Incumbent Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz defeated challenger Tim Canova, a law professor, in a primary election this Tuesday, disappointing some Berniecrat-boosting voters who want to see the Vermont senator’s policies on Capitol Hill. Despite Canova’s outsider status, the race showed how Israel/Palestine is sacred political territory for all Democrats.
Huma Abedin, a top Hillary Clinton aide, announced Monday that she is divorcing her husband, Queens-native Weiner, a disgraced former New York Congressman whose sexting of pictures of his engorged genitals to his fellow Americans cost him his political career in 2011. Her decision comes in the wake of yet another report of his digital infidelity. Before gaining international infamy for his online philandering, Weiner had distinguished himself as one of Israel’s most ardent apologists in Congress, apologizing for Israeli militarism, denying the existence of a military occupation in the West Bank and scolding critics of Israeli policies, even condemning the New York Times for its lack of Zionist cred.
A Washington Post article about occupied Susiya, which Israel wants to bulldoze, all but eliminates the word occupation, treating the West Bank as Israeli land. And it calls the Palestinian hamlet “miserable” “pitiful” and “squalid.”
Most American Jews believe their faith is cultural, including dedication to social justice. But the fundamentalist Liel Leibovitz in a sneering, nasty article says these Jews ignore “the historical and doctrinal truth” that they became Jews by accepting the “burden of becoming God’s chosen children.”
Hillary Clinton has become a zealot against BDS in the last year, evidently in part because many large donors to the Clinton Foundation oppose BDS. These supporters suggest the new lineaments of the Israel lobby under Clinton, in which liberal Zionists and rightwing Zionists are merged.
Bernie Sanders on Wednesday delivered a speech from Burlington, Vermont to his die-hard fans nationwide, calling on them to continue to support progressive politicians to achieve goals like campaign finance reform, universal healthcare and fixing an unfair criminal justice through the new Sanders-backed non-profit, Our Revolution. Absent from his address was any mention of Israel/Palestine or American foreign policy in the Middle East. “I think it shows a lack of courage,” said Robert Akleh, co-founder of Arabs for Bernie, a Brooklyn-based grassroots group.
The Anti-Defamation League brought a delegation of American police officers to an Israeli prison, occupied Hebron and a settler winery in the Golan Heights as part of their 2016 counter-terrorism seminar in Israel, according to an itinerary of the trip obtained by Mondoweiss. Trips like these have come under withering controversy from Palestine solidarity activists and Black Lives Matter protesters. In an age of police militarization and a growing movement to combat police brutality, critics see these trips as potentially fueling harmful police tactics.
For months, pro-Israel and Palestine solidarity groups have been locked in a fierce debate over legislation in California against the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Now, to the chagrin of Palestine solidarity activists, the California State Senate is set to consider the bill that would require state contractors to certify that a boycott of Israel they were engaged in does not violate laws against discrimination. Jewish Voice for Peace activist Estee Chandler says it’s likely it will pass, which would make California the 13th state to pass anti-BDS legislation.
Breitbart News head Stephen Bannon has replaced Paul Manafort as Donald Trump’s primary campaign adviser. Bannon describes his site as a “platform for the Alt-Right,” referring to the growing white nationalist movement, and noted pro-Israel Islamophobe Pamela Geller has praised Bannon in heroic terms. What this revamped campaign means for Trump’s take on the middle east remains to be seen, but alt-right leaders are already imagining a future where they are directly influencing foreign policy.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager says the “hand of the Kremlin” has been working in US elections, but no one talks about the hand of Israel, which is on everything from pushing the Iraq war to censoring any reference to the “occupation” in the Democratic Party platform. The system is rigged by the Israel lobby, and everyone knows it, even if they can’t talk about it.
Gawker, the legendary blog that is shutting down today after nearly 14 years, was better known for covering New York’s power elite than for posts about Israel and Palestine. But the site, published some memorable, even brave, items about the Middle East.
Despite media assertions Russia is behind DNC hack, US government says, “There’s a host of usual suspects out there that engage in this sort of activity.” But Clintonite foreign policy establishment-in-waiting wants to blame Russia, so facts aren’t necessary.
Alan Dershowitz is “quick talking, New Yorkish, loud– of course a liberal– and he can mimic Trump pretty well,” says Mark Green on WNYC in a report saying that Dershowitz will play Trump for Hillary Clinton’s debate prep. First debate, Sept. 26.
Stephen Cohen and Juan Cole say that Russia and Iran are trying to defeat ISIS with attacks in eastern Syria. A. Trevor Thrall says US attacks on Assad would lead to another endless war. But the media are ignoring leftwing, realist and libertarian voices in favor of the hawks-in-waiting of the Clinton administration.
Green Party Presidential Candidate Jill Stein on Wednesday night provided an alternative vision for U.S. policy with Israel that questioned whether Washington was doing “Israel any favors” by dumping money into warfare and occupation.
Donald Trump received his first classified briefing from U.S. intelligence officials on Wednesday, two days after laying out his vision for foreign policy that measures the worth of alliances by whether countries oppose the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Although there are big differences in Trump’s and that of the White House, there are significant similarities, analysts say. For one, both Trump and President Barack Obama are willing to look the other way when it comes to human rights violations committed in campaigns against the ISIS. More than that, both Trump and Hillary Clinton talk about a world where Muslim loyalty to the United States hinges on their condemnation of terrorism.
How can Bret Stephens, who is so sensitive to any slight he perceives against Jews, use the phrase “disease of the Arab mind” when writing about an Egyptian Olympian, and hundreds of millions of other people, in the Wall Street Journal no less? The answer is that a group of ethnocentric spokesmen for the Jewish people, including Jeffrey Goldberg and Benjamin Netanyahu, exercise an Orwellian influence over what can and cannot be said out loud.
The Jewish Daily Forward’s Laura E. Adkins reported Israeli Knesset Member Anat Berko as saying that Students for Justice in Palestine is “collecting information on where Jews live at New York University among others.” What Adkins fails to mention is that Berko’s claim likely originated from a hoax conceived by Adkins herself when she was a student at NYU.
A New York Times editorial calls for cutting off military aid to Saudi Arabia because of indiscriminate civilian killings in Yemen that have the U.S.’s “imprint”. Israel did the same thing in Gaza with the U.S.’s imprint, without a peep from the Times. This is a glaring double standard, which is evident to average Americans. That is why we see such burgeoning grassroots support for the idea of boycotting Israel and ending military aid to the country.
The Boston Globe enables Alan Dershowitz in his abuse of terms like “anti-Semitism” and “blood libel” to control the parameters of discussion for Black Lives Matter. These are old tactics that gave him notoriety but are at last wearing thin.
Hundreds of New Yorkers gathered Monday in Queens to say goodbye to a Bengali American imam and his assistant who were shot down by a gunman in broad daylight on Saturday. Police charged a suspect in the killing, 35-year-old Oscar Morel of Brooklyn. The man’s brother told The New York Post that Morel felt “hatred” against Muslims after the September 11 attacks and many in the Ozone Park immigrant community fear the murder was a hate crime. The funeral and the neighborhood rallying with cries of “Justice!” all took place in the midst of unprecedented racist and xenophobic election-year rhetoric.
Peter Beinart wrote a column for Haaretz last week in which he characterized anti-Zionists, along with the Black Lives Matter movement, as revolutionaries, warning that anti-Zionists want to upend the Israeli system. This is an important assertion, and needs to be addressed. Equal rights, and not Zionism, is the only sane political future in the 21st century. Changing the American Jewish mind is the most important step toward accomplishing this revolution bloodlessly.
What does it take to get into the club? NYT runs seven letters responding to article on Israel/Palestine campus activism, and all seven are by Jews.
Under the auspices of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, nearly 300 Jews with varying positions on Israel marched together last Thursday night in support of Black Lives Matter. But can that community be sustained?
In what witnesses describe as a targeted attack, Imam Alauddin Akhonji of Al-Furqan Jame Masjid Mosque in Ozone Park, Queens, was killed this afternoon walking home from afternoon prayers. The New York Post reports authorities are investigating it as a hate crime, and some residents are blaming Donald Trump.