Months ago, a State Department panel urged the Biden administration to disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid over serious human rights abuses, including rape and torture. According to ProPublica, Secretary of State Blinken received the recommendation in December but has still not taken any action.
Thousands of Jewish Americans and allies gathered in Brooklyn on Tuesday for a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover, held just a block from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to protest ongoing U.S. support for the Israeli assault on Gaza. “Too many of our people are worshiping a false idol,” said award-winning author and activist Naomi Klein, one of several speakers at Tuesday’s rally. “They are enraptured by it. They are drunk on it.
Hundreds of protesters were arrested in Brooklyn on Tuesday when Jewish New Yorkers and allies gathered for what they called a “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel” on the second night of Passover. The demonstration, held one block away from the home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, came just hours before the Senate overwhelmingly approved a $95 billion foreign aid package that includes about $17 billion in arms and security funding to Israel.
President Biden has signed legislation to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act despite years of protest from rights groups and privacy experts who say the law is routinely used to conduct warrantless surveillance on millions of American citizens. The Senate approved the FISA bill on Friday in a 60-34 vote, and critics say it not only reauthorizes domestic spying but also dramatically expands its scope.
Democracy Now! speaks with the great labor organizer and writer Jane McAlevey about the historic victory for Volkswagen employees at a Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory who voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers union. The plant will become the first foreign-owned car factory in the South to unionize.
Fifty-six years ago today, hundreds of students at Columbia University in New York started a revolt on campus, occupying school buildings and disrupting class to protest the school’s ties to the Vietnam War and racism in New York. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who participated in the 1968 protests when hundreds of students were injured by police and arrested, speaks about the rebellion and how it compares to Columbia’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters occupying campus today.
Palestinian solidarity protests and encampments are appearing on college campuses from Massachusetts to California to protest Israel’s attacks on Gaza and to call for divestment from Israeli apartheid. This week, police have raided encampments and arrested students at Yale and New York University.
President Biden has signed legislation to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act despite years of protest from rights groups and privacy experts who say the law is routinely used to conduct warrantless surveillance on millions of American citizens. The Senate approved the FISA bill on Friday in a 60-34 vote, and critics say it not only reauthorizes domestic spying but also dramatically expands its scope.
As the death toll in Gaza tops 34,000 Palestinians killed since October 7, Israeli forces and settlers have continued to ramp up violence in the occupied West Bank. The army killed at least 14 people during a two-day raid on the Nur Shams refugee camp near the city of Tulkarm over the weekend, and separately killed a Palestinian ambulance driver near Nablus as he was trying to reach Palestinians injured in an attack by Jewish settlers.
We speak with Mahmood Mamdani, a professor of government at Columbia who has spoken with many of the pro-Palestine protesters camping out on school grounds to show solidarity with Gaza and demand the school divest from Israel. He says there is growing outrage from faculty after the school’s leadership called in the police to raid the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and conduct mass arrests, while administrators have started suspending and evicting some students.
Columbia University canceled in-person classes Monday as campus protests over the war in Gaza enter a sixth day. The protests have swelled after the school administration called in the police to clear a student encampment last week, resulting in over 100 arrests. Solidarity protests and encampments have now sprouted up on campuses across the country, including at Yale, MIT, Tufts, NYU, The New School and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, organized by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), collected work from 14 Palestinian photographers who were each asked to share one image that captured the devastation of the Gaza Strip over the last six months. We speak with Charlotte Cans, head of photography at OCHA, about the project.
As Israel continues bombarding the Gaza Strip, we speak with a Palestinian photographer who recently fled the territory with his family. Ahmed Zakot has been documenting Gaza for the last 25 years, and two of his photographs were just featured in a project by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and published by Rolling Stone earlier this month in a piece titled “Gaza’s Carnage Through the Eyes of Palestinian Photojournalists.
Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik on Thursday called on New York police to forcibly clear a student occupation on the lawn of the school, which had been dubbed the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, resulting in over 100 arrests.
Israeli police arrested the internationally renowned feminist Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian at her home in Jerusalem on Thursday on charges of incitement to violence. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who holds both Israeli and U.S. citizenship, was suspended by Hebrew University last month after saying in an interview Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, though the university later reinstated her.
The Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, organized by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), collected work from 14 Palestinian photographers who were each asked to share one image that captured the devastation of the Gaza Strip over the last six months. We speak with Charlotte Cans, head of photography at OCHA, about the project.
As Israel continues bombarding the Gaza Strip, we speak with a Palestinian photographer who recently fled the territory with his family. Ahmed Zakot has been documenting Gaza for the last 25 years, and two of his photographs were just featured in a project by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and published by Rolling Stone earlier this month in a piece titled “Gaza’s Carnage Through the Eyes of Palestinian Photojournalists.
Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik on Thursday called on New York police to forcibly clear a student occupation on the lawn of the school, which had been dubbed the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, resulting in over 100 arrests.
Israeli police arrested the internationally renowned feminist Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian at her home in Jerusalem on Thursday on charges of incitement to violence. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who holds both Israeli and U.S. citizenship, was suspended by Hebrew University last month after saying in an interview Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, though the university later reinstated her.
The Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, organized by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), collected work from 14 Palestinian photographers who were each asked to share one image that captured the devastation of the Gaza Strip over the last six months. We speak with Charlotte Cans, head of photography at OCHA, about the project.
As Israel continues bombarding the Gaza Strip, we speak with a Palestinian photographer who recently fled the territory with his family. Ahmed Zakot has been documenting Gaza for the last 25 years, and two of his photographs were just featured in a project by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and published by Rolling Stone earlier this month in a piece titled “Gaza’s Carnage Through the Eyes of Palestinian Photojournalists.
Columbia University President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik on Thursday called on New York police to forcibly clear a student occupation on the lawn of the school, which had been dubbed the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, resulting in over 100 arrests.
Israeli police arrested the internationally renowned feminist Palestinian academic Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian at her home in Jerusalem on Thursday on charges of incitement to violence. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who holds both Israeli and U.S. citizenship, was suspended by Hebrew University last month after saying in an interview Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, though the university later reinstated her.
New reporting indicates that the Biden administration has approved Israel’s plan to attack Rafah in exchange for Israel not launching counterstrikes on Iran. “Israel is almost certainly going to respond to the Iranian strike in some way,” says Mairav Zonszein, a senior Israel analyst for the International Crisis Group.
Students at Columbia University and Barnard College in New York have set up dozens of tents to occupy the South Lawn of the campus to create a Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Democracy Now! spoke to some of the student-activists, who say they are occupying the space, despite the administration’s threats of suspension and disciplinary action, as part of a demand that the Ivy League school divest from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli occupation.
In nearly four hours of grueling congressional testimony before the Republican-led Committee on Education and the Workforce, the president of Columbia University, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, said she had taken serious action against accusations of antisemitism on campus in recent months amid Israel’s assault on Gaza, including dismissing or removing five faculty members from the classroom, suspending 15 students and suspending two student groups — Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voi
Amid widespread repression of pro-Palestinian voices on campuses across the United States, we speak to University of Southern California valedictorian Asna Tabassum, whose commencement speech has been canceled for what the university claimed were “safety” reasons after Tabassum became the subject of an online anti-Palestinian hate campaign led by pro-Israel groups.
We speak with veteran journalist Peter Maass about the Israeli war on Gaza and his new opinion piece for The Washington Post headlined “I’m Jewish, and I’ve covered wars. I know war crimes when I see them.” Maass, who was a senior editor at The Intercept until earlier this year, has spent decades covering wars, including the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s that killed about 100,000 people over nearly four years.
On Wednesday, 4,000 Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, begin voting in a closely watched election on whether to organize with the United Auto Workers in what could be the union’s first big victory as they try to expand into the southern United States after huge contract wins in 2023 with Detroit companies General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.
Democracy Now! speaks with two of the Google employees who were arrested staging sit-ins on Tuesday at the company’s offices in New York City and in Sunnyvale, California, to protest the tech giant’s work with the Israeli government. Organized by the group No Tech for Apartheid, the protesters are demanding Google withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military.