January 27 at 7 p.m., at the Jewish Community Center....
Over 100 Stanford students and community members demonstrating against police brutality temporarily shut down the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge Monday afternoon, snarling the evening commute. The group made their way on eastbound and westbound lanes of state Highway 92 on the bridge at the high-rise around 4:50 p.m., CHP Officer Daniel Hill said. The protesters had been dropped off by cars on westbound lanes and briefly made their way to both sides of the freeway, he said. As of shortly after 5 p.m., eastbound lanes were reopened for motorists heading to Hayward but westbound lanes were still closed off for cars traveling to Foster City, Van Eckhardt said. Drivers were seen turning around at the toll plaza and going the wrong way on the bridge as CHP tried to find tow trucks to take away abandoned cars left on the bridge by protesters. The bridge was reopened shortly before 5:30 p.m.[caption id="attachment_113857" align="alignnone" width="600"] (Image via Farah Salazar Twitter)[/caption] In this video taken by a stalled driver on the other side of the highway, you can see how initially traffic was backed up on both sides creating a dangerous situation high on the span (the initial comments seem to indicate the drivers thought it was an abortion protest until they got closer):
Pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel activists disrupted the City Council’s stated meeting on Thursday while members were voting on a resolution commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The protesters started yelling, “shame on you, Melissa”, “why are you supporting an apartheid” and “Palestinian lives matter.” After five minutes of yelling and screaming, the some 40 protesters were ordered to leave and escorted out the balcony. Council member Cory Johnson called it “incredibly disrespectful and offensive. Simply awful.” Councilman Mark Weprin added, “The State of Israel has never supported the killing of innocent people, and they want to love in peace.” “I am still shaken, upset and angry,” Councilman David Greenfield. “Shame on them for hating Jews.” “But I’m pleased, because we can stop pretending that this is about Israel. What we saw here was blatant antisemitism, good old fashioned antisemitism,” Greenfield roared. “They were angry, you know why? because Hitler did not finish the job.” The trip to Israel is a message that “we will not be cowered by this fear and hatred,” he added.... Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in an emailed statement, “At a time when the Council was voting on a resolution commemorating the 70thanniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, this outburst was offensive, outrageous and counter to the values of the City Council.”One of the people in the protest recorded Vine loops(h/t Gothamist).
Part of group seeking to hijack Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter protests into anti-Israel crusade....
University of Illinois trustees say they will not reconsider a September decision to rescind a job offer to a professor over his profane, anti-Israel Twitter messages. The trustees issued a statement Thursday that said the decision was final. A committee of university faculty had recommended that the school reconsider hiring Steven Salaita. Salaita was offered a job teaching Native American Studies at the Urbana-Champaign campus starting last August but the offer was rescinded after he wrote the Twitter messages. Some university donors complained they were anti-Semitic.The Urbana News-Gazette further reports:
When I was in Paris, I was advised by complete strangers to remove my kippah so as not to be identifiable as a Jew: http://t.co/PspmGuwiD1
— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) January 9, 2015
Below are a couple of videos from the assaults on Jewish sections of Paris and a Synagogue during "pro-Palestinian" riots last summer over the Gaza conflict.
See also several of my posts (some of the videos in the posts have gone bad):
The Arava desert, a salty wasteland dotted with tufts of scrub, gets only about an inch of rain each year. And yet cows lazily low at dairy farms that collectively produce nearly 8 million gallons of milk annually. Orange bell peppers flourish in a long swath of greenhouses that skirts the Jordanian border. Kibbutzim with vineyards somehow manage to churn out shiraz and sauvignon blanc, unfazed by the desert sun. The clusters of farms and wineries in the Arava are a testament to Israel's acumen in water technology. One of the most parched places on earth has found a way to beat water woes once so severe that Israel's national mood rose and fell with the changing level of the Sea of Galilee, one of their most critical water sources. That expertise helps explain why the University of Chicago sought out Israel's Ben-Gurion University to help tackle one of the world's most worrisome problems — water scarcity....
My column at The NY Post....
In his acclaimed, Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Finkler Question, British writer Howard Jacobson named a phenomenon which has become familiar to all of us engaged against the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment movement. It is the phenomenon of select Jews speaking out against Israel as “ASHamed Jews,” who seek to distance themselves from Israeli actions against Palestinians and to imagine through their heartfelt public displays that they are participating in the creation of a better, more peaceful, post-occupation world These progressive Jews, in the United States mostly aligned with Jewish Voice for Peace, openly lend themselves to the passage of campus motions to boycott Israel and to efforts in the liberal Protestant churches to enact divestment from companies supplying Israel.... What is the gambit in pressing for boycott and divestment? What do such progressives truly seek? Jacobson wrote knowingly how, for some Jews, Israel is a figure of speech, a pretext for setting loose emotions that may originate somewhere else....
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