A Chicago-area activist was sentenced to 18 months in prison Thursday for failing to disclose her convictions for bombings in Israel when she applied to be a U.S. citizen.
Source: www.chicagotribune.com
Yesterday Deadline reported that Reza Aslan, a popular commentator on comparative religion and the author of books like Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, will be hosting a new CNN show called Believer (a working title) in which he will travel around the world participating in various faith’s religious rituals.
The show, Aslan told Science of Us, will orient itself mostly toward rituals that might be less familiar to an American audience — for example, he cited plans to shoot scenes taking viewers inside Muharram, a Shiite period of mourning involving rituals of self-flagellation, and Na Nachs, a sect that combines orthodox Judaism with a love of rave culture.
In an interview, Aslan expanded on his goals for the show and explained how he both is and isn’t hoping to be a religion-themed version of Anthony Bourdain.
Source: nymag.com
As the Israeli election approaches, The New York Times has provided us with a broad look at West Bank settlements, publishing an online piece with interactive maps to illustrate their rapid growth and an analysis of spending, population, planning and construction and how all this will shake out in the final vote.
The lavishly illustrated piece, “Netanyahu and the Settlements,” seems to provide readers with a quick overview of the issues, but it is all smoke and mirrors: A major element of the West Bank is missing here—the Palestinians, the indigenous residents of this landscape.
In all of this lengthy article, reporter Jodi Rudoren never once quotes a Palestinian source. We meet settlers and we hear from American and Israeli officials, but Palestinian voices are omitted entirely. Their opinions emerge only in brief phrases—“Palestinians object” or “Palestinians do not accept”—never with a name attached.
Source: timeswarp.org
The Israeli leader’s settlement policy resembles his predecessors’, but it is a march toward permanence at a time when prospects for peace are few.
Source: www.nytimes.com
The Forward’s Nathan Guttman reports that the Netanyahu speech has enraged not just liberal Jews but centrist establishment types, who are finally becoming critical of Israel. The hardworking Guttman reports on an explosion in Washington ahead of the speech:
On March 2, [Florida Rabbi David] Paskin, who attended the AIPAC annual conference in Washington that coincided with Netanyahu’s speech, was among dozens at a packed closed-door session on pro-Israel outreach to progressives. There, the discussion quickly turned heated when former Democratic congressman Barney Frank (who is [AIPAC operative] Ann Lewis’s brother) chided the lobby for not speaking out against Netanyahu’s visit and for avoiding any criticism of Israeli policies. According to two session participants, Frank argued that this reluctance causes pro-Israel activists to lose their credibility among progressives.
Tempers flared even more, they said, when Frank claimed that Israel and AIPAC had lobbied members of Congress a decade ago to support the war in Iraq. Similar arguments in the past have been hurled at the lobby by anti-war activists from the left and have always been vehemently denied. Frank, faced with vocal resistance from AIPAC members in the room, clarified that while calling for war was not the lobby’s official position, some of its top members advocated for it personally in their meetings with him and other members of Congress.
Efforts to contact Frank to ask about this exchange were unsuccessful.
Source: mondoweiss.net
Some of the oldest Christian communities in the world are disappearing in the very lands where their faith was born and first took root. During the past decade, Christians around the Middle East have been subject to vicious murders at the hands of terrorist groups, forced out of their ancestral lands by civil wars, suffered societal intolerance fomented by Islamist groups, and subjected to institutional discrimination found in the legal codes and official practices of many Middle Eastern countries.
The past year has seen brutal atrocities committed against Christians and others because of their religious identity by terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. These incidents underscore the gravity of the situation. As a consequence, Christians have migrated from the region in increasing numbers, which is part of a longer-term exodus related to violence, persecution, and lack of economic opportunities stretching back decades. They have also moved to safe havens within the Middle East, and the Christian presence has become more concentrated in places such as Jordan, the area controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, and Lebanon.
Source: www.americanprogress.org
The Syrian refugee crisis has exploded from about 270,000 people a year ago to today’s tally of more than two million who have fled the country. The pace of the diaspora has been characterized by the United Nations as the worst since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. In addition, an estimated 4.25 million Syrians have been displaced within their country, bringing the total number forced into flight to more than six million.
Source: www.nytimes.com
When I started out as a journalist in the 1980s, I asked an experienced Irish reporter for advice. “Read The Guardian,” he told me.
The message that there was no better newspaper had a lasting effect. For years, I wanted to write for The Guardian. Eventually, this desire was realized after I emailed the late Georgina Henry, then editor of its Comment is Free section, in 2007. Henry was immediately receptive to my idea of tackling the European Union from a critical, left-wing perspective.
I very much enjoyed contributing to The Guardian. Having previously worked for quite a stuffy publication, it felt liberating to be able to express opinions.
There was one issue, however, on which I felt my freedom curtailed: Palestine. Although The Guardian did publish a few of my articles denouncing Israeli atrocities, I began to encounter obstacles in 2009.
Source: electronicintifada.net
A Palestinian-American activist was sentenced to 18 months in prison on Thursday for immigration fraud after failing to tell U.S. authorities that she had been imprisoned in Israel for a 1969 supermarket bombing that killed two people.
Rasmieh Yousef Odeh, 67, will be deported after serving her sentence as a result of last year’s conviction in a Detroit federal court of unlawful procurement of naturalization.
Odeh served 10 years in Israeli prison for the bombing before being released in a prisoner swap with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). She had said Israeli authorities tortured and raped her to get a confession. But U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain barred reference to that at trial. He said what happened in Israel was not relevant to whether she lied on the citizenship form.
Before sentencing, Odeh told Drain, “I’m not a terrorist, I’m not a bad woman.”
But Drain said the offense is about lying under oath.
Source: america.aljazeera.com
Geneva, 12 March 2015 – As the Syrian conflict enters its fifth year, millions of refugees in neighbouring countries and those displaced within the country are caught in alarmingly deteriorating conditions, facing an even bleaker future without more international support, UNHCR warned today. With no political solution to the conflict in sight, … Continued
Over the objections of a prosecution team that called for 5-7 years in federal prison, a harsh sentence with terrorism enhancements, Judge Gershwin Drain sentenced Rasmea Odeh, Chicago’s 67-year-old Palestinian community leader, to 18 months for Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization, of which she was convicted last November. Almost 200 of Rasmea’s supporters filled two courtrooms … Continued
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