Posts with the tag Palestinians

30-Minute Terrorism, Just Add Sprinkles

Ali M Latifi — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:56:37 EDT

Recently Rachael Ray and Dunkin' Donuts have both come under fire for an advertisement featuring the TV host in what is allegedly a keffiyeh.

To say that this argument is nothing more than nonsensical xenophobia and Arab mongering would be an understatement.

Ralph Nader on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza

Nazik — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:26:48 EDT

Here is an excerpt from Ralph Nader's recent article in CounterPunch:

According to The Nation magazine, the great Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, reports that the primitive rockets from Gaza, have taken thirteen Israeli lives in the past four years, while Israeli forces have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories in the past two years alone. Almost half of them were civilians, including some 200 children.

The Israeli government is barring most of the trucks from entering Gaza to feed the nearly one million Palestinians depending on international relief, from groups such as the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The loss of life from crumbling health care facilities, disastrous electricity cutoffs, gross malnutrition and contaminated drinking water from broken public water systems does not get totaled. These are the children and their civilian adult relatives who expire in a silent violence of suffering that 98 percent of Congress avoids mentioning while extending billions of taxpayer dollars to Israel annually. UNRWA says “we are seeing evidence of the stunting of children, their growth is slowing.” Cancer patients are deprived of their chemotherapy, kidney patients are cut off from dialysis treatments and premature babies cannot receive blood-clotting medications.

The misery, mortality and morbidity worsens day by day. Here is how the commissioner-general of UNRWA sums it up, “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and-some would say-encouragement of the international community.”

An Untenable Situation

Jesse Singal — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 12:10:04 EDT

There's a really heartbreaking, well-reported piece in today's New York Times about Gaza and the Israeli military's recent tendency to kill children there. Definitely worth a read.

Walt & Mearsheimer In San Francisco

Justin Elliott — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 19:59:11 EDT

“Like Israel, the authors have often had to defend the right of their theory to exist.” With that quip Thursday evening, Jane Wales, president of the World Affairs Council of Northern California, kicked off a talk on “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. They spoke in the chandelier-lined Terrace Room of the swank Fairmont Hotel atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill.

Philip Weiss has called the book serious, cold, and stunning. Ditto for W&M’s presentation. I would add to that list: remarkably polished. Each man spoke for about 30 minutes and then fielded audience questions and I didn’t hear either of them stumble or utter a single “um” or “eh”.

The audience reaction was less raucous than I expected. It wasn’t raucous at all, actually. People listened attentively in complete silence until about 45 minutes in when there was a light sprinkling of applause at Mearsheimer’s suggestion of a viable Palestinian state. The crowd was uniformly polite and, judging from the sizeable lineup for book signatures, at least somewhat supportive.

In a way it was heartening to see the room packed with influential-looking people: almost exclusively middle-aged to elderly, white, mostly in suits and evening wear. On the other hand, in a room of several hundred, I was probably one of just a dozen attendees under 30—likely due in part to the World Affairs Council’s unfortunate decision to charge for tickets. So to Farrar, Straus and Giroux: add more campuses to W&M’s tour. Most students won’t be willing to shell out $26 for a book, but it would be a smart move in terms of intellectual and cultural impact.

The younger and sprier of the two scholars, Walt defined the Israel Lobby (like any other interest group; not monolithic; not composed exclusively of Jews), calling it “as American as apple pie,” an oft-repeated line designed to ease concerns the authors are somehow painting American Jews as a dangerous fifth column. They are explicitly not doing that.