5 things Netanyahu won’t tell congress– Dena Tarkruri skewers the premier in a new video from Al Jazeera

“And I am a supporter of BDS.” Dorothy Zellner said those magic words at Harvard Hillel Wednesday night. But she and other Jewish veterans of the civil rights movement have been barred from speaking at UMass and MIT Hillels because of support for the boycott movement against Israel.

Israel is politicized in the U.S.! Bill Kristol’s neocon group runs an ad painting Obama as a madman and Netanyahu as a statesman, while the New York Times runs a cartoon saying that Netanyahu wants to build a settlement on Pennsylvania Avenue

IMEMC reports: “The British rights organization Oxfam stated that the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip may take more than 100 years, at the current rate, to complete essential building of homes, schools and health facilities in Gaza unless the Israeli blockade is lifted.”

Katie Miranda imagines the scene at Netanyahu’s speech to Congress tomorrow.

As the U.S. prepares to re-engage more deeply in the Iraq War, including the likely deployment of ground troops to help retake Mosul from Islamic State, there has been a push from mainstream commentators to recommit to an ideological view of our military campaigns in the Muslim world. A splashy cover story in The Atlantic, “What ISIS Really Wants”, offers an intellectual foundation for the reenergized War on Terror, presenting full recognition of ISIS’s “very Islamic” nature as a matter of urgent strategic significance. Eamon Murphy writes the obsession with naming Islam as the enemy of the West is in fact a defense of our own side’s troubled ideology. He says the guiding principle of post-World War II foreign policy — that the course of world events should be influenced, wherever possible, by force — is imperiled by the spectacular failure of the War on Terror, which actually succeeded in creating a transnational army of Islamic terrorists. That Islamic State rose in Iraq, then spread to Syria and Libya, threatens to give war a very bad name.

Marcia Fudge of Ohio is the latest congressperson to say she won’t attend the Netanyahu speech, even as Elliott Abrams predicts that the Democratic Party will abandon Israel and Barack Obama will become a Jimmy Carter figure on this issue when he leaves office

Kamau Franklin thanks the women who educated him about the politics of Palestine and the Middle East, including Suheir Hammad, Suzanne Adely, Rama Ali Kasad and Lamis Deek.

Bill Kristol of the Emergency Committee for Israel urges AIPAC attendees to boycott speeches from the Obama administration officials as AIPAC urges congressmen to attend Netanyahu’s speech next week

The American Muslims for Palestine unveiled its latest ad campaign that uses Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s breach of protocol to focus on the detrimental impact our ‘friendship’ with Israel has on the United States.