DIRECT NEWS INPUT SEARCH
Dear UNESCO: You're Going to Honor Shimon Peres? Really? |
17 Oct 2012: posted by the editor - Human Rights, International | |
A Human Rights activist has written an open letter to UNESCO criticising its decision to give an award Shimon Peres To: Dr. Amii Omara-Otunnu Dear Dr. Omara-Otunnu I understand that your office, as part of the annual International Conference on Comparative Human Rights to be held on Tuesday, 23 October 2012 at the University of Connecticut, will be honoring several individuals (through their representatives) for their stellar contributions to advancing human rights in its fullest sense in their specific regions of the globe. These include social justice, peaceful resolution of conflicts, advancing women's rights and children's rights, freedom, dignity, tolerance and respect for all peoples and their faiths as well as cultures, especially the indigenous, oppressed and colonized of the world. The people you have selected are: Salmaan Taseerof Pakistan, Shimon Peres of Israel, Kwame Nkrumahof Ghana, Yuri Kochiyama of USA/Japan and Abdulhadi al-Khawaja of Bahrain. Your own experience in the struggle of the people of South Africa against apartheid is evidence of your commitment to these pursuits. In this context it is very disturbing for me to understand the rationale for your selection of Shimon Peres, President of Israel, as one of your honorees next week. I write to you as a peace and human rights activist and an alumnus of the University of Connecticut (PhD, Physics, 1981). There is no other country in the world that continues to colonize, humiliate, oppress, kill and maim wantonly another people, indigenous to the region, than Israel does to the Palestinians. Shimon Peres presides over the highest office of Israel and has overseen the many wars waged against the people of Palestine and the neighbors of Israel since before the country was founded in 1948. He is the person who is credited with establishing Israel's not-so-secret nuclear weapons program that poses an existential threat to the people in the region. Israel's leaders, including Mr. Peres, have refused to acknowledge these deadly instruments of death and destruction in their possession. They have also refused to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty even as they threaten Iran with war for developing its nuclear program for avowedly peaceful purposes. On the issue of the nuclear program of Iran President Peres stated, "We must quickly and decisively, establish a strong, aggressive coalition of nations that will impose painful economic sanctions on Iran". In 1947, Peres, coming from Poland, joined the Haganah, the predecessor to the Israel Defense Forces. As early as 1948, Israel terrorist groups were involved in killing Palestinian civilians, forcibly evicting them from their homes and making them into penniless refugees. Just yesterday a report titled, "Israeli army veterans admit role in massacres of Palestinians in 1948" has the following confession from an Israeli army veteran:
As Miko Peled, the Israeli peace activist and author ("The General's Son") wrote after President Obama awarded the Medal of Freedom to Shimon Peres earlier this year:
Under Shimon Peres's presidency, Israel waged one of its most brutal (of many) wars against the Palestinians in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead, 2009-10) that killed more than 1,500 people, a majority of them innocent children, women and men. Hospitals and schools (including a U.N. school) were not spared. To this day, under Mr. Peres, the belligerent Israeli military occupation of the West Bank continues, including the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements. These actions, among many others, have grossly violated the human rights of the Palestinians and of many other people living in the Middle East (such as in neighboring Lebanon and the occupied Golan Heights of Syria). Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaking earlier this year at a conference in Boston on Ending the Israeli Occupation of Palestine said, "I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. What of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes? The Israeli government is placed on a pedestal , and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?" He has called for an international divestment from Israel similar to that against apartheid South Africa, saying, "Yesterday's South African township dwellers can tell you about today's life in the Occupied Territories. To travel only blocks in his own homeland, a grandfather waits on the whim of a teenage soldier. More than an emergency is needed to get to a hospital; less than a crime earns a trip to jail. The lucky ones have a permit to leave their squalor to work in Israel's cities, but their luck runs out when security closes all checkpoints, paralyzing an entire people. The indignities, dependence and anger are all too familiar. Many South Africans are beginning to recognize the parallels to what we went through. Ronnie Kasrils and Max Ozinsky, two Jewish heroes of the anti-apartheid struggle, recently published a letter titled 'Not in My Name'. Signed by several hundred other prominent Jewish South Africans, the letter drew an explicit analogy between apartheid and current Israeli policies. Mark Mathabane and Nelson Mandela have also pointed out the relevance of the South African experience. Dr. Omara-Otunnu—as leader of the first UNESCO Chair in Human Rights in the US and as someone who has long standing connections with the African National Congress and other institutions that fought apartheid and for human rights in South Africa, I appeal to your good conscience to revoke the honor to be bestowed on Shimon Peres next week by your office, the University of Connecticut and UNESCO. Otherwise it will disgrace the institutions involved and your office as well and come as an insult to the other honorees at this distinguished function. Sincerely yours, Cc: Nana Amos Tags: UNESCO, human rights |
|
|
Name: | Remember me |
E-mail: | (optional) |
Smile: | |
Captcha | |