toastykitten

the myth of kamala harris' gaza shift - As Caitlin so eloquently wrote yesterday, it is understandable that people are so hungry to seize on any scrap of potentially hopeful news about Harris. We have all been tormented by Joe Biden’s rotting visage and equally rotting politics for far too long, and there is a desperation for change.

But we should not invent change where no change is happening. Harris and Biden have been saying the same things about Gaza for a long time. The idea that she has any meaningful distance when it comes to the genocide is fanciful. Ahead of her meeting with Netanyahu, an aide was keen to point out to NBC that “Harris has been engaged on the Israel-Gaza conflict for the last 10 months…including participating in every call with Netanyahu as well as critical meetings like those with hostage families.” Maybe we should take that aide seriously.


Harris support for Israel "ironclad" after attack on Golan Heights - U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris' support for Israel's security is "ironclad," her national security adviser Phil Gordon said on Sunday, adding that she has been briefed and is closely monitoring a rocket attack on a football ground in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

“The Vice President has been briefed and is closely monitoring Hezbollah’s horrific attack on a soccer field in Majdal Shams in northern Israel yesterday which killed a number of children and teenagers. She condemns this horrific attack and mourns for all those killed and wounded.

Arab Americans and the presidential campaigns - typical - Siblani, who organized Wednesday’s meeting with Trump surrogates, has spent months serving as an intermediary between his community and officials from all political parties and foreign dignitaries. Privately, he says, almost all express the need for a permanent cease-fire.

“Everybody wants our votes, but nobody wants to be seen as aligning with us publicly,” Siblani said.

Kamala Harris will only shift on Gaza only if we make her - The last 10 months of destruction and carnage, in which the Israelis have killed more than 40,000 civilians and displaced 2 million more, have been a humanitarian catastrophe. They have also been a political disaster for the Democrats. Poll after poll shows that the demand for a ceasefire is mainstream, with voters more likely to cast a ballot for a Democrat who expresses clear support for one than a Democrat who mirrors the Republican on the issue. More than 45 percent of voters who expressed support for the Biden-Harris ticket say that military assistance to Israel should be decreased. The campaign for the “uncommitted” ballot option in states like Michigan, New Jersey, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Washington enabled Democratic voters in the hundreds of thousands, alongside professional organizers and activists, to express opposition to Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s occupation and apartheid system.

Having watched Kamala Harris in CA politics most of my adult life, my general observation is that: she goes where the wind blows. So keeping up the pressure on her is the correct thing to do.

 https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf

TLDR: Israel's presence in Palestinian occupied territories is illegal and should end. 

NYT archive.is -  Israeli generals, low on munitions, want a truce in Gaza - 



I guess it turns out the students and the activists have been right since the beginning. Too bad everyone else had to pay the price. 

There’s some terrible things going on still, but I just wanted to share some things that are good, because sometimes we need that to keep going.

One of the neighbor’s kids, age about 10, I think, came over today and learned what it sounds like when a cat purrs. He said “It sounds like a motor.” It was kind of fun watching him observe this.

I am starting swim lessons again. Hopefully this time I get over my fear of the water for real.  

An mRNA vaccine could be used to treat a type of brain cancer. 

A 13 year old boy was completely cured of DIPG, the same pediatric brain cancer that killed my neighbor’s son, after completing a study on the effectiveness of different cancer drugs. The other patients in the study are also living longer than expected. 

Modi did not sweep elections in India as expected. 

University workers are making the connection between free speech and labor. 

I just listened to a Good Food interview with Franco-Palestinian chef Fadi Karan, and immediately ordered his new cookbook Bethlehem. It’s gorgeous. I also came across his series on YouTube, which he filmed during the COVID pandemic, called “Teta’s Kitchen” where he visits various Palestinian grandmothers and talks to them about their cooking. It’s really beautiful. I also ordered the 3rd edition of The Gaza Kitchen, which contains more seafood dishes, and a couple other dishes not found elsewhere. 

I’ve been delighted by this food series Did You Eat Yet? That was created by someone born and raised in Oakland, and his latest video is on the emerging food scene in Castro Valley. 

I am somehow sticking to the commitment this year of reading a book a month - I think The Sympathizer kicked me in the butt a bit. It was so good. Anyway, after the Committed I started The Refugees but then I got distracted, and then I ended up ordering A Man of Two Faces online and I realized how much I like reading an actual book as opposed to reading a screen. Maybe I might end up reading more than a book a month, who knows? 

I am really enjoying the series on HBO, and it is astonishing how much better the writing is when your source material is the work of a talented and thoughtful writer. (Yes, this is a bit of a dig at Warrior. I still can't bring myself to watch the rest. Maybe I'll skip to season 2.) The next episode is I think the one where Nguyen gets his vengeance on Hollywood and sends up the Apocalypse Now Vietnam War American movies. Highly looking forward to that one. 

Anyway, back to this book. I found this memoir, a bit hard to get into, because it is at once both very broad and very specific. At the end, you find out that the book is compiled out of a bunch of different lectures and works he's put out over the years, and then it makes more sense. The main thing is that Nguyen writes about growing up in San Jose, CA as a refugee and child of Vietnamese Catholics who really believed in the capitalist American Dream, and what happens with his memory when his mom gets sick and how he betrays her memory by writing about it, and how he experiences both America and the Vietnamese community he grows up in as a spy in both worlds. Which recalls the opening of The Sympathizer. And then he broadens out to an eagle eye view of how the legacy of war and American imperialism has affected the disconnect between him and his parents, and his community in general, and how it's affected other diaspora communities and writers.

He writes of being radicalized by Chicano and Asian American literature, and coming to an abiding belief in the power of change through writing. (Man I wish I had that kind of faith.) And sprinkled throughout is his commitment to both "Karl Marxism and Groucho Marxism" - in one chapter, he lists all the one-star reviews of The Sympathizer, in another, he notes that now that HBO is making a show out of The Sympathizer, you don't have to read it, you can just watch it. He mentions how he learned about tenure and was like "you can't get fired? sweet!" and just committed to being an academic so he could do whatever he wanted. 

And he recalls how he ended up in a class taught by Maxine Hong Kingston, only to fall asleep in every single class. He connects it later with his disconnect with his memory and the self-protective barriers he's constructed to avoid dealing with his mom's illness. 

Anyway, overall I enjoyed it and I feel like he's a bit of a kindred spirit in his voracious reading and he obviously has a lot of the same tastes I do - the book is peppered with different quotes from renown diaspora and minority writers such as Kingston, of course, but also Carlos Bulosan, Mahmoud Darwish, Jessica Hagedorn, etc. He names his son Ellison after Ralph Ellison and his daughter Simone after both Nina Simone and Simone de Beauvoir. But I didn't think this was as coherent or as well-written as The Sympathizer. 

Campus Bail Funds

World Central Kitchen is going back to Gaza. Jose Andres posted a scathing op-ed stating what they expect and need from Israel, along with calling out their discriminatory treatment of their Palestinian workers. 

PCRF - this is the main Palestinian charity I donate to. 

Donations to UNRWA are still tax-deductible I think. 

Doctors Without Borders operates in Gaza. 

 Messages for US college students from Gaza. Bisan on hope. 

It's been a while; things still suck.

A statement from Jewish Americans opposing AIPAC: In contrast to AIPAC, we are American Jews who believe that US support for foreign governments should only be extended to those that respect the full human and civil rights, and right to self-determination, of all people. We oppose all forms of racism and bigotry, including antisemitism—and we support the historic alliance in our country of Jewish Americans with African Americans and other people of color in the cause of civil rights and equal justice.

Reject AIPAC - is a broad coalition of progressive groups working together to take on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliated dark money Super PACs across electoral, political, digital and organizing strategies. The coalition calls on candidates for federal office to take the Reject AIPAC Pledge to not take endorsements or contributions from AIPAC and/or aligned PACs.

Has Zionism Lost the Argument? 

There was a recent article in NYT about Guernica editors quitting over an article that was published by an Israeli writer. I didn't find the actual article itself offensive, maybe just kind of misguided or something? But anyway, r/literature has the actual gossip - the real issue is that the article was published without any editorial insight/input and did not reflect the vision of the magazine. 

Speaking of NYT, New York War Crimes is a single-purpose site documenting criticism of NYT's journalistic practices, especially in regards to Palestine. 

Mass death is imminent in Gaza. 

Between the Westerners who were in charge of the Hugos pre-censoring Chinese works because of imagined political controversies and censorship of Palestinian perspectives in the West. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, who has spoken up about Gaza, has said that sometimes the censorship is worse than what he faced in China.