By Richard Silverstein (Tikkun Olam)

It’s commencement time and universities are proudly announcing who they’ve snagged as honorary degree and commencement speakers.

On March 7, members of Northeastern University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) were informed by the school’s Center for Student Involvement that their chapter had been suspended for at least a year.

Israeli occupation forces have been busy lately in the West Bank city of Nablus. Last week, they demolished a water reservoir serving the Kherbit al-Taweel, southeast of Nablus. Demolition orders have also been issued for a several structures in a park in the village of Burqa.

srael’s blockade of Gaza has long been known for it’s cruel results in strangling the population. But two recent happenings – namely Egypt’s destruction of Gaza’s smuggling tunnels and Israel’s decision ratchet up the blockade by blocking construction materials – have made Gaza virtually “uninhabitable,” according to the UN.

The only “liberals who have lost touch with what the ideas they positively stand for” as Alan Johnson put it are the so-called “9/11 liberals,” including individuals he cited, such as Paul Berman.

TIME

The biggest donor to Republican Party political groups said Tuesday that the United States should drop a nuclear bomb on Iran to spur the country to end its own nuclear program.

File this away under “What if this were a Muslim…?” Shimon Gapso, mayor of the Israeli city of Upper Nazareth, has recently published an article for Ha’aretz in which he lays bare his racist and extremist religious ideology. Gapso implicitly endorses a policy of ethnic cleansing, and defends his statements calling for the “Judaization” of his city.

Introduction

This is the first in a series of articles that will discuss the relationship between Zionism and Islamophobia. The impetus for this series is what many have already observed:

The annual Israel lobby confab has once again put its seal of approval on Islamophobia. A key member of what has been termed the “Islamophobia network” appeared Sunday at an officially scheduled session at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference.

Student activists in California have exposed inflammatory remarks made by a university lecturer who is the head of an Israel lobby group that tries to pressure college administrations and state officials into investigating what the lecturer calls anti-Semitism.