The writers’ organization PEN urges Enrique Iglesias not to play Azerbaijan because of its political prisoners, but it accepts money from Israel as a “champion” of its world voices festival, even as Marilyn Hacker, Richard Ford and Junot Diaz urge it not to accept the money.
Two 14-year-old Palestinian girls are the latest to be accused of attempting an attack on occupying Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in a Palestinian village. One girl was shot and is in serious condition, the other was arrested.
Legendary investigative journalist Sy Hersh says that Bernie Sanders’s freedom from having to go to pro-Israel NY Jews to raise money to mount a presidential race may allow the United States to finally get a peace deal in the Middle East. “A forbidden statement,” he tells Amy Goodman
Wilson Dizard reports from Washington DC where Donald Trump gave a speech this week outlining his foreign policy: “The nation-state remains the true foundation for happiness and harmony,” Trump said. That was kind of the scariest thing he said, and also the most indicative of his white, christian-ness trumping the constitution, a document designed in a secular spirit to defuse the deep religious rivalries between Europeans in the New World. It specifically prohibits religious tests, but one of Trump’s main platforms is the banning of Muslims from entering the country. Trump embraces Western values, but all the worst ones. The ones that put Westerners first and everyone else second.”
Officials of Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop issue a crazy fiat: to “stop scheduling any events related to SodaStream, BDS, Israel or boycotts related to these subjects in the meeting room.” The censorship begins after a meeting this Sunday about SodaStream’s new facility in the Negev and the treatment of Bedouins there.
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A Vice News report claiming to expose a “leaked” Israeli military investigation into last month’s execution of a Palestinian man in Hebron is actually a regurgitation of the official Israeli government line disseminated shortly after the killing, and part of an effort to portray the killer as a bad apple, rather than a soldier following orders.
Aluf Benn urges Israeli elites to fight BDS because it will transform Israel into a state of its citizens, possibly ending up with an Arab prime minister. But that’s what decolonization means.
A photo taken by the Christian Peacemaker Team shows Palestinian men being detained at a checkpoint in Hebron while Israeli soldiers take a group selfie.
If Sheldon Adelson would buy the world, then Jeffrey Goldberg would be alright. But his troubles are beginning. He is a ruthless propagandist for Israel at a time when young American Jews don’t think it’s cool to shoot wounded Palestinians dead in the name of ethnic solidarity.