I just finished the upgrade to WordPress 2.3 at PalCast.org. The site is getting more traffic every week. Later this month I think I’m gonna do some promotion for it around the net. If anyone has any ideas or wants to help, let me know. In the meantime, check out the newly upgraded PalCast, Podcasting the Occupation of Palestine. When you look at single items, you now get related pod/vidcast suggestions. On a related note, our friends at IMEMC.org are dealing with some server problems, so thats why there haven’t been any IMEMC daily news updates for the past several days. As soon as they are up and running again, we’ll be publishing them.

I also upgraded this site a couple of days ago. I’m trying to decide if I should ditch categories altogether and just use tags. My experience at PalCast points me toward tags…

Unbelievable.

…in a move that still has faculty members shaking their heads in disbelief, St. Thomas administrators—concerned that [Archbishop Desmond] Tutu’s appearance might offend local Jews—told organizers that a visit from the archbishop was out of the question.

Cecille Surasky lays it out:

Dissenting at your own risk
By Cecilie Surasky
Special to the Star-Telegram

Last year, I agreed to speak to a Jewish youth group about my organization, Jewish Voice for Peace, and our opposition to Israel’s occupation. My talk was to follow one from a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which calls itself “America’s pro-Israel Lobby.”

A week before, a shaken program leader said the AIPAC staffer had threatened to get the entire youth program’s funding canceled if I was allowed in the door. The threat worked, and in disgust, they canceled the whole talk.

Pundits will surely argue for years about professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s explosive new book, The Israel Lobby, which blames poor U.S. policy in the Middle East on a loose network of individuals and pro-Israel advocacy groups.

But the book, and the response to it, opens up another controversy: the stifling of debate about unconditional U.S. support for Israeli policies.

Why is Israel’s increasingly brutal 40-year occupation of Palestinian land regularly debated in the mainstream media abroad, including in Israel, but not here? And why is there an almost total lack of discussion among presidential candidates about the dollars that subsidize this occupation and the American diplomatic support that makes it possible?

Now that the first ever US Social Forum has ended, the broad social justice movement needs to look critically at the event and what it means for the work we do in the future. The next USSF is only 2 1/2 years away. Hopefully a process can begin that will address the faults of this forum and manifest creative solutions in the next.

Update: The audio from the “Future of the Forum” workshop is online at the USSF2007 site, and many of the issues I write about here were discussed. Give it a listen below

An Amazing Success
The organizers and the workshop and event planners need to all be congratulated for putting together an amazing week of social justice. The logistics for an event of this magnitude are just overwhelming. The vast majority of the events at the forum ran smoothly and on time and, as all of the participants know too well, the sheer scope of the offerings at this forum was staggering.

I say this now, up front, because all of the criticism that follows is intended to be constructive and not to detract from the organizing work done by the organizers and event planners.