“Big Brother is watching us all,” Larry Towell, a leading Canadian photographer, writes after Canada’s gov’t offers to pay his way to Bangladesh foto festival so long as he doesn’t talk about Gaza. No dice, Towell said.
The AP reports: Some half million Gaza children made a delayed return to school on Sunday after a devastating 50-day war with Israel that killed more than 2,100 Palestinians and damaged hundreds of school buildings.
Catherine Baker meets a woman at the post office trying to send a package to the occupied Palestinian territories.
US Congressman Danny Davis (D-IL) has called for a lifting of the blockade against Gaza. In a September 8th letter to the Chicago Sun Times, one of the City’s two major daily newspapers, Davis urged an end to the blockade on humanitarian and strategic grounds. Congressman Davis now joins the only two other members of Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison and Rep. Barbara Lee, who have spoken out against the blockade.
It’s been a busy time for Palestine solidarity folks in Albuquerque. Five and half years ago after Israel’s 08-09 massacre in Gaza, the Coalition to Stop$30Billion to Israel, a grassroots group of ordinary citizens, launched a campaign erecting 10 billboards in their city that inspired campaigns in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Portland, Washington DC, Boston, Arizona, and Seattle, just to name just a few. They’re at it again. Last Monday Sept.8 the coalition up their first digital billboard in response to the recent carnage in Gaza.
Saturday night activists in Amsterdam pulled off a fantastic action at an Israeli whitewashing event promoted as “Israel=Culture” the first Israeli theatre mini-festival in Amsterdam, “three days of presenting the rich and vibrant theatre culture of Israel.”
This lukewarm truce in Gaza is part of a long, boringly consistent pattern. A 2009 study that tracked patterns of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza over the course of eight years revealed that unlike what Western mainstream media coverage of the conflict suggests, Israel violates the vast majority of ceasefires first.
Tithi Bhattacharya and Bill V. Mullen share five lessons they learned from the efforts to reinstate Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois. As they watched the protests over Salaita’s firing they saw protesters connecting the dots between Apartheid Israel and the violation of labor rights at home and realized that the protesters at UIUC were showing us the way to a new social movement that could constitute a fighting force against neoliberalism, both at home and abroad.
Sarah Salibi talks with two young men in Gaza dealing with the post-traumatic stress of life after ‘Operation Protective Edge’. Ahmed abu Shanab, 17 years old, and Mahmoud Naser, 18, recall the day they were injured. After few days of the Shijaia massacre, the Israeli warplanes and the artillery tanks shelled Al-Shijaia market with several missiles during a ceasefire. The bombing left 17 deaths and 200 injuries. Ahmed and Mahmoud, who after the strike became close friends, were among the injured and are now at Al-Quds hospital receiving treatment.
One American News network’s On Point show with Tomi Lahren is determined to educate Americans about the Israel/Palestine conflict from a fresh perspective. A fiery debate between Moe Diab and Philippe Assouline showed the smashmouth tactics of the pro-Israel side with Assouline’s misrepresentations