The Washington Post has the most aggressive paywall on the internet and still has the nerve to declare that democracy dies in darkness.
It's almost like the talking points were lined up in advance. (And "most people" don't in fact spend at least five dollars a day on a cup of coffee.)
Imagine deploring the theft of labor in order to defend a company owned by Jeff Bezos.
(Note how so many blue-checks, with all the insight of a heat pump, are devoted to the self-serving notion that regular people, currently in revolt, are obligated to subsidize a profit-making venture for the world's richest man, all in the name of democracy.)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
This is exactly why academic boycott of Israel is justified and necessary. Palestinian scholars and students suffer arbitrary regimes of confinement and severe restrictions of movement.
What reason does the Zionist regime have to prevent this young man from acquiring a study visa? Because it can. Because it's capricious and ruthless. Because it dispenses rights according to religion.
.@PENamerica: please look into the violation of this writer's right to movement and expression. Unfortunately, it's a common occurrence for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
Okay, we're getting close to publication time for the new English translation of Ghassan Kanafani's "On Zionist Literature" (July 8). If you'll be so kind as to humor me, a few observations about the process and the book itself.
I didn't contribute much labor to the project--I wrote a short intro--and was only tangentially involved, but I have a decent sense of how the book came into being. It's a more complex process than you might imagine.
It's difficult to overstate how much work @Louis_Allday (editor) and Mahmoud Najib (translator) put into the project. It wasn't easy tracking down sources (many obscure) or doing the fact-checking on a text over fifty years old. They deserve our applause.
You've probably heard the phrase "the Palestine exception to the first amendment" or "the Palestine exception to free speech." (Or simply "the Palestine exception.") I've long been curious about it and finally got around to researching its provenance. This is what I found:
The phrase doesn't simply denote an inconsistent application of "free speech" where criticism of Israel is concerned. It also suggests a systemic absence of civil and political rights for Palestinians in the United States and Canada (and in some cases Europe).
There's a LOT to say about "rights" and "liberties" and the judicial system and their utility to a viable socialist/communist politics, especially in relation to colonized peoples, but I'll prattle about those issues another day. Moving on...
Career is never a valid excuse to betray the downtrodden.
"But she wants to run for Senate!"
"But she needs to appease Pelosi!"
"But she has to get reelected!"
These tired excuses are profoundly disdainful of Palestinians.
Why should we suffer to facilitate AOC's bourgeois aspirations?
Why are you asking us to in the first place?
I don't give two shits about her political career, or anyone else's. Serving empire requires ghoulish calculations. Plenty choose not to serve for this very reason.
Israelis had to invent a language, a cuisine, a paleo-history, a nationality, and a folk culture from a set of mythologies about the ancient past and then have the goddamn nerve to declare that Palestinians are a fiction.
For the many left-liberal types objecting to my comment:
First of all, if you deem that comment "antisemitic," then you're not merely a bad faith interlocutor; you're also resorting to the tired Zionist tactic of trying to punish Palestinians who refuse to cede our existence.
Otherwise, a few notes:
Re modern Hebrew. I don't deem the language illegitimate. Its revival outside the context of Zionism is a wonderful thing. Within the context of Zionism, though, it was an undeniably political choice indivisible from a project of colonial invention.
This young Palestinian, brilliant and kind, recently graduated college with honors and began a good job. A fanatical Trump-loving Zionist account doxed him and snitched him out to his employer. Now he faces severe recrimination. A few thoughts below...
"pretty boy" has an agile mind and a big heart. He's somebody our community can be extremely proud of. This is precisely the kind of person Zionists like to target for punishment, for they abhor our talent, they fear our pride, they dread our joy.
I was fired from a job in 2014 for tweets that were falsely deemed "antisemitic." I'll never forget the unadulterated dread that overwhelmed me when I first learned of an organized Zionist defamation campaign.