Palestine Legal: Three anti-BDS bills were fast-tracked out of committee and passed today (March 8, 2017) without debate by the New York State Senate. These bills are blatantly unconstitutional attacks on First Amendment rights to protest and dissent. They resurrect widely-condemned tactics used to undermine democracy: creating blacklists, punishing dissent, attacking academic freedom, and cracking down on student organizing…
Avi Shlaim, on Al Jazeera: ‘Israeli propagandists deliberately conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in order to discredit, bully, and muzzle critics of Israel; in order to suppress free speech; and in order to divert attention from the real issues: Israeli colonialism, Israel’s apartheid, its systematic violation of the human rights of Palestinians, and its denial of their right to independence and statehood. The propagandists persistently present an anti-racist movement (anti-Zionism) as a racist one (anti-Semitism)…’
Sixteen years ago today, in the midst of the Second Intifada, Alison Weir set off to Palestine as an independent reporter, bent on seeing for herself the reality behind the news headlines that depicted Israel under storm by hostile Arabs. She had never visited Israel or Palestine and was completely new to understanding the so-called “Mideast Conflict.”…