All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Trump-Russia: more election meddling evidence found, says Senate panel

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Intelligence committee finds ‘further support’ to conclusion that Vladimir Putin and his government aimed to boost Trump

A Republican-controlled Senate panel has said that further evidence has been found to support a US intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help elect Donald Trump.

Related: US and Russian officials hold ‘frank’ talks before Trump-Putin summit

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The Shunning, Part 4: Scott Pruitt Edition

grin The Shunning, Part 4: Scott Pruitt Edition:

crooksandliars:

The Shunning, Part 4: Scott Pruitt Edition

In the fourth installment of my favorite series “The Shunning”, we catch up with another Trump White House super villain, Scott Pruitt. For readers who have been away from social media or the news for the last few months, Pruitt is a villain with a Capital V. He is evil. He is greed personified. He IS the actual swamp. He is under at least 56 investigations from crimes ranging from abusing his power to making staff hand wash his $3,500 bullet proof underwear to $5,000 helicopter rides to his favorite fast food place, IHOB.

On Monday, Pruitt was the latest official to be greeted warmly by a member of the public while eating out at a restaurant. The woman, Kristin Mink, posted on her Facebook that she urged him to resign. She said:

“EPA head Scott Pruitt was 3 tables away as I ate lunch with my child. I had to say something…We deserve to have somebody at the EPA who actually does protect our environment, someone who believes in climate change and takes it seriously for the benefit of all us, including our children. I would urge you to resign before your scandals push you out.”

In the video, she is seen holding her young child. She remained calm, but firm. The video was viewed thousands of times within the first house, although that number surely has skyrocketed since.

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The Deal of the Century…What the hell is that deal?

What’s the deal? There is none that can or will be talked about so people know what is even possible. Just shadows meeting behind closed doors demanding support for their deal – no questions or knowledge needed! Fie!

نادية حرحش

I am about to ask a serious question. What the hell is this deal? Ever since Trump became president, we have heard about this century deal. Trump is creating the century deal. Kushner is making trips to advocate for the Century Deal. Abbas is resisting. The egyptPalestinian leadership is opposing. Arab countries are warning Egypt is silent.

The Deal will be revealed after Ramadan. The deal is out there. Kushner is back. Prince William is touring and eating Falafel. Abbas will not meet Americans. Ramallah is cleaning the city for the American visitors.

The locals are mobilizing themselves to move against the century deal. An analysis is provided about the pros and cons of the deal.

A demonstration is taking the streets. Nasrallah warns the deal has already started.

What the hell is the deal?

why don’t we have one official come out and tell us what the hell this deal is?

Maybe…

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Jerusalem Women : The Growth and Development of Palestinian​ Women Movement during the Mandate Period (Book Launch)

نادية حرحش

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The  book is an outcome of my MA Thesis in Jerusalem Studies.

The research discusses the development of the women’s movement in Palestine in the early British Mandate period through a photo that was taken in 1945 in Jerusalem during a meeting of women activists from Palestine with the renowned Egyptian feminist Huda Sha’rawi.

The photo sheds light on a side of Palestinian society that hasn’t been well explored or realized by today’s Palestinians. It shows women in a different role than what today, by some is constructed as the “traditional” or “authentic” one.

The photo gives insights into a particular constituency of the Palestinian women’s movement : urban, secular-modernity women activists from the upper echelons of Palestinian society of the time, women without veils, contributing to certain political and social movements that shaped Palestinian life at the time, and connected with other Arab women activists. Veiling or unveiling of…

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lifestyle of humiliation

Who will not resist a life of degradation? If this was your fate in Chicago, what would you do?

نادية حرحش

I wonder how people manage to survive daily checkpoints. The level of dehumanizing whatever is left of our humanity. When this continues on a regular basis, how can we ever maintain understanding?

The privileged Palestinian that I am, by not having to cross checkpoints on a daily basis, was disprivileged in having to go to the ministry of interior office today.

I am not sure where to start from. The appointment of five months that I missed ( due to my negligence) ( i know I should be accountable on that level). I was late five minutes for the appointment that I mistakingly thought was an hour later. I was late five minutes from the date that I scheduled five months ago. As a reasonable attempt at keeping my humanity in place, I took responsibility for my negligence and tried to set a new appointment. The closest date was in…

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Western Shoshone Carole Wright ‘White House Racism and Stolen Children’

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Carlisle Indian School, Penn., circa 1900
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Carlisle Indian School ‘The Children Who Never Came Home’
Photo Brenda Norrell, Longest Walk 2008
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Western Shoshone Carole Wright ‘White House Racism and Stolen Children’

By Carole Wright, Western Shoshone

Censored News

July 3, 2018

I, and my Indian relatives, have watched the ugliness of the immigration policies perpetrated

‘For many young American Jews, the Trump-Bibi axis is the enemy’

There have always been undercurrents of dissent within American Jewry when it comes to Israel. After all, it was progressive Jewish Americans, radicalized by the New Left of the 1960s, who became the avant-garde of the American Jewish Left, demanding that the Israeli government enter into talks with the PLO decades before it became Israeli policy. It was radical American Jews who, just a decade after protesting the Vietnam War, began demonstrating outside Israeli embassies and consulates during the First Lebanon War.

Decades later, we tend to hear a great deal about the changing relationship between American Jews and Israel, whether by those who feel let down by it, deceived by the stories and mythologies promulgated by their own communities, or those who are simply turning away from the Jewish state altogether.

What we hear far less about is progressive American Jews who have chosen to make Israel their home. How do American Israelis, particularly those thought leaders who have helped inform many of the changes bubbling up among their kin back in the U.S., feel about Israel today?

For Bradley Burston, making his Jewish American voice heard has become a mission of sorts — even when no one was really listening. Burston has become one of the most prominent voices of liberal Zionism (he rejects the term, calling himself “more of a post-labeling guy”) through his Haaretz column, “A Special Place in Hell.” Long before IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, J Street, and Peter Beinart blew the lid off a simmering crisis between American Jews and Israel, his writing served as a refuge for those who felt stranded between their values and Israel.

Bradley Burston outside the Haaretz offices in south Tel Aviv. (Oren Ziv)

Bradley Burston outside the Haaretz offices in south Tel Aviv. (Oren Ziv)

As Israel’s military dictatorship over the Palestinians grew more entrenched, Burston’s columns became more strident, warning Israelis — and their American Jewish patrons — of its dire repercussions. So it is somewhat incredulous to hear Burston declare that his views about Israel have not changed since 1971. After all, much to his chagrin, his name has become synonymous with a strain of liberal Zionism that has struggled to remain relevant in the Netanyahu era — one that believes in a two-state solution, a Jewish state that respects and empowers its minorities, and a healthy connection to the rest of the world.

Despite the political setbacks and the fading hopes for two states, however, Burston believes that deep down, most American Jews agree with that vision.

“The majority of American Jews want to see a democracy here, and they are tremendously embarrassed by the way things are going,” the Los Angeles native says, as we sit down for an interview in Jaffa, where he lives. “They are concerned about the asylum seeker issue and the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. For many if not most young American Jews, the Trump-Bibi axis is authentically their enemy.”

Yet on the Palestinian issue, Burston believes the majority of Jewish Americans still have a ways to go. It’s a slow-moving process, he says, but only a matter of time. “[American Jews] have been brainwashed into thinking that Israelis know best. But it’s only a matter of time. If Netanyahu alienates the American Jews on issue after issue, things are going to change. I hope we’re heading for something better — something more sustainable.”

Members of Jewish-American anti-occupation group IfNotNow protest Trump's decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, Washington D.C., May 14, 2018. (Gili Getz)

Members of Jewish-American anti-occupation group IfNotNow protest Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, Washington D.C., May 14, 2018. (Gili Getz)

“This country has changed tremendously since I moved here in the mid-70s,” he says, rubbing the sides of his salt-and-pepper goatee, as he tends to do while deep in thought. “Yet I still believe what I always have: that the best solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is two states, side by side. The problem is I don’t believe it is possible anymore.”

How did you come to the realization that there won’t be a two-state solution?

“I would like to have two states. But hundreds of thousands of Israelis said ‘you can’t have it,’ and they run the country. When Netanyahu won the election in 2015 following his racist campaign — that was when I knew it was game over. But it won’t be forever.”

Is the idea of a Jewish and democratic state sustainable in the long term?

“I believe there can be a confederation that makes it possible to have a Jewish and democratic state. I don’t want to throw out the baby with the horrible bathwater, but I believe that there is something positive about Jewish culture and the revival of Hebrew culture.

“You need to remember that something happens to Jews in Israel — whether or not they end up living here — which is extremely powerful. That’s not the bathwater. The bathwater is fascism, it’s ruling over another people. For Netanyahu, bathwater is the essence of this country.”

You have written that the country’s ruling ideology has become akin to racism. Do you still identify as a Zionist?

“I’m not sure that I ever did. I don’t have any problem with there being a Jewish state. I have a problem with a Jewish state that is oppressive. I have a problem with a Jewish state that fights against its own vestiges of democracy. I have a problem with a Jewish state that is exclusionary of Jews of all kinds. When Zionism becomes equated with support for settlements or the expulsion of asylum seekers, it becomes really easy for me to answer that question. If that’s what it is, then I’m not a Zionist.”

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More than ever, American Jews are more willing to talk about the Nakba and the dispossession of the Palestinians. How does one reconcile progressive ideas such as equality with the history of how this country was founded?

“The truth of all of this is that it is an incredible mess. Benny Morris made a tremendous study of what happened in 1948 and what you realize while reading it is that there were instances of true nobility, and there were instances of terrible atrocities. People were suddenly given the opportunity to be themselves, and in many cases it ended in a terrible result, and in other cases it didn’t.

“It’s the perfect storm. Jews were legitimately worried about being exterminated again. If I believe that everybody is trying to kill me, I’m going to be terrible to them. There are enough people who are willing to say they want to kill the Jews and that we have no right to be here, to give Israelis the justification to do terrible things to them.”

Has that mentality persisted since 1948?

“Yes, and it explains why Israelis today don’t care about Palestinians being shot dead at the border with Gaza. That was the genius of cutting off contact between Israelis and Palestinians, because if you really want to make people to loathe and fear the other side, then you need to make sure they have no contact. Now we never see the other side. If I think the other side wants me dead, I will do terrible things.

“For good or ill, many of the Jews who came here did so because they deeply believed in this place, that they were of this place, even if they had never seen it. Just like the Palestinians holding on to their keys who are also from here. The Jewish man in Estonia who wasn’t allowed to be openly Jewish in the Soviet Union — he was from here. He was willing to go to jail in order to live here.”

But why should that matter to the Palestinian holding on to his or her key?

“The one thing that we can’t do is to unfairly dismiss the extent to which both sides are fully, emotionally imbued with this place. This is their place, on both sides. And that’s the problem. There must be some reason why this is the crappiest place in the world and it still has a hold on us. Part of it is some form of brainwashing that is part of Israeli culture, but it’s not only that. There is some mystical element here that people have an unbreakable connection to. The government can’t ruin that.”

Palestinian youth carry a wounded boy to receive medical care during the Great Return March along the Gaza-Israel border, April 27, 2018. (Mohammed Zaanoun/Activestills.org)

Palestinian youth carry a wounded boy to receive medical care during the Great Return March along the Gaza-Israel border, April 27, 2018. (Mohammed Zaanoun/Activestills.org)

* * *

A few weeks after our initial interview, in a single day, Israeli snipers on the Gaza border killed over 60 protesters demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees, wounding thousands more. I went back and asked Burston if the bloodletting had changed anything for him.

“I don’t know how we live with ourselves, knowing what’s happening to people who are essentially next door. I’m not talking in particular about the deaths and injured in the March of Return protests. I’m talking about the years and years that preceded them. The siege of Gaza was and is a terrible error, the worst error Israel has made in the last 12 years, not only morally, but also tactically and strategically, for Israel’s future as well as for the Palestinians. The government knows it.

“But the government is too scared to do anything about it. The army is continually pressing Netanyahu to boost humanitarian aid and work on international cooperation to rebuild the critical infrastructure that we’ve bombed into oblivion, power plants, sewage treatment plants, the drinking water system. But Netanyahu’s too scared. He’s too busy looking over his shoulder and trying to prove that he has more testosterone than Bennett, who’s trying to prove the same about his masculinity level relative to Lieberman.”

“There’s one other thing that makes me despair. For some leaders on the Israeli right, a high Palestinian casualty toll can actually be seen as a political asset. A poll taken after the bloodshed of the initial marches showed that 100 percent of respondents who had voted for [Defense Minister] Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, approved of the military’s actions. A hundred percent.”

* * *

Do you ever think about going back to America?

“There was a time during the Second Intifada where we were terrified for our personal safety or of letting our daughter ride buses in Jerusalem. But I suppose there is something that is holding us here. Everybody who is here and who is a progressive must be an out and out crazy revolutionary, because otherwise how are they able to stand it?”

And yet the feeling is that things are getting worse.

“I’m still holding out for something better. When I came to Israel I said ‘I’m going to give it a year and see what happens.’”

And you’ve been saying that ever since.

“Exactly. Every year around October I say ‘well, okay fine. I’ll give it another year,’ and here I am.”

In Two Mississippi Cases, Justice Breyer Renews Call to Review Constitutionality of Death Penalty

As its 2017-2018 term came to a close, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review two Mississippi cases that presented significant challenges to capital punishment as implemented in that state and across the country. Over the dissent of Justice Stephen Breyer (pictured), who renewed his call for the Court to review the constitutionality of the death penalty as a whole, the Court on June 29 denied certiorari in the cases of Timothy Evans and Richard Jordan. Reiterating concerns he first voiced in his landmark dissent three years ago in Glossip v. Gross (2015), Justice Breyer wrote: “the death penalty, as currently administered, suffers from unconscionably long  delays, arbitrary application, and serious unreliability.” Two Mississippi cases, he wrote, illustrate the first two of those factors. Evans and Jordan were both sentenced to death in Mississippi’s Second Judicial District, which—according to death sentencing data maintained by Mississippi’s Office of the State Public Defender—has imposed more death sentences than any of the 21 other judicial districts in the state and nearly 1/3 of all the death sentences imposed in the state this century. Evans’s petition for writ of certiorari had argued that his death sentence was unconstitutionally arbitrary because of the geographic disproportionality in the way in which the death penalty was imposed and carried out across the state. Jordan had asked the Court to review the constitutionality of his more than forty-year tenure on Mississippi’s death row for a crime committed in 1976. Jordan’s death sentence was overturned three separate times because of different constitutional violations in each of his sentencing trials. In 1991, after his sentence had been overturned for the third time, a special prosecutor agreed that Jordan should be sentenced to life without parole. However, the Mississippi Supreme Court vacated the life sentence saying the sentence was invalid because it had not been authorized by Mississippi law in effect at the time of the murder. The state then sought and obtained the death penalty against Jordan for a fourth time. “Jordan has lived more than half of his life on death row,” Breyer wrote, living most of that time “in isolated, squalid conditions.” Breyer said the cruelty of the conditions of Jordan’s imprisonment constitute an “additional punishment” that warrants review by the Court to address whether the lengthy delay, in and of itself, violates the Eighth Amendment. The geographically arbitrary death-sentencing practices in the Second District also warranted review, Breyer wrote. “This geographic concentration reflects a nationwide trend. Death sentences, while declining in number, have become increasingly concentrated in an ever-smaller number of counties,” he wrote. This arbitrariness, Justice Breyer explained, “is aggravated by the fact that definitions of death eligibility vary depending on the state.” As a result, in Mississippi, unlike most states, a defendant may be sentenced to death for a felony robbery-murder, which does not require that the defendant actually intended to kill someone. Justice Breyer also found evidence in Mississippi that the death penalty was not reliably administered. He noted that just “[f]our hours before Willie Manning was slated to die by lethal injection, the Mississippi Supreme Court stayed his execution,” and in April 2015, Manning became the fourth Mississippi death-row prisoner to be exonerated. With six more death-row prisoners exonerated throughout the U.S. since January 2017, the unreliability of the death penalty, Justice Breyer argued, provides a third reason for the Court to review the constitutionality of capital punishment. “[M]any of the capital cases that come before this court,” Justice Breyer wrote, “involve, like the cases of Richard Jordan and Timothy Evans, special problems of cruelty or arbitrariness. Hence, I remain of the view that the court should grant the petitions now before us to consider whether the death penalty as currently administered violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.” 

(Emily Wagster Pettus, US Supreme Court Rejects 2 Mississippi Death Row Appeals, Associated Press, June 28, 2018; Marcia Coyle, US Supreme Court Turns Down Challenges to Death Penalty, National Law Journal, June 28, 2018.) Read Justice Breyer’s dissent here. See U.S. Supreme Court.

 

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