“I who plowed Israel’s fields, planted trees, built a house and fathered sons and shed his blood in the battle for its founding… renounce my belief in the Zionism which has failed, I shall not be loyal to the Jewish fascist state and its mad vision,” the late Dov Yermiya said in 2009

James North writes that as he read through Phil Weiss’s superb reports on Jewish settlers in West Bank Palestine, he experienced an eerie sense of familiarity. From 1978 to 1983 North lived in southern Africa, writing articles and then a book about the struggle against apartheid. The people Weiss described so vividly reminded him of many of the white South Africans he met back then. He writes, “The resemblance is more than an attitude of colonial superiority. Beyond that, I recognized in Weiss’s settlers a similar feeling of self-confidence, the conviction that although the outside world could criticize all it wanted, no one was going to taken any serious actions to disturb their lives.”

Yonatan Shay, an official of the American Jewish Committee, seeks to paint Syrian refugees in Berlin as anti-Semitic, and as putting Jews in Europe in danger, with the obvious agenda of riding the nationalist xenophobic wave.

Another US foreign policy blunder, this one in Haiti. Does Obama stumble partly because he spends too much time on Israel?

Katie Miranda offers an ad for Airbnb’s rentals in the occupied territories. There is rarely this much truth in advertising.

The New York Times Jerusalem bureau chiefs Ethan Bronner and Jodi Rudoren failed to convey a true grim picture of one-state Israel/Palestine out of Zionist attachment. Similar adherences have kept the US mainstream press from telling a truth that John Kerry and US ambassador Daniel Shapiro have conveyed in recent weeks.

“We live like dogs,” says a Kurdish resident of Grande-Synthe, a burgeoning refugee camp located in an industrial suburb of Dunkerque, France. As the refugee crisis continues to swell across Europe, Grande-Synthe stands as an example of the most perilous living conditions in modern Western society.

While in Hawaii, Hatim Kanaaneh uses the local homelessness crisis to explain Middle East politics.

Over the weekend, in a victory for diplomacy, the U.S. lifted sanctions on Iran in place since 2006 as the two countries also completed a prisoner exchange. But no sooner than the plane carrying released prisoners had left the tarmac in Iran, the U.S. Department of Treasury slapped new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile testing last fall, breaking the spirit of the agreement with Iran.

On December 3rd 2015 a statue was unveiled in honor of Richard “Dick” Cheney at the United States Capitol. Coincidentally, the previous day witnessed the British parliament, specifically the House of Commons, inadvertently honor Cheney in the debate on whether to extend the military intervention aimed at ISIS in Iraq into ISIS’s supposed heartland in Syria.