NOVANEWS
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Blues band ‘Tuba Skinny’ cancels Eilat, reportedly responding to boycott appeal
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Michael Rubin says Obama/Khalidi will support Palestinian statehood so as to wreak ‘Israel’s demise’
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Activist files suit against Netanyahu supporters who attacked her in Capitol
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Eilat deaths count
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JINSA says that Israel has been all for an Arab state since Partition
Blues band ‘Tuba Skinny’ cancels Eilat, reportedly responding to boycott appeal
Aug 20, 2011
Philip Weiss
Tuba Skinny is an upandcoming New Orleans jazz and blues band. It has cancelled a show in Eilat, Israel, scheduled for tomorrow night, without explanation at its website. Electronic Intifadah says Tuba Skinny did soafter receiving cultural boycott materials, and an urgent plea not to play Israel… EI:
The group has joined the picket line of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, Elvis Costello, The Pixies, the late Gil Scott-Heron, Carlos Santana, Pete Seeger, Massive Attack, Faithless, Gorillaz Sound System, The Tindersticks and the Klaxxons.
Michael Rubin says Obama/Khalidi will support Palestinian statehood so as to wreak ‘Israel’s demise’
Aug 20, 2011
Philip Weiss
I kept one eye on former Pentagon adviser Michael Rubin during the Iraq War drumming because he was young and red-cheeked and not as smooth as the grownup monsters (Abrams/Perle/Feith) and I thought he was trying to sound halfway-reasonable. But it turns out that under the gloss of International Relations he’s… gosh, a pro-Israel zealot like so many of the rest. This piece at Commentary is nutty in a very entertaining way, and lends further latter-day support to the Walt and Mearsheimer thesis that the Iraq war couldn’t have happened without the Israel lobby. In Rubin’s view, Samantha Power is an anti-Israel intellectual (a thoughtful, careful woman who praised Marty Peretz and Leon Wieseltier, the “wisest man in Washington,” in her breakout book). The Palestinian statehood initiative would spell “Israel’s demise.” And Rashid Khalidi is still a close adviser of Barack Obama. On what evidence?
Though I like Rubin’s Truman analogy: Truman defied the establishment to recognize Israel; Obama would have to defy it to OK a Palestinian state. True. And why did the establishment change? Because the nature of American leadership culture changed, because Jews were at last permitted into the power structure. Robert Kaplan, ushering out the Arabists, could state that the recognition of Israel was a great “liberal” advance, and Michael Beschloss and Walter Russell Mead and everyone else agreed, for the time being anyway… Rubin (thanks to Jim Lobe):
Rashid Khalidi, a current adviser to the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, remains a close Obama confidante. WhileThe Los Angeles Times continues to withholdthe tape of Obama’s toast to Khalidi prior to the professor’s departure for a post at Columbia University, Obama’s speech perhaps gave an inkling of his sympathy toward the Palestine Liberation Organization and his antipathy toward Israel.
Obama entered office with strong opinions. His understanding of the real reasons for the lack of peace in the Middle East was shoddy, shaped as it was by a former PLO activist and an Ivy League bubble. He reportedly still remains enthralled by anti-Israel intellectual Samantha Power. Intellectual arrogance, however, appears to prevent Obama from reconsidering his assumptions. Rather, he digs in his heels.
That the State Department has come out against unilateral recognition is irrelevant. After all, Secretary of State Clinton also came out against any demands that Syrian President Bashar Assad step aside just days before Obama demanded that Assad step aside. In his speech about the Middle East last May, Obama appears to have left himself too much wiggle room for comfort. Certainly, a US vote in favor of unilateral Palestinian statehood would unleash chaos. The question is whether when the smoke cleared, President Obama thought he might be remembered positively for the fait accompli.
Harry Truman defied the establishment to recognize Israel. We should not discount the possibility that Obama might defy the establishment to advance Israel’s demise. Beware the September surprise.
Actually, I think this piece is hysterical. Israel exists; no one is going to destroy it. The Palestinians are powerless. Before too long, the society will likely be transformed– and if you take Omar Barghouti’s Algerian analogy, which is an outcome I don’t pray for, many Israelis will leave the place. But what everyone on this site actually seeks is a transformation that honors equal rights…
Activist files suit against Netanyahu supporters who attacked her in Capitol
Aug 20, 2011
annie
Code Pink announces a lawsuit filed by Rae Abileah stemming from anincident during the Israeli prime minister’s speech to Congress.The defendants are unnamed in the suit because if the suit goes forward, Abileah willl seek to discover their names in police records.
Rae Abileah, a peaceful demonstrator who was physically attacked and injured on May 24, 2011, while protesting the occupation and oppression of Palestinians during the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, filed a civil action in District of Columbia Superior Court [Thursday] against the unknown individuals who attacked her in the House Gallery, and caused her serious physical injury.
Ms. Abileah is a 28 year old American Jew of Israeli descent, who works as the Middle East Campaigns Coordinator for CODEPINK, a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice organization that seeks to end U.S. wars and the U.S. funded occupation of Palestine. After a security check by the Capitol Police, she was given a seat in the House Gallery, as were other individuals who were given passes by members of Congress for the May 24, 2011 session. About 10 minutes after Mr. Netanyahu began speaking, Ms. Abileah stood up from her seat in the Gallery and opened a banner that read “Occupying Land is Indefensible,” and shouted, “No more occupation. Stop Israeli war crimes! Equal rights for Palestinians! Occupying land is indefensible!”
Four to five other persons sitting in the House Gallery began to attack her, including one man who used his hand to attempt to gag and suffocate Ms. Abileah, and then violently yanked her head back, injuring her neck. As a result of the attack, Ms. Abileah suffered severe emotional trauma and sustained a neck strain, swollen neck and muscle strain, and has since suffered from frequent headaches.
The Capitol Police, who witnessed the attack, have begun an investigation into her assault. One of the police officers present during the attack told Ms. Abileah that it was clear that some of the people present had “roughed [her] up.”
“I am hopeful that my filing suit will be a clear signal to those who attempt to silence us from protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestine, that they will be held accountable for their illegal actions,” said Ms. Abileah.
“Ms. Abileah’s actions were in a long line of peaceful actions intended to bring public attention to grave injustice. The violence against Ms. Abileah mirrors the ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine against peaceful demonstrators,” said Lynne Bernabei, one of Ms. Abileah’s attorneys.
Eilat deaths count
Aug 20, 2011
Philip Weiss
Israel kills Palestinians all the time. On average, the IDF kills one Palestinian civilian every two days with impunity in the occupied territories, as B’tselem documented last year. Just the other day here, Seham did a post about three arbitrary killings in the occupied territories. One of the dead was a 75-year-old woman. There will be no accountability. No American politicians are raising their voices about Selma Al Sawarka, a mother of seven who was grazing her goats when the Israeli forces shot her early in the morning.
The reason that our media and politicians get so exercised about Israeli dead is –I believe– because of the Holocaust and Never-again-ism. Even one Jewish death is seen as a tragedy recalling the extermination of Jews in Europe. And the Holocaust was the world’s rationale for voting to establish Israel.
The result is that a moral imperative, Never-again, is used to justify exceptionalism. But as Norman Finkelstein’s mother, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and a Nazi death camp, used to tell her son, the meaning of the Holocaust is that her Jewish experience should be shared with everyone– to prevent it ever happening to anyone else.
Americans have dealt with this kind of racist exceptionalism, and (I’m a liberal) we’ve largely defeated it. Mark Twain skewered the attitude in Huck Finn. Late in the book he brings Huck to a farm in Arkansas, and Sally Phelps wonders what’s taken him so long to get there (warning, n-word coming)
“What kep’ you–boat get around?”…
“It warn’t the grounding–that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
Mark Twain wrote Huck Finn long after slavery. The point of his book is that racism was perfectly “respectable” — his word — back in the 1840s. Today, too, we must work to destroy respectable racism.
JINSA says that Israel has been all for an Arab state since Partition
Aug 20, 2011
Philip Weiss
The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs’ latest email report is pure propaganda:
Since 1947, Israel [sic] has agreed to a “two state solution” in which there would be a Jewish State of Israel and a Palestinian Arab State. Through wars and intifadas and BDS movements, Israel has asked only that its democratic existence as the national homeland of the Jewish people be recognized by its neighbors – and that the “secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force” promised by UN Resolution 242 be accepted. The Arab states (save Jordan and Egypt) and the Palestinians have refused.