For the last year, an earnest and at times sadly acrimonious debate at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op has focused on whether and how the co-op should officially participate in a boycott or selective buying campaign to challenge Israeli government policies and promote peace in the Middle East. While the 110-year conflict now known as the Israel/Palestine question continues to attract the attention of the world, observers in Sacramento may wonder whether peace at the co-op is possible. The co-op debate is a multilayered one. What are the merits of the Israel/Palestine conflict itself? What kinds of boycott or selective buying strategies, if any, might move this conflict in the direction

Watching Maggie Coulter in action at the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-Op becomes a study in the use of propaganda, and a challenge to those of us committed to the idea that reasonable people can work out their differences. The challenge, one soon learns, is that Maggie’s BDS ensemble is simply not available for a reasoned search for agreement. Instead, dialogue is a mere platform for additional misinformation and historical distortion, offered loudly and dramatically, in search of their audience. While it may be tempting to ignore this behavior and hope it goes away, when the lies and distortions get big enough, it is necessary to speak out and help people figure out what’s going on. So, fo

Imagine being held at a security checkpoint for seven hours, told you can't return to where you have lived for the past four years, blindfolded, handcuffed and dropped at the border of a rough neighborhood in the middle of the night. This is Berlanti Azzam's story, as told by her to a diverse audience including Palestinians and Jews Wednesday night at the Sierra Arden United Church of Christ. The 22-year-old was six weeks away from graduating with a bachelor's degree in business administration from Bethlehem University when deported from the West Bank to her homeland, Gaza. Azzam was given legal aid from GISHA, an Israeli legal team dealing mostly with freedom of movement issues, but wa

  The stretch of an NBA player’s reach goes far beyond their measurable wing span. From the internet to television, player’s lives are dissected and analyzed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Savvy players create charitable foundations, Facebook fan pages and blogs to market themselves and keep the fans “close”. While the Sacramento Kings Omri Casspi is not your “average” American-born basketball player, it is clear that Omri’s impact goes far and beyond what any might have originally expected. This past December marked the launch of www.casspi18.com, an interactive website that connects fans directly to Number 18, giving them the chance to write him questions, follow in-depth Om

In the wake the recent presidential elections or re-selection of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Islamic Republic of Iran, supporters of the opposition Presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi have staged massive protests within the country to show their displeasure of the announced results. With a record voter turnout in what amounted to as a very heated contest for the top public post in Iran, observers, reformers, and analysts alike across the globe felt that popular candidate Mousavi could unseat Ahmadinejad when it was all said and done. However those hopes were all but dashed when the official reporting came out that in fact Ahmadinejad had not only won by a close ma