Parodies can be valuable when they force people to consider reality from a different perspective. But most of these e-cards aren’t parodies. It’s what millions of people have to live through every single day.

Families who come from both sides of Israel’s apartheid wall are not always permitted to be together. Husbands and wives are kept apart by concrete walls, checkpoints, soldiers, and residency laws aimed at subsiding a “demographic spillover”.

That’s what happened at the University of California, Irvine when the Orange County district attorney filed charges against eleven Muslim students for protesting and disrupting Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s speech. Oren was attempting to justify the murder of over 1,400 civilians in Israel’s 2008-2009 invasion of the Gaza Strip.

The last few times Israel and the Palestinian Authority met at the negotiations table, among Israel’s many preconditions (continuing settlement building, maintaining control over the West Bank, maintaining the Gaza blockade, etc.) was that the PA not have any preconditions of its own. [Read more...]