Friday, July 25, 2025

"And yet we watched as those subtle, innocent, beautiful nuances of our tongue were twisted into indicators of suspicion. In an American discourse so heavily imbued with anti-Palestinian racism and so rife with Islamophobia, Palestinians or those who dare see them as human are not allowed to have legitimate intentions or legitimate grievances. They are to be constantly seen as suspicious. Even if they speak of human rights, equality, dignity, they can never really be trusted to mean those things because of who they are — sneaky shapeshifters with deeply held, murderous, ulterior motives. It is quite remarkable how much this echoes antisemitism throughout history, and that should surprise no one. All forms of racism are connected" Yousef Munayyer

... An Era of Being Exogenously Defined

On a nightly basis after September 11, 2001, so-called terrorism experts who knew next to nothing about the language, religion, or cultures of the region would appear on news broadcasts — indoctrinating our friends, neighbors, classmates, and coworkers to treat our language as suspicious.

We watched as those subtle and innocent nuances of our tongue were twisted into indicators of suspicion.

I remember hearing an Arab-American elder once explain to a curious neighbor, “In Arabic, God is in every conversation.” At the time, I thought it was a bit overdramatic. It is undoubtedly true that it is hard to imagine an Arabic conversation where Allah is not uttered. Whether in our bismillahs, alhamdulillahs, mashallahs or inshallahs or our yallahs or wallahs, God makes routine appearances. But these are not necessarily religious conversations at all. Even the non-religious use these terms; it is just the nature of how we communicate in our language due to its historic ties to faith. It is also one of the many things that makes the Arabic language beautiful.

And yet we watched as those subtle, innocent, beautiful nuances of our tongue were twisted into indicators of suspicion. In an American discourse so heavily imbued with anti-Palestinian racism and so rife with Islamophobia, Palestinians or those who dare see them as human are not allowed to have legitimate intentions or legitimate grievances. They are to be constantly seen as suspicious. Even if they speak of human rights, equality, dignity, they can never really be trusted to mean those things because of who they are — sneaky shapeshifters with deeply held, murderous, ulterior motives. It is quite remarkable how much this echoes antisemitism throughout history, and that should surprise no one. All forms of racism are connected.

A Shoe on the Other Foot

Imagine for a minute subjecting words or phrases in a different language, or about a different people, to the same unfair treatment. Consider the Hebrew phrase Am Yisrael Chai. The literal meaning of the phrase is “the people of Israel live,” and there are plenty of instances where the use of this phrase is mundane. However, the phrase is routinely chanted by murderous Israeli settlers as they engage in mob violence against Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Recently, it has been shouted by Israeli soldiers as they commit heinous war crimes in Gaza and shared widely and proudly by those same soldiers on social media. Thus, one could argue that Am Yisrael Chai is a genocidal slogan and must be banned, and that all those who use it or have used it must be criminalized and viewed with deep suspicion.

Surely, this is absurd. And yet this is the absurdity Palestinians and those who support their freedom are constantly subjected to. Still, too many cannot see the glaring double standard... READ MORE

https://theintercept.com/2025/07/10/mamdani-globalize-intifada-democrats/

Zohran Mamdani Shows Democrats How Not to Take the Bait

By refusing to capitulate on "globalize the intifada," Mamdani rejected a long tradition of demonizing Arabic language.

Yousef Munayyer

July 10 2025

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

"The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel's goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming UN aid organisations were linked to Hamas "terror" in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity " It was a genocide in Gaza from day one. Here's why- Here is a brief outline of some of the most pertinent factors by Jonathan Cook

"1. In early 2008 – that is, 17 years ago – deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai, a former senior Israeli general, threatened that Gaza would face a "Shoah" – a word until then, strictly reserved for the Holocaust.

2. He did so shortly after Israel implemented what would become a near two-decade siege of Gaza. Israel had already surrounded the enclave with a heavily militarised fence, made its territorial waters off-limits, and bombed its only airport. From then on, food was tightly rationed, or what Israeli leaders called “ putting Gaza on a diet”, while swaths of the enclave were intermittently destroyed by Israeli bombing, or what Israeli leaders called “mowing the lawn”. Gaza was effectively turned into a

concentration camp

3. The siege was complemented by Israel's gradual destruction of Gaza's means of self-sufficiency: any fishing off its coast was stopped; Israel regularly sprayed herbicide on the enclave’s agricultural land; Israel eradicated Gaza's industrial sector by making exports almost impossible; and Israel regularly bombed Gaza's electricity and desalination plants, limiting the essentials of water and power.

4. The goal was clear: to make Gaza entirely dependent on Israel's goodwill, of which there was almost none, and at the same time utterly dependent on aid. In tandem, Israel started waging a deceitful campaign claiming UN aid organisations were linked to Hamas "terror" in the hope it could use this as a rationalisation for impeding aid, as it has done with great ferocity since 7 October 2023, and ultimately for taking over for itself all aid provision, as it has also managed to do in recent months with the creation of an Israeli-US front group, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.

5. With this as the background, the United Nations warned a decade ago that Gaza was likely to become uninhabitable by 2020. That was a major reason why Palestinians began mass protests at their concentration camp fence in 2018, which Israel responded to with lethal live fire.

In one article in the Israeli media at the time, IDF snipers boasted about shooting “ 42 knees in one day”. Hundreds were killed and many thousands crippled as a result. Those same snipers are currently shooting children in the head, abdomen and testicles, as British surgeon Nick Maynard, who is volunteering in Gaza, has warned Let us note too that Israel’s almost complete, and malevolent, control over Gaza – and the fact that the world had lost interest in the enclave’s desperate plight – was a major factor in Hamas and other groups launching their lethal break-out on 7 October 2023.

5. In parallel to all this, and starting in 2007, Israel persuaded the US to join it in a pressure campaign on Egypt: to open its single, short border with Gaza so that the enclave’s people would flood into Sinai – an act of ethnic cleansing and a blatant violation of international law. Egypt refused to submit before 7 October 2023, and has continued to do so since.

In fact, forcibly removing a group from their homes through violence and by making life impossible for them where they live itself meets the legal definition of genocide – all the more obviously so if those doing the forcible removal say that is what they are doing, as Israeli leaders have been stating from the start of their genocidal slaughter and starvation campaign in Gaza.

Israel is committing a genocide to force Egypt and the Arab world to take the people of Gaza as refugees. If they refuse, Israel will continue with the genocide by killing more of Gaza’s people. If they relent, Israel will continue the genocide by dispersing what’s left of the people of Gaza to the far corners of the world.

Either way, it is genocide. Either way, it must be stopped – now."

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1948696269448196337

Chris Hedges Confronts the N.J. State Assembly on Dangerous Antisemitism Bill: The bill would accept the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, which conflates criticism of the state of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/copy-confronts-the-nj-state-assembly?publication_id=778851&post_id=169193100&isFreemail=true&r=34riug&triedRedirect=true

Chris Hedges

Jul 24, 2025

VIDEO- ZIONISTS ATTACK FREE SPEECH

https://youtu.be/ky5811p43-I

Text of Speech:

I am the former Pulitzer-prize winning Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times. I spent seven year covering the Middle East, including in Gaza and the West Bank. I am an Arabic speaker. During my time in the Middle East, I was based in Jerusalem and Cairo. I am also the author of 16 books and have taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and Rutgers University. I live in Princeton.

I strongly oppose A3558, which expands antisemitism’s definition to include most anti-Zionst expression for the purpose of civil rights law. This is a dangerous assault on free speech by seeking to criminalize legitimate criticism of Israeli policies.

The Trump administration’s campaign to ostensibly root out antisemitism on college campuses is clearly a trope to shut down free speech and deport non-citizens, even if they are here legally. This bill falsely collapses ethnicity with a political state. And let’s be clear, the brunt repression on college campuses was directed against students and faculty who opposed the genocide in Gaza, 3,000 of whom were arrested and hundreds of whom were censored, suspended, or expelled. Many of these students are Jewish. What about their rights? What about their constitutional protections?

I have had numerous relationships with Israeli journalists and political leaders. I knew, for example, former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who negotiated the Oslo peace agreement. Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli ultranationalist who opposed the peace accord, stated bluntly that the occupation was not beneficial to Israel. Israeli colleagues frequently criticize Israeli policies in the Israeli press in language that would be defined as antisemitic by A3558.

For example, the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, who served in the Israeli army and writes for the newspaper Haaretz, has called for sanctions to be imposed on Israel to stop the slaughter in Gaza, saying “Do to Israel what you did to South Africa.”

Omer Bartov, who served as an Israeli company commander in the 1973 war, is Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University. He stated in an article on July 15 in The New York Times that his “inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.”

These kinds of statements, and many more I can quote from Israeli colleagues and friends, would see them under this bill criminalized as antisemites.

As someone who speaks and writes frequently about the conflict, I fear that any criticism I make of the Israeli government, although grounded in my long experience in the region, will make me a target if this measure is adopted.

It is imperative, especially with the press under attack from the Trump administration, that we do not erode our constitutionally protected speech and political expression.

The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/copy-confronts-the-nj-state-assembly?publication_id=778851&post_id=169193100&isFreemail=true&r=34riug&triedRedirect=true

Thursday, July 24, 2025

A July 16th 2025 Letter from Presiding Episcopal Bishop Sean Rowe on Crisis in Gaza Palestine: "We join Archbishop Hosam in his call for the Israeli military to end the bombing of hospitals and the seige of Gaza: for the restoration of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza under United Nations supervision, and release all unjustly detained people and hostages..."

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/publicaffairs/letter-from-presiding-bishop-sean-rowe-on-crisis-in-gaza/

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Gaza 2025: An aerial image before AND during the israeli annihilation of an entire population, from homes, hospitals, livestock, to the people themselves

An aerial image before AND during the israeli annihilation of an entire population, from homes, hospitals, livestock, to the people themselves

Revealed: Harvard publisher cancels entire journal issue on Palestine shortly before publication. As Harvard’s feud with Trump escalated, so did tensions over an ‘education and Palestine’ issue of a prestigious journal. Scholars blame the ‘Palestine exception’ to academic freedom

The Palestine issue was slated to include a dozen research articles, essays and other writings on topics ranging from education in Israel-Palestine and among the Palestinian diaspora, to academic freedom in the US.

A copy of the Harvard Education Review previewing a future issue dedicated to education in and about Palestine. Photograph: Thea Abu El-Haj

Alice Speri

Tue 22 Jul 2025 07.10 EDT

Last modified on Tue 22 Jul 2025 12.31 EDT

In March 2024, six months into Israel’s war in Gaza, education in the territory was decimated. Schools were closed – most had been turned into shelters – and all 12 of the strip’s universities were partially or fully destroyed.

Against that backdrop, a prestigious American education journal decided to dedicate a special issue to “education and Palestine”. The Harvard Educational Review (HER) put out a call for submissions, asking academics around the world for ideas for articles grappling with the education of Palestinians, education about Palestine and Palestinians, and related debates in schools and colleges in the US.

“The field of education has an important role to play in supporting students, educators, and policymakers in contextualizing what has been happening in Gaza with histories and continuing impacts of occupation, genocide, and political contestations,” the journal’s editors wrote in their call for abstracts.

A little more than a year later, the scale of destruction in Gaza was exponentially larger. The special issue, which was slated to be published this summer, was just about ready – contracts with most authors were finalized and articles were edited. They covered topics from the annihilation of Gaza’s schools to the challenges of teaching about Israel and Palestine in the US.

But on 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited “a number of complex issues”, shocking authors and editors alike... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/22/harvard-educational-review-palestine-issue-cancelled

Gaza doctors ‘becoming too weak to treat patients’ as hunger crisis deepens Medical staff say they are struggling to function well enough to care for injured and malnourished civilians in overwhelmed hospitals

The scale of malnutrition in patients is putting a huge strain on an already depleted and exhausted workforce, say doctors. Photograph: Mariam Dagga/AP

Doctors and medical staff in Gaza say their increasing hunger and the lack of available food is beginning to leave them too weak to provide urgent medical care to patients inside hospitals full of malnourished and injured civilians.

Almost a dozen medical staff across the territory have told the Guardian and the Arabic Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) of their increasingly desperate search for food and declining physical health due to hunger.

“They are in a state of extreme exhaustion. Some have fainted in the operating rooms,” said Dr Mohammed Abu Selmia, the director of al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, who said that like the people of Gaza, staff had not received any aid or had any meals in the past 48 hours.

“Medical services will be affected because our staff will not be able to hold out any longer in the face of this famine,” he added.

Many of the doctors and medical practitioners who sent messages to the Guardian did not want to be named as they feared being targeted by the Israeli military.

“Today I have been on a 24-hour shift,” said one physician... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jul/23/gaza-doctors-becoming-too-weak-to-treat-patients-as-hunger-crisis-deepens

Mass starvation spreading across Gaza, aid agencies warn- More than 100 aid agencies, including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam, say ‘our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away’

A one-and-a-half-year-old child in Gaza facing life-threatening malnutrition as the humanitarian situation worsens due to ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jul/23/israel-gaza-war-aid-benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-middle-east-latest-news-updates?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-688084458f086020c423e7fa#block-688084458f086020c423e7fa

More than 100 aid organisations warn of 'mass starvation' in Gaza

More than 100 aid organisations warned on Wednesday that “mass starvation“ was spreading in Gaza, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.

Israel is facing mounting international pressure over the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territory, where more than 2 million people face severe shortages of food and other essentials after 21 months of conflict, triggered by Hamas’s attack on Israel.

The UN said on Tuesday that Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food aid since the US- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started operations in late May – in effect sidelining the existing UN-led system.

A statement with 111 signatories, including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, warned that “our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away”.

The groups called for an immediate negotiated ceasefire, the opening of all land crossings and the free flow of aid through UN-led mechanisms.

Israel says humanitarian aid is being allowed into Gaza and accuses Hamas of exploiting civilian suffering, including by stealing food handouts to sell at inflated prices or shooting at those awaiting aid.

In their statement, the humanitarian organisations said that warehouses with tonnes of supplies were sitting untouched just outside the territory, and even inside, as they were blocked from accessing or delivering the goods.

The signatories said:

Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of hope and heartbreak, waiting for assistance and ceasefires, only to wake up to worsening conditions.

It is not just physical torment, but psychological. Survival is dangled like a mirage.

The humanitarian system cannot run on false promises. Humanitarians cannot operate on shifting timelines or wait for political commitments that fail to deliver access.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jul/23/israel-gaza-war-aid-benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-middle-east-latest-news-updates?CMP=share_btn_url&page=with%3Ablock-6880c15a8f086020c423ea5e#block-6880c15a8f086020c423ea5e

A former worker of the Israeli-backed logistics group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), has told Israel’s Channel 12 outlet that the group’s aid centres put the Gaza population “in danger”, Al Jazeera reports.

The US security guard said in an interview on Tuesday that the GHF system “has to be put an end to”.

He described incidents during which GHF staff pepper sprayed and threw stun grenades at Palestinians, despite them appearing to pose no threat.

He said:

While the Palestinians were finishing collecting the aid that was at the site, the American security guards began shooting at them … shooting at their feet, shooting at the earthen embankments, to make them leave.

In all my military service, I have never seen such use of force against unarmed civilians. I will not take part in it now.

Philippe Lazzarini: "Silencing voices. As if banning international media is not enough. Humanitarian workers are also banned when they report on atrocities committed in Gaza & elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territory." ... OPEN THE GATES!

Philippe Lazzarini

@UNLazzarini

16h

Silencing voices.

As if banning international media is not enough. Humanitarian workers are also banned when they report on atrocities committed in #Gaza & elsewhere in the occupied Palestinian territory.

The denial of a visa to our colleague from @ochaopt is the latest in a pattern of restrictions.

Since the beginning of the war, the Israeli authorities have increasingly denied or failed to renew visas for UN staff, including Humanitarian Coordinators, heads of UN agencies & staff of International NGOs.

In addition, legislative restrictions to intimidate Israeli Human rights organisations were adopted.

All @UNRWA international staff have not been granted visas for nearly six months now.

I, too, have been denied entry to Gaza since March 2024 after the @CIJ_ICJ ruling & to the West Bank including East Jerusalem since June 2024.

Visas must be granted to humanitarian staff to support the work of their Palestinian colleagues.

Coupled with the ongoing ban of international media to enter Gaza, these visa denials are deepening the spread of dis-information & increasing de-humanization of the people in #Gaza.

United Nations

@UN

The world is witnessing an utter disregard for – if not outright violations of – international law; with no accountability.

@antonioguterres says failures to uphold international obligations are coming at a staggering cost — measured in lost lives and shattered communities.

UNRWA

@UNRWA

People in #Gaza, including UNRWA staff, are fainting due to starvation and severe hunger.

People including children are dying from severe malnutrition.

People are being starved.

UNRWA alone has thousands of trucks in neighbouring countries waiting to enter Gaza – banned by Israeli Authorities from entering since March.

The siege must be lifted now to allow our lifesaving humanitarian aid in.

https://x.com/i/status/1947899556789686722

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