John Mullen writes Fordham University’s Dean of Students Keith Eldredge on the decision to prevent Students for Justice in Palestine from forming a chapter on the campus: “You made a bad mistake; bad for Fordham, for your students and bad for Catholic higher education. Your reputation will suffer from it, as did Phyllis Wise’s career at Illinois, and the reputation of Fordham will suffer. There is still time to fix it.”
The Washington Post ignores Israel’s brutal killing of a 17-year-old Palestinian youth protesting the occupation but publishes a bizarre feature story on a blind Israeli golfer. The relative weight granted Israeli human interest stories and Palestinian human rights speaks volumes, says Jim Zogby.
The Palestinians have always deserved the basic human rights afforded to so many other people. With the passage of U.N. Resolution 2334, now is the time to act.
Obama failed to establish a Palestinian state but his success against Netanyahu on the Iran deal and last minute abstention on the UN Security Council resolution against settlements have fostered the international campaign for equal rights in Israel and Palestine.
Eve Spangler just returned from a yearly human rights delegation to Israel/Palestine and says the best description of the emerging situation is this: a perfect storm is coming. All the most destructive forces are aligning to produce (possibly violent) change and uncertainty early in the Trump administration. She says younger Palestinians are beginning to prepare themselves for the civil rights struggle to come when Israel annexes the West Bank.
Batsheva Dance Company of Israel is on a North American tour. More than a dozen activist organizations call for boycotting its performances unless it ceases its role as an ambassador for the Israeli government and condemns Israeli human rights violations.
Yesterday, Israeli police forces demolished homes and structures at Umm Al-Hiran, a Bedouin village in the southern Negev desert. Umm Al-Hiran is one of 39 ‘unrecognised’ Bedouin villages in Israel’s southern Negev and has faced state repression since the founding of Israel in 1948. Therefore it is best to understand yesterday’s violence and the case of Umm Al-Hiran as part of an overarching policy of ethnic cleansing.
“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.