Friends of Sabeel N.A. Tag

On Sunday, March 1, 2015, we provided on-scene coverage of Code Pink's "Shut Down AIPAC" protest. The most notable feature of the protest was the waving of Hezbollah flags. Code Pink managed to get some press coverage even though it didn't shut down AIPAC, or even an itsy, bitsy part of AIPAC, because five protesters were arrested, including two from Ithaca, my current place of residence. One of the arrestees, Ariel Gold, may be familiar to readers from prior coverage of Gold's efforts to have GreenStar Food Coop in Ithaca boycott Israeli products and products co-owned by Israelis, such as Sabra and Tribe Hummus. Gold is employed as a professional organizer for Friends of Sabeel - North America, a group which works to weaken American Christian support for Israel, and is a leader of Ithaca Jewish Voice for Peace. You may recall that when I spoke on local progressive radio against the boycott movement, Gold called into the control room to complain about me in the middle of the interview! Publicity, of course, was the real goal of the Code Pink protest. If all you knew about the arrests was the press coverage, you'd think that the arrests were not the goal, but the byproduct of protesting. Much as the Pallywood fake or staged photo ops are used to gin up press coverage against Israel, however, so too were the arrests at AIPAC. It was pure Pallywood, arrests contrived for the cameras. They weren't arrested for protesting. They were protesting to get arrested for publicity. Don't take my word for it. A Legal Insurrection reader who saw our coverage of the protest sent along a video of Gold speaking at a post-arrest event, in which she admitted it was all a set up: