Cowardice and incompetence at the U.S. State Department are jeopardizing the freedom — and possibly the life — of a dynamic, progressive Muslim leader in the global south. Mohamed Nasheed, who was once the elected president of the Maldives, the Indian Ocean island nation, has been violently dragged into a courtroom to face a show trial that might end with him going back to prison,
Two days ago Israel’s foreign minister called for beheading Arab citizens of Israel who are “against us.” As of this morning the New York Times had still not covered the story, and neither has National Public Radio, which has given Lieberman a platform in the past. What would happen if a Palestinian politician called for beheading some Jews? How loudly would our media decry such statements?
“This is not something we should be discussing” is the mantra that unites Israeli discourse across left and right in the upcoming Israeli elections. Ora Yeshua-Lyth writes that the debate about the central issues in this campaign: corruption scandals, wars, the high cost of living and the housing crisis, extreme social gaps and the lack of compassion for the weak would all be understood easier when placed against the background and core principles of the Zionist state. But this issue is off the ballot.
Three of four letters to the NYT on Gaza say that the blockade is a good thing. Israel can do whatever it wants and they will be sad but support Israel. It’s a clever way of trying to be liberal while being racist. MLK saw the attitude in his letter from a Birmingham jail.
Who wrote the 47 Republican senators’ awful letter to Iran? Not Tom Cotton of Arkansas. J Street speculates Bill Kristol. A former AIPAC staffer says, AIPAC. The media have an obligation to turn a harsh light on the Israel lobby groups who are supporting the letter
Denial is an important and often underemphasized dimension of Israel’s violence toward Palestinians. The Forensic Architecture team explains how the Nakba day killing of 17-year-old Nadeem Nawara and 16-year-old Mohammad Abu Daher in 2014 is a microcosm of how Israel denies historical crimes and daily incidents equally. The Nakba day massacre was denied, just like the Nakba of 1948 it was commemorating.
Times columnist Nick Kristof describes Gaza as an “open-air prison” under “siege” by Israel, but he also rationalizes Israel’s collective punishment and treats Palestinians as a backward other.
The great news about Netanyahu’s speech to Congress is that it has shored up support for Obama’s Iran negotiations. The president says he is “confident” he has the American people’s support and he blasts 47 senators who signed a letter to Iranian hardliners seeking to undermine the deal. An AIPAC staffer says the letter has AIPAC’s fingerprints
Last week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress in hopes of blocking a possible nuclear deal with Iran he did not mention the Palestinians once. To officials in the West Bank, this omission showed Netanyahu would rather the occupation stay invisible.
At long last the Palestinian issue is entering the Israeli election campaign, with the two leading Jewish factions competing over the two-state solution. Netanyahu’s Likud came out against a two-state solution, while the challenger Zionist Camp has come out for it. Though notice in the platform released yesterday that the Zionist Camp is parroting a Jewish-nationalist Netanyahu position that actually caused his government to fall last October: the “unequivocal” assertion that Israel is the “nation state of the Jewish people.”