Award-winning film 'Ibdis' reflects Palestinian spirit that refuses to be destroyed. Earlier this summer I shared reflections on my journey to Ibdis, where my father introduced my brother and I to the ruins of our grandparents’ village, now a nameless cluster of debris on a commercial Israeli farm. It was a haunting homecoming, my own bittersweet “Birthright” voyage. And this is truly the experience of our people—whether in the Diaspora, under occupation, or living out our days as lesser members within the racist structure of the Israeli state, to be a Palestinian means to bear a very unique burden.
It means to grow up with ghosts, shadows of what could have been, and the constant horror of what continues to be. Yet I dare to say that the overwhelming spirit of our people is one of beautiful, improbable hope. It is a spirit that, even in the face of violence, theft, oppression, humiliation, and denial, has stoutly refused to be destroyed. It is a message to Palestinians everywhere to remember where they come from. Courage take heart. Book review: how Israeli school textbooks teach kids to hate. At the height of Israel’s brutal 2008-09 assault on the Gaza Strip, then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni claimed that “Palestinians teach their children to hate us and we teach love thy neighbor” (232). The first part of this myth is propagated by people like US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and more recently Newt Gingrich, who both spread the baseless claim that Palestinian schoolbooks teach anti-Semitism.
This calumny originated with anti-Palestinian propagandandists such as Israeli settler Itamar Marcus and his “Palestinian Media Watch.” In an important new book, Palestine in Israeli School Books, Israeli language and education professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan buries the second part of Livni’s myth once and for all. Peled-Elhanan examines 17 Israeli school textbooks on history, geography and civic studies. She goes into great detail, examining and exposing the sometimes complex and subtle ways this is achieved. Palestinians marginalized, demonized by Israeli textbooks. StandWithUs' revisionist history train campaign. Hasbara outfit StandWithUs, as reported late last month, has placed its own billboards at Metro-North train stations in New York and Connecticut in an attempt to counter a much-discussed awareness campaign depicting the loss of Palestinian land over the past sixty-six years, paid for by Henry Cliffords’ Committee for Peace in Israel/Palestine.
StandWithUs’ counter-campaign, aimed at denying the validity of Palestinian ties its own homeland by presenting the Old Testament as a divine land deed (in addition to lauding Israel’s technological achievements and resurrecting the “no partner for peace” talking point), includes this ad: No one disputes that Jewish presence in Palestine has been continuous since antiquity, albeit in varying degrees of population percentage whereby Jews often represented a very small minority of the total population of Palestine. But this particular billboard is even more dishonest as one reads further. Why Israel is 'singled out' In the recent debate over the proposed boycott of Israeli goods by the Park Slope Food Coop, it was asserted that critics of Israeli human rights abuses are unjustly “singling out” the Jewish state.
They are “ignoring” the human rights abuses committed by other governments and eliding the criminal actions of the Palestinians. One hears the same argument wherever and whenever the subject of the Israel-Palestine conflict is brought up. What about Syria? Iran? North Korea? To say that Israel is being “singled out” is to say that it is being unfairly vilified for doing the same sorts of, presumably “bad,” things that other states are doing; it’s to grant, in other words, that Israel is doing something “wrong.”
Those who assert that Israel is being “singled out” aren’t interested in assessing where to rank Israel on the scoreboard of global human rights violators. The charge of “singling out” is at once disingenuous and obfuscatory. There are several compelling reasons. But Israel? Visualizing Occupation: Distribution of Water. Occupied Palestine | فلسطين | Category Archive | Hunger Strike. Interactive map of Palestine villages destroyed in Nakba. Update, 9 August 2012 This resource has been removed due to a licensing dispute with PalestineRemembered.com.
The Electronic Intifada has produced this interactive map that allows you to see information about any of the more than 400 Palestinian cities, towns and villages depopulated and destroyed during the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist and later Israeli forces from late 1947 into 1948. The data and images come from the website Palestine Remembered, which used much of the basic research from Walid Khalidi’s seminal reference All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948.
Many individuals have also contributed their own narratives, images and personal discoveries on Palestine Remembered. The Electronic Intifada acknowledges this work and is pleased to present and increase access to this important data in a new form. How to use the map: Al Jazeera exposes 2nd anti-Islam class taught to US military officers. One slide in an anti-Muslim class taught to US officers implies that Hamas, through CAIR, infiltrated the Bush administration. Circled in red on the right is Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director. (Screenshot via Al Jazeera) Al Jazeera English has revealed that a second anti-Muslim class was taught to senior US military officers.
The class was titled “Understanding the Threat to America,” and claimed that Islamists from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood have infiltrated the US government at the highest levels. The Al Jazeera program “Inside Story” has the details. Watch the program here: The report came a day after Wired.com’s Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman exposed a similar course being taught at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College. Al Jazeera reported that the class it revealed was taught at a military base in Virginia, although it’s unclear if it was at the same college where the course Wired exposed was taught.
The firm’s website states its president, E.J. The army sergeant and Lovelle Mixon: Mass killings, race and state power. The March 21, 2009, death of Lovelle Mixon (pictured in poster at right), commemorated by a march and rally four days later, came less than four months after Oscar Grant was executed by police on an Oakland BART platform. – Photo: Dave Id, Indybay On Sunday morning, March 11, an army sergeant walked into an Afghan village and went house to house killing 16 civilians, nine of them children . The sergeant then took most of the bodies, including those of four little girls, and set them on fire. There has been much discussion in the ensuing weeks about this man’s psychological make-up, family life, his childhood, the stress of being a soldier, PTSD etc.
They try to take the “war” out of “war atrocity.” The answer is neither that these soldiers are simply sociopaths nor that they are merely following orders, as was used to explain abuses at Abu Ghraib or the My Lai massacre . What was this man doing in Afghanistan? The unit of analysis in this conversation is the war, not the soldier. Interfaith Peace-Builders - Video - African Heritage Delegation Press Conference. Our Eyes Witnessed: On People of Color in the United States and The Palestinian BDS Movement. Our Eyes Witnessed: On People of Color in the United States and The Palestinian BDS Movement by Darnell L.
Moore & Lisa Weiner-Mahfuz | special to NewBlackMan According to AIPAC’s website, they recruit “[o]n campuses across America—from Ivy League universities, to small liberal arts colleges, to Historically Black and Christian schools,” as a means to help students, “find their voices in support of a strong U.S. The success of recruitment and propaganda efforts, like that of AIPAC, might be a result of Israel’s efforts to focus attention on its ostensibly progressive track record of human rights while conveniently overlooking its human rights and international law infringements as it relates to its treatment of Palestinian people and possession of Palestinian land. In the case of black and brown students, it seems that a similar phenomenon may be occurring.
In fact, we believe that the occupation of Palestine is a struggle that all people of color should recognize as our own. 1. 2. 3. The world must heed Khader Adnans call: Make Palestinian Political Prisoners Day, 17 April 2012, a day of international action. Feeling the Ignorance at AIPAC 2011 Enough with the “Gaza is impoverished” remarks « Sixteen Minutes to Palestine. As Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu vows to strike occupied Palestine with vengeance, as the Israeli air force targets civilian infrastructure, as retaliatory strikes damage the supposed peace process beyond reconciliation, the “abject poverty” of the Gaza Strip appears to be our main concern.
Yesterday, I wrote a short piece urging specifically the international community to take notice of themissiles regularly falling on Gaza and to intervene in the same moral manner it did in Libya. Today, I direct this message to everyone. It takes nothing more than a cursory glance at my Twitter newsfeed to recognize the tweets and retweets referencing the sub-par living conditions in Gaza. Statistics indicate that 80% of Gazans live under the established poverty line. One-liners name the sun as the only source of usable energy since virtually all of the territory’s electricity plants are either under-resourced, damaged, or destroyed.
So what’s the point? It’s understandable though.