Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
From the category archives:
One terrible consequence of Israeli (and Western) racism toward Arabs is that a number of what should be unnecessary defenses of Arab behavior must be made. I don’t want to be in the position of defending Hamas, for example, and yet the absurd caricature of that complex organization must be countered.
Ditto on the recent [...]
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As I mentioned in my earlier post on Haiti and Gaza, Israel sent an IDF search-and-rescue team to Haiti to share “Jewish ethics” with the disaster-stricken locals. This is, of course, entirely unrelated to Israel’s desire to re-earn some of the brownie points lost in the course of, inter alia, its multiple year siege [...]
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There are few influential journalists as arrogant, deceptively violent, and insane as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. I mean, what other pseudo-journalist could write an editorial about the peace plan he pitched to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah (in the early 2000s), which was nothing more than UN Security Council Resolution 242, which [...]
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If Israelis and Americans just understood better what Palestinian life was like under Israeli occupation, then there would be far less sanctioning and acceptance of the brutal, 42-year long occupation. Or so I have long believed. In particular, I have argued the US citizenry has a critical role in pressuring their congresspeople to, [...]
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If I was editor of the New York Times, the self-proclaimed “newspaper of record”, during a week when:
Jewish terrorist/settler Jack Teitel was arrested
The 14th anniversary of Yitzchak Rabin’s assassination by another Jewish terrorist was being commemorated
Netanyhahu’s wholesale subjugation to the settler movement was recognized as having killed Obama’s so-called peace process
The NY Mets [...]
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Last week I highlighted a recent essay in the New Yorker on Gaza. I had a number of problems with the details of the article, but despite those concerns I considered it one of the deeper analyses I had seen in a mainstream American media outlet.
What attracted me to the article? First, [...]
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Today’s Jerusalem Post carries the type of article that would never be published in a major US media outlet. The article examines Israeli social psychology around Operation Cast Lead and its aftermath. The article is so self-aware and penetrating, its worth an extensive quotation:
The kill ratio was 100-to-1 in our favor. The destruction [...]
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When the US describes Israel’s policy of evicting Palestinians and demolishing their homes as “unhelpful” to the peace process [sic], they are using shockingly euphemistic language to characterize what is, in effect, ethnic cleansing.
What does that process look like? How do settlers go about stealing Palestinian land under Israeli law? Part [...]
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As I wrote the post yesterday on the significance of the Daily Show’s interview with Baltzer and Barghouti, a part of me suspected that I would come to see my reaction partially as hype or misplaced optimism.
After further thought, however, I find that the opposite is true: I think the show is even [...]
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In the annals of American media coverage of Israel/Palestine, yesterday’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart was a watershed. On national TV, Jon Stewart interviewed Anna Baltzer and Mustafa Barghouti, advocates for equal Palestinian rights.
They got on TV, they argued for equal Palestinian rights, they advocated for security and democracy for both peoples, [...]
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