The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was formed by B’nai B’rith in 1913 to be the leading Jewish defense agency in the wake of the conviction of Leo Frank, an officer of the National Pencil Co. of Atlanta,Georgia,, for the murder of 13 year old Mary Phagan, a shop floor worker at the pencil factory. It was […]
Robert O. Paxton, the distinguished emeritus professor at Columbia University, is perhaps the world’s leading authority on fascism. His book Vichy France (1972) has become a classic, not least in France itself, for telling truths about the collaborationist regime that the French themselves had been too ashamed and timid to say. More recently, The Anatomy […]
I honestly don’t know how you can be a Zionist and see this kind of report without screaming– from Al Jazeera, about the destruction of 20,000 Palestinian houses in "Occupied East Jerusalem," some of them repeat demolitions of individual families’ houses. From reporter Jacky Rowland, with the great Jeff Halper of ICAHD saying the intention […]
Joe Klein says Abe Foxman should be fired now, and points to Foxman’s long disgraceful record, including calling Klein anti-Semitic for saying that Jewish neocons had pushed the Iraq war (and now Iran war) without disclosing their true concern. During the high-tide of anti-semitism, and then again during the civil-rights movement, and often since, the […]
Editor’s note: I’m going to be writing a lot about boats these days. Americans are organizing a U.S. boat to Gaza, with a cruise around New York this Thursday to raise money for the effort, and in the meantime a Jewish boat to Gaza will be sailing from Europe. No departure set yet, but it […]
This is interesting. Mike McMahon, a first-term Democratic congressman from New York, fired a staffer after she said that McMahon’s Republican challenger was getting a lot of out-of-state donors and "Jewish money." NY Observer: The file, labeled "[Mike] Grimm Jewish Money Q2," for the second quarter fundraising period, shows a list of over 80 names, […]
It’s happened: the Anti-Defamation League has overplayed its hand (in this case, neoconservative Islamophobia) in such a glaring manner that it is being condemned at every quarter– a statement from the group opposing the construction of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York. The statement openly abandons civil rights, standing for no principle at […]
Today in Palestine:
I’ve been spending more time in the camps recently. Two days a week, I leave my apartment on my leafy street in my quiet neighborhood and jump in a taxi heading southwest. ‘Ala mafra’ sou’ Shatila, iza t-reed,’ is what I usually say to the cab driver. He drives west first, past the open air […]
There’s a very important piece in Haaretz today: Pre-state Jewish undergrounds enjoy a renaissance among settlers. In recent years, interest in the pre-state Revisionist underground movements has grown among West Bank settlement youth. By Chaim Levinson Dozens of people crowded into Tel Aviv’s Jabotinsky Museum last week to celebrate the 130th birthday of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, […]
The night before my group departed from Gaza in June 2009, I talked about not being ready to leave. And I wasn’t. It took me another two months after I got back to pull out of my "Gaza Haze" and begin to function again. I met with my Congressman’s Director of Outreach, and he advised […]
Larry Derfner has a great piece in the JPost laying out the hypocrisy of Israel’s extolling terrorists while condemning Palestinians when they do the same. It’s a wonderful argument, but for me what leaped out was the Bernadotte bit. Consider, that Count Bernadotte, who saved Jews from the Nazis during the war, wanted to internationalize […]
Amitai Etzioni leads The New Republic today with "Unshackle the Troops". Also headlined: "The Military Cares Too Much About Civilian Casualties." The subtext: Be more like Israel, Learn to Stop Worrying, and Inflict Civilian Casualties. This goes with Eztioni’s other recent articles urging an attack on Iran so maybe there’s a second subtext: Don’t listen […]
The recent announcement that Palestinian communities in Israel will be provided with a bus service for the first time since Israel’s founding – that is, in 62 years – surprised observers who had not realised second-class citizenship also extends to being deprived of a bus line. People often object to the comparison of Israel within […]
This is funny. Oliver Stone recently disparaged Jewish domination of the media and the Israel lobby’s effect on foreign policy, and was compelled to apologize. Compelled? Well here, in the LA Times, are Ari Emanuel and Haim Saban putting pressure on Showtime to blacklist Oliver Stone because of his comments. Here’s neocon wildman Ron Radosh‘s […]
You want two states? You get a gold star! But it’s one state right now, folks. A Washington Post piece on a baptismal site for Christians in the Jordan River in the Occupied West Bank quotes only Israelis, Gidon Bromberg, and Eli Dror of "Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority", and generally treats the site as […]
I’m not a religious person but before I went to Israel I read a friend’s book that described the "sweetness of the Sabbath" and wondered what it meant. Then I got to Israel and altogether I’ve experienced three or four Sabbaths there, and now I know what my friend meant by the phrase. Observing the […]
The post below refers to a story included in Seham’s rundown earlier today. The AFP article we linked to indicated that the settlers had left the Kirresh home, this eyewitness account tells a much different story: Yonatan Shapira has sent me the following account of events unfolding at the Kirresh family home in the Muslim […]
A couple weeks ago the Times ran a good story about the Gaza blockade with the byline of Michael Slackman and Ethan Bronner; and you will see two very different bylines at the bottom of the story, Mona El-Naggar and Fares Akram. The night after the story ran, Felice Gelman, who knows Akram, and knows […]
Adam posted this video last night. It’s the most important thing on this site, and it’s only 2-1/2 minutes long. What else is there to say, besides, Please watch it. And look at the soldiers’ Centurionlike shields, and their black getup… (Video: guardian.co.uk)
Lord Chris Patten, chancellor of Oxford University, president of Medical Aid for Palestinians, has an important piece in the Financial Times describing the cruel reality built by the peace process. Patten is consummate British establishment: Britain’s former EU commissioner, the last governor-general of Hong Kong. And a Tory. A real indication of the deep shift […]
Wonderful piece by Andrew Bacevich at Tom Dispatch, proving that realists and leftists must break bread with one another (realists must learn to talk about human rights, lefties must think about national interests) if we are going to make any progress in fighting the neoconservative/militarist agenda for the Middle East. Read the whole piece to […]
Phan Nguyen, a member of the Olympia Food Co-op, defends of the co-op’s Israeli boycott in the Tacoma, WA News Tribune: When we talk about the Israel/Palestine conflict, we cannot talk about it in the third person. It is our conflict, as it is our taxpayer dollars that supply Israel’s weapons of war and our […]
And other news from Today in Palestine:
In the cool summer evening air of the Jerusalem hills last Tuesday evening, hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis descended on the small village of al-Walaja for a screening of the critically acclaimed documentary Budrus. The screening was jointly organized by Israelis and Palestinians who are working to non-violently resist the construction of Israel’s separation barrier […]