General News

Israel Calls European UNSC Members Critical of Illegal Settlement Expansion "Irrelevant"

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Faced with Israel’s continued settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories, as well as Palestine’s statehood efforts at the U.N., European members of the U.N. Security Council released a joint statement Tuesday declaring the settlements as a principal obstacle to peace and illegal under international law. The joint statement – made by Britain, France, Germany and Portugal – came after the UNSC’s closed-door meeting on the state of the Middle East, at which every member (except for the United States) condemned both Israel’s continued settlement expansion as well as the increase in settler violence against Palestinians, including the repeated torching of mosques in the West Bank. According to Haaretz, Israel’s Foreign Ministry angrily responded by not just delegitimizing the critiques, but by denigrating some of its strongest allies in Europe:
A statement released by the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said that the EU members of the Security Council would be well advised to exert their efforts on resuming direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians, instead of “interfering” in Israel’s internal affairs. “If, instead of contributing to stability in the Middle East through these steps, they invest their efforts in inappropriate bickering with the one country where the independent law and justice system can handle lawbreakers of all kinds, they are bound to lose their credibility and make themselves irrelevant,” the statement said. Of course, the biting irony here is the Foreign Ministry’s claim that Israel is “the one country where the independent law and justice system can handle lawbreakers of all kinds.”

General News

Chanukah's History: Challenging but Full of Meaning

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The history of Chanukah squeezes us between two competing narratives: one of idealization and one of consternation. The former encourages us to view Chanukah as a holiday of liberation, when the Maccabees overthrew their Hellenistic occupiers in pursuit of faith and freedom. The Jews wanted a homeland free of outside ruler and were willing to pick up arms in self-defense. The latter emphasizes the un-miraculous nature of the conflict and the fact that, when ‘free’ during the Hasmonean period (which followed the Maccabean conquest), Jewish leaders at times engaged in programs of forced conversion and other unsavory acts. Freedom from Hellenistic domination did not liberate Jews from internal strife and harsh rulers.

Culture

"By Imbeciles Who Really Mean It": Lost Verities and Dirty Hippies

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Regardless of the dissembling of corporate state propagandists, free market capitalism has always been a government subsidized, bubble-inflating, swindlers’ game, in which, psychopathic personalities (not “job creators” but con job perpetrators) thrive. By the exploitation of the many, a ruthless few have amassed large amounts of capital by which they dominate mainstream narratives and compromise elected and governmental officials, thereby gaming the system for their benefit. Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence. These stultifying circumstances will level an atmosphere of restiveness and nebulous rage.

General News

FUTURE HEADLINE: American Soldiers Seize & Detain U.S. Citizens as Police Block Press From Scene

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How has it come to this? How is it possible that President Obama will be the one to codify, for the first time since the McCarthy era, the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens? I will get to the answer. However, first, let me defend the title of this post by making clear that the revised National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) set to be signed by Obama – called “an astonishing attack on our civil liberties” by Sam Seder – indeed legislatively grants the U.S. military the authority to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens on American soil without a trial or charge. While this codified detention authority is intended to be used on terror suspects, the categories of those who can be detained are so slippery and amorphous that they could, in the future, be potentially applied to anyone.

Culture

Murmuration & Occupation – Why We Shut Down the Ports

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On Monday morning I awoke before dawn and somehow managed to crawl out of bed, fumble my jeans and boots on, and sling my drum and backpack – the one that has become the indefinite home for my first aid kit, a patchwork bag of herbal tinctures, a squirt bottle half-full of milk of magnesia, a bottle of bubbles, and some lavender essential oil – over my shoulder. As I checked my back pocket one more time for my ID and locked the back door, the clock on the microwave read 5:08 AM. By 5:39 AM, I was snaking through the dark streets of West Oakland in what seemed to me to be a much-too-small crowd, mostly quiet except the occasional heartbeat of a lone drum or the sleepy but hopeful cheer that rose up as we passed under the overpass of Mandela Parkway. It was somehow comforting to hear our own voices echoing off the walls – it helped us remember our power. You better believe I was asking myself the same questions that CNN, the Huffington Post, the BBC, and Mayor Quan had that morning: Why on earth are we doing this?

Healing Israel/Palestine

Newt's Audacity of 'Nope'

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Newt Gingrich asserts that the Palestinians are “an invented people.” … [But] all nations are “invented” in their formative stage. Whether due to geography, history, language, culture or religion, they obtain a level of self-consciousness as a distinct people….

General News

Christians United For Israel: Israel's Mistaken Embrace

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When so many citizens and governments of so many countries regularly bathe in an anti-Israel bias, why would Israel ever reject a loving embrace? Christians United For Israel (CUFI), founded in 2006, is now the largest pro-Israel (see Israel’s pro-Israel definition) group anywhere in the known universe and afterlife — over 500,000 strong and bountifully multiplying. All committed and loyally engaged in their Biblical struggle to defend the home team by enlisting, along with AIPAC, Israel’s much smaller Jewish quarterback, as Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s American blocking back and unofficial coalition party member. Just as Netanyahu feels he speaks for generations of Jews, as he proclaimed before Congress in May, Pastor John Hagee, CUFI’s leader, has proclaimed to speak for all right-thinking evangelical Christians — evangelical Christians who know that Jews are God’s chosen title holders to all of pre-1947 Palestine: In July, while speaking at the sixth annual CUFI summit in Washington, D.C., he said, “The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people….they own the land of Israel!  The boundaries…are given exactly in the Bible.”