Wednesday, December 20, 2017

Ahed Tamimi Arrested | What Can You Do | 'Hands Off Jerusalem' | Pence, Persona non Grata | Song for Ibrahim | More ..

The Palestine Chronicle
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Weekly Newsletter. Dec 19-26, 2017. Visit our website: English; French. To help us, click here. 
TWO VIDEOS AND AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE

What can you do to help in these critical times

Dear Readers, 

There are two short videos we would like you to watch. First,  THIS VIDEO of a speech about Jerusalem by our Editor, Dr. Ramzy Baroud that went viral on social media. And, second the video below produced by our contributor, Romana Rubeo as a reminder of what we are all fighting for. 



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Team Trump Add Insult to Injury for the Palestinians

US vice-president Mike Pence. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth
It is tempting to interpret the announcement this week of a delay until the new year in US vice-president Mike Pence's visit to the Middle East as the ultimate travel warning. It follows an eruption of regional unrest over Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
During protests last Friday, Israeli occupation forces killed four Palestinians and injured more than 250.
US officials, however, are not worried about Pence's safety. In fact, predictions of a third Palestinian uprising in response to Trump's Jerusalem declaration may be premature.
After decades of flagrant US bias towards Israel, Trump has confirmed to Palestinians only what they already knew. Some even grudgingly welcomed his candor. They hope he has finally silenced US claims to being an "honest broker" in an interminable "peace process" that has simply bought time for Israel to entrench the occupation.
The Palestinians' anger towards Israel and the US is a slow-burning fuse. It will detonate at a moment of their choosing, not of Trump's.
Rather, the hesitation in Washington over the vice-president's visit reflects the messy new diplomatic reality that the White House has unleashed.
Pence was due here to smooth the path to Trump's long-promised peace plan and to highlight the plight of Christians in the Middle East. The door has now been firmly shut in his face on both counts. Palestinian officials have declared a boycott of him, as have Christian leaders in Palestine and Egypt.
Instead of cancelling Pence's visit or exploiting the extra breathing space to try to reverse the damage, the bull-headed Trump administration has indicated it is eager to break more of the china.
Denied access to Palestinian officials, his schedule will focus on Israel. Following a diplomatic precedent set by his boss in May, Pence is due to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem's occupied Old City and immediately below the Al Aqsa mosque plaza.
His visit, however, has been billed as "official", not private. And it will be invested with far graver symbolism, given Trump's designation of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
To add insult to injury, and in contravention of claims that Washington will not pre-determine the borders of a divided Jerusalem before peace talks, an unnamed senior US official gave Pence's visit an even more troubling context. He noted that there was no scenario in which the US did not see the Western Wall ending up in Israel's hands.
The US policy change on Jerusalem has been a hammer blow to the three main pillars supporting the cause of Palestinian statehood: the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and the Arab states.
The biggest loser is Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Washington stripped him of his emperor's clothes: he now heads a Palestinian government-in-waiting that is unlikely ever to be attached to a state, viable or otherwise.
The Arab states, which assumed they were the key to a much-touted "outside-in" strategy, creating a regional framework for peace, have been deprived of the single issue - Jerusalem - that matters most to them.
Egypt scrambled to help Abbas at the weekend by drafting a UN security resolution to rescind any change of status for Jerusalem. But an inevitable US veto made the move moot.
And Europe, which has played "good cop" to the bullying US one, has been exposed as complicit in its partner's rogue behavior.
Europe's predicament is underscored by its peace-making rhetoric. It has long cried wolf, warning that a moment would soon arrive when a two-state solution was no longer feasible, when a temporary occupation morphed into permanent apartheid.
Now that the heart of a Palestinian state has been publicly devoured by the wolf, what will Europe and Abbas do?
The signs are that they will pretend nothing has changed - if only out of fear of what might fill the void if peace-making were exposed as a hollow charade.
But it is precisely the pretense of a peace process that has kept Palestinians chained to an illusion. The perpetuation of false hope about statehood does not benefit Palestinians; it preserves a calm that aids Israel.
That was why the White House accused Abbas of walking away from dialogue last week. But only a fool keeps on appealing to the better nature of a deaf thug.
The burden now falls on the PA, the Arab states and Europe to accept the new reality, and assert a policy independent of the US.
Some Palestinian leaders, like Hanan Ashrawi, already understand this. "Trump's move is a new era," she said last week. "There's no going back."
Palestinian goals and strategies must be reassessed. Nonetheless, the pressures for a return to the "peace" business as usual will be intense.
Ordinary Palestinians in Jerusalem may be the first to signal the new direction of struggle - one that recognizes that a Palestinian state is dead and buried.
In recent years, growing numbers have started applying, as Israeli law entitles them to, for Israeli citizenship. Israel has twisted and turned to delay honoring its commitment, even as it calls Jerusalem its "united capital".
Palestinians will have to shame Israel, the US and the watching world by adopting the tools of an anti-apartheid struggle - of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience - to gain equal rights in a single state.
At the moment, the undercurrents of Palestinian rage chiefly swirl below the surface. But they will rise in time, and the consequences of Trump's deed will become all too apparent.
(A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)
- Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit his website: www.jonathan-cook.net.

Whitewashing: The Media's Two Narratives on Terrorism

Students, Deah Barakat (R), his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha and her sister, Razan Abu-Salha (not pictured) were killed by Craig Hicks on Feb 10, 2015.

By Ramzy Baroud
Within hours after Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi immigrant, allegedly detonated a pipe bomb in New York City on December 11, severely injuring himself and wounding four others, a most comprehensive official and media narrative emerged.
The formulation of the narrative concerning Ullah's motives, radicalization and assumed hate for the US was so immaculate, one would have thought it took authorities months, not hours to compile such demanding evidence.
Strangely, Ullah's own family was surprised by the accusation concerning their son.
However, the exact nature of what truly happened matters little. Not only was Ullah instantly found guilty by the media, all Muslims and immigrants, in fact, were.
Following each attack of this nature, Muslims in the US mobilize to fend off accusations concerning their faith, their values and their allegiance to the country in which they live.
But it is not an easy fight to win. When President Donald Trump is constantly tweeting anti-Muslim propaganda, while his administration exploits every opportunity to advance anti-immigrant initiatives, the beleaguered small community of Muslims in the US can do little to stop the rising tide of Islamophobia.
The media has played a major role in propagating the negative attitudes towards Muslims and Islam, which, in turn, provide the much-needed public support for the government to continue with its anti-Muslim measures.
Compare such attitudes with the way in which mass shootings carried out by white American men is communicated by the government and media alike.
Although mass killings by white males have proven to be the deadliest in the US, the discussion generated in the media and official discourses are centered mostly on mental illness of white attackers. In other words, there is consensus that violence perpetrated by members of the white community is not inherent to that community's race, culture or religion.
Five years after Adam Lazna killed 20 first graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, many are still at work trying to analyze Lanza's supposed mental illness that drove him to commit such a reprehensible act.
The fact that Lanza was carrying more than 30 pounds of weapons seemed superfluous. Many pundits and politicians still refuse to engage in a discussion about guns.
The 'mental health' argument in also championed by Trump himself.
"Mental health is your problem here", Trump said in a statement in response to a mass shooting by Devin Kelly, a white male who killed more than two dozen people in a Texas church last November.
Resorting to easy answers when white men kill is now the norm. Killers of other races, skin colors and nationalities, however, get entirely different treatment.
As soon as the news emerged of Ullah's alleged bombing in New York, the Trump administration moved in full force to target immigrants. It called on Congress to end the diversity immigration lottery program, and to also shoot down chain migration - a government program that allows for easier immigration based on family connection.
The incessant media coverage and stubborn government targeting of Muslims have led to an unprecedented hysteria which, in turn, led to numerous incidents of Muslims being targeted because of their faith. Many accounts  of Muslims being thrown out of airplanes, often kicking and screaming, is becoming a fact of life in the US.
When Khairuldeen Makhzoomi was kicked out of a Southwest Airlines flight last year for speaking Arabic on the phone, the agent who escorted him reprimanded him for using his mother tongue in public considering "today's political climate."
Anila Dualatzai was dragged down the aisle of a plane heading to Los Angeles. She was "profiled, abused, interrogated, detained, and subjected to false reporting and the trauma of racist, vitriolic public shaming precisely because she is a woman, a person of color, and a Muslim," her attorney told the Washington Post.
While this hysteria plays well into the hands of opportunistic politicians like Trump, actual facts suggest that violence is hardly a Muslim phenomenon.
Newsweek reported on statistics showing that white men have committed most of the country's mass killings. Since 1982, the "majority of mass shootings - 54 percent - were committed by white men," numbers show.
Stephen Paddock, the 64-year-old white man who massacred 58 people and wounded hundreds more at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas last October, was only one of an ever-growing list.
Countless government officials and journalists have fanned out to find out why Paddock would carry out such a heinous act, as if a white man's violence is a rare event in a country supposedly threatened by Blacks, Mexicans and Muslims.
Yet the truth is that the white man's profile is the most violent in the US.
"White men commit mass shootings out of a sense of entitlement," John Haltiwanger wrote inNewsweek.
Research conducted by Eric Madfis from the University of Washington argued in 2014 that, in the US, "middle-class Caucasian heterosexual males in their teenage years and in middle age commit mass murder ... in numbers disproportionately high relative to their share of the population."
He ascribed this finding to "white entitlement" and "heterosexual masculinity", among other reasons.
Still, a whole race, gender and religion are not held suspect; a rule that applies to some and excludes others.
Certainly, anti-Arab and Muslim sentiment in the US has been around for generations, but it has risen sharply in the last two decades. Arabs and Muslims have become an easy scapegoat for all of America's instabilities and failures.
But demonizing and humiliating brown-skinned men and women is certainly not the way out of the economic, political and foreign policy quagmires which American ruling elites have invited upon their country.
Such unlawful and undemocratic behavior may feed anti-Muslim hysteria a little longer, and give the likes of Trump more fodder for their useless efforts in targeting innocent men and women. But, in the long run, it will do the country much harm, damaging its democratic institutions and contributing to the culture of violence, founded on entitled white men touting guns and killing innocent people.
- Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and editor of Palestine Chronicle. His forthcoming book is 'The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story' (Pluto Press, London). Baroud has a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and is a Non-Resident Scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California Santa Barbara. His website is www.ramzybaroud.net.
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Israeli Army Arrests Iconic Palestinian Teenager Ahed Tamimi

December 19, 2017
An Israeli army unit composed of 20 vehicles raided early Tuesday the village of Nabi Saleh, northwest of Ramallah, and detained a 17-year-old girl, according to Mohammad Tamimi, a local activist. He told WAFA that [...]

From Gaza to Jerusalem

December 10, 2017
By Haidar Eid - Gaza US president Donald Trump has taken a decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Forget about international law, UN and Security Council Resolutions, Arab and Muslim reaction! The President of the [...]
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