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Bibi: A "vile" man

Jennifer Loewenstein (a human rights activist and faculty associate in Middle East Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) in writing about the visit of Israeli PM Netanyahu to Washington, and addressing the Congress, calls him a "vile" man.   She is right!   But she also, again rightly, excoriates the West for allowing Israel to conduct itself as it has for decades now.  Let her explain, in this piece, on truthdig, why....

"All speculation aside, what strikes me as the most obvious piece of information to re-emerge from the tempest now brewing in Washington is that Benjamin Netanyahu is an unscrupulous, scheming, vile man who has taken the meaning of “chutzpah” to new heights in his display of unseemly and undiplomatic behavior. That no world leader has yet demanded that he and his regime be made to answer for its brutally criminal, scandalous policies time and again compels us to recognize how grievously weak and flawed the ‘international community’ is, and by extension, how depraved those leaders are whose actions are considered most synonymous with it. It takes the unknown human rights organizations on the ground in the Gaza Strip, the Mezan Center for Human Rights and the Palestine Center for Human Rights, to have to beseech the world repeatedly, day after day, to compel Israel and the United States to adhere to the most fundamental precepts of international law and accepted standards of humanitarian and diplomatic behavior.

What we are watching today, and have been a party to for the past few weeks is yet another media-political circus for the sake of narrow sectarian interests. A genuine rift in US-Israeli relations would manifest itself in long overdue concrete policies the US would demand of its client regime: an immediate end to the building of illegal Jewish settlements on all occupied Palestinian land; recognition of East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state; a full moratorium on the on-going theft and use of natural resources outside the boundaries of the Green Line, or borders that existed prior to June 4th, 1967; a complete withdrawal of all military checkpoints and barriers within occupied Palestinian land; an immediate halt to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, the withholding of tax revenues from the Palestinian Authority, and the closure of crossing points into and out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip."

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