Author: Kairos Puget Sound Coalition

Read carefully to see how these terms are currently being used or misused by media reporting.

By Roger Sheety | The Palestine Chronicle | Apr 2, 2019

Palestine/Israel ‘Conflict’: A corporate media abstraction used to cover up and obfuscate the continuing destruction of Palestine by creating a false balance and ethical equivalency between the colonizers and the colonized where no such balance and equivalency exists to begin with.

What is the point of journalism if not to question, doubt, and challenge state or elite power? If a journalist merely reports the standard talking points of that power (as most corporate media journalists do), isn’t he or she simply perpetuating the basic premise of those talking points, that all is fundamentally well with the status quo? How, then, can such a stance be thought of as fair, objective, or impartial?

The following piece is partially indebted to John Ralston Saul’s “The Doubter’s Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”, which itself was partly inspired by earlier dictionaries such as those by Samuel Johnson and Ambrose Bierce.

The aim of these anti-dictionary dictionaries was to challenge and mock conventional wisdom and use language to clarify and communicate rather than the opposite.

Continue reading “A dictionary of media terms for the Palestine/Israel ‘conflict’”

Echoes of South African anti-apartheid tactics seen in the ongoing struggle for Palestinian human rights.

By Ronnie Kasrils | The Guardian | Apr 3, 2019

How disgraceful that, despite the lessons of our struggle against racism, such intolerance continues to this day

As a Jewish South African anti-apartheid activist I look with horror on the far-right shift in Israel ahead of this month’s elections, and the impact in the Palestinian territories and worldwide.

Israel’s repression of Palestinian citizens, African refugees and Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza has become more brutal over time. Ethnic cleansing, land seizure, home demolition, military occupation, bombing of Gaza and international law violations led Archbishop Tutu to declare that the treatment of Palestinians reminded him of apartheid, only worse.

I’m also deeply disturbed that critics of Israel’s brutal policies are frequently threatened with repression of their freedom of speech, a reality I’ve now experienced at first hand. Last week, a public meeting in Vienna where I was scheduled to speak in support of Palestinian freedom, as part of the global Israeli Apartheid Week, was cancelled by the museum hosting the event – under pressure from Vienna’s city council, which opposes the international movement to divest from Israel.

Continue reading “I fought South African apartheid. I see the same brutal policies in Israel”

A Netanyahu win in April election may cause some to rethink support for BDS.

By Dean Obeidallah |  Forward | Apr 1, 2019

… if Netanyahu and Trump both team up to say no to Palestine, and yes to Palestinians living under permanent occupation with no civil rights, where does that leave people like me?

President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have so very much in common.

They’re both being investigated for corruption; Netanyahu is on the verge of being indicted, while Trump is still being investigated by the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Both Bibi and Trump use the term “Fake News” to delegitimize media outlets critical of them. And both have courted the support of extremists. Trump has retweeted visible white supremacists and defended racists as “fine people” after Charlottesville, while Netanyahu recently embraced the political party known as “Jewish Power” which has been called the KKK of Israel.

And now these BFF’s have something else in common: They both oppose self-determination for Palestinians. And in so doing, Netanyahu and Trump will almost certainly push people desperate for justice to join the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, known as BDS.

Continue reading “Trump and Netanyahu are BDS’s best recruiters”

A look into the consequences of extreme trauma and ways it is possible to become free of this trauma legacy.

By Martha Sonnenberg |  Tikkun  |  Mar 22, 2019

Trauma changes us in permanent ways. But we have a choice about the outcome of our story.
— Rabbi Tirzah Firestone

When I finished reading this illuminating new book, Wounds into Wisdom, by rabbi and psychotherapist Tirzah Firestone, I was struck by what incredibly complex and wondrous beings we humans are. Rabbi Firestone’s book is a beautiful tribute to that wonder and complexity, just as it is a comprehensive look at what is now known as traumatology — a field of social research that has evolved because of the ubiquity of trauma, tragedy, and catastrophe characterizing human experience over the past century. But Tirzah Firestone’s book is unique in the way she looks at the meaning of traumatic experience. Through the lens of her own compassion and empathy she sees real people, not as passive products of their traumatic circumstances, but as active agents of their own healing from trauma. This is not a mere self-help book, although it will be extremely helpful to those who have suffered traumatic events, but more importantly it leads all of us to consider the ways in which we and others are affected by trauma, and what this may mean for healing the world, for tikkun olam.

Firestone makes her case through the use of stories, interviews with people, and honest and open revelations of the trauma in her own family. Her mother was a Holocaust survivor, and her father became fanatically Orthodox after witnessing the horror of the concentration camps as an American soldier at the end of World War II. Her parent’s traumatic experience was transmitted to, and psychologically internalized by, their children. This legacy of trauma also led to the subsequent deaths of her two older siblings, Danny, from suicide, and Shulamith, author of the feminist book, The Dialectic of Sex (1970), from the ravages of mental illness. It was Shulamith’s death that brought to her younger sister, Tirzah, the “terrible gift” which became the impetus to further investigate the inner workings of the legacy of trauma in herself and others. This book is then both a labor of love as well as an intellectual tour de force.

Continue reading “Book Review of “Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma””

Prominent black voices expressing solidarity with Palestinians has riled the pro-Israeli lobby.

By Hatem Bazian | Middle East Eye | Mar 26, 2019

Solidarity demands that we no longer allow politicians or political parties to remain silent on the question of Palestine.
— Marc Lamont Hill, CNN commentator fired for comments supporting boycott of Israel

In 1979, Andrew Young, the first African American ever appointed as a US ambassador to the UN, was forced to resign because of pressure mounted by pro-Israel groups on then President Carter following Young’s meeting with a representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation.

The Andrew Young episode demonstrated the increasing power of America’s pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, and the centring of US-Israel relations at the expense of all other considerations including the career of an African American civil rights icon.

The recent entanglement of Ilhan Omar with AIPAC and pro-Israel organisations is not new, but the outcome points to a rapidly changing socio-political and socio-religious landscape. In 1979, Young did not advocate or speak of Palestinian rights; instead, a mere meeting with the PLO was the sufficient cause for losing his post as UN ambassador.

Indeed, AIPAC’s targeting of Omar and attempts to silence her voice on Palestine adds to a long list of African American leaders who faced a similar backlash from pro-Israel groups for daring to speak out for Palestinians’ human rights and who have expressed readiness to challenge the power of the Israel lobby.

Continue reading “Why black voices matter on Palestine”

Pro-Israel philanthropist using his millions to get ugly with BDS supporters.

By Alex Kane | The Intercept  |  Mar 25, 2019

We should teach them that anyone that attacks us, there is a price, there is accountability.

Adam Milstein, a real estate millionaire and prolific donor to right-wing, pro-Israel causes, had a busy few days on Twitter this month. In one tweet, he accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of being a “terrorist.” In another, he questioned Omar’s and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s loyalty to the United States. He also accused Tlaib and Omar, the first two Muslim-American women elected to Congress, of having links to the Muslim Brotherhood, indulging a tired trope popular among anti-Muslim bigots.

The backlash was swift, particularly in light of Milstein’s backing of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, whose annual conference kicked off on Sunday. In response to those Twitter posts, an AIPAC spokesperson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Milstein “is not a representative of AIPAC and his views are not ours.” Meanwhile, Milstein pulled out of a panel he was scheduled to moderate at the conference, saying he did not want to be a distraction.

Milstein sits on AIPAC’s national council, and through his family foundation, has donated generously to the American Israel Education Foundation, AIPAC’s nonprofit arm. His support for AIPAC is just one part of his portfolio of pro-Israel philanthropy, which has in recent years bankrolled efforts to shut down American support for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS.

Continue reading “Right-wing donor Adam Milstein has spent millions of dollars to stifle the BDS movement and attack critics of Israeli policy”

A wounded Palestinian is evacuated during a protest at the Israel-Gaza border fence, east of Gaza City on February 22, 2019. (photo: Mohammed Salem / Reuters)

A powerful Israeli lobby, reporting fatigue and the fear of being accused of anti–Semitism harms coverage, say experts.

By Alasdair | Al Jazeera | Mar 17, 2019

Everyone is terrified of putting a foot wrong and being accused of being anti-Semitic that they daren’t even ask the necessary questions.
— Sarah Helm, journalist

Often dubbed an open-air prison on account of Israel’s and Egypt’s ongoing air, land and sea blockade of the coastal enclave, Gaza is, according to Amnesty International and several other rights groups, on the brink of a humanitarian disaster.

In February, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, highlighted the crisis, saying that the near two million Palestinians of the besieged strip “remain mired in increasing poverty and unemployment, with limited access to adequate health, education, water and electricity”.

But the mainstream media does not always succeed in telling Palestine’s contemporary story with accuracy and empathy.

On Thursday, in the Scottish city of Glasgow, experts discussed the media’s role in covering one of the most pressing and divisive issues in international politics.

Continue reading “Why the media fails to cover Palestine with accuracy and empathy”