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      Rashida Tlaib was unfairly smeared by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Here’s a handy tip: before you comment on an article, read the whole damn thing. Don’t just read the headline, don’t just read a paragraph someone screenshot and put on social media – read the whole thing. This one weird trick is very helpful when it comes to ensuring you’re not taking something dangerously out of context or just making up facts entirely.This advice isn’t addressed to you, dear reader. I’m sure that you don’t need to be told something so basic. Rather it is addressed to everyone – including some very prominent cable news anchors – who has spent the last few days spreading inflammatory misinformation about the Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. It’s addressed to everyone who has falsely and dangerously claimed that Tlaib said that the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, only filed charges against pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan because she is Jewish. Which, if this is what Tlaib actually said, would obviously be an outrageous statement.But here’s what actually happened: on 13 September Tlaib had an interview with Steve Neavling from the Detroit Metro Times where she talked about crackdowns on pro-Palestinian protests. In this interview Tlaib criticized Nessel for filing charges against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan when her office hadn’t done the same in relation to other protests. Tlaib said the following:“We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest … We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”Nowhere in the interview did Tlaib mention anything about Nessel’s personal identity, but Neavling’s article frames Tlaib’s quote with a sentence explaining “Nessel is the first Jewish person to be elected Attorney General of Michigan.”Neavling has since made clear that sentence was not meant to insinuate Tlaib was talking about Nessel being Jewish when she talked about biases; rather Tlaib was referring to anti-Palestinian attitudes that are pervasive in US institutions. Further on in the original interview, Tlaib also explains what she thinks influenced Nessel’s decision to charge pro-Palestinian protestors, suggesting the attorney general was being pressured by university authorities.Neavling quotes Tlaib as saying the following: “I think people at the University of Michigan put pressure on [Nessel] to do this, and she fell for it … I think President Ono and Board of Regent members were very much heavy-handed in this. It had to come from somewhere.”To recap: absolutely nowhere in the original interview did Tlaib say Nessel charged pro-Palestinian protesters because she’s Jewish. And yet that inflammatory claim has spread dangerously far and wide. On Friday, Nessel herself addressed it in a tweet also referencing a cartoon implying Tlaib was a member of Hezbollah.“Rashida’s religion should not be used in a cartoon to imply that she’s a terrorist. It’s Islamophobic and wrong. Just as Rashida should not use my religion to imply I cannot perform my job fairly as Attorney General. It’s anti-Semitic and wrong,” wrote Nessel on X.From there, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper picked up the smear. In an interview with Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, on Sunday, Tapper said the following:“Congresswoman Tlaib is suggesting that she shouldn’t be prosecuting these individuals that Nessel says broke the law and that she’s only doing it because she’s Jewish.”Again, that’s not what Tlaib suggested; it’s a very dangerous contortion of what she said.Still, on Monday, CNN’s Dana Bash continued to advance this narrative. And then, on Tuesday, 21 House Democrats released a statement accusing Nessel’s critics of antisemitism. It didn’t specifically name Tlaib but it was very clear who this statement was directed to.While all this was going on, by the way, Neavling – the guy who interviewed Tlaib in the first place – was desperately trying to correct the narrative. Neavling repeatedly tweeted at Tapper and Bash that they were lying. “Now Dana Bash from CNN is lying about what happened,” Neavling wrote in a tweet on Monday. “US Representative @RashidaTlaib did not say Nessel filed the charges because she’s Jewish. She said there is an anti-Palestinian attitude among many institutions, and most of them are not run by Jewish people.” Neavling has also published a comprehensive factcheck of what happened.Despite this factcheck and repeated requests by Neavling for people to stop “spreading lies”, the people responsible for advancing this false narrative have not adequately walked it back or apologized.Nessel’s office has declined my request to clarify whether or not the attorney general believes Tlaib is antisemitic and what evidence Nessel has for spreading this claim. Instead it provided a statement saying: “Our department is staffed with many experienced, professional prosecutors and any allegation of bias within our agency is baseless and unfortunate.”CNN has also declined to speak on the record about the matter but has emphasized that Tapper said on Monday that he “misspoke” when characterizing Tlaib’s comments. Bash has also clarified that “Tlaib did not reference Nessel’s Jewish identity” but continued to say that “Nessel still says she believes it’s antisemitic.”Admitting to misspeaking just isn’t good enough. CNN has spent days amplifying a news story centered around a fabricated quote. And these smears aren’t just insulting, they put Tlaib in danger. The congresswoman, let me remind you, is the only Palestinian American federal lawmaker and has been the subject of death threats, smears and conspiracies since the start of her political career. She has suffered an immense amount of hate for speaking up about Palestinians and her words have routinely been twisted and taken out of context to paint her in the worst possible light. This latest misinformation campaign is yet more of the same.Of course, what’s happening to Tlaib isn’t unique. Advocating for basic Palestinian human rights has always been billed as somehow “controversial” in the US. Since 7 October, however, speaking up about what many human right experts have termed a “genocide” in Gaza puts you at the risk of losing your job and becoming the subject of smear campaigns. Calling out or protesting against a genocide now seems to be considered a worse crime than committing one.For almost a year now, being a Palestinian in the US has meant waking up every morning to images of children in Gaza who have been dismembered by US-made bombs. It means watching helplessly as Gaza is made completely uninhabitable. It means reading letters from doctors who have been in Gaza talking about treating “pre-teen children who were shot in the head” by Israeli soldiers. It means hearing violent and dehumanizing comments from elected officials like the US House representative Tim Walberg of Michigan, who said Gaza should “be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima”.Palestinians are being starved, displaced and bombed off the face of the earth. And as US politicians and pundits mock our pain and cheerlead our slaughter, they have the temerity to tell Palestinians and our supporters that we’re the hateful ones. As 2,000-pound bombs keep dropping on tent encampments full of starving children, Israel’s apologists have the audacity to tell us that we’re the violent ones.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Uncommitted movement declines to endorse Harris – but warns against Trump presidency

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      The Uncommitted National Movement announced that it will not endorse Kamala Harris for president, saying on Thursday she failed to respond to the movement’s requests that she meet with Palestinian families in Michigan and to discuss a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza by 15 September.“Vice-President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted leader and delegate from Michigan, said during a press conference on Thursday.After the Democratic national convention last month, Uncommitted leaders sent a letter to Harris and her senior advisers voicing their dissatisfaction with the DNC’s refusal to allow a Palestinian American to speak, as well as reiterating their demands for a ceasefire and engagement with people who have been affected by Israel’s war on Gaza. In a response to movement leaders on Sunday, Harris’s team said “they don’t have particular engagements that they can point us to, but they can keep us updated as things develop”, Alawieh said. Harris’s campaign added that it would continue to be open to opportunities to engage with communities on vital issues.However, the movement’s leaders who helped mobilize more than 700,000 Americans to vote “uncommitted” or its equivalent in Democratic party primaries throughout the nation also acknowledged the danger of Donald Trump winning the election.“At this time, our movement opposes a Donald Trump presidency whose agenda includes plans to accelerate the killing in Gaza while intensifying the suppression of anti-war organizing,” said Alawieh. “And our movement is not recommending a third-party vote in the presidential election, especially as third-party votes in key swing states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency, given our country’s broken electoral college system.”For months, the movement had urged Harris to demonstrate a shift in her policy on Gaza, where more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, to no avail, said the Uncommitted leader and Palestinian American Lexis Zeidan.“We urge uncommitted voters to register anti-Trump votes and vote up and down the ballot. Our focus remains on building this anti-war coalition, both inside and outside the Democratic party,” said Layla Elabed, a leader of the Uncommitted National Movement and a Palestinian American.In a statement, a Harris campaign spokesperson said: “[T]he Vice President is committed to work to earn every vote, unite our country, and to be a President for all Americans. She will continue working to bring the war in Gaza to an end in a way where Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination.”The uncommitted movement originated in Michigan, where more than 100,000 people cast “uncommitted” ballots to signal to Biden their dissatisfaction with his Gaza policy, before spreading to Democratic primaries throughout the nation. A June CBS poll showed that a majority of Americans believe that the US should not send weapons to Israel, including 77% of Democrats.Arab American voters in Michigan and other swing states will play a critical role in the presidential election. Joe Biden won Michigan, where 278,000 Arab Americans live, by just 154,000 votes in 2020. Four years earlier, Donald Trump won Michigan by 10,704 votes.Several Arab and Muslim American leaders have endorsed Harris in recent months, including the Black Muslim Leadership Council Fund and the US representative Ilhan Omar. Muslim Women for Harris-Walz, which disbanded after the Democratic national convention because of its denial of a Palestinian American speaker, reaffirmed their support for Harris a week later.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe uncommitted leaders who spoke on Thursday were split on their voting plans for the top of the ticket. Alawieh said that he plans to vote for Harris so that he can continue with his anti-war efforts, despite her lack of alignment with his values on the issue. “But I am concerned with Donald Trump’s very specific plans to suppress pro Palestinian human rights organizing,” he said.As a Palestinian American with family in the occupied West Bank, Elabed said, whenever she’s questioned on her voting choice, she feels like she’s “being asked that question at a funeral”. While she said that she won’t vote for Harris, Trump or a third-party candidate for president, she continued: “I will be going out to vote and ensuring that I’m voting up and down the ballot for candidates that I have a shared value with.”Zeidan said that she also plans to abstain from voting at the top of the ticket. “Still, I’m open to having that very perspective change as it relates to what VP Harris and the administration and her campaign plan to do between now and November,” she said.Until the November election, the Uncommitted National Movement plans to continue applying pressure on the Biden administration to adopt an arms embargo on Israel and support a permanent ceasefire, as well as to block a Trump presidency. Over the next few months, Zeidan said, the movement will produce content “that is cutting through the noise and building coalitions that are going to continue to challenge both Trump’s extremism and also Harris’s status quo”. They will also continue to educate voters on the risk of a Trump presidency and will continue pushing Harris to stop sending arms to Israel.“The Democratic party, pro-war forces like [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] want to drive us out of the Democratic party, but we won’t concede,” said Elabed. “We’re here to stay.” More

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      The Guardian view on Israel’s booby-trap war: illegal and unacceptable | Editorial

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      In the second world war, guerrilla forces scattered large quantities of booby-trapped objects likely to be attractive to civilians. The idea was to cause widescale and indiscriminate death. The Japanese manufactured a tobacco pipe with a charge detonated by a spring-loaded striker. The Italians produced a headset that blew up when it was plugged in. More than half a century later, a global treaty came into force which “prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”. Has anyone told Israel and its jubilant supporters that, as Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group points out, it is a signatory to the protocol?On Tuesday, pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria, killing at least 12 people – including two children and four hospital workers – and wounding thousands more. This situation is directly analogous to the historical practices that current global arms treaties explicitly prohibit. US media say Israel was behind the attack, and the country has the motive and the means to target its Iran-backed enemies. Israel’s leaders have a long history of carrying out sophisticated remote operations, ranging from cyber-attacks, suicide drone attacks and remote-controlled weapons to assassinate Iranian scientists. On Wednesday it was reported that Israel blew up thousands of two-way personal radios used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon, killing nine and wounding hundreds.This week’s attacks were not, as Israel’s defenders claimed, “surgical” or a “precisely targeted anti-terrorist operation”. Israel and Hezbollah are sworn enemies. The current round of fighting has seen tens of thousands of Israelis displaced from the Israel-Lebanon border because of the Shia militant group’s rocket and artillery attacks.However, the pager bombs were clearly intended to target individual civilians – diplomats and politicians – who were not directly participating in hostilities. The plan appeared to produce what lawyers might call “excessive incidental civilian harm”. Both these arguments have been levelled at Russia to claim Moscow was committing war crimes in Ukraine. It’s hard to say why the same reasoning is not applied to Israel – apart from that it is a western ally.Such disproportionate attacks, which seem illegal, are not only unprecedented but may also become normalised. If that is the case, the door is opened for other states to lethally test the laws of war. The US should step in and restrain its friend, but Joe Biden shows no sign of intervening to stop the bloodshed. The road to peace runs through Gaza, but Mr Biden’s ceasefire plan – and the release of hostages – has not found favour with either Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Hamas.The worry is that Israel’s actions lead to a disastrous all-out conflict that would pull the US into a regional fight. The world stands on the edge of chaos because Mr Netanyahu’s continuing hold on power and consequent insulation from corruption charges depend largely on his nation being at war. None of this is possible without US complicity and assistance. Perhaps it is only after its presidential election that the US will be able to say that the price of saving Mr Netanyahu’s skin should not be paid in the streets of Lebanon or by Palestinians in the occupied territories. Until then, the rules-based international order will continue to be undermined by the very countries that created the system. More

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      West Bank residents tell of teargas then shots before US woman’s death

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      US officials have insisted that a ceasefire in Gaza is close even as fighting rages unabated in the blockaded Palestinian territory and violence spirals in the occupied West Bank, where witnesses told the Observer an American-Turkish dual national was killed by Israeli forces on Friday.William Burns, who is also the US’s chief negotiator in the indirect talks between Israel and Hamas, echoed secretary of state Antony Blinken during a speech in London on Saturday in which he said that “90% of the text had been agreed but the last 10% is always the hardest”.But pressure from the US, Israel’s most important ally, and the two mediators speaking to Hamas, Qatar and Egypt, has done little to assuage the fighting in Gaza or rising tensions in the West Bank.The US has also said it is urgently seeking more information about the killing of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, who witnesses said was shot in the head by Israel Defence Forces (IDF) troops during an anti-settlement protest in the West Bank on Friday. Several of Israel’s western allies, including the US, have recently imposed sanctions on individuals and organisations associated with Israel’s settler movement, despite blowback from prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ­government, which includes far-right supporters of Israeli extremism in the West Bank.Eygi’s family have called for an independent investigation into her killing, adding to the pressure on the Biden administration to end what critics say is US complicity in the Israeli occupation.On Saturday, IDF troops, some of whom appeared to be forensic investigators, visited the town of Beita, near Nablus, to examine the scene where Eygi was killed. For the residents, it was yet another case of the IDF investigating itself: about 1% of army inquiries result in prosecutions, according to rights groups.All of the Beita residents the Observer spoke to gave very similar accounts of the shooting. A group of demonstrators had gathered on the hillside, as they have every Friday for midday prayers in recent years, to protest against Eyvatar, an Israeli settlement on the next hill built on land belonging to Palestinian farmers.On this occasion, there were some 20 Palestinians from Beita, 10 foreign volunteers from the anti-occupation International Solidarity Movement, including Eygi, and about a dozen children from the district.“The kids were throwing stones here at the junction, and the soldiers fired tear gas at them,” Mahmud Abdullah, a 43-year-old resident said. “Everyone scattered and ran into the olive grove and then there were two shots.” One of the bullets hit something along the way and a fragment hit a protester in the stomach, wounding him slightly, the witnesses said. The other bullet hit Eygi in the head, passing through her skull. Neighbours pointed out both the spot where Eygi was shot and where the bullet came from: a house on a ridge.The owner, Ali Mohali, said a group of soldiers, perhaps half a dozen, had gone on to his roof, 200m from where Eygi was shot. He said he heard one shot, but was not sure if there had been a second from that position.The IDF statement on the incident said it was looking into the report that troops had killed a foreign national while firing at an “instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them”.View image in fullscreenMoneer Khdeir, Mohali’s 65-year-old neighbour, was derisive of the IDF account. “They said that the stones posed a threat to the soldiers. They were stones thrown by kids from all the way down there, yet they talk about it like it was a Yassin [rocket propelled grenade],” Khdeir scoffed.Across the West Bank, army units on the ground are increasingly seen by Palestinians as a protective military wing of the settlers, taking their cues from the far right elements of Netanyahu’s government. Palestinian officials and rights groups have long accused the IDF of standing by during or even joining in settler attacks.Hisham Dweikat, 57, a science professor from Beita, said Eygi was the 15th person to be killed protesting against Eyvatar over the three years since the settlement was reoccupied, but hers was the first killing the IDF has investigated. He did not put much faith in the result. “It is clear that the army is with the settlers,” he said.Fifteen kilometres south of Beita in the village of Qaryut, Amjad Bakr and his family buried his 12 year-old daughter Bana on Saturday afternoon. She was shot dead while opening the window in her bedroom at about the same time on Friday that Eygi was killed in Beita.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“As usual on Friday, settlers came to raid the town and the people of the town went to defend themselves. There was a confrontation and the army came,” said Bakr, 47.“We went back home, because we thought that if the army was here, maybe they could stop the settlers. But unfortunately the army did not stop the settlers. They stand with the settlers,” he said.“The bullet that hit my daughter came through the window and hit her in the heart,” he said. “She was innocent, and shy, and clever. She had memorised three sections of the Holy Quran.”As to what Bana had planned to do with her life, Bakr shrugged: “An Israeli bullet doesn’t care about the future of any Palestinian.”In a statement, the IDF said that soldiers were dispatched to disperse violent confrontation between dozens of Palestinians and Israelis, and had fired shots in the air. “A report was received regarding a Palestinian girl who was killed by shots in the area. The incident is under review,” it said.Since Hamas’s 7 October assault that triggered the war in Gaza, Israeli troops or settlers have killed at least 662 Palestinians in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry, which does not differentiate between militant and civilian deaths. The toll is almost five times higher than the 146 killed in 2022, which was already an almost 20-year record high.At least 23 Israelis, including security forces, have been killed in Palestinian attacks during the same period, according to Israeli officials. Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, another 61 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes across the territory in the past 48 hours, the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said, putting the death toll at 40,939 people. Around 1,200 Israelis and other nationals were killed in Hamas’s 7 October assault that triggered the war, according to Israeli tallies.The latest round of ceasefire talks have stalled over Netanyahu’s insistence that Israeli troops will not withdraw from the Gaza-Egypt border – a dealbreaker for Hamas – despite agreeing to the measure in talks held in July.Tensions between Israel and its regional foes – Iran and the powerful Lebanese militia Hezbollah – have brought the Middle East to the brink of regional war on several occasions in the past 11 months. More

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      ‘This is my political home’: how 30 ceasefire delegates changed the Democratic convention

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      Asma Mohammed organized the uncommitted movement in Minnesota because she “was seeing children who look like my son be massacred”.June Rose, an uncommitted delegate from Rhode Island, joined the cause because they were raised as an orthodox Jew, kept away from Palestinians and taught that the occupation of Palestine was for their safety. Then Rose went to Palestine. “And I realized that not one single child needs to die in order to keep me safe,” they said.Abbas Alawieh, a leader of the movement, kept coming back to his experience as a 15-year-old in south Lebanon, where he said he survived US-funded Israeli bombings. “I remember what those bombs feel like when they drop. I remember how your bones shake within your body. I remember what they smell like. I remember what the dust feels like when it fills the room after a bomb drops and I can’t even see my own hand in front of my own face,” he said.At the Democratic national convention in Chicago this week, uncommitted delegates repeatedly shared the personal reasons they had decided to start an anti-war movement within the Democratic party – and what Kamala Harris needs to do to win back the voters they represent, who don’t agree with the Biden administration’s policy of sending more weapons to Israel as a disproportionate number of civilians in Gaza are being killed.Over the course of the four-day convention, the delegates pushed for a Palestinian American speaker to get time on the main stage – a request the Harris campaign denied – leading to an impromptu sit-in and, ultimately, the support of lawmakers, hundreds of delegates, and far more attention to the cause.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThese are Democrats. Most are activists, seasoned at turning out their communities to vote. Alawieh was a congressional staffer for multiple members of Congress. He was a staffer on 6 January 2021, he said, when rioters flooded the US Capitol building in Washington DC. “I don’t need to be convinced how dangerous Trump is,” he said.There’s no chance Mohammed changes parties because of this. “Imagine me, a hijabi Muslim woman, walking into the [Republican national convention] right now. It would never happen. This is our party. That’s why we are working on our own party. This is my political home. That’s why we are working on the inside.”At the Chicago convention, most Democrats focused on joy and celebration, rallying around Harris after a slog of an election abruptly changed course a month ago.But there was a convention within the convention, so to speak, of hundreds wracked with grief and despair over the ongoing war in Gaza, which has taken at least 40,000 Palestinian lives and left hundreds of thousands of people starving, sick and injured. Attendees could go from hearing a doctor describe children – the only remaining members of their families – covered in burns, then walk a few feet away into a display about coconuts, a nod to a meme-ified Harris quote.The juxtaposition made Dr Thaer Ahmad, a doctor who grew up in the Chicago area known as Little Palestine, sick to his stomach. Ahmad worked in a hospital in Gaza early this year, and said he will never forget what he saw. First, a bomb would go off, shaking the hospital. Minutes later, families would pour into the doors of the emergency department.“We didn’t have any beds because the hospital was already totally full, so we’re seeing five-year-olds, six-year-olds on the ground, some of whom have already been killed, are already dead, and others who are shrieking in pain who have had a limb blown off and we don’t even have any pain medicine to give them,” he said. “And you’re just sort of looking around a room that’s full of bleeding and suffering patients, some of whom will die while you’re sitting there trying to figure out what your next move is. And you’re lost.”Ahmad was among a handful of doctors who shared, time after time, what they saw in Gaza hospitals with reporters and convention attendees. He came to Chicago, he said, “to essentially spoil the party”.“I can’t come in one place and talk to you about the five-year-old and the six-year-old and the family and the house, and then see somebody get up there on the main stage and just sort of pretend like we’re in la-la land,” he said. “I mean, it’s so hard to even listen to. It’s just very cringy, to be honest, and to be fair, that’s how I’ve felt for a lot of the last several months.”Using the system for changeStarting in Michigan, Democratic activists hatched the grassroots plan to vote “uncommitted” instead of for Biden in the Democratic primary earlier this year. The idea spread to other states, with nearly 800,000 voters selecting some version of an uncommitted vote on their ballots.This protest vote would send a message that voters demanded a change on Gaza for Biden to get their votes. In some of the states, uncommitted won enough votes to earn delegates to the convention. Those delegates, organizers planned, would use their power inside the party process to win over committed delegates, amplify their voices and, hopefully, get Harris’s attention – and action.Throughout the campaign, the group has kept its sole focus on getting a ceasefire and arms embargo. Before the convention began, they added the call for a speaker on the main stage, first suggesting a doctor who had worked in Gaza and a Palestinian American leader, as a way to bring attention to the issue.Tens of thousands of people also took to the streets outside the convention throughout the week, but the delegates didn’t join them. Their focus has been on working the system inside, finding allies among other Democratic activists and officials.View image in fullscreenThe Democratic party included the uncommitted delegates in the convention process – to an extent. They were allowed a space for press conferences, but it was in a far-flung corner of a building beyond the main action during the day – people would not accidentally happen upon this room. They were granted a panel on Palestinian human rights, a first of its kind, but it was scheduled for the last slot of the day, after shuttles started departing to the United Center.The speaker request was shut down, without much reason given for why.The Harris campaign later defended the decision not to allow a Palestinian speaker by saying the party had given the uncommitted movement lots of ways to engage in the convention process already. The delegates disagreed.“The scale is just completely out of whack when we’re talking about room space versus when we’re talking about a Palestinian American getting to speak at the convention, or when we’re talking about meaningful policy change, an immediate, permanent ceasefire and an arms embargo,” Rose said.But much of the process still worked: the 30 uncommitted delegates convinced more than 300 Harris delegates to sign a pledge to become ceasefire delegates, building their power tenfold. And, as the week wore on, and the speaker request languished, prominent progressive elected officials including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Greg Casar, started joining the public call for a Palestinian on the main stage and helped internally to send that message to the Harris campaign and Democratic party.Finding alliesThe caucus and council meetings offered to the group did not lend themselves to organizing large groups – they were essentially panel discussions. Instead, the delegates fanned out around the convention, at morning breakfast meetings where all convention attendees had to pick up credentials each morning, at press conferences, in the hallways outside panels, in the crowded walkways at the United Center.They stayed visible. Their shirts, emblazoned with bright red flowers, said “democratic majority for Palestine”. Their pins, in red font, said “ceasefire delegate”. They wore white-and-black keffiyehs, some of which said “Democrats for Palestinian Rights”.View image in fullscreenOn the first day, they handed out flyers for a historic event: the first time the convention had allowed a panel on Palestinian human rights. Outside the panel, delegates asked those attending to sign on to their petition, to join them in the ceasefire cause even if they were already pledged to Harris. The panel itself drew a few hundred people, who listened as a doctor who had worked in Gaza described children blown apart by US-funded bombs and as a Palestinian American shared the stories of the more than 100 family members she had lost.Inga Gibson, an uncommitted delegate from Hawaii, said other middle-aged women, her peers, would come up to her as she sat in the hall. They said their kids were challenging them – ”What are you going to do about this, Mom?” – and telling them they might not vote because of Gaza, Gibson said. She convinced several to sign on to the petition as ceasefire delegates.On Tuesday, while a few delegates sat on a bench in a broad hall not far from where people had lined up to buy Democratic merchandise, a person with a “save the children” pin walked up. “I love your pin,” Mohammed said, then started talking about becoming a ceasefire delegate. At another point, someone walked up and said: “I appreciate what y’all are doing.” “Are you a delegate?” Mohammed asked.On Wednesday morning, she said, a man came up to her and said: “Is that a ceasefire shirt?” She thought he was going to be upset. “What does a ceasefire even mean?” he continued. She started to reply when he added: “I’m going to stop you right there. I’m a Jewish American, and I hate that they’re doing this in my name,” Mohammed recounted. He signed on as a ceasefire delegate after their conversation.Time to sit inAlawieh’s hands had a slight shake as his voice cracked with emotion on the third day of the convention, after several press conferences where he had shared that he was waiting for a call to greenlight the main stage speaker and again recounted his story of surviving bombings as a teenager.Standing amid dozens of reporters and delegates outside the United Center, he made an impromptu personal decision: he would just sit and wait.He pulled his phone out in the middle of the press conference, calling his contact with the Harris campaign. “I’m someone who works within the system and I was asking a very reasonable ask, not to be suppressed,” he told the person on the phone. “I’ve run out of options from my position as a delegate so I’m leaning into my power as an everyday citizen and I’m sitting here, and I’m not going anywhere.”View image in fullscreenIn between the United Center, which displayed images of Harris and running mate Tim Walz bathed in bright red, white and blue lights, and a CNN Politico tent where journalists and politicians partied, the uncommitted movement started their sit-in.About a dozen ceasefire delegates slept overnight on the pavement outside the United Center on the penultimate night of the convention, grabbing a few moments of sleep where they could. Mohammed was one of them. Asked how she was feeling the next morning, she said: “Really tired. Holding out hope.”By the next day, the final day of the convention, Harris’s team still had not budged. The movement set a 6pm deadline, which passed.The work they’d done inside had convinced hundreds of their fellow Democrats, but it hadn’t swayed the Harris campaign enough to grant a speaker on the main stage. And the speaker, they pointed out, had not been going to give a radical speech: Ruwa Romman, a Georgia state representative and one of the speakers the uncommitted delegates had suggested, wrote about her Palestinian grandfather’s influence on her life and called for people to unite behind Harris and push for an end of the war in Gaza.As political elite spoke inside, Romman gave her speech to the cameras gathered outside instead.View image in fullscreenAlawieh said he was certain her speech had gotten more media attention this way than it would have if she’d been given a short slot on stage earlier in the week. “I would put all my money, she would not have had this many cameras pointed at her,” he said.The uncommitted movement then issued a demand to Harris to come meet them in their communities, in Michigan, to talk about a ceasefire and arms embargo. They gave a deadline of 15 September. The speaker request may not have been granted, but the uncommitted delegates cast their work at the convention as a success, leaders told reporters that evening.The uncommitted delegates decided to go inside the arena, where their party was about to hear from Harris herself. They weren’t going to disrupt the process – something party officials had worried about throughout the week. Instead, the delegates linked arms and weaved through the crowded hallways attempting to get to their seats. They stopped and stood in a circle, singing “ceasefire now”.View image in fullscreenOutside, helicopters whirred overhead as the uncommitted movement packed up the rest of the sit-in. They put away the snacks and water. They rolled up banners that said “not another bomb”. They packed away extra ceasefire T-shirts and keffiyehs and an errant cheesehead, the preferred headgear of the Wisconsin delegation.View image in fullscreenStanding outside as the sun moved lower in the sky, Layla Elabed, one of the co-founders of the movement, said that her belief in the democratic system hadn’t been shaken.“Power, for me, is with people,” Elabed explained. “Because often it isn’t electeds who wake up one day and decide that, oh, we should have a policy change that actually speaks to the most marginalized people, the most displaced people, the people without the most resources.“Black folks didn’t get the Civil Rights Act because those who were in office decided one day and woke up and said, oh, we should do this. It is because people mobilized and organized and advocated and put so much pressure on policymakers and moved those policymakers to make that right decision. That’s what we’re going to be doing.” More

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      Harris wants to bring ‘joy, joy, joy’ to Americans. What about Palestinians? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Muslim Women for Harris is disbandingGot any spare brooms to hand? I think the folk at the Democratic national convention may need a few extra because they’ve been very busy this week trying to sweep the carnage in Gaza under the rug.Hope and joy have been the big themes of the convention. On Wednesday, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, told the crowd that working to get Kamala Harris elected would mean “joy, joy, joy comes in the morning”. It is wonderful to see all this exuberance, all this optimism for a brighter future. But it is also impossible not to contrast the revelry in Chicago with the Biden administration-sponsored suffering coming out of Gaza.Well, it’s impossible for some of us, anyway. For plenty of delegates at the convention, the suffering of Palestinians, the harrowing images on social media of charred babies and toddlers in Gaza whose heads have been caved in from US-manufactured bombs, seem to be nothing more than an annoying distraction. Pro-Palestinian protesters at the convention haven’t just been met with stony faces, they’ve been met with jeers and violence. One delegate inside the convention was caught on camera repeatedly hitting a Muslim woman in the head with a “We Love Joe” sign. The woman’s crime was that she had peacefully unfurled a banner saying “Stop Arming Israel”. It’s not clear who the man assaulting this woman was but one imagines he will not face any consequences.To be fair, Gaza hasn’t been completely ignored. On Monday, there was a panel centered on Palestinian human rights, in which Dr Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric doctor who treated patients in Gaza, talked about the horrors she had witnessed. But the panel, while important, wasn’t on the main stage. It wasn’t given star billing like the parents of the Israeli-American hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who gave an emotional speech on Wednesday. It felt a lot like pro-Palestinian activists had just been tossed a few crumbs.For a brief moment, it did seem like a Palestinian might get a proper chance to speak. The Uncommitted National Movement, which launched an anti-war protest vote during the primaries, had been urging convention officials to include two Palestinian American speakers on the convention’s main stage. “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,” the movement’s statement released on Tuesday read.By Wednesday evening, however, it seemed clear that the convention had rejected these requests. In response, a group of uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in in front of Chicago’s United Center. Ilhan Omar joined the demonstration, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called in via FaceTime.In light of the convention’s refusal to have a Palestinian American speaker, the group Muslim Women for Harris made the decision to disband and withdraw support for Harris. “The family of the Israeli hostage that was on the stage tonight, has shown more empathy towards Palestinian Americans and Palestinians, than our candidate or the DNC has,” Muslim Women for Harris’s statement read.For those of us who have been cautiously optimistic that Harris might break from Joe Biden’s disastrous policy of unconditional support for Israel, this week has been bitterly disappointing. Whoever wins this election, it seems clear joy, joy, joy will not be coming to Gaza anytime soon. Just more bombs, bombs, bombs.Dismiss ‘grannies’ as frail old biddies at your perilWhether it’s “Nans against Nazis” protesting in Liverpool or the Raging Nannies getting arrested at US army recruitment centers, older women are some of the toughest activists out there, writes Sally Feldman.Woman, 75, uses gardening tools to fill in potholes outside home in Scottish villageArmed with a bucket and spade, Jenny Paterson undertook the resurfacing work against her doctor’s orders. She’d had surgery and wasn’t supposed to lift things but said: “I’m fine and I’m not a person to sit around and do nothing anyway.” Which has given me some inspiration to pick up a rake and go tackle the raggedy roads of Philadelphia.The late Queen Elizabeth II thought Donald Trump was ‘very rude’Apparently, she also “believed Trump ‘must have some sort of arrangement’ with his wife, Melania, or else why would she have remained married to him?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHow Tanya Smith stole $40m, evaded the FBI and broke out of prisonThe Guardian has a fascinating profile of Smith that touches on how the FBI couldn’t catch her for so long because they didn’t think a Black woman was capable of orchestrating her crimes. In Smith’s memoir, she recounts how one officer told her that “neeee-grroes murder, steal and rob, but they don’t have the brains to commit sophisticated crimes like this”.A clueless Alicia Silverstone eats poisonous fruit off a bushIf you’re wandering the streets of London and see a bush in someone’s front garden with mysterious fruit on it, should you a) admire it and move on? Or b) reach through the fence and film a TikTok of yourself munching the lil street snack while asking whether anyone knows what the heck it is? This week, Silverstone chose option b. The woman thinks vaccines are dodgy and yet she has no problem sticking an unknown fruit into her mouth. Turns out it was toxic but Silverstone has confirmed she’s OK, which means we can all laugh at her without feeling too bad about it.Women use ChatGPT 16%-20% less than their male peersThat’s according to two recent studies examined by the Economist. One explanation for this was that high-achieving women appeared to impose an AI ban on themselves. “It’s the ‘good girl’ thing,” one researcher said. “It’s this idea that ‘I have to go through this pain, I have to do it on my own and I shouldn’t cheat and take short-cuts.’” Very demure, very mindful.Patriarchal law cuts some South African women off from owning their homesBack in the 1990s, South Africa introduced a new land law (the Upgrading of Land Tenure Rights Act) that was supposed to fix the injustices of apartheid. It upgraded the property rights of Black long-term leaseholders so they could own their homes. But only a man could hold the property permit, effectively pushing women out of inheriting. Since the 1990s, there have been challenges and changes to the Upgrading Act, but experts say that women’s property rights are still not sufficiently recognized and “customary law has placed women outside the law”.The week in pawtriarchyThey stared into the void of an arcade game, and the void stared back. Punters at a Pennsylvania custard shop were startled when they realized that the cute little groundhog nestled among the stuffed animals in a mechanical-claw game was a real creature. Nobody knows exactly how he got into the game but he has since been rescued and named Colonel Custard. “It’s a good story that ended well,” the custard shop manager said. “He got set free. No one got bit.” More

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      Stop using the term ‘centrist’. It doesn’t mean what you think it does | Arwa Mahdawi

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      I would like to start a petition for journalists – and everyone else – to immediately stop using the C-word. Centrist. It’s an insidious word that has degraded how we think about politics and distorted how we see the world.Perhaps that statement sounds a little over the top. After all, being a “centrist” sounds eminently reasonable, doesn’t it? A centrist is a moderate, right? Someone who is rational and practical and takes the middle ground. Someone who isn’t extreme like those crazy ideologues on the far right or far left. A centrist, logic dictates, is really what everyone should strive to be.But stop for a moment and ask yourself how you would define a centrist in more specific terms. When you start spelling out what the word really means, it becomes clear that it obfuscates more than it illuminates. The word does not describe a set of ideas so much as it reinforces a system of power.This, of course, is a feature not a bug of political language. As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay Politics and the English Language: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”Orwell wrote that essay in 1946. Today, 78 years later, it feels just as relevant. Look, for example, at the carnage in Gaza and the West Bank. Look at the statements from Israeli leaders that clearly suggest genocidal intent. Look at the tragedies that barely make a dent in the public consciousness any more. This week, for example, an Israeli airstrike killed four-day-old twins, along with their mother and grandmother, when their father went to collect birth certificates in central Gaza. Look at the levels of brutality that barely seem to register any more: there is video evidence of the sexual abuse of Palestinians at a notorious Israeli military prison (though the more accurate term is “torture camp”) and, even with that evidence, we know there will be no real accountability.Look at the dead. Nearly 40,000 people in Gaza are now dead, including nearly 15,000 children. When you look at the scale of devastation, it seems likely that those figures are an underestimate. Further, counting the dead is excruciatingly difficult: kids are being blown into fragments so small that their surviving relatives have to collect pieces of them in plastic bags. Then there are the tens and thousands more who are now dying from starvation, or facing a looming polio epidemic.Look at the West Bank, meanwhile, where Israel has published plans for new settlements, which violate international law. Since 7 October, the Israeli army and settlers have displaced 1,285 Palestinians and destroyed 641 structures in the West Bank, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Ethnic cleansing is taking place before our eyes.Now look at how all of this is being justified. This war isn’t just being waged with bombs, it’s being waged with “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”. When you lay out what is happening in clear language, it is indefensible. So political language dresses all those dead and starving children up in euphemism. It obscures ethnic cleansing with vagaries. Don’t believe your eyes, political writing says. What you are seeing is far more complex than your eyes can possibly comprehend.This narrative is so entrenched that people don’t believe their eyes when it comes to Palestinians. Last October, the actor Jamie Lee Curtis posted a photo on Instagram showing terrified-looking children peering up at the sky. She captioned the post “terror from the skies” with an Israel flag emoji. When it was pointed out that the kids were Palestinian, she deleted the post. Her eyes may have told her that those innocent children were terrified; the narrative, however, was more complicated.Around the same time, Justin Bieber posted a photo of bombed houses with the caption “praying for Israel”. When it was pointed out the picture was of Gaza, he deleted it and apparently stopped praying.In 2022, a picture of a small blonde confronting a soldier was widely shared online, with the claim that it was a Ukrainian girl standing up to a Russian soldier. How brave, people though. How inspiring! When it was revealed that it was actually old footage of a then 10-year-old Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian activist, interest in the image fizzled out.Again: when you lay out what is happening in clear language it is indefensible. When people see what is happening with their own eyes, it is indefensible. I say that as someone who has seen what life is like for Palestinians with my own eyes. As someone who had to run from soldiers shooting teargas when I visited my dad’s village in the West Bank when I had just turned six. Who was interrogated by an IDF soldier when I visited my dad’s village at 15, because I had a school chemistry book in my bag. Who knows what is like to be harassed and humiliated by heavily armed soldiers at checkpoints when you are just trying to go from one village to another. If you experience life under occupation for even a day it becomes starkly apparent that there is no way to defend it.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn order to defend the indefensible, politicians and political writers move away from concreteness, from clear language, and hide behind the respectableness of terms like “centrism”. Pro-Palestinian protesters are labelled the far-left or extremists. Continuing to unconditionally send arms to Israel and shield the country’s far-right government from accountability, however, is considered a centrist – and therefore reasonable – position.See, for example, this paragraph from the New York Times, earlier this month, when Pennsylvania’s governor, Josh Shapiro, was still being considered as a possible candidate for Kamala Harris’s running mate.“Mr Shapiro has emerged as the choice of the party’s pro-Israel donors, those with ties to the school-choice movement and business-friendly contributors in Silicon Valley. But his centrist positions that appeal to those groups are the same ones that make him the least favorite of the party’s most liberal funders.”This paragraph is one of the rare instances where there is some explanation as to what centrism actually means. Centrism we are told, is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what. This piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own”. He has never properly apologized for this, nor will he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties”. If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.“If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” Orwell wrote. There is very little that most of us can do to change what is happening in Gaza, but the one thing we can all do is simplify our English. So let’s begin with “centrism”. If we are to be honest about what we mean, if we are to express it in its simplest terms, we should use the word “status-quoism” instead. The point of words like “centrism” is to prevent thought and prompt acquiescence. It’s up to you whether you want to acquiesce.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Tens of thousands of activists prepare protests over Gaza war at Democratic National Convention

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      Some 40,000 protesters are expected to gather outside the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago on Monday to demonstrate against the Biden administration’s position on Israel, with some groups saying they will push for amendments to the party’s platform.The party is on guard for disruptions to high-profile speeches at the DNC, with one pro-Palestinian group called Delegates Against Genocide, angry at US support for Israel’s offensive in Gaza, saying it will press for an arms embargo this week.Delegates Against Genocide said it would exercise its freedom of speech rights during main events at the four-day convention. Its organisers declined to give details, but said they would offer amendments to the party platform and use their rights as delegates to speak on the convention floor.The group wants to include language backing enforcement of laws that ban giving military aid to individuals or security forces that commit gross violations of human rights.“We’re going to make our voices heard,” said Liano Sharon, a business consultant and delegate who signed an alternative platform along with 34 other delegates. “Freedom of expression necessarily includes the right to stand up and be heard even when the authority in the room says to shut up.“They want the convention to go smoothly. They don’t want to have any kind of disruption or any kind of statement or anything like that,” he told Reuters at an event hosted by Chicago’s large Palestinian population. “I’m sorry. A convention is a political engagement vehicle, OK? And if we’re not using it for that, then it’s just a beauty pageant.”The Harris campaign declined to comment on the group’s plans.The Uncommitted National Movement, a separate effort pushing Democrats to change policy on Israel that won more than 30 delegates in primary elections, also wants an arms embargo. But it has focused, unsuccessfully so far, on winning a main-stage speaking slot for a Palestinian American or Gaza humanitarian worker.Uncommitted has said it is not planning to disrupt the convention proceedings.Late on Saturday, convention organisers added a daytime panel discussion on Arab and Palestinian issues to Monday’s agenda and one on antisemitism.Nadia Ahmad, a law professor at Florida’s Barry University and a delegate, said there were about 60 Muslim delegates, a fraction of the 5,000 overall. But their concerns were shared by others, she said.Demonstrations are expected every day of the convention and, while their agendas vary, many activists agree an immediate ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war is the priority.The largest group, the Coalition to March on the DNC, has planned demonstrations on the first and last days of the convention. Organisers say they expect at least 20,000 activists, including students who protested the war on college campuses.“The people with power are going to be there,” said Liz Rathburn, a University of Illinois Chicago student organiser. “People inside the United Center are the people who are going to be deciding our foreign policy in one way or another.”The Democratic party’s draft platform released in mid-July calls for “an immediate and lasting ceasefire” in the war and the release of remaining hostages taken to Gaza during the 7 October attack by Islamist militant Hamas fighters in which Israel says 1,200 people were killed.The platform does not mention the more than 40,000 people that Palestinian health authorities in Gaza say have been killed in Israel’s subsequent offensive. Nor does it mention any plans to curtail US arms shipments to Israel. The United States approved $20 billion in additional arms sales to Israel on Tuesday.Mediators including the US have sought to broker a truce between Israel and Hamas, which rules Gaza, based on a plan Biden put forward in May but so far have not succeeded.Pro-Palestinian activists say Harris has been more sympathetic to people in Gaza than Biden has been. Her national security adviser said on X this month that she does not support an arms embargo on Israel. After meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month, Harris told reporters not only that Israel had a right to defend itself but also in reference to Gaza: “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering and I will not be silent.”Organisers of Monday’s planned-protest said the numbers outside the convention could swell to over 100,000.The city has designated a park about a block from the DNC’s venue, the United Center, for a speakers’ stage. Those who sign up get 45 minutes.The convention will draw an estimated 50,000 people to the nation’s third-largest city, including delegates, activists and journalists. Activists say they learned lessons from last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and are predicting bigger crowds and more robust demonstrations in Chicago, a city with deep social activism roots.The city says it has made necessary preparations with police and the Secret Service. Security will be tight, with street closures around the convention centre.With Associated Press and Reuters More