Congressional candidates Leslie Cockburn in Virginia, Scott Wallace in Pennsylvania and Mal Hyman in South Carolina have all been critical of Israel or supported Israel critics. And the progressive Democratic base wants to hear that criticism. Aaron David Miller fights back, saying that supporting Israel is mom and apple pie, and Israel support must stay bipartisan.
“I am an Islamophobe,” former Israeli government official Daniel Seaman confesses on I24 news. Seaman is considered a prominent and respected guest in Israeli mainstream media, despite his racist, bullying, bigoted conduct – or is it because of it?
Asaf Ronel of Haaretz said it is “unlikely” that Palestinian medic Razan al-Najjar was deliberately killed last Friday, although he confirms that deliberate targeting of medics with live ammunition occur. Having targeted her is a war-crime in itself, kill or no kill. On top of that, the possibility of a deliberate killing – murder – is completely relevant.
NPR promoted the Israeli occupation TV show “Fauda” on Saturday and when Scott Simon suggested that Palestinians killed in Gaza were “innocent,” Lior Raz retorted that 60 had been killed — a lie — and that almost all were members of a terror group– the Israeli government line. Simon failed to mention the killing the day before of a Palestinian medic.
Many of the people who defend Israel are consciously racist, but others dehumanize Arabs and Muslims by reproducing unexamined assumptions about Israel’s moral or civilizational superiority. Because so much time is spent debating when (or if) criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, we rarely get around to assessing how pro-Israel arguments and narratives exhibit anti-Arab racism. Luckily, Steven Salaita is here to help. Here are seven of the most common ways that defending Israel crosses the line into racism.
Israa M. Khater on her visit to the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon: “My nation has been reduced to human trash. We are simply meant to be sustained, contained, but never returned. So comes the international aid, a humanitarian initiative by no other than those who stripped us of everything we owned. It comes preconditioned on our admission of defeat, on our acceptance of what cannot be logically accepted. Can one be grateful to what amounts to nothing compared to what has been lost?”
An open letter to Wajahat Ali about his involvement with the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative: “Nobody is denying the benefit of a diversity of views on a given topic. But there is a difference between disparities in opinion and participation in a program that seeks to undermine the Palestinian struggle. You’ve been incredibly disingenuous about the voice you now have and why you have it.”
Let’s say Hamas fired a rocket that killed a young Israeli nurse while she was tending to the wounded from earlier rockets. Is there any doubt that the mainstream media would cover her death extensively, with photos, and interviews with friends and family? But when Israeli snipers murdered a 21-year-old Palestinian nurse named Razan Al-Najjar, the mainstream media was nearly silent.
Today, Palestinians mourned the funeral of 21-year-old Rawan al-Najjar, carrying her body with on top her medic vest soaked in blood, in the city of Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip. Al-Najjar was a medic who was shot the day before by an Israeli sniper as she was attempted to reach the injured during the protest at the Gaza fence, near Khuza’a.
This article is a plea not to forget Jaffa on the “Disappearing Palestine” maps illustrating the Palestinian loss of land from 1946 to the present. Jaffa was a gem of Palestinian urban life, with a population of 120,000, and assigned as territory of a Palestinian state under the UN partition plan that the Zionists soon overrode, ethnically cleansing the city.