First an excerpt, and then some of the readers' comments. They'll set your hair on fire. Lynfield:

“They celebrate and we cry,“ said Mohammed Ibrahim Mawalid, 85, a resident of the Old City. “They celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem as they view it. But we remember the disasters.”

One of the disasters that still haunts Mawalid is a mass demolition that eradicated his old Palestinian neighborhood. It was carried out at Judaism’s holiest site on the last day of the Six Day War and the first day of the ceasefire. It was just a few days after David Rubinger shot his iconic picture of young awestruck Israeli soldiers standing before the ancient stones at the Western Wall just after having taken over the area.

The soldiers then were standing in the Mughrabi Quarter, which encompassed most of what is today the long, wide plaza in front of the Western Wall. Its destruction is an event either unknown or repressed by most Israelis and Jews who visit the Kotel. It is deleted from public discourse about the Old City. But for some Palestinians it is still a sore wound.

Mawalid’s home once stood in this area, along with 135 other buildings, including three mosques and two zawiyas, or pilgrim hospices. Palestinian historians say that some of the Mughrabi Quarter buildings were more than seven centuries old, dating back to the time of Saladin’s son, al-Afdal. But Israeli bulldozers erased them June 10 and June 11, on the orders of Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, to enable large numbers of worshippers to come to the Western Wall for Shavuot prayers the following week. Now, not even a plaque marks the site. It is as if the Mughrabi Quarter never existed.

pleepleus: They can return to live in the former Mughrabi district when the Temple Mount is returned to its rightful owners. Our holiest site is not the Kotel, but the mount behind it. 

 

Art Wegweiser: Nothing like a religious argument to support stomping on the rights of others who are not members of ones particular group of chosen. Hardly a week goes by when the "democracy" called Israel does not demonstrate reprehensible tyrannical and autocratic actions and violations of international standards of decency. Whenever I am asked, as a Jew, about my possible support of Israel, I point out that it is constantly diminishing and evolving into disgust and the disgrace of a once noble enterprise.

 

Matt613: What you are criticizing is not a religious argument. It is a statement of fact. Without the demolition, the Kotel would still be next to a miserable alley with little or no access to Jews, due to the confined space. I suppose you think that it is better to limit access. Be that as it may Governments all over the world take property to provide access to areas they deem important. In a lot of nations the owners are not even entitled to compensation for the taking. Where is your criticism of those practices? Or do you feel Israel is the only nation that deserve condemnation?

 

Zubelee: And we fell the pain of the mosques on our Holy site. No one asked the 'religion of peace' to build in front of the Kotel as well as making it into a garbage dump.If anyone doesn't like it give it a thousand thumbs downs.Oh BTW i thought Philistines were always there but i guess I'm wrong [These are people who in a few hours lost everything. We lost an eight-centuries-long tradition of North Africans and Andalusians in Jerusalem that was an important element of historic Jerusalem.”] Also along the road to Jerusalem many of the Arabs' aren't Arabs at all but Bosnian muslim settled there by the Turks '

 

Melvin Bonzarelli: The 'displaced' Arab residents can always move to Gaza or Ramallah. There are plenty of other filthy, overcrowded slums in those places. They'll feel right at home.

 

Lemondrop613:  When the Old City was in their hands the Jordanian Army blew up 28 synagogues but the Forward sheds not a tear for them.The liberals always reserve their tears for those who would (Rachmana L'tzlan do us in in two seconds)....

 

Jerusalem Arabs are enemies of Israel .Having lived there I can tell you from first hand experience this is true. The oldest and most sacred cemetery to the Jewish People is on the Mt. of Olives. Vandals hit it everyday. The Forward could not give a rats snot about that.Only running articles on how we need to put olives on our seder table to honor the terrorists and those who support them. And you are wrong.The Arabs of Jerusalem do support HAMAS. Why wouldn't they?

 

Israeli authorities have implemented another way to impede free access to the occupied Palestinian territories for American travelers.

Haaretz’s Amira Hass reported over the weekend that Israel is now forbidding “tourists from the United States and other countries to enter the territories under Palestinian Authority control without a military entry permit – but it has not explained the application process to them.”

Hass’s report was published as opposition mounts to the Senate bill that grants Israelis visa-free travel to the U.S. while also codifying Israel's practice of denying U.S. travelers entry on the basis of security concerns. That Senate bill exposes a galling aspect of the "special relationship." All the military aid and diplomatic support to Israel doesn’t shield Americans from being routinely discriminated against based on their political affiliations or ethnic background. And Israel can count on the U.S. not putting up a fight. Having the whole Congress behind you means never having to think twice about these actions. 

The policy Hass exposes is yet another example of Israeli authorities’ free reign at border crossings, which includes detaining, interrogating and deporting Americans.

Here are some of the details in the Haaretz report: Christian clerics from the United States told Hass they can’t go meet Palestinians in the West Bank because they signed an official Israeli declaration at Ben-Gurion Airport stating that they need a special military permit to visit those areas. (Their mistake, apparently, was that they were honest about wanting to visit the West Bank.) The catch is that the Israeli authorities wouldn’t explain to them how to get these permits.

Hass provides the text of the document the Christian clerics signed:

1. I understand that this permit is granted me for entry and visitation within Israel only, and it has been explained to me that I am unable to enter the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority without advance authorization from the Territory Actions Coordinator and I agree to act in accordance with these regulations.

2. I understand that in the event that I enter any area under the control of the Palestinian Authority without the appropriate authorization all relevant legal actions will be taken against me, including deportation and denial of entry into Israel for a period of up to ten years

Americans wishing to visit illegal settlements in the West Bank do not have to sign such a document, an Israeli attorney told Hass.

It's another element of Israel’s crackdown on foreign travel in occupied Palestine. In January 2013, Hass reported that Israel renewed restrictions on foreigners already living in the West Bank by stamping their passports with the words “Judea and Samaria.” The move, which was first revealed by the Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah, aims to prohibit foreigners in the West Bank--some of whom are Palestinians who lived abroad or people who married Palestinians--from visiting East Jerusalem or Israel.

The report on the Christian clerics notes that the practice of requiring tourists wishing to go to the West Bank to sign a declaration “was discontinued and renewed only at the beginning of this year.” But I had to sign a similar declaration--perhaps not exactly the same one--in January 2011.

The background to why I had to sign an Israeli government document stating I would not go to the areas under the Palestinian Authority’s control begins in early 2010.

I had joined a small delegation part of the larger Gaza Freedom March and entered the besieged territory to spend a few days there. Afterwards, I naively thought it was a good idea to try to enter Israel through the Taba border crossing to make my way to the other part of occupied Palestine I had not seen. I was denied entry; my assumption is that it was because I had been to Gaza.

The next year, I flew into Ben-Gurion Airport to join a human rights delegation traveling through the West Bank. I had arrived with a brand new passport, but it was to no avail: Israeli authorities detained me at the airport and held me for a good five hours. They immediately knew I had been to Gaza in the past and wanted to go to the West Bank, and so I admitted that fact after initially concealing it. I was questioned by an Israeli official who told me he was a Ministry of Defense employee. He mentioned the word terrorism and wanted to know who I met with in Gaza. He asked me to write down the names of who I was going to meet with in the West Bank; I scribbled down some names but nothing that would truly reveal my friends.

The interrogation occurred within the first hour I was there, and then four slow hours passed by with no word from Israeli authorities. At that point I was steeling myself for the experience of deportation. But eventually, they asked me to come into a separate room. They furnished a piece of paper with a declaration similar to the one that the Christian clerics Hass reports on had to sign. I looked it over; by then I was desperate to get out of Ben-Gurion. It said that I will agree not to enter areas that the Palestinian Authority controlled. I signed it. And then I made my way to Ramallah--there was no way for Israel to enforce the declaration I put my name on.

My experience could have been much worse; my whiteness probably had a lot to do with why I was not deported. It was a very tiny slice of what people like Nour Joudah went through. And the Senate bill being pushed by Barbara Boxer will give a red, white and blue seal of approval to the Israeli crackdown on U.S. travel to the West Bank--which means that we can expect many more stories like Joudah’s and the Christian clerics', with the U.S. not doing a thing about it.
 

A thousand people from around the country will descend on Ft. Meade, Maryland, to show their support for Army whistleblower PFC Bradley Manning in a mass demonstration on Saturday, June 1. They will use marching, theater, creative visuals and other actions to protest against his imprisonment two days before his court-martial trial is set to begin, on June 3, 2013.

 

Speakers for the rally will include Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower; Ethan McCord, the soldier who saved the children attacked in the Collateral Murder video released by WikiLeaks; Col. Ann Wright, the most senior state department official to resign in protest of the Iraq war; Birgitta Jonsdottir, Icelandic parliamentarian and co-producer of the Collateral Murder video; Sarah Shourd, hiker imprisoned by Iran turned prisoner rights activists; and Lt. Dan Choi, prominent anti-Don't Ask Don't Tell activist featured on the Rachel Maddow show.

 

Buses will be coming to the event from Syracuse, NY, New York City, Philadelphia, Willimantic, CT, New Brunswick, NJ, Baltimore and Washington D.C. and more supporters will be joining them from across the country and the world.

 

Bradley Manning's actions exposed the true number of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S.-supported torture in Iraq, and a pattern of corporate influence on U.S. foreign policy worldwide. Despite pleading guilty to charges of mishandling classified information, which could put him in jail for up to 20 years, the military is pursuing 22 charges including one count of “aiding the enemy,” which carries a sentence of life without parole. By the time Manning’s trial begins on June 3, he will have been in prison for more than three years since his arrest in May 2010.

Pauli sent me early notification of this Shmuel Rosner NY Times blog post on the Israeli al-Dura report.  Rosner says he now believes (sort of) the report after years of questioning Israeli attempts to debunk the original French news story.   But the Rosner post sheds little light on why he or anyone would now believe the Israelis.

The conclusion of the Rosner's post is interesting because the writer is basically a shill for the his country's right-wing, but even he cannot fully swallow the hasbara hook.

This evolution [from skeptism to belief in Israeli version of al-Dura video] brings me relief: I want to be able to trust what my government says. But that carries its own problem: what about my own motivations? Have I really been swayed by the new evidence, or am I finally giving in to a deep desire of letting Israel off the hook?

Yesterday the online Times removed Isabel Kershner's controversial pro-Israel piece on the al-Dura report from the news section and placed it in the "Lens" blog.  This seemed like an attempt to distance the news department from Kershner's advocacy journalism.  However with today's inclusion of the Rosner post, it seems more like pro-Israel advocacy is alive and well at the Times.  

Jamal al-Dura, Mohammed's father, has called for an international investigation of the incident and is willing to open his son's grave and exhume the body for an autopsy.  Neither Kershner nor Rosner mentioned al-Dura's offer in their pieces.  

Maybe these writers should get on Dubai Pauli's news mailing list.

Or they should read this Facebook post by Palestinian Authority spokesperson, Nour Odeh: 

I will not dignify the report purporting that the brutal murder of Mohamad Al-Dura thirteen years ago was a Palestinian hoax - so I will not share it on my timeline. I will say this however: This panel and its fantastical report is a reflection of a revolting and senseless attitude of supremacy and racism against Palestinians; to have the audacity to claim that a Palestinian father faked the shocking images of his son's killing and to maintain this lie for 13 years with the supposed active participation of the entire society, is a statement of the dehumanization and demonization of the Palestinian as a human being and of the entire society. Mohamed Al-Dura was killed with chilling inhumanity; that image will haunt the perpetrators always and all the panels and so-called experts cannot and will not change the fact: Thirteen years ago, we all lost a piece of our humanity when that boy died in his father's helpless arms. On a professional note, it is dismaying and so very disappointing that media should be involved, directly or indirectly, in disseminating this kind of preposterous propaganda whose racism cannot be ignored, without so much as questioning the validity or motive of these false claims. Final note: the dark history of this on-going belligerent military occupation of Palestine does not need any hoax or staged incidents to expose its brutality; that evidence is clear for those who refuse to be blinded or side-tracked by hate, propaganda, and spin. May God rest your soul Mohamad....

Currently, more courses at major colleges and universities throughout North America teach about the destruction of European Jewish culture than about the culture that was destroyed. As a result, young Jews (as well as many older ones) see the experience of Jews in Europe as a never-ending history of constant despair and sadness. Yiddishkayt sees this situation—so far from the truth of actual, lived experience—as a tragedy.

Sounds fascinating, if I was in L.A. I would definetly check out them out. While educating Jews on the cultural legacy of life in Europe doesn't sound like it should be particulary controversial in the Jewish community, evidently it is.  Yiddishkayt's Executive Director, Rob Adler-Peckerar, has an interesting blog post up on their site explaining how Jewish philanthropies have ignored the Helix program because it does not focus on the Holocaust or Israel.

Adler-Peckerar writes:

Even though philanthropies’ “giving priorities” are often slow to change, responses to our program have made clear just how tied the Jewish establishment is to a particularly parochial and insular view of Jewish life, so detached from the mainstream and from our history.

Over the past year:

• A major holocaust organization reported that even though their mission is to preserve the memory of European Jews so “that the world does not forget both how they lived and how they died,” our program did not include “enough death.”

• We were told that funding a program that explored Jewish history in Europe would be “improbable” if it did not include a visit to Israel.

• For our focus on the variety of Jewish life in the diaspora and claim that there had undoubtably always been a spectrum of religious belief among Jews — as among any people — we were called (in the Los Angeles Times), “just stupid” and “really sick.”

• Another funding organization responded to our statement that “the past 70 years of Jewish history needs to be placed in a context of a millennium of diaspora Jewish life,” by saying that it is too much to ask for such a major change in the way mainstream Jewish history is presented and to lower expectations about what Jewish educators can accommodate.

• We have received numerous angry emails, demanding to know why we were going to take students “to the land of killers,” often including — without any sense of irony — an urging rather to take students to the place that has “always been central to Jewish life, Israel.”

I just had to look up that Los Angeles Times article to get some context. Here it is:

"There are people who aren't interested in the synagogue route, and they don't connect to Judaism through religion, or they don't connect to Judaism through Israel," said Aaron Paley, who founded Yiddishkayt in 1995 and whose family is providing the seed money for the Helix program. "This is a different way to connect with who you are."

Adler Peckerar, a former professor of Jewish literature and culture at the University of Colorado, goes further, arguing that the Jewish religion has never been central to Jewish identity.

"I think the idea that Judaism is equal to what a Jew is — that a Jew is someone who practices Judaism — is a totally new phenomenon," he said in an interview at Yiddishkayt's offices in the mid-Wilshire district. A poster of the Yiddish actress Molly Picon peered over his shoulder.

Statements like that can leave some people sputtering in exasperation.

"It's just stupid," said Allan Nadler, director of the Jewish studies program at Drew University in New Jersey and a former director of research for YIVO, a widely respected Yiddish research institution.

Before the 19th century, Nadler said, "everything one did was governed by the religion."

Even in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Nadler argued, most Jews remained religiously observant. "There's something really sick about the attempt to rewrite Jewish history and establish that this secular Yiddishkayt was ever a normative form of Jewish identity," he said.

I'm not a historian of Eastern European Jewish life, so I can't really judge Nadler's claim, but I think the seed of some people's anger toward the Helix program is revealed in this line from the same Times article:

"It just … sounded so different and so interesting that I just had to take advantage of it," said Tessa Nath, a first-year student at UCLA who gave up plans to go to Israel so she could participate in the trip.

Adler-Peckerar concludes his blog post:

Today’s Jewish establishment, for reasons political, cynical, but more often thoughtless, has become fully devoted to a vision of Jewish history that attempts to unite under a banner of victimhood. Under this banner, it would seem, future generations can be bullied into supporting militarism and chauvinism, scared into religious observance, or guilted into acts of differentiation and group identity at the expense of understanding a common vision of humanity and of a better, more loving world.

The Israeli government has just published a report of its investigation into French TV station France 2’s controversial coverage of 12-year-old Palestinian Muhammad al-Durrah’s death during rioting in the Gaza Strip on 30 September 2000 and the disputed claim that he was killed by a shot fired from Israeli positions.

The report’s release came three days ahead today’s announcement by a Paris appeal court that it will finally issue its ruling on 26 June in the defamation case between France 2’s Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, and Media Rating founder Philippe Karsenty, who suggested that the teenager’s death was staged.

The Israeli report, which is very critical of France 2’s staff, was produced by a committee consisting of representatives of various ministries, the police and the Israel Defence Forces. It was appointed by Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu last September.

“While the Israeli government has the right to respond publicly to a media report it regards as damaging, the nature and substance of this report are questionable and give the impression of a smear operation,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

“As regards the substance, Charles Enderlin has always said he would be ready to testify to a commission of enquiry in conditions that guaranteed impartiality and independence. These conditions were not respected, and Enderlin was not asked to testify. Nor was he asked to provide his unused footage of the incident.

“Above all, the committee’s published findings consist of just 11 pages on the ‘facts’ of the case and has another 30 pages condemning the way France 2’s report was used. We think it is absurd and unacceptable to accuse Enderlin’s report of having ‘played a major role in inciting terrorism and violence, both in the Israeli-Palestinian arena and worldwide’.”

The committee claims to have based its findings on France 2’s raw video footage of the incident. Enderlin says he posted all of the footage online. Is that what the committee used? The report’s authors do not say. It claims there is no evidence to support Enderlin’s account of the incident but produces no evidence to support its own claim.

The committee claims that evidence suggests that neither Muhammad al-Durrah nor his father, Jamal Al-Durrah, sustained a gunshot injury that day. In particular, it claims that no trace of blood was found the next day at the spot where they were filmed. The report, which does not name the source of this claim, also claims there was no sign of blood in the video footage.

According to the committee’s findings, the broadcast footage excluded a movement of Muhammad al-Durrah’s hand and elbow that can be seen in the raw footage after Enderlin’s voice said he had been killed.

The committee quotes Dr. Ricardo Nachman, deputy director of the Tel Aviv forensic centre, as saying the boy could not have moved in that way if, as France 2 claimed, he had already been hit by gunfire.

The Franco-Israeli surgeon Yehuda David is quoted in the report’s appendix as saying the father’s injuries could have been sustained prior to the incident filmed by France 2’s cameraman. But David bases his claim on medical reports and did not examine Jamal Al-Durrah himself after the incident.

“This report is absurd,” Enderlin said. “How can the report’s authors omit the fact that Jamal Al-Durrah was hospitalized the next day in the Jordanian capital of Amman? How can they claim that the Israel Defence Forces did not open fire?”

A journalist’s friend, Guillaume Weill-Raynal, added: “No ballistic report has ever been produced to support these claims, which were already being made prior to this report.”

Barak Ravid, the Israeli daily Haaretz’s diplomatic correspondent, said: “This report on the Muhammad al-Durrah case is probably one of the least convincing documents produced by the Israeli government in recent years.”

You can find the statement here.

Eight days after the Boston explosions, President Obama exploded another missile on a Yemeni village. Farea Al-Muslimi, a former inhabitant of that village, has lately testified both in Congress and in news interviews about the difficulty of explaining America's intentions to people who have suffered what his village has suffered:

"My mind was racing and my heart was torn. I was torn between the great country that I know and love and the drone above my head that could not differentiate between me and some AQAP militant. It was one of the most divisive and difficult feelings I have ever encountered. That feeling, multiplied by the highest number mathematicians have, gripped me when my village was droned just days ago. It is the worst feeling I have ever had. I was devastated for days because I knew that the bombing in my village by the United States would empower militants."

Those are the feelings of a Muslim who has experienced to the full, and by living in America, the kindness and generosity this country has to offer. Al-Muslimi finds it impossible to reconcile what the country at its best looks like from inside, to one of the lucky, and what it looks like from outside to one of the thousands of the innocent who have seen their families and neighbors killed or maimed by American weapons. All this is done in the cause of the War on Terror which President Obama, with his love of euphemism, prefers not even to mention by name. But you must name it if you want to get your countrymen to realize that this policy has subverted the Constitution and soiled the reputation of the United States.

...Obama gives the impression that he does not intend the evil he performs, but powerful others want it so pressingly that he cannot bear to say no. He recognizes what this means, from the point of view of right and wrong, but he thinks that his having not intended it, a preference sometimes telegraphed by a public demur, absolves him of responsibility. It is a perversion and a defection of the will. And it fits with his being a winner -- someone who likes very much to win, far beyond knowing why he wants it so much -- and also being a quitter. ...

As this president has lengthened the shadow of American power in Arab lands and made it hard for someone like Farea Al-Muslimi to persuade his countrymen that the U.S. is not at war with Islam, he has made serial visits to comfort Americans mourning the dead after the mass murders in Tucson, in Aurora, in Newtown, and in Boston. None of these speeches has carried a hint of the perception that there could be a link between American violence at home and abroad. The role of this president -- a president of safety and protection rather than a president of liberty and the rule of law -- is dismaying in itself. But there is something actively morbid in the dramatic assumption of grief counseling as his major public function, even as he continues in secret his wars against people about whom he will not speak to Americans except in platitude.

The United States in the past decade has now killed, at a low estimate, 225,000 people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. How, in the face of those figures, could one argue against a Muslim who once admired the United States but has been convinced, by the actions of the country under Bush and Obama, that we are bent on his destruction? One would be driven to request an act of faith: "We are good. Please believe that we are good." That is what Bush said, and it is what Obama says. But it will take more than occasional words to shift the direction of the policy of perpetual war; and words that are given the lie by actions are worse than no words.

During the past few days, people have speculated that Al Jazeera succumbed to various pressures, and censored its own pages.

Al Jazeera has always demanded transparency from the centres of power around the world, and we demand it from ourselves as well...

After publication, many questions arose about the article's content. In addition, the article was deemed to be similar in argument to Massad's previous column, " Zionism, anti-Semitism and colonialism", published on these pages in December.

We should have handled this better, and we have learned lessons that will enable us to maintain the highest standards of journalistic integrity...

Glenn Greenwald played an important part in the firestorm. He published a note from Massad saying that Al Jazeera censored the piece so as to mimic the "highly restrictive political line of the mainstream American media, especially on Israel" in order to gain a footing in the U.S. market:

When I criticized the Qatari Emir in the second article I wrote for them, I was not censored, and when I harshly criticized Qatari foreign policy since the Arab uprisings began, which I did in a number of articles, I was also not censored. It is ironic, though not shocking, that it was my criticisms of Israel and its Western allies that would be banned. . . . essentially neutralizing the remaining critical edge which made Al-Jazeera popular inside and outside the United States.

You make up 11 percent of the seats in the United States Congress. You make up one-third of all Nobel laureates. So many notions that are embraced by this nation that particularly emanate from over 5,000 years of Jewish history, tradition and culture: independence, individualism, fairness, decency, justice, charity. 

Writes Bruce Wolman:

Guess who is running for President? This is about the worst pandering I've ever seen. Gays didn't drive gay marriage, Jews in Hollywood and on the internet did. Is Joe sacrificing the Orthodox vote?