Human Rights
Arab and Muslim American voters did not remove Democrats from office, nor did they cost Kamala Harris the Oval Office. They merely sent a strong message that Palestine matters, not only to Arabs and Muslims but to many Americans as well.
The ones who cost the Democrats the elections are the Democrats themselves. Their humiliating defeat on November 5 was due largely to their undeniable role in the Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.
Peter Beinart put it best in his November 7 op-ed in the New York Times, entitled "Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party."
On October 28, the Israeli Knesset passed a second reading of two bills that effectively ban the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) from carrying out “any activity” in Israel and occupied Palestine.
Simply put, the decision is catastrophic, because UNRWA is the main international body responsible for the welfare of millions of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, and throughout much of the region.
Under the slogan ‘Gaza is Ours, Forever’, a large number of Israeli extremists and right-wing politicians met in the settlement of Be’eri, near the Gaza border region, on October 20-21.
[This important and delayed compilation is a bit longer than usual but it
takes 7 minutes to read if you do not open links. Please forward to others
at least sections you think they need to see. This post is also at my blog
for easy share:
https://popular-resistance.blogspot.com/2024/10/olives-hope-and-more.html ]
Today is the last day we work on our olive trees at the museum gardens in
Bethlehem (80 trees). Earlier last week we picked olives in our own home
garden in Beit Sahour. This is a form of resistance but it is also
physically and mentally healthy exercise that gets us to understand both
the blessings and the challenges of life. As a communal event, we receive
help from volunteers (local and international) and we get to feel
camaraderie and friendship while we also discuss the horrors of starving
Oddly, it was Israeli historian Benny Morris who got it right, when he offered a candid prediction of the future of his country and its war with the Palestinians.
"The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective," he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in 2019. "They see that, at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can't last. They are bound to win. In another 30 to 50 years they will overcome us, come what may."
If we look beyond the opponents of genocide who are so shamefully smeared with the label “antisemite,” but if we still treat “Semite” as meaning “Jew,” then the identity of a leading actual antisemite might surprise many people.
Very few, I’ve found, are aware that the policy of Nazi Germany for years was to pursue the expulsion of the Jews, not their murder, that the U.S. government led the world’s governments in holding public conferences to discuss who would accept the Jews, that those governments — for open and shamelessly Anti-Semitic reasons — refused to accept the Nazis’ future victims, and that Hitler openly trumpeted this refusal as agreement with his bigotry and as encouragement to escalate it. I’m not aware of a single popular history text that includes the fact that the U.S. and British governments, throughout the war, repeatedly refused to evacuate the Jews or any other at-risk groups simply because they found it inconvenient.
The situation in North Gaza is beyond the word catastrophic:
horror, massacres, extermination. People are shot on site as they even try
to evacuate injured people, medical personnel are targeted, hospitals are
targeted. No food or water allowed. Israel simply rejected UN and
humanitarian organization access. People are dying by injuries and by
thirst. It would be more merciful to drop a nuclear bomb on them. All to
clear North Gaza for Zionist nefarious schemes to control its natural
resources (e=and control the whole region). In some places they simply
rounded people up, forced the women and girls to the south and took men and
boys (we remember mass executions like this in 1948 ethnic cleansing). IN
other cases they simly sent robot explosives to clear neighborhoods or
bombed people (men, women, children) from the air. How could we tell our
children and grandchildren that we had a chance to stop this and did not,
Please see the below small examples of what is happening and write letters,
stop the world to stop a genocide. Speak out, act now urgently. The horror
is beyond description.
and friends and people we followed on social media before they left us.
(Please leave your comment. Mourn!) I mourn the loss of all lives,
especially the 31 members of my extended family, three first cousins and
their children, Refaat, Marouf, Hind, Hamza, Yousef, Ismael, and lately my
brilliant student Hatem. I mourn the destruction of our house, my books, my
mint plant, the pigeons, ducks, and rabbits. My bike. The family photo
album. The school where I taught. The graves of my relatives that were
razed, especially my young brother and my grandparents. I mourn, I mourn.
It does not end." Mosab Abu Taha
Ongoing US supported genocide: 365 days of forced starvation and deliberate
preventing humanitarian aid; 3628 massacres; 41900 registered deaths that
arrived at hospitals; over 10,000 missing presumed dead (some maybe in
Israeli jails); 11,458 registered women and >16,891 registered children
killed (710 less than one year old); estimated 90,000-100,000 dead due to
medical and food conditions; 986 medical personnel killed; 174 journalists
This week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in a joint action with Canada Public Safety Ministery have officially designating the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, or “Samidoun,” as a foreign terrorist organization and you would never guess why. Toronto Star ran a story yesterday, October 15, 2024, citing Canadian officials who accused the organization of spreading hate. Seriously? The US' reason was that Samidoun act as a sham charity that serves as a fundraiser for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Again, zero evidence. I will get to that in a in minute!
On January 8, 2009, my friend Tammy Obeidallah (known by the moniker "Intifada girl") and I co-authored an open letter to our US Senator Goerge Voinovich to have the name of Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli Mossad, be added to the US "Terrorist Watch list and " No Fly List. Voinovich died in 2016 at age 79 and we never got a courtesy response letter from him. Mr. Dagen, who also passed away in 2016 at age 71, was notorious for committing war crimes during his military service in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 1970s in Gaza and 1980s in Lebanon. Meir Dagan established his reputation by severing the heads of innocent and unarmed civilians in both aforementioned locations. Shamefully, Israel's Channel 2 named him the country's "Man of the Year" in 2008.
Once again today, I would like to ask our US State Department and the US Justice Department to add the names of Crime Minister Netanyahu of Israel and the Israeli War Minister Yoal Gallant to the "Terrorist Watch List" and "No Fly List" and freeze all of their assets on any U.S. Banks. America should not provide a safe haven or a sanctuary for anyone who has committed war crimes.