In a strong editorial, the LA Times says that Israel’s “noxious” law against admitting boycott supporters will not stop the country’s “delegitimization,” and that US states are also wrong to try and legislate against Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS), because it’s a “classic tool” of nonviolent dissent.
As Terry Gross’s interview with Muslim reformer Haroon Moghul on Fresh Air yesterday demonstrates, the mainstream media loves anti-Islamists and the war for the soul of Islam. But it maintains a blacklist of anti-Zionists and ignores the war for the soul of Judaism.
After an article quoting a science fiction writer making a mistake that any high school science nerd would spot — the energy of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs — the New York Times corrects the error, but does so in a way calculated not to reveal the sloppiness of the original.
Whatever happened to the biblical command to bear witness? A dozen US rabbis are shocked by what they see in occupied Hebron, but they don’t want their names to appear in Haaretz lest their congregations back home get upset with them.
America has been at war for 15 years but few Americans notice, because overall it is rural communities that have suffered the highest casualty rates, Francis Shen and Douglas Kriner argue in an important new paper. And it was those communities, in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, that gave Donald Trump his victory over Hillary Clinton, who was seen as pro-war.
Jeffrey Gettleman, a New York Times reporter who covered Africa for a decade, accidentally reveals why much mainstream coverage is so bad. There is a focus on violence and “ooga-booga” stories, ones that satisfy western prejudice, rather than relating the real struggles and achievements of Africans.
Cal State Fresno shuts down search for Middle East professorship after all 4 finalists are Palestinians and/or Arab Americans. Friends of a foreign government have silenced debate and made us all dumber, writes one finalist, who remains anonymous lest they beomce “another name on the Israeli lobby’s effective but untraceable blacklist.”
Recent days have dashed any thought that Donald Trump would be neutral or an honest broker. Negotiator Jason Greenblatt spent all his time echoing the Israeli message about the conflict, while envoy Jared Kushner reportedly angered Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas by carrying Netanyahu’s talking points to Ramallah.
The 1967 war was not an existential crisis, Israeli scholar Guy Laron tells Wilson Center. “The Israeli general staff quietly knew that they’re going to win the war big.” And the CIA told LBJ the same thing: “If Israel is attacked, it will win in a week.”
Yakov Rabkin’s book “What Is Modern Israel?” is one of the most important critiques of Zionism ever published. Zionism is opposed to Jewish tradition and to liberalism, and it has fostered a deep sense of insecurity in Israeli Jews and made American Jewish leaders into “vassals” of Israel. Critics must overcome the “climate of intellectual terror” to condemn the Zionist ideology.