Category: Israel

Farewell to the War Criminal, Genocide Joe

While the doe-eyed Democratic apparatchiks begin their predictably patriotic accolades for president Biden — the self-sacrificing commander-in-chief who willingly surrendered his presidential prospects in service to America’s beleagured democracy — now is also the time to remind ourselves that president Biden has served as the chief facilitator of the most public genocide in world history.

Joe Biden had/has the power to stop Israel’s genocidal assault against the people of Gaza at any time.  But he chooses not to use it.

Why? Because his commitment to a racist nation-state is greater than what could have been his conscientious concern for human lives.

Biden (together with the US Congress) has not only allowed the Gaza genocide to continue, he empowered the Netanyahu government’s criminal assault by providing 12.5 billion dollars in American financial support as well as the vast majority of the high-tech weaponry used to slaughter Palestinian men, women and children.

Joe Biden, who is always proud to wave his Zionist bone fides before a campaign crowd, is a staunch, unreflective Zionist who has hardended his heart against Palestinian suffering. This will be his, and America’s, Middle Eastern legacy.

He is another racist Zionist who refuses to acknowledge the bloody, heartless reality presented by countless Al Jazeera reports, Palestinian Tik Tok posts and personal Instagram films, all creating an overwhelming record  about the truth of Israeli genocide in Gaza.

This record will stand on its own as an historical indictment of all those, like Biden, who insist that what is happening in Gaza is not a crime against humanity.

Biden has admitted that he does not believe the casualty figures documented by the Hamas Health Ministry, but he confidently accepts the grotesque, well-documented lies spread by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) regarding the death toll on October 7.

[Nothing exemplifes the racist underbelly of Israeli/Zionist rhetoric more clearly than this example. European-looking Israeli Jews are always trustworthy, no matter how far fetched their claims. Whereas, brown-skinned, bearded Muslim Palestinians are inherently untrustworthy, prone to lies, dissimulation and violence.]

Only days after October 7, president Biden claimed to have seen the photographs of “beheaded babies” from the kibbutzim of southern Israel.

Except…such photographs never existed because there were no beheaded babies from the Hamas attack on October 7. (Biden’s administration had to retract the president’s statement and correct his lie the next day.) This Israeli claim has been thoroughly debunked by reputable news reporting. (See the reporting at The Electric Intifada, The Grayzone and Mondoweiss).

No babies were beheaded that day; 40+ babies were not killed; no infant was cooked in an oven; no baby was cut from its mother’s womb. These were all grotesque fabrications, incredible lies!, manufactured by sick Zionist minds who naturally shared in the widespread western, Orientalist assumption that European-looking Jews will always be believed because they always tell the truth (especially when under attack!).

Palestinian Arabs, on the other hand, are inherently violent and conniving, constitutionally predisposed to exactly the kind of reprehensible violence described by Israeli sources. So, of course, their denials will not be believed by the majority of western listeners.

Joe Biden’s penchant for lies and exaggeration when standing behind a podium has always been a well-known character flaw. But his tendency to spew self-serving misinformation has descended to new depths of disgust whenever he talks about Israel and Gaza.

Take a few minutes to watch British, independent journalist Owen Jones as he offers an across-the-pond perspective on Biden’s legacy:

CFIP Conversation with Journalist Ali Abunimah

You are invited to join the Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine this coming Tuesday (tomorrow, June 18) for our second conversation. This time we will be talking with Palestinian-American author and journalist Ali Abunimah, founder and senior editor of the Electronic Intifada.

You won’t want to miss it!

Use this link for the livestream and to view the recording after the fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYLhwY_yThU

 

Another Instalment About My Visit to Masafer Yatta in the West Bank: Justice Ain’t on the Side of Zionist Land Theft

Last June I posted the story about my visit to the West Bank region known as Masafer Yatter.

Terry and I had helped to plant new trees and grape vines for a Palestinian farmer by the name of Hafez Hureini. Mr. Hureini’s hands had been broken by Jewish settlers who were in the process of stealing his land.

The young people from Aida Refugee camp (where we lived) were helping him to catch up on his backlogged farm maintenance. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, we were attacked by both Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers as we worked.

That’s right. In Israel it’s apparently illegal to help a Palestinian farmer  work his own farmland.

A few days ago I happened across an Al Jazeera documenatary focusing on Mr. Hureini’s continuing struggle against Israeli land theft! Here you can meet this man and hear his story for yourselves.

Yes, the settlers are still stealing. The soldiers are still oppressing the innocent and defending the thieves. And Mr. Hureini continues to stand his ground peacefully.

All the while, our God sees it all and promises to one day restore justice to his world. And I’ll give you a hint: justice ain’t on the side of Zionist land theft.

 

“Here’s Every Ceasefire Deal and Prisoner Exchange Hamas Has Offered Israel Since October 7th”

A central plank of Israeli/Zionist mythology is the claim that Israel is always desperate for peace but can never find a Palestinian peace partner willing to sign a ceasefire agreement.

That has never been the case, but that doesn’t stop the Israeli propaganda mill — faithfully reported on the Christian Broadcast Network as gospel truth — from repeating these claims.

The following video report rehearses all of the ceasefire proposals that have been agreed to by Hamas but have been rejected by Israel.

Of course, Israel has the right to negotiate as it pleases and reject the proposals it does not like.  But it does not have the right to lie about the nature of the negotiations, insisting on Hamas’ intransigence when in fact Israel has always wanted to continue the current attack on Gaza regardless of the peace plan being offered.

“Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic”

The Jewish magazine Forward has published two different letters written by Jewish university students insisting that the anti-genocide demonstrations on their campuses have NOT been antisemitic, but that all impulses towards

Photo-by-Lisa-Maree-Williams-Getty-Images.jpg

violence and antisemitism have been imported by outside instigators.

Here is a brief excerpt of the Foward article titled “Jewish students reject claims that campus protests for Palestine have been antisemitic“. All emphasis is mine:

Editor’s note: Today we published two open letters from college students regarding the protests that have been roiling campuses nationwide for weeks. Below, 750+ Jewish students from 140+ campuses say they “reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety.” In the other letter, 280+ Jewish students at Columbia University argue that their “concerns have been brushed off and invalidated” when calling out antisemitism on campus. The original letters can be found here and here.

We the undersigned are Jewish students on college campuses in solidarity with student encampments for Gaza. We reject the ways that these encampments have been smeared as antisemitic and we call on our institutions to take action to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza. 

In the last week, we have watched the movement of student encampments for Gaza spread across the country. We have also watched as these protesters have been met with repression, arrests, violence, and false claims of antisemitism. As Jewish students, we wholeheartedly reject the claim that these encampments are antisemitic and that they are an inherent threat to Jewish student safety. We believe that safety for Jewish students can only come when all students are safe, including Palestinian students, BIPOC students, and queer and trans students.  

While journalists, students, and even police have consistently reported encampments to be peaceful, school administrations and city officials have intentionally and consistently escalated through state violence. Their tactics have included arresting and brutalizing students, and denying students access to housing, medical care, and religious spaces. The majority of these acts have targeted Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students. This violence we’ve seen this week does not make any of us safer. We wholeheartedly condemn the brutal repression of the encampments. 

You can read the entire article here.

Counterpunch: “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza”

Helen Benedict has posted a good story at Counterpunch magazine investigating the student protests launched against the Gaza genocide.

The article is titled “The Distortion of Campus Protests Over Gaza.” I include a brief excerpt below:

. . . Even as the now-notorious student tent encampment there stretches through its second week, all is calm. Inside the camp, students sleep, eat, and sit on bedspreads studying together and making signs saying, “Nerds for Palestine,” “Passover is for Liberation,” and “Stop the Genocide.” The Jewish students there held a seder on Passover. The protesters even asked faculty to come into the encampment and teach because they miss their classes. Indeed, it’s so quiet on campus that you can hear birds singing in the background. The camp, if anything, is hushed.

Those protesters who have been so demonized, for whom the riot police are waiting outside — the same kinds of students Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, invited the police to arrest, zip-tie, and cart away on April 18th — are mostly undergraduate women, along with a smaller number of undergraduate men, 18 to 20 years old, standing up for what they have a right to stand up for: their beliefs. Furthermore, for those who don’t know the Columbia campus, the encampment is blocking nobody’s way and presents a danger to no one. It is on a patch of lawn inside a little fence buffered by hedges. As I write, those students are not preventing anyone from walking anywhere, nor occupying any buildings, perpetrating any violence, or even making much noise. (In the early hours of April 30th, however, student protesters did occupy Hamilton Hall in reaction to a sweep of suspensions the day before.)

As a tenured professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, I’ve been watching the student protests ever since the brutal Hamas attack of October 7th, and I’ve been struck by the decorum of the protesting students, as angry and upset as they are on both sides. This has particularly impressed me knowing that several students are directly affected by the ongoing war. I have a Jewish student who has lost family and friends to the attack by Hamas, and a Palestinian student who learned of the deaths of her family and friends in Gaza while she was sitting in my class.

Given how horrific this war is, it’s not surprising that there have been a few protesters who lose control and shout hideous things, but for the most part, such people have been quietly walked away by other students or campus security guards. All along, the main messages from the students have been “Bring back our hostages” on the Israeli side and “Stop slaughtering Gazan civilians” on the antiwar and pro-Palestinian-rights side. Curiously enough, those messages are not so far apart, for almost everyone wants the hostages safe and almost everyone is calling for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a different direction and protect the innocent. . . 

You can read the entire article here.

Check Out My Recent Article in the “Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies”

Today the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies published my article  titled “Echoes of Slavery, Racial Segregation and Jim Crow: American Dispensationalism and Christian Zionist Bible-Reading.”

Below is the abstract, that is a brief summary of the article:

The apologetics of pro-slavery, pro-segregation Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were identical to the methods of biblical interpretation used by Dispensationalist Christian Zionists today. The ideology’s specific rules of ‘literal interpretation’ and ‘antecedent theology’ led both groups to similar conclusions about slavery and racial segregation, on the one hand, and Jewish privilege and Palestinian displacement, on the other. Abolitionist efforts to promote a Christ–like hermeneutic rooted in Christian morality points the way forward to correcting modern theologies, such as Dispensationalist Christian Zionism, that continue to sanction human oppression.

I believe that clicking the highlighted title above will allow access to the article online. However, if this does not work for you, let me know and I can send you a copy.

Yes, I too am disappointed by the numerous formating and editorial errors in my article. Yuck! Unfortunately, it is too late for me to do anything about it now…sigh…

More Than 700 Bodies Discovered in Two Mass Graves Near Gaza Hospitals

One mass gravesite is near Al Shifa hospital. The other is near Nasser hospital. Both hospitals have been demolished by Israeli forces.

Many of the corpses have their hands tied together.

Many are women. Some are children.

Others are wearing hospital gowns. Some even have the IV drip tubes still attached to their arms.

I have posted a selection of video reports below. Since most are age restricted I have enclosed the URL in quotation marks. Simply copy the URL to your web browser in order to watch:

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhsRRGvl1dc”

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clg-x1dchv8”

“https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcZ4_dZ8WZU”

 

Nowhere is Safe in Gaza, Not Even in the So-Called ‘Safe Zones’

An NBC investigative report demonstrates the frequency with which Israel continues to bomb areas and travel routes that have been designated by Israeli officials as “safe zones.”

Destitute Palestinians travel to areas where they were told they would remain safe from attack, only to be bombed, shot and terrorized in their  freshly erected makeshift homes.

It’s as if the ‘safe zones’ were deliberately designed holding pens created to ensure a higher percentage of civilian targets for Israeli bombs.

There is LITERALLY no safe place in Gaza today. Watch:

 

Why Are American Police So Violent Without Provocation?

I have experienced unnecessary, unprovoked police violence myself. I was marching in a perfectly peaceful anti-NATO rally in Chicago.

For no reason other than a chance to flex their muscles, hundreds of Chicago policemen attacked the crowd and arrested dozens of people for nothing more than exercizing their Constitutional rights to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.

We see this happening now across the country as police violently assault college students gathered together in peaceful demonstrations.

One of the reasons this happens — but only one reason out of many, which I will address in future posts — is because many US law enforcement agencies have outsourced their police training programs to the state of Israel.

But here is the outrageous catch: It you have watched any of the recent anti-Netanyahu marches in Israel’s cities over the past six months, you will notice a sea of Israeli, Jewish humanity protesting the current government without a police officer in sight.

The only time Israeli police really clamp down on protests or demonstrations is when they are carried out by Palestinians. And all Israeli security forces always treat Palestinians as The Enemy.

And the Palestinian Enemy always “deserve” the harshest, most brutal treatment prior to their arrest, no matter how peacefully they behave.

It is these brutal tactics in “crowd control” that American police bring back with them from their Israeli training. (Often Israeli security forces come to the US to train entire departments here.)

The result is that American demonstrators are treated as if they, too, were The Enemy. Thus, protesters are literally attacked for no reason.

Our civil rights are trampled underfoot. Innocent people are beaten, tasered, handcuffed and jailed simply for speaking out and exercizing their civil liberties.

This Israeli-like behavior is a very large part of “the violence” reported now on US campuses. The students are not out of control, folks. It’s the police.

Watch Kim Iversen’s video explaining it all below, titled “Shocking IDF Link Exposed”: