http://www.aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=54431
Sex slavery and Israel’s failure to fight the growing trade

Excerpt:

Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women.

By Emile Tayyip

Last year, the United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women, according to the BBC.

Israel has also been named as an offender in the annual U.S. State Department‘s Trafficking in Persons (Tip) report, which condemned the Jewish state for not fully complying with the “minimum standards” to eliminate sex trafficking.

According to Canadian journalist and social activist Victor Malarek, “newspaper ads from modeling and employment agencies promise exciting jobs, but the women are duped… They must submit, or they are raped, beaten and tortured. There are between 5,000 and 10,000 trafficked women in Israel and more than 280 brothels in Tel Aviv alone. It is a human rights issue the Jewish community knows about. They have a voice and they must use it.”

Hat tip to RootlessCosmo, who is not the same person as Tony Karon despite the coincidence of nomenclature

And here is the kicker. UST is guilty of a whopper of a double standard. Two years ago, the university allowed Ann Coulter to speak on its campus.

Ann Coulter once said of Muslims, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Coulter can speak at UST. But not Desmond Tutu.

footnote

It is not a bellicose book. On the contrary, its style is restrained and factual. The authors take great care not to utter a single negative comment on the legitimacy of the Lobby, and indeed bend over backwards to stress their support for the existence and security of Israel. They let the facts speak for themselves. With the skill of experienced masons, they systematically lay brick upon brick, row upon row, leaving no gap in their argumentation.

This wall cannot be torn down by reasoned argument. Nobody has tried, and nobody is going to. Instead, the authors are being smeared and accused of sinister motives. If the book could be ignored altogether, this would have been done–as has happened to other books which have been buried alive.

(Some years ago, there appeared in Russia a large tome by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the world-renowned laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature, about Russia and its Jews. This book, called “200 Years Together”, has been completely ignored. As far as I know, it has not been translated into any language, certainly not into Hebrew. I asked several of Israel’s leading intellectuals, and none of them had even heard of the book. Neither does it appear on the list of Amazon.com, which includes all the author’s other works.)

Avnery continues, further on:

The authors do not call into question the Lobby’s legitimacy. On the contrary, they show that hundreds of lobbies of this kind play an essential role in the American democratic system. The gun and the medical lobbies, for example, are also very powerful political forces. But the pro-Israel lobby has grown out of all proportion. It has unparalleled political power. It can silence all criticism of Israel in Congress and the media, bring about the political demise of anyone who dares to break the taboo, prevent any action that does not conform to the will of the Israeli government.

In its second part, the book shows how the Lobby uses its tremendous power in practice: how it has prevented the exertion of any pressure on Israel to for peace with the Palestinians, how it pushed the US into the invasion of Iraq, how it is now pushing for wars with Iran and Syria, how it supported the Israeli leadership in the recent war in Lebanon and blocked calls for a ceasefire when it didn’t want it.

Each of these assertions is backed up by so much undeniable evidence and quotations from written material (mainly from Israeli sources) that they cannot be ignored.

* * *

MOST OF these disclosures are nothing new for those in Israel who deal with these matters.

I myself could add to the book a whole chapter from personal experience.

He recounts his personal experiences of being prevented from speaking, or protested, in the US — as a member of the Israeli Knesset! … well worth a read.

Meanwhile, the Lobby continues to blacklist public speakers who are too sympathetic to the Palestinians: Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu Rejected by U St Thomas, MN, Will Not Speak on Peace and Justice:

In this case, the would-be speaker isn’t a Holocaust denier. Nor does he run a government that routinely denies basic civil rights to scholars, journalists or gay people.

The speaker barred at St. Thomas won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the prize for his nonviolent opposition to South Africa’s apartheid regime, was deemed unworthy of appearing at St. Thomas because of comments he made criticizing Israel - comments the university says were “hurtful” to some Jewish people. Further, the university demoted the director of the program that invited Tutu after she wrote a letter to him and others complaining about the revocation of the invitation. (She retains a tenured faculty job.)

While the incident happened several months ago, it has only just become public, when it was reported by City Pages, the alt-weekly in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The revoked invitation has some faculty members at the university seething.

[…]

The comments by Tutu that appear to have set off scrutiny of the invitation came in a 2002 speech in Boston about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The Zionist Organization of America has criticized the speech and said that in it, Tutu compared Israel to Hitler. But a transcript of the speech raises questions about that interpretation. In the transcript, published by one of the groups that sponsored the lecture, Tutu is harshly critical of Israel’s government and of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and expresses regret that some Jews in Israel and elsewhere do not identify with the oppression of Palestinians. But Tutu also explicitly talks about Israel’s right to exist within secure borders.

The transcript released by Sabeel, a Palestinian ecumenical group, does not show a direct comparison between Israel and Hitler. The mention of Hitler in the speech comes during a section in which Tutu urged the audience not to assume that the status quo lasts forever, and in which he urged those listening to challenge to “Jewish lobby” in the United States. “People are scared in this country [U.S.], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful. Well, so what? This is God‘s world. For goodness sake, this is God‘s world. We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end, they bit the dust.”

[…]

Toffolo said that she was informed that she was losing the directorship of the program she led, and received a negative evaluation, right after she spoke out against rescinding the Tutu invitation. She said that administrators were very clear with her about the relationship between their decision on her leadership of the program, and the invitation. (Hennes, the St. Thomas vice president, confirmed that Toffolo was removed as chair shortly after she defended the Tutu invitation, but he declined to say why she was removed, citing the confidentiality of personnel decisions.)

“It’s outrageous and it infringes on my academic freedom,” said Toffolo of the university’s decision to strip her of the program director’s position.

Other cases in which academics have been punished for criticising Israel.

An additional layer of irony of course is provided by the long tradition of cosmopolitan European and Russian Jewry as a culture of scholars, writers and academics who were frequently found on the leading edge of thought and philsophy labelled “subversive” and banned or repressed by State powers of their time.

I’m definitely interested in how romanticism (as a subversive doctrine, with its emphasis upon the imagination) echoes throughout the disciplines — sixteen years ago I applied to the University of New Mexico’s Department of English to study Romantic literature (I was accepted, but granted no teaching associateship). Even Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, admits that “in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century,” and some of these philosophers, utopians such as Charles Fourier, were part and parcel of the literary tradition of romanticism.