David Norris (Independent)

The Minister of State is a decent and intelligent man, but his speech was pretty poor. It was timid, pusillanimous, apologetic and lickspittling to the Americans. I was astonished at the sequence of ideas. There was a general expression of concern about the level of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, which is entirely due to the Israeli invasion of that area, and a gesture towards a reciprocal ceasefire under the supervision of the international model. Why does the Minister of State not take the bull by the horns and admit that to protect the human rights of people who are being shot like rabbits every day of the week, Israel must accede to the requests for international observers to be brought in immediately? We must have some idea what is going on. Did the Israelis not bulldoze Rachel Corrie into the ground? Did they not shoot an unarmed reporter, James Miller? There was hardly any protest about this. Why was that?

The Minister of State also condemned attacks on Israel and called on the Palestinian Authority to take immediate action against terrorists. He must know this is rubbish. I have been there and I presume he has too. I have seen the devastated police stations. The Israelis have deliberately destroyed the infrastructure. The Palestinian police are not even allowed to wear uniforms when they are directing traffic. They have no means of controlling terrorism. The Minister of State also referred to Hamas. Hamas was established by the Israelis in order to impinge on the Palestinian Authority. It is coming back to haunt them now, sadly, at the expense of innocent Israeli lives.

The Minister of State referred to the security fence. That is an interesting use of language. I wonder whether he has seen it. It is a wall. I have been there. It horrifies me because it reminds me of the ghetto wall in Warsaw. On one side it is a nice, pretty wall with murals, about a quarter of the height it is on the other side. I know something of the distress of the people living there, as do many Israelis, who would be disgusted by the timidity of the Minister of State's speech. This disgust would be shared by groups such as Physicians for Human Rights — distinguished doctors who queue outside the ghettos, waiting their turn in the rain to go in and treat Palestinians because they do not agree to the suspension of their human rights.

The Minister of State reaffirms the calls of Mr. Bush for an end to the occupation. I do not remember any such calls, but that is what should be done. Israel should withdraw to within its 1967 boundaries and obtain guarantees from the surrounding states. The one place where settlements cannot be satisfactorily dismantled is in Jerusalem, because it is so organically embedded in its surroundings I do not see how it could be done. However, Israel should sow the seeds of peace with an act of generosity, unlike what happened at Taba. It should agree that instead of demolishing these buildings it will make them available to its Palestinian cousins.

Many European countries which were involved in the Holocaust against the Jews, which was a shameful crime, should help to subsidise the building of decent neighbourhoods for the people displaced from these settlements.

In the Minister of State's attempt to do a balancing act, he has not done a service to this House. He referred to Nick Berg, which was an horrific appalling occurrence for his unfortunate family. They blame the United States Government because he was arbitrarily arrested by United States forces and detained there, but they made no attempt to guarantee his safety on the way out. Perhaps he was set up. His family feels aggrieved at the Bush Administration for what happened.

The Minister of State expressed his deep concern at reports that some 40 people were killed by US forces in an incident last week, the circumstances of which must still be clarified. I can clarify them for him. It was a wedding. There is contemporary video and eye-witness accounts that it was a wedding. The people killed who have been identified included children and one of the best known entertainers in Iraq, who was performing at the wedding. That imbecile general said he does not know why people would go 40 miles into the desert. Many of these people are called Bedouin and they do it regularly. I have visited the area and I know a little about it. It does not need to be clarified. What awaits to be clarified is the fact that the general said he had nothing for which to apologise. He said he would not apologise for his troops because nasty things happen in war. They certainly do when an army is out of control and the tone is set by the commander-in-chief, President George Bush, who is personally implicated in the whole mess, particularly in the use of torture.

Last summer, I read an analysis of American foreign policy by Gore Vidal who said the sweetest four words in the English language were "I told you so". They are not; they are the bitterest because some of us on all sides stood up here during the debates and warned what would happen in the Middle East. However, we are impotent and make no impact. It is dreadful to experience standing by and seeing what one forecast happening. We should recall the language used by the soldiers during the war such as "Iraq is a disease and we are the cure", which is sinister, and "I got that chick", when a woman civilian was killed.

This all came about because President Bush decided unilaterally and arbitrarily to suspend the Geneva Conventions as they operate in particular areas and for particular groups of people. He has no authority to do so. He set about systematically and deliberately to undermine the rule of law in areas of human rights, destroy international conventions in these areas and deprive people of the very basic human rights. He is directly responsible. I will quote from an article in the weekend review in The Irish Times on Saturday, 15 May 2004, which states:

In some cases, such as determining whether a US citizen should be designated an enemy combatant who can be held without charge, the president makes the final decision, as Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, said on February 24th in a speech to the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security.

It could not be clearer. The President's finger prints are on this gun, which is not smoking — it has actually fired a fair few bullets at this stage. That makes the man a war criminal.

They call Guantanamo "Gitmo". The personnel from Guantanamo were transferred within the last year to Abu Ghraib prison with instructions to "Gitmoise" the situation there. What we have are people torn to pieces by dogs, people covered in their own excrement, people forced to fish food out of a lavatory bowl and people forced into humiliating images of copulation in front of female officers. The most disturbing of all is a pretty young "bimbo" in her 20s, with her head resting on the ground and her two fingers up in a victory salute beside the corpse of a man who had been battered to death. This is not far from the Nazis, but should this surprise anyone who knows of the Bush family's connections with the Nazi party in the 1920s? This is worrying.

I honour Deputy O'Donnell who spoke for all of us when she said in the Dáil that the United States has been shamed by what has been happening. However, there is no shame in President Bush. This is a man who corrupts language. There was no condemnation from Bush when they shot rockets from a helicopter at an unarmed, slowly-moving civilian group of peaceful demonstrators. President Bush reaffirmed backing for Israel as a courageous ally. This is the man who described Ariel Sharon, the man responsible for Sabra and Chatila, as a peacemaker. He appears to be either deliberately dishonest or completely disconnected from reality.

We must examine some of the other personnel like General Boykin, who is the Under-secretary of Defence with responsibility for intelligence. His ideas are interesting. He was one of the people sent to "Gitmoise" Abu Ghraib. In the past year, he staged a travelling slide show around the United States displaying pictures of Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. He is quoted as saying, "Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army". He preached they "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus". As a Christian who goes to church every Sunday, I am revolted by this and I object strenuously to this barbarian invoking a religion whose basic tenet he does not understand because it is about love and turning the other cheek against violence. How dare they abuse the religion to which the majority of people in this country, including Catholic, Protestant and so on, belong.

In regard to Israel, I am a friend of Israel and will remain so. However, I feel betrayed as that wonderful dream has been betrayed. I stand with the really courageous people of Israel, the 29 air force pilots who refused to bomb because they knew it was against international human rights protocols, including the physicians for human rights and my former partner, Ezra, who goes every Saturday to Hebron to protect his Arab cousins — the Jews are cousins of the Arabs. Tommy Lapid, whom I know but do not personally like very much, who was a victim of the Holocaust, said in the Knesset at the beginning of this week that the pictures of the demolitions in Gaza and elderly women wandering around reminded him of his grandmother and her experiences in Hungary. That is from the horse's mouth, which is what we should listen to.

What should we do? Instead of this vague, wishy-washy sentiment about looking for stability, peace, democracy and all this blabber, why not do the one thing we can in our current position, and it is not a boycott? I do not agree with a boycott, which has a nasty aura and a nasty smell about it in this country because it is so personally motivated. It would become a cover for anti-Semitism and it would be a pin prick. We can do something much more serious, which is to examine the human rights protocols attached to the association agreement between the Israel and the European Union. When there are situations where people are being picked off like rabbits, including men, women and children, and there is utter abuse of human rights in Israel, if the human rights protocols are to mean anything and are not just a cosmetic decoration, when else should we operate them other than when Ireland is in the driving seat? This is what I am calling for, not an easy sentimental boycott which will do nothing except release anti-Semitism, which I deplore. We must use the instruments in the treaty itself.

This is a terrible situation, for which the Americans are largely responsible, not just in Iraq but also in Israel because it is under the shadow of the criminal regime in Washington that Sharon operates. It is by this that he is protected.

Even if one accepts American motivations, it has still been disastrous. They set out to look for weapons of mass destruction, yet not a single thing was found. We all said that would be the case but they would not listen. They frustrated Mr. Blix and the inspectors. They then forged a completely nonsensical relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. There were no members of al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time but there certainly are now. There was a secular state run by a tyrant that the Americans had placed in power, but at least it was run efficiently. There is now a shattered society and the possibility of a civil war. People are up in arms and I do not blame them.

There is now the real possibility of a fanatical Sharia regime. This was done at the behest of whom? Some very interesting material was released over the weekend which suggested that they were used like cats' paws by Iranian intelligence. It suggested that Ahmed Chalabi misled them deliberately and fed information to the Iranians so that the Americans could be used by proxy to knock out Iraq in the interests of Iran. This is the type of moral, intellectual and spiritual imbeciles with whom we are dealing. The visit of President George W. Bush, a known war criminal, is a disgrace to this country and I do not want to meet him. I would only like to meet him on the way out of Shannon, through which some of the torturers have probably moved.

I passed some information to the Leader of this House about Canadian citizens who were grabbed in JFK airport by the CIA. They were shackled, interrogated, placed on private planes and exported to Syria to be tortured, yet the US is simultaneously and hypocritically denouncing Syria. I named these people and we now have even more information in reports from Amnesty International. These reports make it clear that the UK and the US are without moral leadership or any vision. This small country, with a pivotal position in Europe, should not be allied to nations that are morally bankrupt and are on the way to imitating the excesses of the Nazis in the 1930s.