Voices of the Middle East and North Africa

Guest:

Nima Tootkaboni is a former student activist, and a Ph.D. student in sociology at the Johns Hopkins University

nationwide protests continue in Iran - What is next? by VOMENA Team at KPFA

Women, Life, Freedom. Women are leading Iran protests by VOMENA Team at KPFA

Victors write history, as the old cliché goes. Over the past 5 centuries, European powers have fanned out

across the world, conquering entire continents and writing self-serving accounts of those conquests

while diminishing the merits of the conquered civilizations in order to justify their own depredations.

Palestine has been no exception to that rule.

Today we speak with Professor Salim Tamari, a Palestinian historian based in Ramallah, whose

trailblazing work has illuminated the history of Palestine and the Levant prior to British and Zionist

occupations from a perspective that is largely absent from western narratives.

More specifically, we discuss his book The Year of the Locust, an eloquent chronicle of the transition period

that saw the end of the Ottoman empire in the Levant and the arrival of western occupiers through the revealing lens of a rare personal diary kept by a young soldier fighting in the ranks of the Ottoman army.

Guest:

Salim Tamari, Salim Tamari is IPS senior fellow and the former director of the IPS-affiliated Institute of Jerusalem Studies. He is editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Hawliyyat al Quds.

Neda semnani tells the story of her parents in"They Said They Wanted Revolution" by VOMENA Team at KPFA

France, a Settler Postcolony? A conversation with professor Olivia Harrison by VOMENA Team at KPFA

we speak with Palestinian-American journalist and media analyst Laura Albast about coverage of Palestine in the US media- In a recent Washington Post Op-Ed, she argues that By neglecting to contextualize Israeli state violence, the media has given the Israeli government a free pass, enabling it to continue ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people with impunity. It is time for outlets to address the harm they have done. They should make an effort to hire Palestinian journalists and center Palestinian voices, instead of consistently erasing them from their own stories. The endless footage of documented violence against Palestinians should not remain confined to social media feeds (which face a different form of censorship).

Read her op-ed:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/28/jerusalem-al-aqsa-media-coverage-israeli-violence-palestinians/

**Boycott, is screened on this year’s DocLands on Sunday, May 8 at 4 PM at SMITH RAFAEL FILM CENTER in San Rafael- For more information please visit, doclands.com**

The freedom to refuse to buy a product at any time from anyone you want, which has historically been used by oppressed minorities throughout the world, witness the bus boycotts of the 50s, the grape boycotts of the 60s or the anti-Apartheid campaign of the 80s, is now at the heart of the struggle for Palestinian rights.

The new documentary film "Boycott," examines the heroic plight of three individual Americans in three different states who rejected the dictate of anti-BDS laws surreptitiously passed by 31 states of the union, challenged that ban in court and prevailed in the head.

BOYCOTT chronicles the stories of three everyday Americans -- a speech pathologist, a public defender, and a newspaper publisher -- who take the extraordinary step of suing their states after new laws require them to sign a pledge saying they won't participate in boycotts of Israel in order to receive a government contract.

VOMENA’s Khalil Bendib spoke with the film’s producer Suhad Babaa.

Palestinian American journalist Laura Albast says the media must stop giving reign to Israeli aggression & begin telling the full story of Palestine.

Recently- Ms Albast and Cat Knar coauthored an opinion piece in the Washington Post on the biased & inaccurate coverage of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine- they write, we have seen the same patterns over and over again in media coverage of Palestine. Palestinians are not killed; we simply die. When Israeli forces raid our neighborhoods in the middle of the night, bomb our children, demolish our homes, colonize our land and kill our people, we are somehow equal instigators. Media descriptions regularly imply a false symmetry between occupier and occupied, propping up anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic narratives that blame the Palestinian people for Israeli aggression.”

Malihe Razazan spoke with Laura about the media coverage of Palestine in the US media and Why the media fails to cover Palestine with accuracy and empathy.

Laura Albast, a Palestinian American journalist and translator, is senior editor of digital strategy and communications at the Institute for Palestine Studies-USA.

In a bold and historic step backwards for the cause of peace in the Middle East last Sunday, Morocco was one of four Arab countries meeting in a special summit with Israel and the US.

Although distant Iran was central to the discussions held during this meeting, the central issue of Palestine never broached during this summit, which took place in the heart of historic Palestine.

Khalil spoke with Samia Errazouki, a journalist formerly based in Morocco and a PhD candidate in early modern Northwest African history at UC Davis, about Morocco’s participation in this summit and what might be motivating the Moroccan regime to go against the wishes of its own people,

March 9, 2022- Amany Khalifa on forced evictions and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by VOMENA Team at KPFA