Meet Nicola Doward – who the Head Teacher at Stretford High School who attempted to steal the money intended for Palestinians
Money intended for the victims of Israel’s merciless bombing of Gaza is being stolen and given to Israel’s racist Magen David Adom
UPDATE – VICTORY
I am pleased to announce that the school authorities have totally backed down now and the money will go, as originally intended, to a Palestinian charity, probably Medical Aid for Palestinians
The students of Stretford High School decided that they would get together to raise funds for the Palestinian victims of Israel’s genocidal bombing of Gaza. The Head Teacher, Nicola Doward decided otherwise. The funds would be split between those who murdered and those who were killed.
Nicola Doward – Headteacher at Stretford High
Let us recall what started the attack on Gaza. It began in Sheikh Jarrar in East Jerusalem. Palestinian refugees who have lived there since 1948, for 73 years, found that they were subject to legal proceedings under the Legal and Administrative Matters Law 1970 to evict them because the properties were originally owned by Jews who fled to Israel when Jerusalem was partitioned.
This is part of the Master Plan to ‘Judaise’ Jerusalem and ensure it has a large Jewish majority. See Systematic dispossession of Palestinian neighborhoods in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan by Israel’s Peace Now.
However the 45,000 Palestinians who fled West Jerusalem cannot evict the Jews who took over their homes. Why? Because Israel is a Jewish state and it is also why it is a racist state.
Israeli Police have since been laying siege to Sheik Jarrar and acting with vicious brutality. On Saturday the veteran Al Jazeera reporter, Givara Budeiri, was arrested for the crime of reporting. During her arrest she was kicked and beaten and suffered a broken arm.
Stretford High School
There was the attack on worshippers at Al Aqsa mosque. There was no equivalent invasion of a Jewish synagogue by Palestinian protestors. This was totally one sided and relates to the continuous attempts by Jewish settlers to encroach on Al Aqsa Mosque. Their desire is to demolish the mosque and build a Third Temple on the site.
Imagine if Iranian police, firing stun grenades and sponge-tipped bullets, which have taken the eyes of 3 Palestinians out, were to invade a Jewish synagogue in Tehran. The cries of ‘anti-Semitism’ would resound far and wide. Yet the White House, Keir Starmer et al said nothing.
This is the background to the firing of rockets from Gaza, though most of them are just fire crackers. Just 12 Israelis died, of whom 2 were Israeli Arabs and two Thai workers. Jews have air raid shelters in Israel unlike non-Jews. At least 265 Palestinians were murdered by ‘precision’ bombings, including 67 children. 22 Palestinians were murdered in the West Bank where there has been a reign of terror.
This is the background to Doward’s decision to steal money collected for the Palestinians. Doward has explained her actions on Facebook and on the school’s website. She says it is untrue:
i. ‘That I have donated money raised by the school to 2 charities: ‘one supporting Palestine, the other supporting Israel’…. We are donating the money to ONE charity: Red Cross Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel Crisis Appeal.’
This is dishonest. The Red Cross itself says that it is
‘supporting the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross and our partner organisations the Palestine Red Crescent, and Magen David Adom in Israel.’
In other words it is going to support both the Palestinians and their killers. Israel does not need assistance. None of its hospitals were bombed. Israeli bombing deliberately targeted Palestinian hospitals, schools and clinics in Gaza. This included Gaza’s only COVID testing clinic. The one hospital they did not bomb Al Shifa had the roads to it destroyed preventing ambulances reaching it. Israel took care to kill as many doctors as possible. Dr Ayman Abu al-Auf, Shifa head of internal medicine and head of its coronavirus response.
ii. Nicola Doward says that ‘people who want to sow seeds of hate will not deter us.’ The only hateful person is Ms Doward. The Israeli charity Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross, is a thoroughly racist organisation. It has a history, when attending to the shooting of Palestinian ‘terrorists’ i.e. civilians who resist the occupation of only attending to the Israeli wounded not Palestinians. This includes Palestinian children.
Amazingly in 2012 MDA set up a religious ethics committee headed by Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Chief Rabbi of Safed. Eliyahu is a vicious racist who in 2010 issued an edict forbidding Jews in Safed to rent homes to Arabs. Even worse he stated that MDA must refuse to treat wounded ‘terrorists’ (for which read Palestinians) and if necessary should poison their food in prison. Rabbi Eliyahu also advocated the hanging of Palestinian children yet MDA saw fit to appoint him nonetheless.
iii. Jonathan Cook, a former Guardian Reporter and winner of the Martha Gelhorn award, reported that:
There is mounting evidence that Israeli ambulance crews are withholding treatment from Palestinians injured during a wave of attacks over the past six months, according to rights groups.
Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, a medical watchdog group, found that wounded Palestinians had been left untreated for as long as two hours.
In some cases, medical teams are suspected of failing to tend to the injuries of suspected attackers as revenge, in the expectation that they will die from their wounds….
Physicians for Human Rights (an Israeli body) accused Israel’s leading medical bodies – the Israeli Medical Association, which lays down ethical codes, and Magen David Adom, which supervises ambulance services – of ignoring the evidence it has collected of such abuses.
Ha’aretz, a liberal Israeli paper asked Why Wasn’t the Hurt Palestinian Assailant Treated? it went on to say that
‘Footage of terror attacks show Israeli medical staff standing by as Palestinian assailants lie wounded on the ground; the incidents put the national rescue service, which officially isn’t meant to operate in the territories, in an embarrassing position.’ As one Israeli medic said on Twitter
‘“To all who ask, when I got to the scene today in Jaffa Gate, I helped the wounded [Israelis], but not the hateful terrorist, although he suffered more critical wounds.”
All Palestinians who resist the occupation are routinely called ‘terrorists’.
Dr. Tslil Regev writing in Israel’s +972 Magazine described how:
The video clip released Thursday of an Israeli soldier shooting in the head an incapacitated Palestinian man, who had stabbed and wounded a separate soldier, doesn’t leave much room for speculation. Maybe it’s because I’m a doctor, but when I watched the video I couldn’t take my eyes off the Magen David Adom (MDA) medical team at the scene — treating the wounded soldier, completely ignoring the man lying wounded on the street, evacuating the soldier in an ambulance, and then boom. A murder.
Doward’s statement went on to say that:
The appeal will help provide medical and humanitarian assistance in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank including East Jerusalem, supporting the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross and our partner organisations the Palestine Red Crescent, and Magen David Adom in Israel.
Ms Doward equates the Israeli superpower with its victims who have been under occupation for over 70 years (including Israeli Palestinians). Doward goes on to say that the ‘Red Cross is a ‘neutral, impartial, independent humanitarian Movement’ who ‘respond when people need us, no matter who or where they are.’
This is nonsense. The Red Cross was set up to provide help for imprisoned soldiers, not civilians. It refuses to condemn the racism of MDA and Israeli soldiers who, according to Medical Aid for Palestine deliberately delay Palestinian ambulances at check points.
The Red Cross never reveals information about human rights abuses which is why the Americans uniquely allowed them access to Guantanamo on condition they remain silent. The Red Cross is trusted by the most brutal regimes for this reason.
Ms Doward is guilty of ‘bothsidism’. Treating the oppressed and oppressor as equals. As Paulo Freire, the famous Brazilian educator and philosopher wrote:
‘Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Archbishop of Johannesburg and hero of the anti-apartheid wrote:
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”
That is precisely what Doward has done. She has chosen the side of the oppressed, donating money to a racist Israeli organisation which, unlike the Palestinian Red Crescent, is overburdened with money.
Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize conveyed the same message:
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented”
And if Doward is hard of hearing perhaps the words of Martin Luther King Jr. will resonate:
“The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict…[an individual] who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it” –
In her smug and self-righteous statement Doward said that ‘people who want to sow seeds of hate will not deter us.’ In subverting the desire of her students to help the Palestinians, who are the real victims in favour of a bogus neutrality, it is she who is guilty of hatred. Her liberal piety is neutrality in the face of injustice. Doward has projected her own hate onto others.
For more about how Palestinians in Israel are subject to lynchings and racist attacks as the Police look on see Zion Square assault
Doward’s students may be younger than her but they are wiser.
The International Committee of the Red Cross
As someone who is Jewish I have never given a penny to the Red Cross and never will. Why? Because during the Holocaust it refused to give any aid or comfort to the victims of the Nazis until the very end, in Hungary in late 1944. Indeed it was worse than that. It conducted visits to the Thereisenstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps and then gave them a clean bill of health.
The ICRC refused to provide any protection for Jews since they accepted the Nazi designation of them as stateless criminals.[i] According to its President Max Huber they could not be seen to be ‘intruding into the domestic policy’ of the Nazis.
There were discussions throughout August 1942 about the murder of Jewish civilians yet at the ICRC executive of 14th October 1942 the pro-Nazi former foreign minister of Switzerland, Philip Etter, ‘opposed even the anodyne Huber draft’ calling for the humane treatment of civilians, not even Jews, arguing that it could be interpreted as a violation of neutrality.’ Etter’s view prevailed.[ii] The Dutch Red Cross made no effort to communicate with deported Jews although they did send an ambulance to the Eastern front ‘to comfort the Dutch Waffen-SS volunteers.’ [iii]
The ICRC attitude changed only at the very end of the war. Louis de Jong condemned the IHRC for its ‘almost total lack of concern for the Jews’ disasters.’[iv]
As the US Holocaust Museum details the ICRC allowed itself to be taken in by ‘beautification’ of Thereisenstadt. Just before their visit most inmates were deported to Auschwitz and after the visit more were deported. The ICRC made no attempt to document the names of the inmates or to ensure that those they spoke to were protected.
As Samuel Moyne wrote in the Wall Street Journal Carl Jacob Burckhardt, the effective head of the ICRC,
harbored a traditional anti-Semitism and such hatred of communism that he regarded German Nazism as a bulwark of civilization and a necessary evil. As early as April 1933, the ICRC was receiving desperate letters from inmates of German concentration camps, including one from Dachau pleading: “‘I beg you again in the name of the prisoners—Help! Help!’” Yet … during this period Burckhardt was given an inspection tour “and officially lauded the commandant of Dachau for his discipline and decency.”
It wasn’t just willfully repeating the Germans’ propaganda that stained the ICRC. Nor was it only the fact that, knowing the Nazis had confirmed their policy of mass extermination of the Jews at the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the ICRC did nothing to intervene. What was more difficult to defend was Burckhardt’s sympathies with and efforts on behalf of Nazi actors after Germany’s defeat. He opposed the Nuremberg trials, labeling them “Jewish revenge.” … After the Holocaust, the ICRC—by then helmed by Burckhardt—even abetted the flight of Nazis such as Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele by providing them with travel papers.
See How the Red Cross Failed Europe’s Jews & American POW’s
This is the organisation that Nicola Doward has entrusted with money meant for the Palestinians
Tony Greenstein
[i] Arthur Morse, p. 38, While 6 Million Died, Secker Warburg, London 1968
[ii] Lacquer, The Terrible Secret, pp. 62-3.
[iii] Henry Mason, Testing Human Bonds Within Nations: Jews in the Occupied Netherlands, p. 338.
[iv] Louis de Jong Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog, 862-864 cited by Henry Mason, Imponderables of the holocaust, p. 105.
