Tompkins County Against War & Occupation

The anti-war movement responds to President Obama’s speech
Statement from the ANSWER Coalition
The U.S. cannot “win” the war in Afghanistan. It was losing the war when Barack Obama took office. In March 2009, President Obama ordered another 30,000 troops. Rather than reverse the outcome, the U.S. and NATO effort lost even more ground. Now President Obama [...]

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Come celebrate the 50th anniversary of the triumph of the Cuba revolution and 20th Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan

Ithaca has been a host city for the Pastors for Peace Cuba Caravan since the 3rd caravan in 1993. That year, mayor Ben Nichols signed a mayoral proclamation designation US-Cuba Freinedship week in the City of Ithaca. Though we have missed some years, the record has been consistent, though the scope of the annual effort has dropped since the early years. Here are some highpoints.

 

 Reese Erlich on the real story of the Buena Vista Social Club, Critical Thinking with Andrew Patner, WFMT, Chicago, March 16, 2009 http://www.wfmt.com/main.taf?p=1,1,41,25,2 [57:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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By Antony Loewenstein
Haaretz.com,
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1093667.html

During this year’s AIPAC conference in Washington, Executive Director Howard Kohr warned the 7,000-plus crowd that the global movement to “delegitimize Israel” was gathering steam.

“These voices are laying the predicate for an abandonment,” he said. His sentiments were almost apocalyptic: “The stakes in that battle are nothing less than the survival of Israel, linked inexorably to the relationship between Israel and the United States. In this battle we are the firewall, the last rampart.”

The age of Barack Obama has unleashed a global wave of Jewish unease over Israel’s future and the Diaspora’s relationship to the self-described Jewish state. It’s a debate that is long overdue.

Zionist organizations in Australia campaigned loudly in May against the allegedly “anti-Semitic” play Seven Jewish Children, a ten-minute think-piece written by an English playwright accusing Jews of complicity in violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

A Jewish columnist for The New York Times, Roger Cohen, argued in June that the key word among Palestinians now is “humiliation.”

“It’s not good for the Palestinians, the Israelis or the Jewish soul,” he wrote. The Jewish Week editor chastised him for such views - for “the anger, blame and one-sidedness of his argument” - and wondered “whose heart?has grown brutal?”

An upcoming academic conference at York University in Toronto exploring the “one-state, bi-national solution” to the conflict was slammed last week by Gerald M. Steinberg, chair of the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University, for fueling “the vicious warfare and mass terror” against Israelis and Palestinians.

The decades-old ability of Zionist groups to manage the public narrative of Israeli victimhood is breaking down. Damning critics has therefore become a key method of control.

But, writes Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, a leading Jewish-American blogger, “whereas these smear tactics once inspired fear in many people, now they just inspire pity. They no longer work.”

He may be overly optimistic, but alternative Jewish voices are rising who are less concerned with being accused of “self-hatred” or treachery. They see it as their duty to damn what is wrong and not simply support Israeli government policies.

A thinking, more enlightened Judaism is emerging, a necessity in the face of apartheid realities. The cause is human rights, not Zionist exclusion.

Obama’s recent speech in Cairo reflected the new Jewish consciousness. American Jews were certainly an intended audience because if it this group that must challenge their conservative spokespeople to undo years of following Likudnik thinking. As a candidate in 2008, the then Illinois senator said that, “there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel.”

Many Jews in the Diaspora have never imagined anything else; it’s been an imagined Israel in their minds for decades. Lawless behavior in the occupied territories is ignored through willful ignorance. Tellingly, the most reliable information about these truths in the West is found online, through blogs and activist Web sites, and not generally in the mainstream media. The gate-keepers are clinging on to the Exodus myths for dear life.

Defining a humane Judaism in the 21st century means condemning the brutal military occupation in the West Bank and resisting the ongoing siege of Gaza.

Jewish-American blogger Phil Weiss, who recently returned from the Strip, quoted a young Gazan saying in dismay: “We are being experimented on.”

The Palestinian narrative is routinely ignored or dismissed in the U.S. and beyond. This must change quickly for any chance of peace to break out in the Middle East. However, peace without justice is guaranteed to fail.

After Obama?s speech in Cairo, where which he almost acknowledged the Palestinian “Nakba” without mentioning it by name, most major Jewish-American groups reacted with caution.

The Anti-Defamation League said it was “disappointed that the President found the need to balance the suffering of the Jewish people in a genocide to the suffering of the Palestinian people resulting from Arab wars.”

This was code for “Nakba”-denial, as pernicious as Holocaust revisionism.

But the liberal J Street lobby, still clinging to the delusion of a viable two-state solution and a “democratic, Jewish homeland,” praised Obama?s “active diplomacy” and claimed that the “overwhelming majority of American Jews” supported an end to the West Bank colonies.

Consistent polls suggest they are right, but the devil is in the detail. Is there real will to back the necessary steps, namely the removal of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers in the West Bank?

Co-Author of The Israel Lobby, Stephen Walt, said recently that he couldn’t understand why more American Jews didn’t realize the cliff Israel was running toward. Did they not see that repression in the occupied territories had defined Israel in the eyes of the world? Perhaps apartheid didn’t bother them. Out of sight and out of mind. Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech at Bar-Ilan University suggested he wasn’t too fussed, either.

I recently attended the Salute to Israel parade in New York ? picture 100,000 American Jews marching to celebrate the state, waving flags in praise of the IDF. It was a thoroughly depressing affair. Palestinians didn’t exist; they were invisible. The world’s biggest public display of pro-Israel feeling had no room for 20 percent of the Israeli population (let alone the millions in the West Bank and Gaza.)

These events are actually a sign of desperate projection, not strength. Mainstream Zionism wants to completely shield Jews from the uncomfortable facts of the Israeli occupation and Palestinian self-determination. Jews were a proud people, a clever people and a victimized people. There was no time to indulge in frivolous Arab trivialities.

But facts have an uncomfortable way of seeping back into view. Colonel Itai Virob, an IDF brigade commander in the West Bank, recently told an Israeli court that, “a slap, sometimes a punch to the scruff of the neck or the chest, sometimes a knee jab or strangulation to calm somebody [a Palestinian] down is reasonable.”

Where is the Jewish outrage over this?

Antony Loewenstein is a New York-based journalist and author of My Israel Question.

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The Bellingham Sanctuary Movement is facing a big challenge.   In her op-ed Sanctuary city Pro: Support for troops should mean all of them published June 13 in the Bellingham Herald, Marie Marchand, executive director of the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center, writes:
Given Bellingham’s reputation, it is an especially stinging affront that four AWOL soldiers of [...]

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Please forward widely, Terry is a Vietnam Vet I marched with along the US Gulf Coast in our veterans and survivors march in March of 2006 from Mobile Alabama to New Orleans. He has a very keen bullshit detector as you will read, below. –George McAnanama
Tool of the Rich
Originally posted by peezfulmindz on the [...]

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[ May 27, 2009 to June 6, 2009. ] Despite the difficulties with parking for an event downtown just after the Ithaca Festival parade, 50 people attended the screening and discussion. If you missed the Ithaca screening, you still can see it in Oneonata (May 29), Corning (June 1), Cortland (June 4), Binghamton (June 5), or other locations in the Mohawk Valley and Sugerties scroll down for schedule).

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By Mary Anne Grady Flores
I was deeply saddened to see that it was our friend Bassam Abu Rahmah that was killed this past Friday, April 17th, 2009, in the village of Bil’in, Palestine. He was killed by an Israeli soldier firing a high velocity tear gas canister into his chest from only 100 feet away!  [...]

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Dude, Where’s My Karma?

April 14, 2009 - 12:00am
By Ariela Rutkin-Becker
“If only the Palestinians had better leadership.” I often hear this point from well-intentioned, but in this case at least misguided, pro-Israeli friends and colleagues. They continue to bemoan, “If only they had a Ghandi or an MLK.”
And one can surely make a logical case [...]

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Washington Times
Op-Ed, Friday, April 10, 2009
SOSA: Time to lift travel bans by Ignacio Sosa
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/10/time-to-lift-travel-bans/
Please go to article on Washington Times website to comment.

There is much anticipation that President Obama will use the April 17-19 Summit of the Americas to announce the lifting of Cuba travel and family-remittance restrictions for Cuban-Americans.
Although a welcome step toward crafting [...]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/opinion/04bisharat.html
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Israel on Trial
By GEORGE BISHARAT
Published: April 3, 2009
San Francisco
CHILLING testimony by Israeli soldiers substantiates charges that Israel’s Gaza Strip assault entailed grave violations of international law. The emergence of a predominantly right-wing, nationalist government in Israel suggests that there may be more violations to come. Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli civilians also constituted [...]

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-ehrenreich15-2009mar15,0,4405950.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
Zionism is the problem
The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace.
By Ben Ehrenreich
March 15, 2009
It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of [...]

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Last month’s Ithaca Common Council meeting was interrupted for an hour by a shoe throwing incident in reaction to the Council’s signing of a resolution at the October 1 meeting designating Ithaca a Community of Sanctuary “thus respecting the rights of its residents to support lawfully and proactively military personnel and veterans who are organizing [...]

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Informed Comment
Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The outcome of the Israeli election has sounded the death knell for the two-state solution. There are not 61 votes for it in the new Knesset of 120 seats. A good 64 of the just-elected and/or [...]

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by Norman Solomon
Published on Tuesday, February 3, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
The United States began its war in Afghanistan 88 months ago. “The war on terror” has no sunset clause. As a perpetual emotion machine, it offers to avenge what can never heal and to fix grief that is irreparable.
[...]

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by John J. Mearsheimer
Israelis and their American supporters claim that Israel learned its lessons well from the disastrous 2006 Lebanon war and has devised a winning strategy for the present war against Hamas. Of course, when a ceasefire comes, Israel will declare victory. Don’t believe it. Israel has foolishly started another war it cannot win. [...]

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Original publihed on socialistworker.org

Eric Ruder reports that the number of Palestinian dead in Gaza will continue to rise despite Israel’s “cease-fire.”
January 19, 2009

ISRAEL DECLARED a unilateral cease-fire Sunday after a 23-day onslaught on Gaza that left more than 1,250 Palestinians dead and more than 4,000 wounded. Among the dead are at least 280 children and [...]

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text of Gerald Kaufmann’s address to the House of Commons:
Israel’s leaders are not simply war criminals; they are fools
By Sir Gerald Kaufman, House of Commons (British Parliament), January 15, 2009
I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National [...]

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Join the forum discussion on this postGaza: A Different Perspective
Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb
January 12, 2009

Watching the news these days is not an easy task, especially if you switch between Arab channels like Al Jazeera on one hand, and Western channels like Fox on the other. The same conflict is portrayed so differently that one [...]

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Join the forum discussion on this postI just read the text of H.RES.34: “Recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza, reaffirming the United States strong support for Israel, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.”
I cannot fathom a worse resolution for the House to pass. I urge you to contact your [...]

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Thursday 08 January 2009
by: Jimmy Carter, The Washington Post
Go to original article on washingtonpost.com
I know from personal involvement that the devastating invasion of Gaza by Israel could easily have been avoided.
After visiting Sderot last April and seeing the serious psychological damage caused by the rockets that had [...]

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