Wetlands Activism Collective

Palestine solidarity actions today!

Palestine actions today!

Palestine solidarity events today!

Events today - defend Rafah!

Palestine solidarity actions today - defend Rafah!

Events today!

Today's Palestine solidarity events!

Events and actions to free Palestine!

Events today to stop the genocide in Gaza!

Events today to stop the genocide and free Palestine!

Events happening today!

The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness

Attend live on on Zoom:

https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/mindethicspolicy/events?authuser=0

"2:30pm - Invertebrate Consciousness

Alexandra Schnell: Evidence regarding consciousness in cephalopod mollusks

Robert Elwood: Evidence regarding consciousness in decapod crustaceans

Lars Chittka: Evidence regarding consciousness in insects

Moderated by Jonathan Birch"

Events Spring 2024

TEANECK: PASS A CEASEFIRE RESOLUTION, NOT A POINTLESS RESOLUTION AGAINST ANTISEMITISM!
JOIN IN PERSON OR ON ZOOM - PREPARE A THREE MINUTE COMMENT!

When: Apr 16, 2024 06:30 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) (the council will meet in closed session until 8 PM, but it is important to arrive early in person and on Zoom, because Zionists pack the council meetings both in person and on Zoom until both are at capacity in order to drown out other voices. However it may be possible to join later if necessary.)

Join in person: 818 Teaneck Rd, Teaneck, NJ 07666
or

By phone or computer: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86393093523 Passcode: 530668 (if the meeting isn't open yet, try again periodically)

or

Youtube: If you are unable to get into the meeting in person or on Zoom, you can also watch on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/ and comment in the live chat. Thereafter try joining the Zoom periodically, as space will open as attendance dwindles.

WHAT'S HAPPENING:
On Tuesday, The Teaneck Township Council will vote on a pointless resolution against antisemitism introduced by pro-Israel councilmembers Hillary Goldberg and Karen Orgen. Teaneck passed a resolution supporting Israel as it was committing war crimes in Gaza in October - and has yet to pass a resolution in support of a ceasefire!

Join JVP and our allies at Tuesday night's Teaneck Township Council meeting to say:

- Teaneck doesn't need a divisive resolution that condemns antisemitism while saying nothing about Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, or other forms of bigotry and oppression!
- Teaneck DOES need a ceasefire resolution!
- Passing a resolution against antisemitism during Arab American Heritage Month while saying nothing about anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry continues a trend of insensitivity and outright contempt by the Teaneck township council for Arab and Muslim Teaneck residents.

You can speak in the public comment period on the resolution for three minutes and possibly a second time when they open for general comments in the Good and Welfare portion of the meeting. We recommend preparing notes or writing out your comments and practicing so you can use the three minutes effectively!

TALKING POINTS:

Please join us at tomorrow's council meeting to say that:

- Resolutions like this are an empty gesture. If antisemitism is in people's hearts, it won't disappear because Teaneck passes a resolution.

- Resolutions that put Jews on a pedestal and treat antisemitism as separate and apart from other injustices do nothing to advance Jewish safety. Jews are safest in a culture that challenges all forms of oppression and builds solidarity ties against hatred and oppression.

- The greatest antisemitic threat comes from the fascist right. Misdirecting people into viewing support for Palestine as antisemitism as ADL does only serves to draw attention away from fighting the REAL antisemites, who grow more powerful as AIPAC helps to elect far-right pro-Israel Republicans.

- Throwing salt in the wound from October's pro-Israel resolution - showing concern for Jews and not for Arab and Muslims will only serve to deepen tensions and divisions and build resentment. This is especially true in light of the death threats against Arab Muslim teenagers who protested for Palestine, a violent attack on a hijabi student at Teaneck High School, harrassment of Teaneck's Muslim community center, racism and violent threats agaisnt Palestine protesters, and stochastic terrorism targeting a Muslim community member by both sponsors of this resolution, with Orgen accusing this Teaneck resident of wanting to "blow up the town" and Goldberg posting her name and photo on Instagram and labelling her an antisemite.

- Goldberg and Orgen obviously know this, suggesting that this resolution is more about attention seeking and pandering to Zionists extremists than Jewish community safety.

- Goldberg and Orgen's need to turn Teaneck council meetings into a hostile debate forum on Israel and Palestine have limited the ability of community members to address pressing local concerns
- a problem exacerbated by their repeated votes to close public comment at one hour.

- Support for a ceasefire and for an end to genocide, Apartheid, and ethnic cleansing are not antisemitism!

- Nothing will do more to create a safer world for Jews than an end to the genocide and occupation of Palestine, including Palestinian Right of Return.

- If Councilmembers Goldberg and Orgen feel the need to pass more resolutions rather than doing their jobs - addressing issues like roads badly in need of repaving - they should take down the temperature by calling for peace - passing a resolution supporting an immediate ceasefire and an all for all hostage exchange. Northern NJ communities like Prospect Park, Union City, North Bergen, Ridgefield, Gutenberg, Haledon, Paterson, and Weehawken have already passed ceasefire resolutions - and Teaneck should join them! Such a resolution should also call for an end to US military funding to Israel - no more US tax dollars for genocide! Additionally Teaneck can join communities like Durham, North Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Portland, Oregon in passing an Apartheid Free Zone resolution, joining the global Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement. While local resolutions have no direct effect on federal policy, they send a message to federal elected officials about where our communities stand and can potentially influence their votes.

BACKGROUND:

On October 17, Teaneck council member Hillary Goldberg, introduced a resolution that set the stage for months of conflict at a time when community members, including Teaneck High School students, were addressing the vital need for dialogue at a time when Jewish and Arab and Muslim community members were all experiencing great pain. Asked to pass an inclusive resolution that acknowledged the tragic loss of life in both Israel and Gaza, she instead insisted on voting on a resolution that expressed support for the state of Israel as it was already committing war crimes in Gaza, called for the release of hostages by Hamas and not the thousands of Palestinians detained by Israel, and mourned the Israeli dead of October 7, but offered no expression of sympathy for the Gazans killed in Israel's retaliatory campaign. For six months, Goldberg has sought to escalate tensions at every opportunity.

She has:

- falsely accused protesters outside the council meeting where she passed her resolution of chanting "Gas the Jews"

- doubled down on her lie at at a subsequent council meeting when asked to retract it, despite no evidence of this chant in video of the protest or media reports

- used her social media account to defame and dox community members and organizations working to end the genocide while posting anti-Palestinian hate speech denying that Palestine exists and that Palestinians have a right to their homeland

- participated in a rally denouncing high school students for organizing a walkout and rally for Palestine, building a climate of hate that led to death threats against these students and a possible attempt on their lives

- make inflammatory prepared speeches at the end of every council meeting, even as several of her colleagues have attempted to deescalate community tensions and then has them published in the Jewish Link, a newspaper published by her fellow councilmember Mark Schwartz, that has joked about the IDF shooting 100,000 Palestinians, promoted real estate events facilitated the sale of property in illegal West Bank settlements to Jews, and hosted a wine tasting event featuring wine produced in a newly created illegal settlement - and then defamed organizations who protested the event as antisemites.

- came out with Schwartz to support an event at a Teaneck synagogue promoting the sale of properties in ilegal West Bank settlements exclusively to Jew on the first night of Ramadan and was filmed in the act of apparently encouraging police to crack down on protesters

- intimidated high school students by filming them as they held a Palestinian human rights march in collaboration with a former councilmember who described Muslims as "Jihadi Janes" and "sick bastards" and a community member with ties to the fascist hate group Moms for Liberty

This Tuesday she and fellow Zionist councilmember Karen Orgen, who recently accused a pro-Palestine Muslim community member of seeking to "blow up the town" and praised the racist "thin blue line" graphic will launch their latest effort to deepen the divide in Teaneck and spit in the face of Arab and Muslim community members by passing a resolution that addresses anti-semitism while saying nothing about anti-Arab racism or Islamophobia, this despite recent incidents in town including an assault on a hijabi school student at Teaneck High School. Worse, her resolution cites the Anti-Defamation League's misleading report of a surge in antisemitic incidents, based on a new definition of antisemitism that treats criticism of israel as inherently antisemitic, potential even when it takes the form of protest by Jewish organizations like JVP. This cynical redefinition has been critiicized by publications including The New Republic and even by ADL's own staff.

The Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign presents:

How Putin is drawing the left into the far right
Sunday, April 14th, 2024. 9 PST/12 EST/ 18 CET /19 kyiv

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/

International working class solidarity is the heart and soul of socialism, yet major sectors of socialism have abandoned that principle. The fascist connected Putin has taken advantage of that to draw many on the left into a far right web. This is creating great confusion. Russian disinformation is on the rise on the right and the left internationally.

Join us for a presentation on this controversial topic with a lively discussion to follow. John Reimann, co-chair of the Ukraine Socialist Solidarity Campaign, will be presenting.

Together we will explore these and related questions:

* What is the Putinized “left”?

* What is the role of the Putinized “left” and the far right in the counter-revolution in Syria and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

* How have propagandists further brought together nationalists, fascists, and elements on the “left”?

* Can the Putinized “left” ever recover?

* What conclusions can working class socialists draw from this?

* How can a renewed and healthy socialist movement develop?

For further reading/viewing, read/view the following by John Reimann:

https://oaklandsocialist.com/

https://youtu.be/nxDeUyfgUb4?

Putinism, the "left" and Russia's invasion of Ukraine In this third in the series, we document how the Putinized "left" has joined the far right in apologizing for or even outright defending Russia's imperialist...

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/26/opinion/thepoint/what-new-york-city-did-to-flaco-the-owl?smid=url-share

"What New York City Did to Flaco the Owl

The death of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who flew into a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last month, shook our usually unflappable city. This week, Bronx Zoo pathologists published a coroner’s report that helps explain why he died. It revealed that even Flaco, who had fled the confines of the Central Park Zoo, could not escape the strictures of his environment, especially because that environment was New York City.

While the acute trauma from that crash was the most immediate cause of death, the necropsy also found that Flaco had pigeon herpesvirus and exposure to four different anticoagulant rodenticides. In other words, he had eaten too many infected pigeons and poisoned rats.

“These factors would have been debilitating and ultimately fatal, even without a traumatic injury,” the report states, “and may have predisposed him to flying into or falling from the building.” Flaco, it seems, was a dead bird flying.

Last summer, I edited a guest essay for Times Opinion by Jason Munshi-South, an urban ecologist at Fordham University, about New York City’s clumsy, counterproductive war on rats. Munshi-South warned me at the time that the city’s widespread deployment of rat poison posed a grave threat to Flaco.

Of all the ways to kill rats, anticoagulants are an especially slow and pernicious method. A rat repeatedly nibbles on bait laced with the stuff. Eventually, the rat becomes weak from internal bleeding. If the internal bleeding doesn’t kill it, the rat’s lethargic state makes it easy prey. Rat poison travels up the food chain all the way to owls.

Flaco is not the only creature who has died as a result of New York City’s pest management policies; rodenticide is a widespread cause of death for much of the city’s wildlife.

Humans don’t have to turn to punitive and ineffective crackdowns through poison and traps for rat management. One alternative, already being rolled out by the Department of Sanitation, is better trash collection.

Flaco lived a notable life as the sole member of his species in New York. It’s easy to anthropomorphize an uncomplicated individualism in him. He was above the mess of the city. He knew nothing of SantaCon or Eric Adams. But no matter how high he flew, Flaco could not escape the decisions that can make the city a death trap for those who are not human."

Opinion | What New York City Did to Flaco the Owl He was a dead bird flying.

"We studied 55,000 people’s dietary data and linked what they ate or drank to five key measures: greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, water pollution and biodiversity loss. Our results are now published in Nature Food. We found that vegans have just 30% of the dietary environmental impact of high-meat eaters."

Vegan diet has just 30% of the environmental impact of a high-meat diet, major study finds We studied 55,000 people’s diets and linked them to data on environmental impacts of food.

LOL. Jerusalem Post is such trash. Read this article. At a certainly point, you'll get to a photo of unambigously antisemitic protesters. If you read the small type, you'll discover that:

- this protest wasn't even in the same country as the one they're covering
- the event being protested had nothing to do with Israel.

So in other words, they slipping in a photo of a N**i protest in an article on a protest for Palestine on the probably correct assumption that a lot of people wouldn't read carefully and would falsely assume this photo is from the protest the article is about.

Montreal: Protesters say 'fake' Jews have no home, colonized Germany Pro-Palestinian protesters hurl antisemitic and sexist abuse at Jewish counterprotesters at a Montreal synagogue during an antizionist rally.

Unimaginable evil.