amateur ramblings

Six months ago, I wrote an article for The Electronic Intifada raising questions about Palestine Note’s funding and editorial style. Of its two founding funders, Hani Masri donated money to notoriously anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab Congressman Anthony Weiner, and Abul Huda Farouki contracted with the US military to provide material support for the occupation of Iraq. [...]

Perhaps the most important success of the divestment movement at Berkeley has been overlooked. Yes, it is true that a super majority of the student senate supported divestment from Israeli war crimes and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. It is true that the vote was reversed only after pro-Israel mobilization kicked in to remind [...]

Artificial rivalries between offensively similar elite centers of privilege are noxious enough in their own right, but when they foster elitism and prejudice, they become dangerous. In last Friday’s edition of YDN, Bijan Aboutorabi argues that, in withdrawing a t-shirt design calling the rival-but-mirror-image team “sissies,” a university committee tasked with facilitating this crass competition [...]

Following the occupation of Wheeler Hall on Friday November 20, former Student Action Senator Tara Raffi penned a regrettable op-ed decrying the protest and its participants. I know Raffi, who has always been kind and respectful towards me, but her demeanor cannot save her claims from criticism or scrutiny. Unfortunately Raffi’s column appears to misapprehend [...]

As the House of Representatives passed its delusional resolution condemning the Goldstone Report last week, Congressman Kucinich forcefully objected: “Almost as serious as committing war crimes is covering up war crimes, pretending that war crimes were never committed and did not exist. Because behind every such deception is the nullification of humanity, the destruction of [...]

For the most part, public and explicit expressions of extreme hate or animosity towards racialized groups of people are pretty easy to identify as wrong. Despite this, in certain spaces, the infamous ‘harmless racist joke’ persists because, as the defender says, it is not to be taken as a serious communication of ill-will. Examples of [...]

Note: I wrote this when I was in Syria last summer. I’ve decided to publish it in the hopes of starting a discussion on the nature of the freedoms we tend to discuss in political activism in different parts of the world. At the very heart of it, the question is, what kind of freedom [...]

The ASUC is the elected student government at UC Berkeley. Composed of five executives and twenty senators, its most important task is to distribute money to student organizations. Many people believe that the ASUC can, in some sense, be an activist tool for “change.” Unfortunately, I don’t think this is true, despite having believed it [...]

Background: On Nov 13, 2008, three members of the Zionist Freedom Alliance, including current ASUC Senator John Moghtader, stormed up several flights of stairs in Eshleman Hall to confront three Palestinian students who silently held Palestinian flags on a balcony  above a ZFA event to protest the group’s anti-Palestinian message. An altercation ensued in which [...]

Recent weeks have seen the appearance of a group called the Zionist Freedom Alliance at UC Berkeley. It is not clear at this point what the group’s affiliation is with Tikvah, however all the major members of Tikvah work with the Alliance, which sponsored Israeli Liberation Week. The Zionist Freedom Alliance reflects the desperate and [...]