The Arab Resource and Organizing Center in Oakland will promote its BDS campaign by staging a “Revolution is Love” Valentine’s Day party at the Palestinian solidarity mural in Oakland

A new petition at Stanford against divestment from companies doing business in the occupation says that the initiative seeks to delegitimize Israel. In fact, the resolution is aimed at illegal, immoral activities targeting a people under occupation and condemned around the world, David Palumbo-Liu explains.

Within the past four days, over 29 Stanford professors have signed on to a faculty letter calling on Stanford University to “stop investing in companies that profit from the occupation of Palestinian territories occupied by Israel since 1967.” Tonight the Stanford Undergraduate Senate will be voting on a resolution calling for divestment from companies violating human rights in occupied Palestine.

Since last August when professor of international law William Schabas was appointed as the head of a United Nations war crimes inquiry into violations committed in Gaza over the summer, Israel has repeatedly sought to remove him. Last week, Israel won. Schabas recused himself amid allegations of bias in a favor of the Palestinian government, but the resignation is not enough for Israel. It wants the entire investigation scrapped.

Kayla Mueller, the American killed last weekend by a Jordanian airstrike while being held captive by ISIS in Syria, had worked to prevent Palestinians from being thrown out of their homes in East Jerusalem in 2010.

The pressure keeps mounting on Benjamin Netanyahu to arrange a face-saving means of cancelling his speech to both houses of Congress next month lest he create a rift between the U.S. and Israel. Almost every Zionist and Israel-supporter seems to agree about this. Only Netanyahu himself seems determined to go forward, and Phil Weiss agrees with him. Here are three reasons the speech is too important to cancel.

Recently, community groups called on New York City Councilmembers to skip an all-expenses-paid, eight-day junket to Israel. Challenged on Israel’s racism, progressive Councilmembers’ excuses quickly turned to gay rights following the lead of pro-Israel lobbyists who now tout Israel’s LGBT “tolerance” as often as they conjure anti-Semitism. We’re left to wonder what lobby groups like the Jewish Community Relations Council have whispered in the ears of Progressive and LGBT Caucus members to make them stray so far from their principles – and their voters.

In his new book, Roger Cohen’s description of his late mother’s mental illness and the way it traumatized him as a boy is spiritually scouring. His belief that Israel is necessary because Jews feel displaced is not as compelling.

Scott Long comments on the Brian Williams scandal that he lied about his experience in Iraq, but he doesn’t understand why this is an issue. Williams made up a story, but he was in the middle of the most fantastic made-up story in American history. The Iraq war was a gigantic fiction: the reasons were fake, the goals were fake, the triumph was fake. Rather than Williams’ tall tales, the real scandal is journalism’s complete submission, as the “war on terror” raged, to the fantasies of patriotic allegiance.

“No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have…