Elvis Costello cancels Israel Concert

Rock legend and hipster icon, Elvis Costello has canceled his planned concert in Israel giving hope to the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement within the pro-Palestinian camp in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a statement on his website, Costello wrote:

Sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static and so an end to it.

I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel, which is a matter of regret but I can imagine a better time when I would not be writing this.

Read all about it at Mondoweiss

British Lawyers Seek Arrest of Ehud Barack on War Crimes

The Guardian is reporting today that 16 British lawyers have filed to obtain an international arrest warrant for Ehud Barak, accusing him of committing war crimes in Gaza.

Fat chance. If recent history is any indicator then it would appear that these laws only apply to people of color in former Soviet or American puppet states as well as a couple of people in the Balkans.

Nonetheless, the Guardian reports:

The legal action relates to alleged war crimes and breaches of the Geneva conventions during the war, which was launched by Israel in response to Palestinian rocket attacks and widely criticised internationally. The death toll is disputed, but the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that 1,387 Palestinians died, among them 773 people not taking part in hostilities.

Solicitors are asking a district judge at the City of Westminster magistrates court to issue a warrant for Barak’s arrest under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act, which gives courts in England and Wales universal jurisdiction in war crimes cases. The application alleges that Barak has committed offences against the 1957 Geneva conventions.

Barak, who is also deputy prime minister of Israel and leader of the country’s Labour party, could argue that his government office guarantees him “state immunity” from prosecution. But lawyers from two London law firms, Irvine Thanvi Natas and Imran Khan & Partners, believe the warrant that the international criminal court issued in May last year for the arrest of Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, offers a precedent. Bashir is accused of committing war crimes in Darfur.

This would be the shock of 2009 if Barak were dragged away in handcuffs, but don’t hold your breath in anticipation.

gaza, january 2009. (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Biden, a Vice-President Corrected.

President Obama put the kibosh on Vice-President Biden’s careless words last weekend where he told a reporter: “Israel can determine for itself - it’s a sovereign nation - what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.”

Today the Los Angeles Times is reporting that President Obama has “absolutely not” given Israel any sort of a green light to attack Iran. The President later went on to try to clean up the Vice-President’s loose lips by stating that what the Veep had said was simply “a categorical fact, which is that we can’t dictate to other countries what their security interests are.”

Drinks in Tel Aviv Anyone?

The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz is reporting that a new bar in Tel Aviv run by an anarchist collective called The Rogatka (aka the sling shot) “bans Israel Defense Forces soldiers in uniform and boycotts products made in West Bank settlements.”

No Guns and no settlement products? That probably sounds nice to a lot of you but not to Seth Freedman who argues that “the sentiment may be admirable, but to extrapolate it into a ban on uniformed soldiers makes little sense: first because – according to Vinter’s own logic – she and her friends shouldn’t be doing business inside Israel at all.”

Freedman might have been better off leaving his retort to a one liner: “who wants to drink with smelly hippies anyway?”

Maybe that only works in America…