Tag: Nora Barrows-Friedman

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Israel forces teachers to leave Palestine by Nora Barrows-Friedman

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

The president of Arab American University, a private institution based in the West Bank city of Jenin, condemned Israel’s closure of the college. Ali Abu Zuhri argued it was an attempt to impose new facts on the ground aimed at changing the cultural and historical identity of Jerusalem… Israel’s closure of Hind al-Husseini college “is one more manifestation of Israel’s relentless assault on Palestinian education and culture, a systematic assault that is tantamount to cultural genocide,” Nada Elia, an organizing committee member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), told The Electronic Intifada.

Continue reading at https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/israel-forces-teachers-leave-palestine

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Israel’s first trans officer helps with ethnic cleansing by Nora Barrows-Friedman

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Dean Spade, a professor at the Seattle University School of Law and a member of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, told The Electronic Intifada, “It is disturbing to learn that the Israeli government is sending a trans Israeli army commander on a public relations tour in the US, [and] to see this blatant attempt to co-opt the trans liberation struggle to make a brutal colonial military seem like a site of diversity and inclusion. How can it be a victory for trans liberation when trans people become embedded in the most violent operations of settler-colonialism and genocide?” Spade added. “How can we celebrate trans people clearing the land of indigenous people, arresting children, maintaining checkpoints and launching tear gas?”

… About a week before this month’s event with the Israeli officer, two members of the LGBTQ Commission resigned. “We all have issues that we stand for and for me I stand for the boycott, divest and sanctions movement. For me, it is an issue similar to South Africa apartheid,” Luzviminda Uzuri Carpenter wrote her colleagues in a resignation letter on 28 March. “I personally stand against the genocide of Palestinian people and cannot support militarized efforts or military personnel regardless of gender identity, gender expression, or sexuality or other identity markers,” Carpenter added.

Continue reading at https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-first-trans-officer-helps-ethnic-cleansing/20171

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Why Israel’s actions can be called genocide by Nora Barrows-Friedman

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Israel lobby groups recently reacted with outrage against the Movement for Black Lives policy platform which refers to US complicity in Israel’s “genocide” and “apartheid” against the Palestinian people.

Despite the outrage of many pro-Israel groups, there is a long history of human rights scholarship and legal analysis that supports the assertion Israel is committing genocide, according to a statement from the Center for Constitutional Rights. “As human rights lawyers, [we felt] it might be appropriate to just clarify the record that this was nothing new – that the term genocide had been applied by human rights activists, lawyers, scholars both inside law and inside other disciplines for many, many years.”

Listen to the full interview at https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/why-israels-actions-can-be-called-genocide

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Documenting the campus struggle for Palestine by Bill Mullen

NORA BARROWS-Friedman’s In Our Power: U.S. Students Organize for Justice in Palestine is a masterpiece of social movement journalism. In the tradition of Howard Zinn’sSNCC: The New Abolitionists and Staughton and Alice Lynd’s Rank and File, Barrows-Friedman presents a riveting “from below” oral history of a grassroots campaign for social justice…

In the same year, 10 University of California Irvine students were convicted of the misdemeanor crime of “disrupting a public meeting” after a non-violent protest against the 2010 appearance on campus of Israel ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren. The students challenged Oren’s justification of the massacre of 1,500 Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead, calmly stating from their floor positions things like, “You, sir, are an accomplice to genocide.”

Continue reading at http://socialistworker.org/2015/03/31/the-campus-struggle-for-palestine

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.
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Interviews with Dr. Mona El-Farra and Yafa Jarrar by Nora Barrows-Friedman

Dr. Mona El-Farra: “… I cannot absorb or understand or get on with what happened to us during the 51 days. It was beyond words. It was not just war crimes — there was a systematic way of genocide. They were trying to get rid of us all. And of course I’m glad and relieved of the ceasefire, because if it didn’t start, there would have been more destruction than what we saw in Gaza. So I’m relieved it happened.” 

Yafa Jarrar: “Being in solidarity includes being a part of their campaigns, being in continuous communication with them, because this is what makes us stronger. One of the things that unites us — as Palestinians and as indigenous people here on Turtle Island — is that we’re both subject to colonial projects. Now, these colonial projects differ, but they have a lot of striking similarities that we see. History repeats itself. Greed repeats itself and manifests itself in different ways. And we see a lot of similarities in terms of the actual apartheid policies that exist, let’s say, in Palestine by the Israeli apartheid regime and the policies that the indigenous people have been subject to here on Turtle Island and particularly here in Canada. Residential schools, different forms of projects that led slowly to what is called or used as ethnic cleansing of certain people. Legal separation. We see it here with the reserve system. Residential schools — people still suffer from it today. And the same in Palestine – we see these kinds of legal separations and slow genocide, and ethnic cleansing. In many ways it’s slow, but we’ve seen it happening quicker with the situation in Gaza recently.”

 

Continue reading at http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nora-barrows-friedman/dr-mona-el-farra-mass-trauma-and-destruction-gaza

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.