities?

Britain which seized Palestine from the Islamic Ottoman state and gave it Zionist Jews on a silver platter is historically responsible from the enduring Palestinian plight. However, far from seeking atonement for its unforgivable sins, which wreaked disaster, death and pain on millions, Britain seems to be still faithful to the same evil mentality that motivated Lord Balfour 94 years ago to issue his infamous promise to give Palestine to Zionist Jews.

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