“I prefer a painful truth over any blissful fantasy,” Chelsea Manning said, and President Obama has commuted her sentence in one of his last acts as president
Controversy erupted on Wednesday over conflicting reports regarding an incident in Umm al-Hiran, a Palestinian Bedouin village facing demolition in the Negev, where two people — one Palestinian civilian and an Israeli police officer — were killed. Palestinian witnesses said Israeli forces shot at a truck driving through the village, making the driver lose control and run over an officer, while Israeli officials have reported that the Palestinian was shot and killed after purposefully running over and killing the Israeli officer. Grainy drone footage, released after the incident, allegedly shows Israeli forces opening fire before the driver sped up and hit the officer.
Current theater critic and Fox News commentator Judith Miller is undoubtedly best known for her fact-free reporting on Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” for the New York Times that helped create the pretext for the 2003 war in Iraq. So it was rather odd yesterday when Miller criticized President Obama’s decision to commute the sentence of Chelsea Manning by wondering, “How many people died because of Manning’s leak?” The quick answer is none, but the internet wasn’t going to let Miller off that easy.
A peaceful march broke out into clashes on Sunday, after Palestinians gathered in the occupied southern West Bank city of Bethlehem to demand Israeli authorities release the remains of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces to their families for burial. Samir al-Khadour, the husband of slain Majd al-Khadour, said, “To see all these people here gives me hope that I will get my wife’s body back one day.”
UN resolution against settlements will lead to ‘mass boycotts and sanctions’ of Israel, Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum tells Park Ave synagogue, as liberal Zionists panic over the dangers posed to their dream by Netanyahu and Trump.
Citing concerns that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) would be too “polarizing” for the campus to tolerate, Fordham University denied status to a group of students seeking to establish an SJP club. “My own university told me I can’t share my culture and history like other students because I’m a Palestinian who believes in Palestinian freedom,” said Ahmad Awad, whose family is originally from the West Bank, and who hoped to be president of SJP.
Qusay Hassan al-Umour, 17, was shot dead during clashes in Tuqu village on Monday afternoon. While the Israeli army says youth in the village had started a “violent riot”, locals say less than a dozen teens were throwing rocks at Israeli military jeeps before the shooting began. Sheren Khalel reports from Tuqu as thousands take to the streets in mourning and the al-Umour family struggles with the devastating news. “They have destroyed me. May God bring them to justice,” al-Umour’s mother tells Khalel.
Al Jazeera’s four-part series on the Israel lobby’s actions in Britain shows the primary function of the Labour Friends of Israel and other groups with the Israeli embassy is to smear Palestinians and their supporters with charges of anti Semitism, and thereby control the limits of public opinion about the Jewish state.
All over the world people who challenge Zionism are being accused of antisemitism. You might imagine the one group of dissidents who are safe from this kind of delegitimization is the Israeli Jews—they are not. This cruel irony, when exposed, may actually play a productive role in decoupling antisemitism and anti-Zionism. As actual antisemites take positions of power in the US government while maintaining a pro-Israel stance, the need to oppose the false accusations of antisemitism becomes ever more vital.
Ma‘an reports: Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager during clashes in the Bethlehem-area village of Tuqu‘ in the southern occupied West Bank on Monday evening. A Palestinian Red Crescent spokesperson told Ma‘an that 17-year-old Qusay Hasan al-Umour was shot with live ammunition in the chest at least three times, and that Israeli forces had detained him for an unspecified period of time before handing over his body to the health organization. A video taken by Palestinian journalist Hisham Abu Sharqah immediately after al-Umour was shot seemingly contradicts the Israeli army’s version of events.