The Democratic Party begins its national presidential convention in Philadelphia on Monday, under circumstances that political scientists refer to with the technical term “shitshow.” Wilson Dizard reports from the scene.
A specter is haunting Cleveland, the specter of the Alt Right. The Alt Right in the United States is a small but growing intellectual movement that seeks to resist the dilution of “White” people, both as a matter of biology and imagined culture. Wilson Dizard talks to Alt Right leader Richard Spencer, one of the people lending intellectual legitimacy to the Donald Trump campaign. Among other things they discuss Spencer’s view of Israel, “I respect Israel as a homogenous ethno-state, but I hate the meddling of the Israel lobby in American politics,” he says.
When asked outside the Republican National Convention in Cleveland what message he has for the West Bank, Cornel West tells a Lebanese news channel: “I think our young our precious Palestinian brothers and sisters need to know that there are voices here in the United States of all colors, white and black and red and yellow and brown, some of them are young Jewish voices who are concerned not just about the plight of Palestinians, but know that the day will come when the vicious Israeli occupation will be lifted. Palestinians will be able to live lives of decency and dignity and live lives of self determination.”
Wilson Dizard reports from Day One of the Republican convention which has already featured new heights of bizarre offensiveness. He meets activists from the American southwest who came to Cleveland to protest Trump’s proposal for a wall, which sounds very similar to Israeli separation wall in the West Bank. Rebekah Hinojosa, 25, who lives in the Rio Grande valley in Texas , calls the current wall between the US and Mexico a “monument to racism.”
Wilson Dizard reports from Cleveland, OH where the Republican convention is about to get underway. He writes, “This election is a battle between two of the most corrupt political ideologies. And they have voters jumping through rationalization hoops to justify voting for two of the most unpopular candidates a primary season has ever produced.”
A Palestinian computer engineer has put together a chilling game for smartphones, which shows the struggle of Gazan civilians to survive Israel’s 2014 onslaught. Rasheed Abueideh, creator of “Liyla and The Shadows of War” says he wants to provoke an emotional reaction from players. “[The purpose of the game is] to make people cry,” he says. “It’s to show the facts in the war and the effect of war on the civilians and on children.”
Over the July 4th weekend two sixteen year old Muslim boys in Brooklyn suffered a severe beating at the hands of an assailant who called one a “terrorist,” according to the victims. The New York Police have said that the incident was not a hate crime. This decision has disturbed some members of the area’s Muslim community, making them feel the police have overlooked their safety.
Wilson Dizard reports from San Francisco where members of the city’s LGBT community, rallied and marched with thousands of others down Market Street on Sunday night, a show of defiance and unity against anti-gay bigotry and gun violence itself. In the speeches by local politicians, activists and parents of gun violence victims, Islamophobia, homophobia and the National Rifle Association were San Francisco’s common enemy, not Islam or Muslims. Yet, by Monday, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were duking it out in one of the first major battles of what promises to be an election season full of them. Although Clinton paid lip service to rejecting Islamophobia, her proposal for what to do about people like killer Omar Mateen were similar to Trump’s.
The Democratic party is coming to a crossroads over Palestinian rights, one that may be as important to its future as its metamorphosis from the party of segregation into the party of Obamacare. Nominee or not, there’s nothing Hillary Clinton can do about it. Just as liberal, Roosevelt Democrats in the North realized that segregation in the American south was a ghastly and cruel institution in need of dismantling, so too are Bernie Democrats wising up to the idea that separation and equality don’t mix in Israel/Palestine.
The New York Times on Thursday described Israel’s military occupation in dismissive quotations (i.e “occupation”) in a story concerning Israelis and Palestinians and the Democratic National Convention. In another breathtaking example of digital illiteracy and editorial discombobulation, the Times removed the insensitive quotation marks a few hours afterwards with no editorial explanation. Maybe it was all some kind of innocent misunderstanding. But there’s plenty of reason not to believe that.