Author Archives: Arab America

Corrie pleaded with Israeli soldiers for two hours not to destroy the home, and took it as self-evident that no Israeli soldier or bulldozer driver would dare kill the citizen of a country which Israel describes as its closest ally.

However, being a U.S. citizen or a nonviolent activist did not save her getting killed by an Israeli military bulldozer, which was made in the U.S. and paid for by the American government as part of its aid to Israel.

An army investigation concluded that she was partially hidden behind a dirt mound and ruled her death an accident. The driver said he didn’t see Corrie. Neither the driver nor his commander were charged or tried and no one has been punished for her death. Even though the statements of numerous eyewitnesses and photographic documentation proved that she was killed intentionally.

Tom Dale, an eyewitness, said that “The driver knew absolutely she was there. The bulldozer waited for a few seconds over her body and it then reversed, leaving its scoop down so that if she had been under the bulldozer, it would have crushed her a second time. Only later when it was much more clear of her body did it raise its scoop.”

Another eyewitness Gregory S. Schnabel said in his affidavit, “The bulldozer approached Rachel from a distance of 10 to 15 meters away. Rachel was clearly visible and was wearing her orange florescent jacket. As the bulldozer advanced Rachel signaled to the bulldozer driver by waving her arms. She was standing in a wide open area. “

“As the bulldozer came extremely close to Rachel it began to push the dirt from underneath her feet and around her ankles. The driver had clear sight of Rachel until the machine he was driving knocked her over. The bulldozer continued, driving over her entire body from feet to head until Rachel was directly underneath the center of the bulldozer. The bulldozer paused for a moment. It then reversed and drove back over her with its blade still down.”

“After the bulldozer pushed Rachel over the driver continued to advance for a minimum of five meters more. During this time there was no place where Rachel could possibly have been except for underneath the bulldozer. For this reason I believe that this was clearly an intentional action by the bulldozer driver.” Schnabel said.

Source: www.dailysabah.com

Two Palestinians were arrested by Israeli troops on Sunday during clashes at an event in a West Bank village to mark the 12th anniversary of the death of US activist Rachel Corrie.

One of those arrested had lost consciousness during an olive tree-planting protest on Sunday in Qariyut, near Nablus.

The activity marked 12 years since the death of Rachel Corrie, a US citizen activist who was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer on 16 March 2003 in Rafah, Gaza Strip, as she tried to block the demolition of a Palestinian home.

The activists chose the village of Qariyut to plant olive trees to support their protest against the blocking of the main road connecting the village to Road 60, which leads to two main cities in the West Bank, Nablus and Ramallah.

The participants planted about 40 olive trees in the threatened lands of Qariyut, which is surrounded by many Israeli settlements and outposts.

Photographs of Corrie were hung on the newly planted trees, alongside pictures of other international activists killed or injured while involved in solidarity action in Palestine. These included Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian activist who was kidnapped and killed in the Gaza Strip in April 2011; British activist Thomas Hurndall, shot and killed by an Israeli sniper in January 2004; and Tristan Anderson, a US citizen who was critically injured in March 2009 after being shot in the head with a high-velocity tear gas grenade by Israeli Border Police following a protest against the separation wall in the West Bank village of Ni’ilin.

Source: www.middleeasteye.net

Seated on a child-sized chair in her Gaza classroom, teacher Maisoun Abedmoeti says her priority is to make story time fun for children. And, she wants to share her tools and know-how to accomplish that with parents who then can help their children learn to read. Maisoun teaches a preschool in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, where a group of teachers took ANERA’s preschool teacher training session on teaching children to read. She says it was both a motivating and an engaging experience.

“It has fueled me with positive energy,” Maisoun smiles. “Life in Gaza has made us lose that sense of inner optimism and the training helped me dig deep inside myself and restore it.” Reading, she says, puts her in a different mood. “We can dive into a world that is rich with endless imagination.”

Maisoun is thrilled with ANERA’s gift of colorful book bags that are filled with story books, coloring books and crayons. There are also useful brochures for parents and teachers that contain valuable tips on how to maximize the resources on hand.

She says reading was a powerful tool to help her own five children overcome their fears during the 2014 Gaza war. And, she found their love of reading and their connection to the stories they read have continued months after the conflict ended. “I hope all children can continue to read at preschools and homes.”

Source: www.anera.org

As part of the 11th annual Israeli Apartheid Week, taking place on campuses around the globe, we held awareness-raising stalls on campus and did two film-scr…

Source: www.youtube.com

In March 2005, the Arab Students’ Collective, a campus organisation at the University of Toronto, held a series of local events to support Palestinians and protest Israeli policies. Hoping to broaden debate at the end of the second Intifada and on the eve of Israel’s redeployment of ground forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, originally called “the separation plan,” they called their proceedings Israeli Apartheid Week.

A decade on, their creation has become an annual and globally-recognised event. This year, it will feature cultural and educational events, as well as public protests in more than 200 cities on six continents.

Activists say the campaign’s growth indicates the rising appeal of its message.

“In the wake of Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, this year’s IAW takes on even greater significance,” Michael Deas, a London-based member of the IAW international coordination committee, told Middle East Eye.

“More and more people are participating in IAW events for the first time, to find out more about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians and how they can take effective action in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle,” he said.

While IAW schedules typically last a week, their dates vary by location to account for different national calendars. Local groups are currently holding events across Canada, Ireland, the US, and South America. Others recently ended in Europe, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, South Africa and the UK, according to the IAW Web site.

‘A wider discussion’

IAW’s expansion dovetailed with that of the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, which started independently four months later in July 2005. Many IAW events highlight specific BDS campaigns, while others have sparked new ones.

Yasmeen Abu-Laban, a professor of political science at the University of Alberta and co-author of Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race: Exploring Identity and Power in a Global Context, said the breadth of IAW shows Palestine’s emergence as a global issue.

“The ten-year anniversary reflects on its longevity,” she told MEE. “But more than that, the fact that IAW went not only national in the context of Canada, but international, appearing in cities across the globe, reflects on the tremendous importance of Palestine solidarity as a movement for human rights and justice in the 21st century.”

“IAW activities have also enabled a wider discussion of BDS as a global civil society response to the 2005 call of Palestinian civil society to respond to Israel’s policies and continued occupation,” she added. “The BDS movement, like IAW activities, are part of how Palestine solidarity is being expressed today.”

Source: www.middleeasteye.net

The fact that the Joint List is likely to be the third largest slate in the next Knesset means they cannot be ignored. All the Israeli papers, analysts and news broadcasters are suddenly forced to relate to “the Arabs” — the 20 percent of the population that are normally out of sight and mind when Israelis goes to the polls.

It was both groundbreaking and satisfying to see Joint List chair Ayman Odeh’s face alongside those of Netanyahu, Bennett, Herzog and Liberman on the Friday evening news. It may not seem like a big deal, but this alone is a game changer.

The very fact that mainstream Israel is forced to look at and hear an Arab politician on “their” television channel is unprecedented, and a much-deserved slap in the face to all the right-wing party leaders who have at best ignored and at worst directly incited against Palestinian citizens of this country. Never mind the fact that almost all the media outlets refer to the Joint List incorrectly as “the United Arab List,” the “Joint Arabs List” or just “the Arabs.” In truth, the very fact that they must now mention them at all is significant.

Source: 972mag.com

Three plays by major contemporary Palestinian playwrights will be performed as staged readings on consecutive nights in New York this month.

Hosted by Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies and curated by playwright and poet Ismail Khalidi, the plays, according to organizers, “embody the contemporary Palestinian playwright’s use of art to resist historical, political and geographic erasures.”

The sequence of plays starts on 25 March with Amir Nizar Zuabi’s I am Yusuf and This is My Brother, which was staged in 2010 at London’s Young Vic Theatre. Zuabi is one of the founders of Haifa’s Shiber Hur Palestinian theater company and his plays about Palestine and Syria have been widely performed and published.

Source: electronicintifada.net

A second high-profile speaker in as many weeks has backed out of a planned visit to the University of Illinois over the Steven Salaita saga.

The latest: Anita Hill, who was booked to give the keynote address at the Faculty Women of Color in the Academy’s third national conference, set for April 10-11, as well as deliver a lecture at the UI.

Neither will happen, Hill wrote in a column that appeared online Sunday in The Huffington Post. Her reason for canceling, though, differs from Cornel West’s and others who preceded the civil rights activist in boycotting the university as a show of support for Salaita.

Hill wrote Sunday that the Palestinian-American professor’s pending lawsuit against the university over it revoking a job offer in August 2014 has created a “changed environment” that “erodes the possibility of the open conversation I had hoped to have during my talks there.”

Source: www.news-gazette.com

The tomb of Iraq’s late dictator Saddam Hussein was virtually levelled in heavy clashes between Isis militants and Iraqi forces in a fight for control of the city of Tikrit.

Fighting intensified to the north and south of Saddam’s hometown on Sunday as Iraqi security forces vowed to reach the centre of Tikrit within 48 hours. All that was left of Hussein’s once-lavish tomb were the support columns that held up the roof.

Poster-sized pictures of Saddam, which once covered the mausoleum, were nowhere to be seen amid the mountains of concrete rubble. Instead, Shia militia flags and photographs of militia leaders marked the predominantly Sunni village, including that of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the powerful Iranian general advising Iraqi Shia militias on the battlefield.

Source: www.theguardian.com

In a corrugated iron building a few miles from Jericho’s town center, rows of dirt trays are stacked floor to ceiling. Inside the trays, soft white mushrooms grow under florescent lights.

Women in matching aprons and colorful headscarves pick the day’s harvest and package the small bulbs neatly into small plastic containers, ready to be delivered to shops across the occupied West Bank.

“There was no Palestinian mushroom in the Palestinian market, so all our consumption of fresh mushrooms would come from the Israeli market — and our philosophy is against that,” Mahmoud Kuhail, the thirty-year-old co-founder of Amoro Agriculture and owner of the mushroom farm, told The Electronic Intifada.

Together, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are Israel’s second largest importer. The West Bank alone provides more than $3.3 billion to the Israeli economy every year, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Source: electronicintifada.net

With his groundbreaking satirical TV show now off the air in his home country of Egypt, Bassem Youssef has lately taken up residence near Boston. He has just one small produce-related complaint. “I pity Americans for their very bad fruits,” he says. “Your ‘mango’ is cucumber. The only thing I really miss about Egypt is mangoes.”

Often called “the Jon Stewart of Egypt,” the 40-year-old Mr. Youssef used to host “Al Bernameg” (“The Program”). His show, which took on everything from politicians to the military to the Muslim Brotherhood, attracted millions of viewers during its run from 2011 to 2014. It has been credited with starting a “humor assault” that helped to turn public opinion against former President Mohammed Morsi, who was ousted by the military in July 2013.

Mr. Youssef’s show was suspended by its network last June, and he left Egypt in November. He is now a resident fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, where he runs a seminar on how humor can break political, social and religious taboos. He is not officially banned from entering and leaving Egypt, but he says that he would not be surprised if his passport were denied. His life in Egypt became “an unpredictable roller coaster,” he says. “And I’m getting old for amusement parks.”

Source: www.wsj.com

The world watched in fascination as Egyptians, Libyans, Syrians, Yemenis, Tunisians and Bahrainis took to the streets of their respective nations to denounce social injustice, poverty and tyrannical state institutions in 2011. Yet the Arab Spring movement has failed to translate those calls for change into democratic realities.

“If anything, the region has moved from authoritarianism to institutionalized-military despotism in four short years, all under the guise of the so-called ‘Free World,’ the United States of America,” Ahmed Mohamed Nasser Ahmed, a Yemeni political analyst and former member of Yemen’s National Issues and Transitional Justice Working Group at the National Dialogue Conference, told MintPress News.

Indeed, where has the U.S. stood as the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region rose to the barricades, demanding that the ruling class be held accountable to the people for their actions?

Although U.S. officials have been keen to proclaim and assert their devotion to democracy, foreign policies have betrayed such honorable intentions, ultimately revealing the reality of corporatism and capitalism ruling unchallenged as the new tyrants of Western democracies.

Western powers — led by the U.S. — campaigned for the ousting of Syrian President Bashar Assad on the basis that he had lost all popular legitimacy. As they rolled out sanctions and plans for military intervention in Syria, Bahraini King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa’s brutal crackdown on protesters was brushed under the political rug.

“If of course the burden of responsibility ultimately sits on the people, it is evident the U.S. and Western powers in general have worked against the Arab Spring, betraying the very democratic principles they claim to represent for the sake of corporate capitalism. Democracies don’t turn a profit the way dictatorships do! The flow of weapons alone stands as a testimony to Western democracies’ real oath of allegiance,” Ahmed told MintPress.

The United Kingdom, America’s staunchest ally, signed a military agreement with Bahrain in January. This agreement contains provisions for the establishment of a permanent British naval base on the island kingdom, courtesy of King Hamad. The “landmark” deal, as the British government dubbed it, also paved the way for a lucrative arm deals, whereby the Bahraini regime would acquire British-made military equipment.

“The agreement reaffirms the UK’s and Bahrain’s joint determination to maintain regional security and stability in the face of enduring and emerging regional challenges,” Michael Fallon, the British defense secretary, said before the House of Commons in December, as quoted by the Guardian.

Yet if the U.S. and its Western allies care not for democracy, as Ahmed suggests, then what goals are they pursuing? Looking at events in the MENA it has become painfully evident that under the impetus of Washington and its regional allies, political self-determination and freedom have been repressed, derailed and negated in places like Liby

“If anything, generating unrest appears to have been high on America’s agenda. Washington’s policies have led to the ongoing balkanization of the MENA and the rise of Islamic radicalism. Terror and despotism are the fruits of America’s policy,” former Bahraini MP Jawad Fairooz told MintPress.

 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Historically, the U.S. has attempted to generate change in foreign countries by exporting liberal democratic institutions through military occupation and reconstruction. Despite these efforts, the record of U.S.-led reconstruction has been mixed, at best. For every West Germany or Japan, there has been a Cuba, Haiti, Somalia or Vietnam.

Ever since the U.S. arose as a new world superpower on the back of World War II, Washington’s main ambition has been to export democracy to the world, often amid the thuds of military drums and almost always to catastrophic results, Christopher J. Coyne, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center, argues in his 2006 book, “After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy.”

“Do efforts to export democracy help as much as they hurt? These are some of the most enduring questions of our time,” Coyne writes.

Source: www.mintpressnews.com