City voters to weigh in on pro-Palestine article

Vergennes residents on Town Meeting Day will have a chance to tell city councilors to take a stand in the war between Israel and the Palestinian people.

There’s been some divisive disinformation about Zionism on news and social media these days. I’d like to offer some historical perspectives with the hope they provide more light than heat.

It has been one year since the worst mass murder of Jewish people since the Shoah.

In his letter to the editor in the September 5 Addison Independent, Hal Cohen asserts that those who support the Palestinians’ right to exist are actually Hamas supporters and are therefore traitors.

We share Hal Cohen’s outrage at Hamas’s unspeakable recent murder of six Israeli hostages. No decent person could defend Hamas, which is, indeed, evil personified; but it is absolutely wrong to equate Hamas with all Palestinians or Gazans.

With the murder of American hostages by Palestinian Hamas those pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protesters have become traitors.

It’s a rainy Monday afternoon in Ripton, and outside I hear crickets chirping. Tonight is the beginning of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and my heart is with the protesters calling for Kamala Harris to end all arms sales to Israel.

On Wednesday, the day before this issue of the Addison Independent came out, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to address the joint houses of Congress. 

If you ask me how I am doing these days, I don’t know how to answer. My heart is breaking for Palestine. And my heart is breaking for American Jews, many of whom have dear friends and family in Israel, who are longing for safety and security.

I conceived and introduced the Leahy law in 1997 because our Latin partners, and security forces in many other countries, were violating the basic principles that the United States stands for, and we were complicit. Today, people are asking whether the la … (read more)

Since I have been writing about higher education in these pages, it’s incumbent that I address the current campus protests against the agony in Gaza.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. I am a United States citizen. I have paid my federal taxes. Our United States government offers money and weapons to Israel.

If others aren’t going to protest America’s support of Israel through its billions in cash and tens of thousands of bombs that have reduced wide swaths of Gaza to rubble, campus protests have a role to play — and at the very least have succeeded in making … (read more)

I have been pondering the relationship between policing and teaching. Initially, one might not see the two as related, but they really are quite intertwined.

Middlebury College students on Monday struck a deal with administrators and dismantled the pro-Palestinian encampment formed in the center of campus.