by Susan Abulhawa / May 15th, 2008
We watch these celebrations with an ineffable collective loss and grief, and an equally deep vow never to give up our basic rights as the natives of Palestine
by Kenneth Lewan / May 15th, 2008
When we see how Zionist ideology is used and the purposes it serves in Israel, America and Germany, we can obtain a better understanding of the deplorable situation in each case and perhaps some improvements.
Theodor Herzl, the leading ideologist and organizer of the Zionist movement, wrote in his book Der Judenstaat which was published in 1895: “No nation in history has had to endure such struggles and suffering as ours … because of old prejudices lying deep down in the soul/minds (Gemüt) of all other nations … And the longer it takes before …
by James Petras / May 15th, 2008
I have known and advised three left wing president including President Papandreou (Greece 1981-85), President Salvador Allende of Chile (1970-73) and President Hugo Chavez.
Both Allende and Chavez share many strategic goals and embrace policies favoring the working class, peasantry and the urban poor. They also pursued programs regaining national control over the strategic sectors of the economy, redistributing land (agrarian reform), reallocating budgetary expenditures in favor of social programs for the poor and pursuing independent anti-imperialist foreign policies.
In broad historical and sociological terms, they also share a common belief in constitutional, electoral processes, in a multi-party system, a mixed economy …
by Bruce Dixon / May 15th, 2008
The contours of urban apartheid in twenty-first century America are depressingly familiar. Where post WW2 government spending built the interstate highway system and the suburbs to fuel white flight from the cities, the dispensation for the new century involves massive diversions of public resources toward the objective of disempowering and expelling the black and poor from central cities.
Far from being a problem to flee from any more, the central cities now have what America’s elite covet. Everything in the US runs on oil, but dense urban populations enable a far more sustainable transit infrastructure in this era of increasingly …
by Michael Dawson / May 15th, 2008
In his scramble to become Head Babysitter of the status quo in the United States, Barack Obama famously threw his minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, under the bus. There will be no “trouble-makers” on his bus, Mr. Obama wants to make clear.
But Reverend Wright is not the only victim of the Obama bus-toss routine. Another major victim has been none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.
As I noted here last month, on the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, Obama ended a generally picayune and misleading commemorative speech with this conclusion: “One of the forgotten aspects of Dr. …
by Tom Burghardt / May 15th, 2008
In the wake of Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins’ (R-ME) alarmist report, “Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorism Threat,” the Senate may be moving towards passage of the Orwellian “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ (S. 1959).
A companion piece of legislative flotsam to the House bill, “The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ (H.R. 1955), the Democrat-controlled Congress seems ready to jettison Constitutional guarantees of free speech and assembly. The bill passed the House by a 404-6 vote in October. Twenty-three congress members abstained, including House Speaker Nancy …
by Reza Fiyouzat / May 15th, 2008
For the past seven years — and especially since those ghastly pictures from your friendly security providers at Baghram, Abu Ghuraib and Guantanamo concentration camps, showing prisoners’ dignity, rights and minds shredded to smithereens — continents of ink and keystrokes have had a go at this ‘controversial’ topic. Yet, few commentaries have shed any real enlightenment upon the subject.
For the people who have grown up and lived in the relative comfort of the metropoles of our world capitalist system, the establishment media and academics alike pose the question in terms of the ‘ticking time bomb’, and focus merely …
by Rodrigue Tremblay / May 15th, 2008
[U.S.] strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. …[His removal is absolutely vital to] the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century [and for] the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil.
– Neocons’ January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton
[About the Iraqis] If they turn on their radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn missiles. They know we own their country. We own …
by Media Lens / May 14th, 2008
On May 1, the BBC website reported an attack on Somalia with the words: “Air raid kills Somali militants.”
One might think the BBC’s headline would identify the agency responsible for the bombing, but the first few sentences also shed no light:
“The leader of the military wing of an Islamist insurgent organization in Somalia has been killed in an overnight air strike.
“Aden Hashi Ayro, al-Shabab’s military commander, died when his home in the central town of Dusamareb was bombed.
“Ten other people, including a senior militant, are also reported dead.”
Only in the fourth sentence, was responsibility ascribed:
“A …
by Jason Del Gandio / May 14th, 2008
America is evading meaningful debate surrounding Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The whole country is talking about a few decontextualized snippets of potentially offensive and inflammatory remarks and whether or not Barack Obama subscribes to such views. However, we should be talking about Wright’s wider interpretation of this country as needing fundamental change. This interpretation is not unique to Wright’s Black Liberation Theology. Instead, it is shared by millions of people of many different races, religions, genders, ages, sexualities, socio-economic classes, and even political affiliations. But most of America is evading this fact, thus avoiding any truly meaningful debate about …
by Jason Leopold / May 14th, 2008
A senior legal adviser to the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign is working behind the scenes to help enact a Missouri state constitutional amendment that critics say would suppress the vote in the key battleground state this November by requiring voters to show proof of citizenship.
Mark “Thor” Hearne, Bush-Cheney’s national counsel in 2004 and now a partner in the St. Louis, Missouri, firm of Lathrop & Gage, has been collaborating with Missouri’s Republican state Rep. Stanley Cox, the sponsor of the constitutional amendment, Cox’s office confirmed this week.
For years, Hearne has been a leading Republican figure demanding stricter voter-identification …
by Barry Alford / May 14th, 2008
Over the last few years many Americans have come to rue the decisions of the Bush administration that lead to the war in Iraq. Much of the distain for the conflict involves the lies that were told and the incompetent execution of the war effort. While the tragedy that is Iraq has its own as yet unknown costs in lives, treasure, and the good name of the country, there is another war that this administration is fighting against schoolchildren here at home. It is marked by the same disdain for honesty and integrity that Bush brought to …
by Garry Leech / May 14th, 2008
In the early hours of May 13, Colombian security forces transported 14 high-ranking paramilitary leaders from their prison cells to an aircraft that whisked them out of the country and to the United States. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe had ordered that the paramilitary leaders be extradited to face drug trafficking charges in the United States because, as Interior Minister Carlos Holgumn stated, “In some cases they were still committing crimes and reorganizing criminal structures” from their prison cells. The paramilitary leaders were engaged in a demobilization process that called for them to confess their crimes in return for reduced jail …
by Jeffrey St. Clair & Joshua Frank / May 13th, 2008
The nation’s biggest polluter isn’t a corporation. It’s the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste — more than the top three chemical companies combined.
Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon’s partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way. For the past five decades the federal government, defense contractors and the chemical industry have joined forces to block public health protections against perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel that has been shown …
by Bernard Weiner / May 13th, 2008
Suppose you have a controversial project you wish to push through, but you’re afraid that if you come right out and say what you’re up to, there will be so many objections from other officials and ordinary citizens that you might never get a chance to implement your agenda.
But you’re savvy about how influence-molding works and you know that with the right kind of massive publicity and P.R. campaigns, you probably can “spin” public perception in your direction.
So, on a foundation of lies and deception, you decide to launch your project, careful to keep absolutely secret the most controversial …
by Franklin Lamb / May 13th, 2008
Choufeit, Lebanon
Street Notes 12 May 2008
In the lower Chouf village of Choufeit with its panoramic view of Beirut’s closed airport (which will likely stay closed for 4 or 5 more days as a Hezbollah pressure point on the Bush administration to achieve a settlement that it views as fair and just), Dahiyeh, Sabra, Shatila and Burj Barajneh Palestinian Refugee Camps; Pentecost Sunday started in a somber mood for the few remaining Christians and dominant Druze population of this picturesque, rugged, hilly and ancient village.
The reason was that virtually the whole village was in attendance at a 9 a.m. memorial service …
by Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan / May 13th, 2008
In “Dominant Capital and the New Wars,” an article that we wrote in October 2002 and later published in the Journal of World Systems Research (2004), we argued that the global regime of accumulation was undergoing a major change. Instead of the mergers and acquisitions that fuelled the breadth phase of the 1980s and 1990s, dominant capital was moving toward a depth phase of stagflation and crisis. The new wars in the Middle East were part and parcel of that transition. Their role, whether intended or not, was to kick-start inflation by jacking up the price of oil.
Back …
by Robert Weitzel / May 13th, 2008
To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it . . . An evil unchecked is the prelude to genocide.
– Dr. Mordechai, The Ezekiel Option
There are over 70 million human beings living in Iran, 17.5 million of whom are under the age of fifteen. Hillary Clinton vowed to attack Iran and “totally obliterate” the majority of the Persian race in a furnace of primordial fire should the Iranian government attack Israel with nuclear weapons, which they do not now possess or are likely to for some time — if ever.
Hillary’s “final …
by George Monbiot / May 13th, 2008
When we learnt last week that Abdallah Salih al-Ajmi had blown himself up in Mosul in northern Iraq, the US government presented this as a vindication of its policies. Al-Ajmi was a former inmate of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon says that his attack on Iraqi soldiers shows both that it was right to have detained him and that it is dangerous ever to release the camp’s prisoners.Josh White, 8th May 2008. “Ex-Guantanamo Detainee Joined Iraq Suicide Attack,” Washington Post. On the contrary, it shows how dangerous it was to put them there in the first place.
…
by Bill Berkowitz / May 12th, 2008
Over the course of the Iraq War, the Pentagon has used hand-picked retired military officers as “message force multipliers” to shape public opinion, a New York Times investigation revealed last month.David Barstow, “The Message Machine: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” New York Times, April 20, 2008. According to the report, which was the product of a two-year battle with the Pentagon over the release of some 8,000 pages of documents, briefers gave talking points to the retired military men, who were then frequently showcased as experts on war matters by various media that did not make viewers aware of …
