....subtitled, goodbye Tom J, who recently joined "the banned" at Daily Kos.

Strikes of political blogs are generally only symbolic protests and this one is no different. A week ago, a Daily Kos diarist was banned from the site by an administrator, for no apparent reason, which ticked off Arab and Palestinian bloggers, and their sympathizers. So one of them called for a strike, and others joined in.

The banning was of Tom J. Tom J was a regular diarist at Daily Kos who provided factual diaries about daily events taking place in Israel and Palestine against its indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians. Diaries about the effects of Israel's occupation, the enforced colonization it has been conducting for over 40 years, stories about killings, house demolitions, wrecking of farmlands and orchards, and deprivation of water resources, all for the purpose of expanding Jewish settlements, the towns and cities Israel has built over the years on stolen Palestinian lands.

Tom J provided a daily account of the horrors taking place through news stories, pictures, and videos, the kind of reporting that is usually censored from mainstream US media. Without implying conspiracy, Tom J is also the proprietor of the site, STOP AIPAC.

By simply revealing the reality, Tom J continually disturbed the large gang of right wing Zionists who blog at Daily Kos, viewed his diaries as Israel-bashing, and him as part of the "Israel is always wrong" crowd. However, under the brutal conditions of the Palestinian occupation/colonialism, there has never been an "Israel is right" diary posted on Daily Kos  that justified Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians. Diaries about left wing peace activism inside Israel or Palestine or in the US, especially among Jewish peace groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, recently condemned as anti-Israel by the ADL, have always been considered Israel-bashing, strange as it may seem.

Emergency Committee For Israel's Joe Sestak Ad

Ad for Mary Jo Kilroy (same for Jim Himes and Glenn Nye)

Ad on Rep. Rush Holt

Picked up this blast of the ADL, and its bigoted leader, Abe Foxman, a little late, but since the ADL has joined the right wing pro-Israel lobby and will presumably continue with its anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Islamic diatribes, it seemed to be a good place to start understanding the ADL. This is not the ADL of old, you understand, which had been active since 1903 as a force fighting anti-Semitism in the US, and now in Europe. It is the new ADL that is willing to partake of bigotry itself if it believe that it will in some way benefit Israel.

The subtitle says it all: "Abe Foxman calls Jewish Voice for Peace one of the "top 10 anti-Israel groups in America"

Self-haters the JVPers are no doubt, all of them. Here's some of the Salon War Room text, this time not written by Glenn Greenwald, but by Justin Elliott.

Latest UN map of the West Bank including Jerusalem.

...only a greater Israel, and Palestinians will need the int'l community in the coming fight against apartheid

"Empire" host Marwan Bishara speaks of the "Zionist lobby" and the current Isreali-Palestinian peace talks with Nabil Shaath of the P.A., former negotiator Rob Malley, and John Mearsheimer, co-author of The Israel Lobby.

The headline from Mondoweiss (via Haaretz) read,

150 American actors, writers, directors and artists support Israeli actors' West Bank settlement boycott

More than 150 American actors, writers, directors and other artists signed a letter of support for the Israeli actors who declared they would not perform in Ariel, located in the West Bank.

Among them are well known TV actress Cynthia Nixon, playwright Tony Kushner, 21-time Tony winner for productions of "The Pajama Game" to "Phantom of the Opera" Harold Prince, star of the film "Yentl," Mandy Patinkin, and Cameri co-founder Theodore Bikel.

The actual letter with the list of signatories has yet to be published.

What is being resisted in the words of one Palestinian activist is Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in the Jordan Valley. That's the portion of the West Bank shown to the right in light yellow in the map below. When Netanyahu speaks of 'no preconditions' for starting peace negotiations, what he really means is that, not only will settlement expansion resume full throttle, but ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem will likewise continue.  

The Jordan Valley is located in a stretch of land adjacent to the Jordan river up to the base of a mountain ridge on the eastern side of the West Bank. It runs from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the Dead Sea in the south.

.....'hopeless' was Huffington Post's rendering of the New York Times coverage of the recently announced resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, which spoke of 'scant hopes from the beginning.'

Who cannot agree?

Last week, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy, speaking in Dundee, Scotland on a tour sponsored by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, talked about Israel's abandonment of the pretense of diplomacy in favor of a policy of provocation and raw military power, with the ultimate aim of denying Palestinians any chance of forming their own independent state.

And a week before that, Chris Hedges, speaking at a fund raiser for the US Boat to Gaza campaign, called the "peace process (a) cynical, one-way route to the crushing of the Palestinians as a people."

Levy is really talking about the racist Likud agenda of the present government, which will screw Palestinians by offering them a group of Bantustans inside of what will become Greater Israel, the ultimate Likud goal.

The cynical title of this report is [a slight variation on] Jeff Halper's way of introducing us to the latest news on the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel-Palestine, while the Israeli PM Netanyahu claims an interest in negotiating peace. President Obama released videotaped Ramadan wishes last Friday, sending "best wishes to Muslims in America and around the world" and wishing them "Ramadan Kareem" on "behalf of the American people, including Muslim communities in all 50 states." 'Kareem' variously means 'generous, bountiful, gracious, noble,'. in short, 'Happy Ramadan.'

But for Palestinians, most of whom are Muslim, residing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem it is not a happy time.

Earth Report - 2003 - Conflict over water in Israel/Palestine.

Crossposted from OpenLeft (USA)

This fucking guy is really something. He recently said that he knows how to politik! Is this what he means?

Obama's Ground Zero Mosque Comments: President Recalibrates

My intention was to simply let people know what I thought. Which was that in this country, we treat everybody equally in accordance with the law. Regardless of race. Regardless of religion. I was not commenting on and will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding. That's what our country's about and I think it's very important that as difficult as some of these issues are, we stay focused on who we are as a people and what our values are all about.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

Apparently inspired by the ADL-Ground Zero mosque controversy and the appeals of prominent Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Tea Partiers, a wave of anti-Islamic bigotry seems to be spreading across the country. As reported by Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times,