BY: Nisreen Eadeh/Staff Writer Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was given the choice to pick five members of the Democratic Party platform-writing committee, and his first choice was Arab American leader, James Zogby. The platform-writing committee for the Democratic National Convention (DNC) is where the Democratic Party drafts policies that will be adopted by … Continued
We Are Not Numbers/Contributing Writer Dear Secretary Hillary Clinton, After hearing your speech at AIPAC in March and all of your comments since then, I can only wonder if you are truly uninformed (which would be shocking given your past positions and the one you aspire to hold) or are simply heartless. Maybe I am … Continued
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders applauds fellow panelist Linda Sarsour, Executive Director at Arab American Association of New York, during a discussion at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in the Brooklyn borough of New York April 16, 2016. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson America’s Arab and South Asian activists are redefining whiteness BY Zahir Janmohamed Newsweek … Continued
By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News
Published: 17:01 May 18, 2016
Add to My Gulf News SHARERssFollow us on FacebookFollow us on Twitter Add on google plus Send Email to Friend Addthis 1
Once again, Israel has managed to escape scrutiny — thanks to a last-minute American intervention from the United States Secretary of State John Kerry, who has said that the date of the upcoming meeting is not convenient for him.
For many weeks, the French President, Francois Hollande, has been calling for an international conference, due to be held later this month in Paris, to relaunch peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis. But the key participants from the high-ranking officials of some 30 countries will not include any official from the Palestinian National Authority or Israel in order to launch guidelines for a peace settlement between the two warring parties of more than five decades.
Unlike the Palestinians, the Israelis were not supportive of this expanded undertaking. And now at the last minute, Kerry has reportedly told his French hosts that the timing is not convenient for him, raising curiosity about his last-minute response before the May 30 meeting in the French capital.
The French government has reportedly grown frustrated over the absence of a movement towards a two-state solution since the collapse of the US-brokered talks in 2014 and letting the status quo prevail, prompting fears that the region is on the brink of additional turmoil. More to the point, Israel has repeatedly declared it is not willing to support an expanded international conference, probably for fear of international condemnation and hopes of grabbing additional Occupied Palestinian Territories, where some half a million of illegal Israeli colonists have moved into the West Bank without any effective condemnation from key western powers, especially the US.
But the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, who visited Israel and the Palestinian government last week, raised slight hopes in saying that the conference will take place “in the course of the summer”.
The Israeli government is against the projected meeting and particularly recent French actions; its support of a Unesco resolution that did not acknowledge Jewish ties to occupied Jerusalem and of Palestinian membership in Unesco.
The potential participants in the upcoming meeting will include the Middle East Quartet (US, Russia, European Union and United Nations), Arab League, the UN Security Council and about other 20 other countries.
In turn, the Palestinians remain hopeful that the projected French conference will bring about new “parameters for the promised talks”, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah declared. He cited the case of the international community when it came together before. “A peaceful settlement was found for the Iranian issue. Why not Palestine?” he said.
But what remains troublesome is the approaching American presidential election, where the two presumptive candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are hard-nosed supporters of Israel. Trump, the Republican front-runner, is on record as supporting Israel build colonies in the West Bank, while Hillary said: “We need steady hands, not a president who says he is neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday and who knows [not] what on Wednesday, because everything is negotiable”. She added: “Well, my friends, Israel’s security is not negotiable.”
What has been more rattling lately is Israel’s expectations regarding US financial aid that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes to sign before January 2017 when US President Barack Obama’s last term in office expires, although crucial disagreements remain unresolved. His concern is that signing the deal with Obama, a Democrat, will assure all that Israel is supported by both Democrats and Republicans, fearing that Trump will be the next president.
The current deal, valued at $30 billion (Dh110.34 billion), expires at the end of 2018. Obama is willing to give Israel $40 billion on condition that Israel will not seek more financial assistance over the next 10 years. Aid from the US equals to a quarter of the Israeli military budget.
But a contradictory turnaround that may influence a new America administration was revealed by the Pew Research Centre. Democrats are more than four times as likely as Republicans to say they sympathise more with the Palestinians than with Israel, and sympathy for Palestinians among Americans is growing.
The empathy for Palestinians, according to the survey published in the Times of Israel earlier this month, “is up most sharply among the youngest American adults, growing threefold over the last decade”. It added that “some 27 per cent of millennials say they are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis. In 2006, the figure was 9 per cent, but the share of those favouring Israel has held at 43 per cent”.
The survey also shows that “there is more optimism among Americans that a two-state solution can be achieved by the Israelis and Palestinians than scepticism that it cannot”.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
Source: gulfnews.com
By Adam DuBard Paste Magazine The 2016 Election Cycle has been one of the most memorable and irreverent elections in recent memory—certainly since the 24/7 media machine came into full operation. Unsurprisingly, foreign policy has been one of the main hot take zones of these primaries, with Donald Trump, 2016’s resident headline generator, offering suggestions … Continued
Alia Al Ghussain
The Electronic Intifada
Israel froze funding to Al-Midan Theater after it staged A Parallel Time by Bashar Murkus last year. Nir Elias Reuters
The Palestinian community in Haifa enjoyed a small victory in March when a theater successfully challenged the Israeli government to win reinstatement of official funding cut after controversy over the staging of a play about prisoners last year.
But the reinstatement also threw into focus the constraints on Palestinian artistic expression in present-day Israel and some saw the resumption of official funding as a double-edged sword.
On 29 March, al-Midan Theater reached agreement with the Israeli culture ministry to resume the transfer of public funds to the theater, as well as to unfreeze outstanding funding for last year, ending a stand-off that started in May 2015.
The ministry had frozen al-Midan’s public funding after the theater staged Bashar Murkus’ play A Parallel Time, which revolves around the lives of six Palestinian prisoners and a jailer in an Israeli prison.
Adalah, a Haifa-based legal center, alleged that the ministry’s decision was taken for “political reasons.”
Acting on behalf of al-Midan, Adalah filed a petition against the decision in October 2015.
The legal grounding for the ministry’s decision was dubious from the outset, according to Adalah. The group argued that the decision was illegal and “did not meet the basic requirements of administrative law.” No hearing was held before the decision was made, no formal reasoning was provided for the decision and it did not have any proper factual basis, the legal center said.
In addition, the play had been approved three times by official bodies, including a committee supported by the culture and education ministries, and Adalah lamented the fact that it took the intervention of Israel’s attorney general for the issue to be resolved.
A necessary compromise
“It is unfortunate that it was only after the intervention of the attorney general that the ministry of culture retracted its illegal freezing of funds and its attack on the theater’s freedom of expression and artistic creativity,” Adalah stated after agreement was reached.
“The most important thing for us is that the agreement made between the theater and the ministry did not impose any prohibition or conditioning of the creative content produced by the theater,” Adalah added.
The agreement did, however, entail a compromise under which al-Midan agreed to a deduction of 75,000 shekels (just under $20,000) from its annual budgets between 2016 and 2019. And Palestinian artists in Haifa remain acutely aware that their artistic expression is curtailed by the Israeli state.
“The tightening of democratic spaces in any state is usually reflected in its control and censorship of art. When a state begins censoring art, we know we’ve reached a dangerous situation,” Khulud Khamis, a Haifa-based author, told The Electronic Intifada.
Some artists feel that the reinstatement of funding to al-Midan was simply an attempt to polish Israel’s democratic credentials in the international arena.
“Personally, I was not impressed by the reinstatement of funding,” said Yazid Sadi, al-Midan’s production director. He was speaking to The Electronic Intifada in a personal capacity and was not stating the theater’s position.
“I expected it, as the culture ministry needs from one side to show how democratic they are, but from the other side they made us pay a penalty of 300,000 shekels … So that we think twice next time before we want to stage A Parallel Time or any other meaningful political theater or art.”
Sadi described the compromise al-Midan made as necessary to maintain its freedom of programming: “If we had given into their pressure and cancelled A Parallel Time, we probably wouldn’t have had to pay the penalty. But we didn’t think twice and decided to pay the penalty gladly. The play became a symbol of freedom of expression, and we were ready to give up all of our funding if they would rob us of this very basic right.”
Shrinking freedoms
“A state that censors art is a state that is well aware of the power of art as a tool for political resistance,” Khamis said. “Art has the power to convey reality in different forms and shed light on socio-political phenomena from perspectives that the state does not want us to see, thus acting as an eye-opener.”
While Israeli law is supposed to provide for freedom of speech, Palestinian citizens, who make up one-fifth of Israel’s population, often see these rights violated. In 2003, for instance, the Israeli film board banned the commercial viewing of a film about Israel’s 2002 siege of Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. The film, Jenin, Jenin, which comprises a collection of interviews with camp residents a week after the invasion, was directed by Mohammed Bakri, a Palestinian citizen of Israel.
The ban was later overturned, although the judge in the case commented that the accusations of war crimes by Israeli forces made in the film were “lies,” and that the documentary had “not been made in good faith.”
Like A Parallel Time, Jenin, Jenin sheds light on the ugly face of Israel’s occupation.
More recently, in 2015, the Israeli high court upheld key provisions of a law imposing legal consequences for those boycotting or advocating a boycott of Israel.
This law will disproportionately affect Palestinian citizens of Israel, who are already marginalized under Israeli law.
A 2011 measure — that Palestinians call the Nakba Law — prevents commemoration of the ethnic cleansing that led to Israel’s creation, for example. Such laws severely restrict the ability of Palestinians in Israel to express their opinions and draw attention to Israel’s crimes, historic and contemporary.
“The problem is that everything is linked to loyalty … You only have the space they will allow you,” said Nadim Nashif, director of Baladna, a Palestinian youth group in Israel.
A “loyalty in culture” bill proposed by Miri Regev, Israel’s culture minister, is currently making its way through Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The bill would cut funding to any institution that questions the existence of Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state,” denigrates state symbols like the flag and marks the Nakba. An amended version of the first draft was approved by Avichai Mendelblit, Isarael’s attorney general, in February.
“The aim is to make Palestinian cultural institutions behave,” said Nashif.
Maintaining an ethnocracy
The definition of Israel as a Jewish state results in the repression of Palestinian identity and freedom of expression, Nashif added.
“The whole structure of the state is designed to create and educate generations of ‘good’ Arabs, including in the cultural field — Arabs who don’t question government policy, who do not talk about the Nakba,” Nashif said.
Sadi agreed: “The so-called Jewish democracy is ridiculous as it can’t be a real democracy since it is only for Jews.”
This partly explains why Palestinian artists in Israel are disproportionately targeted for censorship. A new generation is exploring and expressing its Palestinian identity, openly questioning the Israeli institutions which discriminate against its community.
“Palestinian artists are usually not funded, or they are not hired,” said Nashif. “Now the discrimination is more extreme and much more evident. The policies of Miri Regev were there before, but done more quietly. There was a concern about image. This government is arrogant enough to say it out loud. These fights have always been there but now they are more open and brutal.”
Source: electronicintifada.net
An international conference due in Paris to help relaunch peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis will go ahead on June 3, allowing the United States to attend, France’s foreign minister said on Thursday. “The date that I can announce today that allows everyone to participate is June 3,” Jean-Marc Ayrault told reporters on the sidelines … Continued
RT News Pope Francis has criticized Western powers for attempting to export democracy to countries in the Middle East and Africa without paying attention to local political cultures. The pontiff was speaking to the French Catholic newspaper, La Croix. “Faced with current Islamist terrorism, we should question the way a model of democracy that was … Continued
Tim Mak
Bob Bennett spent his last days letting Muslims know how sorry he was that an Islamophobe had become his party’s all-but-certain nominee.
Former GOP senator Bob Bennett lay partially paralyzed in his bed on the fourth floor of the George Washington University Hospital. He was dying.
Not 48 hours had passed since a stroke had complicated his yearlong fight against pancreatic cancer. The cancer had begun to spread again, necessitating further chemotherapy. The stroke had dealt a further blow that threatened to finish him off.
Between the hectic helter-skelter of nurses, doctors, and well wishes from a long-cultivated community of friends and former aides, Bennett faced a quiet moment with his son Jim and his wife Joyce.
It was not a moment for self-pity.
Instead, with a slight slurring in his words, Bennett drew them close to express a dying wish: “Are there any Muslims in the hospital?” he asked.
“I’d love to go up to every single one of them to thank them for being in this country, and apologize to them on behalf of the Republican Party for Donald Trump,” Bennett told his wife and son, both of whom relayed this story to The Daily Beast.
The rise of Donald Trump had appalled the three-term Utah senator, a Republican who fell victim to the tea-party wave of the 2010 midterms. His vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, had alienated many conservative activists in his state, who chose lawyer Mike Lee as the GOP nominee for Senate instead.
But as Bennett reflected on his life and legacy in mid-April, following the stroke, he wasn’t focused on the race that ended his political career. Instead, he brought up the issue of Muslims in America—over and over again.
He mentioned it briefly in a hospital interview with the Deseret News, a Utah news outlet. “There’s a lot of Muslims here in this area. I’m glad they’re here,” the former senator told the newspaper in April, describing them as “wonderful.”
“In the last days of his life this was an issue that was pressing in his mind… disgust for Donald Trump’s xenophobia,” Jim Bennett said. “At the end of his life he was preoccupied with getting things done that he had felt was left undone.”
Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigrants from America had outraged the former senator, his wife Joyce said, triggering his instincts to do what he could on a personal level. They ultimately did not canvass the hospital, but Bennett had already made an effort in his last months of life.
As they traveled from Washington to Utah for Christmas break, Bennett approached a woman wearing a hijab in the airport.
“He would go to people with the hijab [on] and tell them he was glad they were in America, and they were welcome here,” his wife said. “He wanted to apologize on behalf of the Republican Party.”
“He was astonished and aghast that Donald Trump had the staying power that he had… He had absolutely no respect for Donald Trump, and I think got angry and frustrated when it became clear that the party wasn’t going to steer clear of Trumpism,” his son relayed.
Bennett’s Mormon faith also played into his beliefs on Trump and Muslims: the billionaire’s proposal to ban Muslims prompted the LDS Church to issue a statement in support of religious freedom, quoting its founder saying he would “die in defending the rights… of any denomination who may be unpopular and too weak to defend themselves.”
“That was something my father felt very keenly—recognizing the parallel between the Mormon experience and the Muslim experience. [He] wanted to see these people treated with kindness, and not ostracized,” Jim Bennett said.
His concern for Muslims was not the only issue he raised in his last days: to his brother-in-law, he spoke urgently on plans for low-income housing in Salt Lake city; to his son Jim, he mentioned a land management plan to mitigate the effects of drought.
“His sense of humor was still there,” his wife recalls, as the former senator lay bed-ridden, unable to swallow or stand up. At the end of his days, Bennett cried out, “Procrustes!”—a reference, and a joke about, the Greek mythological figure who stretched or cut off people’s legs in order to force them to fit on a bed.
As this all occurred, letters flowed in from former staff and friends from a long career in politics. One former aide recalled an incident in which she had lied to a television producer to excuse her boss’s lateness for an interview. Outed by the producer, the senator had found out about the fib.
“‘I never want you to lie for me, and I’ll never ask you or any of my staffers to lie for me,’” the staffer, who asked to remain anonymous, recalled Bennett saying to her. “I realized that I was working for a man of great integrity. It was something kind of stuck with me.”
At his D.C. area funeral—he had two, the second in Utah—there was an outpouring of grief from both sides of the aisle. Both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid spoke at the service.
“As someone who worked hard to bring both sides together to solve problems, it was only fitting that Bob Bennett brought together the Senate Majority Leader and Senate Minority Leader to deliver remarks at his memorial service,” Tara DiJulio, a former Bennett spokesperson, told The Daily Beast. “When there was a problem before us, he always worked hard and challenged his staff to find common ground between both parties without wavering on his core principles.”
The Tea Party wave that ousted Bennett from the Senate in 2010 was one of the first signs of popular discontent that has arguably led to the tsunami of support for Donald Trump. As that initial wave receded, it swept away many of the values that Bennett cherished: bipartisanship and concern for vulnerable refugees among them.
But even as he was passing away, Bennett struggled to press the issues—to ensure that though his life was ending, the ideas he held dear would not go with it. He died Wednesday, May 4.
Source: www.thedailybeast.com
Susan Greene PNN/ Oakland Arab Resources Organizing Coalition (AROC) and Art Forces on the 68th Nakba day presented George Jackson in the Sun of Palestine; a multimedia cultural event that expresses the interconnections between current and historic struggles against colonization from Palestine to the streets of Oakland. The event displayed posters that came from the original exhibition that … Continued
Ken Bredemeier
Voice of America
The United States and Egypt sought ways Wednesday to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process after Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said this week he would “make every effort” toward a solution.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with the Egyptian leader in Cairo, with a State Department spokesman later saying the top American diplomat “expressed his appreciation” for Sissi’s “strong support for advancing Arab-Israeli peace.”
But spokesman Mark Toner did not elaborate on any specific new effort to renew the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process that broke down in 2014 with no agreement.
The Kerry-Sissi meeting came a day after the Egyptian leader said an Israeli-Palestinian accord would make Cairo’s relations with Tel Aviv “warmer.”
Sissi said there was a “real opportunity” for peace in the region. He said an Israeli-Palestinian pact would “give safety and stability to both sides. If this is achieved, we will enter a new phase that perhaps no one can imagine now.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Sissi’s “willingness to invest every effort to advance a future of peace and security between us and the Palestinians.”
Egypt and Israel reached a peace agreement in 1979, the first accord between an Arab country and the Jewish state.
Source: www.voanews.com
BY: Fred Shwaery/Arab America Contributing Writer Last month, we signed off for a few weeks as not much was going to happen until the conventions. Well, like just about everything else in this election, the expected didn’t happen and the unexpected did. Here we are, two months before the conventions and the Republicans have … Continued
1,451 Results (Page 91 of 121)
Loading ...