Music: Tigran Hamasyan with Berklee Middle Eastern Fusion Ensemble — ‘Love Song’
The roots of Israeli fascism
Rick Perlstein writes: In 1928, a prominent [Zionist] Revisionist named Abba Ahimeir published a series of articles entitled “From the Diary of a Fascist.” They refer to the founder of their movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (his adopted first name is Hebrew for “wolf”), as “il duce.” In 1935, his comrade Hen Merhavia wrote that Revisionists were doing what Mussolini did: “establish a nucleus of an exemplary life of morality and purity. Like us, the Italian fascists look back to their historical…
Palestinian political prisoners targeted in Israel’s campaign of vengeance
The Observer reports: Marwan Barghouti spends his days huddled in a cramped, dark, solitary cell, with no way to tend to his wounds, and a shoulder injury from being dragged with his hands cuffed behind his back. Barghouti holds almost mythic status within Palestinian politics, seen as a figure whose potential to unify different factions has only grown during his 24 years in prison. The books, newspapers and television that he used to be able to access have been gone…
Arrested. Injured. Suspended. Six NYC university students say they’ll keep protesting
NPR reports: At Columbia University, word was spreading among the student protesters who’d defied the university’s order to take down their pro-Palestinian encampment on a central lawn. Police were gathering outside the school’s locked gates. Arrests seemed imminent. It was the evening of April 30. Allie Wong, a doctoral student, was off campus when she heard what was happening. She rushed there and found a way to sneak in. Before the night was over, Wong would be one among nearly…
Pro-Israel Jewish billionaires caught secretly plotting to crackdown student protests
Middle East Monitor reports: A group of prominent American Jewish billionaires and business leaders have been privately pressuring New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, to deploy the police against pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University, and even offered to pay for private investigators to assist the New York Police Department in handling the protests, according to a report by The Washington Post. The revelations, based on a WhatsApp chat log obtained by the newspaper, shed light on the group’s efforts…
Ukraine can still beat Russia. It just comes down to receiving enough Western aid
Business Insider reports: With 14 to 21 well-equipped brigades, Ukraine could eject Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, according to an American expert. The question is whether Ukraine can find the manpower, and whether Ukraine’s allies are willing to spend the money to arm them properly. Yet what is remarkable is that despite Ukraine being outnumbered and outgunned by Russia, Kyiv still has a genuine chance of winning the war. “What has really kind of disturbed me is that we’re…
Ecologists struggle to get a grip on the term, ‘keystone species’
Lesley Evans Ogden writes: Anne Salomon’s first week as a graduate student in 2001 was not what she had anticipated. While other new students headed to introductory lectures, Salomon was whisked away by van and then motorboat to Tatoosh Island, which sits just offshore of the northwestern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Among the tide pools of this isolated island, Salomon peered at the web of life on the rocks: ochre sea stars, barnacles, mussels, snails and assorted algae that…
‘More Neanderthal than human’: How your health may depend on DNA from our long-lost ancestors
Live Science reports: The group had traveled for thousands of miles, crossing Africa and the Middle East until finally reaching the dimly lit forests of the new continent. They were long-vanished members of our modern human tribe, and among the first Homo sapiens to enter Europe. There, these people would likely have encountered their distant cousins: Neanderthals. These small bands of modern-human relatives had hooded brows, large heads and squat bodies, and they had spent epochs acclimating to Europe’s colder…
Music: Tigran Hamasyan — ‘The Kingdom’
How a Jewish desire for revenge against the Nazis turned into an Israeli justification for killing Palestinians
76 years after, we are still in 1948. — Shachar Pinsker (@spinsker) May 14, 2024 Shachar Pinsker writes: By the end of the Second World War, writing about vengeance in Hebrew had taken on a new significance. A million and a half Jews fought in the armies of the Allied Powers. Writing in Hebrew, however, focused on the 30,000 Jews from the Yishuv [the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine] who volunteered to fight alongside the British army, especially the Jewish Brigade, numbering…
UN says it has no more food or tents for nearly 2 million people in Gaza
The Guardian reports: The UN has run out of tents and food to distribute to almost 2 million people in Gaza, the majority displaced from their homes and dependent on aid to stave off looming famine. UN officials told the Guardian on Wednesday afternoon that their warehouses were now completely empty south of the river dividing the northern third of the Gaza from the south, with no likelihood of resupply as long as the main entry points into the territory…
‘Resist the normalization of evil’: Israeli reporter Amira Hass on Palestine and journalism
Our guest is the Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. She is the recipient of the 2024 Columbia Journalism Award, and on Wednesday she addressed the graduating class of the Columbia Journalism School in New York City. Hass discusses the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, why journalists should “resist the normalization of evil and injustice,” Israel’s recent censorship of Al Jazeera,…
Apparently NYU has administrators schooled in the Soviet Union
Ginia Bellafante writes: At one point during the demonstrations at Columbia University in 1968, protesters took the acting dean of the liberal arts college hostage. Barricading his office door with furniture, they kept Henry Simmons Coleman, a former Navy man, locked up for 26 hours. When he was finally released, he seemed unfazed; there had been plenty to eat. Retaliation was not on his agenda. So little did it interest him, apparently, that he went on to write letters of…
Interview: Putin has not given up on erasing Ukraine ‘as a state, a concept, and a people’
Nataliya Bugayova, a nonresident fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, interviewed by RFE/RL: RFE/RL: In a recent ISW backgrounder that you co-authored, you wrote in the very first sentence that “Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West — and will likely lose — if the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin.” How big is that “if,” and how big a step in that direction is the recently approved U.S. aid? Nataliya Bugayova: Thank you for…
The Alitos flew a flag supporting the insurrection after being blamed for the Jan 6 insurrection
Adam Serwer writes: There may be an insurrectionist justice on the Supreme Court, perhaps two. The New York Times reported yesterday that 10 days after a violent mob ransacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election and keep Donald Trump in power, an upside-down American flag flew outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito. At the time, Trump supporters were using the upside-down flag as a symbol of their belief in Trump’s lies that the election had…
The heart sends messages to the brain
Science News reports: Everyone knows that the brain influences the heart. Stressful thoughts can set the heart pounding, sometimes with such deep force that we worry people can hear it. Anxiety can trigger the irregular skittering of atrial fibrillation. In more extreme and rarer cases, emotional turmoil from a shock — the death of a loved one, a cancer diagnosis, an intense argument — can trigger a syndrome that mimics a heart attack. But not everyone knows that the heart…