A moral inversion is unfolding in the state of New York
By Dezeray Lyn
New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo has moved against speech rights for the people of the state he serves by criminalizing any business or individual actively supporting the Boycott Divest Sanction campaign against Israel for various transgressions including the fracturing of international law, breaking the Geneva Convention, war crimes, illegal occupation and the collective denial of the human rights of Palestinians inside the West Bank, Gaza and those living in historic Palestine (Israel).
Cuomo proudly, and to a band of applause, declaring that “If you sanction Israel, New York will sanction you,” is an inversion of ethical conduct as the people of Gaza have been crippled under Israeli siege as a collective punishment for the election of Hamas.
The executive order will see the Office of General Services compiling a list of businesses and individuals who have actively supported the BDS campaign, which is fashioned around the tactical boycott stratagems launched against apartheid South Africa, to levy financial punishments as well as blacklisting them.
With an aggressively anti-speech, anti-media, anti-protest presumed republican nominee with a frighteningly probably path to the White House, quelling speech and protest rights of an entire state is a dark look into what is possible in the near future.
The politically motived attack against those immersed in the active struggle for Palestinian national liberation runs parallel to the moral inversion of the US government’s funding of the settler state of Israel, who has been carrying on an illegal occupation in the West Bank, an internal system of apartheid for Palestinians existing under Israeli law as well as rampant racism against black African migrants and Ethiopian Jews stepping onto their soil.
The compendium of crimes committed by Israel doesn’t just spill from the lips of pro-Palestinian activist communities, but has been decried by thousands of Israelis, hundreds of thousands of Jews around the world, former Israeli soldiers as well as Israeli political figures like Moshe Ya’alone, Israel’s very recently resigned former Defense Minister.
It is quite possible that if executive orders and aggressive political moves were taken against illegal occupation and the mass-extermination of civilians by bombs and bio-chemical warfare (both Israeli enacted offenses utilized against Palestinians in the Gaza strip over the past 8 years) there is a good chance that the need would no longer exist for a Boycott Divest Sanctions campaign to counter the terrorism being inflicted by Israel and paid for by the US government.
The BDS campaign wasn’t birthed from a void, the movement is a reaction to a tragedy that has continued unabated with the full financial, social and political support of the mighty US entity to maintain its foothold in a region hostile due to US/Israel empire building, imperialist agendas.
As long as the occupation continues, and executive legislations such as the one Cuomo has delivered unto the people of the state of New York criminalizing speech and protest rights are unleashed, US hypocrisy and its convenient cherry picking of the application of ‘justice’ remains an ugly global spectacle.
Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.
Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).
Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.
Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.
His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.
Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.
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