EDITOR: The Lie Machine is as true as it ever was
Not three days after they killed a woman protester, the IDF has already found the ‘truth’, as we knew it would. Apparently, gas had nothing to do with the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmah. Well, they certainly did not persuade even the editors of Haaretz, as you can see from their editorial, below. When you have been lying for decades, how can you tell the truth?
IDF: No proof Palestinian woman died from tear gas at protest: Haaretz
Defense sources find inconsistencies in medical report over the death of Jawaher Abu Ramah, who reportedly died after inhaling tear gas at demonstration against West Bank fence.
The Israel Defense Forces said on Monday that the medical report on the death of a Palestinian woman said to have been killed at a West Bank protest contains significant inconsistencies regarding the circumstances of her death.
Bil’in residents claim that Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36 died after inhaling tear gas fired by IDF soldiers during a protest against the West Bank security barrier on Friday.
Military sources said, however, that there was no evidence that Abu Rahmah even participated in Friday’s demonstration against the security barrier in Bil’in – nor that she died from inhaling tear gas.
Following repeated requests from Israel’s defense establishment, the Palestinian Authority on Monday turned over the medical report on Abu Rahma’s death. IDF officials say the medical report contradicts the family’s version of events.
According to information obtained by Haaretz from Palestinian medical sources, in the weeks before Abu Rahmah’s death she was taking drugs prescribed for a medical condition. It is not known whether these drugs, combined with the tear gas and the “skunk bombs” used by the soldiers, could have caused her death.
Her family says Abu Rahmah’s death was caused by the Israel Defense Forces’ use of a particularly lethal type of tear gas, but they cannot explain why other demonstrators affected by the tear gas did not need medical care.
Eyewitnesses told Haaretz that the tear gas had an immediate and dramatic effect on Abu Rahmah, who within a few minutes after exposure went into convulsions, began foaming at the mouth and lost consciousness.
Abu Rahmah’s brother Samir said that for several weeks his sister had complained of bad headaches, mainly near one ear. He said she also had dizzy spells and problems keeping her balance and had unusual marks on her skin.
On December 21, Abu Rahmah saw Dr. Khaled Badwan, head of the ear, nose and throat department of Jerusalem’s Augusta Victoria Hospital. He refused to be interviewed for this report.
According to a document obtained by Haaretz, Badwan prescribed a common remedy for dizziness and instructed her to bathe her ear in hot water. Samir said Badwan thought the problem was caused by water trapped in the middle ear, but nevertheless ordered a CT brain scan.
Physicians consulted for this article said Badwan probably suspected another condition.
After receiving normal results from the December 27 brain scan, Abu Rahmah saw Dr. Nasser al-Mualem at the Ramallah hospital, who according to Samir said her problem was common and told her to return in one month.
The medical documents seem to support Samir’s claim that with the exception of the headaches and dizziness, his sister was in generally good health. None of the doctors consulted for this article could think of a condition or symptoms that could be fatal in the presence of tear gas.
The lawyer representing the Abu Rahmah family completely denied the IDF’s claims. Lawyer Michael Sfrad said that Abu Rahma went in for testing a week ago for a routine winter illness.
“According to people I spoke with, [Abu Rahmah] was at the demonstration on Friday but not at the forefront of the protesters,” he said. “After she was injured by the tear gas, she was taken to the village and then transferred to an ambulance. An operational investigation cannot produce reliable findings; therefore we demand a criminal investigation by the military police.”
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned Abu Rahmah’s death calling it a “new Israeli crime carried out by the occupation army against our helpless nation.”
Israel must allow Palestinians to protest in peace: Haaretz Editorial
The IDF should allow the demonstrations at Bil’in to take place. It should act only when there is danger to life and property.
Jawaher Abu Rahmah, a 36-year-old kindergarten teacher, was killed over the weekend after she choked on tear gas while watching the weekly demonstration at her village. Residents and human rights activists from at home and abroad demonstrate against the separation fence that was built on village land. Abu Rahmah died less than two years after her brother Bassem was killed by a tear-gas canister fired directly at his chest at a similar protest. A third brother, Ashraf, was caught on camera as he was shot by Israeli soldiers while he was handcuffed.
The demonstrations at Bil’in, which have been going on since work to build the fence on village land began in February 2005, are entirely legitimate. The residents have the right to protest the theft of their land for the giant settlements set up around their village. More than three years ago, following such demonstrations, the Supreme Court ordered that the fence’s route be moved to give the village back some of its land – about 700 dunams. The defense establishment has yet to carry out this ruling.
Since the demonstrations against the fence began in the West Bank, 21 protesters have been killed, according to Palestinian sources. This is a chilling statistic that should greatly trouble every Israeli. So should the death of Abu Rahmah. According to the demonstrators, the Israel Defense Forces used particularly large quantities of gas on Friday. An Israeli doctor who takes part in the protests, Daniel Argo, told Haaretz that some tear gas is less dangerous than the kind used by the IDF. So it’s not clear why the army chooses to use the more dangerous type.
The IDF should allow the demonstrations at Bil’in to take place. It should act only when there is danger to life and property. And even then it should act as security forces do in democratic countries when there are demonstrations. Just as the settlers’ protests against the Gaza disengagement passed without deaths, so should the Palestinian protests against the fence pass. There are enough ways to break up demonstrations, if this is at all necessary, without risking the lives of the participants.
Abu Rahmah died in vain. She didn’t endanger anyone. There’s no need to mention the countries where the regimes kill people who demonstrate against them. Israel must not become one of them.
We’re not looking for revenge, says family of Palestinian protester who died after rally: Haaretz
36-year-old Jawaher Abu Rahmah died Saturday, a day after inhaling tear gas fired by the IDF at a protest in the West Bank village of Bil’in.
The family isn’t seeking revenge, says a relative of 36-year-old Jawaher Abu Rahmah, who died Saturday after she inhaled tear gas at a protest in the West Bank village of Bil’in. What they want is an end to the occupation and their land back.
“For me, as relative, her death – a martyred death – at the hands of the Israeli occupation, is an honor for me,” says Abu Nidar Abu Rahmah, Jawaher’s uncle. Her brother, Bassem, was killed in April 2009 by a tear gas canister fired during a demonstration in the same village.
“No one from the army has called us to apologize,” he says. “There is no communication between us and the army. Even when Bassem was hit, we spoke to the army and asked them to send help, and they never did.”
Jawaher had been working in recent years with her younger brother and sister as tailors in Ramallah, says Mohammed Al Khatib, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the village. After Bassem was killed, most of the responsibility for bringing in an income fell on her shoulders.
The father of the family, who had been employed in construction in Israel until diabetes prevented him from working, died six years ago after battling cancer. The family’s impoverished state meant that seven children – five boys and two girls – cut short their high school education and went out to work. The two youngest sons studied at a boarding school in Bethlehem.
Now family matriarch Subhiyeh has four sons and one daughter left. One of her sons, Ashraf, was shot in the leg at close range by an Israel Defense Forces soldier in 2008, after he was arrested and tied, handcuffed and blindfolded, to an IDF jeep. The soldier who shot him maintained that he was acting on the orders of his commander, Omri Burberg.
Part of the land owned by the family is now used for homes from the settlement of Modi’in Illit. Another part is behind the West Bank separation fence, they expect to get a few dunam back when Israel changes the route of the fence in accordance with a High Court order.
The whole family currently lives in a three-room house. At the time of his death, Bassem had just laid the foundations for a house he intended to build for the entire family. Khatib says that the last thing the women in the village heard Jawaher say was how much she was looking forward to moving into their new home.
“Our family believes in Allah,” says Abu Nidar, “they know and I know that the occupation army has made us all into targets. We are not surprised by anything that happens. Now the family is not seeking vengeance, we just hope that our girl will go to heaven. Jawaher’s mother said she doesn’t want revenge. Allah will avenge us.”
“We have no problem will the people of Israel. We have a problem with the army and the occupation,” he says. “We know that our land will be returned to us even if someone is killed every day. We say this to [Benjamin] Netanyahu: The demonstrations here will not end until we get our land back. We believe in a popular struggle, a non-violent struggle. We don’t want a violent struggle.”
EDITOR: Chomsky gets it wrong again…
In this otherwise interesting article, Chomsky again makes an argument for the Two-State solution, rubishing the One_State solution by defining it thus;
“Therefore those concerned with Palestinian rights should call for Israeli takeover of the entire West Bank, followed by an anti-apartheid struggle of the South African variety that would lead to full citizenship for the Arab population there.”
This is totally nonsensical. No one in Palestine, or no one progressive elsewhere, is considering or proposing this anathema. Chomsky is setting up a straw-man, so he can knock it down. The one-state idea is not based on the racist, ultra-nationalist state of Israel as it now is, but on a future secular, democratic state of ALL ITS CITIZENS. This state cannot, by definition, be Jewish, Muslim or Christian, and will not be Zionist. Hence, Chomsky’s argument against secularism and democracy in Palestine is false, and also anti-democratic. For a thinker of his standing to resort to such low tactics is sad, and proves that for all his critique of Israeli brutalities, he is wedded firmly to the Zionist tennets of a Jewish State.
Breaking the Israel-Palestine Deadlock: truth-out
Monday 03 January 2011
by: Noam Chomsky
Palestinian Abu Ayaesh picks his grape harvest downhill from the homes of the Karmi Zur settlement. (Photo: michaelramallah)
While intensively engaged in illegal settlement expansion, the government of Israel is also seeking to deal with two problems: a global campaign of what it perceives as “delegitimation” – that is, objections to its crimes and withdrawal of participation in them – and a parallel campaign of legitimation of Palestine.
The “delegitimation,” which is progressing rapidly, was carried forward in December by a Human Rights Watch call on the U.S. “to suspend financing to Israel in an amount equivalent to the costs of Israel’s spending in support of settlements,” and to monitor contributions to Israel from tax-exempt U.S. organizations that violate international law, “including prohibitions against discrimination” – which would cast a wide net. Amnesty International had already called for an arms embargo on Israel. The legitimation process also took a long step forward in December, when Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil recognized the State of Palestine (Gaza and the West Bank), bringing the number of supporting nations to more than 100.
International lawyer John Whitbeck estimates that 80-90 percent of the world’s population live in states that recognize Palestine, while 10-20 percent recognize the Republic of Kosovo. The U.S. recognizes Kosovo but not Palestine. Accordingly, as Whitbeck writes in Counterpunch, media “act as though Kosovo’s independence were an accomplished fact while Palestine’s independence is only an aspiration which can never be realized without Israeli-American consent,” reflecting the normal workings of power in the international arena.
Given the scale of Israeli settlement of the West Bank, it has been argued for more a decade that the international consensus on a two-state settlement is dead, or mistaken (though evidently most of the world does not agree). Therefore those concerned with Palestinian rights should call for Israeli takeover of the entire West Bank, followed by an anti-apartheid struggle of the South African variety that would lead to full citizenship for the Arab population there.
The argument assumes that Israel would agree to the takeover. It is far more likely that Israel will instead continue the programs leading to annexation of the parts of the West Bank that it is developing, roughly half the area, and take no responsibility for the rest, thus defending itself from the “demographic problem” – too many non-Jews in a Jewish state – and meanwhile severing besieged Gaza from the rest of Palestine.
One analogy between Israel and South Africa merits attention. Once apartheid was implemented, South African nationalists recognized they were becoming international pariahs because of it. In 1958, however, the foreign minister informed the U.S. ambassador that U.N. condemnations and other protests were of little concern as long as South Africa was supported by the global hegemon – the United States. By the 1970s, the U.N. declared an arms embargo, soon followed by boycott campaigns and divestment. South Africa reacted in ways calculated to enrage international opinion. In a gesture of contempt for the U.N. and President Jimmy Carter – who failed to react so as not to disrupt worthless negotiations – South Africa launched a murderous raid on the Cassinga refugee camp in Angola just as the Carter-led “contact group” was to present a settlement for Namibia. The similarity to Israel’s behavior today is striking – for example, the attack on Gaza in January 2009 and on the Gaza freedom flotilla in May 2010.
Noam Chomsky says, “Truthout is performing an invaluable service, for those who hope to understand the world, and to go on to change it.” Do you agree? Support our work by clicking here.
When President Reagan took office in 1981, he lent full support to South Africa’s domestic crimes and its murderous depredations in neighboring countries. The policies were justified in the framework of the war on terror that Reagan had declared on coming into office. In 1988, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress was designated one of the world’s “more notorious terrorist groups” (Mandela himself was only removed from Washington’s “terrorist list” in 2008). South Africa was defiant, and even triumphant, with its internal enemies crushed, and enjoying solid support from the one state that mattered in the global system.
Shortly after, U.S. policy shifted. U.S. and South African business interests very likely realized they would be better off by ending the apartheid burden. And apartheid soon collapsed. South Africa is not the only recent case where ending U.S. support for crimes has led to significant progress. Can such a transformative shift happen in Israel’s case, clearing the way to a diplomatic settlement? Among the barriers firmly in place are the very close military and intelligence ties between the U.S. and Israel.
The most outspoken support for Israeli crimes comes from the business world. U.S. high-tech industry is closely integrated with its Israeli counterpart. To cite just one example, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, Intel, is establishing its most advanced production unit in Israel.
A U.S. cable released by WikiLeaks reveals that Rafael military industries in Haifa is one of the sites considered vital to U.S. interests due to its production of cluster bombs; Rafael had already moved some operations to the U.S. to gain better access to U.S. aid and markets. There is also a powerful Israel lobby, though of course dwarfed by the business and military lobbies.
Critical cultural facts apply, too. Christian Zionism long precedes Jewish Zionism, and is not restricted to the one-third of the U.S. population that believes in the literal truth of the Bible. When British Gen. Edmund Allenby conquered Jerusalem in 1917, the national press declared him to be Richard the Lionhearted, finally rescuing the Holy Land from the infidels.
Next, Jews must return to the homeland promised to them by the Lord. Articulating a common elite view, Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, described Jewish colonization of Palestine as an achievement “without comparison in the history of the human race.”
There is also an instinctive sympathy for a settler-colonial society that is seen to be retracing the history of the U.S. itself, bringing civilization to the lands that the undeserving natives had misused – doctrines deeply rooted in centuries of imperialism.
To break the logjam it will be necessary to dismantle the reigning illusion that the U.S. is an “honest broker” desperately seeking to reconcile recalcitrant adversaries, and to recognize that serious negotiations would be between the U^.S.-Israel and the rest of the world.
If U.S. power centers can be compelled by popular opinion to abandon decades-old rejectionism, many prospects that seem remote might become suddenly possible.
(Noam Chomsky’s most recent book, with co-author Ilan Pappe, is “Gaza in Crisis.” Chomsky is emeritus professor of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.)
© 2011 Noam Chomsky
Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.
Israel’s Qassam strikes on Gaza: Haaretz
Vilnai is depending on Israelis’ total indifference to our Qassams: our soldiers’ nearly daily firing on Gaza civilians, regularly wounding and sometimes killing them.
By Amira Hass
If anyone in the world had called Israel an “abscess,” we would have generated a wave of protests, and learned scholars of anti-Semitism would lecture about the vocabulary that the Nazis borrowed from pathology and microbiology (the same holds for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ). But when a deputy prime minister of Israel and a member of the Labor Party used a clinical metaphor to talk about the Gaza Strip this week (“Gaza is an abscess, troublesome pus” ), no one got upset. We are always allowed to do what others are not.
In February 2008, the same politician, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, warned the Palestinians that they would bring upon themselves “a bigger shoah” – using the Hebrew word for both a generic catastrophe and the Holocaust – if they continued firing rockets at Israel. That was shortly before an Israel Defense Forces offensive that killed 107 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians. Two IDF soldiers were also killed.
Vilnai’s words at the time were misunderstood, or deliberately twisted, making it sound like he was pledging that Israel would bring about a “bigger shoah” in Gaza. (“Bigger” than what? Than the Nakba of 1948? ) But he did announce that Israel would take revenge imminently, and laid the blame on the Palestinians. And without intending to, he revealed a characteristic imperviousness to the connotations of his words and showed contempt for our people’s history.
Exactly two years after the start of Operation Cast Lead, an offensive that kept 1.5 million people trapped by clearly superior Israeli firepower, Vilnai decided to describe the Gaza Strip as an abscess. What was he trying to convey when he made his comments Monday during an appearance before the Eshkol regional council? That now Israel needs to use radical surgery to fully remove the localized infection? Vilnai once again renounced any Israeli responsibility for the volatility, placing all the blame on Hamas. “Instead of worrying about its own people, Hamas is trying to conquer Jerusalem,” he said.
Vilnai didn’t have to depend on Israelis’ short memory, since you can’t forget what you don’t want to know in the first place. He is depending on Israelis’ total indifference to our Qassams: our soldiers’ nearly daily firing on Gaza civilians, regularly wounding and sometimes killing them. The civilians are mainly farmers trying to work their land, fishermen who make their living off the sea, and unemployed parents and their children who rummage through the rubble of Gaza’s former settlements.
Just like the masked men of Iz al-Din al-Qassam, Vilnai is employing the logic of “They started it, so we have the right to respond.” Hamas cannot guarantee even that college students will be able to reach their universities or that destroyed Palestinian homes will be restored, so it boasts about some mythical future. For domestic consumption, and to justify Islamic financial support, Hamas commanders are faking their ability to match the IDF’s deterrent capability. Along comes Vilnai, who uses that to depict a virtual reality in which Israel is not the occupying power but the victim, and to say that the reason Israelis in the south don’t feel secure has nothing to do with his government’s policies, but is linked to some kind of external contamination.
In January 1991, when Vilnai was GOC Southern Command, he signed a military order on which the entire disastrous Israeli policy toward Gaza is based. It was the order to revoke the general exit permit granted to Palestinians at the beginning of the 1970s. In other words, it’s the order that denied the Palestinians’ right to freedom of movement and that imposed the closure regime that prevails to this day. Beyond the economic deterioration and the serious health and environmental damage that continues to be caused by the closure, the isolation from the rest of the world – especially from Palestinian society in the West Bank and Israel – has closed off the educational, cultural and social avenues of development in Gaza.
It was Vilnai’s signature, not a persistent infection, that fated the Gaza Strip to be the world’s largest and most overcrowded detention camp. And we, the Israelis, are its wardens.
EDITOR: Neo-Nazis and fascists in Europe support their brethren in Israel
While we should not be really surprised about this, it is still useful to see that fascists unite in the cause of colonialism and oppression…
Support for Israel’s Settlements From Europe’s Right: NYTimes
By ROBERT MACKEY
An Israeli video report on a visit to West Bank settlements this month by the leaders of anti-immigrant political parties from Europe.
As my colleague Ethan Bronner reports, Israelis are divided over a West Bank settlement construction boom.
Activists from the group Peace Now decry the construction of 2,000 new homes on land Israel has occupied since 1967, with 13,000 more to follow, as an obstacle to the formation of a viable Palestinian state. Leading settlers, like David Ha’Ivri, a spokesman for the West Bank’s Samaria Regional Council, welcome the construction. Mr. Ha’Ivri told The Times: “The Peace Now numbers are reliable. Their count seems to be correct. The only difference is that they see it as negative, and we see it as positive.”
Outside Israel, most of the world’s governments oppose the settlement construction, but in recent weeks the settlers have found solid support from what might seem an unlikely source: the far-right of the European political spectrum.
Geert Wilders, whose anti-immigrant party supports the government of the Netherlands, said in a speech this month in Tel Aviv, “Jews need to settle Judea and Samaria,” using the ancient Hebrew name for the West Bank. He added, “Without Judea and Samaria, Israel cannot protect Jerusalem.”
Mr. Wilders told Reuters, “Our culture is based on Christianity, Judaism and humanism and [the Israelis] are fighting our fight.” He added, “If Jerusalem falls, Amsterdam and New York will be next.”
During his trip to Israel, Mr. Wilders also met with Israel’s most prominent settler, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, as Radio Netherlands reported.
The day after Mr. Wilders spoke in Tel Aviv, a delegation of anti-immigrant politicians from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Britain and Sweden toured West Bank settlements. Arutz Sheva, a settler news organization, observed: “Sixty-five years after the defeat of the Third Reich, a senior delegation of European right-wing politicians toured Samaria Monday in support of the Jews who live there, whom they see as a bridgehead in the struggle against a common foe — Islamic jihadism and expansionism.”
Writing in Haaretz, Adar Primor noted that some of these newly-minted supporters of Israel, like Austria’s Heinz-Christian Strache and Belgium’s Filip Dewinter, lead parties with anti-Semitic roots. Mr. Primor suggested that the anti-immigrant leaders had come to Israel “after trading in their Jewish demon-enemy for the Muslim criminal-immigrant model.” He added:
“Dewinter is a leader of Vlaams Belang party, a successor to the Flemish National Movement, many of whose members collaborated with the Nazis. Among its current members are a number of Holocaust deniers. Dewinter himself moved about in anti-Semitic circles and has ties to European extremist and neo-Nazi parties. In 1988, he paid his respects to the tens of thousands of Nazi soldiers buried in Belgium, and in 2001, he opened a speech with an oath used by the SS.
The honor of lighting the torch goes to the brightest jewel in this racist crown – Heinz-Christian Strache, leader of Austria’s Freedom Party. If Jorg Haider was “Hitler’s spiritual grandson,” then Strache is his extremely illegitimate great-grandson. His grandfather was in the Waffen-SS, and his father served in the Wehrmacht. As a university student, Strache belonged to an extremist organization from which Jews were banned, hung out with neo-Nazis and participated in paramilitary exercises with them.”
During their visit, Mr. Strache and Mr. Dewinter issued what they called their “Jerusalem Declaration” in support of Israel as a key ally in the struggle against “fundamentalist Islam.” (The declaration can be read in the original German on the Web site of the Austrian Freedom Party.)
As Slavoj Zizek explained in October, most of Europe’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim political parties are based on ethnic nationalist ideals: “From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride in one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society — ‘it is our country, love it or leave it’ is the message.” Of course Israel was founded to be a nation state, on the European model, but there is still something odd about hearing, as one can in the Arutz Sheva video report at the top of this post, an anti-immigrant German politician declaring that Israel has a right to the West Bank because it is the land of the Jewish “volk.”
The settler spokesman David Ha’Ivri, who helped host the European delegation, told Arutz Sheva: “If these European leaders — with their ties to anti-Semitic groups and their past — come around and declare that Israel has a right to exist securely in all of the areas under our control, and that Europe has a moral responsibility because of the crimes of their past, then I believe that we should accept their friendship.” Calling their statements of support for the settlements, “the strongest possible tool in the war against anti-Semitism,” Mr. Ha’ivri added:
“No skinhead cares what [Anti-Defamation League Chairman] Abe Foxman has to say, but if Filip Dewinter and Heinz-Christian Strache make these statements they will have real impact. For that reason I am considering appearing with them in their countries for pro-Israel rallies. I think that it is worth the risk of being defamed by Haaretz and the like if we can cause a shift in the European nationalist movements, moving them away from their traditional Jew-hatred and bringing them closer to appreciation of Zionism. I don’t think that I am naive to feel that this is a revolutionary opportunity.”
Majalli Wahabi, an Israeli Druze politician who is a member of Israel’s Parliament and with the opposition Kadima Party, wrote in The Jerusalem Post that the embrace of Europe’s anti-Islamists worried him:
“As the Knesset representative to and vice chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership Committee, I see firsthand how Israel’s standing in the world is deteriorating. This is not to speak of Arab countries and some of their allies, nor of the Scandinavian countries who always took a harsh stance against us, but many in the European Union.”
The situation is far worse when we see those in Europe who we call “our friends” – starting with Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who campaigns to stop Islamization and frequently visits, and to Heinz Christian Strache, who ousted the late Jörg Haider as the Austrian Freedom Party leader and who last week came to Samaria for a solidarity visit with the settlers.
When the central leadership of Europe turns its back on Israel, we take comfort in the arms of radicals, just because they prefer at this stage to pursue Muslims rather than Jews. It’s time to stop and rethink before it is too late. We must consider if this is the society we want, if the current tone is worthy of expression and if these are the people worthy of our friendship.