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22:16
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Body on the Line
after spending the last week glued to the television and internet almost 24 hours a day, following the news in gaza, it is overwhelming to be away from it and come back and see how much death and destruction has occurred in the time that i’ve been traveling and visiting with friends. i have barely [...]
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6:18
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Body on the Line
i’m not sleeping much these days. it’s too difficult. and whenever i turn on chatting software at odd hours–like now when it is 4:35 am–who else is online? friends in gaza–when they have electricity, which is sporadic at best. one blogger friend asked me to go into his blog and updated it for him tonight [...]
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3:32
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Body on the Line
it is going to be a long night. i should be grading papers right now, but i cannot. i can’t stop watching the massacre live on television. al jazeera’s coverage has been non-stop and it has been great, in spite of putting lying israeli terrorists trying to push their propaganda on (by the way americans [...]
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21:56
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Body on the Line
just to be crystal fucking clear: israeli terrorists invaded gaza about an hour ago. for those journalists who are unfamiliar with the term, invasion means:
(of an armed force or its commander) enter (a country or region) so as to subjugate or occupy it
why then do all the headlines so far suggest otherwise, as if [...]
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22:40
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Body on the Line
so i’ve got two friends visiting me in nablus this weekend. the story of how i know them is one example of how small the world is. they are a married couple and one is from boise. her father is a professor at boise state university in the business school where my ex used to [...]
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16:41
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Body on the Line
i’ve been thinking far too much about hawa or wind, air this week. mostly because of these insane winds that have created a kind of orchestra that i heard for the last 48 hours outside my home. ironically as i learned this new arabic vocabulary word i encountered it in a stanza of one of [...]
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1:04
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Body on the Line
i’m still thinking about disappearance. i have been thinking about this since i heard esmail nashif’s really fascinating, original talk at the muwatin conference a few weeks ago. though he was speaking about a different type of disappearance: one that gives palestinians agency. a new strategy of resistance. a disappearance underground, to reorganize, to regroup, [...]
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21:11
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Body on the Line
today was a first for me: i taught on a saturday. well, maybe not a first. i seem to recall that when i taught in warren correctional institution (that’s the euphemism americans use for prisons) in ohio i think i also spent some saturdays there. we have make-up classes right now because of the strike [...]
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23:36
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Body on the Line
so president bush just met with mahmoud abbas in the white house. he said–with a straight face no less–this:
The U.S. president said, “No question, this is a hard challenge. But nevertheless, people must recognize that we have made a good deal of progress.”
really, can someone please put me to sleep and wake me up when [...]
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16:51
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Body on the Line
apparently someone has called for a shoe intifada, but i would prefer to give tamara credit for this as i believe she posted this on my facebook wall before it appeared in the media. there is also a new video game you can play (there is a screen shot of it above); the independent [...]
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22:07
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Body on the Line
somehow this news item slipped passed me when it first hit in april: an israeli adapted ghassan kanafani’s novella return to haifa into a play that is now being performed in yaffa. there is something deeply disturbing about kanafani’s writing being adapted by a colonizer who lives his former land that he will never be [...]
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1:28
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Body on the Line
i spent the morning in beit lahem because i had a meeting at badil and i was waiting for my friend to get back so we could take one more little trip. after the meeting i walked around the old city of beit lahem a bit and i saw santa claus walking around. i [...]
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16:28
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Body on the Line
This photograph was taken (with some additional water color over it) sometime in the late 19th century. It is of the Palestinian village of Tabariya (known today as Tiberias in English). It is one of the many villages where Palestinians were expelled from in 1948. Today not a single Palestinian lives in Tabariya. [...]
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19:55
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Body on the Line
well, not really. but there are two. one is the original one. the palestinian one. the other one is the colony built on top of nasra’s hill as zionist colonists always build on top of the hill so they have easier access to surveillance as well as offensive actions against palestinians.
nasra (also known as [...]
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15:55
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Body on the Line
i think that press tv could learn a lot from watching al jazeera’s “inside story” in terms of learning how to shut people up when they need to be shut up. though i think al jazeera should cease putting these racist american and zionist mofos on the air. we get enough of their hatred in [...]
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18:05
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Body on the Line
Russell Means, Lakota Activist leads resistance against the U.S. government with a goal of creating a sovereign nation for the Lakota people, separate from the U.S. In Al Jazeera’s “Inside USA” he explains the significant connections between such resistance movements among indigenous people across history and the globe:
They [Lakotas] were still resisting imperialism. It is [...]
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20:08
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Body on the Line
Some months ago I came across an article in the Guardian that suggested some uncanny similarities between the fictional drama The West Wing and the Barack Obama election campaign. In the article it was noted that there was some synergy between the writers of the show and real-life political actors:
For what those West Wing [...]
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3:37
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Body on the Line
This is why I love the rain. This is a view from my apartment last night after the rain stopped. It’s hard to see, but that is the Mediterranean Sea in the background. I’m told it’s a straight shot of 30 minutes down a road, when those roads are not occupied by foreign occupiers. [...]
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22:20
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Body on the Line
It’s really hard to live anywhere, I imagine, and not be aware of and disturbed by divisions among people. This week my university is holding student elections as I mentioned in an earlier post. But today Hamas withdrew from the elections because the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA) has been rounding up students in Hamas and [...]
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22:11
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Body on the Line
I made it back home to Nablus today, through the Sheikh Hussein Bridge. This bridge is much quieter than Malak Hussein in the south as it is mostly for tourists. I was pleasantly surprised that most of my traveling companions today were not tourists, however. Most of them were Palestinians from 1948. Many of [...]
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3:28
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Body on the Line
So the battle at Boise State University seems to continue. And it is getting worse. It was only a matter of time, but the local rabbi, Dan Fink, has decided to butt into the Cultural Center’s “Tunnel of Oppression,” which I wrote about last week. It’s fascinating that in 5 years of teaching there he [...]
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23:16
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Body on the Line
“Anthropology” by Chrystos from Dream On (Vancouver: Press Gang, 1991).
We have been conducting an extensive footnoted annotated indexed & complicated study of the caucasian culture hereafter to be referred to as the cauks for ease in translation.
The most important religious ritual, one central to all groups, is the mixing of feces & urine with water. [...]
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18:37
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Body on the Line
no, i’m afraid not. my dear friend baha’a, whose family was forcibly expelled from yaffa, palestine in 1948, used this phrase last year in reference to our friends yassin, mark, and nizar’s hip hop collaboration. it became a little mantra in other contexts for us. but today, al jazeera ruined it for me when their [...]
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22:51
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Body on the Line
I received an email this morning from my comrades in the Brown Berets in Boise, Idaho. Boise is the city where I lived for five years when I was a professor at Boise State University. These friends, some of whom are affiliated with Boise State University’s (Multiethnic: it used to be “Multiethnic,” the university deleted [...]
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16:34
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Body on the Line
Surprise, surprise: Once again the word Palestine was erased from the discourse of a Presidential debate. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama, nor any of the American voters asking questions, uttered the word Palestine. Nor did the words Gaza or the West Bank cross anyone’s lips. Instead they danced around the daily invasions, assassinations, home [...]
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15:28
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Body on the Line
it’s not a great report–not enough context–historically, politically–for one thing. no mention of those who colluded to destroy the homes of 31,000 palestinian refugees in this camp. no mention of the fact that many of the families had been expelled from their homes in 1948 by jewish colonists in palestine, by lebanese militias in refugee [...]
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20:08
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Body on the Line
a quick post before i get back to writing. last night i went to the studio for my interview on iranian press tv. i got picked up by one of the journalists because i had to go at iftar and there are no services at that hour. it turns out that the studio is in [...]
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13:02
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Body on the Line
in palestine it is eid al fitr, a time of celebration. for jews in the zionist state it is new year’s eve. these holidays happen to overlap this year, but somehow barack obama thinks that only jews are worthy of holiday greetings:
“As families come together to mark the High Holy Days, upholding a proud [...]
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1:37
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Body on the Line
The weather this week has been really amazing. The past few days have brought Nablus a khamseen and rain that made the sky so blue, the sun so bright, and the clouds so billowy and beautiful. The light, especially in the evening, is magnificent as it hits the mountains of Nablus and its white houses [...]
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12:16
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Body on the Line
this is the program from al jazeera’s “inside usa” that i mentioned two posts below. it’s a must watch for americans. it is also a must watch for those who are subjected to modern day american or israeli colonialism.
Posted in Colonialism, Environment, History, Human Rights, Indigenous, International Law, Media, Militarization, Resistance, U.S. Foreign Policy, [...]
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23:20
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Body on the Line
Watching the first U.S. Presidential debates today was like watching a contest to see who could out perform the other with respect to American hegemony and supremacy. It was like watching who could make more blunders to prove who did not know anything about the regions they discussed (both of them said the “Iranian Republican [...]
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23:38
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Body on the Line
I took this photograph the other day on my way home from school. It is a view of Nablus from the entrance of An Najah University. It looks a bit unreal, but the sky was amazingly beautiful that day. Very blue and the shadows on the mountains looked amazing. After this I headed to my [...]
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20:38
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Body on the Line
Open Letter to President Mahmoud Abbas
To: President Mahmoud Abbas
Chair of the Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee
President of the Palestinian National Authority
CC:
League of Arab States
Non-Aligned Movement
Organization of the Islamic Conference
Re: The Rights of Palestinian Refugees and the Final Status Negotiations
Dear Mr. President,
Greetings of Return
We, the undersigned Palestinian refugee organizations, civil society movements [...]
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11:27
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Body on the Line
are there israelis who know how to speak without using the word “terrorist”? is it possible for an israeli to function in the world without hurling this word at palestinians or lebanese or syrians (or insert neighbor of choice here) every five minutes? is it possible that this disease (akin to the one commonly seen [...]
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15:10
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Body on the Line
Just to be clear upfront: I don’t really think that a university is a prison. But I have been thinking about this a lot because of a few things that I’ve been noticing among my students. It seems that many of my students are anxious about their first exam, which is coming up next week. [...]
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16:27
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Body on the Line
The past couple of weeks–and in particular the last couple of days–the Israeli Terrorist Forces (ITF) have been working over time to terrorize people in the Nablus area. Their overflights all day long, during which they break the sound barrier, is bad enough. But dropping sound bombs has been added to the daily way they [...]
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17:36
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Body on the Line
News of Israeli terrorism in Sur, Lebanon is certainly not as horrible as being subjected to it, but I found it interesting that on the same day that the Zionist state announces it is giving back the Lebanese villages it currently and illegally occupies, the Israeli Terrorist Forces (ITF) decide to violate Lebanese airspace and [...]
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17:05
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Body on the Line
I could not believe my ears last night when I heard Ray Nagin, the mayor of New Orleans, threaten the people who live in his city–whom he is supposed to be serving, not the other way around, say:
“Anyone who is caught looting in the city …. will go directly to Angola,” Nagin said referring to [...]
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14:11
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Body on the Line
Yesterday my friend in Deheishe refugee camp decided that we should call Palestinian refugee camps–or indeed perhaps all refugee camps around the world–the Fifth World. He imagined that if we call the global south the “third world” then perhaps the conditions here should be emphasized in this way. His comment came after I was sharing [...]
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11:11
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Body on the Line
Although I was apprehensive at first, I am enjoying the conversation classes I’m teaching at An Najah University. I was not very happy when I first found my schedule changed, mostly because I’m not a language teacher and I have no experience teaching such classes. But my friend Diya helped me immensely with a textbook [...]
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10:14
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Body on the Line
So I have been obsessing about that David Horowitz bit I posted from “Riz Khan” on Al Jazeera English the other day. When you think about it, what Horowitz is engaging in is really Hitler’s “big lie” scheme. I think that the more he says “Jordan is a Palestinian state” the more he thinks people [...]
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18:58
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Body on the Line
Where do I even begin? There is nothing like watching David Horowitz before one goes to sleep to nauseate and agitate you ad infinitum. But I subjected myself to this because when it comes to listening to Zionists I must be masochistic. Last night Horowitz was on Al Jazeera English’s “Riz Khan” program with Hussein [...]
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0:12
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Body on the Line
I’ve always found it very odd that the state of Israel uses the word “absorption” to describe the process of making more Jews colonists in Palestine. Of course, some people are more welcome than others. Much of this depends upon whiteness as per the state’s codified racist policies. Take today’s recent report that Eritrean refugees [...]
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4:02
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Body on the Line
Aside from the bit that Rana Hayeck wrote about me in Al Akhbar last week, I have been waiting and wanting to write about the Free Gaza boat that set sail from Cyprus to Gaza this week. I was invited to go on this boat by activists last summer in Lebanon and then in [...]
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19:52
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Body on the Line
i cannot believe that u.s. congressmen and women think that an apology is sufficient–not only for slavery but also for the ways in which the west continues to profit off of the system of the trans-atlantic slave trade, slavery, and various modern day forms of enslavement (read: the prison industrial complex). what of the reparations [...]
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