Campaigns

NOVANEWS   So the incorrigible and tenaciously ignorant Grant Smith/Idrees Ahmad duo have posted a new video on their website: "US-Israel Trade: Espionage, Theft and Secrets." Look out! The lobby is stealing our military technology and hard-earned taxpayer dollars, spending it within a foreign state! Nationalists unite! I also saw this video reproduced on the feed of a leftist friend of mine. A couple comments. Nations and economies are socially constructed categories. As is capital. The question is, who do they serve, and what do they explain? Does a conceptualization of "Israel" stealing "American" taxpayer dollars help us forge a coalition to break Zionism, the Special Relationship, empire, and capitalism? If that were the case, we would be posed with a moral quandary. However, ...

NOVANEWS   More Recent Articles Search MuzzleWatch Prior Mailing Archive The growing campaign to criminalize pro-justice Israeli-Palestinian campus activism and even thought has come to UC Hastings. The Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council are probably crowing over their successful effort to get UC Hastings Law school to distance itself from a March 24 conference devoted to the legal rights of Palestinians called “Litigating Palestine: Can Courts Secure Palestinian Rights?” (Read an excellent piece on the events by Lisa Hajjar over at Jadaliyya.) But the truth is that their efforts to stop–in the name of Jews– a conference promoting legal and human rights for an oppressed people is a profound embarr...

NOVANEWS by crescentandcross Swiss train service is ordered to allow signs that claim ‘Israel was established with violence on Palestinian land’ A Swiss court has ordered the state’s national train service, the SBB, to allow a pro-Palestinian group to hang anti-Israeli posters in Zurich’s central train station, the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger reported on Tuesday. Members of the Palestine Solidarity Action first attempted to hang controversial posters in several locations within the station in 2009, but were ordered by the station’s management to take them down after three days. The posters appeared to argue against Israel’s right to exist. “Sixty-one years of Israel, 61 years of injustice,” the sign read. “A country without a people did not exist in the Middle East for the people ...

NOVANEWS by crescentandcross     Kenza Drider, a burqa-wearing French Muslim, is surrounded by media in the French capital. The recent move by France to impose a ban on burqa, a cover-all headdress some Muslim women choose to wear, has come in contrast with the country’s tolerance of public nudity. The ban came into force on Monday and was followed by immediate arrest of nearly 60 women that defied the ban by walking outside the famed Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, reported a Press TV correspondent from the French capital. A recently-surfaced video, meanwhile, featured a naked male running around the country’s streets while trying to cut a figure as a pole vaulter. Kenza Drider, a young Muslim that left the southern city of Avignon for Paris to participate in a television ...

  Interview with BDS leader Omar Barghouti More Recent Articles Search The Only Democracy?     Democracy Now! shared this: interview with a Palestinian leader of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Omar Barghouti. Jewish Voice for Peace was part of an international campaign to get the U.S. State department to reverse the decision to deny him a visa. Thankfully, the campaign was successful and the U.S. granted him a visa after unconscionably delaying. Hear what you almost missed below. From the trancript, here’s Omar on Juliano Mer-Khamis’s death.   OMAR  BARGHOUTI: It’s   very  hard to  say who  killed him,  because  no Palestinian  group  or individual  had any  interest  in killing him. I mean, any patriot...

NOVANEWS http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/omar-barghouti-j-street’s-ben-ami-has-jews-only-policy-on-bds-debates.html by MAX BLUMENTHAL APRIL 12, 2011 Last night I went to Columbia University to see Omar Barghouti discuss his new book, Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights.For those who don’t know, Barghouti is one of the BDS movement’s most effective strategists and promoters, basing his advocacy on a platform of human rights and international law while explicitly rejecting arcane ideology. His book offers the most in-depth and accessible analysis to date of the movement, its history, and why it is gaining so much momentum. Read an excerpt here. During his talk, Barghouti mentioned that he had approached J Street President Jeremy B...

NOVANEWS A thousand Bravos to SAIA Carleton!   From the press release: However, the university administration’s attempts to muzzle the long list of divestment campaign endorsers – including over 2,000 letter and petition signatories, both the undergraduate and graduate students associations, and more than 25 student clubs, academic workers’ unions and university service centres – deeply backfired.   During one of the busiest academic weeks of the year, more than 400 divestment supporters rallied at every entrance of the building to challenge the illegitimate decision-making process, and to voice a united message: “Board of Governors, we won’t rest, we won’t rest til you divest!” In an inspiring show of solidarity, students and their allies engaged in a diversity of creative prot...

NOVANEWS by crescentandcross   Controversial law will mean country with Europe’s biggest Muslim population will no longer allow any public face covering France – home to Europe’s biggest Muslim population on Monday officially banned women from wearing full-face veils in public places. Other European countries have drawn up bans on the burqa and the niqab but France is the first to risk stirring social tensions by putting one into practice. Belgium, France and the Netherlands may outlaw attire viewed by many as gateway to radical Islam. Muslim leader: The economy, the cost of living and decent housing are more pressing issues than worrying about a burqa ban The law comes into effect at an already fraught moment in relations between the state and France’s Muslim minority, with ...

NOVANEWS Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem Chair of West Midland PSC   France is home to Europe’s largest Muslim community. French police have detained two Muslim women for wearing Islamic veils across their faces after a ban on burqa came into force. Authorities say the women were not held for their veil but for participating in an unauthorized protest against the ban. “Today was not about arresting people because of wearing the veil. It was for not having respected the requirement to declare a demonstration,” said police spokesman Alexis Marsan. French police arrested 59 people on Saturday who turned up for the protest against the veil ban. Police received a guide on how to implement the ban last week. Paris has declared that any woman — French or foreigner — who wears a niqab ...

NOVANEWS