More: VIVA PALESTINA – A LIFELINE FROM BRITAIN TO GAZA

By Robert F. Worth, New York Times, 18 February 2009

MARAJ, Lebanon — For 25 years, Ali al-Jarrah managed to live on both sides of the bitterest divide running through this region. To friends and neighbors, he was an earnest supporter of the Palestinian cause, an affable, white-haired family man who worked as an administrator at a nearby school.

To Israel, he appears to have been a valued spy, sending reports and taking clandestine photographs of Palestinian groups and Hezbollah since 1983.

Now he sits in a Lebanese prison cell, accused by the authorities of betraying his country to an enemy state. Months after his arrest, his friends and former colleagues are still in shock over the extent of his deceptions: the carefully disguised trips abroad, the unexplained cash, the secret second wife.

[…]

It is not the family’s first brush with notoriety. One of Mr. Jarrah’s cousins, Ziad al-Jarrah, was among the 19 hijackers who carried out the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though the men were 20 years apart in age and do not appear to have known each other well.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, declined to discuss Mr. Jarrah’s situation, saying, “It is not our practice to publicly talk about any such allegations in this case or in any case.”

[Read the report | hat tip]

Please circulate
Bard College terminates Joel Kovel

Call for support and letter writing to the Bard administration.

Joel Kovel has now issued a statement:

STATEMENT OF JOEL KOVEL REGARDING HIS TERMINATION BY BARD COLLEGE

After the Bombing / Speech at Ford Auditorium
“The Last Message“
The First Annual Dignity Projection and Scholarship Award Ceremony, Detroit, Michigan, 14 February 1965
Transcribed and edited by the Malcolm X Museum and Noaman Ali
You can listen to this speech, click here

This is where the white man does himself the most harm. He invents statistics to create an image, thinking that that image is going to hold things in check.

MSNBC’s Pat Buchanan and Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson: Afraid to talk race?

The newly awakened people all over the world pose a problem for what’s known as Western interests, which is imperialism, colonialism, racism, and all these other negative isms or vulturistic isms. Just as the external forces pose a grave threat, they can now see that the internal forces pose an even greater threat. But the internal forces pose an even greater threat only when they have properly analyzed the situation and know what the stakes really are.

Democracy NOW!: LA School Teacher Fired for Being Too “Afrocentric”; Arizona Bill Proposes to Prohibit Teachings Critical of Western Civilization

More information/hat tip:
Institute for Public Accuracy: Malcolm X’s Legacy

Aya Kaniuk, a report from Huwara Checkpoint, Saturday 24.1.2009
Translated by Tal Haran.

We disembarked from our van inside the cab-park, amidst the vendors’ stalls, and spoke with the people there about the Gaza massacre and about the checkpoint. And people, some of whom we know, others we do not, were friendly and sad and desperate and full of soft humor as always, in spite of and along with everything.

And we had coffee and they asked if we heard about the woman from Marda village who was beaten up last week and dragged to the watchtower. And about Mahmoud Awad whom the soldiers nearly killed, who has been lying in intensive care after they hit him with their gun butts, and about the vendor who was beaten and went to hospital and when he came back, and said he’d complain, was prevented from getting home. And about life under Occupation. And the idealization of life as it had been before this total closure, as if that was freedom itself, even if under occupation and dispossession, and again about Gaza whose images do not cease to fill one’s imagination and one’s heart.

Gaza that has been imbued in everything. Occupiers and occupied alike.

[Read the report]