Keeponstalin

In a long statement released Friday, Sanders said that the Biden administration is on the wrong path if it truly wishes for “full accountability” for Eygi’s killing in the occupied West Bank, as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have called for. He called on the Department of Justice and the FBI to open their own independent investigations into the attack and the many others in which Israel has killed American citizens.

“Let’s be clear: there will be no accountability if the United States defers to the extremist Israeli government to investigate its own actions,” Sanders said.

The senator directly refuted Biden and Harris’s false claims that Eygi’s killing was an accident, and pointed out numerous incidents in the past two years in which Israeli forces have killed Americans with “no accountability” for their deaths.

Indeed, as many advocates for Palestinian rights have pointed out in recent days, Israeli forces have killed at least five Americans in the occupied West Bank since Biden took office, including 17-year-olds Tawfiq Ajaq and Mohammad Khdour; Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh; retiree Omar Assad; and now, Eygi. Sanders brought up Israel’s targeting of American journalist Dylan Collins, who was shot at by Israeli tanks while reporting in Lebanon in October.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) are calling on the Biden administration to conduct an independent probe into Israel’s killing of American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, as officials have been relying on Israel’s own flawed investigation into her death.

In a letter addressed to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the two lawmakers call for an “immediate, transparent, credible, and thorough independent U.S. investigation” into Eygi’s killing. They raise alarm that U.S. officials have allowed Israel to kill U.S. citizens in the past with impunity.

“We fear that if this pattern of impunity does not end with Ms. Eygi, it will only continue to escalate. It is imperative that the United States take concrete and decisive action to better protect American citizens,” the lawmakers said. They then asked the administration to indicate whether they will pursue an investigation and to release the knowledge they have of her killing within the next two weeks.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said that Eygi’s killing, as well as Israel’s bombings of its designated “safe zone” in Gaza this week, are the latest evidence that the U.S. must stop sending weapons to Israel.

On June 11, a week after a police training facility in Richmond, California, broke ground, organizers from the Stop Cop City Bay Area Coalition marched to the Overaa Construction headquarters in protest. Citing concerns over rising police militarization and repression in the predominantly Black and Latino area, the protesters — joined by local residents — called on Overaa workers to boycott the $30 million construction deal.

“By furthering the militarizing and surveillance of our city — and coordinating law enforcement resources across the region, including ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] — they’re actually making our cities into Cop Cities,” said Refilwe Gqajela, a community organizer with the Anti Police-Terror Project in California’s Bay Area.

The influx of these facilities parallels the emergence of the defund the police movement, which — following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — saw thousands of people across the country mobilize to decry police violence against Black and brown communities. Within the last five years, there has been a quiet rollout of over 80 multi-million dollar Cop City-like facilities across the country.

Dozens of Atlanta organizers have been jailed and charged with domestic terrorism and racketeering. According to Franklin, this a coordinated effort to criminalize activism and scare organizers. He said a large part of the facility will be built by the end of the year, even though a poll from 2023 indicated that 59 percent of residents don’t support it.

Over the last year, repressive policing has extended beyond Stop Cop City organizers to encompass Gaza solidarity student encampments as well. Tamera Hutcherson, an organizer with Stop Cop City Dallas, said the city council held secretive meetings and used vague language around “public safety” to get voters to support a proposition that gave $50 million to a police training facility. Soon after, Texas State Troopers raided a peaceful Gaza solidarity student encampment.

As Israel perpetrates a genocide in the Gaza Strip, key players in the labor movement have joined forces to strategize how unions might apply leverage to help bring about an end to the assault. Over the last year, recognizing the widespread opposition to the war among their membership and the potential for dissent inherent in cross-union solidarity, representatives of over 200 U.S. unions — from many dozens of participating locals, to the leaderships of multiple leading national unions — banded together to form The National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC).

“The workers [of Gaza] need us to push back through our unions,” Dimondstein said. “These are bombs often funded by the United States of America. We don’t want our tax dollars being used … to bomb the hell out of innocent men, women and children. And about half of the known deaths in Gaza have been children. This has got to stop. The idea of the NLNC is to bring more organized strength to the issue, to educate on the issue, and to pressure the Biden administration to use their leverage to force a ceasefire and [deliver] massive humanitarian aid.”

The NLNC promises to be a continuing force in the days to come. As Dimondstein reflected, “We’ve probably had some influence on the rest of the labor movement, even if it’s [just] in words. I don’t know if a majority of the unions now have ceasefire positions, but many of them do, including the AFL-CIO. So, I think by getting organized as the National Labor Network, we’re able to put much more of a spotlight on this issue and bring some strength to the issue within the organized labor movement.” By following the early example of the UFCW Local 3000, and at the urging of its early founding members like Dimondstein, the NLNC has at least helped labor advance past a certain political hesitancy.

A 2020 CBS/YouGov survey found that a slight majority of Pennsylvanians actually oppose fracking, with 52 percent of voters opposed and 48 percent in favor. Another 2020 poll, this one by Franklin & Marshall College, reported that 48 percent of registered Pennsylvania voters supported a ban on fracking, while only 39 percent opposed such a ban. And in a 2021 poll by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a sustainability-focused think tank, less than a third of Pennsylvanians said they supported continued fracking in the state.

Popular support for fracking has declined in Pennsylvania as understanding of its adverse effects has grown. A review of more than 2,500 scientific, medical, government and media reports — many of which focused on Pennsylvania — found that fracking is linked to numerous health problems, including cancer, asthma and congenital anomalies. The evidence is staggering, but here are some particularly egregious examples: An August 2023 report by the University of Pittsburgh determined that children living within a mile of a natural gas fracking well were seven times more likely to contract lymphoma, a rare form of childhood cancer. Another study found that children within a mile of a fracking well were also more likely to develop juvenile leukemia.

Commissioned by the Arab American Institute (AAI), the online poll of 2,505 American voters conducted between July 31 and August 1 found that 44% of U.S. voters would back Harris, 40% would support Republican nominee Donald Trump, and 11% would vote third party “if the election for president of the United States were held today.”

But if Harris were to endorse a suspension of U.S. arms shipments and diplomatic support for Israel “until there was a cease-fire and withdrawal of forces from Gaza,” her national support would grow from 44% to 49%.

A majority of Democratic voters say the Gaza crisis is either very or somewhat important in determining how they vote in November, according to the AAI poll.

The new survey, which has a margin of error of 2 percentage points, is consistent with an earlier poll commissioned by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project, which found that Harris would bolster her chances in key battleground states if she backed an arms embargo.

This is the painful calculus of American immigration policy — a patchwork of executive actions that bring relief to a chosen few, while millions more are subject to increasingly cruel forms of immigration enforcement. Broadly speaking, enforcement comes in two forms: an explosion of border patrol that creates border detention camps, and makes crossing ever more dangerous for migrants, and deportations in the interior that rip families like mine apart. While the political debate over immigration moves in an ever more ethnonationalist direction, few understand the brutal reality of our current immigration system — and what deportation actually means for my family and thousands of families like mine who are currently fighting to stay together.

But as one administration after another failed to pass comprehensive legislation that would allow immigrants to apply for legal permanent residency, the immigration enforcement system grew ever crueller. Republicans, now calling for mass deportations, have become increasingly extremist, while Democrats have tracked them to the right. The Clinton administration expanded temporary protections for immigrants from certain countries, while criminalizing immigration and making it more difficult for most undocumented immigrants to adjust their status. The Obama administration enacted the DACA program, which allowed 800,000 undocumented youth to apply for temporary status, while deporting a record 3 million immigrants. As politics on immigration move further to the right, smaller and smaller segments of the community are granted fragile, temporary status, while the majority are criminalized and threatened with imprisonment and deportation.

The only way to break this vicious cycle is to demand the obvious: a path to legal status and permanent protection from deportation for the millions of us who have built families and a life in the United States. Anything less rips children away from their parents and destroys communities.

Sponsored by the Maine Coalition for Palestine and the Maine chapter of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), the newly approved resolution contains a “divestment list” of more than 85 companies, from U.S.-based Chevron, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing to Israel-based Elbit Systems. The list also includes public entities such as Israel Bonds and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries.

The Maine Coalition for Palestine said Wednesday’s vote makes Portland the fourth U.S. city to adopt an Israel divestment resolution. Two California cities — Hayward and Richmond — and Hamtramck, Michigan passed similar divestment resolutions earlier this year.

“Americans overwhelmingly want a cease-fire and an arms embargo,” the group continued. “Divestment sends a clear message that current U.S. policy towards Palestinians is morally unacceptable and does not serve the interests of our country. We urge everyone to join this effort in their own communities. Our tax money should not be spent killing women and children in Palestine.”

In her first major interview since replacing Joe Biden on the ballot, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was questioned about her shifting statements on fracking, which has been linked to a surge in methane gas emissions over the past decade.

Harris, who has previously made comments opposing fracking, vowed not to ban it if elected. The vice president went on to highlight the Biden-Harris administration’s environmental record, which activists have criticized for vastly expanding oil production rather than drawing down the country’s reliance on fossil fuels.

“The data is telling us that what Kamala Harris said about fracking — that we can do it without dealing with reducing the supply of fossil fuels — it’s just not borne out by the numbers,” explains The Lever’s David Sirota, who adds, “Ultimately, consequences for that will be on the United States, for the entire world.”

“We’ve never seen anything like this, where the students have suffered sanctions before a finding of their responsibility for violations of the rules,” Franke said, “And the sanctions that they received before any finding of guilt are far more stringent than anything we’ve seen with much more disruptive protests.”.

The crackdown on students taking part in pro-Palestine protests began in November, when the school suspended campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace after those groups led an unsanctioned rally. Then in early April, the school suspended four students for hosting an unapproved rally which featured a speaker who is an alleged member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization

As protests sprouted on campuses across the U.S. with students calling their schools to divest from companies with connections to Israel, Republican lawmakers have decried the demonstrations as hotbeds of antisemitism. While antisemitic incidents have occurred on campuses since October 7, along with anti-Muslim and anti-Arab incidents, House Republicans such as Foxx have conflated them with any and all protests for divestment from Israel or in opposition to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. High-profile congressional hearings on antisemitism in college campuses by Foxx’s committee have since led to the resignation of presidents of elite schools, including Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and most recently, Shafik of Columbia.

New York University (NYU) has changed its guidelines around hate speech and harassment to include the criticism of Zionism as a discriminatory act.

"For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity. Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH (non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy) if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists," read the new guidelines from NYU, which were released last Thursday.

The NYU chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (NYU FSJP) released a statement on Sunday condemning the move, saying that it sets a dangerous precedent which could also shield other ethnonationalist movements, such as Hindu nationalism and Christian nationalism, from criticism.

"The new guidance sets a dangerous precedent by extending Title VI protections to anyone who adheres to Zionism, a nationalist political ideology, and troublingly equates criticism of Zionism with discrimination against Jewish people," NYU FSJP said.

"The new NDAH guidance represents an intensification of NYU’s year-long effort to censor criticism and criminalize protest of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza," NYU FSJP said in its latest statement.

Notably absent from Walz’s speech was any real substance on foreign policy — including discussion of the genocide happening against Palestinians in Gaza, which uncommitted delegates and their allies have been trying to discuss for days at DNC. Indeed, most of the night, if not the week, has ignored the issue, and where it has been mentioned, Israel’s role in the genocide has been glossed over.

Uncommitted delegates in support of Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide have requested that the DNC allow a Palestinian speaker take the podium in the United Center, to discuss a permanent ceasefire and an embargo for weapons from the U.S. to Israel, which the U.S. is legally obligated to do.

“We are learning that Israeli hostages’ families will be speaking from the main stage. We strongly support that decision and also strongly hope that we will also be hearing from Palestinians who’ve endured the largest civilian death toll since 1948,” read a statement from the Uncommitted National Movement account on X. "Excluding a Palestinian speaker betrays the party’s commitment in our platform to valuing Israelis and Palestinian lives equally. Vice President Harris must unite this party with a vision that fights for everyone, including Palestinians."

A group of uncommitted delegates, joined by interfaith leaders and their allies, staged a sit-in just outside the convention hall on Wednesday night, saying they wouldn’t remove themselves from that spot until their demands for a Palestinian speaker were met.