juicy

I was held for two hours. The first round of questions was about my views on Hamas. Then the agents wished to know whether I thought Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip amount to genocide and what I think of the slogan “Palestine should be free from the river to the sea”. I said yes, I do think Israel is committing genocide. As to the slogan, I said that in my view people anywhere in the world should be free.

Then the agents interrogated me about who I know in the Arab American and Muslim American community. They asked me to provide them with telephone numbers, took my phone away for quite a long period and asked to wait until they made some phone calls before they let me go.

While the prosecutor’s statement did not mention Israel, it was issued after Israeli and US officials have warned of consequences against the ICC if it issues arrest warrants over Israel’s war on Gaza.

While polls broadly show Biden continuing to fall behind former President Donald Trump in swing states across the country, they consistently show the older, whiter states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as the most competitive for Biden. Trump has larger leads in the Sun Belt states, in large part owing to Biden’s loss of support with younger voters and voters of color.

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The most recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed Biden with smaller leads than 2020 among voters under 45 (3 points), Black voters (60 points) and Hispanic voters (13 points) — important voting blocs in the southern and western battlegrounds.

What happens in November is up to Biden – it will not be the fault of the protest voter if Trump is elected. The questions remain: does the Democratic party fear Trump as much as we do? And does it value its voters enough to shift away from an approach to the onslaught in Gaza that a majority of Democratic voters are against?

I am a Palestinian American in Pennsylvania, a contested state. I plan to write in “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary on 23 April and in November, I will vote for a third-party candidate.

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For many, myself included, a vote for Biden is simply impermissible – the extent of the moral calamity is so great as to render a vote for Biden a vote for complicity.

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As the president of the Center City mosque in Philadelphia, Mohammed Shariff, said to me: “My vote is the purest form of expression and speech.” President Biden ignores our voices at his own peril, and ours.

According to NBC News, another guest, Dr. Nahreen H. Ahmed, “was taken aback when she showed Biden prints of photos of malnourished children and women in Gaza—to which Biden responded that he had seen those images before. The problem, the doctor said, was that she had printed the photos from her own iPhone.” Biden was clearly making up the fiction of having seen the pictures before as a way not to have to look at them. As Ahmed rightly notes, Biden’s behavior “speaks volumes to the dismissive nature of the administration when it comes to strong-willed action towards a permanent cease-fire or, at a bare minimum, a red line on the invasion of Rafah.”

Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, helped to form the LA chapter of the group Black Lives Matter, and West praised her as “one of the great freedom fighters of her generation”.

A human rights monitor documented the sniping of at least 13 children in and around Shifa Hospital, all between the ages of 4 and 16.

Benjamin Netanyahu says there is no starvation in Gaza. Palestinian Israeli politician Ayman Odeh was forcibly stopped from speaking in the Knesset after he referenced the hunger crisis. And, in the United States, the lobby group AIPAC has been pushing talking points saying that “reports that people are starving in Gaza are false.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- After narrowly backing Israel’s military action in Gaza in November, Americans now oppose the campaign by a solid margin. Fifty-five percent currently disapprove of Israel’s actions, while 36% approve.