Talib Kweli and M1 (of Dead Prez), with the help of beatmakers Beatnick & K-Salaam,…
“It sounds to me like you’d prefer Palestinians not to exist,” I said between sessions at the Jewish retreat center. “I wouldn’t go as far as genocide,” he said. “Almost, but not quite.” And he smiled.The ideological merger between Judaism and Zionism has given rise to an American form of idolatry that one rejects at one’s own peril. A vicious hasbara indoctrination had overtaken these people’s minds and shuttered their ability to think.
Rabbi Danielle Leshaw, the director of Ohio University’s Hillel, felt tremendous anguish over the Gaza onslaught this summer as a liberal Zionist. Still she threw herself into fighting the burgeoning Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement on campus. Then she was outraged by the pro-BDS “bloodbucket” video posted on Sept. 2 by student senate president Megan Marzec. Leshaw has helped lead demands for Marzec’s resignation by stating that Marzec had made Jews feel unsafe in Athens, Ohio. “Athens is a shitshow right now,” she has tweeted.
In her new book On the Brink, Alice Rothchild chronicles a visit to Palestine at the height of Israeli raids on the West Bank this summer. She has returned to a country where Jews are at last wrestling with the issues: is Jewish privilege over Palestinians consistent with liberalism? is there any possibility of a two-state solution given John Kerry’s negotiating failure?
The U.S. is not a neutral mediator in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; it is an active participant and is guilty of the crimes being committed by Israel against Palestinians, most recently, the mass killings and destruction Israel wrought on the Gaza Strip during the summer. The reality that the U.S. is an active supporter of unimaginable suffering may very well be the motivating force behind the U.S.’s adamant attempts to block the Palestinians from using any of the internationally recognized tools of accountability to hold Israel responsible, such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. When an indigenous, stateless population is blocked access to opportunities for justice by superpowers like the U.S., something is wrong—deadly wrong.
Longtime journalist Barbara Erickson’s site criticizing New York Times stories for their pro-Israel bias has been up for less than a year but is gaining a reputation for clarity and insight. TimesWarp presents evidence that the NYT is Israel-centric in its coverage.
When Senator Elizabeth Warren began spouting Likud talking points– that Hamas welcomed civilian deaths and the US should not sanction Israeli settlement construction — her progressive base was shocked. That’s why they confronted her at a talk at Tufts earlier this week.
When Episcopal chaplain Bruce Shipman got drummed out at Yale for controversial statements about Gaza, school officials surely violated the school’s Woodward Report, which says that “civility” is less important than free access to ideas, including those who “challenge the unchallengeable” and “think the unthinkable”
Rabbi Danielle Leshaw has called on Ohio U. student leader Megan Marzec to resign because her action for Palestine allegedly made Jewish students feel “unsafe.” But Leshaw is administrator of a pro-Israel group that in its logo denies the existence of Palestine or an occupation.
As evidence the Salaita firing is a catastrophe for the University of Illinois keeps stacking up, the American Studies Association (ASA) issued a statement from their Executive Committee characterizing the UIUC administration’s decision to rescind the offer of tenured faculty position to Salaita’s as “a de facto assault against the Program in American Indian Studies at UIUC ” that sets a “dangerous precedence”.