"As the State of Israel and the United States collectively engage in innumerable forms of spectacular state violence, the question of who has the right to protest and where continues to be used as a distraction. The latest debate once again involves the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli land-theft organization, My Home in Israel. The event, which occurs annually, is sponsored and hosted by Jewish community organizations, including synagogues, all over the United States. This month, events held at the Park East Synagogue in New York City’s Upper East Side neighborhood on May 5 and at Young Israel of Midwood in Brooklyn on May 11 highlighted listings in and around the Palestinian village of Beit Iskâria, currently illegally occupied by the Israeli State and known as the settlement bloc Gush Etzion. In response to this event, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation (Pal-Awda) organized protests outside the synagogue, where hundreds of people showed up to condemn the illegal land sale.

Similar protests have previously drawn attention when Zionist politicians like former President Joe Biden and California Governor Gavin Newsom condemned protestors as antisemitic. Similarly, on May 6, New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin announced, “I’m deeply disturbed by the hateful rhetoric heard last night outside Park East Synagogue. Calls for the destruction of Israel and the glorification of Hezbollah are horrific, intimidating, and only fuel the flames of antisemitism.” In line with Menin’s statement, Jen Goodman, spokesperson for New York Governor Kathy Hochul, said: “While protesters have a First Amendment right to be heard, hate-fueled antisemitic rhetoric has no place in New York and Governor Hochul will continue to call it out and confront it head on.” Falling in line, General Letitia James added, “Antisemitism has no place in New York…We will protect New Yorkers’ First Amendment rights and condemn hate, harassment, and violence in equal measure.” While New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani initially condemned the event itself, stating, “These settlements are illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians,” after much public pressure, his Press Secretary, Josh Raskin, clarified, “Some of the rhetoric and conduct outside Park East Synagogue — including displays of support for terrorist organizations and antisemitic acts — was unacceptable.”

Are the protests in fact antisemitic?

The answer is clearly, “No.” In fact, they have fully revealed how claims of “antisemitism” are merely a distraction from Israel’s genocide in Palestine, including the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians from their land. The truth is, every institution complicit in this violence should be targeted, regardless of whether that space is a school, synagogue, or weapons manufacturer. Exceptionalizing synagogues as exclusively religious spaces erases their political, financial, and ideological investments in Zionism and, therefore, genocide. The debate over the morality and legality of synagogue protests is a distraction amidst the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and imperial wars waged by the State of Israel. "

https://mondoweiss.net/2026/05/synagogues-that-sell-stolen-palestinian-land-should-of-course-be-protested/

#acab #palestine #colonialism

Rare images capture pioneer life on WA's south coast in the early 1900s
By Andrew Chounding and Mark Bennett

Pioneering photographer Bert Saw captured Federation-era life and experiences in Denmark, Albany and surrounding communities throughout the 1900s.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-31/pioneering-photographer-bert-saw-historical-collection-gifted/106738624

#Photography #Historians #Colonialism #AndrewChounding #MarkBennett

(PRE)FIGURING FASCISM #4: War Machines and Growth Engines: Militarism, State Formation, and the Limits of Degrowth Politics

Het Fort van Sjakoo, Thursday, June 18 at 05:00 PM GMT+2

Thursday, 18 June, 2026 – 17:00 to 19:00

This talk argues that the degrowth movement has two blind spots at its theoretical core. The first concerns militarism. The vast apparatus of modern warfare — the logistics, the accounting systems, the nationalism needed to make people willing to fight — was not a byproduct of capitalist growth but one of the forces that produced it. The second blind spot concerns the solution(s) degrowth proposes. The dominant strand of degrowth scholarship looks to progressive state institutions and cultural transformation as the vehicle for a degrowth transition. But the modern state is constituted by organised violence — it is, at its core, a war machine — and a politics that fails to name and confront this fact will end up reproducing what it opposes, whether at the national scale or the municipal one. In other words, this talk will argue that a genuine degrowth transition requires demilitarisation as a precondition.

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Andro Rilović is a lecturer and PhD researcher at UvA. Both his teaching and research are rooted in degrowth scholarship, and he primarily investigates how militarism shapes political and economic institutions in ways that create and reinforce a constant imperative for economic growth.

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(Pre)Figuring Fascism is a series of talks drawing attention to the continuities between liberal governance and fascism, hoping to stimulate an understanding of fascism as it relates to colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism – rather than viewing it as a kind of shock to an otherwise well-working liberal system. Because we know: So long as the conditions for fascism’s emergence are not overcome, we are always living in proto-fascist times.

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/prefiguring-fascism-4-war-machines-and-growth-engines-militarism-state-formation-and-the-limits-of-degrowth-politics

(PRE)FIGURING FASCISM #3: The State of Exception in Which We Live – Lessons from the Black Radical Tradition’s Analyses of Fascism

Het Fort van Sjakoo, Thursday, June 11 at 05:00 PM GMT+2

Thursday, 11 June, 2026 – 17:00 to 19:00

Fascism and authoritarianism are often framed as a danger in the future that paradoxically resembles a relapse into the past: If we do not defend our democracy now, we might experience again what we believed to have left behind. Informed by the interventions of black radical thinkers and activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Bobby Seale, and Angela Davis, this talk proposes a different understanding of the temporality of fascism: fascism and liberal democracy are not opposites but can coexist. The liberal democracy of some is at the same time the fascism for others. We will together talk about some of the political and strategic implications of this claim.

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Daniel Loick teaches social and political philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is interested in critiques of state-inflicted violence (police, prison, borders) and the politics of forms of life. He is Principal Investigator of the research project “Emergencies of Authoritarianism”.

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(Pre)Figuring Fascism is a series of talks drawing attention to the continuities between liberal governance and fascism, hoping to stimulate an understanding of fascism as it relates to colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism – rather than viewing it as a kind of shock to an otherwise well-working liberal system. Because we know: So long as the conditions for fascism’s emergence are not overcome, we are always living in proto-fascist times.

https://offbeat.amsterdam/event/prefiguring-fascism-3-the-state-of-exception-in-which-we-live-lessons-from-the-black-radical-traditions-analyses-of-fascism

Tibet, by any (other) Name?

I noticed when I report something from Tibet under that name, some DXers insist on changing it to China. Well, in case you are inclined to [add bs?] to China’s cultural genocide in Tibet, and not grant it at the very least radio country status, I suggest you look at a recent "Frontline" on PBS called "Battle for Tibet".
Glenn Hauser, World of Radio, May 28

I think I could hear Mr Hauser’s anger, and I might feel the same about it. When I sent in my logs to a collective loglist earlier this decade, I also used TIB for Tibet and ETU for East Turkestan (known in Mandarin as Xinjiang), and stopped my contributions once I saw that the editors replaced those names with CHN.

However, I object to the term "cultural genocide". Yes, the addition does make it clear that China isn’t running a program to kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, and that it rather refers to the policy of the sinicization of Tibet.

But "genocide" doesn’t belong in this context, neither with nor without a qualifying attribute next to it. The term must be reserved for cases where genocide really happens.

All the same, respect for Tibet is important – the country’s name is a political issue, if we like that or not. Chinese leaders have run campaigns against Tibetan culture and identity for at least seventy-plus years, and they have recently upped the ante. Radio and Television Tibet’s English program, in line with that policy, has started referring to itself as "Radio Xizang".

We don’t have to do likewise. Even if we write to the station for QSL, there’s no need for that. Chances are that reception reports to RT Tibet will get QSL anyway – and that one or another among the staff will even feel a hidden moment of joy when looking at it (even if they dutifully correct the sender).

Let’s not allow Chinese nationalism and colonialism to fool us. Let’s not make ourselves useful in the "sinicization" of Tibet.

🇫🇷 🇫🇷 🇫🇷

France overturns law classing people as property – 178 years after it abolished slavery

🔗 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/28/france-votes-code-noir-slavery-law-colonialism

#France #Imperialism #Colonialism #Slavery #History #Histodons