AFP

Violence broke out as several hundred people demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night against the sizeable community of African immigrants in the city, police spokeswoman Luba Samri said.

“Following the violence, we arrested five demonstrators,” Samri added.

The media reported that people shouted xenophobic slogans, such as “blacks out,” and chided the “bleeding heart leftists” who defend immigrants.

There were also reports that two demonstrators attacked a foreigner, and that the windshields of several cars carrying Africans were smashed.

Over the years, an estimated 60,000 Africans, mostly from Sudan and Eritrea, have slipped over the border into Israel from Egypt.

Following a number of recent crimes, a lively debate has erupted over the tensions caused by the presence of the large African community concentrated in south Tel Aviv.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the “phenomenon of illegal immigration from Africa is extremely serious and threatens the foundations of Israeli society, national security and national identity.”

Israel is building a wall along its border with Egypt and a detention centre in the southern Negev desert.

By NOMAAN MERCHANT, Associated Press

CHICAGO (AP) — Thousands of protesters marched through downtown Chicago on Sunday in one of the city’s largest demonstrations in years, airing grievances about war, climate change and a wide range of other complaints as world leaders assembled for a NATO summit.

The protest, which for months had stirred worries about violence in the streets, drew together a broad assortment of participants, including peace activists joining with war veterans and people more focused on economic inequality. But the diversity of opinions also sowed doubts about whether there were too many messages to be effective.

Click here to continue reading “Protesters march through Chicago to NATO summit” by Nomaan Merchant.

– and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

By Rick Perlstein

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, “suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks” and “scarves or towels around their heads” were heard grumbling at the protesters’ unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as “Cyco,” explained to his anarchist colleagues how “you can make plastic explosives with bleach,” and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge.

Click here to continue reading How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing ‘Terrorists’ – and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook” by Rick Perlstein.

Inside the struggle for power in the People’s Republic of China

by Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, 30 April 2012

The US embassy in Beijing is a pretty happening place of late. First the police chief of a major city tries to defect and implicates the wife of a top Chinese leader in a murder plot. The police chief, one Wang Lijun, leaves the next day, is spirited away by the authorities – and Bo Xilai, an up-and-coming party leader poised to challenge China’s “reformist” leadership, disappears from sight. Next up: a blind Chinese human rights activist escapes from house arrest, and arrives at the US embassy – which is 300 miles away. Chen Guangcheng, we are told, scaled a wall in the dead of night – “darkness is nothing to him,” said one commenter – and walked for miles, unassisted, until he met a supporter who drove him to Beijing. Reportedly his captors did not even notice he was gone until it was too late. Although details are “murky,” according to a New York Times account, the escape was apparently long-planned, with Chen feigning illness for weeks. One telling detail: he also was able to link up with his supporters by cell phone in spite of a jamming device that authorities used to isolate him from communications with the outside world.

Where would a Chinese dissident held incommunicado in an isolated farmhouse get a de-jamming device?

Click here to continue reading “China’s ‘Reformist’ Crooks” by Justin Raimondo.

by Jack Ross, Antiwar.com, 26 April 2012

Since even before its release last month, Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism has been extravagantly denounced and praised. To his everlasting credit, Beinart has described in vivid and uncompromising terms the corrupting and corrosive impact of the American Jewish establishment he so courageously exposed in The New York Review of Books:

At the core of the tragedy lies the refusal to accept that in both America and Israel, we live in an age not of Jewish weakness, but of Jewish power, and that without moral vigilance, Jews will abuse power just as hideously as anyone else. American Jewish organizations do not deny that Jews wield power, privately, they exult in it. Emotionally, power is what groups like AIPAC sell…. They deny that Jews, like all human beings, can use power not merely to survive, but to destroy. A few years ago, a journalist reported that Malcolm Hoenlein, the influential executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, had a photo in his conference room of Israeli F-15s flying over Auschwitz. It is a photo of a fantasy. Israeli jets never bombed Auschwitz and never will. What they have bombed, in recent years, is the Gaza Strip, a fenced-in, hideously overcrowded, desperately poor slum from which terrorist groups sometimes shell Israel. Hoenlein, in other words, has decorated his conference room not with an image of the reality that he helps perpetuate, but with an image of the fantasy that he superimposes on that reality. In this way, he embodies the American Jewish establishment, which, by superimposing the Jewish past on the Jewish present, is failing the challenge of a new age.

Beinart has offered a powerful indictment of the American Jewish Establishment, to be sure, but he steadfastly refuses to challenge the very legitimacy of that establishment. For the one question that has not been asked is why its loss of the younger generation of American Jews should be regarded as a problematic development in the first place, much less a crisis.

Click here to continue reading “Peter Beinart and the Specter Haunting American Jewry” by Jack Ross.