STONE-THROWING UNDER APARTHEID: THE LAW ISN'T THE SAME
Minimum sentence for a Palestinian who throws a stone towards an Israeli is three years in prison according to Israeli law. If "necessary", the accused Palestinian is tortured under he or she confesses - like happened to the Hares Boys.
In practice, the maximum sentence for an Israeli who throws and hits a Palestinian with a stone is zero days in jail.
ON THE WADI QANA ROAD
Today we learn that illegal Israeli settlers have stoned - like they do on each and every day in the occupied territories - Palestinian vehicles on the Wadi Qana road between Salfit and Qalqiliya, damaging a bus and an another car, breaking it's windshield.
Israeli occupation shot bystander Mahmoud Badran(15) dead and wounded four other youths when illegal Israeli settlers' vehicles were stoned three months ago, but in these cases they just look on and intervene only if Palestinians respond.
If a Palestinian would have thrown a stone breaking the windshield of a car driven by an illegal Israeli settler, the charge from Israeli occupation would have been "Attempted murder".
THE LAW OF BEN HUR
On Thursday June 14th Israeli occupation district court sentenced Palestinian youth Ahmad Yasser Baraghithi(21) to 8 years in prison after already keeping him imprisoned for 2 years.
The charge? Throwing a stone that injured Israel's occupation forces' officer in Palestine's East Jerusalem.
According to Israel's law, intent doesn't matter when a stone thrown by a Palestinian injures an Israeli.
Basically Israeli law could be lifted out of Lew Wallace's much filmed epic historical novel Ben Hur(1880): A native accidentally injuring or a killing an occupier is guilty and much be punished based not on intention, but solely results.
APARTHEID LAW SYSTEM AND THOSE WHO EXCUSE IT
Israel, with the support of 'Western' governments and especially that of the United States, has created an Apartheid law system where the ethnic-religious background of a person decides whether an act is a crime and also the punishment, if it is.
Millions of otherwise supposedly decent people know what is going on, yet they continue to support what is going on.
Like the British priest and social activist Giles Fraser, they frame the current Apartheid and ethnic cleansing practiced by Israel in a big enough historical context to include the Holocaust, and then justify occupation and killing of tens of thousands as a "lesser evil" compared to it.
But what couldn't be 'justified' as a 'mere' 'lesser evil' compared to Holocaust and pushed under a carpet if this is accepted as valid?
A SHIELD OF CADAVERS FOR ISRAEL
The torture and imprisonment of the Hares Boys and Ahmad Baraghithi disappear from the vision of people like Giles Fraser, as they bring to use their 'comforting' Holocaust comparison, which 'allows' them to declare that they still support Israel and Zionism:
Jews need to be protected from a German crime that happened 75 years ago and Palestinians must continue to suffer because of it. A price the Giles Frasers of the world are more than happy to pay after they have silenced their conscience with the Holocaust.
The deaths of long-gone victims of the Nazis are used to make a shield of cadavers to protect Israel, so that it can itself go on turning living Palestinians into corpses and to entomb children alive in it's archipelago of jails and prison camps.
THE COUNTRY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING
It's deeply sad and ironic that the first African-American president of the United States has presided over seven and a half years of increased support for Israel as this system has deepened and become more severe.
Barack Obama's reward has been disrespect and opposition at every step by the regime of Israel which he so lavishly and unconditionally has supported, allowing it to continue to bleed occupied Palestine.
To Palestinians' his presidency, which promised so much, has been an extreme disappointment and the main candidates for succession try to out-do each other in declaring their allegiance to Israel and support for it's war crimes and human rights violations.
Fifty years after United States' own Jim Crow -system broke down, the country of Martin Luther King has made every effort to help to first install and then keep up a similar system in occupied Palestine.
(The accompanying photograph is used for illustrative purposes and is not connected to any cases mentioned in the article.)
SOURCES:
Arrests…prison sentences…extensions of arrest…and conditional releases
Israeli settlers throw rocks at Palestinian vehicles in northern West Bank
Palestinian sentenced to 8 years in prison for throwing stones at Israeli officer
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