Postings Begin Again

After a few months of not posting here, I begin again. The posts will be simple at first, that is, providing links to items in the news and on the Internet without commentary on my part. The links will be to important stories and/or opinion pieces that do not appear on widely-circulated websites and news outlets.

Please watch for a return to the normal format and content here within a few days. Thank you.

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Why I Dissent
By James Zogby

Posted on April 29, 2017, in Washington Watch

This week, nearing the end of four years of service as an Obama Presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), I felt compelled to issue a public dissent to USCIRF’s 2017 Annual Report.

While the larger part of my dissent dealt with the way the Commission does its work (which I will discuss in a future column), what moved me to go public was the glaring refusal of some Commissioners to allow even a consideration of religious freedom in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
(More . . . )

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385 Israeli settlers storm Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque

Anadolu Agency
2017 By Abdel Raouf Arnaout
April 14, 2017

Hundreds of Israeli settlers Thursday [April 13] stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the occupied East Jerusalem amid protests by Jerusalem-based Muslim bodies, Palestinian officials said.

“Three hundred and eighty-five settlers stormed the mosque while being heavily guarded by Israeli police,” Firas al-Debs, a media official in Jerusalem’s Islamic Endowments Department, told Anadolu Agency.
(More . . .)
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“The Three Cypress Trees,”  by Mourid Barghouti

Transparent and frail,
like the slumber of woodcutters,
serene, foreshadowing things to come,
the morning drizzle does not conceal
these three cypresses on the slope.
Their details belie their sameness,
their radiance confirms it.
I said:
I wouldn’t dare to keep looking at them,
there is a beauty that takes away our daring,
there are times when courage fades away.
The clouds rolling high above
change the form of the cypresses.
The birds flying towards other skies
change the resonance of the cypresses.
The tiled line behind them
fixes the greenness of the cypresses
and there are trees whose only fruit is greenness.
Yesterday, in my sudden cheerfulness,
I saw their immortality.
Today, in my sudden sorrow,
I saw the axe.

Mourid Barghouti
From: Midnight and Other Poems
Translation: 2009, Radwa Ashour
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009