The Israeli rampage against Palestinians, which began with the siege of Al-Aqsa mosque, is a turning point in the Palestinian struggle for justice. The pogrom escalates ethnic cleansing of Palestinians & strengthens military occupation of East Jerusalem while holding the destruction of BDS & international solidarity in the crosshairs.

Netanyahu adamantly denies Israel is trying to destroy or ‘change the status quo’ at Al-Aqsa mosque & actually has the effrontery to accuse Palestinians of inciting violence at the mosque. Media operates as the Greek chorus for Israeli propaganda & peddles this rubbish as the gospel truth.

Israel has in fact instituted several new repressive measures that directly change the status quo at Al-Aqsa. For months, men under 50 years-old were denied freedom of religion & could not pray in the mosque but had to kneel in the public streets; Israeli soldiers militarily occupied the Noble Sanctuary compound where the mosque is & ushered extremist vandals into the mosque for “touring.” These were violations not only of the agreement between Israel & the Jordanian trust governing the mosque but a denial of religious freedom to Palestinians.

Now, East Jerusalem, where the mosque is located, is under martial law & on lockdown. That means Palestinians from the West Bank won’t be allowed to enter the area in order to worship at the mosque. Israel also built a 15-foot wall between Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem & newly constructed Zionist settlements; Palestinians will have to show identification to leave their own neighborhoods. There are hundreds of Israeli police prowling the streets hunting down Palestinians & dozens of new military checkpoints. For media to parrot Netanyahu that these are not ‘changes to the status quo’ at Al-Aqsa is to mock the intelligence of the public.

Certainly one of the most despicable & dangerous of the new repressive measures is Israel’s decision that the bodies of alleged Palestinian assailants shot dead by Israeli forces will be buried in secret & will no longer be returned to their families for burial. Consider the possibilities for Israeli criminality! For summarily executing unarmed Palestinians; for leaving no forensic evidence of what actually happened; for depriving families of the right to mourn & honor their own.

These are Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank directing fire at unarmed Palestinian protesters. The caption to this photo read “Jews armed themselves with everything from guns to broomsticks, rattled by a wave of Palestinian attacks that have shaken the country.” The cynicism of that caption appalls. What’s with the broomsticks when Netanyahu is urging them to arm themselves & when they’re backed up with firepower from one of the best armed militaries in the world?

This is no time to be daunted. Build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel & demand no aid of any kind to apartheid Israel. To stand in solidarity with Palestinians, international solidarity will have to double down in our activities. We have an immense task to counter media lies.

(Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images)

We expected the caption to this photo to read: ‘Palestinian terrorist charges Israeli bulldozer with knife” but that must have seemed a little over the top even to the Guardian-UK. Yahoo might still try to pull it off.

What the caption does say is that the activist is running toward the bulldozer when the dust cloud clearly shows the damn thing is moving against him. That doesn’t require a dust pattern expert to detect. It describes this encounter as coming after the activist & fellow protesters tore down a section of the apartheid fence between Israel & Gaza. In one of its peculiar non sequiturs (trying to pack as many lies into one caption as it can), it says Israel has set up more military checkpoints in occupied East Jerusalem. Those alleged stabbers have the city on edge. And military occupation is calming who?

After the reporter for the CBS affiliate gave such positive coverage of the Palestinian solidarity rally (last Saturday) & Palestinian struggle, I emailed the news producer to commend their coverage. They responded that unfortunately she had made “factual errors that need to be corrected.” Tonight their news coverage of Palestine was as rabid as it gets, emphasizing of course the alleged Palestinian stabbing binge & neglecting to report the Israeli pogrom.

Lessons learned? Flattery will get you nowhere in politics; building BDS remains primary.

Don’t come to my wall badmouthing BDS as too tame & not military enough to be effective. It was called by 171 Palestinian organizations & has proven immensely effective in the 10 years of its existence. Armchair revolutionists who think they can do better than Palestinians on the front lines of the struggle against Israel will find other much more hospitable places to express their ignorant views. Here we don’t try to one-up those fighting the actual battles.

This is one slick piece of propaganda. Israel is deploying thousands of extra troops into the occupied West Bank, adding hundreds of extra police in occupied East Jerusalem, & encouraging vigilantism among armed Israeli settlers. It must be quite a spectacle to see such massive military force using tanks, grenades, live ammo against unarmed Palestinian protesters. But media chose this photo of a Palestinian in the West Bank armed with a slingshot, rocks, & a knife to document their hysterical headlines: “Terrorist stabbings have Israel on edge.”

Media neglects to report on Israeli settlers torching mosques & homes in the West Bank but is making a big deal over Palestinians torching this empty car owned by settlers who were trying to take back a funerary monument near Nablus in the West Bank called Joseph’s Tomb. Several days ago, a group of Palestinians also tried to torch the cenotaph itself & this is being condemned from here to Mars as a desecration of a Jewish holy site. Is it holier than Al-Aqsa mosque to the Palestinians which Israeli police are helping extremist Israelis destroy?

Judaism’s claims to the site of Al-Aqsa hang by a Biblical thread exploited by Israeli propagandists who invented a religious tradition that does not exist for a people invented by colonialism. Not even a thread exists for Joseph’s Tomb. It’s a complete fabrication of recent vintage.

There’s no need to address the historicity of the Bible, disputes among Biblical scholars & archaeologists, or to elaborate the lengthy odyssey of Joseph. The basic narrative is that Joseph was a Hebrew kid sold into slavery by his brothers & who then rose to prominence in Egypt. When Moses led Israelites out of slavery in Egypt–the exodus story–Joseph’s bones were exhumed & carried by Moses so he could be buried in his hometown.

The Exodus story is the founding myth of the state of Israel in 1948, portrayed in the 1960 Hollywood movie “The Exodus”–a noxious & tedious romanticism of terrorism that even Paul Newman & Sal Mineo could not salvage. Once again, we needn’t challenge the historicity of the Bible but archaeologists find no evidence supporting the Exodus, let alone burial of Joseph’s bones near Nablus–Biblical events from several centuries BCE–& many have abandoned pursuit of archaeological evidence. His bones aren’t there.

No Jewish or Christian sources mention Joseph’s Tomb prior to the 5th century & the cenotaph standing now was built in the 19th century. It’s been a source of dispute between other religions but only between Israel & Palestinians since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 when Israel forbade Muslims from worshipping at the shrine & turned it into a Jewish prayer room. After the Oslo Accords in 1993, it came under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority which allows Jewish “worshippers.”

The issue is not Bible as history but Bible as Israeli politics to invent Jewish religious traditions in Palestine where they do not exist & efface Palestinian history, culture, traditions, & rights.

Palestinians torched Joseph’s Tomb, not as an act of desecration but an assertion of political rights over the occupied West Bank & over the shrine. The incident happened when Israeli settlers tried to enter the shrine without authorization & Palestinian Authority police handed them over to the Israeli army. Only a fool would believe settlers entered the shrine to worship when Israeli soldiers are taking tear gas, live ammo, & grenades after protesting Palestinians in the same area. That’s called a provocation. Just like at Al-Aqsa.

Build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel. Continue emergency rallies all over the world in defense of Palestinian freedom of religion, to end Israeli violence, & to end the occupation.

(Photo by Abed Omar Qusini/Reuters)

Sometimes when you read the news, especially about Palestinians, you think media must hire those who flunked out of Writing Skills 101 because you can’t make head nor tail out of what happened. There’s ‘no there there’ to the half-assed narratives. Then, in a progression from credulity to jaded wisdom, you realize they deliberately mangle the story–sometimes in grotesque but always in dishonest ways.

The lengthy Associated Press caption to this photo read: “Jewish settler holding his pistol after he shot & killed a Palestinian man is seen in this still image taken from a video shot by Youth Against Settlements & obtained by Reuters TV, in the West Bank city of Hebron October 17, 2015. Three Palestinians were shot dead on Saturday in what Israel said were thwarted knife attacks, but a Palestinian witness of one incident said it was a result of Jewish settler violence, as tensions ran high after more than two weeks of unrest. The shooting occurred near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank city of Hebron. The Israeli military said a Palestinian attempted to stab an Israeli civilian, who was carrying a gun & then shot & killed the attacker.”

“India asks us, ‘Why do you throw stones?’ No one asks, ‘Who burned your house down?'”

Said by a Kashmiri youth, tortured in Indian detention–but could just as well have been said by a Palestinian youth.

Affinities between the struggles in Kashmir & Palestine are more than just the barbaric methods of repression & occupation used by India & Israel. Over both struggles is the pall & legacy of British colonialism. International solidarity is imperative to lay that legacy to rest.

Those who oppose Bernie Sanders as a progressive alternative to Clinton don’t do so because he’s not the perfect candidate but because on most political questions, he’s on the wrong side. Even if you consider him an advocate of working people in the US, he has turned his back on the working people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, Mexico, Central America.

It’s not simple-minded to say that in politics “whose side are you on?” is the essential question of solidarity & social transformation.

Bernie Sanders, the voluble man of the people, went through a candidates debate with Clinton (the other three jamokes present might as well be mannequins) without mentioning US wars–after 24 years of deployment & barbarisms in Iraq & on the 14th anniversary of the occupation of Afghanistan. And people who call themselves socialists campaign for him!?

“Sewer socialists” is an old derogatory term from the early 20th century used against socialists elected to local office who boasted about the public sewer system in their cities & neglected other questions in national & international politics–like war. Without US investment in war, there would be funds for all sorts of essential infrastructure programs–like re-building the bridges that are collapsing all over the country.