….subtitled, goodbye Tom J, who recently joined “the banned” at Daily Kos.
Strikes of political blogs are generally only symbolic protests and this one is no different. A week ago, a Daily Kos diarist was banned from the site by an administrator, for no apparent reason, which ticked off Arab and Palestinian bloggers, and their sympathizers. So one of them called for a strike, and others joined in.
The banning was of Tom J. Tom J was a regular diarist at Daily Kos who provided factual diaries about daily events taking place in Israel and Palestine against its indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians. Diaries about the effects of Israel’s occupation, the enforced colonization it has been conducting for over 40 years, stories about killings, house demolitions, wrecking of farmlands and orchards, and deprivation of water resources, all for the purpose of expanding Jewish settlements, the towns and cities Israel has built over the years on stolen Palestinian lands.
Tom J provided a daily account of the horrors taking place through news stories, pictures, and videos, the kind of reporting that is usually censored from mainstream US media. Without implying conspiracy, Tom J is also the proprietor of the site, STOP AIPAC.
By simply revealing the reality, Tom J continually disturbed the large gang of right wing Zionists who blog at Daily Kos, viewed his diaries as Israel-bashing, and him as part of the “Israel is always wrong” crowd. However, under the brutal conditions of the Palestinian occupation/colonialism, there has never been an “Israel is right” diary posted on Daily Kos that justified Israel’s behavior toward the Palestinians. Diaries about left wing peace activism inside Israel or Palestine or in the US, especially among Jewish peace groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, recently condemned as anti-Israel by the ADL, have always been considered Israel-bashing, strange as it may seem.
Picked up this blast of the ADL, and its bigoted leader, Abe Foxman, a little late, but since the ADL has joined the right wing pro-Israel lobby and will presumably continue with its anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Islamic diatribes, it seemed to be a good place to start understanding the ADL. This is not the ADL of old, you understand, which had been active since 1903 as a force fighting anti-Semitism in the US, and now in Europe. It is the new ADL that is willing to partake of bigotry itself if it believe that it will in some way benefit Israel.
The subtitle says it all: “Abe Foxman calls Jewish Voice for Peace one of the “top 10 anti-Israel groups in America”
Self-haters the JVPers are no doubt, all of them. Here’s some of the Salon War Room text, this time not written by Glenn Greenwald, but by Justin Elliott.
Lawrence of Cyberia again seems to have all the insights on the current and purported peace negotiations going on between Israel and the Palestinian people, or not. Whatever the solution, any peace agreement or the lack of one will end up with the same result. Why do we bother?
We officially demand that the US administration and the Israeli government provide a map of the borders of the state of Israel which they want us to recognize. …
We want to know whether this state includes our lands and houses in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. …
If this map is based on the 1967 borders and provides for the end of the Israeli occupation over all Palestinian lands… then we recognize Israel by whatever name it applies to itself in accordance with international law.
— Senior Palestinian Official Yasser Abed Rabbo
This of course under-reported in the U.S. move by the Palestinians (the latest U.S. ‘news’/propaganda on I/P, by the way, is “Israel offers settlement freeze in exchange for recognition; Palestinians say ‘no'”) is smart if it increases international attention on what the U.S. and Israel are asking Palestinians to recognize: a borderless state fully expanded into Palestinian territory. Abed Rabbo added:
It is important for us to know where are the borders of Israel and where are the borders of Palestine. Any formulation the Americans present – even asking us to call Israel the ‘Chinese State’ – we will agree to it, as long as we receive the 1967 borders. We have recognized Israel in the past, but Israel has not recognized the Palestinian state.
What is being resisted in the words of one Palestinian activist is Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in the Jordan Valley. That’s the portion of the West Bank shown to the right in light yellow in the map below. When Netanyahu speaks of ‘no preconditions’ for starting peace negotiations, what he really means is that, not only will settlement expansion resume full throttle, but ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem will likewise continue.
The Jordan Valley is located in a stretch of land adjacent to the Jordan river up to the base of a mountain ridge on the eastern side of the West Bank. It runs from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the Dead Sea in the south.
Professor Marc Gopin is the Director at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy, and Conflict Resolution (CRDC) with the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. You can follow his work by visiting www.MarcGopin.com. He has focused a lot of his work around interfaith conflict resolution, which is why we asked to speak with him about the controversy over the proposed construction of the Cordoba Mosque in lower Manhattan. Right after we scheduled the interview, news broke that peace talks among Israel, Palestine, and the United States would resume in September. This is an issue that Professor Gopin has been deeply involved with for a very long time now, so we included that in our line of questioning.
Highlight clips with partial transcripts and the full 40-minute interview below the fold…
…..’hopeless’ was Huffington Post’s rendering of the New York Times coverage of the recently announced resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, which spoke of ‘scant hopes from the beginning.’
Who cannot agree?
Last week, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, speaking in Dundee, Scotland on a tour sponsored by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, talked about Israel’s abandonment of the pretense of diplomacy in favor of a policy of provocation and raw military power, with the ultimate aim of denying Palestinians any chance of forming their own independent state.
And a week before that, Chris Hedges, speaking at a fund raiser for the US Boat to Gaza campaign, called the “peace process (a) cynical, one-way route to the crushing of the Palestinians as a people.”
Levy is really talking about the racist Likud agenda of the present government, which will screw Palestinians by offering them a group of Bantustans inside of what will become Greater Israel, the ultimate Likud goal.
