Ma’an News: 15-year-old Mahmoud Rafat Badran and his family had been driving home from a swimming pool late Sunday night when Israeli forces showered their car with gunfire, killing Mahmoud, and seriously injuring his two brothers 16-year-old Amir and 17-year-old Hadi, as well as Daoud Abu Hassan, 16, and Majd Badran, 16.The Israeli army later admitted they “mistakenly” opened fire on the innocent bystanders after Palestinian youth were reportedly throwing stones at Israeli settler vehicles nearby. Israeli media initially reported that Mahmoud and his teenage companions were “terrorists.”

Gaza-based writer Mohammed Saleem writes, “Skin tanned and hands calloused from working forty-two years under the sun, Emad Khalil, a sixty-one year old retired laborer, sits in front of me. For thirty of those years, he worked in Israel. His story documents a tremendous change in attitude and policy towards Palestinian freedom of movement, employment opportunities, healthcare, and relations between Palestinians and Israelis.”

Clintonite Henry Waxman warns against including “contentious” language on Israel in the Democratic platform, as J Street suggests words about “settlements” entrenching the “occupation” will make both Clinton and Sanders forces happy. Nothing about Jerusalem, and nothing about BDS.

The Democrats are repeating their post-9/11 mistake by pushing for the expansion of the national security state. Their celebrated sit-in is pushing for a measure that would bar people on a terrorist watchlist from buying guns. These watchlists are deeply flawed, arbitrary and disproportionately impact Muslims.

Susie Day imagines a series of satirical letters from Hillary Clinton’s most ardent admirer: “As Senator, you masterfully voted for the war in Iraq, and have for years expertly supported just about every U.S. military intervention – without losing an ounce of your femininity. As Secretary of State, you deftly orchestrated the bombing of Libya. And when Muammar Gaddafi died, sodomized with a bayonet blade, you wittily quipped on TV news: “We came, we saw, he died.” You even got the State Department to approve $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments gave big bucks to the Clinton Foundation. Take THAT, sexism!”

In the last decade the number of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and Gaza has increased by one million, according to a survey conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in advance of World Refugee Day.

After author Miko Peled criticized Israel at an April event at an Episcopal church on the Upper West Side in NY, the rector organized a session on how to talk about the conflict which featured a city councilman and rabbi opposing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The Episcopal church is demonstrating moral cowardice by not supporting the non-violent movement to end atrocious Palestinian conditions.

Rida Abu Rass writes, “Some may argue that the Nakba is an ongoing process, or rather, that it never really ended. Yet, bearing in mind the frightening political processes that are unfolding within Israel, one should wonder whether we are heading towards another catastrophe. So let us ask: how likely is is it for an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to occur once again, similar to (or worse than) 1948? Surprisingly, I find that the Israeli Left never seriously raises this as a possibility.”

Today, Center for Constitutional Rights, Palestine Legal and Jewish Voice for Peace filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request seeking documents relating to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s recent executive order that will blacklist institutions and companies that abide by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns related to Israeli human rights abuses and violations of international law.

Following the massacre carried out by Omar Mateen in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, the subject of homosexuality in the lives of American Muslims has been brought front and center. Katie Miranda discusses her own conversion to Islam and her challenges with homophobia in the Muslim community: “People are free to believe what they want to believe about homosexuality. The problem is the homophobic rhetoric in the Muslim community which is as vile as the Islamophobic rhetoric coming from Pam, Donald and the mainstream media. Let’s not keep our heads in the sand about this anymore.”