I was a guest of Hajj Suleman’s twice at Umm al Khayr in the South Hebron Hills, once in 2017 and once in 2019. But for the pandemic, I’d have seen him again in the summer of 2020: my flight was booked, but circumstances conspired against my going. He’s now fighting for life against injuries sustained in his struggle for justice (see the article just below).
Tag Archives: Israel
Law’s Empire
When I was younger, I had this conviction that the law was a noble calling allied with rationality and justice. The more I learn about it, and see of it, and deal with it, the more it seems a grotesque parody or subversion of those things. Necessary? Yes. Noble? Not really. Often, it just seems like a game played by the rich, educated, and powerful, intended to rationalize whatever needs to be rationalized so that the world stays the way it is.
Back to School: Life in Palestine (3)
For the last post in this installment, I thought I’d forego the verbose commentary and just quote one of my sources verbatim from Tuk’u.
Continue readingOur fourth day, no school. The man in the photo is the headmaster of the school. The army has detained him for two hours, then they threaten him not to reopen the school again.”
9/11 + 20
This Saturday marks the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. To that end, I thought I’d haul out some of the more edifying things I’ve written over the years about, or of relevance to, 9/11. In doing this, I’m to some extent plagiarizing at least the form of Chris Sciabarra’s most recent blog post at his blog, summarizing the twenty annual posts he’s written about 9/11. But plagiarism in this case is intended more as a tribute than as mere theft. If you read one thing about 9/11, you should read Chris’s Post of Posts.
Character-Based Voting FTW
Lorenz Kraus is (or was) a candidate for US Senate, based in Troy, New York. My knowledge of his candidacy is based on about ten minutes’ Internet search after he sent me a crank email cc’d to Counter-Currents Publishing, a white nationalist website, among other recipients. Ten minutes is all it took to figure out that Kraus was a crank, and all it would have taken to figure out not to vote for him.
How? Because Kraus’s entire campaign is based on anti-Semitism of a wild, overt, over-the-top sort. No need to hash through the details; once was enough for me. If you don’t want to take my word for it, spend maybe ten minutes scrolling through his Twitter feed below (underneath the separator), or whatever else comes up in a Google search. If it takes you more than ten minutes, you’re doing it wrong.
Continue readingWhat to the Palestinian is the Fourth of July?
Barely a word about this in the mainstream American media. Barely a word about it from libertarian defenders of property rights. But lots of caterwauling about “cancel culture” and Critical Race Theory, and lots of empty rhetoric about the “freedom” we brought the world with the Revolution of 1776.*
Continue readingIsrael has sent demolition notices to residents of about 100 homes in Silwan, warning their abodes–housing more than 1,500 people–are to be destroyed.
Crazy Like a Foxman: The ADL’s Descent into Racist Sociopathy
Abraham Foxman was for decades the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, and is currently its National Director Emeritus. Paul Surovell, a Facebook friend of mine, is a peace activist and Chair of South Mountain Peace Action in Maplewood, New Jersey. The exchange between them (below the fold) is both revealing and astonishing.
Revealing because despite using them all his career, Abraham Foxman literally has no idea what the word “libel” or the phrase “blood libel” actually mean. Astonishing because Surovell’s final accusation really is as obvious as he says it is: Foxman’s aversion to the very acknowledgement of Palestinian suffering seems to suggest either that Palestinian suffering doesn’t exist, or that it’s deserved even in children, or that even if it exists, it doesn’t merit acknowledgement. Why else would that be, except on the assumption that non-Jewish suffering by definition takes a back seat to Jewish suffering? How much clearer could the sheer dehumanization of Palestinians get?
Continue readingAnti-Semitism: A Pro-Palestinian Rejection
In case anyone had missed the message, the cause of and movement for Palestinian rights is flatly incompatible with anti-Semitism. Put differently, there is no justifiable way of being in favor of Palestinian rights on anti-Semitic grounds or for anti-Semitic ends. When anti-Semites try to appropriate the Palestinian cause for their own purposes, or hijack the cause by attacking innocent Jews, consistent defenders of Palestinian rights are among the first–and loudest and clearest–to call them out. Here’s a piece from CommonDreams for anyone who still has doubts about the supposed “connection” between anti-Semitism and Palestinian rights (ht: Kevin Carson). There is no connection, just the wholehearted disavowal of one.
Continue readingWoke Conspiracies and Zionist Ones
People on the American Right sincerely seem to believe that “woke” ideology is so terrible and pervasive a phenomenon that it can be compared to a conspiratorial form of totalitarianism sweeping the country.
David Brooks, in The New York Times:
Continue readingMy friend Rod Dreher recently had a blog post for The American Conservative called “Why Are Conservatives in Despair?” He explained that conservatives are in despair because a hostile ideology — wokeness or social justice or critical race theory — is sweeping across America the way Bolshevism swept across the Russian Empire before the October Revolution in 1917.
A Welcome Tension: AOC, the Democrats, and Palestine
So it looks like decades of activism are finally, very gradually, starting to pay off in the form of polarization within the Democratic Party over Israel and Palestine. This didn’t happen by activists’ genuflecting before the prevarications and dogmatism of the mindlessly pro-Israel wing of the party, including Joe Biden. It happened through open, unapologetic confrontation.
Policy of Truth 