by Scott Creighton
'Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.'
A little peek at the secret garden I have been helping with. It's not mine. Just helping a neighbor and wrecking my knees. All in good fun.
Started with just taking spare pavers and laying out this little patio in the midst of the random junk in an unused side yard.
(This genocidal effort by the zionists in Israel has soured the youth against Israel by exposing them for what they are and their propagandists fully understand the implications of such a heel-turn. So, rather than stopping their actions, instead they turn to their hasbara teams to put pressure on school administrators via threats of labeling them as anti-Semites in order to get them to impose strict free speech violations on these very same young people. As if stopping campus demonstrations thru coercion will somehow fix the problem rather than making it worse. Fucking stupid.)
from Mondoweiss
U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, sent a letter on March 27 to officials at Rutgers University castigating “senior administrators, faculty, staff, academic departments and centers, and student organizations” for creating “a pervasive climate of antisemitism,” and an alleged “failure to protect Jewish students.”
This letter is a small part of a larger assault on progressive pedagogy and activism at college campuses which is currently sweeping the country. The House Committee, aiming to silence campus supporters of Palestine, has already targeted some of the nation’s most high-profile private universities and is now turning its attention to public institutions, starting with Rutgers University.
The Rutgers Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter emphatically rejects this transparent attempt to defame growing support for Palestinian rights at Rutgers and across the country as anti-Jewish. We affirm, moreover, our steadfast support for the Rutgers faculty and students who have been maliciously targeted by Foxx in her letter — including Professors Noura Erakat and Sahar Aziz, the Center for Security, Race, and Rights (CSRR), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and others — and call on all Rutgers faculty, staff and alumni, and, above all, administrators to resist this blatant attempt to silence free speech and curtail academic freedom at New Jersey’s flagship university...
read more here
(This coward, Shafik, doesn't want to be the next Ivy League president to lose their job over Israel's zionist genocide in Gaza so she throws her staff under the bus and loudly declares her allegiance to Nazis. Comfort doth make cowards of them all)
from Electronic Intifada
On 17 April, Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, the latest episode in efforts by members of Congress to shut down criticism of Israel on campuses by falsely accusing students, professors and administrators of anti-Semitism.
Three professors were singled out for vitriol and smears: Katherine Franke, Mohamed Abdou and world-renowned scholar Joseph Massad.
Instead of defending the academic freedom of her faculty from what the American Association of University Professors is calling “a new strain of McCarthyism in the US,” Shafik threw them under the bus.
A particular focus of the attacks on Massad, who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history, was an article he wrote for The Electronic Intifada on 8 October 2023, titled “Just another battle or the Palestinian war of liberation?”
For months, Israel supporters have misquoted and misrepresented the article in an attempt to smear Massad and by extension Columbia, and Wednesday’s hearing was no exception.
However, instead of defending Massad’s right to free speech and correcting lawmakers’ lies, Shafik joined the attacks.
“I do condemn his statement. I am appalled by what he said,” Shafik said in response to a question from Representative Tim Walberg. “He has been spoken to.”...
read more here
from Sputnik News
Iran is not planning an immediate retaliatory strike after Friday's attack and it is not yet clear who exactly is behind it, Reuters reported, citing a high-ranked Iranian official.
read more here
(Seems like a couple drones were shot down and since Genocide Joe's admin needed press cover for vetoing Palestinian statehood in UNSC, looks like they tried to make it into some kind of earth shattering news.)
from al Jazeera
Iran’s air defences brought down three small drones over the central city of Isfahan, state media reported, hours after US broadcasters, quoting senior United States officials, said Israeli missiles had hit an Iranian site.
Iranian state television reported explosions in Isfahan as air defences were activated and flights across several areas, including the capital Tehran and Isfahan, were suspended.
Airspace was reopened about four and a half hours after the incident and there were no reports of casualties.
Second Brigadier General Siavash Mihandoust, the top military official in Isfahan, told state media that air defence batteries hit “a suspicious object” and there was no damage...
read more here
from RT
Google has fired 28 workers who protested against the company’s ties with the Israeli government amid the war in Gaza. The US tech giant claimed that defiant employees were disrupting the normal work process.
“Physically impeding other employees’ work and preventing them from accessing our facilities is a clear violation of our policies, and completely unacceptable behavior,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to the media on Wednesday. “After refusing multiple requests to leave the premises, law enforcement was engaged to remove them to ensure office safety.”
According to tech publication the Verge, a group of employees occupied the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in Sunnyvale, California on Tuesday, while another group staged a nearly eight-hour sit-in in the common area of the company’s office in New York. Disgruntled workers also demonstrated outside several Google campuses.
The activist group behind the demonstrations – No Tech for Apartheid – described the firings as illegal and “retaliatory...”read more here
(What'sApp, TOR, NordVPN, Telegram, Twitter, it doesn't matter. They all collect your data and sell you data and will hand it over to any nation, business or cause their owners deem worthy. Don't trust any of them)
from PressTV
A software engineer and blogger has challenged the Meta technology company over accusations that it is sharing users’ data in its WhatsApp messaging application with Israel to help the regime identify targets in the war on the Gaza Strip.
In an article on his blog, Paul Biggar highlighted a recent report by Israeli outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call about the use of the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered database named Lavender in the Gaza onslaught.
He said that a little-discussed detail in the article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same WhatsApp group.
“Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a ‘private’ social network, including ‘end-to-end’ encryption of messages,” he said.
“Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of … targets and their families, in violation of International Humanitarian Law and Meta's publicly stated commitment to human rights.”
Biggar also referred to the “close ties” to Israel of the three most senior Meta officials, including Chief Information Security Officer Guy Rosen, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and former Chief Operating Officer and current board member Sheryl Sandberg...
read more here
(In spite of all their efforts (revealed by The Intercept) to convince the other 14 nations to vote against Palestinian statehood, not a single one of them did, with only two abstaining. Do not misunderstand... months ago Biden's people penned an Op-Ed for WSJ in which they made it clear that they knew Palestine would end up being recognized as a state after all of this. They still understand that. This is all about the current administration not wanting to weaken Israel's position in negotiating what parts of Palestine they get to keep when they finally have to admit defeat.)
from PressTV
The United States has predictably cast its veto against a bid by the Palestinian Authority (PA) for Palestine to be recognized as a full member of the United Nations.
The US, the Israeli regime’s biggest ally, blocked a relevant draft resolution that had been put to vote at the 15-member UN Security Council on Thursday.
Britain and Switzerland abstained, while the remaining 12 Council members voted yes.
"…The draft resolution has not been adopted owing to the negative vote of a permanent member of the Council,” said Vanessa Frazier, permanent representative of Malta, the Council’s rotating president.
Palestine is currently a non-member observer state. An application to become a full UN member needs to be approved by the Security Council and then at least two-thirds of the UN General Assembly.
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said the US “once again demonstrated what they really think of the Palestinians.” “For Washington, they do not deserve to have their own State. They are only a barrier on the path towards realizing the interests of Israel,” he said.
Citing “unclassified US State Department cables,” The Intercept, an online American news organization, reported on Wednesday that Washington was secretly pushing members of the Council into rejecting Palestine’s bid.
“We…urge you not to support any potential Security Council resolution
recommending the admission of ‘Palestine’ as a UN member state, should
such a resolution be presented to the Security Council for a decision in
the coming days and weeks,” one cable read...
read more here
from Mondoweiss
The UK media's coverage of the killing of World Central Kitchen workers shows how much Palestinian life is devalued.
“It may seem wrong that, after more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have perished, it took the deaths of just seven international aid workers to stir Western governments into a sense of outrage, but that is the reality.”
Thus reads the front page of the British newspaper, The Independent.
“These were not Hamas militants,” it continues.
“They were not illicitly transporting Hamas commanders…The seven have
become symbolic of the lawless and reckless manner in which Benjamin
Netanyahu has prosecuted this war.”
The Global North has drawn its red lines, and it is the deaths of World Central Kitchen charity workers from Britain, Australia, Canada, America, and Poland. Six months on, Joe Biden finally called for an “immediate ceasefire.” Across the pond, the UK government summoned the Israeli Ambassador and demanded an investigation into the deaths on April 2. Labour leader Keir Starmer condemned the strike and asserted “international law must be upheld,” and the Scottish National Party requested an immediate recall of parliament over arms sales to Israel. The SNP’s call follows a letter signed by over 130 parliamentarians last week urging the halt of arms exports to Israel.
It is profoundly disturbing to see politicians value the lives of a handful of WCK workers over tens of thousands of Palestinians. Such currents are shared in the UK media. Although over two hundred aid workers have been murdered since October 7, and agencies such as the Palestine Red Crescent Society have been vocal that PRCS “team members have been repeatedly killed despite coordination efforts and wearing the RED Crescent emblem,” it is only with the death of British civilians that the British media has acknowledged Israel’s concerted targeting of aid workers...
read more here