The smear campaign against Lowkey has stepped up a gear over the past six months. In December, the rapper was booked for a gig in London’s Jazz Cafe. The venue came under pressure to call off the show, which celebrated the 10th anniversary of his album, Soundtrack to the Struggle, reports Kit Klarenberg.
For the fifth week in a row, residents of Jabal al-Mukaber, a Palestinian neighborhood in Occupied East Jerusalem, demonstrated outside city hall against a municipal plan to demolish their homes to expand the American Road, a highway largely viewed as a bypass serving illegal Israeli settlements throughout Jerusalem, reports Jessica Buxbaum.
UN Special Envoy Hans Grundberg and UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths highlighted the drastic rise in civilian casualties over the last few months, reports People's Dispatch.
A telegram warned Israeli diplomats that, in the upcoming 49th regular session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), which is expected to begin on February 28, a report will be tabled regarding Israel’s 2021 bombing of Gaza. This report will apparently use the word “apartheid” to refer to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians, according to the telegram, writes Vijay Prashad.
Israel is no longer the party shaping events in Palestine and controlling the discourse around these events. Palestinians, and a growing international movement of supporters, are proactively shaping global perceptions of the realities on the ground, writes Ramzy Baroud.
Reclaiming history is not an intellectual exercise; it is a necessity, yes, with intellectual and ethical repercussions, but political and legal, as well. Surely, Palestinians do not need to re-write their own history. It is already written. It is time that those who have paid far more attention to the Israeli narrative abandon such illusions and, for once, listen to Palestinian voices, because the truth of the victim is a wholly different story than that of the aggressor, writes Ramzy Baroud.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019