Democratic pro-Israel clone fails to take Georgia seat

from The Electric IntifadA

Michael F. Brown Power Suits 21 June 2017


Jon Ossoff, Democratic candidate in Georgia’s 6th District, lost the most expensive US House race in history. (via
Pundits and politicians billed Democrat Jon Ossoff versus Republican Karen Handel as a major referendum on the first few months of the Trump administration.

Democrats poured tens of millions of dollars into the effort to flip Georgia’s 6th District, helping to make it the most expensive US House race in history. But on Tuesday Republicans held the conservative stronghold by a margin of 52-48 percent.

Democrats have now lost all four special elections to replace Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s cabinet, including in Montana where the Republican candidate physically attacked a journalist just hours before election day.

Ossoff ran a centrist campaign, trying to pull right-wing voters – exactly the kind of strategy that failed to put Hillary Clinton into the White House. Ossoff was also cautious in referencing Trump – one of the most unpopular presidents since polling began.

According to Kamau Franklin, editor of the Atlanta Black Star, this strategy “is just wrong.” By tacking to the right on issues like healthcare and the economy, Ossoff failed to galvanize the Democratic base.

Franklin predicts that Ossoff’s defeat will reignite the “civil war” within the party between the centrist Clinton-Obama wing and the more progressive wing that gravitates toward Senator Bernie Sanders.

Tough and ignorant
Domestic issues, of course, drove this vote, but Democrats also missed opportunities to distinguish themselves on foreign policy.

Like other Democrats foisted on voters by party leaders, Ossoff engaged in “me-tooism” to show just how tough – and ignorant – he could be when it comes to the Middle East, particularly the question of Palestine and the Israelis.

Both candidates emphasized their support for Israel.

Ossoff listed 13 priorities on his campaign website. “US-Israel relations” ranked sixth. Constituents might have been surprised to learn he put Israel before national security, veterans, seniors, the environment, education, criminal justice and fighting corruption.

It’s difficult to discern if Handel orders her priorities any differently. She listed eight issues on her website with “Israel” coming fourth, before “jobs and the economy.” But her list – unlike Ossoff’s – was in alphabetical order.

Ossoff declared he is “committed to Israel’s security as a homeland for the Jewish people and to strengthening the historic, unbreakable bond between the United States and Israel.”

Noting he has twice traveled to Israel, he affirmed his “deep personal relationships with family who live in Jerusalem and many friends who live in Israel.” In his view, Palestinians appear to count for less.

The victor Karen Handel sounded indistinguishable, emphasizing that the “United States and Israel share a remarkable friendship” and various “shared objectives” such as to “defeat terrorism.”

Both made boilerplate nods towards “peace.” But neither offered a word about the imperative ethical need to end the Israeli occupation, let alone about respecting the right of return of Palestinian refugees and ensuring equal rights for all.

Georgia’s 6th District was previously held for 20 years by Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Republican presidential hopeful who declared in 2012 that the Palestinians are an “invented people.”

Gingrich, who was re-elected repeatedly despite – or perhaps because of – a history of bigotry, was currying favor with billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major backer of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and big donor to anti-Palestinian causes.

A political group tied to Adelson reportedly spent more than $6 million dollars to defeat Ossoff.

Brutal mentors
Minimally qualified, Ossoff touted that while an undergraduate at Georgetown University he “studied under Madeleine Albright and former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren.”

These are scarcely badges of honor, but they indicate that Ossoff, as a representative of the Democratic establishment, offered no break from interventionist foreign policies that have brought injustice and catastrophe on a global scale.

When she was secretary of state in the Clinton administration in the 1990s, Albright notoriously defended sanctions that killed an estimated 500,000 children in Iraq. Challenged by 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl whether inflicting such suffering could be justified, Albright answered, “we think the price is worth it.”

Oren, Ossoff’s other mentor, is currently a minister in Netanyahu’s government.

Oren lied in a 2014 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the killings by Israeli forces of Nadim Nuwara and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, two Palestinian children shot dead in cold blood on video during a Nakba Day protest a few days earlier.

Oren indicated on television – days after they were killed – that it was not certain that the two boys were even dead.

In order to generate this bogus doubt, he cited the videotaped shooting of 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura in Gaza in 2000 at the outset of the second intifada, which generated worldwide outrage.

Oren recycled the far-right conspiracy theory that the shooting had been staged, even questioning whether the child “was shot at all.”

At the time, Oren was described by CNN as merely a “Middle East analyst,” as if he had not spent many years as a soldier in Israel’s army and an official apologist for its policies.

It is a damning indicator that Oren can be uncontroversially cited by a Democratic candidate with no party leaders challenging Ossoff for promoting his connection to an anti-Palestinian racist who engages in grotesque fabrications and conspiracy theories.

Time for radical break
National polling indicates that core constituencies increasingly disagree with the pro-Israel positions taken by Democratic candidates.

Majorities of Americans also support radical breaks on domestic policy – such as a single-payer healthcare system.

Yet in the race for Georgia’s 6th District, the Democratic establishment rallied around a candidate who opposes single-payer and stuck to the traditional script on foreign policy.

Defying conventional wisdom that voters only want right-wing populism or bland centrism, Britain’s Labour Party this month surged to its most successful general election performance in years on a platform of left-wing policies championed by Jeremy Corbyn, a leader with a lifelong record of supporting Palestinian rights.

After a string of defeats, it is an example Democrats urgently need to study.

Why Is One Pro-Israel Group Desperate To Keep You From Watching This Video?

Why Is One Pro-Israel Group Desperate To Keep You From Watching This Video?

Peter BeinartJune 21, 2017facebook


When it comes to Palestinians, the American Jewish establishment is in the ignorance business. The average American synagogue has never hosted a Palestinian speaker. The average “pro-Israel” activist has never read a book by a Palestinian author. The American Jewish philanthropists who fund Birthright send thousands of young American Jews to Israel each year, on a program that systematically excludes the voices of 50% of the people who live under Israeli control.

But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that for major American Jewish organizations, ignorance is an export. It is not enough that American Jewish leaders never hear from Palestinians themselves — they do their best to ensure that American politicians don’t, either.

Consider the sequence of events that began on June 8. On that day, an advocacy group called No Way To Treat a Child hosted a panel discussion on Capitol Hill. That’s not unusual. Advocacy organizations hold panel discussions on Capitol Hill all the time; the location makes it easier for congressional staff to attend. What made this one unusual was its subject: the Palestinian experience under Israeli control.

You can watch the panel online. The first speaker was Omar Shakir, the Israel-Palestine director of Human Rights Watch. In dry, rather clinical, terms, Shakir discussed some of the consequences of the fact that West Bank Palestinians are subjects, not citizens, of Israel. He noted, for instance, that in Area C, which encompasses roughly 60% of the West Bank, it is “nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain a permit to build a home.” When Palestinians build without a permit, the Israeli government often demolishes their homes.


Following him was Brad Parker, a staff attorney at Defense for Children Palestine. Observing that, according to the most recent statistics, Israel holds hundreds of Palestinians between the ages of 12 and 17 in its jails, often for stone throwing, Parker explained that the Israeli military frequently arrests Palestinian children at night. They are often bound, blindfolded and transported to a military installation, where they wait until morning before being interrogated without a lawyer and without their parents knowing where they are. They “essentially disappear for 24, 48, 96 hours.” Then they are generally prosecuted in military courts where the conviction rate approaches 100%.

Following Parker was Yazan Meqbil, a young West Bank Palestinian attending college in the United States, who talked about growing up in a house repeatedly slated for demolition. “Every single day,” he said, “I used to wake up hoping my house will not be demolished.” Meqbil ended his remarks by saying: “Palestinians, we all have a dream, to be free, to live like normal human beings. To not be afraid whenever we leave our homes.”

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The final speaker was Nadia Ben-Youssef, who works for Adalah–-The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. She stressed the links between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and its treatment of Palestinian citizens inside Israel proper. Israel’s Palestinian citizens, she noted, lived under military law until 1966. And even today, she argued, inside the Green Line, Israel privileges Jews over non-Jews in important ways.


I offer this summation to illustrate the shamelessness of the attack that followed. In a video posted June 12, The Israel Project, which is led by former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, called the event an “anti-Israel hatefest” filled with “hate speech.” Notice the Orwellian turn.


According to The Israel Project, it is not hateful to hold millions of West Bank Palestinians for 50 years as non-citizens, without due process, free movement or the right to vote for the government that controls their lives. It is hateful to criticize Israel for doing so. By that standard, the 2012 documentary “The Gatekeepers,” which featured former heads of the Shin Bet calling Israel’s occupation of the West Bank “brutal,” “colonial” and “unbearable,” was an “anti-Israel hatefest,” too.

Then came the inevitable insinuation of anti-Semitism. As menacing music played in the background, the video declares that while the panel pretended to be “about human rights,” the speakers “couldn’t stop talking about Jews.” Actually, the panel was entirely about human rights. But, as if uncovering a terrible offense, the video noted that panelists had 17 times used the phrases “Jewish,” “Jewish state,” “Jewish people,” “Jewish citizens” or “Jews.” How sinister! I’m sure Josh Block never uses such despicable phrases when speaking about Israel.

New Approach: The head of The Israel Project, Josh Block, right, and David Hazony appear at a launch of the group?s new publication, The Tower.
New Leader Josh Block Gives Makeover to The Israel Project
Nathan GuttmanApril 2, 2013
In fact, two of Shakir’s uses of the word “Jewish” came from quotations. He quoted the State Department as calling settlement growth “inconsistent with Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state,” and President Obama as saying that settlement growth undermines “Israel as both Jewish and a democracy.” Then again, everyone knows that Obama and the State Department are anti-Semitic, too.

Most of the references to Jews came from Nadia Ben-Youssef. The video quoted her as saying that “Israel was established as a Jewish state to privilege the rights of Jewish people,” and referring to “this Jewish state that is premised on the basis that you must have greater rights, so that means more Jewish people than anyone else in that land.” The video never explained what’s incorrect or odious about those statements. Their hatefulness is presumably self-evident.

But both statements are true. Yes, Israel’s Declaration of Independence speaks about ensuring “complete equality of social and political rights… irrespective of religion, race or sex.” And yes, Palestinians inside Israel proper (as opposed to Palestinians in the West Bank) enjoy citizenship and the right to vote. But Israel was also explicitly founded to represent and safeguard the Jewish people, and that inevitably privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Jews who immigrate to Israel, for instance, gain citizenship on day one. For non-Jews who wish to immigrate to Israel, by contrast, including Palestinian refugees born inside Israel’s borders, gaining citizenship is virtually impossible. Israel’s flag contains a Jewish star; its national anthem speaks of “the Jewish soul.” In these symbolic ways, too, Israel privileges Jews over non-Jews. As for Israel’s effort to maintain a Jewish majority so that Jews can control the destiny of the state, that’s hardly a secret. It’s a goal that the Israeli government and mainstream American Jewish organizations proudly endorse.

Israel is not the only country on earth to face a tension between its desire to protect and nurture one ethno-religious community and its commitment to provide equality under the law. Many European democracies have immigration policies that favor a dominant ethnic group. Many have crosses on their flags. The 2003 Palestinian Constitution states that “the Palestinian people are part of the Arab nation” and that “the principles of Islamic Shari’a shall be the main source of legislation.” So if a Palestinian state is ever created, it will likely wrestle with the tension between ethnic nationalism and democracy, too.

I believe that in a post-Holocaust world, it’s important to have one country on earth that assumes a special obligation to protect Jewish life. The goal, therefore, should be to minimize the tension between Jewish statehood and liberal democracy as much as possible, while acknowledging that you can never erase it entirely. The challenge, as Martin Buber once put it, is to “do no more injustice to others than we are forced to do in order to exist.”

Zionist thinkers like Chaim Gans and Alexander Yakobson and Amnon Rubinstein have sought to meet that challenge. But doing so honestly requires acknowledging that all forms of Jewish statehood entail some moral costs, and that some are more morally defensible than others.

These are the kinds of debates that the American Jewish establishment fears. It fears them because such debates give Palestinians a voice. Given the influence that American Jewish groups wield in Washington, it’s far easier to simply deny Palestinians a platform. That’s why The Israel Project ends its video by urging people to call Rep. Mark Pocan, who authorized No Way To Treat a Child to use a room on Capitol Hill, and “demand that he condemn the event.” The goal is to scare members of Congress so they don’t facilitate such discussions again.

The deep, dark secret of the American Jewish establishment is that its leaders are not equipped to respond to smart Palestinian critics of Israel. They’re not familiar enough with the realities of Palestinian life under Israeli control. So having built itself a cocoon that shuts out Palestinian voices, the American Jewish establishment insists that Congress live inside that cocoon too. Because if the cocoon cracks, American politicians, and the American public, will realize how intellectually weak the American Jewish establishment actually is.

When it comes to Israel, the organized American Jewish community would rather bully than think. That’s what happens when power corrupts. It doesn’t only make you immoral. It makes you dumb.

Peter Beinart is a Forward senior columnist and contributing editor. Listen to “Fault Lines,” his podcast with Daniel Gordis here or on iTunes.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.
Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/375214/why-is-one-pro-israel-group-desperate-to-keep-you-from-watching-this-video/

Democrats Have a Bigger Problem Than Jill Stein

from truthdig

Posted on Jun 20, 2017


Jill Stein is back in the spotlight.

In the past few weeks, a number of interviews with the former Green Party presidential candidate have popped up—and with them comes the inevitable ire of the Democratic Party.

Stein has faced this wave of criticism before, and it doesn’t seem to bother her. Earlier in June, she spoke with The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill on his “Intercepted” podcast to discuss liberal accusations that her campaign took crucial votes away from Hillary Clinton.

“We’ve got to find a reason. We’ve got to blame somebody,” Stein says of the mentality of voters who see her as a “spoiler.”

“That said,” she continues, “it’s really important to stand back and realize that the solution for a democracy on life support is not less democracy. Silencing political opposition is a very dangerous thing to do.”

She expressed similar sentiments in an interview with Ben Schreckinger for Politico Magazine. “I consider it a great honor that the party and our prior campaign for president is suddenly being attacked outside of an election season,” she told him, adding that she doesn’t have any regrets about her 2016 presidential bid.

Stein’s comments in these interviews and on social media have prompted backlash. The left-leaning site Jezebel ran a story attacking her for her “infuriating” point of view. Keith Olbermann, who has a Twitter following of 972,000, called Stein an “imbecile” in a tweet earlier this month. Neera Tanden, president of the policy research organization Center for American Progress, also used Twitter to blame Stein for rising tensions in Syria. Even Schreckinger latched on to the assumption that Stein may have something to apologize for, running his interview with her under the title “Jill Stein Isn’t Sorry.”

Stein is probably used to intense criticism—she faced plenty of it when she was running for president. And as Schreckinger notes, there are some issues, such as her relationship with the Russian government, that may merit a closer look (although she addresses this topic in detail during her interview with Scahill, lambasting the “neo-McCarthyism” currently at play in American politics). But the Democrats’ insistence that Stein is partly to blame for Donald Trump’s election overlooks a more insidious element of American politics: nonvoters, or those who showed up at a polling place in 2016 and neglected to cast a vote for president.

Meagan Day of The Week explains:

There are two categories of non-two-party votes in the contemporary American political climate, and they’re regarded differently. The first is the third-party vote, which, especially on the left side of the aisle, is considered burglary. The second is total abstention, which is considered inevitable, and therefore hardly factors into the mainstream media’s election postmortems. In neither scenario does the losing major party (in this case the Democrats) take responsibility for failing to move potential voters to act on its behalf.

“But,” you may protest, “Donald Trump won by a margin smaller than the number of Green Party votes in key states, particularly the Upper Midwest!” And you’re right, that’s true. Take Michigan: Trump won Michigan by 13,225 votes, while Jill Stein walked away with 51,463 votes. Clearly, if all of those people had voted for Hillary Clinton instead of Stein, Clinton would have won Michigan. (Whether Stein votes ought to be otherwise considered shoo-in Democrat votes is a separate matter.)

If these are the only variables of interest to us — the number of ballots affirmatively cast for Trump, Clinton, Stein, and maybe Johnson — then yeah, the Stein-as-spoiler argument makes some sense. But here’s another number, one that ought to change your perspective: 87,810. That’s how many Michigan voters showed up to the polls, cast ballots, and declined to vote for a presidential candidate at all.

Day goes on to explain that in the swing states of Michigan, Maine, Florida and Arizona, “the undervote total was larger than the margin of victory.”

“And what is an undervote but an intentional expression of distaste for the prospects on offer?” Day ponders. “Apparently these voters found the presidential choices too unappetizing for even a clothespin vote.”

Also worth mentioning, of course, is the problem of low voter turnout. “Nearly three million Michiganders joined the roughly 40 percent of eligible American adults who declined to vote at all last year,” Day writes. “In Michigan, those eligible nonvoters were 200 times larger than Trump’s margin of victory.”

These nonvoters represent a critical problem in both the Democratic and the Republican parties, in that nonvoters tend to be poor or working-class people of color. Day writes:

Nonvoters are far less likely to identify with one of the major parties. And who can blame them? While it’s unfair and ill-advised to completely elide the differences between Democrats and Republicans, the fact remains that neither party has a proven track record of robustly demanding and taking consistent steps to ensure that everyone is paid a living wage, has access to health care, has quality public education — even where the provision of those basic goods and services contravenes corporate or donor-class interests. ...

Without a functional safety net, poor and working-class people have a hard time in America, and neither party is truly committed to fixing that.

“The only reason the [minuscule] Stein vote totals matter to anyone is that, deep down, they take the political inactivity of poor people — especially poor people of color — for granted,” Day concludes. And yet liberal media repeatedly utilize its platform to attack Stein for speaking up about poverty, the environment and inequality.

“We need a political process that creates multi-partisan democracy. That’s really where democracies get their best shot at moving forward and solving our crises,” Stein told Scahill in her “Intercepted” interview. “Let’s create the democracy that enables us to choose the candidates that we want.”

—Posted by Emma Niles.

Cuba’s Formal Response to Trump’s Speech on Policy Changes

Posted on Jun 18, 2017


Below is the full statement released Friday by the Cuban government.

On June 16, 2017, US President Donald Trump delivered a speech full of hostile anti-Cuban rhetoric reminiscent of the times of open confrontation with our country in a Miami theater. He announced his government’s Cuba policy, which rolls back the progress achieved over the last two years since December 17, 2014, when Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama announced the decision to re-establish diplomatic relations and engage in a process towards the normalization of bilateral relations.

In what constitutes a setback in the relations between both countries, President Trump, gave a speech and signed a policy directive titled “National Security Presidential Memorandum”, which provides the elimination of private educational “people-to-people” exchanges and greater control over all travelers to Cuba, as well as the prohibition of business, trade and financial transactions between US companies and certain Cuban companies linked to the Armed Revolutionary Forces and the intelligence and security services, under the alleged objective of depriving us from income. The US president justified this policy with alleged concerns over the human rights situation in Cuba and the need to rigorously enforce the US blockade laws, conditioning its lifting, as well as any improvements in US-Cuba bilateral relations to our country’s making changes inherent to its constitutional order.

Trump also abrogated Presidential Policy Directive “Normalization of Relations between the United States and Cuba”, issued by President Obama on October 14, 2016. Although said Directive did not conceal the interventionist character of the US policy nor the fact that its main purpose was to advance US interests in order to bring about changes in the economic, political and social systems of our country, it did recognize Cuba’s independence, sovereignty and self-determination and the Cuban government as a legitimate and equal interlocutor, as well as the benefits that a civilized coexistence would have for both countries and peoples despite the great differences that exist between both governments. The Directive also conceded that the blockade is an obsolete policy and that it should be lifted.

Once again, the US Government resorts to coercive methods of the past when it adopts measures aimed at stepping up the blockade, effective since February 1962, which not only causes harm and deprivations to the Cuban people and is the main obstacle to our economic development, but also affects the sovereignty and interests of other countries, which arouses international rejection.

The measures announced impose additional obstacles to the already very limited opportunities that the US business sector had in order to trade with and invest in Cuba.

Likewise, those measures restrict even more the right of US citizens to visit our country, which was already limited due to the obligation of using discriminatory licenses, at a moment when the US Congress, echoing the feelings of broad sectors of that society, calls not only for an end to the travel ban, but also for the elimination of the restrictions on the trade with Cuba.

The measures announced by President Trump run counter to the majority support of the US public opinion, including the Cuban emigration in that country, to the total lifting of the blockade and the establishment of normal relations between Cuba and the United States.

Instead, the US President, who has been once again ill-advised, is taking decisions that favor the political interests of an irrational minority of Cuban origin in the state of Florida which, out of petty motivations, does not give up its intent to punish Cuba and its people for exercising the legitimate and sovereign right of being free and having taken the reins of their own destiny.

Later on, we shall make a deeper analysis of the scope and implications of the announcement.

The Government of Cuba condemns the new measures to tighten the blockade, which are doomed to failure, as has been repeatedly evidenced in the past, for they will not succeed in their purpose to weaken the Revolution or bend the Cuban people, whose resistance against aggressions of all sorts and origins has been put to the test throughout almost six decades.

The Government of Cuba rejects political manipulation and double standards in human rights. The Cuban people enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms and can proudly show some achievements that are still a chimera for many countries of the world, including the United States, such as the right to health, education and social security; equal pay for equal work, children’s rights as well as the rights to food, peace and development. Cuba, with its modest resources, has also contributed to the improvement of the human rights situation in many countries of the world, despite the limitations inherent to its condition as a blockaded country.

The United States are not in the position to teach us lessons. We have serious concerns about the respect for and guarantees of human rights in that country, where there are numerous cases of murders, brutality and abuses by the police, particularly against the African-American population; the right to life is violated as a result of the deaths caused by fire arms; child labor is exploited and there are serious manifestations of racial discrimination; there is a threat to impose more restrictions on medical services, which will leave 23 million persons without health insurance; there is unequal pay between men and women; migrants and refugees, particularly those who come from Islamic countries, are marginalized; there is an attempt to put up walls that discriminate against and denigrate neighbor countries; and international commitments to preserve the environment and address climate change are abandoned.

Also a source of concern are the human rights violations by the United States in other countries, such as the arbitrary detention of tens of prisoners in the territory illegally occupied by the US Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba, where even torture has been applied; extrajudicial executions and the death of civilians caused by drones; as well as the wars unleashed against countries like Iraq, under false pretenses like the possession of weapons of mass destruction, with disastrous consequences for the peace, security and stability in the Middle East.

It should be recalled that Cuba is a State Party to 44 international human rights instruments, while the US is only a State Party to 18. Therefore, we have much to show, say and defend.

Upon confirming the decision to re-establish diplomatic relations, Cuba and the United States ratified their intention to develop respectful and cooperative relations between both peoples and governments, based on the principles and purposes enshrined in the UN Charter. In its Declaration issued on July 1, 2015, the Revolutionary Government of Cuba reaffirmed that “these relations must be founded on absolute respect for our independence and sovereignty; the inalienable right of every State to choose its political, economic, social and cultural system, without interference in any form; and sovereign equality and reciprocity, which constitute inalienable principles of International Law”, as was established in the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed by the Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC), at its second summit held in Havana. Cuba has not renounced these principles, nor will it ever do so.

The Government of Cuba reiterates its will to continue a respectful and cooperative dialogue on topics of mutual interest, as well as the negotiation of outstanding issues with the US Government. During the last two years it has been evidenced that both countries, as was repeatedly expressed by the President of the Councils of State and of Ministers, Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, can cooperate and coexist in a civilized manner, respecting the differences and promoting everything that benefits both nations and peoples, but it should not be expected that, in order to achieve that, Cuba would make concessions inherent to its sovereignty and independence, or accept preconditions of any sort.

Any strategy aimed at changing the political, economic and social system in Cuba, either through pressures and impositions or by using more subtle methods, shall be doomed to failure.

The changes that need to be made in Cuba, as those that have been made since 1959 and the ones that we are introducing now as part of the process to update our economic and social system, will continue to be sovereignly determined by the Cuban people.

Just as we have been doing since the triumph of the Revolution on January 1st, 1959, we will take on every risk and shall continue to advance steadfastly and confidently in the construction of a sovereign, independent, socialist, democratic, prosperous and sustainable nation.

Havana, June 16, 2017.

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Fresno State Cancels a Middle East Studies Professorship Amid Alleged Right-wing Pro-Israel Pressure

Fresno State Cancels a Middle East Studies Professorship Amid Alleged Right-wing Pro-Israel Pressure
Murtaza Hussain

June 5 2017, 3:01 p.m.

Late last year, the California State University at Fresno began soliciting applicants for a newly created Edward Said Professorship in Middle East Studies, a teaching role named after the late Palestinian-American public intellectual. In a job posting, the school described the role as a “tenure-track, academic-year position” teaching courses on the Middle East and helping develop the school curriculum on the region. Said was famously known as an advocate of Palestinian nationalism in the United States as well as the author of the groundbreaking work of cultural criticism “Orientalism.”

Last week, however, after months of evaluating candidates, Fresno State abruptly announced that it would not be filling the role this year. While the school cited “procedural errors” as a reason for the cancellation, academics at the school, including one professor who resigned in protest, are claiming that the school is engaging in an act of academic censorship.

In a resignation letter issued last week, Vida Samiian, the longtime dean of Fresno State’s College of Arts and Humanities, said that a pressure campaign had targeted the search committee for the professorship, and that the school had balked at having four Arab-American finalists for the role. “I have decided to resign in objection to the unethical and discriminatory cancellation of the Edward Said Professorship,” Samiian wrote. “The administration carried out the vicious and discriminatory attacks launched by Israel advocacy groups against the search committee and the four finalists who were of Middle Eastern and Palestinian ethnicity.”

PARIS - NOVEMBER 25: Palestinian author Edward Said poses while in Paris,France to promote his book on the 25th of November 1996. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)
Palestinian author Edward Said poses while in Paris to promote his book on Nov. 25, 1996.

Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images

Amid the debate about campus free speech in recent years, a lot of ink has been spilled over the alleged excesses of left-wing students who have often sought to shut down unpopular speakers and events on American campuses. But the suppression of speech and activism on Israel-Palestine differs markedly in that it is taking place on a systemiclevel — targeting both activism and scholarship and often taking place with the connivance of school administrations and under pressure from outside pro-Israel groups. In recent years, a number of schools have shut down academic programs, banned Palestinian student groups, and even criminally prosecuted students for protesting events held by Israeli government officials.

And, with the latest flap at Fresno State, advocates for Palestinian rights are worried that even the appearance that the school folded to a pressure campaign could have a chilling effect on faculty and their scholarship.

Speaking to The Intercept, Samiian, the former Fresno State dean, said that she had decided to resign in protest as a last resort, seeing it as the only way left to bring attention to the increasingly intolerable level of academic suppression on Israel-Palestine.

“This pattern of behavior has always existed on campus and goes to a longer campaign to attack Middle East studies programs,” she said. “I served 10 years as dean of this college and have been the target of attacks many times. Ultimately, I felt that resigning was the only option left and only way to tell the story of what happened.”

Fresno State, for its part, denied that there had been either any discrimination or a pressure campaign. “During the search, the university was never pressured by any individual or group to cancel the search based on candidates’ ethnic background or political point of view,” Lynnette Zelezny, the school’s provost, said in a statement forwarded to The Intercept. “In particular, the individuals who determined to cancel the search and reopen it next year were not exposed to any pressure from any source at any point in time during the search. It is unfortunate that attention has been improperly directed to this unfounded allegation.”

A petition initiated by activists in response to Fresno State’s decision to cancel the hire has collected hundreds of signatures from academics across the United States and Europe, calling on the school to reinstate the search for a candidate. But there is little indication that the school plans to change course.

Particularly troubling to some activists is the role that outside advocacy groups play in suppressing academic freedom. In her resignation letter, Samiian referenced the role played by the website Canary Mission in influencing the search committee. Canary Mission has become notorious for its blacklists of pro-Palestinian student activists and professors and for public databases intended to threaten their future career prospects over their stances on Israel-Palestine.

“For years, Israel advocacy organizations like Canary Mission and others have been blacklisting students and professors, pressuring administrators to silence political advocacy around Palestinian rights,” says Naomi Dann, media coordinator of Jewish Voice for Peace, a progressive Jewish-American organization working on the Israel-Palestine conflict. “This instance at Fresno State is particularly concerning because it seems that outside pressure from Israel advocacy organizations succeeded in preventing the university from hiring a professor for a position working on Palestine and related issues.”

The affair at Fresno State followed a flap last month where a professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College, who had been offered a deanship at the school, was forced to withdraw after being targeted by a public campaign over his support for the Palestinian civil society-led boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. In another high-profile 2014 incident, Palestinian-American professor Steven Salaita lost a tenured position he had been offered at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign after criticism of social media postings he had made about the conflict. Following a lawsuit, the school ultimately settled with Salaita for over $600,000 in damages, though it refused to concede wrongdoing.

In 2016, the legal monitoring organization Palestine Legal registered 258 instances of suppression of campus speech on Israel-Palestine, roughly 10 percent of which targeted faculty. But these cases are only “the tip of the iceberg,” said Liz Jackson, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal. Many more students and faculty have simply become too afraid to engage in activism or critical scholarship about Israel-Palestine, for fear of the inevitable blacklisting and threats that follow.

“We get calls on a weekly and often daily basis from people asking us if it’s safe to be involved with campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine,” she says. “People are very hesitant to speak because they are concerned about how their future will be affected.”

Jackson cited a recent example of a young woman who contacted her to inquire if it would be safe to speak out publicly about Israel-Palestine on campus. The woman was a green card holder from a country targeted by President Donald Trump’s ban on travel from select Muslim-majority countries and was concerned that getting involved in activism on this subject would jeopardize her family’s immigration status. “She told me that she wants to be a civic leader, but she’s a black Muslim woman and is afraid of what will happen to her and her family if she is profiled and accused of being a terrorist,” Jackson said. “I had to give her an answer that I never want to give, which is that there really might be consequences if she is profiled by advocacy groups and accused of being at terrorist because of her stance on this issue.”

Along with the concerns felt by individual students and faculty, Jackson said that a “McCarthyite” environment is being created more broadly on campuses, driven by institutional pressure to censor opinions on the issue. This pressure will have an inevitable chilling effect on scholarship in the long term, with faculty and students increasingly self-censoring to avoid scrutiny.

“There are courses that are not offered, dissertations that are not written, faculty who are denied positions, students who won’t join activist groups or attend lectures — all because they are afraid of the likely consequences,” says Jackson. “This isn’t just a problem for people who care about Palestinian human rights. It’s a problem for anyone who cares about keeping our universities places of rigorous learning and open inquiry, especially in the Trump era.”

Top photo: Ryan Branagan carries a sign during a protest in support of Palestine in Boston, Tuesday, March 18, 2014 after the Northeastern University student organization “Students for Justice in Palestine” was “temporarily suspended for multiple violations of university policy over an extended period of time,” according to a university statement. in Boston, Tuesday, March 18, 2014. Branagan, from Pittsburg, Penn., was a Masters candidate in History at Northeastern concentrating on the history of the Middle East.


https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/fresno-state-cancels-a-middle-east-studies-professorship-after-pressure-from-right-wing-pro-israel-group/

Israel provoked the Six-Day War in 1967, and it was not fighting for survival

from MONDOWEISS

James North, June 2, 2017


I am old enough to remember clearly how the Six-Day War was reported at the time. Just about everything we were told then was wrong, as the major historians of the period all acknowledge today. Let’s start with how the crisis was covered as it happened, 50 years ago:

* Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of Egypt, was portrayed as a dangerous demagogue, widely popular across the Arab world, who wanted to destroy Israel. The Western press regularly demonized him, and he was easily the most recognized Arab leader until Saddam Hussein.

* In May 1967, Nasser made his move. He ordered the United Nations to remove peacekeeping troops from the Sinai peninsula, where they had been serving as a tripwire to prevent conflict between Egypt and Israel.

* Next, Nasser escalated by closing the Straits of Tiran to international shipping, blockading Israel’s southern port of Eilat, which started to strangle the country.

* Meanwhile, Nasser was plotting with other Arab states, chiefly Syria and Jordan, to launch a joint invasion and push Israel into the sea.

* Israel’s very existence was in danger. Therefore, Israel launched a “preemptive” attack on June 5, fearing that it had no choice if it were to survive.

* Fortunately, despite the odds against Israel, it won in only 6 days.

* To protect itself against another onslaught, Israel occupied the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank. The occupation was the purely accidental consequence of a fight for Israeli survival.

This Mainstream Narrative remains unchallenged in the popular imagination, 50 years later. Just the other day, a New York Times reporter stated as fact that in 1967, “Israel defied annihilation by its Arab neighbors.”

Norman Finkelstein, the distinguished scholar, has done as much as anyone to uncover the truth about the Six-Day War. In a wide-ranging interview in his Brooklyn office, he refuted the Mainstream Narrative point by point. You can find his detailed revisionist account in a chapter of his now classic Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, supplemented by another work: Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance with Israel is Coming to an End. Finkelstein is known as combative, a man who has not been afraid to fight for the truth, despite damage to his career along the way. But what’s also vital to recognize is that he is a serious scholar, Talmudic in his intensity, and that no one has ever successfully challenged his research.


Norman Finkelstein, May 2, 2017, in his office in Brooklyn.

[We will run the entire interview with Finkelstein this weekend.]

Finkelstein emphasizes that no genuine academic today, whatever their political orientation, endorses the Mainstream Narrative. He starts by identifying what he has called the “Two Biggest Lies.”

* The truth is that Nasser and the other Arab leaders had absolutely no intention of invading Israel in June 1967.

* And Israel’s existence was never in the slightest doubt, as both Israeli and American leaders knew that Israel could easily win any conflict, even against a coalition of Arab states.

Finkelstein insists we cannot understand the Six-Day War without going back 11 years, to the 1956 Suez Crisis. That year, the Egyptian leader, Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal — and Israel, Britain and France launched an unprovoked joint invasion of Egypt to seize the waterway back. But the United States, under President Dwight Eisenhower, opposed the attack, and pressured the tripartite invasion force to withdraw and leave the Canal to Egypt. Suez was a catastrophe for all three invading nations, and British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign. Meanwhile, Nasser’s reputation in the Arab world, and across Africa, Asia and Latin America, rose to new heights.

Norman Finkelstein argues that the historical record shows that in 1967 Israel yearned to complete its failed mission of 1956. First, he says, Israel’s “primary goal was to neuter Nasser, to deliver a death blow to these uppity Arabs, and finish off what was called radical Arab nationalism.” He goes on that Israel’s government had a “secondary goal” — “to conquer the lands they had coveted but didn’t manage to seize in ’48: East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan.”

Israeli leaders had only one big doubt: what would America do? If Israel did attack, would the United States force another humiliating climbdown, as in 1956? Or would Washington look the other way?

Finkelstein challenges the Mainstream Narrative’s account of the specific events in the months leading up to the war. His analysis is not at all unusual, and is shared to a great extent by other scholars. He argues that the facts show that Israel was not peacefully minding its own business, but instead regularly and violently provoking its Arab neighbors. In November 1966, in the largest military action since the Suez invasion, Israel attacked the West Bank town of Samu, then under Jordanian rule, killing 18 Jordanian soldiers and destroying 125 homes. Israel continued instigating along its border with Syria in April 1967, triggering an aerial battle in which 6 Syrian planes were shot down, including one over Damascus. Voices in the Arab world started to accuse Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leader of the Arabs, of standing by and doing nothing.

So Nasser did tell the United Nations to remove the peacekeeping troops from Egyptian Sinai, mainly so he could be seen to be taking some action. But Finkelstein points out that Israel could have asked for UN peacekeepers to be placed on its side of the border, which would have maintained the tripwire. Israel did no such thing.

Nasser’s closing of the Straits of Tiran has been similarly distorted in the Mainstream Narrative. Finkelstein explains that Nasser may actually have had the legal right to close the Straits, that he probably did not intend to maintain the closure, and that he offered to take the dispute to the International Court of Justice, but Israel refused. And Israel would not have choked overnight, but got 95 percent of its imports through its other ports and had a several months’ reserve supply of oil.

Meanwhile, Finkelstein says, Israeli diplomats descended on Washington, D.C. to find out if the United States would give them a green or at least an amber light. Finkelstein has looked through the historical record, and here is a summary of what he found:

* The U.S. agreed with Israel that Nasser had no plans to attack.

* The U.S. agreed that Israel would easily defeat Egypt on the battlefield, either alone or with any combination of other Arab nations.

* And the U.S. tacitly gave Israel permission to start the war, or at least indicated there would be no repeat of Eisenhower’s repudiation after the 1956 Suez invasion.

Once Israel attacked first, Finkelstein says the conflict should more aptly be called the Six-Day Walkover. “In fact,” he says, “the war did not last six days; it lasted closer to six minutes. Once Israeli planes in a surprise blitzkrieg knocked out the Egyptian air force still parked on the ground, the war was over. . . If the war lasted longer, it was only because Israel wanted to conquer the Egyptian Sinai, the Jordanian West Bank, and the Syrian Golan Heights.”

Finkelstein does recognize that the Israeli public did believe the Mainstream Narrative, took to heart the lies and distortion their government was feeding the world, and genuinely feared the Arab states wanted to push them into the sea. He explains that the Israeli government “figured the Israeli people would give their all if they feared their backs were up against the wall. The leaders were culpable twice over; they provoked the crisis and then launched an unprovoked attack.”

Once the war ended, in the United States it was treated as a lark, a thrilling adventure. After Israel occupied the Egyptian Sinai, jokes circulated: “See the Pyramids. Visit Israel.”

But it was no joke for the at least 18,000 people who died in the fighting: 10,000-15,000 Egyptians; 6000 Jordanians; 1000-2500 Syrians; and nearly 1000 Israelis.

Israel did win its immediate war objectives; Nasser’s image was severely damaged, and he died three years later, with his brand of Arab nationalism greatly discredited. Israeli soldiers did occupy the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan.

Whether the occupation, now shuddering into its 51st year, has been good for Israel is still to be decided by history.

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2017/06/provoked-fighting-survival/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=df35f004dd-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b86bace129-df35f004dd-309260894&mc_cid=df35f004dd&mc_eid=b1e0e2d3d7#sthash.iY9q639W.dpuf