In the town of Umm al-Fahm, more than a third of all letters never reach their destination. Identity cards, passports and drivers’ licences go missing, welfare cheques are lost, appointments expire, and penalties mount up over unpaid fines.
GPS navigation apps like Waze fail, taxis struggle to find customers, and private delivery companies have to be met at the town’s entrance and escorted in.
In Umm al-Fahm, more than a third of letters never reach their destination. Identity cards, passports and drivers' licences go missing, welfare cheques are lost, appointments expire, and penalties mount up over unpaid fines. For decades the town's 301 streets have lacked any names or house numbers. And five years after the municipality submitted a list of names, Israeli officials are still dragging their feet.
After seven years of delays, the Israeli governing parties have agreed the final terms of controversial new legislation that would define Israel exclusively as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”.
The bill is now expected to be fast-tracked through the Israeli parliament and on to the statute books in the coming weeks.
Approval by the parliament’s justice committee this week of the Basic Law, which carries much greater weight than normal legislation, marks a dangerous turning-point for Palestinians, according to analysts.
On last year’s St. Patrick’s Day, progressives of Irish ancestry organized the first “Irish Stand” rally at Riverside Church in New York City to protest the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump administration. The rally represented an energizing shift in Irish American social consciousness back toward an original culture of resistance.
Watching old movies is a journey back through time, revisiting the social attitudes of our past. A lot has changed during the last six or seven decades, much of it for the better. Thank goodness I don’t have to wear a white shirt and necktie just to go downtown nowadays, but back in the 1950s that was the norm, the required male attire. I remember my father somewhat awkwardly putting on his dress-up clothes, struggling with his necktie. Being a former fisherman, Dad was skilled at tying all sorts of complicated knots, but that necktie was one he never quite mastered.
Thousands of Israeli families who have been searching in vain for answers since their babies mysteriously disappeared in the early 1950s – shortly after Israel’s creation – have been thrown a lifeline.
The mystery of the missing children has plagued Israel for decades, with evidence mounting that at least some of the babies were trafficked by hospitals and orphanages – possibly with the connivance of Israeli officials.
Other documents indicate some children may have died during experiments conducted by hospitals without the parents’ knowledge or consent.
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
— Abraham Lincoln, June 16, 1858, at Springfield, Illinois.
Kyle Bristow is a Lawyer and the Executive Director of the Foundation For The Marketplace Of Ideas. Kyle earned his juris doctorate from the University of Toledo College of Law, his bachelor of arts degree in international relations from James Madison College of Michigan State University, and his associate degree and certificate in general studies from Macomb Community College. He has provided legal support to many Alt-Right activists.
A video version of this interview is available here.
Our capitalist elites have used propaganda, money and the marginalizing of their critics to erase the first three of philosopher John Locke’s elements of the perfect state: liberty, equality and freedom. They exclusively empower the fourth, property. Liberty and freedom in the corporate state mean the liberty and freedom of corporations and the rich to exploit and pillage without government interference or regulatory oversight.
It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.
― Nelson Mandela
