A few more articles worth reading today:

1. Mississippi is turning to Iran for advice and assistance in improving its rural health care. The project is forging unlikely alliances between this community and Iran.

2. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood finished its latest round of democratic elections for the Brotherhood's Shura Council.

3. Christmas rock concert in Bethlehem.

It is true that the European Union leaders who came to occupied Jerusalem last January to publicly embrace Ehud Olmert, the then Israeli prime minister, - while white phosphorus seared the flesh of Gazan children and bodies lay under the rubble - still cower before their respective Israel lobbies, as do American and Canadian politicians.

But the shift in public opinion is palpable as Israel's own actions transform it into a pariah whose driving forces are not the liberal democratic values with which it claims to identify, but ultra-nationalism, racism, religious fanaticism, settler-colonialism and a Jewish supremacist order maintained by frequent massacres.

Below are some recent articles discussing the continued siege of Gaza and the intentional Israeli policy of utterly destroying the lives of those who live in the Strip. One of the most direct quotes started this article.

Israel Resembles a Failed State, Al-Jazeera

Punish, Humiliate, Terrorise, Al-Jazeera

Tough military stance stirs little debate in Israel, NYT

I am hanging out in New York currently, hitting up some museums, meeting endless amounts of Swedes and Brazilians at the hostel and enjoying some greenery and fairly decent weather. I'll be heading down to DC later this afternoon.

News roundup for this snowy Chicago evening.

1. Despite vehement denials by the Israeli government and a diplomatic row between Sweden and Israel, it turns out that Israeli officials really did harvest the organs of dead Palestinians and Israeli soldiers in the 1990s.

2. Hewlett-Packard makes racist webcams that can only recognize and follow white people.

3. President Obama prank calls Virginia Governor Tim Kaine.

Original article can be found here.

When Will It Be Our Time?

By MUSTAFA BARGHOUTHI

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK — I have lived my entire adult life under occupation, with Israelis holding ultimate control over my movement and daily life.

When young Israeli police officers force me to sit on the cold ground and soldiers beat me during a peaceful protest, I smolder. No human being should be compelled to sit on the ground while exercising rights taken for granted throughout the West.

It is with deepening concern that I recognize the Obama administration is not yet capable of standing up to Israel and the pro-Israel lobby. Our dream of freedom is being crushed under the weight of immovable and constantly expanding Israeli settlements.

Days ago, the State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, managed only to term such illegal building “dismaying.” The Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, stands up and walks out on the U.S. envoy, George Mitchell, every time the American envoy mentions East Jerusalem.

And Javier Solana, just prior to completing his stint as European Union foreign policy chief, claimed Palestinian moves toward statehood “have to be done with time, with calm, in an appropriate moment.” He adds: “I don’t think today is the moment to talk about that.”

When, precisely, is a good time for Palestinian freedom? I call on Mr. Solana’s replacement, Catherine Ashton, to take concrete actions to press for Palestinian freedom rather than postpone it.

If Israel insists on hewing to antiquated notions of determining the date of another people’s freedom then it is incumbent on Palestinians to organize ourselves and highlight the moral repugnance of such an outlook.

Through decades of occupation and dispossession, 90 percent of the Palestinian struggle has been nonviolent, with the vast majority of Palestinians supporting this method of struggle. Today, growing numbers of Palestinians are participating in organized nonviolent resistance.

In the face of European and American inaction, it is crucial that we continue to revive our culture of collective activism by vigorously and nonviolently resisting Israel’s domination over us.

These are actions that every man, woman and child can take. The nonviolent movement is being built in the villages of Jayyous, Bilin and Naalin where Israel’s segregation wall threatens to erase productive village life.

President Obama, perhaps unwittingly, encouraged this effort when he called for Palestinian nonviolence in his Cairo speech. “Palestinians,” he said, “must abandon violence. … For centuries, black people in America suffered…the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”

Yet without public American complaint, the Israeli military has killed and injured many nonviolent Palestinians during Obama’s 10 months in office, most notably Bassem Abu Rahme who was killed in April by an Israeli high-velocity teargas canister. American citizen Tristan Anderson was critically injured by the Israeli Army in March by a similar projectile and remains in a deep coma. Both men were protesting illegal Israeli land seizures and Israel’s wall. Hundreds more are unknown to the outside world.

A new generation of Palestinian leaders is attempting to speak to the world in the language of a nonviolent campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions, precisely as Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of African-Americans did with the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s.

We are equally right to use the tactic to advance our rights. The same world that rejects all use of Palestinian violence, even clear self-defense, surely ought not begrudge us the nonviolence employed by men such as King and Gandhi.

Western lethargy means the clock may run out on the two-state solution. If so, the fault will rest with the failure to halt Israeli settlement activity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that settlement construction will continue in East Jerusalem, with government buildings in the West Bank and on thousands of West Bank housing units already under development makes a mockery of the term “freeze.”

We Palestinians are completely accustomed to — and unwilling to accept — such caveats from Mr. Netanyahu.

The demise of the two-state solution will only lead to a new struggle for equal rights, within one state. Israel, which tragically favors supremacy rather than integration with its Palestinian neighbors, will have brought the new struggle on itself by relentlessly pushing the settlement enterprise. No one can say it was not warned.

Eventually, we will be free in our own country, either within the two-state solution or in a new integrated state.

There comes a time when people cannot take injustice any more, and this time has come to Palestine.

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Well worth the read -

Original Haaretz article here

Stephen Walt's commentary

Sorry for the short post. I'm finishing up presentations, papers and final exams.

At the following link is a great blog post by one of my favorite contemporary scholars of the Middle East, Marc Lynch, of George Washington University.

He examines the "Arab disappointment with Obama" and takes a few pot shots at SAIS' Fouad Ajami, who is one of my least favorite contemporary "scholars" of the Middle East.

Excerpts below:

Ajami does not need "evidence" for he knows how Arabs feel, the patterns of the desert and the timeless tribal traditions, the hot arid summer which follows the blooming spring but leads inexorably to the fall and then the cold, hard winter. He has anonymous Saudi drinking buddies. One should not argue.
--
And good for him. It's not like the Bush administration's support for democracy actually created much democracy, after all. Instead, it raised expectations which were quickly dashed as the U.S. failed to follow through on its rhetoric (sound familiar?).
--
They are right about one thing, though: Arab public opinion is disappointed with Obama. But it isn't because he hasn't lived up to his predecessor's commitment to democracy and reform.