The lack of moral consistency from pro-Israel groups is hardly surprising, but you rarely see such a nice distillation within the span of just a few days.
Even as UAE clamps down on a poet, its ambassador celebrates tyranny to pro-Israel group. Yousef Al Otaiba: “People always think we don’t pay attention to public opinion inside the Emirates because we are not a democracy, and it’s actually quite the opposite. Because we’re not a democracy we have to be very in tune with what our people want and what the Street feel.”
Robert Vitalis’s new book, “Oilcraft” argues the US militarization of the Arabian Gulf is based on false ideas about controlling oil. But history shows this control is central to maintaining hegemony, which is the US goal.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Columbia University have both passed historic resolutions calling for divestment from Israel. “These campus BDS victories are indicative of the rapidly changing tide we’re seeing across the United States,” the BDS Movement’s North America coordinator Olivia Katbi Smith told Mondoweiss. “Despite the escalating campaigns of repression on campuses and in the halls of government, it is becoming impossible to be ‘progressive except Palestine’, because it is becoming impossible to silence our movement.”
While the rate of COVID-19 infections in Israel has skyrocketed in the last week, Palestinian health officials are reporting more promising numbers, with the Ministry of Health reporting an 80% recovery rate among COVID-19 patients in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
Want to know why Joe Biden won’t say a critical word about Israel? Haim Saban, who just raised $4.5 million for Biden, repeatedly praised the “Jared [Kushner] plan” for peace in the Middle East today for being “outside the box.” Saban was at White House for the UAE/Israel/Bahrain deal announcement Sept. 15.
Instead of putting anti-racist education in the hands of the pro-Israel lobby, the California Department of Education should recommit to a true ethnic studies curriculum.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s withdrawal last Friday from an October memorial to Yitzhak Rabin is an act of irreverence for an Israeli leader we’ve not seen before at her political level; and the drama has roiled the pro-Israel community. Even the Biden campaign spoke up, an aide saying that AOC’s decision was “problematic” for the Democratic Party.
An award-winning breathless New York Times podcast about Islamic Jihadism that was downloaded millions of times in 2018 turns out to have been based on a fraudulent liar — but so far the paper and its reporter, Rukmini Callimachi, have declined to fully acknowledge their error.