Total number of comments: 163 (since 2010-06-20 17:59:23)
Kate
American (New Englander); Muslim; B.A., M.A. in political science; former ISM volunteer in the West Bank
Website: http://www.theheadlines.org
Showing comments 163 - 101
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Showing comments 163 - 101
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There's this AP article at HuffPost:
link to huffingtonpost.com
link to bostonglobe.com
"By including digital subscribers, he said, circulation figures “better reflect the marketplace reality where readers are being counted, whether they are reading online or in print, and these new metrics are showing a strong demand for journalism in our chaotic information environment.’’
That demand was perhaps best exemplified by The New York Times’s dramatic 73 percent increase in total circulation in the six-month report, fueled in large part by digital gains. The Audit Bureau of Circulations said the Times online now has more subscribers than the newspaper’s print version. Average digital circulation was 807,026, compared with print circulation of 779,731, for a total of 1,586,757."
Thank goodness for Wikipedia - I was totally mystified by your headline, never having seen the term 'nutmeg' before, but then I'm no football fan.
As for Netanyahu's father 'resting in peace', why should he? He would have been the last person to want Arabs to live in peace. His influence on his son is most probably responsible for a lot of misery.
I can't help commenting on this post because I stayed in this beautiful village for a few days back in 2002 and still communicate with the family who opened their home to me. We picked olives on the hill across the settler road, keeping a sharp eye out for Israeli helicopters and jeeps. One day after some large helicopters went over the olive grove toward the village, Israeli soldiers in several vehicles closed the entrance to the village, leaving many Palestinians in their cars waiting to get in. When I went over to find out why, an obviously American-Israeli soldier said to me, "We just wanted to talk - you wouldn't want us to talk in the middle of the road, would you?" In fact the soldiers, including those from the helicopters, were preparing to hold some kind of practice maneuver on the far side of the village, as witnessed by some mortar fire a short time later. So what if the people couldn't get into or out of their village?
Aside from the great economic value of olive trees, picking olives is an almost idyllic experience, except when the army is around. The setting is beautiful, the food brought from the village or cooked on the spot is delicious, the company is great. Everyone looks forward to olive-picking season, the anticipation tempered only by fear of attacks by settlers. I can't express my anger at the way what should be a peaceful experience is so often ruined by these invaders. And as for stealing, burning, and uprooting olive trees, this is unspeakable.
Look at the entry for Deir Istiya on Palestine Remembered to see a photo I took of 'my' family returning to the village after a day of picking. The village on its hill in the golden light of late afternoon is truly lovely.
link to palestineremembered.com
'Martyr' (shaheed in Arabic) does not mean suicide bomber. There is a special word for that. 'Shaheed' means someone killed in a war, which the situation in I/P certainly is, and has been for decades. A child killed by a land mine is a martyr. A woman dying in childbirth because she isn't allowed through a checkpoint to get to a hospital is a martyr. A person killed as 'collateral damage' in a targeted assassination is a martyr. A person run over and killed by a settler is a martyr. Let's get this straight.
Loved it! Really brought back memories.
Even worse photo:
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/404031_3278174466189_1022320161_3162169_1154654790_n.jpg
This kid won't be 'OK' without plastic surgery, and perhaps not even then. I met a man in the West Bank who had been shot in the face like this, also just to the right of his lips, and he had had plastic surgery twice and still had a bad scar. With typical Palestinian resilience and humor, he said he was thinking of asking the Israelis to do it again so the two sides of his face would match.
Hard to see how Palestinians could put up with one state. Who could stand to live with these creatures?
Izak, "Fortunately there were no collaterals" ? What do you call these people hurt in the Israeli strikes?
link to maannews.net
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- A correspondent for Ma'an-Mix satellite TV and his pregnant wife sustained injuries late Friday in Israel's bombardment of Gaza.
Muamin Shrafi was injured by shrapnel and his wife Iftikhar sustained bruises when a missile landed near their home in Gaza City's Shujaiyyah area.
Or these?
link to maannews.net
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces opened fire on mourners near the Gaza Strip's eastern cemetery on Saturday and injured four people, a government medical official said.
Oh, I forgot, you probably consider all Palestinians terrorists.
Pabelmont, it isn't new, really. It's been used in chatrooms for a long time, by people without Arabic keyboards, or in Latin alphabet-only chats. See link to en.wikipedia.org
Arabic has a lot of consonants that aren't found in the Latin alphabet - so in English some letters are used for two different sounds in Arabic, like the two h's (the one in Muhammad and the one in hijra). The first one is often written with a 7 in chat alphabets - the letter in Arabic script looks a bit like a 7: ح
A very common sound in Arabic is ‘ayn, as in Ma‘an, Shu‘fat refugee camp, Ni‘lin, Bil‘in, even ‘Abbas, ‘Arafat, ‘Iraq, ‘Anata (village). It usually isn't written in English when it's initial, as in the names just mentioned, though sometimes E is used (‘Urayqat rendered as Erekat). In other positions in a word it's usually written in English with an apostrophe (Ma'an, Ni'lin), but this is problematic because there is another sound in Arabic, hamza (the glottal stop, like the catch in the middle of uh-uh in English), which is also usually written with an apostrophe in English: Qu'ran. One well-known name with both of these sounds, ‘ayn at the beginning and hamza after the first vowel: ‘A'isha.
I am not going to try to describe the sound ‘ayn, I will just say that it's made using muscles not used for speech in English, and is hard for speakers of other languages to learn. In chat alphabets it is often written 3, because one form of the Arabic letter looks like a backward 3: ع
Excellent, thank you Ahmed.
Leah McElrath @alphaleah
#BAHRAIN :MT @adshap: @radhikasainath punched n head; @huwaidaarraf hair pulled; no food/water/restroom whole flight - pilot didn't respond
By the way, the beatings mentioned in the headline were done by Israeli forces and a settlement guard, not settlers themselves.
One story in this list that rather intrigues me is this:
Israeli guard suspected of confining Palestinian woman to get her phone number
Haaretz 5 Feb -- Alleged incident took place in Jerusalem’s Ras Hamis checkpoint, where the Palestinian law student says she was detained until the security guard verified she gave him her real number ... Following the woman’s complaint, Jerusalem’s police department opened an investigation on the matter, following which the security guard was questioned under warning and released under limitation. Police sources indicated that he was suspected of harassment. Dozens of residents of the woman’s home village of Ras Hamis, upon gaining knowledge of the incident, raided the checkpoint, protesting what they called an abuse of the woman’s honor.
link to haaretz.com
What did this deluded security guard think he was going to do with her phone number? Did he seriously think she'd be interested in him? Amazing.
It is not the case for most Muslims that only fish with scales can be lawfully eaten. Shrimp, crab, lobster, clams, etc. are all considered halal, because all creatures from the sea are lawful.
There are some Muslims and Muslim groups that believe bottom-feeders like lobsters are not halal, on analogy with non-halal carrion eaters like vultures.
Some Muslims accept all meat slaughtered by other People of the Book (Jews, Christians), presuming that the animals are killed in the name of God.
It's complicated.
Our Sunni mosque holds discussion groups with the Conservative synagogue in the next block -- I remember that the one about kosher and halal was fascinating for the many different beliefs and practices among the attendees.
Few seem to have doubts that the assassination involved Israel. The NY Times yesterday:
link to nytimes.com
"WASHINGTON — As arguments flare in Israel and the United States about a possible military strike to set back Iran’s nuclear program, an accelerating covert campaign of assassinations, bombings, cyberattacks and defections appears intended to make that debate irrelevant, according to current and former American officials and specialists on Iran.
The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim on Wednesday when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour...."
Don't miss the first two articles under 'Settlers' and the first one under 'Israeli forces', among others.
Memphis, go to Google Images and look for "O little town of Bethlehem cartoon"
Several of the best Bethlehem cartoons are listed - the one I think you want is the second one, next to the one about the Magi stymied by the Wall. You can either just download the image as is, or go to the website it's on - find the image by clicking on "Christianity" in the list on the right side of the page and scroll down to #9. Then click on "O little town of Bethlehem alternative card"
More Bethlehem cartoons interspersed with other things, as you scroll down the page.
patm, I didn't mean that the MSM got stories from Shadi's/Seham's/my list, though that would be great if it happened. I just meant that we used to have to dig for stories in obscure places on the web, as well as in Palestinian and Israeli news sites, and now many of the very same stories (even if slanted in ways we don't like) appear in the AP or AFP or even the NY Times at the same time.
Formerly only a few egregious misdeeds appeared. For example - while I was in the West Bank in 2002 a Palestinian friend at home emailed me that his 60-year-old cousin Shaden Abu Hijleh, a peace activist, had just been shot to death by an Israeli sniper while sitting on her front porch in Nablus doing embroidery. I thought this story would sink without a trace as usual, but amazingly, the story appeared in the Times and several other places:
link to remembershaden.org
I suppose it was the combination of her gender, age, peace activism, and the lack of any militant activity going on at the time that caused the story to come out - most other stories were ignored as usual. Still, it was a start.
But now it is pretty common for such outrages to be covered in Western media. Not that that means anything is done about them.
Thank you, patm and Woody. It is grim, but I am encouraged by the fact that more information about the whole awful mess seems to be making it into the MSM. Some of what I put into the list actually appears there also, something that still surprises me. That certainly wasn't the case when this list was started by Shadi Fadda in late 2002. The information appears in newspapers, that is -- I hope more will show up on TV soon, since that seems to be where most people get their news.
Thank you, john h. I'm sure many readers will find the information on those websites close to unbelievable, but unfortunately it's true.
There have been two trials, patm, one for each of the two Palestinian teens accused of the Itamar killings. (You must not have read all the way through all the Today in Palestine lists, but then I imagine few people have the time to do so.)
TiP for 2 Aug 2011 includes a link to a Ynet article about Hakim Mazen Awad, 18, being found guilty after confessing in court.
TiP for 5 Oct 2011 includes a link to a Ma‘an article about Amjad Mahmad Awad, 19, also confessing before a military tribunal and pleading guilty.
Hey Annie, I thought you already were 'writer-at-large'! I love your posts, and your passion for justice.
Outrageous treatment by Israeli officials at borders and at the airport is common, though NYT journalists are not usually the targets. Check out this essay by Alison Weir on the subject from If Americans Knew (there is also a 13-minute video available there with interviews of victims telling their stories).
Humiliation and Child Abuse at Israeli Borders & Airports
link to ifamericaknew.org
This is a fairly well-known incident, but there are countless others:
"New Jersey stand-up comedian Maysoon Zayid describes being strip-searched at Ben Gurion Airport when she was “seven, eight, nine years old” on family trips to visit her parents’ original home in Palestine. On her most recent trip in July 2006, Maysoon, an American citizen, had her sanitary pad taken by officials in Ben Gurion Airport. When the search was completed, she says, the Israeli official in charge, Inbal Sharon, then refused to return her pad or allow her to get another.
Zayid, who has cerebral palsy and was sitting in a wheelchair, was then forced to bleed publicly for hours while she waited for her flight.
Zayid, a former class president and yearbook editor at New Jersey’s Cliffside Park High School known for her irreverent comedy routines and strong personality, describes sobbing uncontrollably. “No one spoke up,” she remembers. “There were several women, including the woman who was pushing my wheelchair, none of whom said a word.”
When she boarded her flight, Zayid recalls, “The flight attendants looked at me in disgust.” She told them what had happened, and the attendants then gave her some of their own clothing to use.
In addition to taking her sanitary napkin, Israeli officials also confiscated medication that Zayid is required to take when flying. As a result, she vomited repeatedly throughout the 12-hour flight. "
I think the Zionists have more than met their match in the Palestinians. Call it sumoud, steadfastness, determination, stubbornness, whatever - the Palestinians are NOT going to be defeated. And they are not going to leave. I'm not sure the Zionists realize this, even now. Their racism means that they will always underestimate the Palestinians.
Newclench, could you explain your comment? I may be blind but I don't see any combination of 'protest' and 'bombing' here.
By the way, Phil chooses the headline and the lead story for each Today in Palestine lists - Seham and I do not.
See Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh's article on the subject of Netanyahu's lies (in Today in Palestine list for today, Wednesday); has link to interesting video.
"Sarkozy called Netanyahu a liar. So what's all the fuss about? Netanyahu has admitted this publicly. The question now is whether or not his lies will pull the region into a war with Iran--a conflict that some Arab leaders support behind closed doors.
"I do not know why people are surprised at what Sarkozy and Obama said to each other in private about Netanyahu as a liar. This is, after all, the same Netanyahu who gave a speech to dozens of Likud Party members in Eilat in which he admitted this is his strategy. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (15 July 2001): "...giving his audience a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers (Netanyahu said): 'Always, irrespective of whether you're right or not, you must always present your side as right.'" So Netanyahu admitted to lying and Sarkozy and Obama merely agreed with Netenyahu, and most of the Israeli public, that the current Israeli prime minister is a perpetual liar.
"And here is Netanyahu, thinking cameras are off, bragging about how easy it is to manipulate the US and go around the Oslo commitments:
link to youtube.com
(make sure to click CC for English subtitles.)
I agree that it wasn't a good idea for PNN (or was it Ma‘an?) to use a 'file photo' of an injured child because they didn't yet have one of Aseel Arara. But many news outlets do this. One would hope that they usually do so for less sensitive stories, but I have certainly seen the same photos over and over again in the Western press when the subject was something in the Third World.
I doubt that there was any intent to deceive.
The Palestinian Information Center has this to say Thursday about the little girl paralyzed by the bullet:
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, (PIC)-- A four-year-old Palestinian girl was paralyzed for life after being hit with an Israeli bullet in her neck on Wednesday.
Professor Samy Hussein, a neurosurgeon at Maqased hospital in Jerusalem, said that a medical team had performed an operation on Aseel Ara’ra, 4, and that she was currently in the intensive care.
He said that the Israeli bullet penetrated her neck from the left and got out from her right shoulder directly inflicting irreparable damage to her spinal cord.
Hussein said that the bullet was most probably of a machinegun and not a pistol, adding that the chances of improving the child’s condition were very slim.
The Jerusalemite child was hit by the bullet on Wednesday fired from a training camp for the Israeli army built on Anata village land to the north east of occupied Jerusalem.
As far as the settlers are concerned, I rather like this from Micah 2:
Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil upon their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand.
They covet fields, and seize them; and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance.
Therefore thus says the Lord: Behold, against this family I am devising evil, from which you cannot remove your necks, and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be an evil time.
In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you, and wail with bitter lamentation, and say. "We are utterly ruined; he changes the portion of my people; how he removes it from me! Among the rebellious he divides our fields."
Sorry, Pabelmont, but the US is not a "majority person-of-color population" yet, not by a long shot. From link to 2010.census.gov
"While the non-Hispanic white alone [that is, not mixed with any other race] population increased numerically from 194.6 million to 196.8 million over the 10-year period, its proportion of the total population declined from 69 percent to 64 percent.
"The overwhelming majority (97 percent) of the total U.S. population reported only one race in 2010. This group totaled 299.7 million. Of these, the largest group reported white alone (223.6 million), accounting for 72 percent of all people living in the United States."
The difference between the 64% and the 72% is presumably accounted for by 'white Hispanics', who apparently do not view themselves as 'persons of color'.
Please look at this in the compilation above:
VIDEO: Celebration of the release of the batch of prisoners of freedom / Haitham al-Khatib
Haitham as usual manages to get to the heart of the matter. Hard to watch this with dry eyes.
link to youtube.com
Carlos Latuff has come up with a cartoon about the same thing:
link to twitpic.com
Maybe not quite, Chu, but in 1985, Israel released 1,150 prisoners in exchange for three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon. Question is, has any other country done this?
For some reason the link to Al-Akhbar and Max Blumenthal's article is no longer working. But you can read the article here:
link to uprootedpalestinians.blogspot.com
CitizenC, The Palestine Remembered site has some beautiful photos of ‘Ayn Karim, both B&W ones taken in the 1930s and recent color ones. It is truly a special place.
All the photos can be accessed from the following page, and there is an index:
link to palestineremembered.com
Thanks for that, Henry!
I'm so sorry, Phil. I wish you could have gone to the synagogue at the right time. What a disappointment that must have been.
Here is another, written by Hannah Mermelstein (of Birthright Unplugged) in 2004.
BOSTONTOPALESTINE
www.ismboston.org
Jewish activists paste Yom Kippur repentance-for-occupation message INSIDE the illegal Israeli settlement of Ariel.
report below from Hannah
---------------------------------------
Dear friends,
I won't be going to synagogue this year on Yom Kippur, but this morning I
participated in what I think is the most powerful thing I could have done
for the holiday. Please read below and share the prayer with friends,
colleagues, rabbis, and congregations. (Make sure you read it all - my
favorite part is the TAPUACH part, which comes at the end).
Hannah
24 September, 2004
International Women's Peace Service (IWPS) brings message of repentance to settlers
On Friday morning, September 24, 2004, Jewish IWPS activists offered the
settlers of Ariel and Tapuach a new penitential prayer for Yom Kippur.
The women posted copies of an alternative « Vidui » inside Ariel and in
areas around Tapuach, naming for each letter of the English and Hebrew
alphabet a sin committed by settlers in the name of the Jewish people. With
this revision of the traditional prayer, the activists hoped to communicate
to the settlers that their continued residence in the West Bank is an
obstacle to peace.
Please find the text of the new prayer in English below. Visit our website
at www.womenspeacepalestine.org/yom_kippur_action.htm for the complete flyer in English and Hebrew, along with photographs. [no longer available, but see sites listed at the end here]
Ashamnu for Ariel and Tapuach – Yom Kippur 5765
We have Appropriated land
We have Burned olive trees
We have Constructed Apartheid walls
We have Dumped our trash on the village of Marda
We have Erased history of Palestinians
We have Falsified the teachings of the Torah
We have Generalized about Arab people
We have Hated people because of their race
We have Ignored the suffering of our neighbors
We have ‘Judaized’ Palestinian areas
We have Killed children
We have Lied about our history
We have Manipulated public opinion
We have Neglected our responsibility to work for justice
We have Obstructed the right of refugees to return home
We have Punished collectively
We have Quietly transferred Palestinians from their homeland
We have Restricted free movement of Palestinians
We have Stolen olives from Palestinian farmers
We have Thwarted peace initiatives
We have Unfairly accused people of anti-Semitism
We have Vandalized
We have Wrongly educated our children
We have eXpunged Arabic from road signs
We have Yelled racist epithets
We have promoted Zionism
We have Acquiesced in things we know are wrong
We have Refused to compromise
We have Initiated false beliefs
We have Encouraged home demolitions
We have Lost our humanity
We have Terrorized the Palestinian population in the name of G-d
We have Aggressively prevented Palestinians from working on their land in
the name of G-d
We have Persecuted others in the name of our own persecution and in the name
of G-d
We have Used guns and laws to facilitate ethnic cleansing in the name of G-d
We have Assaulted in the name of G-d
We have Colonized in the name of G-d
We have Harmed the Jewish people in the name of G-d
For all these sins we have committed against G-d and our Palestinian
neighbors, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.
link to lists.indymedia.org
link to groups.yahoo.com
Hey lli, where do you think the US got the idea? Along with all the rest of it, hooding and humiliating prisoners, outright torture, etc. A horrible thing to watch, the US becoming more like Israel all the time.
Funny thing, DBG, that link you gave is about Jews going to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries - and Ethiopia is neither. Maybe you're the one who should read some history - even your own links.
And if you look up 1984's 'Operation Moses' you will find that the Ethiopian Jews were taken to Israel to save them from a famine, not from Muslims.
Ethiopia adopted Christianity as the state religion in the 4th century. It was Christian when some of the first Muslims fled there for safety from the pagans in the year 615. It is currently 62.8% Christian.
Taxi, thanks so much - you really made my week!
I was already proud and happy to see Abu Mazen stand up to those SOBs in spite of all the threats, regardless of what happens next.
And Boney M! Love their music. I watched the first video you linked to, and was thinking about mentioning Rivers of Babylon, one of my favorite songs of all time, and then saw that you had that too... we must be on the same wavelength.
Psalm 137, as you pointed out, is relevant to the Palestinians today:
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion ... For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning..."
[If you haven't heard Fairouz sing about Jerusalem/al-Quds, try this video: link to youtube.com
There is anger as well as longing in this song, understandably, but then the last verse of the Babylon psalm is angry too: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones."]
I suspect that since descendants of slaves in the Americas have forged such a strong connection through the Christian church between their history and the Bible's stories of the Jewish Egyptian and Babylonian captivity, it is difficult for African-Americans to see the Israelis as Pharaoh and the Palestinians as the Israelites. This might be why we don't yet see very many African Americans who are Palestinian activists as we would like. But this is changing, I think.
You are right, ToivoS. I have been thinking for some time about merging my "settlers" and "Israeli forces" categories in the Today in Palestine list - it doesn't seem that it is any longer possible to separate many of the misdeeds of one group from those of the other. To say nothing of the Israeli government's official actions.
I can't get this poor man's misfortune out of my head - not that that will do him any good. Gratuitous cruelty is really not understandable by normal people - and if there's a remedy for it outside of locking people up I don't see it.
Thank you! All I've heard for the past week at least is grief and fury over American losses. This I can understand from family members of those killed and those who were in New York or the Pentagon that day. But from other Americans? Don't we have any empathy at all for the thousands of innocent people killed overseas in our orgy of revenge?
Woods Hole, hmm? Can hardly think of that extreme SW corner as Cape Cod - I've never been there, am familiar with such central Cape places as Hyannis, West Yarmouth. I thought Woods Hole was mostly government and scientific installations - which it is, I think. Population 925 in the 2000 census. But I looked it up in Wikipedia and found this:
"Notable property owners on Penzance Point at the beginning of the twentieth century included Seward Prosser of New York's Bankers Trust Company; Francis Bartow, a partner in J. P. Morgan and Company; Joseph Lee, a partner in Lee, Higginson & Co.; and Franklin A. Park, an executive of Singer Sewing Machine. Other notable businessmen established homes on Gansett Point, Nobska Point, and at Quissett Harbor, further from the village center." Notable indeed.
I went to a Seven Sisters college in the late '50s - at that time the quota (upper limit, not lower) for Jews was 18%. I think this kind of anti-Semitism was widespread in the WASP upper class, and Woods Hole probably wasn't unusual.
Thank you, Lynn. Reading your evocative piece I almost think I was there too. Wish I had been. The way Palestinians manage to make a good life out of the little they've been allowed to keep is an inspiration to everyone.
Welcome, Remax!
This worries me too, but perhaps not quite for the same reason. The extremist settlers have always had plenty of weapons. What worries me is the extra excuse they now have for shooting Palestinians - they are 'planning to march en masse against the settlements' or some such nonsense. Considering how close many Palestinian villages are to settlements - after all, the settlements were carved out of the village lands - how close would a Palestinian have to be in order to be 'legally' shot - 20 yards? 100 yards? And not in the legs, either. God help any kid looking for a lost sheep, or any family trying to go from village to village in the vicinity of some nutcase settlement if a relative is taken sick suddenly or something.
This is not the first time. Something similar happened at Brandeis Univ. in Mass. in 2006.
link to haaretz.com
AP May 3 2006
"Brandeis University officials have removed from a school exhibit artwork that depicts injured and bloodied Palestinian children, according to a media report.
The images were painted by Palestinian teenagers at the request of an Israeli Jewish student at at the Jewish-sponsored college who wanted to bring the Palestinian viewpoint to campus. But school officials said the paintings were too one-sided.
The paintings were removed Saturday, four days into a two-week exhibit at a school library, The Boston Globe reported on Wednesday.
Lior Halperin, the student who organized the exhibit, called the school's action "outrageous."
"This (is) an educational institution that is supposed to promote debate and dialogue," Halperin told The Globe. "Let's talk about what it is: 12-year-olds from a Palestinian refugee camp. Obviously it's not going to be about flowers and balloons."
The images include a bulldozer threatening a girl, and a boy with an amputated leg on a crutch. Halperin had contacted a friend who works in a Bethlehem refugee camp and asked teenagers to paint images of Palestinian life.
Brandeis was founded in 1948 and is the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored college in the United States. Half of its students are Jewish. School officials said between six and a dozen complaints were made.
"It was completely from one side in the Israeli Palestinian conflict, and we can only go based on the complaints we received," Brandeis spokesman Dennis Nealon said, according to The Globe.
Nealon said the school would consider displaying the artwork again in the fall, if it is alongside pieces showing the Israeli point of view, The Globe reported.
Halperin, 27, is an Israel Defense Forces veteran. Her "Voices from Palestine" exhibit was a final project for a class called "The Arts of Building Peace."
....
link to democracynow.org
Brandeis University Takes Down Palestinian Youth Art Exhibit Mounted by Israeli Jewish Student - May 10 2006
An art exhibit at Brandeis University featuring 17 paintings by Palestinian youths was removed by university officials last week, after several complaints from students. We speak with the Israeli Jewish student who organized the exhibit and the director of Brandeis University’s International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life. [includes rush transcript]
We look at a controversy that has erupted over an art exhibit at Brandeis University in Boston. The exhibit features 17 paintings of Palestinian youths who depict their perspectives on life under Israeli military occupation. But just four days into a two-week run, the exhibit was removed by Brandeis officials after several complaints from students. A university spokesperson has said the school would consider re-mounting the paintings if they were to appear alongside paintings showing an Israeli perspective. The exhibit was organized by an Israeli Jewish student who said she wanted to showcase a Palestinian perspective on campus. The exhibit was subsequently moved to MIT where it is being housed for one week.
"On numerous occasions, Palestinian citizens of Israel have found themselves fired from jobs for speaking their mother tongue."
Reminds me of the treatment of Native Americans/American Indians, put by the US gov't in boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their own languages -- in the name of 'assimilation'.
link to npr.org
"The federal government began sending American Indians to off-reservation boarding schools in the 1870s, when the United States was still at war with Indians. An Army officer, Richard Pratt, founded the first of these schools. He based it on an education program he had developed in an Indian prison. He described his philosophy in a speech he gave in 1892.
"A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one," Pratt said. "In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
Fifty years later, Pratt's philosophy was still common.
In 1945, Bill Wright, a Pattwin Indian, was sent to the Stewart Indian School in Nevada. He was just 6 years old. Wright remembers matrons bathing him in kerosene and shaving his head. Students at federal boarding schools were forbidden to express their culture — everything from wearing long hair to speaking even a single Indian word. Wright said he lost not only his language, but also his American Indian name."
Similar things happened in Australia, to 'half-castes' who were considered to be too white to be allowed to grow up 'uncivilized'. They were taken from their Aboriginal mothers and brought up in a sort of prison school. I have met some of the victims of this policy.
It's 2011! Is Israel forever stuck in the past? I do not understand people who want everyone to be the same.
Phil, I have to disagree with you on this one. I do agree about the media hype, but not about the state of emergency and the hurricane warnings.
We are through the worst of Irene here in southern New England, at least I hope so. We lost power for about an hour, and there are trees down in various places in town. The stores here did not close, though people did rush out yesterday and the day before to buy batteries, bottled water, even generators.
Why? Because some of us have long memories of previous hurricanes in this area. Carol, in 1954, took a track similar to Irene's, and our town lost 4,000 trees and was without power for 10 days (all those trees landing on power lines, not enough repair people to fix things faster, although some came in from as far away as Québec and Illinois). Carol did not weaken as much as Irene did when it made landfall - but you can't know in advance what will happen to the intensity. A couple of weeks later we had another hurricane, Edna. The two of them did $500m in damage in 1954 dollars. In 1960 there was Donna, which hit every state on the east coast of the US. Since then it has been relatively quiet here, though the coast has been hit a few times. Perhaps this decade will be like the 1950s when it comes to New England hurricanes - hope not.
Judging from the flickering of the lights, I think we are about to lose power again. Just thought I'd get this in while I still could.
"I have watched wholesale fondling of Palestinian women’s breasts by the IDF and armed settlers usually when the husband was present to degrade the man in front of others."
I was stunned by this sentence. I have never heard of this happening. This is such a gross violation of the women's honor and that of their families that I wonder how they survived it. I suppose the soldiers and colonists enjoy doing this because they think of it as the ultimate emasculation of Palestinian men.
I still can hardly believe this. Can't think of anything bad enough to say about it. Except that I can't regard men who do this as truly human.
Let's not forget that many of these children DID NOT THROW STONES in the first place!
She didn't learn anything on her trip, did she? Except about Iron Dome. Sigh.
This was in Ynet on 11 August, so the story is probably legit.
American olim seek combat service
Ynet 11 Aug -- Some 100 young Jewish adults from US, Canada to join IDF immediately after arriving in Israel next week; nearly all of them want to be combat soldiers ... These young Jews are immigrating to Israel as part of a joint campaign launched by the Nefesh B'Nefesh organization, the Jewish Agency, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), Garin Tzabar of the Friends of Israel Scouts and the Immigrant Absorption Ministry.
link to ynetnews.com
Good find, Seham. Wish they had shone the laser, at the end, on the Palestinian flag that replaced the Israeli one.
LOL Woody. In any case, as you know, it is almost impossible to aim the homemade rockets. Grads, that might be another story, though they rarely seem to hit anything either.
It is interesting that most rockets from Gaza harm no one. Yet the 'retaliation' very frequently results in deaths.
You are quite wrong, LongLive. I always include rockets fired at Israel in my newslists. And if you look at the second Gaza article above, you will see:
"The Israeli army confirmed that airstrikes had hit the coastal enclave. "Overnight, IAF aircraft targeted four targets in the Gaza Strip. Direct hits were confirmed," a statement said. "These sites were targeted in response to the firing of a rocket from the Gaza Strip at the city of Be'er Sheva." The projectile that hit near Beersheba did not cause any damage or injuries, the military said. Israeli public radio said a second projectile had been fired at Beersheba, but it was not immediately clear where it landed."
Jeez the AP is slow! I had this in my Aug 12 Today in Palestine list, from a Hamas site:
Israeli intelligence tried to recruit Al-Jazeera journalist
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PIC) 12 Aug -- Samer Allawi, who is detained by the Israeli occupation authorities said that the Israeli intelligence tried to recruit him but he refused and that he was threatened with being accused of something serious. Allawi, a Palestinian journalist who works as al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Afghanistan, was visited by the lawyer of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society in Betah Tekva detention centre where he is being detained. Allawi told the lawyer that his detention is to do with his work as a journalist in Afghanistan and called on human rights organisations and international journalist bodies to pressure the Israeli occupation to release him ... He was detained on Tuesday at the Allenby Bridge on his way to Jordan after the end of a visit he made to his family in the village of Sabastya near Nablus.
link to palestine-info.co.uk
Your houseguest must be one of those people who consider 'WASP' to stand for upper-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestants only. (I see that Wikipedia agrees with him, to my surprise.) When he talks of communities based on trust funds he apparently refers to the WASP elite that used to be celebrated in the society pages. Certainly ordinary WASP communities as in many small towns all over the country have not disintegrated at all, and they were never 'based on trust funds'. If anything they were (and are) based on churches and kinship. They never had more than local power, and often had great resentment toward the elite, even though that elite had similar ancestry. (In New England, the lower-class 'swamp Yankees' are perhaps even more likely than the elite to have 17th-century settler ancestry, and many know it and are proud of it. For example, the ancestor of the 'Boston Brahmin' Cabots immigrated from the Channel Island of Jersey only in 1700, 80 years after the Mayflower; Paul Revere's immigrant father, Apollos Rivoire, was a French Huguenot who arrived here around 1715.)
It is indeed interesting to see that the upper-class elite of the past is no longer in power, and to see how they were replaced. As a non-elite WASP who attended a Seven Sisters college on a scholarship and met there far too many arrogant debutante types, I won't miss them. But let's not make that elite synonymous with WASPs. The latter is a much broader group. Poor Southern whites are WASPs too, and the descendants of Dust Bowl refugees in California, not to mention the millions of ordinary middle-class Americans of English/Scottish/German descent. A lot of non-elite WASPs would be surprised and furious to find that some people deny them their membership in the group. After all, there is no other term for such people.
During the Black Power movement there were a number of other ethnic groups that started researching their subcultures, finding out much that they hadn't known in the process. I attended a few meetings of such an 'identity' group in California in the early 1970s - a WASP one, which I suspect was unusual. It was sometimes farcical -- for example, two Japanese anthropologists were present at the first meeting to study us (they were not welcome, any more than whites were in similar black groups).
I learned some things -- for example, that it was typical of WASPs to walk tensely with their shoulders raised. Nonsense, I thought, and then the next time I was walking I noticed -- yep, I was doing it! We talked about WASP mothers, and how they were always wrongly portrayed on TV, presumably because the writers were not WASPs themselves. (What real WASP mother would say "After all I've done for you, the least you could do is...."? She'd be more likely to say "Do it, or you'll wish you had.") We discussed the fact that the WASP majority culture was the background against which other cultures were studied, so that there were few studies of WASP culture itself.
What I found most interesting was the argument about who was a WASP and who wasn't. One woman who was half Italian and a Catholic insisted she was a WASP (to hoots of derision) - she apparently thought WASP was an economic designation. No one else agreed with her. Since the meetings were held in a church and included some congregants, some people thought being a practicing Protestant was important - although the 'practicing' part would exclude a lot of WASPS. To me the 'Protestant' part of the acronym just meant non-Catholic, non-Jewish, etc. 'Anglo-Saxon' meant any traditionally Protestant group, mainly the English, Scots, and some Germans. The 'white' part is of course redundant.
link: link to staradvertiser.com
Then choose "In defense of Palestine." By Carol Murry and Greta Berlin POSTED: 10:40 a.m. HST, Aug 08, 2011
Problem is that you have to have a subscription to the paper to read more than the first two paragraphs.
Glad you appreciate them, Annie. I know some of them are quite long, esp. the two-day ones.
Hope you didn't fall asleep on top of the computer!
The article below certainly explains a lot. I couldn't really understand why so many soldiers, etc. treat Palestinians as if they were inferior, or even non-human, but now I see they're brought up to think that:
Academic claims Israeli school textbooks contain bias / Harriet Sherwood
Guardian 7 Aug -- Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians. But, she says, they are never referred to as Palestinians unless the context is terrorism. They are called Arabs. "The Arab with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress. They describe them as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don't pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don't want to develop," she says. "The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer." Peled-Elhanan, a professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has studied the content of Israeli school books for the past five years, and her account, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is to be published in the UK this month. She describes what she found as racism -- but, more than that, a racism that prepares young Israelis for their compulsory military service ... In "hundreds and hundreds" of books, she claims she did not find one photograph that depicted an Arab as a "normal person".
link to www.guardian.co.uk
I would expect some more Latin American countries to fall in behind the Palestinian effort. Note this from Wikipedia:
"In total, an estimated 600,000 Palestinians are thought to reside in the Americas. Palestinian emigration to South America began for economic reasons that pre-dated the Arab-Israeli conflict, but continued to grow thereafter.[137] Many emigrants were from the Bethlehem area. Those emigrating to Latin America were mainly Christian. Half of those of Palestinian origin in Latin America live in Chile.[6] El Salvador[138] and Honduras[139] also have substantial Palestinian populations. These two countries have had presidents of Palestinian ancestry (in El Salvador Antonio Saca, currently serving; in Honduras Carlos Roberto Flores). Belize, which has a smaller Palestinian population, has a Palestinian minister – Said Musa.[140] Schafik Jorge Handal, Salvadoran politician and former guerrilla leader, was the son of Palestinian immigrants
I read that Chronicle article with disbelief, wondering just who in Israel had managed to come up with the idea of equating East Timor's struggle with Israel's. They'd have to have really twisted minds. In 1975 when Indonesia invaded E. Timor, I was living near Darwin, Australia, 400 miles away. There soon were Timorese refugees in northern Australia, mostly if I remember correctly running food stalls in markets or small general stores. Many Australians were sympathetic to the E. Timorese fight for independence, in which a very large number of Timorese were killed. I certainly can see the similarities between the Palestinian and Timorese struggles, but as for Israel's? No way.
When I was in the West Bank the IDF's idea of 'protecting' the Palestinians from the settlers carrying guns and knives was to evict us - Palestinians and Internationals - from the Palestinian olive grove where we were trying to pick. The idea of evicting the settlers instead seems never to have occurred to them. In fact some of the soldiers were walking around arm in arm with some of the the settlers.