Here’s an important story we’ve been following from Athens, Ohio: the student senate president at…
An Israeli gov’t video promoting immigration of American Jews to Israel says “best of all” they can get a “free degree” on Uncle Sam’s tab if they do so. Oh and Becky Sebo, an Ohio student arrested last night in pro-Israel demo, says “my country” is ISRAEL.
Dr. Hassan El-Nabih shares a harrowing account of being in his Gaza home when Israel destroyed it on August 23, 2014. He writes, “On that day, I horribly experienced death when an Israeli military aircraft destroyed my house. Fortunately, a miracle happened and I was born again from the rubble of my house.”
s we keep saying, Gaza has changed Israel’s image in American politics: the grassroots are appalled by Israel’s carnage and they’re going to be more and more of a force in American elections, countering the Israel lobby. When Ted Cruz lumped Hamas with ISIS and said Israel was on the right side, he got booed at a Middle East Christian conference in Washington Wednesday night and left the stage. Sort of like VT Sen Bernie Sanders getting booed for defending Israel in Vermont.
On July 12th, about five days after Israel began to bombard Gaza with the airstrikes of Operation Protective Edge, Julia Carmel arrived at the Israeli-operated Allenby border terminal to cross into the occupied West Bank. Followed by ten hours of detention, interrogation, and some humiliation, she was denied entry by the IDF. Her long-anticipated plans to return to Beit Sahur – to learn, do research, and assist a friend’s community development project for the next two months – were dissolved by two magavniks, who sent her back to Jordan without a legitimate reason and at her own expense.
As we mark another anniversary of the attacks in 2001, it seems as if little has changed. We appear to be caught in a time loop where history keeps repeating itself again and again. If it was al Qaeda in 2001 that represented the pinnacle of all things evil that animated the US invasion of Afghanistan and later Iraq, today its al Qaeda’s evil twin Islamic State that is prompting air strikes in Iraq and upcoming airstrikes on Syria as well. Virtually absent in the media circus around ISIS is an honest discussion of how the US War on Terror, rather than halting the growth of violent Islamist groups, actually fosters fundamentalism.
On Monday former Republican Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee visited the Gush Etzion settlement and claimed that radical Islamists are after American boys.
Jeremy Ben-Ami of the liberal Zionist group J Street says that the latest Israeli settlement “landgrab” should be the “straw that broke the camel’s back in Washington.” Like maybe the U.S. should stop giving money to the settler state? Nope. The US should undertake a “thorough review” of its policy on Israeli settlements
Netanyahu’s depiction of Hamas and ISIS, or Islamic State, as “branches of the same poisonous tree” is a travesty of the truth. The two have entirely different – in fact, opposed – political projects. ISIS wants to return to a supposed era of pure Islamic rule, the caliphate, when all Muslims were subject to God’s laws (sharia). Given that Muslims are now to be found in every corner of the globe, the implication is that ISIS ultimately seeks world domination. Hamas’s goals are decidedly more modest. It was born and continues as a national liberation movement, seeking to create a Palestinian state. Its members may disagree on that state’s territorial limits but even the most ambitious expect no more than the historic borders of a Palestine that existed a few decades ago. ISIS aims to sweep away Palestine and every other Arab state in the region.