Marilyn's blog

http://warincontext.org/2010/01/04/turkey-helps-viva-palestina-deliver-aid-to-gaza/

Turkish MPs to enter Gaza with Viva Palestina convoy in Egypt
World Bulletin, January 4, 2010

Click here to watch this short documentary about Israel's policies in occupied East Jerusalem.

I've always found Chanukah troubling, and not just because of the way this minor holiday has been blown way out of proportion to provide an opportunity for Jewish Americans to partake in the orgy of Christmas shopping.  What bothers me even more is who and what it celebrates: a group of religious fanatics making war on their fellow Jews.  And yet who can resist candlelight and latkes?

Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress, has in recent years become a strong critic of Israeli Government policies and one of the most well-informed.  His views are often expressed in the London Review of Books. His most recent essay, Israel's Lies, takes on Israel's justiifications for their assault on Gaza.

Check out this relatively new progressive organization, AJJIP.  Good principles and a very useful website.

At a celebration in Tel Aviv of the national poet, Bialik-- from whom the phrase "cast lead" was cynically taken to name the assault on Gaza -- our friend, the filmmaker Udi Aloni, and other well-known cultural personalities, demonstrate outside -- with a powerful alternative poem of Bialik's. Watch Israeli President Shimon Peres try to ignore the truth, here.

In Trying to 'Teach Hamas a Lesson,' revisionist historian and Haaretz journalist Tom Segev visits the historical record to illustrate the futility of Israel's efforts over the years to bludgeon the Palestinians into abandoning their national aspirations.

Read Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy's trenchant critique of the Israeli assault on Gaza: The Neighborhood Bully Strikes Again and his reply to Gaza war supporter, author, A.B. Yehoshua,

On Sunday December 14's Beyond The Pale, I read on air from a chilling news story, A Settler Porgrom from the Receiving End, by Haaretz journalist Avi Issacharoff.  The story had been reprinted in The Forward, which in a lead editorial commenting on the growing settler violence asked rhetorically: "Is this what happens to a 2,000-year-old ethical tradition when its transplanted to a sovereign soil?  Can a moral system with such a profou

Here's the link to Jon Stewart's take on the Presidential candidates speeches at the annual AIPAC conference--Indecision 5768--it says it all.