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PAN AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL 2024: Capsule Reviews

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The 32nd Pan African Film & Arts Festival, America’s largest Black-themed filmfest, took place Feb. 7 – Feb. 19 in Los Angeles. During Black History Month PAFF annually screens movies ranging from Hollywood studio productions and Hallmark Channel TV-movies to indies, foreign films, documentaries, low budget productions, shorts, animation, etc. Films span the spectrum from Oscar nominees to hard-to-find gems from Africa, the Caribbean, America Continue Reading...

Top 3 Things Biden could Do instead of intensively Bombing Iraq and Syria

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The Biden administration launched 85 air strikes on Friday against small bases of the Party of God Brigades (Kata’ib Hizbullah), an Iraqi Shiite militia active in Iraq and Syria. The organization is likely the culprit in Sunday’s drone strike against the Tower 22 US base in the far north of Jordan on the border with Syria. The communique issued by something calling itself “the Islamic Resistance in Iraq” said that the strike had been in Continue Reading...

Martin Luther King Would Still Fuck the Right’s Shit Up (Still Getting It Wrong Edition)

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It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and that means it's time for the racist dickscabs of the right to trot out that one quote from "I Have a Dream" they use to attempt to colonize King's power and message. And while they are still talking about judging people by "the content of their character" as a way of avoiding how King was actually saying that can happen after you deal with all the bigoted shit woven into the filthy fabric of Continue Reading...

Russian Roulette: Doctors w/out Borders Demand Immediate Ceasefire as Hospitals turned into “Morgues”

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Doctors without Borders (the French volunteer organization Médecins Sans Frontières [MSF]) has written a poignant letter to the United Nations Security Council imploring for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. They took this step after Israeli troops deliberately attacked MSF rescue vehicles and destroyed them with tank fire. Making the shotMaking the shot: MSF Convoy Vehicles Destroyed in Gaza: Doctors Without Borders / Continue Reading...

We’re All Just Watching the Wheels Fall Off the GOP Clown Car

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Watching the wheels come off a clown car has its charms, teetering as it does on that tightrope between hilarious and terrifying. It's hilarious because, c'mon, it's a bunch of clowns and you're watching those painted dopes as they get flung around like a dog toy in the teeth of a particularly enthusiastic pit bull, screaming, clawing at each other as they to try to position themselves to not fling out of the car as it flips over and over, Continue Reading...

Can Hamas Survive the Stupidity of its ISIL-Style Tactics in its Drive against the Grey Zone?

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Hamas leaders have said they were driven to their attack on Israel this weekend by two major considerations, the danger posed by right wing religious Zionism to the al-Aqsa mosque complex, the third holiest shrine for 1.8 billion Muslims, and a wave of Israeli squatter attacks on Palestinian hamlets in the Palestinian West Bank. Ibrahim Ibrash, writing for the London-based pan-Arab daily, al-Arab is puzzled by these announced goals Continue Reading...

Palestine: The Bible is Not a Baton

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A Palestinian pastor throws an intellectual hand grenade into the body of knowledge on Palestine/Israel. The opening line of Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, the People, the Bible says it all: “For Palestinians, including the Palestinian Christian community, Palestine is a real land with real people.” It seems self-evident, but in a time when more people are in love with some majestic idea of Israel/Palestine rather than the Continue Reading...

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s District Owes a Lot to the New Deal and the Great Society (profanity free for the kids)

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(If you want a rude version of this, check out my latest video for the Political Voices Network.) Not to educatorsplain things to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the enthusiastic genital displayer from Georgia's 14th District, but during her speech last weekend at one of those endless streams of conservative conferences that seem to be as frequent as a new Marvel thing, she went off, oddly, on how Joe Biden's Continue Reading...

Dear Ron DeSantis: Consider all the Valuable Skills the Enslaved Taught Cracker Slave-Holders (For Which they were never Paid)

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The new Florida history curriculum on slavery says that some enslaved persons learned skills while enslaved that later benefited them, provoking shock and outrage across the nation. One of the things that is wrong with this way of looking at the issue is the white nationalist assumption that white slavers were repositories of useful knowledge that they sometimes deigned to pass on to the poor benighted enslaved from the backward Dark Continue Reading...

This is the unnamed Palestinian casualty of Israel’s assault on Jenin

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Amid Israeli airstrikes and our political struggle for statehood, we are fighting an economic battle to keep Palestinians in Palestine, the ultimate act of non-violent resistance against the Netanyahu government’s state and settler violence. So why are some U.S. companies turning away?Depending on who you talk to, the Palestinian economy is either in intensive care, a victim of relentless and prolonged Israeli military aggression or it is Continue Reading...

Lessons From Karnataka 2023

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The landslide defeat of the self-declared ‘invincible’ Bharatiya Janata Party by the Congress, that was reportedly ‘sinking’, has stunned India. The entire country seemed to have had a stake in the Karnataka Assembly election. That stake continues, as the victorious Congress is still struggling to cut the Gordian knot of choosing a Chief Minister with two contenders remaining adamant. We do not know whether either of them, or their ardent Continue Reading...

Don’t Cry for Me. Cry for Yourselves

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The voice of a Palestinian child in Gaza, taken from this world by Israel — “the only democracy in the Middle East”. Note: This was written in 2014, a decade after Iman Darweesh Al Hams was murdered by an Israeli soldier in Gaza and after Israeli courts cleared the solider who killed her from any wrongdoing. Today, as I watch more Gazan children killed by the Israeli killing machine, I remembered Iman and this article. Sadly, this Continue Reading...

Best of Web

The View Within Israel Turns Bleak

It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12. “These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun,” complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there,” Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood.”

America is not becoming isolationist

“A specter is haunting the world — the specter of American isolation. 

Signs of a retrenchment start with Congress’ reluctance to authorize additional military assistance for Ukraine to defend it from a revanchist Russia. An aid bill finally made it to Biden’s desk for a signature this week, but it took the GOP-led House months to pass their version of the legislation, with many Republican leaders claiming the U.S. should focus instead on problems closer to home — a sentiment widely shared on the right.”

Antisemitic Zionists Aren’t a Contradiction in Terms

“LAST NOVEMBER, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) awarded Donald Trump its highest honor, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion. Nine days later, the former president dined with two of America’s most prominent antisemites, rapper Kanye West and white nationalist provocateur Nick Fuentes. Noting the proximity of the two events, The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner asked ZOA president Morton Klein an uncomfortable question: Could Trump be among those “people who, for whatever reason, have sympathies with Israel but don’t like Jews?” Klein dismissed the proposition.”

The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities – including in Gaza

“It’s an Oscar tradition: a serious political speech pierces the bubble of glamour and self-congratulation. Warring responses ensue. Some proclaim the speech an example of artists at their culture-shifting best; others an egotistical usurpation of an otherwise celebratory night. Then everyone moves on. Yet I suspect that the impact of Jonathan Glazer’s time-stopping speech at last Sunday’s Academy Awards will be significantly more lasting, with its meaning and import analyzed for many years to come . . . “

Israel threatens the identity of American Jews

“My father was something of a lapsed Jew. An ardent atheist, he thought all religion, including Judaism, was a dangerous anachronism. He couldn’t speak a lick of Yiddish, unlike his Russian-born father, and disliked most Kosher food. Borscht Belt humor was lost on him . . . “

Trump, McConnell, Putin, and the Triumph of the Will to Power

At a critical moment in the 2016 presidential campaign, President Obama met with Republican congressional leaders and, after presenting them with evidence of Russian tampering, asked that they uniformly condemn it.  GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others refused.  The evidence just wasn’t there.  But it was.  And many of the same lawmakers eagerly condemned Hillary Clinton’s perceived misdeed, as reported by the FBI.  So much for love of country.