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House Speaker Johnson drowned out by booing crowds at Columbia University speech on Gaza protests

  House Speaker Mike Johnson was drowned out by booing crowds during a speech at Columbia University where he condemned the ongoing student protests against the war in Gaza. Columbia’s campus has been enveloped in student protests over the war that have garnered national attention amid reports of antisemitic speech targeting Jewish students. Johnson called on the university’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, to resign if she could not restore order to the campus and said he would urge President Joe Biden to take executive action against the protesters. House Speaker  Mike Johnson , R-La., struggled to get a word in edgewise Wednesday, battling a chorus of booing crowds during a speech at  Columbia University  where he condemned the ongoing student protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. “Enjoy your free speech,”  Johnson  said tersely, pausing his prepared remarks to wait for the jeering to die down. Columbia’s campus has been frozen by controversy since student protesters se
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United States Hypocrisy – Again BY ROBERT FANTINA

  The hypocrisy of the United States government knows no limits. On April 18, a proposal was submitted to the United Nations Security Council to admit Palestine as a full member, thus effectively recognizing the state of Palestine.  Of the fifteen members of the Security Council, twelve voted in favor, two abstained, and the United States, using its veto power, opposed it . This,  after frantic lobbying  by the U.S. of the other nations on the Security Council to convince at least one of them to vote with the U.S., so the U.S. would not have to stand alone, again, in its support for the apartheid regime of Israel. “’It remains the US view that the most expeditious path toward statehood for the Palestinian people is through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with the support of the United States and other partners,’ Vedant Patel, the State Department spokesman , told reporters  earlier in the day.” This writer is almost tired of pointing out the obvious: ne
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Elites in the Global North Are Scared to Talk About Palestine BY VIJAY PRASHAD

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  Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Israeli bombs continue to fall on Gaza, killing Palestinian civilians with abandon. Al Jazeera published a  story  about the destruction of 24 hospitals in Gaza, each of them bombed mercilessly by the Israeli military. Half of the 35,000 Palestinians killed by Israel were children, their bodies littering the overwhelmed morgues and mosques of Gaza. The former United Nations assistant secretary-general for human rights Andrew Gilmour  told  BBC Newsnight that the Palestinians are experiencing “collective punishment” and that what we are seeing in Gaza is “probably the highest kill rate of any military, killing anybody, since the Rwandan genocide of 1994.” Meanwhile, in the West Bank section of Palestine, Human Rights Watch  shows  that the Israeli military has participated in the displacement of Palestinians from 20 communities and has uprooted at least seven communities since October 2023. These are established facts. Yet, these facts—according to a
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Intifada, the Origin of Democracy BY ELLIOT SPERBER

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  It’s a testament to the contradictions of our present barbarity that while the whole world recognizes that crimes against humanity, if not the crime of genocide itself, are being committed by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, the political-economic institutions of the U.S., and their dutiful servants in government, academia, entertainment, and elsewhere, only allow for the continual provision of funds and material in support of these ongoing atrocities. This barbarity runs deep, down into the very meanings of words — words that, haunted by ideological, religious and superstitious fears, spread and reproduce this confusion, mystification, and barbarity. The word intifada, for example, which refers to a political uprising in general, and to a popular Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in particular (as opposed to the military operations of Hamas, or anything antisemitic or Judeophobic), literally means a shaking, a shaking off of something burdensome. And
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Against Israel and US Misuse of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombing to justify Gaza Genocide BY TOMOMI KINUKAWA – A.YOSHIDA

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  Israeli politicians , including  Benjamin Netanyahu, have made references to air bombings of Germany and Japan during WWII as well as the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to justify their genocide of Palestinian people. In response to global outrage against the continued “unconditional” US military aide to Israel,  US law makers  have also legitimized US support for Israeli genocide of Palestinians and US blocking of humanitarian aides by reproducing similar references to WWII. For example,  according to  the New York Times , Tim Walberg,  a member of the House of Representative (R-Michigan), “openly mused during a town hall meeting on March 25 about wiping out Gaza,” telling his constituents “Get it over quick” and that “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.” Bryan Mark Rigg, a pro-Israel researcher who claims to be a Holocaust expert,  has  alleged  that Palestinians are ruled by Hamas like Germans were by Nazis and as such, atomic bombs must be used to stop Hamas in t
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