BY: Eugene Smith/Contributing Writer PHILADELPHIA: On Monday, July 25 the American Friends Service Committee held a panel discussion on the U.S. response to issues surrounding Palestine. The panel came as a response to the failed attempt to include Israel’s illegal settlement expansion and occupation of Palestinians into the Democratic platform drafting committee. The absence of … Continued
BY: Clara Ana Ruplinger/Contributing Writer The Occupation of the American Mind is a sophisticated and in depth analysis of how Israel’s public relations manufactures misguided support for its occupation of Palestine in American media. The documentary featured scholarly commentators who have become experts on the Israeli propaganda machine. It is conceivable to think that Israel’s occupation of … Continued
Evan Carter The Detroit News (Photo: Max Ortiz / The Detroit News) Dearborn — Car safety advocate Ralph Nader has serious reservations about fully self-driving cars, and says they’re far from being ready to hit the highways. “I don’t see a fully autonomous vehicle replacing the driver fleet any time in the next generation,” Nader … Continued
BY GABRIEL SAN ROMAN
OC Weekly
Rida Hamida celebrated the Muslim holiday of Eid last week with exciting and unexpected news. Steve Phillips, author of Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Created a New American Majority, invited the Palestinian-American activist to speak at a “Democracy in Color” event during the Democratic National Convention. “It didn’t even cross my mind,” Hamida says. “It was so humbling to be invited because I don’t see myself as a national figure, just as a person trying to make a difference in Orange County.”
But those efforts in making OC a better place, both politically and culturally, caught Phillips’ eye before, when he included Hamida’s work in his book and again when extending the invitation to the “Women of Color: Uniting the Party, Leading the Nation” luncheon launch. “We asked her to speak at our convention event so that more people can learn about her work fighting against anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry as well as her efforts to foster multi-racial coalitions,” Phillips tells the Weekly. “Her excellent work identifying and engaging Arab and Muslim voters led me to use her as an example in my book.”
In 2014, Hamida organized communities to volunteer for seven pivotal campaigns in OC during the midterm elections that’d help turn the demographic tide. She assembled twenty people (all women save for her teenage son) after reaching out to local Islamic centers and nonprofits. Hamida asked for Political Data, Inc, (PDI) numbers on Arab and Muslim voter populations. A consultant returned with a staggeringly low number of 525. Knowing that couldn’t be right, she asked to dig into the data and identified a much larger universe of voters, 62,912 to be exact, by looking at Arab and Muslim majority country identifications rather than Arab sounding last names. Hamida put the new data to good use in turning out the vote.
In Phillips’ Brown is the New White bestseller published this year, the author notes how pivotal that work proved to be in Garden Grove’s mayor race where Bao Nguyen squeaked pass incumbent Bruce Broadwater by just 15 votes to become the first Vietnamese person to hold that office, not only in the city, but in any major city across the U.S. “Hamida’s story illustrates the invaluable difference a campaign consultant with cultural competence can make in an election,” Phillips wrote in the book.
With OC having been majority-minority for more than a decade now, reports proclaim its elections to be on the cusp of change. “The majority of voters in Orange County together encompass women of color, Latinos, Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander and Arab American community,” Hamida says. “We use that model to build multi-racial coalitions in turning out the vote and in return win elections.” Hamida herself is the first hijabi in OC to work for public office, serving as a community liaison for Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez. “Muslim-American women are stronger than fear, we do not allow Islamophobes to define or dictate our destiny, we are stronger than that,” she says.
Hamida’s multi-racial organizing work isn’t limited to electoral politics. In another volunteer effort, she spearheaded OC’s “Adventures of Al-Andalus” which brings Latinos and Muslims together. In tandem with Santa Ana Valley High School teacher Ben Vazquez, Hamida led Latino community members through a food tour of Anaheim’s Little Arabia, a simple act that generated big media buzz in the backdrop of Donald Trump’s bigotry against Muslims and Mexicans. “That created a movement that was bigger than us and spoke to people on a national level,” Hamida says. Al-Andalus isn’t just a cross-cultural undertaking, but a political one as well. “We are going to mobilize communities here on the ground against that hate rhetoric by turning out the vote in November 2016 at a presidential, statewide, congressional, county and city level.”
While Hamida plans to take the lessons of Al-Andalus to the DNC in Philadelphia, there’s more volunteer initiatives to speak of. During the month of Ramadan, Hamida also organized an Iftar event in Garden Grove where Muslims and the LGBTQ community shared a meal at dusk. For years, the activist has chaired the annual World Refugee Day event in Anaheim, but reached out to OC’s Vietnamese community to make common cause with Syrian refugees during their time of crisis. They held a #Walk4Refugees event at Miles Square Park in Fountain Valley last year to raise funds for Syrians.
Hamida at work during Little Arabia’s “Shawarma Summit.”
Photo by Gabriel San Roman / OC Weekly
“Rida’s proving to many that balancing domestic issues and global affairs is not only possible but a must for any U.S. Government leader,” says Suzanne Meriden, National Operations Director for the Syrian American Council. “I want to be at that DNC luncheon to witness what I know is the first in a series of triumphs not only for Rida but for Arab-American Muslim women in general.”
The relentlessness of Hamida’s work doesn’t go unnoticed by her fellow sisters in the struggle. “I met Rida throughout working in Orange County with my previous employer AFSCME International,” Karla Salazar, a Democratic Party and labor activist, says. The two women plan on working together in the future, but for now Salazar is excited that her friend and colleague is going to the DNC. “As women of color, we don’t get that attention. I’m happy that Rida is going to have that opportunity to share her experience of working across cultural, religious and community lines.”
Hamida is humbled by the all-expenses paid invitation to speak at DNC women of color luncheon event, where she’ll join former Nevada state legislator Lucy Flores, Georgia House Minority Leader Stacy Adams and San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim. “I’m taking Orange County with me to Philadelphia,” Hamida says with a smile. “We are going to have one voice in this movement when I come back.”
Source: www.ocweekly.com
By Ali Abunimah Electronic Intifada Pharrell Williams, a ten-time Grammy Award winner, has canceled his 21 July performance in Tel Aviv amid conflicting explanations. Over the last year, the “Happy” pop star has faced sustained pressure from the Palestine solidarity movement. Last year, amid rumors that he would be scheduling a Tel Aviv performance, campaigners … Continued
Israel’s apologists would call the BDS campaign “immoral”, but the slander is laughably false. A pro-Palestinian protester supporting the BDS campaign against Israel takes part in a demonstration in Cape Town, South Africa [Getty] by Stanley L Cohen Al Jazeera Stanley L Cohen is an attorney and human rights activist who has done extensive work in … Continued
By Amelia Smith
Middle East Monitor
Over recent days several disturbing facts about race relations in the US have emerged: a black man is 13 times more likely to be murdered than a white man; African Americans are shot at 2.5 times the rate that white men are; American police have shot dead 556 people this year, a disproportionate number of whom are African American or Native American.
The chain of events that brought these statistics to the fore began in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, last week when 37-year-old Alton Sterling was shot at close range by police officers whilst they restrained him outside a convenience store. It was captured in a graphic video and posted online. One day later, in Falcon Heights, Minneapolis, Diamond Reynolds and her boyfriend Philando Castile were pulled over for a broken tail light; he was shot four times in the arm and pronounced dead at the scene. Reynolds, whose four-year-old daughter was sitting on the back seat, live-streamed the attack.
These latest killings coincide with the two-year anniversary of the war on Gaza, which killed over 2,000 Palestinians – including some 500 children – and left thousands more in need of a home, food and psychological support. In 2014, four weeks into the war, American police shot, at close range, the teenager Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, then left his body in the street for four hours before it was taken away. At the mass protests that ensued, demonstrators raised signs in solidarity with the Palestinians; simultaneously, Palestinians posted advice on Twitter for protesters in America, including how to counter the effects of tear gas inhalation.
Back then parallels were drawn between the two communities. Both suffer state-sanctioned violence and discrimination, whilst those responsible for carrying it out are rarely held to account. There are other similarities – both have been subject to racial segregation, for example. Two years on since the killing of Darren Wilson and the Israeli bombardment on Gaza, the events of the last week have reminded us that neither community is better off in securing equal rights or justice.
In the West, when we hear of crimes carried out by security forces in the Middle East, our first reaction is to blame the leader. We are (quite rightly) happy to hold up Sisi, Assad and Netanyahu as responsible for the killing and torture that take place under their rule. When it comes to the US, however, the narrative changes – rarely is President Obama held so directly responsible for the actions of American law enforcement. Part of the reason is that we associate police brutality and state violence with something that only happens in “corrupt” Middle Eastern countries, rather than in the “free world” – when it take place in the US it is a one-off, when it is in the Middle East it is expected.
What began as shock and horror at the shooting of two black men was soon eclipsed by the story of Micah Johnson, the sniper who killed five police officers and injured eight others at the peaceful rally organised in memory of Sterling and Castile. In the UK at least, the news lead with coverage and analysis of the “extreme” behaviour and “terror” caused by the sniper and efforts were made to uncover which groups he had ties with and whether they were planning further attacks. Many news outlets described it as the deadliest attack on law enforcement since 9/11. As the story unfolded around Johnson’s life, it simultaneously relieved the pressure on Obama and the police force to confront the ongoing issue at the heart of last week’s events: institutional racism in the American police force.
Muslims in Britain will be familiar with such tactics since discriminatory laws, the stigmatisation of their communities and Islamophobic attacks are often heavily underreported, whilst terror attacks and extremist cells receive wall-to-wall coverage, feeding the narrative that all Muslims are terrorists.
The disproportionate media coverage offered to the sniper gives the impression that all protests attended by or organised by African Americans are violent – from here it’s not much of a jump to say that they in turn deserve a violent response. In reality, the thousands that protest peacefully for their rights get nowhere near the same kind of attention thanks to a media, and their consumers, who are only interested in stories that involve terror and clandestine groups who are proud of their commitment to violence. Demonstrations, including the rally last Thursday, are often organised by the Black Lives Matter movement in response to state-sanctioned violence and in favour of justice, transparency and accountability. But this hasn’t stopped these activists being smeared as violent hooligans.
Likewise, ask an observer about Palestinians and they will more readily recall rockets and suicide bombers, rather than the weekly peaceful protests in occupied West Bank village of Bil’in, or the boycott movement. Despite the existence of a solid, non-violent movement, this hasn’t stopped their opponents smearing their efforts in every way they can, including labelling them as anti-Semitic.
The people of Palestine, and other countries in the Middle East, are all too familiar with a media that oscillates between completely ignoring them, and demonising them. Small windows of attention, like that which followed the killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and the 2014 War on Gaza, do help open a debate on crucial issues, but the debate never remains open or focused on the real issues for long enough. Like the people of Palestine, African Americans in the US will continue to be subject to discrimination and violence long after the cameras withdraw.
Source: www.middleeastmonitor.com
Naomi Dann
The Huffington Post
On June 24, as the Democratic Party platform drafting committee meeting in St. Louis, Missouri debated late into the night over whether to call Israel’s nearly half-century-old military rule over the Palestinians an ‘occupation,’ the Presbyterian Church USA’s General Assembly meeting in Portland, Oregon voted to adopt some of the most progressive policies on Palestine of any major U.S. institution. Sitting in the back of that convention center surrounded by an interfaith, intergenerational group of human rights advocates, including Jews, Palestinian Christians and Muslims, Presbyterians, and Quakers, I caught a glimpse of what might be possible if leaders and policymakers admitted the truth.
The message of the Church was clear: in the absence of a just peace, what is needed are concrete steps to end the egregious injustices and human rights abuses taking place in Israel/Palestine and lay the groundwork for a future with equality and justice for all.
Yet, as I sat in the back of that hall, my phone lit up with tweets about the #DNCPlatform debate over Israel/Palestine, reminding me once again of just how far many U.S. political leaders are from taking the necessary action to make that future possible.
If you can’t even name the problem, how can you expect to solve it? As the Arab American Institute’s James Zogby told his fellow members of the platform drafting committee: “We have to be able to call it what it is. It is an occupation that humiliates people; that breeds contempt; that breeds anger, and despair and hopelessness that leads to violence.” That reality has certainly been on display in the region in recent months, as Israel’s repressive policies, including expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary imprisonment, and collective punishment in the form of restrictions on movement and home demolitions have escalated in response to attacks by frustrated individuals.
The debate over the Democratic Party’s approach to Israel/Palestine during the platform committee process is a clear illustration of just how out of touch many US politicians, including leaders of the Democratic party, are with both the situation on the ground and changing public opinion on Israel/Palestine. Recognition that Israeli policies, including occupation, dispossession, and siege, are underlying causes that drive the conflict, along with support for efforts to protect Palestinian human rights, has been growing among Democratic voters over the last several years, particularly among liberals, young people, and people of color. A recent Pew Poll found that liberal Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, while a poll released by the Brookings Institution in December 2015 revealed that 49% of Democrats would support sanctions or stronger action against Israel over settlement construction.
The draft of the Democratic Party platform being debated in Orlando this weekend fails to represent these growing constituencies that care about Palestinian human rights. As it currently reads, the platform omits any reference to the occupation regime that has dominated the lives of millions of Palestinians for nearly 50 years, or the daily violence Israel inflicts on Palestinians to enforce that occupation.
Naming the reality of the occupation is the bare minimum necessary for taking any realistic steps towards ending it.
Moreover, the platform now contains a clause attacking the grassroots Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. The condemnation of BDS is part of a broader campaign to suppress BDS in the US, which has escalated in recent months. Eleven states have passed bills intended to suppress BDS, and just last month New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order requiring the state to create a blacklist of institutions that abide by BDS campaigns. These various measures threaten the civil liberties of all Americans to engage in boycotts and other economic acts of conscience in support of human rights and social justice struggles, as noted by the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Lawyers Guild, and others.
Growing constituencies of Americans recognize that a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians will require the U.S. to give equal weight to concerns for Palestinian security and freedom as it does to Israeli security. There can be no real security for anyone in the region while Israeli policies continue to incite pain, anger and frustration.
In truth, the platform itself is primarily symbolic, and the final language matters less than the policies actually implemented by policymakers and leaders once in power. However, the much-publicized fight over Israel/Palestine in the platform has made it clear that, even as the public conversation on Palestinian rights has advanced significantly in recent years, many politicians from both parties are still standing in the way of ending the unjust status quo. In the absence of a just peace, the very least the Democratic Party can do is admit that there is an occupation, and that it has to end.
Naomi Dann is a writer focusing on Israel/Palestine and U.S. foreign policy, and the media coordinator at Jewish Voice for Peace. She is writing in her personal capacity, Jewish Voice for Peace is a non-partisan 501 (c) 3 organization and does not support or endorse candidates or parties.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com
By Hatem Abudayyeh Chicago Monitor I saw a contemporary of my father, Adnan Askar, at a funeral a few weeks before the passing of one of the most important people of the 20th century, Muhammad Ali. Askar is a good man, a retired worker whom I’ve always liked and respected. He is from my … Continued
The AMERICAN MIDDLE EAST VOTERS ALLIANCE is the first Arab-American Political Action Committee in the history of Illinois, certified in 2014. We are requesting that all Americans get involved by signing our Petition Renouncing Religious, Racial, and Ethnic profiling. The impact of profiling on individuals, families, and communities is beyond measure. Profiling creates fear and mistrust … Continued
BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer America witnessed two more fatal shootings of black men by police officers this week – Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana. Cities across America, big and small, demonstrated on the streets Thursday night, demanding an end to the unnecessary deaths of black men by white cops. The level … Continued
Alex Kane The Intercept ON THE MORNING of August 28, 2014, two days after the end of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Sohaib Zahda hopped into a shared taxi in Hebron that was going to Ramallah, where he had a job interview. Thirty-three-year-old Zahda, who owns a paintball company, is an unlikely terrorist. An avid … Continued
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