https://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2023/12/omni-war-watch-wednesdays-158-december.html Compiled by Dick Bennett
Local ISRAEL/PALESTINE PROTESTS: Donations to our current campaign for justice and peace in Palestine can be made online with Venmo at this link: https://venmo.com/u/Abel-Tomlinson-1. Or, checks can be mailed to
Arkansas Antiwar Alliance, 60 West Smith St.
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Thank you,Abel Tomlinson
Palestine Solidarity NWA, Organizer
Arkansas Antiwar Alliance, Organizer
OMNI Peace Action Committee, Chair
(479)283-5762
NOTE CHANGE OF NAME FOR ISRAEL/PALESTINE DEMONSTRATIONS:
Palestine Solidarity NWA
PSNWA Gaza Ceasefire Protests & Meeting
The next PSNWA protests will be next weekend in Rogers and Bentonville. The focus of these protests is to call for a Ceasefire and to Save the Children. The U.N. reports that around 40% of the deaths from Israel’s bombings of Gaza are children.
The first protest is on Saturday, December 30th at 11 A.M. at the intersection of Promenade Blvd and Whitaker Pkwy in Rogers, at the entrance of the Pinnacle Mall. The second protest is on Sunday, December 30th at 2 P.M. at the Bentonville Square.
A carpooling system has been set up in case anyone needs a ride or would be willing to provide a ride to the protests.
Please help us spread the word by forwarding this email, or if you are on Facebook, please share the event page to the Rogers Protest here and the Bentonville Protest here. If you are on Instagram, please share the attached flyers.
Our next meeting for Palestine Solidarity NWA is this Friday, December 29th at 6 P.M. We will meet at the same location as last time, at David’s blue building right next to Fayetteville Public Library, 105 S. West Ave. Fayetteville. You can park in the Library parking garage.
Toward Justice & Peace,
Abel Tomlinson
Palestine Solidarity NWA, Organizer
(479)283-5762
The Present Genocide Didn’t Have to Happen: Studying the History
Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine. 2012. Reissued, 2023.
A groundbreaking “dual narrative” history of Israel and Palestine which offers a new paradigm for the teaching of history in conflict and post-conflict situations.
“The battle lines of the Israel-Palestinian conflict extend to the classroom, where the two sides’ versions of their shared history diverge sharply. Now, two university professors aim to change the way the conflict is taught by exposing Palestinian students to Israeli history lessons and Israeli students to the Palestinian version of history.” —USA Today
More than twenty years ago, in the midst of widespread violence in Israel and Palestine, a group of Israeli and Palestinian teachers gathered to address what, to many people, seemed an unbridgeable gulf between the two societies. Struck by how different the standard Israeli and Palestinian textbook histories of the same events were from one another—whether of the Balfour Declaration or the 1967 War—they began to explore how a new understanding of history itself might open up different kinds of dialogue in an increasingly hostile climate. Their express goal was to “disarm” the teaching of Middle East history in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms.
The result is a riveting and unprecedented “dual narrative” of Israeli and Palestinian history. Side by Side comprises the history of two peoples, in separate narratives set literally side by side, so that readers can track each against the other, noting both where they differ as well as where they correspond. This unique and fascinating format, translated into English from Arabic and Hebrew, reveals surprising juxtapositions and allows readers to consider and process the very different viewpoints and logic of each side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
An eye-opening—and inspiring—new approach to thinking about one of the world’s most deeply entrenched conflicts, Side by Side is a now classic book that offers to its readers a way to discuss and perhaps help find a bridge to peace in the Middle East.
US MILITARISM: Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, Biden (continuing to deepen our knowledge of US warmaking/warmakers history)
Jeremy Kuzmarov. Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the US Trajectory from Bush II to Biden. Clarity Press, 2023.
December 1, 2023 See all formats and editions
During the 2016 presidential election, many younger voters repudiated Hillary Clinton because of her husband’s support for mass incarceration, banking deregulation and free-trade agreements that led many U.S. jobs to be shipped overseas. Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the Trajectory from Bush II to Biden, shows that Clinton’s foreign policy was just as bad as his domestic policy. Cultivating an image as a former anti-Vietnam War activist to win over the aging hippie set in his early years, as president, Clinton bombed six countries and, by the end of his first term, had committed U.S. troops to 25 separate military operations, compared to 17 in Ronald Reagan’s two terms. Clinton further expanded America’s covert empire of overseas surveillance outposts and spying and increased the budget for intelligence spending and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot which promoted regime change in foreign nations.
The latter was not surprising because, according to CIA operative Cord Meyer Jr., Clinton had been recruited into the CIA while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and as Governor of Arkansas in the 1980s he had allowed clandestine arms and drug flights to Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries (Contras) backed by the CIA to be taken from Mena Airport in the western part of the state. Rather than being a time of tranquility when the U.S. failed to pay attention to the gathering storm of terrorism, as New York Times columnist David Brooks frames it, the Clinton presidency saw rising tensions among the U.S., China and Russia because of Clinton’s malign foreign policies, and U.S. complicity in terrorist acts.
In so many ways, Clinton’s presidency set the groundwork for the disasters that were to follow under Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden. It was Clinton―building off of Reagan―who first waged a War on Terror ridden with double standards, one that adopted terror tactics, including extraordinary rendition, bombing and the use of drones. It was Clinton who cried wolf about human rights abuses and the need to protect beleaguered peoples from genocide to justify military intervention in a post-Cold War age. And it was Clinton’s administration that pressed for regime change in Iraq and raised public alarm about the mythic WMDs―all while relying on fancy new military technologies and private military contractors to distance US shady military interventions from the public to limit dissent.
(I learned early in its history that political social media often resulted in or was even designed to produce polarization via viral images that stimulated adrenaline and dopamine, not thought. I delete all images from the articles l reproduce or discuss. What is lost in excitement and emotion I hope to gain in argument and reason.)