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Are you sure about that, David? The Brigades of the Martyr Ezz ad-Din al-Qassam are disciplined and tactically proficient, and if indeed they were responsible for the settler attacks, it's not implausible at all that they not only planned the attack, but targeted the people specifically. These settler paramilitary units train, and in order to conduct training, a unit needs an area in which to train. Those areas and the training conducted in them can be easily surveilled, especially in a condensed area like the West Bank. It's also not difficult to gather human intelligence (i.e. via intelligence assets) on enemy settler units, their personnel, equipment, et cetera when Palestinians hold labor positions in and around settlements (e.g. constructing them). Beyond that, I myself have seen numerous websites maintained by settler paramilitary groups posing for pictures in which they are flaunting their weapons and conducting training exercises, all while tagging the images with the full names of the participants involved. I haven't even touched on electronic surveillance, which of course the Brigades are capable of. It would not be difficult at all for a professional paramilitary organization like Kata'ib ash-Shaheed 3zz ad-Din al-Qassam to target, say, settler unit commanders and assassinate them. These are not ragtag, disorganized bands of men-at-arms with no military awareness.
Walid -
While I do think the United States is quite a few steps removed from the level of discrimination against Muslims present Belgium, Austria, France, Switzerland to some degree, and other European nations, it's clear that there is rampant Islamophobia in the U.S., and it's not limited merely to rhetoric and punditry. The mosque-bombing in Florida has followed years of vandalism and attacks on mosques in the U.S. especially since September 11th, as well as harassment of and discrimination against Muslims. Again, not near Europe's levels, and that's something to be thankful for, but of course any manifestations of Islamophobia are causes for concern.
I'm not sure what marker you're using, or what you're really saying with the assertion that Saleema would have a "better chance of surviving in America" [than in Pakistan, I'm guessing?], so I'll leave that one alone. Essentially, the argument in your concluding sentence amounts to, "Don't build the bomb shelter until the warheads are on the way," which I find to be too little, too late. By the time mass internment of American Muslims becomes a serious issue being debated by policymakers, we will be past the point when Muslims can make preparations to live in safe-haven countries and make their exodus.
By the way, pundits, "journalists", and "scholars" already have started to talk about mass internment of Muslims. Michelle Malkin and Daniel Pipes are two of note; I also recall Ann Coulter recommending internment for Muslims, though I can't find a source for it now. Ms. Malkin's book attempts to look at the internment of Japanese-Americans in a positive light and propose a like "solution" to the Muslim "problem".
Here's the press release (links to photos are included), and here is the program that was handed out. I didn't realize the stuff was already up at USACBI and a few other places. I don't know when the video will be up of the disruption will be up, though.
There was a coordinated action targeted at this event. There is a press release, a few photos, and some video of one of the specific actions (a disruption of a "come and invest in Israel" type of seminar), all of which should be available soon. I'd post it now but Phil might be getting it from somewhere else (if he doesn't, I'll see that it's circulated to MondoWeiss).
Ok I'll do it again, sure. In the opening segment they're pulling the activist by (I assume its a female) her hair, and I can't imagine that feels great. The mukhabarat agent most prominent in the field of view hits the arms and hands of all of them to break their grip on her and also hits her repeatedly in the back. Then at 0:29 seconds a different mukhabarat agent kicks another activist who is being dragged away by multiple officers ("successfully subdued" in police terminology, a euphemism for "not needing further brutalization") in the tailbone. For me, that qualifies as "beating".
Are you joking, Richard? This is exactly like the time you denied the undercover Israeli police in Bil3in were assaulting protesters in a video and I deconstructed it for you, step by step and using my own former military experience and you still played the blind man. If you can't see it, you need to watch it again.
Al Jazeera reported on Marie Renee's death? I didn't see it on the English or Arabic website.
And I still trust PressTV more than I do the New York Times or Yedioth Ahronoth, etc.
Correction from Ma'an:
A French woman, Marie Renee, died but was not present at any of the protests and reportedly had a heart attack Wednesday afternoon.
I'll paraphrase something I remember 3ali Abunimah saying at the BDS conference back in November (this was in response to a question from the Zionist in the audience during the Q&A section, which wasn't in the video that was posted, if I remember correctly): If a one-state settlement occurs, and there are pogroms against Jews living in this new nation-state, I'll be speaking out against the violence and working to stop it from continuing. Fear that something like that could occur is understandable from the Zionist perspective, but it's not a legitimate excuse to maintain the status quo of apartheid and occupation and stave off the natural human rights of Palestinians to realize equality in their homeland.
What would give me and others like me the confidence to trust that equality would occur permanently, rather than a revolutionary purge?
Why assume that equality isn't going to occur in perpetuity?
"We hope this series will spark a conversation over the what Zionism means today."
I suppose I can understand this post and the prior one a little better if I read that over again. It seems that "Zionism" to these folks means accepting or ignoring pressing political problems involving the Palestinians as a nation in diaspora and trying to improve the lot of life of Israel, for the present and future. If that's the case, then "post-Zionism" isn't anything different from Zionism after the Nakba, and all Ms. Guarnieri has managed to find are the ideological progeny of the racist "Labor Zionists" that cleansed villages in order to set up kibbutzim and cities to activate class consciousness among the "Jewish proletariat".
What I'm curious about is what "Israel" means to the subjects, and that's not the question being asked. Ms. Fridman seems to be coming to terms with the crimes of the Zionist past, but perhaps not with those of the present, and her views on who should be included in whose democracy are absent from the study. Mr. Fox says, "We need to think about resources or in ten years we won’t have anything… We need to share water with the Palestinians and our other neighbors." I suppose that works for most of the population in the West Bank and Gaza, as they could be "neighbors", but does Mr. Fox's "we" include the roughly 7 million Palestinian refugees living in the diaspora (including the Gaza and WB refugee population)?
If "post-Zionism" disregards the refugees that want to return to Haifa and Jaffa, etc., then it's just a euphemism for "Zionism", and maybe more specifically for "left Zionism" (if there is such a thing, which I don't think there is).
I don't know about any workshops on the specific goals of BDS. Everyone there seemed to be on the same page as far as that was concerned. Most of them were, as you say, "how-to", but Noura Erekat ran a workshop on international law as it applies to the context, for instance, and I went to one on media relations and another on writing. You should check the program if you're interested in the content, Richard (click on the "Workshop/Panel" links) -- although the website version doesn't have the block descriptions like our printout did. A few of the blocks on the printout didn't have descriptions either and we could really only feasibly attend one workshop per block to get anything out of it so I only know about the ones I was there for.
That's a fine straw man you've built, Richard. Dr. Kovel's point, as made clear by the final sentence in the paragraph preceding the statement about Zionism and usurpation, is that whether a nationalist movement's "seed of racism" will "sprout" or not depends largely on the context of how that nationalist movement arose -- that is, if it arose due to a "liberation struggle" (i.e. liberation from occupation -- see Ireland).
It's also possible for a nationalist movement to usurp, the other argument you failed to properly address. Joel Kovel said, "[a liberation struggle] ... played no real role in the rise of the State of Israel, which was pretty much entirely a story of usurpation." Nationalism is the ideology and the force by which the participants of the movement are unified, usurpation is the action the movement may take.
A state isn't defined simply by its geographical boundaries, but more importantly, to use your analogy: one can use the bones and muscles the skin protects to rape and choke someone else to death, even a child. While the skin of a human being is indeed our protective boundary, and the borders of nation-states define their protective boundaries (that is, an unwelcome incursion over those borders would constitute an act of aggression), it's a tremendous logical fallacy to suggest that human beings or nation-states are inherently "primarily defensive" simply because of the boundaries which outline them.
Very well-analyzed, as always, Dr. Kovel. I especially appreciate point #2, your scrutiny over Ms. Klein's lone concession to the Palestinian cause in her piece. It's striking how she has seemingly fallen back from her position as marked in her June speech given in Ramallah, as she is now mincing words to the point of letting off the hook not only the Zionist ideology and project as a whole, but indeed the State of Israel in its existence as a Zionist, exclusionist "democracy". Her pars pro toto synecdoche placing the Israeli legal system at fault for the State's "meeting the international definition of apartheid" is the most disappointing end-run around the truth in the whole article, in my view. I hope, as you do Dr. Kovel, that Ms. Klein sees the error in her leaving from the principles she seemed to hold, or seemed to be coming to, regarding Israel in earlier writings and activism.
Excellent dissection of Walt's logic and the acrobatics he employs to make it all appear lucid and consonant.
The point being I missed the point? Fair enough :P Makes more sense now... I guess I've got my Irish Republican blinders on when I should be wearing my Israel Lobby specs.
Haha. I got a chuckle or two out of it. Honestly, though, did this part need to be in there?
Right there Phil is sounding like the hundreds (or thousands) of British who "aren't shedding nary a tear" for the man this week because of his alleged "support for IRA terrorists" (really his thoughts on Irish re-unification). I've read more crap from across the pond this week about cooked up links between Kennedy and Noraid, and Noraid and the Provos than usual, though it seems most of Britain's right-wing and conservative Unionist brigade can't go a day without mentioning Noraid five or six times anyway.
The real "fact that cannot be ignored", Richard, is that Salam Fayyad and Mahmoud Abbas aren't in a position of legitimacy to be negotiating political terms for the Palestinian people. Abbas illegally extended his own term and appointed Fayyad as Prime Minister despite the fact that the PA already had one (Haniyeh). The PA's Parliament refuses to recognize Fayyad's legitimacy in that position. The most pressing "fact that cannot be ignored" by rejectionists is that any deal or declaration made by the collaborative, anti-democratic Fatah regime whose power is dependent on the occupier and on Muhammad Dahlan's brownshirts is null and void unless it includes an endorsement from the current popular party in Palestine, which happens to be Hamas. The only way this could change is if Hamas dissolves on its own (not likely), is successfully broken by Israel (impossible), or if Fatah manages to beat Hamas in the next legislative elections, which are currently scheduled for January of next year, as are the presidential elections. That doesn't seem likely either, despite Fatah's superficial makeover; the more likely scenario, if the elections take place, is that Hamas routs Fatah even more soundly than they did in 2006, and Abbas or whoever is President at the time extends the "state of emergency" to keep Khaled Meshaal's party out of power. And so the stalemate will continue until the west smartens up and realizes that Hamas isn't going anywhere, and if treated as such and given a chance, coupled with sufficient pressure on the Israelis, Hamas may indeed serve as the "partner for peace" where Fatah has failed, especially since the former actually has legitimacy both in Palestine and the greater Arab Street.
This looks very promising. Minus the interviews, the documentary looks to contain footage most of us have seen before, but it will be striking nonetheless to see it altogether with fresh content and analysis. More importantly, having something like this to disseminate to the public will prove invaluable. It's difficult to keep the attention of the "progressive" liberal masses with endless streams of YouTube clips and daily written correspondences of Israeli injustices perpetrated against the Palestinians, but if it's condensed into an easy-to-view format such as a documentary, it will make for an easier sell.
I'm interested to hear the commentary in the film, and I can't wait to see it myself and hopefully use it as a weapon.
N referenced a thread on Tikkun-Olam in which Richard Witty stated he believed the Palestinian right of return lost its validity in 1968. N still wonders, "what was so special about that year?" I found this in Phil's post on Tom Friedman, a comment from Richard:
Israel has a long history of seeking out and politically or literally neutralizing the Palestinians' most capable leaders, including their nonviolent activists. This is obviously what's occurring here -- Mohammad Khatib is getting the Mustafa Barghouti treatment. It's more comfortable for people on the outside to accept that Palestinians are incapable of implementing a mass campaign of nonviolent resistance than it is for them to accept that there have indeed been many homegrown Palestinian nonviolent movements for a long time, and that they've actively been not allowed to flourish by the political entity that would benefit least from the movements' success -- Israel.
I look at that and ask myself where I'd throw my first cast! Never fished the Adirondacks area though.
Oscar, it's up to the person who uploads the video to decide whether or not he or she wants to allow comments. This is an Al Jazeera English video, and AJE never allows comments on their YouTube videos, presumably to keep people focused on the journalism and the story and not on fighting with each other in comment fields..
I'm in complete agreement with Donald, v... and others. Everything I've read of Tom Friedman's in the past years has led me to acknowledge that he is incapable of doing anything beyond toeing the liberal Zionist party line. This most recent revelation of his is significant only in confirmation that he wants to maintain his readership and relative popularity (a phenomenon I've yet to figure out, given the banality of his writing -- see Hot, Flat, and Crowded, for example). As Donald suggested, liberal Zionist journalist commentators like Friedman are harmful to the overall peace process when they make "concessions" like this about the lobby's influence while simultaneously regurgitating common knowledge hasbara about the "withdrawals" from Southern Lebanon and Gaza.
In fact, Israel never withdrew from Southern Lebanon -- it still hasn't. The IDF maintains outposts all over the Kfar Shouba hills, conducts illegal violations of Lebanese airspace on a near-daily basis in what can only be construed as a combination of reconaissance flights and intimidation, and illegally occupied the northern half of the village of al Ghajar at the end of the 2006 July War, the northern half of the village having been allocated to Lebanon in 2000. Israel maintains troops in the entirety of al Ghajar today, and mans outposts outside the town's limits on the Lebanese side. In addition to all of this, Lebanon still claims the Sheba'a Farms region as its own, and Israel has been occupying the area since 1967, ignoring calls from the UN and the Arab world to disengage and let the Syrians and Lebanese resolve the border demarcation issue on their own.
Testing my login and such. I'm sure the comment numbers will be back to normal given some time -- after all, people fear change and all that ;P
Also, it probably takes a bit to approve all the accounts.