With all the anti-Arab bashing we see in the news every week, Arab America is determined to expose those who discriminate against our community. We will recognize those who vilify the positive influence and contributions Arabs have made to the fabric of American society. And we will use hummus as our weapon. By naming those … Continued
BY: Andrew Hansen/Contributing Writer On July 23, America’s Muslim communities will come together to rally against extremism, gun violence, and bigotry on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Organized by the Islamic Society of Central Florida and the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), the march is intended to combat recent spikes of anti-Muslim hate … Continued
BY: Kristina Perry/Contributing Writer WASHINGTON, DC: On Tuesday, the Arab American Institute held a congressional briefing discussing the blatant discriminatory policies of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and its plan to seek redress or government oversight. The panelists cited recent spikes in incidents of ethnic, religious, and racial profiling that resulted in minorities, or persons perceived … Continued
Jess Gormley and Tom Silverstone The Guardian Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised to build a wall on the border of the US and Mexico. Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar is one of the Cultrunners, a group of 10 Middle Eastern artists exploring the ideological boundaries between the US and the Middle East.
Surviving tear gas became essential to BLM. Lesson was just one way Millennials used social media to cross global divide (Photo: Cam Burkett) By Imani J. Jackson USA TODAY “Always make sure to run against the wind/to keep calm when you’re teargassed, the pain will pass, don’t rub your eyes! #Ferguson Solidarity.” Activist Mariam Barghouti tweeted … Continued
By Cnaan Liphshiz
Forward
James Zogby, one of Bernie Sanders’ appointees to the the Democratic Party’s platform committee, said he had been unfairly typecast as an anti-Israel activist.
“I’ve just been cast as the anti-Israel guy,” Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, said in an interview published Friday in The Jerusalem Post. “People will type you.”
This view, which Zogby said does not reflect his views toward the Jewish state, “bothers me more than anything else that it fuels a simplistic, combative narrative,” he said.
As a member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic National Committee, Zogby has played a key role in attempt to include in the party’s platform language that recognizes Palestinian “dignity,” and against Israel’s “occupation” and “settlement activity” in what the proposed inclusions refer to as Palestinian lands, according to The Jerusalem Post.
The latest draft of the platform, which is set to be finalized in July, declares that achieving Palestinian statehood would provide “the Palestinians with independence, sovereignty, and dignity,” whereas previous formulations referred to a two-state solution as benefitting only Israel. A proposed phrase calling on Israel to end “Israeli military occupation and illegal settlements” in the West Bank was defeated last week in an executive committee meeting in St. Louis.
Zogby supports the rights of Americans to boycott products produced in the settlements. He also told The Jerusalem Post that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “does more to delegitimize the State of Israel than the BDS movement ever has.”
But, “On the issue of delegitimizing Israel, I object to language that ultimately crosses the line into anti-Semitism,” he said. “That language is offensive, its anti-Semitic and its hurtful.”
The son of Maronite Catholic immigrants from Lebanon, Zogby has become one of the most prominent voices for the Arab-American community. He has a son who is married to a Muslim and a daughter married to a Jew, he said.
“When you type me and reduce me to one thing– which is some ‘hater of’ or ‘threat to’ or ‘danger to’ Israel – then there are crazy people out there who will decide to do things,” he complained. He said he has received death threats. The Post article did not specify as to the nature of these threats.
In the 1990s, then vice president Al Gore tapped Zogby to help promote business investment in the Palestinian territories, in a project known as Builders for Peace. President Barack Obama has twice appointed him to serve on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, in 2013 and 2015.
According to the Post, Zogby’s views are aligned with those of J Street, the Jewish organization which supports increasing international pressure on Israel to speed negotiations toward a two-state solution, which J Street says will benefit both peoples. J Street defines itself as a pro-Israel organization.
Zogby said his attempt to include language that speaks of Israel occupation reflects mainstream views. “There isn’t a president in the last 30 or 40 years who doesn’t call it an occupation,” he said, noting that consecutive Republican and Democratic administrations have also condemned Israel’s continued settlement activity in the West Bank.
Sanders, the first Jewish candidate to win major party nominating contests, named five of the platform committee’s members, including Zogby and two other frequent critics of Israeli policy, Cornel West, a philosopher and African-American social activist, and Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to Congress.
Source: forward.com
US Palestine Community Network (USPCN) On Tuesday, June 28th, chants of “Hey Rahm, shame, shame; no Iftar in our name” echoed as close to 100 Arabs, Muslims, and supporters—including children and entire families—broke fast together in what they called a #PeoplesIftar and protest of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “Community” Iftar at the Chicago Cultural Center downtown. A coalition of Chicago-based … Continued
BY: Tamara Wong Azaiez/ Contributing Writer Speaking to the First Unitarian Church in Des Moines, Iowa, Maria Fillippone recalled her travels to Gaza, where she saw for herself what the living conditions were like there. In this sermon, Fillippone describes her experience in Gaza as a time of catastrophe, a time of celebration, and time of remembrance. As a … Continued
By Laila Lalami
The Nation
PHOTO: Festival participants walk through an area of Hebron inhabited by Israeli settlers on May 24, 2016. (Rob Stothard for The Palestine Festival of Literature)
Palestine expecting to see occupation and degradation, but I had not expected to witness my own privilege so starkly.
“What’s the purpose of your visit?” the officer asked. The epaulets on his blue button-down shirt hung over his narrow shoulders. His eyebrows joined above the bridge of his nose.
“I’m here to give a reading.” I had come to Palestine with a group of poets and writers for a literary festival, with scheduled stops in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, and Haifa.
The officer glanced at the line behind me. “How many are in your group?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many US passports?”
“I don’t know.”
He raised a suspicious eyebrow. “Everything is ‘I don’t know’ ?”
But I really didn’t know. I had met the other writers at a hotel in Jordan the night before, and it hadn’t occurred to me to count their number while we were on the bus from Amman to the Allenby border crossing, nor to ask how many were American. He swiped my blue passport in the machine, then looked up at me with surprise. “You were born in Morocco?”
Here we go, I thought. It had taken me 20 hours to travel from California to Palestine. I dreaded being deported by Israeli immigration, as had happened to some of my Arab friends. “Yes, that’s right.”
“My grandparents were born in Morocco.”
“Whereabouts?” I asked, grateful for the diversion.
“Casablanca,” he said. Then he looked at the screen again. “How old were you when you moved to the United States?” he asked. “Did you move with your parents or by yourself?… Is your husband American?… Are your children American?… Do you miss your husband and children?”
Then it occurred to me that I could ask questions of my own. “Your grandparents are from Casablanca, you said. Do they go back to Morocco for Hiloula?”
His face lit up with a smile. “You know Hiloula?”
“Of course.” The veneration of saints is part of Jewish Moroccan culture.
“Do you know this song?” He sang a few words in Hebrew.
I took a wild guess: “‘Sami al-Maghribi’?”
I don’t think I got it right, but he nodded anyway. Then he typed a few words into a smartphone and held it up to the glass window. It was a YouTube video of Moroccan Jews dancing at a party. A minute later, he printed out my visa and handed me my passport.
When he insisted that he was a UK citizen, he was told, “Enta Falesteeni, khabeebi.” You are Palestinian.
Not a dozen steps behind me, another writer from our group stood waiting. His name was Ahmed Masoud, and he was traveling on a UK passport. But because he had been born in Gaza, he was taken to a special room where he was asked for his Palestinian ID and interrogated for several hours. There was no discussion of music for him, no YouTube videos or fond remembrances of distant lands, only more forms and more questions about the purpose of his visit. When he insisted that he was a UK citizen, like several other writers in our group who had been let through, he was told, “Enta Falesteeni, khabeebi.” You are Palestinian.
Ahmed Masoud was deported that afternoon. He was prevented from reading his work to audiences at the cultural center in Ramallah or walking through the Old City of Jerusalem or taking selfies by the beach in Haifa, the way all the British and American writers did that week. Instead, he was sent back to London.
I had gone to Palestine fully expecting to see occupation and degradation, but I had not expected to witness my own privilege so swiftly or so starkly. My birth in Morocco had made the Moroccan-Israeli immigration official see me for who I was, while Ahmed Masoud’s birth in Palestine had been enough to strip him of his individuality, enough to make the immigration official label him a threat.
The next morning, at the Qalandia checkpoint, I was stuck in line while the soldiers argued with another writer ahead of me. There, at eye level on the blue metal railing, I saw white and pink stickers displaying the Ayat al-Kursi, a Quranic verse that Muslims recite in times of extreme fear or distress. Every morning, Palestinian workers line up to go through these metal cages, and there is never any guarantee they will make it through. I thought of the people who had put the stickers on the metal, to give themselves courage or to inspire it in others.
In the Old City of Jerusalem, I was walking down the street with the journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous when policemen stopped us and demanded to see his passport. What was his crime? Nothing. They just didn’t like the look of him.
In Bethlehem, I saw the wall, an abomination that rises 25 feet and is covered with graffiti. One spray-painted message read “Happy Christmas From Bethlehem.” I was so busy looking up at the wall that I tripped on some empty tear-gas canisters.
In Haifa, which is within Israel’s 1948 borders, I saw a beach. I did not see soldiers.
In Hebron, I saw Palestinian shops with gates that had been welded shut by military order, and I strolled down a street where Palestinians are not allowed to walk, even if they live there. The families who still own homes on this street are forced to enter them from the rear, like servants in a segregated city of the American South. There were no signs warning about this rule, however. Signs can be photographed and distributed. Still, even in the absence of signs, the sight of a street in which the only people standing around are soldiers or settlers is indelible in my mind. I listened to a Palestinian activist talk about the extreme economic hardship brought on by store closures, and then I heard him say, “Despair is a luxury.”
Later, I saw the word “Hope” scrawled on a wall that led to yet another checkpoint.
If despair is a luxury, what is hope? Maybe it, too, is a luxury.
Before leaving Hebron, I bought artwork on Shuhada Street, where shopkeepers had to put up netting to protect themselves from the trash thrown at them by settlers living in the apartments above. In some Native American tribes, dream catchers are used to to keep out bad dreams, allowing only the good ones to enter. But the black mesh that the shopkeepers had put up could not keep out the urine, bleach, or wastewater that the settlers sometimes dumped on them. The Palestinians in Hebron are locked in a nightmare. “Now that you have seen this,” a white-haired shopkeeper said to me, “tell the world about us.”
I am trying.
Source: www.thenation.com
Press Release from The Israel/Palestine Mission Network (IPMN) of the Presbyterian Church (USA): During its 222nd biennial General Assembly, which took place in Portland, Oregon this week, the Presbyterian Church (USA) continued its strong support for Palestinian rights with the passage of a series of overtures. An overture calling on real estate company RE/MAX to … Continued
By Heba Kanso CBS News It’s mid-afternoon at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Hamed Sinno is running through a final sound check. His eyes closed, he sings a capella, filling the room with his rich voice and dynamic vibrato, displaying a clear sense of confidence he didn’t always have. “When I was growing … Continued
Murtaza Hussain
The Intercept
LAST MONTH, A GROUP OF STUDENTS at University of California at Irvine gathered to protest a screening of the film “Beneath the Helmet,” a documentary about the lives of recruits in the Israeli Defense Forces. Upset about the screening of a film they viewed as propaganda for a foreign military, the students were also protesting the presence of several IDF representatives who here holding a panel discussion at the screening.
That student protest has since become the subject of an intense controversy. The school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine is now facing the possibility of being banned from the campus. In addition, a legal representative for some of the students involved in the protest, Tarek Shawky, told The Intercept that the students were informed by the university that their cases have been referred to the district attorney for criminal investigation.
The day after the event, the school’s chancellor released a statement accusing student protestors of “crossing the line of civility.” In his statement, posted on the school website, Chancellor Howard Gillman said that “while this university will protect freedom of speech, that right is not absolute,” adding that the school would examine possible legal and administrative charges against the protestors. News reports cited claims that attendees at the film had been intimidated and blocked from exiting the event.
The protestors at the event represented a wide range of student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Black Student Union. Students who spoke with The Intercept denied that anyone had intimidated attendees at the event or blocked access. “We held our protest in a way that reflected university guidelines, we didn’t use amplified sound and we didn’t restrict anyone’s freedom of access to the event,” says Daniel Carnie, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace who took part in the protest.
Contacted for comment, a media relations representative at UC Irvine said that it was normal practice for cases like this to be referred to the District Attorney. “It is routine for UC Irvine Police Department, when called upon to investigate an incident on campus, to forward the investigation to the District Attorney’s office,” said Cathy Lawhon. “It’s then up to the DA’s office to determine if any charges are warranted.” Lawhon added that the school investigation into banning Students for Justice in Palestine was proceeding separately.
Reached for comment, the Orange County District Attorney stated that they have yet to receive a referral on the case from the school.
The incident is only the latest in which officials at UC Irvine and other major universities around the country have taken harsh measures against pro-Palestinian activists. “There is a really ugly history of targeting student groups advocating for Palestinian issues,” says Liz Jackson, a staff attorney with Palestine Legal, a group which provides legal advice and advocacy to individuals in the U.S. advocating for Palestinian rights. “It suppresses the really important debates about U.S. foreign policy that young people need to be having. Instead of being able to engage freely and voice opinions that challenge the status quo, one side of the debate is just being crushed.”
A REPORT ISSUED LAST YEAR by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights documented 152 incidents of free-speech suppression on U.S. campuses in 2014. These incidents have included acts of censorship, threats of legal action and even accusations of support for terrorism. Citing the threat posed to the First Amendment by such acts, the report added that they were “undermin[ing] the traditional role of universities in promoting the free expression of unpopular ideas and encouraging challenges to the orthodoxies prevalent in official political discourse.”
Threats, punishment and intimidation are all being routinely used to stifle dissenting viewpoints on Israel-Palestine, says Omar Shakir a fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a co-author of the report. “University officials are erecting bureaucratic actions to make it harder to hold certain events, imposing administrative sanctions and even firing and denying tenure to professors for their views on Israel-Palestine, efforts that collectively represent a grave threat to the First Amendment.”
For instance, Native American Studies Professor Steven Salaita lost his tenured faculty position at the University of Illinois in 2014 after being accused of incivility in his online comments on Israel-Palestine. After a public legal battle, last year the school settled a lawsuit filed by Salaita for financial compensation.
In the case of UC Irvine, Shakir adds that the university’s charge of “incivility” on the part of protestors is a particularly egregious attempt to stifle protected speech. “Accusations of incivility have always been used by those in power to justify attempts to suppress changes to the status quo,” Shakir says. “The term itself, ‘civility’ represents coded language that in the past has been used to try and suppress groups deemed ‘uncivilized,’ like Native-Americans and African-Americans in the United States. It has no place being used as a basis to silence student activists today.”
Those views were partly echoed by Ari Cohn, a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a campus free-speech organization. “If allegations that protestors at UC Irvine disrupted the event are substantiated that would not be protected speech, as it would impinge on the speech of others attending the event.” Cohn added, however, that “civility in itself cannot be mandated by schools. Incivility plays a fundamental role in much of the social activism on campuses.”
THREATS TO SPEECH, have come not only from university administrations but from law enforcement as well. In 2010, Osama Shabaik was among a group of eleven students at UC Irvine who were arrested after protesting an appearance by then-Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at the school. Oren’s speaking event came roughly a year after Operation Cast Lead, a three-week Israeli military campaign against the Gaza Strip that killed hundreds of civilians. Intent on making a point about the inappropriate nature of Oren’s appearance following the attack, Shabaik and others organized a protest to disrupt the event.
In an incident that was captured on video, Shabaik and several other students repeatedly stood up in the crowd to interrupt Oren’s speech, chanting slogans against Israeli military abuses during Cast Lead. The students were detained and ejected from the event, something Shabaik says they had expected. But what came next was stunning. The school administration referred the students to the police, filing misdemeanor criminal charges against them for disrupting the event. The charges carried a maximum of one year in prison for each of those who protested.
The following year the case went to court, where Shabaik and nine other students were convicted and sentenced to three years probation.
“The administration was definitely sending a message and implicitly threatening our futures by having us charged as criminals for protesting,” reflects Shabaik today. “A lot of those who were charged were students planning to go on to medical school or law school, and they were worried that having a criminal record would prevent that from happening.”
Shabaik has since gone on to graduate from Harvard Law School, but is concerned about how his criminal record could affect his future employment prospects. Looking back at the incident, he believes it helped inaugurate a high-level campaign to silence dissent on Israel-Palestine in the United States, that has since extended to state legislatures.
Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order that would force public institutions in New York to divest funds from groups supporting the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The executive order has been criticized as a form of political blacklisting. Shabaik believes Cuomo’s proposal echoes his own experience, where powerful institutions and public figures have sought to quash dissent on this issue.
“Its important to understand duality of responses when it comes to free speech. The whole essence of free speech is to challenge power and push back against government repression,” says Shabaik. “The move to stop debate on this issue is now leading to crackdowns at state-funded colleges and universities and even at the state legislature level. People are facing serious threats to their future for speaking out against the status quo.”
IN RECENT YEARS, a movement has built, mostly on the political right, which charges that free speech is being endangered on American college campuses. The most prominent voices on this issue have been conservative activists like Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos and Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro. But liberal writers such as Jonathan Chait have also relentlessly fixated on the idea that “political correctness” is stifling free expression among a new generation of students.
Most of these protestations have focused on a specific type of speech: the right to “offend” by speaking against perceived left-wing orthodoxies on race, feminism and cultural issues. The charges of speech suppression in such cases have generally not been leveled at university administrators or law enforcement, but rather at students who view such speech as offensive. This differs markedly from the Israel-Palestine controversies, where state-funded bureaucracies and government officials have been involved with stifling speech on an issue directly related to American foreign policy.
“Its important to distinguish between the idea that certain views are not popular on campuses, something that may be worthy of discussion separately, and the phenomenon of public institutions and officials taking direct action to restrict speech about vital aspects of government policy,” says Shakir of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The core of the First Amendment defends the right to free speech on campuses, and we should all be concerned when McCarthey-esque tactics are being used by those in positions of power to silence debate on issues of global importance.”
Source: theintercept.com
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