Police evacuate rightists trying to rebuild W. Bank settlement
Nadav Shragai; 10/5/08
Some 100 settlers on late Thursday infiltrated the ruins of the evacuated West Bank settlement of Sa-Nur, in a stated attempt to rebuild it. Protesters were evacuated by security forces shortly after they entered. This was the first time that settlers have staged such a move at Sa-Nur since Israel’s 2005 pullout from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank, in which the settlement was evacuated. The Israel Defense Forces was preparing to evacuate the group, who belonged to an organization called “Homesh - the beginning.” Over the past year, Homesh - the beginning activists have mounted repeated bids to resettle Homesh, another settlement also evacuated in the 2005 pullout, which was titled the “Disengagement.”
See: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/982019.html
Arabs say racism on rise as Nakbeh remembered
Mohammed Assadi
Salwa Abu Jaber believes her story shows Israel discriminating against its Arab citizens, 60 years after the state was established as a haven for Jews. The 32-year-old mother of four from northern Israel said her five-year-old daughter has never seen her father, who lives in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Separated from the man for five years, she says she has been forced to divorce him. Thousands of families have been similarly split by a 2003 ban on Palestinians in the West Bank from reuniting with their families inside Israel, imposed citing security reasons after the Palestinian uprising or Intifada began in 2000. “In practical terms, Israel forced the divorce on us,” Abu Jaber said. “We could not continue to live like this any longer.“If this is not racism, then what is it?”
See: http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=7740
Bigotry and academic freedom
Fawaz Turki; 9/10.08
The relentless campaign to deny Arabs their right to political freedom in Palestine has now extended to denying them their right to academic freedom in the US. The plan here, pursued by pressure groups headed by hard-right, Israel-can’t-do-wrong nationalists like Daniel Pipes, Allan Dershowitz and David Horowitz, among others, is to go after their victims wherever they may be found in the world of academe, and turn their lives and careers into living hell. Pipes, for example, himself a former academic, runs an outfit called Campus Watch whose job it is to make sure that no professor shall utter an unkind word about Israel in a lecture hall. They gave hell to Walid Khalidi when Princeton offered him an endowed chair and equal hell to Khalil Shikaki before his appointment at Brandeis.
See: http://www.gulfnews.com/opinion/columns/region/10212031.html
Tags: Human Rights, Israel, Marriage, Settlers, Terrorism, USA, USA Right