May 31st, 20240The Hamtramck City Council passed Resolution 2024-51 to boycott, divest and sanction Israel 4-0 at its meeting on Tuesday evening.
The only entirely Arab American city council in the country became the first in Michigan and one of the first around the nation to join the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement.
“The BDS...
November 24th, 20230CAIRO – On a recent evening in Cairo, a worker cleaned tables in an empty McDonald's restaurant. Branches of other Western fast-food chains in the Egyptian capital also appeared deserted.
All have been hit by a largely spontaneous, grassroots boycott campaign over Israel's military offensive in the Gaza Strip since the surprise Hamas...
September 18th, 20220A new, extensive national poll shines light on American Muslims' attitudes and perspectives on major issues, in the context of the broader faith landscape in the country.
The American Muslim Poll 2022: A Politics and Pandemic Status Report was released late last month by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), which...
August 14th, 20220It seemed all but a done deal: Israel is finally managing to bend the Arabs to its will, and Palestine is becoming a marginal issue that no longer defines Israel’s relations with Arab countries. Indeed, normalization with Israel is afoot, and the Arabs, so it seems, have been finally tamed.
Not so fast. Many events continue to...
July 29th, 20220— This article by Hamzah Khan, legal intern at the the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ New Jersey Chapter, was first published by the New Jersey Record and USA TODAY Network. It has been edited for style
In a world where there are hundreds of companies manufacturing and selling the same product, the freedom to choose a...
June 3rd, 20220After two years of calls by human rights campaigners, General Mills, the company that produces the popular Pillsbury brand of products, has divested its Israeli business.
The calls came from a diverse set of organizations and interests, including the Quaker organization American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which promotes "a...
May 17th, 20222NEW YORK — Law school faculty at a major university in New York have joined the ranks of educational and professional organizations supporting the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and recognition of Palestinian rights.
Last week, the City University of New York (CUNY) Law Faculty unanimously endorsed a CUNY Law Student...
December 26th, 20190WASHINGTON, D.C – In an extraordinary move that flies in the face of civil rights protections, President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday to interpret Judaism as a nationality. The order expands Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protections against discrimination to prosecute cases of perceived anti-Semitism on...
August 3rd, 20190Israel is at it again. It remains consistent in engaging in one of its favorite activities: Stealing Palestinian land and tormenting Palestinians.
On Monday, Israeli bulldozers, escorted by hundreds of Israeli soldiers, demolished no less than 16 residential buildings containing around 100 apartments in the village of Sur Baher, which...
July 29th, 20191DEARBORN – The owner of the controversial Israeli burger franchise Burgerim, slated to operate on the border of Detroit and Dearborn, is abandoning his plans to open its new location.
Sam Zahr, a Lebanese American and Dearborn resident, decided to open the restaurant after the success of the franchise in another Metro Detroit...
July 20th, 20190TEL AVIV - Since condemning freedom of expression with regard to the BDS (Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions) movement has been prevalent in the U.S., and with President Trump's recent unapologetic racist remarks about Democratic congresswomen of color (a remark that included U.S. Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit)),...
March 15th, 20190DEARBORN — A March 4 meeting between Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Arab American community leaders at the La Pita restaurant ended with the senator failing to mollify participants regarding his vote on the anti-BDS bill.
At the meeting, Peters addressed his choice to vote "yes" on Bill S.1, which includes the controversial Combating...
February 22nd, 20191Hardline supporters of Israel are in panic mode. It was in evidence earlier this week with the all-out assault on the first Somali, African-born immigrant, refugee, Muslim woman elected to serve in the U.S. Congress. Her crime was that she dared to point out, as a leading New York Times columnist and so many others have in the past, the...
February 8th, 20190DEARBORN — U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit), sat down with The Arab American News on Saturday, Feb. 2 to discuss her first month in office and her explicit remarks in November about impeaching President Trump.
She said she faced criticisms, received hate mail and a death threat before making the remarks and during her...
January 18th, 20190WASHINGTON, D.C. – The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement has apparently shaken enough trees in the Zionist-Israeli avenue to provoke a local reaction in the Senate, where Republicans are trying to pass a bill making the movement illegal.
Two Republican Senators, Marco Rubio from Florida and James Risch from Idaho,...
December 21st, 20181Bahia Amawi works as children's speech pathologist for the Pflugerville Independent School District in Texas. Or, rather, she used to work as a children's speech pathologist for the district. After nine years, Glenn Greenwald reports at The Intercept, the district's administration declined to renew her contract because she refused to...
December 21st, 20180AUSTIN, Texas — The Austin public school district told a children’s speech pathologist she cannot renew her contract because she refused to sign a statement pledging not to boycott Israel.
Bahia Amawi said that the no-boycott requirement is a violation of her First Amendment right of free speech.
Amawi, a child language...
December 14th, 20180DEARBORN— A group of University of Michigan-Dearborn students are accusing administrators of trying to silence their voices.
Jenin Yaseen, vice president of U of M-Dearborn’s Students for Justice in Palestine, the only Palestinian student organization on the campus, said she started seeing push-back from university leadership when...
October 13th, 20180An Israeli court on Friday upheld the barring of an American student from the country over her activities in support of an international boycott campaign by pro-Palestinian groups.
Lara Alqasem, 22, flew to Israel last week on a student visa but was refused entry. While in airport detention, she filed an appeal with Tel Aviv District...
October 12th, 20180ANN ARBOR – The University of Michigan promised “serious consequences” this week for instructors whose “personal views” cause them to withhold letters of recommendation, responding to mounting concern that protest against Israel is harming students on campus.
The announcement follows two separate cases this fall in which a...
September 30th, 20180PHOENIX — On Thursday, Sept. 27, a federal court blocked an Arizona law that requires state contractors to certify that they won't boycott Israel, finding that the law likely violates state contractors’ free speech rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“A restriction of one’s ability to participate in...
September 22nd, 20180Palestine, Israel and the right to boycott (BDS) have made their way to the front and center of Michigan’s gubernatorial race. In the past few weeks, Democratic candidate Gretchen Whitmer has publicly expressed support for the right to boycott Israel, after which her Republican opponent, Bill Schuette, vehemently attacked her for it,...
September 21st, 20180ANN ARBOR — A University of Michigan associate professor is facing criticism for not writing a student a letter of recommendation to study in Israel.
John Cheney-Lippold, who teaches in the American Culture Department on the relationship among digital media, identity and the concept of privacy, had initially agreed to write the...
September 5th, 20180Pop singer and songwriter Lana Del Rey has canceled her September 7 appearance at Israel’s Meteor Festival.
Del Rey (real name Elizabeth Woolridge Grant) had pulled out of an earlier engagement in 2014. According to Variety Magazine, the entertainment trade paper, “the organizers are said to be livid”, especially since Grant...
July 22nd, 20180In Ireland on Wednesday morning, I watched an amazing debate unfolding in the Irish Seanad (Senate), as members spoke for and against a bill to prohibit the importation of Israeli goods produced in settlements in occupied Palestinian lands. The legislation in question is the Control of Economic Activity (occupied territory) Bill 2018,...
June 23rd, 20181DEARBORN – As grisly images from “Right of Return” protests along the Gaza-Israeli border become increasingly harder for the American public to ignore, lawmakers across the U.S. are reacting with anti-BDS bills that seek to hamper efforts to boycott the nation’s most significant ally in the Mediterranean – shifting the...
June 1st, 20180By Lindsay Ellis
HOUSTON, TX — In February, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal gave a workshop and reading at the University of Houston's Spanish program in creative writing. The University of Southern California Ph.D. candidate met students and promoted her first book at the event.
But she was surprised in April to hear...
May 18th, 20180DETROIT – On the 70th anniversary of what is considered the greatest catastrophe in Palestine, drones painted the sky with trails of smoke grenades and snipers perched on the Israeli side of the Gaza border pelleted thousands who were protesting against those responsible for the historic tragedy – the Nakba, in Arabic.
More than...
