Easter celebrates suffering and compassion. Alhamdulillah, these human traits were on display on Easter Sunday at European airports and in the Holy Land, reports Eric Walberg

Ben Gurion Airport was thrown into chaos for the third annual Flytilla on Sunday. As starry-eyed tourists arrived to visit the Holy sites and beady-eyed new Israelis arrived to kick more Palestinians off their land in the name of the Jewish State, thousands of Westerners with a sense of conscience presented their air tickets to suspicious officials in Europe and -- if they were lucky -- their passports in Tel Aviv, and held their breath.

Palestinian Land Day and Israel Apartheid Week activities around the world gave Israel and its Western backers something to think about in recent weeks, reports Eric Walberg

BDS activities are moving into a new critical stage, with apostasy, Internet hacking, regattas, and an ever more aggressive Israel and its acolytes upping the perilous ante, reports Eric Walberg

The Third Annual BDS Conference opened 17 December at Hebron’s Children’s Happiness Centre, “to expand Palestinian civil society’s active implementation of BDS that is deeply rooted in the Palestinian struggle.” European BNC coordinator Michael Deas affirmed, “BDS is now the main framework for solidarity. We are very close to closing the European market to Israel.”

A boycott bombshell in January was dropped by an 11th-grade American Jewish teenager, Jesse Lieberfeld, who won Dietrich College’s 2012 Martin Luther King, Jr Writing Award for his essay about his moral awakening when he realised his American Jewish culture was unavoidably identified with supporting Israel.

Yes, it really is another Vietnam, and just as in 1972, presidential elections will make no difference, concludes Eric Walberg

Scarcely a word is heard about foreign affairs amid US election talk, despite the many fires around the world that the US military is either stoking or trying to douse -- depending on your point of view. Other than Republican contender Ron Paul -- not a serious candidate for the mainstream -- no one questions the plans for war on Iran, Israel’s continued expansion in the Occupied Territories, or US plans to end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

 “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1871)

The lexicon of Israel and its Western lobbyists constantly needs parsing to know just what is meant. Most glaringly is the term “settlers”, which suggests peaceful pioneers wishing to integrate with the locals. In Israel, the word “settlers” is a loaded term, for they are “aggressive squatters, half a million of them in over 100 illegal colonies — ugly blots on an otherwise lovely landscape ... who terrorise local villagers, vandalise their crops, pollute their land and harass their children,” as described by Stuart Littlewood. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids that an occupying power transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.