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Cake day: March 10th, 2024

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  • Kamala Harris issued a Whitehouse statement condemning Hamas after the body of an American hostage was found last week:

    Hamas is an evil terrorist organization. With these murders, Hamas has even more American blood on its hands. I strongly condemn Hamas’ continued brutality, and so must the entire world.

    As Vice President, I have no higher priority than the safety of American citizens, wherever they are in the world.

    Will this be the trigger for her to use equally strong language to condemn Israel, who has killed 30 times more people in the ongoing genocide than Hamas? Or will she just reiterate as she did in her recent CNN interview that:

    I’m unequivocal and — and unwavering in my commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself.

    CNN Reporter: But no change in policy in terms of arms and — and so forth?

    No.

    Does she care about all Americans, or only those whose deaths justify continuing this genocide?





  • This additude is how we end up with a Weekend at Bernie’s presidential candidate. Just like activism within national politics is essential to our country’s vitality and growth, activism within party politics is essential for the party to stay relevant and effective. Just as our country will be lost to corporatocracy, oligarchy, and bigotry if no one fights for democracy, justice, and equality, our party will succumb to corporate donors, consultants, and myopic geriatrics if we sit on the sidelines.

    Dems have a serious old people problem. We are the party of Dianne Feinstein, who clung to her senate seat until death despite being literally senile. We are the party of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Hillary Clinton is another symptom of the same disease. She used the power she accumulated within the party over decades to foist herself on a reluctant party base by calling in favors and pulling strings that only someone who has grown old floating in the stratosphere of national politics can.

    This country needs a revolution, and it needs to start within the Democratic Party.





  • Ethnic nationalism is just racism, whether practiced by white supremacist MAGA Americans or Holocaust survivors. In a liberal democracy, the government serves all people regardless of race. I’m confused by your premise that Holocaust survivors were entitled to their own ethnic state for some reason.

    Also, the Zionist movement was not a response to the Holocaust. It was a colonial enterprise that began well before the Holocaust in response to widespread persecution especially in Central Europe. Many Jews opposed the Jewish nationalism undergirding Zionism for the same reasons liberals today reject virtually all nationalist movements. Many emigrated to liberal democracies like the United States where they could live free of ethnic discrimination. Zionists instead chose to respond with their own ethnic persecution.

    It is worth recalling in this connection that at the turn of the century, Zionism’s similarities to other projects of colonization were not a source of embarrassment or shame for most of the movement’s adherents; indeed, they often saw them as a selling point. Zionist leaders studied and sought to learn from the experience of European colonial-settlement enterprises in places like Algeria, Rhodesia, and Kenya, and many imagined their own endeavor as similar in certain ways. Moreover, the Zionist movement readily used such terms as “colony,” “colonial,” and “colonization” to refer to its activities; thus, for example, the original name of its financial arm was the Jewish Colonial Trust. It was only later, after the First World War, that colonialism came to have strongly pejorative connotations for many Europeans. As a consequence the Zionist movement sought to dissociate itself from other European projects of colonization and settlement, began to stress the uniqueness and noncolonial character of its mission and methods, and stopped using such terms, at least in languages other than Hebrew.

    Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (University of California Press, 1996) 21-57.