The demonization of Vladimir Putin by the US press, acting as stenographers for intelligence agencies and Hillary Clinton, limits US ability to bring about diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East, says James W. Carden in interview with Bob Garfield of “On the Media”

Robert Gardner, a UCLA senior active in Palestinian solidarity, described David Horowitz’s Freedom Center as a “hate organization” because of posters it has put up smearing Students for Justice in Palestine as anti-Semitic. Horowitz has now threatened to sue the student. Palestine Legal has defended Gardner’s statement.

Eamon Murphy reports a recent debate held in Brooklyn on “Syria and the Left” sponsored by Muftah Magazine and Verso Books. The expectation was that the event would be contentious and it didn’t disappoint. The speakers represented sides of a deepening divide over Syria: Max Blumenthal and Zein El-Amine represented skepticism of the opposition and emphasized the threat of regime change while Murtaza Hussain and Loubna Mrie, a Syrian exile who participated in the uprising’s early demonstrations, argued that Assad must go.

Open Hillel is calling on Hillel International to reject $22 million in funding from Mosaic United, a new project led by Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Minister of Education and Diaspora Affairs. Mosaic plans to disburse $66 million over two years to Hillel International, Chabad, and Olami Worldwide in order to combat “the weakening of the Jewish foundations of the family unit” and “critical discourse” around Israel.

Lots of Israel gossip in the latest Wikileaks Clinton emails, like Haim Saban, the campaign’s favorite billionaire, writing “Haleluyah” from Israel after Clinton won the Nevada caucuses, and Stu Eizenstat saying “Mission accomplished,” when Clinton threw President Obama under the bus for criticizing Netanyahu.

Establishments should fall over a disastrous war decision; but so far there has been no accounting among elites for the thinkers and journalists who led us into the Iraq War. And Trump has been a beneficiary.

European governments – fearful of upsetting Israel’s patron in Washington – have been trying to hold in check popular anger at a belligerent and unrepentant Israel.

Sam Bahour says Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” should come with a warning label READ WITH CAUTION IF YOU ACTUALLY LIVE UNDER A JEWISH ISRAELI MILITARY OCCUPATION because “between the seriousness of the political premise, the gut-wrenching humor, the community involved, the concept of a collective return of land as even being imaginable, the real, day to day stories—love, death, addiction, work, relationships, etc.—interspersed, and the burning of the Dome of Rock, which already happened once in reality and is being threatened again these days, it’s just too much for a person living under an actual Jewish (or so believed)-inspired military occupation to handle.”

When President Obama rebuked Netanyahu for racism and abandonment of a Palestinian state in March 2015, the New York Times and Hillary Clinton campaign took steps to throw him under the bus. Here’s how it went down, according to newly-released Wikileaks emails.

From Samidoun: “A bus full of Palestinian families was detained for two hours by Israeli occupation forces after a visit with their loved ones on Wednesday, 26 October in the Negev desert prison, on the grounds that one of the mothers of the prisoners had with her a photograph of her imprisoned children.”