Author Archives: Arab America

A member for the defense team of Rasmea Odeh — a convicted terrorist in Israel who more recently was found guilty of federal immigration fraud in the United States — will be speaking at Loyola University Chicago – an appearance funded by student fees.

A petition opposing the event, and calling for official objection to it by the student government and Loyola administration, currently has almost 200 signatures. A memorial to the victims of the supermarket bombing Odeh was involved in in Israel in the 1960s is also scheduled to take place at the same time as the speaking event.

“The event on Loyola’s campus, funded by the Student Activities Fund, will bring Nesreen Hasan, a member of Odeh’s defense team to speak about Rasmea’s defense and the perceived unfairness of her conviction,” the petition states. “The event ignores the fact that Rasmea Odeh is a convicted terrorist responsible for the murder of two people.”

Titled “A Woman’s Intifada: The Story of Rasmea Odeh,” it will be held on Loyola’s campus on Thursday, Feb. 26. It’s being hosted by the Middle Eastern Student Association and will feature Nesreen Hasan, a member of Odeh’s defense team. The talk comes at a time when pro-Palestinian groups are clamoring for Odeh’s conviction to be reversed, calling her an innocent women’s rights advocate who was allegedly raped by Israeli soldiers in the 1970s.

Source: www.thecollegefix.com

Suspected Israeli extremists set fire to a Greek Orthodox seminary in the Old City of Jerusalem on Thursday and sprayed hate slogans on the walls, police said.

Israeli spokeswoman Luba al-Samri said that the fire was started at 4:00 a.m and caused damage to a bathroom and shower room before firefighters controlled the blaze.

Israeli media reported that the assailants poured flammable liquid into the bathroom window before lighting it and fleeing the scene.

The Orthodox seminary is located near Jaffa Gate.

“Jesus is a son of a whore” and “Redemption of Zion” were sprayed on the walls.

On Tuesday, extremist Jewish settlers set fire to a mosque in the southern West Bank town of al-Jaba west of Bethlehem, locals told Ma’an.

The Palestinian foreign ministry said the attack was tantamount to “an official declaration of religious war,” the official WAFA news agency reported.

Source: www.maannews.com

One of the fundamental questions with regard to the critique of — and activism against — the Israeli occupation: How does this connect up with other social movements, and other struggles? Is the case of Israel and Palestine so specific, so complex, as to resist analogy? And if so, what does that mean for those who would be inclined to sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians, but unable to see their way clear to act in solidarity with them, as they might for others?

These are pressing and difficult problems, yet increasingly, and especially on college campuses, and in academic organizations, people are willing to discuss and debate things like divestment, as well as academic and cultural boycotts that refuse to endorse the status quo. Indeed, earlier this month a group of 600 artists that included Ken Loach, Brian Eno, Khalid Abdalla and Haim Bresheeth announced they were endorsing a cultural boycott of Israel.

At a recent event at Stanford, where I am a professor of comparative literature, Cornel West paused in the midst of a speech to praise the student organizers who had put forward a bill to ask the Stanford trustees to divest; the bill had failed by only one vote. (And, on February 18, there would be a revote, in which the bill was passed, 10-4-1.) West made a point of insisting that raising the Palestinian flag should not be seen as an act of narrow nationalism, but rather as an act of solidarity with an oppressed people, and as part of the effort to grant them their right to self determination.

Afterwards, I spoke about how the issue of Israel-Palestine was registering not only with young people, but also with older progressives and intellectuals, and about the linkages between civil rights struggles in the US and abroad.

First of all, let me ask you: Why do you endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement? In what ways do the movement and its goals resonate with your longstanding activism, your values and principles?

Well I always proceed based on moral criteria and spiritual standards that have to do with keeping track of the humanity of persons. And there is no doubt in my mind that the Israeli occupation is ugly, it’s vicious, it’s brutal, and it needs to not just be brought to attention, it needs to be brought to an end. It’s also true that I am against the occupation of the Tibetan people and the occupation of Kashmir and others, but this particular occupation is one that deserves our attention precisely because as an American citizen my tax money is being used to perpetuate that ugly occupation.

Let me draw out a possible link between your anti-racist activism and your support of the Palestinian people. After Ferguson, a lot of people drew the parallel to Gaza. But as soon as they did, many others chimed in and said, “No, those cases are not at all the same and you can’t make that comparison.” And in fact when Angela Davis was invited to give the Martin Luther King, Jr. convocation for the city of Santa Cruz, Calif., recently, she got a lot of criticism for drawing out the parallels. What are your thoughts on that, how do you see making a legitimate case for the connection between Ferguson and Gaza?

Well first, in terms of the various kinds of Zionist critiques, we make it clear that this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with anti-Jewish hatred or anti-Jewish prejudice. This has to do with a moral and spiritual and political critique of occupation. Secondly, there is no doubt that Gaza is not just a “kind of” concentration camp, it is the hood on steroids. Now in the black community, located within the American empire, you do have forms of domination and subordination, forms of police surveillance and so forth, so that we are not making claims of identity, we are making claims of forms of domination that must be connected. And those are not the only two — we could talk about the Dalit people in India and the ways that their humanity is being lost and there are parallels there; we could talk about peasants in Mexico. So all of these are going to have similarities and dissimilarities. But there is no doubt that for the Ferguson moment in America and the anti-occupation moment in the Israel-Palestinian struggle there is a very important connection to make and I think we should continue to make it.

Well at one of our events today you called me a literary critic, but you’re a literary critic too—I’ve read some of your essays–so I want to ask you a question: How do we change the narrative around Israel-Palestine? How does that story change when one version is so ingrained in the American psyche — and it’s a particular narrative of the founding of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, and one that continues to justify the occupation and the colonial settler project of the state of Israel?

Well I am not the sophisticated literary critic you are, but I can say this: You can just look at the history of the divestment movement here at Stanford. You told me that two years ago when the student government voted on a divestment resolution, the vote was one “Yes,” seven “No,” and five abstentions. And just a few days ago when a similar divestment bill was presented, the vote was nine “Yes,” five “No,” and one abstention. The narrative is being changed and it’s only by means of voices — new stories and analysis, and bodies on the line, not just here but also across national boundaries — to shift the court of world opinion. And that’s precisely what is taking place. And of course at the center of it is the unbelievable courage of the Palestinian brothers and sisters against just overwhelming odds.

One last question: When you hear some people say, in the face of protest, agitation, critique, and civil disobedience, “we have to have peace, we need to obey the law,” like Obama did after the Ferguson verdict—you often have to think that it is precisely those whom the status quo serves, and in fact those who have the power to maintain the status quo in their favor, who are saying that we need to maintain peace (as they see it) at all cost. How do you move people out of their sense of privilege and entitlement?

Well first I think we have to be very clear that the call for the end of the vicious Israeli occupation is today a kind of litmus test for progressives, because you have sacrifice so much. There is no doubt that you will be called an anti-semite, that you will be called a chauvinist; there is no doubt you will be called someone who is downplaying the history of oppression of Jews. For so long, we have allowed not just the conservatives, not just the neo-liberals, but even progressive intellectuals to be silent when it comes to Palestinian peoples. So we have to call into question our own academic colleagues, we have to call into question our own fellow intellectuals.

And as a black intellectual it means I have to make the connection between the Obama apologists — who, as intellectuals, hide and conceal, not the silence, but the promotion of the military might that facilitates the killing of 500 Palestinian babies — with not one mumbling word being said by a President as the apologist intellectuals themselves don’t say a mumbling word. That needs to be shattered, that needs to be called into question. One can no longer say one is a serious progressive, let alone committed to moral integrity, without lifting one’s voice to call for an end to the Occupation of the Palestinian people. We have got to make that more and more a central part of our action.

David Palumbo-Liu is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor at Stanford University. Follow him on Twitter at @palumboliu.

Source: www.salon.com

Today, defense attorneys for Rasmea Odeh, Chicago’s 67-year-old Palestinian community leader, filed a “sentencing memorandum” in a Detroit federal court, arguing that Odeh “should not be sentenced to further imprisonment” following her conviction in November 2014 on a single charge of Unlawful Procurement of Naturalization.  Included in the memorandum were “over 70 letters from religious leaders, university professors, human rights attorneys, community activists and people who have worked with her, attesting to her extraordinary and original work with Arab immigrant women.”

Maysoon Gharbieh, a member of the 600-strong Arab Women’s Committee that Rasmea built in Chicago, wrote, “Rasmea is a valuable and lovely icon for us and for the entire community. She works without reward or personal profit. All she cares about is supporting and protecting us and our families. Her ultimate goal is to help develop families that are educated, active and effective in contributing to keeping the community and the country safe for all who live here.”

In support of Odeh, Bishop Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit wrote, “I am asking for compassion in her sentencing. Rasmea has much to offer her community…keeping her out of prison would allow her to continue as a contributing and productive person, doing the work that is so critical to hundreds of refugee women.”

Odeh’s attorneys are asking Judge Gershwin Drain to take her age, poor health, chronic Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and “exemplary history in the United States” into consideration when deciding on her sentence, adding that “there is no reasonable justification for sending Ms. Odeh to federal prison.”

Despite the fact that 98% of all sentences for this offense are at or below sentencing guidelines, the prosecution has called for a heavier, enhanced one of 5 to 7 years, based on allegations that Odeh obstructed justice in her trial and on this ridiculous comparison: “A light sentence in this case would be a signal to anyone who has fought overseas for ISIS or a similar organization that there is not much risk in coming to the United States, hiding one’s past, and seeking citizenship.”

Odeh’s attorneys challenge this linkage, writing, “The Government, for its part, insists that the defendant be branded a terrorist, and sentenced accordingly, based on a conviction for bombings obtained in an illegitimate military trial, conducted by war criminals, 45 years ago.  Their position is that only the bombing matters: Not the illegal 1967 massacres and occupation – let alone the military ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from the land and their homes when Palestine was partitioned in 1948 – not the midnight sweeps and kidnapping by the invading Army after the 1967 war, not the torture, not the kangaroo court and false confessions, not the prison time.”

Odeh plans to appeal her conviction, and will request the granting of an appellate bond no matter the sentence, which could be the prison time, heavy fines, and deportation.

“Hundreds of people will be in Detroit for the sentencing hearing on March 12th,” says Tampa’s Marisol Marquez of the national Rasmea Defense Committee, “and there have been, and will continue to be, events and fundraisers to support Rasmea all across the country. She’s a beloved leader of the Palestinian community, and we will not stop organizing until she’s exonerated.”

For more information and background on Rasmea Odeh’s case, go to http://justice4rasmea.org.

Source: uspcn.org

Mike Huckabee has revived the incendiary notion that there’s no such thing as a Palestinian people, repeating an assertion that has been condemned by a wide spectrum of historians and political analysts.

The likely Republican presidential hopeful made the claim in an interview with the Washington Post, for the paper’s story on Huckabee’s guided tours of Israel. (Price tag: $5,250.) Tourists have the opportunity to hear from guest lecturers, including Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein. The Post reports that Klein told Huckabee’s group that the idea of a Palestinian people is a fiction — a declaration with which Huckabee readily concurred.

“The idea that they have a long history, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true,” the former Arkansas governor and Fox News host told the Post.

This isn’t the first time Huckabee has advanced the idea. “I have to be careful saying this, because people get really upset — there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian,” Huckabee told a Massachusetts rabbi during his 2008 presidential campaign. “That’s been a political tool to try to force land away from Israel.”

Newt Gingrich echoed Huckabee’s remarks in 2011, proclaiming that “we’ve had invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community.” Gingrich’s remarks attracted more than the predictable condemnation from Palestinian officials, also drawing derision from Israeli historians and Mitt Romney, Gingrich’s GOP presidential rival.

As David Remnick outlines, the Huckabee-Gingrich school of Palestinian history is grounded in claims put forth by the late polemicist Joan Peters in her 1984 tome “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine.” Peters’ book accepted former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s declaration that there’s “no such thing as a Palestinian people,” arguing that the people who call themselves Palestinians don’t have deep roots in the territory. Remnick notes that even the conservative author Daniel Pipes, whose initial reaction to Peters’ book was a favorable one, would later concede that Peters was guilty of sloppy scholarship and “ignor[ing] inconvenient facts.”

Source: www.salon.com

After studying and living in the Middle East for years, Janet Rady has dedicated her life to the art of the region.

Source: www.alaraby.co.uk

http://mtv.com.lb/Programs/Dancing_with_the_stars

Source: www.youtube.com

Arab American Rima Fakih, former Miss USA will appear Season 3– Dancing with the Stars.

The Israel Electric Corporation cut power flow to the West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin for about 30 minutes on Wednesday morning, for the second time in two days, in response to the Palestinian Authority’s unpaid bills.

The Palestinians were notified in the early afternoon that the electrical flow would be restricted at 2 P.M. Israel’s defense ministry also said it had been surprised to learn of the move and said it opposed the decision.

The company said it was forced to cut electricity from time to time to minimize future debt.

The company said Monday following the first blackout that it was owed large sums of money by Northern Electric, a Palestinian firm which buys electricity from Israel and distributes it to towns and villages in the northern West Bank. That power outage lasted approximately 45 minutes.

The Israeli electrical company said in a statement the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian companies owed it 1.9 billion shekels ($487 million) and that it had sent many notices warning of the pending step.

“The Israel Electric Corp. is committed to operate under the law to reduce the debt,” the electric company said in a statement. “The Electric Corp. is compelled to act so as not to increase the debt beyond 2 billion shekels.”

Source: www.haaretz.com

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office on Wednesday denied U.S. reports that National Security Adviser Yossi Cohen objected to the premier’s decision to address Congress next week.

Jeffrey Goldberg reported in The Atlantic earlier Wednesday that Cohen told two officials in Washington last week that he was worried about the timing of the speech – slated to take place just two weeks before the election in Israel.

Cohen also expressed concern over the fact that the March 3 speech is viewed as an Israeli attempt to intervene in U.S. politics, Goldberg reported, citing the officials.

Goldberg wrote that Cohen understands that the U.S. is Israel’s second line of defense, and cannot believe that Netanyahu has “written-off” Obama two years before the president’s term runs out.

The report also mentions that Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer tried to invite Arab envoys in Washington to attend Netanyahu’s speech, and that the invitation was rejected.

Israeli sources told Goldberg that Dermer e-mailed the ambassadors of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates in an effort to convince them that the moderate Sunni states and Israel have a shared interest in thwarting the unfolding agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. Dermer reportedly told the diplomats that showing a “united and public front” on Capitol Hill would help compel Congress to block the deal.

Goldberg’s report comes just hours after it emerged that President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice called Netanyahu’s upcoming address  “destructive” to the relationship between the two countries. The relations between the two countries have been marred by partisanship, Rice said.

Source: www.haaretz.com

In bringing the work of Joan Scott and Naomi Davidson together with mine, Muriam Haleh Davis demonstrates the importance of undertaking a history of the present. This history enables us to identify some of the structuring logics of French republicanism and French secularism, as well as to track both continuities and discontinuities between past and present, something that Scott and Davidson continue to do in their responses to Davis. I follow suit here.

Over the past few decades, the French state has undertaken increasingly punitive measures against its Muslim population, most famously the 2004 law banning headscarves in public schools and the 2010 law banning face-veils in all public spaces. In analyzing this phenomenon, a number of scholars distinguish between a culturally identitarian, interventionist, and often Islamophobic laïcité—termed la laïcité nouvelle, or new secularism—and la laïcité historique. This “historical secularism,” anchored by a 1905 law officially separating church and state, guarantees both individual religious freedom and the state’s neutrality with regard to religion. According to historians Jean Baubérot and Micheline Milot, the law of 1905 marks the transition from what they call the “emancipatory republic” of antireligious republicans obsessed with liberating France from the grip of the Catholic Church to a “neutral state.”[1] La laïcité nouvelle, they argue, is a far cry from that neutral state: whereas historical secularism guaranteed religious freedom, the new version constrains it, for Muslims in particular.

It is politically advantageous to invoke a history of non-interventionist secularism to combat prevailing discourses about French national identity that, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo crisis, propose even more of the new secularism (presented, of course, as part of a long French tradition). But doing so may blind us to the continuities between old and new, take for granted the concept of neutrality, and underestimate the regulatory force of secularism, whatever its various modes. After all, the post-1905 neutral state depended on a centuries-long transformation of religious and political life in France. After the French Revolution, the Catholic Church had to confine itself to “religious” activities that were henceforth clearly differentiated from profane activities, for which the state assumed responsibility. Rather than two different models of secularism, then, intervention and neutrality work together, since intervention produces the kinds of religions and religious subjects toward whom the state can be neutral.

For Jews, this process of secularization—called Emancipation—was even more pronounced than it was for Catholics, and it fundamentally transformed Jewish life. Jews’ incorporation as citizens into the French nation in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depended on their becoming incorporable, which in turn depended on a radical transformation of Jews’ relationship to community, self, and the divine. Like Muslims (then and now), Jews in France were long thought incapable of being citizens because they were too communalist. Emancipation attempted to de-communalize Jews and remake Jewish life by dismantling Jewish law (halacha), which had heretofore constituted the legal, political, and ethical basis of Jewishness.[2] The secular state denied authority to those elements of Jewish law that overlapped with the domain of civil law and turned the rest into a matter of optional, individual, private practice—that is, religion. It thereby became possible to remain Jewish without following any Jewish laws or submitting to any rabbinical authorities. As a result, writes the historian Esther Benbassa, “Jews were no longer tied to the community…nor were they required to submit to its religious obligations, themselves the foundation of the very notion of community…[A]s citizens of a universalist France, they differed in no way from other Frenchmen and women, their religion being a private matter.”[3] I will return to this last point in a moment, but what I want to highlight is that Emancipation turned Judaism into a religion—voluntary, private, and separable from law and politics. Indeed, the very term “Judaism” already signals the transformation and circumscription of Jewish life into a discrete entity comparable to Catholicism, Protestantism, and any other “world religion.”

Source: www.jadaliyya.com

Lebanese designers were flavour of the month with actresses at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood overnight.

Joining the likes of Jennifer Lopez, Best Supporting Actress nominee Emma Stone plumped for a thigh-split chartreuse gown by Lebanese king of couture Elie Saab. The long-sleeved, open-backed gown complimented Stone’s alabaster skin and dark red locks. The 26-year-old star completed her look with a pair of Christian Louboutin Gardnera sandals and bejeweled cuffs.

Source: www.thenational.ae