Israel-Arab claims she was humiliated by two security guards who ordered her off bus after hearing her speak Arabic on cell phone. College: First such incident in 15 years (full article…)

One-fifth of Britain would vote for ‘racist’ Nick Griffin (full article…)

I watched the BBC appearance – it was quite boring and silly. Besides the ridiculous posturing over who Winston Churchill “belongs to”, the mainstream politicians were unable to convincingly reject a moron like Griffin. Jack Straw especially bumbled his part… dodging criticism of the government by repeatedly directing the conversation back to Griffin’s bigotry.

Republican members of the Congressional Anti-Terrorism Caucus said the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have tried to plant “spies” within key national-security committees in order to shape legislative policy. (full article…)

This is interesting (and shameful)… When an Islamic lobby groups gets interns inside Congress, they’re called spies and House members cite passages from a book entitled Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America.

Yet, when Jewish lobby members conspire to gain access to government secrets, or when American politicians arrange back-room quid-pro-quo deals with AIPAC… all is forgive. For some reason, no one cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Throughout Israel, young Jewish men are forming vigilante groups to end interracial relationships between Arab men and Jewish women, which are occurring with increased frequency as Jewish settlements dig deeper into Arab territory. The vigilantes say Arabs lure Jewish women with money and “bad boy” personalities. (full article…)

Hundreds of anthropologists at the business meeting — the first official quorum in 30 years — unanimously endorsed a resolution condemning “the use of anthropological knowledge as an element of physical and psychological torture.”

But one anthropologist, while sharing her peers’ condemnation of torture as immoral and ineffective, worried that some of her colleagues had the wrong response to Abu Ghraib: Don’t scold the military, she argued. Educate it.

“If Patai’s book had been used correctly, they would never have done that. Because they would have understood that … you’re not going to get intelligence information out of these people, you’re going to get them and their families attacking you,” she said later. “Half-baked knowledge is sometimes worse than none at all.” (full article…)

Netanyahu: PA must recognize Israel as Jewish state for there to be peace (full article…)

Didn’t he just say that there weren’t going to be preconditions? It’s not fun exposing Netanyahu’s contradictions, because they occur so frequently.

I have a precondition for you… Since you are infatuated with the whole “right to exist” (something no other state has, by the way) why not recognize the Palestinians’ “right to exist” as a sign of reciprocity. No, of course you won’t.

Des histoires comme celles-là, j’en aurais tant d’autres à raconter. On dit de moi que je suis d’origine étrangère, un beur, une racaille, un islamiste, un délinquant, un sauvageon, un “beurgeois”, un enfant issu de l’immigration… Mais jamais un Français, Français tout court. (full article…)

Every night, dozens of young men in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood take to the streets and go out searching for girls.

But theirs is not a promiscuous search. In fact, the group of some 35 volunteers is looking to prevent such interaction and to stop what neighborhood residents have overwhelmingly complained is a growing problem in Pisgat Ze’ev – Arab men going out with Jewish girls. (full article…)

A settler tosses wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron. The approach of some settlers towards neighboring Palestinians, especially around Nablus in the north and Hebron in the south, has often been one of contempt and violence. (more…)

The congressman, we learned, belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ‘48 segregationist candidate for president. Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber. (more…)

Criminalising dissent is not unique to Israel. Many oppressive states, such as apartheid South Africa, have used it to de-legitimise parties, ideas and activities disliked by ruling elites and security apparatuses. Furthermore, persecution on grounds of “security” creates an immediate divide between Arab and Jewish citizens. In 2007, the head of Shabak, the Israeli general security agency, stated that struggles against the Jewishness of the state, even if lawful and democratic, would be deemed subversive. The current right-wing government is seeking to condition citizenship on loyalty to Zionist ideology, a demand unparalleled in any democracy and contrary to the most basic of human rights. With this kind of attitude, it is no wonder that young Arab men and women inside Israel are victimised because of their noble aspirations to equality and freedom. (more…)

The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews.

The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as “scare tactics”, are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young diaspora Jews by encouraging them to move to Israel. (more…)

Obama’s choice of words might not have been politic, but he was merely stating the obvious when he said the police behaved “stupidly.” (more…)

Legislation that Israel’s Arab citizens fear could limit their freedom of speech came a step closer on Sunday to becoming law.
The bill, proposed by a legislator from the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, would withhold government money from any state-supported institutions that fund activity deemed detrimental to the state.
Such activity includes “rejecting Israel’s existence as the state of the Jewish people” and supporting “armed struggle or terrorist acts” against Israel. (more…)

Housing Minister Ariel Atias on Thursday warned against the spread of Arab population into various parts of Israel, saying that preventing this phenomenon was no less than a national responsibility. (more…)

“If you ask an Israeli, ‘are you in favor of equality for Arabs,’ they will say, ‘yes, of course.’ If you ask them are they in favor of throwing the [Arabs] into the sea, they say, ‘yes, of course.’ And it doesn’t feel like any contradiction to them.” (more…)

The aim of these laws is to impose the Israeli nationalist creed by coercion. It’s really that simple. Over the last decade, the Knesset has experienced several bursts of legislative activity seeking to restrict freedom of opinion and expression on the questions of the Jewishness of the state and the right to resist occupation. The advocates of these laws are indefatigable. If the proposals fail to pass through any of the necessary stages, they are resubmitted over and over again in the hope of wearing out their opponents. (more…)

Mayor concerned with rising number of Arab residents, emigration of Jews from city, devises plan to tip demographics with construction of 3,050 housing units in ultra-Orthodox neighborhood built on land expropriated from Arabs in 1967. Mayor recruits Interior Minister Eli Yishai to cause, urges settlers to move in (more…)

Israeli woman denied social benefits for visiting Palestinian husband. (more…)

As the day progressed Danny said he realized the scene he had witnessed was not an isolated incident. “It kept repeating itself. At one point I asked the people at the register if they really weren’t letting Arabs in and they answered straight out that they were not. One of the workers told me that the men just aren’t let in alone, but families are. I asked why and she said that they bothered the female tourists… she said there’s nothing that can be done, it’s just the way it is. (more…)

To be sure Verwoerd was correct. Both apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel were colonial, settler states created on the basis of the harsh dispossession of the land and birthright of the indigenous people. This is unblushingly documented in Israel’s case from the time of Herzl through Jabotinsky, Ben Gurion, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan to Sharon et al. Both states preached and implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the sole claim of Jews in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; monopolized rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property, business; superior access to education, health, social, sporting and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services at the expense of the original indigenous population; the virtual monopoly membership of military and security forces, and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines – even both countries marriage laws are designed to safeguard racial “purity”. The fact that the Palestinian minority within Israel is allowed to vote hardly redresses the injustice in all other matters of basic human rights. In any case those Palestinians allowed to stand for election to the Knesset do so on condition that they dare not question Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. (more…)

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a report confirming that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). (more…)

A community in northern Israel has changed its bylaws to demand that new residents pledge support for “Zionism, Jewish heritage and settlement of the land” in a thinly-veiled attempt to block Arab applicants from gaining admission. (more…)

One bill sought to prohibit marking the day Israel declared its independence as a day of mourning. A second prohibits negating the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. The third bill would have required Israeli citizens, including Arabs of Palestinian descent, to sign oaths of loyalty to the state, its flag and national anthem, and to perform military or civil service. (more…)

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle),” Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its “Ask the Rabbis” feature. Friedman argued that if Israel followed this wisdom, there would be “no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.” (more…)

I don’t know what is more disturbing: the guy’s rhetoric or the “Ask the Rabbis” feature.

“The Carmel Academic Center in Haifa shut down the concentration in accounting within its Department of Business Administration because a majority of the students applying were Palestinian citizens of Israel. This was revealed in a news item reported on Israeli news Channel 10 on 24 May (in Hebrew only).” (more…)

The so-called Israel’s Land Authority uprooted on Monday nearly 250 olive trees and several fig trees and grapevines south of Shqeib Al Salaam Arab village in the Negev. (more…)

The bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi) would prescribe up to one year in jail for anybody who published calls to deny Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, or words “that will bring about an act of hate, degradation or lack of loyalty to the state or to government authorities or to its laws that were justly established. (more…)

To be frank, I couldn’t care less what this lousy Pope does or does not say during his little tour of the Middle-East. I’m strongly opposed to the unfounded respect instinctively granted to religious leaders. Why should anyone care what this man says? Because he wears a silly hat and prays to a mythological man in the sky? Come on. I wouldn’t mind so much if this Pope had actually done something worthwhile or noble with his life (think Desmond Tutu) — but we’re talking about a former Hitler Youth member who has expressed bigoted views against both Jews and Muslims. So he can keep his silly hat and his lousy statements to himself.

One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young Israeli talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. “In the next war,” he said, “we’ve got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good.”…Now, suddenly, I found myself meeting Israelis committed to the creation of a greater Israel embracing the West Bank, who were utterly heedless of the fate of its inhabitants. The Palestinians were perceived as losers, a mere incidental impediment to the fulfilment of Israel’s historic territorial destiny. By a curious quirk, that young Israeli whom I heard enthuse about emptying the West Bank of Arabs was Binyamin Netanyahu, today his country’s prime minister. (more…)

Three years ago in Jerusalem, I met a very bright couple in their late 40s, who had emigrated from Russia a decade earlier. When we began to speak of the Palestinians, the husband said: “In my Russian village in 1920, there was trouble with guerrillas. Budenny’s Cossacks came. They burnt the village from which the guerrillas came. The guerrillas returned twice more. The Cossacks burned two more villages. Then there was no more trouble with guerrillas.” This was the culture from which these two highly-educated Israelis came. They asserted that the Budenny method was the only proper one by which to address Hamas, Hizbollah and Fatah. The policies of recent Israeli governments suggest that their view is widely shared. (more…)

Tzipi Livni, another so-called centrist, holds similar discriminatory views. On January 23, 2002, she urged members of the Knesset to reject an equal-protection clause according to which equality is the right of every citizen in the state regardless of his or her nationality, religion, or views. The proposed bill was rejected, and formal equality remains outside the Israeli book of laws. Livni also supported bills in the Knesset that would grant settlement and allocation of land for Jews only, such as the one submitted by MK Rabbi Haim Druckman on February 18, 2002. Finally, she repeatedly argued that Israel will never be the national home for its Palestinian citizens and averred that, if they have a collective aspiration, they should look for it elsewhere.

The demand for the establishment of a Palestinian state, speaking of the recent Durban II conference, is another type of anti-Semitic trick against us. With all the giant states in the Middle East, it is the Jewish State that is required to share with the Palestinians the little territory that we have. (more…)

In a letter to Michigan State University President Lou Anna Simon, two ADL officials wrote that Tutu, whose opposition to apartheid in the 1980s won him the Nobel Peace Prize, had made statements about Israel that “conveyed outright bigotry against … the Jewish people.” (more…)

The White House offered no further details. But last week a bipartisan group of House members sent a letter to Obama congratulating him for deciding to boycott the meeting, which is scheduled to begin Monday. (more…)

The truth about our foreign minister – and this is no scoop, it’s old news everywhere, but a lot of people have conveniently forgotten it – is that he used to belong to Kach. He is a one-time member of a murderous anti-Arab movement, one whose ideology is summed up in the chant “death to the Arabs,” one that was banned here and is listed by the US and EU as a terrorist organization. (more…)

The winter assault on the Gaza Strip was officially portrayed in Israel as an attempt to quell rocket fire by militants of Hamas. But some soldiers say they also were lectured about a more ambitious aim: to banish non-Jews from the biblical land of Israel. “This rabbi comes to us and says the fight is between the children of light and the children of darkness,” a reserve sergeant said, recalling a training camp encounter. “His message was clear: ‘This is a war against an entire people, not against specific terrorists. The whole thing was turned into something very religious and messianic.’” (more…)

The Israeli military was quick to point out that, ‘This type of humour is unbecoming and should be condemned.’ This isn’t very convincing when you consider the graffiti left by Israeli soldiers who recently occupied houses across the northern Gaza Strip: ‘Death will find you … soon’ scrawled on the bedroom wall of Majeda Abu Hajaj, who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as she attempted to lead a group of civilians to safety after they had been ordered out of their homes by the same soldiers. After killing Majeda, and her 64 year old mother, Raya, the soldiers occupied their house and left graffiti in every room. (more…)

This article was written by my friend and former colleague, Louisa Waugh.

I can’t stand how the Israeli left is attempting to explain Avigdor Lieberman as an aberration – an extreme case of neo-fascism in Israeli politics – when Lieberman is simply the product of widespread Israeli bigotry. Neve Gordon, a generally brave and incisive voice in the Israeli peace camp (one of the few remaining), provides a point-by-point list of why Lieberman is a bad guy…

But his list misses the point – anyone with half a brain realizes the guy is an extremist thug. How many Israelis support Liberman’s views so that his party, Yisrael Beteinu (lit. “Israel is our home”), is now the third largest party in the Jewish state?

An analysis of widespread Israeli bigotry is needed, not the views and actions of a petty extremist.

Of some 120 criminal investigations brought against security force members since the beginning of the intifada, there had only been one conviction – against the Arab-Israeli soldier who shot British peace activist Tom Hurndall dead in Gaza. (more…)

“Palestinian laborers are forbidden to walk around the community of Har Adar in the Jerusalem corridor. They are allowed to work, but cannot simply roam the area. This is the local council’s policy.” (more…)

Anti-Arab verbal and physical attacks inside Israel have spiked in the wake of elections held earlier this year in which right-wing parties made major gains, a human rights group said on Sunday.

The Mossawa Centre for the Rights of Arab Citizens in Israel has documented 250 incidents of aggression against Arab Israelis since the start of the year, compared to 166 in all of 2008, the group said in a report. (more…)

A Hadera elementary school has been accused of racial discrimination, for its singling out of a number of students of Ethiopian origin, all born in Israel, for extra Hebrew lessons. (more…)

The demonstrators said pressure should be put on Hamas to release Shalit by worsening the conditions of the almost 11,000 Palestinians being held in Israeli jails. (more…)

Just imagine if these people put all this effort towards demanding an end to the occupation.

Report: Israel dropped from new Durban II draft

Most fundamentally, we see a growing assault on both the legitimacy and security of the State of Israel. (more…)

A state built on oppression and the racist vision of a mono-ethnic state has no legitimacy. As more and more people realize this, it becomes clearer that Zionism is a failed ideology.

The poll also found that 35% of Israeli pupils think Israel is a racist society, with more youth in the periphery of the country – 41% – holding such a view, and fewer – 29% – in the center of the country. (more…)

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day and it got me thinking about the irony of becoming larger than life—on becoming a national icon. Despite King’s pacifism and incisive rejection of American foreign policy, he has been mainstreamed and virtually removed from the ideology he represented.

How many children are made to recite King’s “I Have a Dream” speech across American elementary schools? Millions, surely. The speech was inoffensive and by now politically neutral, but it touched upon only a selected portion of King’s ideology: the struggle against racial bigotry and oppression.

Now I wonder how many children are made to recite his “Beyond Vietnam” speech? Few if any… In this speech, he described the United States as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. For this, he was lambasted by the media; Time magazine called the speech “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi”; similarly, The Washington Post lamented that King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people”.

But it is in this speech we see the true legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. The depoliticized federal holiday largely whitewashes his political activism beyond fighting racial oppression. But for King, racial oppression was merely the first obstacle symptomatic of American imperialism and aggression.

Nearby was another home that had evidently been used as a base by Israeli troops. Inside it was littered with bullet casings and ration packs, and walls were daubed with slogans including “Arabs need to die” and “Arabs: 1948 to 2009″. (more…)

Israel on Monday banned Arab political parties from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, drawing accusations of racism by an Arab lawmaker who said he would challenge the decision in the country’s Supreme Court. (more…)

Pro-Zionist demonstrators in San Francisco…

The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as “exercising caution”: the frightening balance of blood – about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn’t raising any questions, as if we’ve decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism. (more…)

“It’s incredible, but it seems that an Israeli law forbids Jews to adopt non-Jewish children!” he exclaimed. “This apartheid measure must be denounced by the worldwide media, and the international community should apply pressure against Israel to protest this abjectly racist law so the Israeli government will cancel it.” (more…)

For Burg, Israel’s troubles are self-inflicted. Specifically, he maintains that the principal cause of Israel’s problems is the legacy of the Holocaust, which has become omnipresent in Israeli life. “Not a day passes,” he writes, “without a mention of the Shoah in the only newspaper I read, Ha’aretz.” Indeed, Israeli children are taught in school that “we are all Shoah survivors.” The result is that Israelis (and most American Jews for that matter) cannot think straight about the world around them. They think that everyone is out to get them, and that the Palestinians are hardly any different than the Nazis. (more…)

Well, let’s begin with the elections. The word that the rolls off of everyone’s tongue is historic. Historic election. And I agree with it. It was an historic election. To have a black family in the white house is a momentous achievement. In fact, it’s historic in a broader sense. The two Democratic candidates were an African-American and a woman. Both remarkable achievements. We go back say 40 years, it would have been unthinkable. So something’s happened to the country in 40 years. And what’s happened to the country- which is we’re not supposed to mention- is that there was extensive and very constructive activism in the 1960s, which had an aftermath. So the feminist movement, mostly developed in the 70s-–the solidarity movements of the 80’s and on till today. And the activism did civilize the country. The country’s a lot more civilized than it was 40 years ago and the historic achievements illustrate it. That’s also a lesson for what’s next.

What’s next will depend on whether the same thing happens. Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below. And the answer to what’s next depends on people like you. Nobody else can answer it. It’s not predictable. In some ways, the election—the election was surprising in some respects.

Going back to my bad prediction, If the financial crisis hadn’t taken place at the moment that it did, if it had been delayed a couple of months, I suspect that prediction would have been correct. But not speculating, one thing surprising about the election was that it wasn’t a landslide. By the usual criteria, you would expect the opposition party to win in a landslide under conditions like the ones that exist today. The incumbent president for eight years was so unpopular that his own party couldn’t mention his name and had to pretend to be opposing his policies. He presided over the worst record for ordinary people in post-war history, in terms of job growth, real wealth and so on. Just about everything the administration was touched just turned into a disaster. (more…)