Report Back from Palestine
Friday, January 22nd at 7pm
WESPAC in White Plains
255 Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd., second floor
White Plains, New York 10601We will open with brief video footage provided by Felice Gelman and commentary by Mike Levinson, two of the Westchester residents who participated in the Gaza Freedom March.With Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Ali AbunimahDhoruba Bin Wahad is a Veteran Black Panther and 19-year political prisoner in this country. He won his freedom in 1990 after a New York State judge found that the FBI had suppressed evidence that could have helped clear him of his 1971 charge. He recently tried to enter the West Bank to attend a Palestinian conference on political prisoners and was denied entry by Israeli authorities. There are over 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners being held by Israel with hundreds of them under the age of 16. Dhoruba will discuss the challenges in building Palestine Solidarity within the African American Community.Ali Abunimah is one of the more than 1,300 international solidarity activists who participated in the Gaza Freedom March in Cairo. The Egyptian Authorities did not allow the participants to leave Cairo and travel to Gaza. Ali is one of the founders of the electronic intifada http://electronicintifada.net. Ali will discuss the next steps for the Palestine Solidarity Movement.For more information contact http://www.wespac.org
Friday, January 22nd at 7pm
WESPAC in White Plains
255 Dr. Martin Luther King Blvd., second floor
White Plains, New York 10601We will open with brief video footage provided by Felice Gelman and commentary by Mike Levinson, two of the Westchester residents who participated in the Gaza Freedom March.With Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Ali AbunimahDhoruba Bin Wahad is a Veteran Black Panther and 19-year political prisoner in this country. He won his freedom in 1990 after a New York State judge found that the FBI had suppressed evidence that could have helped clear him of his 1971 charge. He recently tried to enter the West Bank to attend a Palestinian conference on political prisoners and was denied entry by Israeli authorities. There are over 10,000 Palestinian political prisoners being held by Israel with hundreds of them under the age of 16. Dhoruba will discuss the challenges in building Palestine Solidarity within the African American Community.Ali Abunimah is one of the more than 1,300 international solidarity activists who participated in the Gaza Freedom March in Cairo. The Egyptian Authorities did not allow the participants to leave Cairo and travel to Gaza. Ali is one of the founders of the electronic intifada http://electronicintifada.net. Ali will discuss the next steps for the Palestine Solidarity Movement.For more information contact http://www.wespac.org
Why does Noam Chomsky oppose boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and why does he think Palestinians should not talk about justice and redress for their ethnic cleansing from their homeland in 1948? Why does Chomsky dismiss any talk about the influence of the Israel lobby?
On 13 January 2010, Ali Abunimah and Jeffrey Blankfort were invited to respond directly to an interview Chomsky gave earlier on these topics, on KPFA's show Voices from the Middle East and North Africa hosted by Khalil Bendib. Chomsky was invited to take part in a direct debate but declined. Listen!
Just a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks, then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama -- a political unknown nationally -- spoke to the Chicago Defender newspaper (Chinta Strausberg, "Sen. Obama: Barriers 'sad, symbols of fear," Chicago Defender, 17 October 2001). The article is not archived online, but I came across it on Lexis Nexis while searching for something else.
It's interesting how his words already display the sort of 'all things to all people' ambiguity that is his hallmark -- he supports war, but expresses doubts about its effectiveness. His liberal interventionism is already there - the desire to turn other societies into copies of the United States. Notably, he states that terrorism might be bred because people are "suffering under oppressive and corrupt regimes." This calls for us to "examine the foreign policies of the the U.S. to make sure that we occupy the moral high ground." I wonder if he was referring to the sort of "oppressive and corrupt regimes" the US continues to prop up diplomatically, militarily and financially from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to Israel, and from Egypt to Afghanistan under his presidency? Here are the full quotes taken from the above-cited article:
"I think that is the saddest situation and after effect of the Sept. 11 tragedy other than the obvious loss of lives and families.
"Those barricades [around federal buildings in Chicago] are a symbol of the fear that people are experiencing. I recognize the need for such precautions, but my strong hope is that over time, we're able to diminish the daily threat of violence and return to the sort of openness and freedom that is the hallmark of our society."
Asked what should the U.S. do, Obama said: "We're engaged in a military operation. I don't know how effective that operation is, but it's absolutely vital that we pursue a military response and a criminal investigation to dismantle these organizations of violence that have cropped up.
"We should also examine the foreign policies of the the U.S. to make sure that we occupy the moral high ground in these conflicts. In particularly, we have to examine some of the root causes of this terrorist activity," Obama said, referring to terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and his "sleeper" cells throughout the world.
"For nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, or much of the Middle East, young men have no opportunities. The only education they are receiving is that provided to them by religious schools that may not provide them with a well-rounded view of the world.
"They see poverty all around them and they are angry by that poverty. They may be suffering under oppressive and corrupt regimes and that kind of environment is a breeding ground for fanaticism and hatred," said Obama.
"It's absolutely critical that the U.S. is engaged in policies and strategies that will give those young people and these countries hope and make it in their self-interest to participate and create modern, open societies like we have in the U.S."
Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators
Egypt's complicity in the Gaza's siege underlines the role of western support for such regimes in the spread of war
Thursday 7 January 2010
If an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor had gone on hunger strike in support of a besieged people in another part of the world, and hundreds of mostly western protesters had been stoned and beaten by police, you can be sure we'd have heard all about it. But because that is what's been happening in western-backed Egypt, rather than Iran, and the people the protesters are supporting are the Palestinians of Gaza instead of, say, Tibetans, most people in Europe and north America know nothing about it.
Read the rest guardian.co.uk
Gaza Freedom March: detained at the US embassy
Ali Abunimah writing from Cairo, Live from Palestine, 7 January 2010
Medea Benjamin (left) and Kit Kettredge outside the US embassy.
Egyptian police in uniform and plain clothes surrounded US citizens attempting to visit the US embassy. On the afternoon of 28 December 2009, I was with several persons who accompanied CODEPINK cofounder Jodie Evans to the US Embassy in Cairo to present a letter from Massachusetts Senator John Kerry in which he expressed "strong support" for citizens of his state who were traveling to Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and requesting they be given "every courtesy." In fact, we were turned away at the first checkpoint at a side street off Corniche al-Nil leading up to the embassy, and told to come back the next morning.
At 9:45am on 29 December, Evans, myself and two other Gaza Freedom March participants came back to the embassy. We explained that we wished to see Ambassdor Margaret Scobey to discuss why Egypt had prohibited more than 1,300 persons including hundreds of Americans, from going to Gaza to take part in a peaceful march with Palestinian civil society against the siege of Gaza.
My account of the "siege" at the US embassy during the Gaza Freedom March
A year after losing a father and sons, a Gaza family copes
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 6 January 2010
Khaled Abu Jbarah with baby Lina and Jihad, whose father was killed in an Israeli missile strike on their Gaza home. (Rami Almeghari)
"Four months after the martyrdom of my husband and two of my sons, my granddaughter Lina was born -- the daughter of my martyred son Basel," said Fathiya Abu Jbarah. Fathiya is the widow of Jihad Abu Jbarah and mother of Basil, 30, and Usama, 21 who were killed on 4 January 2009 by an Israeli missile that struck their home in al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Their home was hit during Israel's 22-day air and land attack that killed more than 1,400 persons and wounded thousands of others.The Electronic Intifada visited the family a few days after the attack (see "Targeting a cup of tea in Gaza," 12 January 2009) and came back one year later to see how they are coping.
Going through my Gaza Freedom March photos, I found this one. It was when we were outside the US Embassy. The Egyptian secret police (mukhabarat) were our constant companions.