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(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 2, 2020 Where Is Joe Biden?
The Where's Waldo? puzzle has recently lent its iconic title to a different question: "Where's Joe Biden?" Because Biden is the prospective Democratic presidential nominee, this question denotes more than a puzzle game. Joe Biden should be a lot more visible than at present.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 15, 2012 Nationalism vs. Capitalism: Guess Which One Wins?
The ideals of capitalism, so ardently believed in, turn out to be false except for (as the current saying goes) the fortunate 1%. And those of nationalism? They too are drilled into our heads from childhood. But, alas, they cannot substitute for one's supper.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, August 27, 2012 Domestic Terrorism American Style -- An Analysis
It would be a mistake to think that the Klan mentality is dead in the U.S. Quite the contrary. The nation's deep seated history of racism has helped preserve an apparent permanent subset of Americans who grow up with prejudicial feelings against anyone they perceive as a threat to their version of the "American way of life."
(39 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 29, 2015 Who is Right in Syria?
In all of the bloodshed, population displacement and terror that has accompanied the Syrian civil war, the least-considered party has been the Syrian people and their future.Right now that vital ingredient can only be supplied by the reimposition of order by Damascus. The folks in Washington, Paris and Ankara might not like that, but they are not the ones facing a future of anarchy.
SHARE Sunday, August 9, 2015 Australia and the Fight for Justice in Palestine
The scattering of Palestinian refugees throughout the Western world has challenged the image Israel presents of itself as a modern, civilized nation living according to ethical Western values. Joined now by increasing numbers of people who have visited Palestine to see conditions for themselves, the refugees are providing an alternate picture and message.
(23 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 27, 2012 More On Savage Israel -- An Analysis
The ethnic cleansing of 1948 never stopped. Conveniently, the long-standing denial that it ever started has helped to hide the fact of its on-going nature. Yet just this week we received the news that Defense Minister Ehud Barak has given the order to demolish eight Palestinian villages with some 1,500 residents in the south Hebron hills. The excuse offered by Barack is that the land is needed for military training exercises.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, January 26, 2015 Global Warming Revisited: Reality vs Republican Theology
According to a Pew Research poll conducted in June 2014, over 70 percent of those who identify themselves as conservatives either do not believe in global warming or don't consider it a danger, nor do they believe that human activity is a serious contributing factor. Finally, many of these self-described conservatives believe that the U.S. has "gone too far in efforts to protect the environment."
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 10, 2015 The Progressive's Dilemma
The mass media gives the party almost no attention and, while the Green Party presidential candidate in 2012, Stein was not invited to any of the televised debates. Even so, it is interesting to speculate what would happen if American progressives and others rallied around the Green Party and it actually attained power and moved to implement Jill Stein's position paper on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, March 16, 2018 Universal Commodification
Unless regulated, capitalism operates as a wide-open market system. If a demand exists or can be created and a profit made, that demand will be met. As a consequence, capitalism has the capacity to commercialize almost anything, including its detractors and even its enemies.
(8 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 2, 2018 Just How Corrupt Is The American Soul?
there was the remarkable effort to spread international law following the debacle that was World War II. And, one might hope against hope, that these humanitarian moments represent the accumulation of precedents that may underpin a better future. As long as things like civil rights and international law are possibilities we can't give up on them.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 17, 2018 The Republican Party Falls Apart, The Democrats Get Stuck
There is a subset of every population that is susceptible to this sort of shabby salesmanship, particularly when coming from someone who is a bit charismatic. Combine this susceptibility with the sense that the U.S. political system has become generally unresponsive to its citizens, and what you get is a Trump presidency and radicals like Corey Stewart moving, carpetbagger style, into the Republican Party ranks.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 10, 2018 Vietnam's Lessons and the U.S. Culture of Violence
The lessons of Vietnam, and a greater awareness of the massacres that occurred during this war, speak to the need to reform U.S. culture -- to make it less violent and more tolerant. The Vietnam experience should be incorporated into the current debate about guns in America. It would be a major achievement if the 1968 slaughter at My Lai could help stop today's slaughter on the streets of the U.S.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 10, 2012 The Liar's Master Class -- An Analysis
If one has any doubt about Mitt Romney's mendacious temperament, the first presidential debate should have put it to rest. According to one analyst, Romney let loose with "27 myths in 38 minutes," finishing with a big grin after most of these prevarications.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 21, 2015 Divine Time Import
The truth is that there are millions of people, Muslims, Jews and Christians and others who not only still idealize a religiously imagined past, but want, in one way or another, to import that past into the present -- and not only their present but everyone else's as well. Whatever one might think of the teachings of the Bible and Quran, this is a highly problematic desire.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, November 22, 2019 Waging War Against The Rule of Law
There is no doubt about it: at our present moment in history it is embarrassingly hard to be a defender of the rule of law. This is particularly so when such laws seek to assert and protect human rights.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, November 1, 2013 The Mind of the Poor
Society has a moral obligation to deal with more than forms and lengthy interviews. History tells us that we can do, and indeed have done, much better. Short of radical changes in our economic thinking, what the poor in the U.S. need is another "War on Poverty." It is time to consider replaying the 1960s and force the politicians to act responsibly despite themselves.
(21 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 4, 2016 The Saudi Role on September 11
On 22 July 2004, after two years of investigation, the 9/11 Commission's report was released, something was missing. Twenty-eight pages had been withheld from publication. These pages specifically discussed the connections between the 9/11 hijackers and individuals working in the U.S. for the government of Saudi Arabia.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 26, 2017 Where is Zionism Taking Us?
Few of the world's governments are willing to confront Israel, even though it is an apartheid state existing in an era that claims to detest such racist regimes. This has a lot to do with the financial and special interest strength of Zionist supporters both Jewish and Christian, and the strategic use of such power to corrupt policy making. This can be seen most plainly in the United States.
(7 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 15, 2015 Donald Trump's America
What this means is that Trump, in his narcissistic pursuit of recognition, has tapped into a subgroup of the population that includes the permanently dissatisfied. Trump is playing with fire and at some point he will have to wake up to just what sort of monster he has by the tail. Then he will have a decide: is he just out for fun or does he want to go the route of the demagogue?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 28, 2017 BDS, Human Rights and the Jews
Zionist ideology, as it has evolved in practice, is a dangerous enemy of Jewish morality. As long as Zionism stands against human rights while at the same time insisting that Israel stands in for the Jews, it must be the enemy. Ignorance of this logic is also an enemy.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 7, 2017 War Culture -- Gun Culture: They're Related
American behavior in Vietnam was not just tragically flawed -- it was criminal. But it was also historically consistent -- an expression of a long-standing and deep-seated war culture, a culture that still defines the American worldview and has become the very linchpin of its domestic economy. That is why the wars, large and small, never stop.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 8, 2020 The Democratic Party On The Brink
The failure to see the need to manage change, and instead adhere to a traditional and increasingly unresponsive status quo, is a formula for failure. The recent history of the Republican Party shows what happens when an institution fails to respond to discord in such a way. It may now be that the Democratic Party is following the same self-destructive path.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, July 25, 2016 Zionism Goes from Bad to Worse, Taking Judaism with It
The Zionist ability to maintain a close connection between Western governments and Israel is now based on their ability to spread around enormous sums of money, and not on what once was popular emotional admiration for the "Israeli experiment." In truth the Zionists are left with a narrowing base of support for a country that is increasingly seen as, at best, inhumane and racist and, at worst, ruthless and criminal.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, March 30, 2015 John Bolton's Love of Bombs
Bolton is so obsessed with bombs that, in the case of Iran, there is no difference between any sort of nuclear program and a weapons program. And, he obviously feels his opinion is more "true" than the estimates of professional intelligence agencies. It is a blind spot he shares with the Republican Party and other certain political leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, August 4, 2014 Israel and the Erosion of International Humanitarian Law
Israeli behavior and U.S. protection of that behavior is a somber message that we have a way to go to overcome our propensity for murder and mayhem. We have managed to establish standards of humanitarian behavior and even embody them in international humanitarian law. We have managed to create an albeit imperfect prototype for enforcement through the UN.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, January 3, 2014 Egypt Gone Bad
Today's Egypt is a mess. It is an economic mess thanks to decades of military dictatorship, corruption and greed. It is a political mess for the same reason. Whatever faults might be laid at the feet of the elected Morsi government, none of them warranted a return to thuggish military rule -- an action which, for all practical purposes, brought the ideals of the Arab Spring to a tragic end.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 9, 2015 Criminalizing Criticism: A Zionist Project
The Zionists are working behind closed doors -- the closed doors of American state and federal legislatures and university board rooms -- where they do not have to face serious debate. This might prove the most dangerous of their maneuvers. For behind closed doors the Zionist monopoly resurfaces and truth is all the easier to suppress.
SHARE Saturday, September 28, 2019 A Modern Day Children's Crusade
We'll see how well the 16 year old crusading child from Sweden can do. Can she convince today's mothers and fathers (that is the current power structure) to "lend a hand" building a new road to a better future? I wish her all the luck.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 26, 2019 Can Israel Really Serve as a Refuge?
Within the modern context, Israel is an anachronism desperately, and with some seeming success, seeking to turn the clock back to a time when racism, segregation, discrimination, and indeed, imperialism and colonialism, were the Western legal, political, and social norms. To do so is the only way Israel can claim to be a "normal Western society."
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 18, 2012 A Zionist Worldview and the Slaughter in Gaza - An Analysis
I don't give a damn who lived in or controlled Palestine three thousand years ago. The ones who control it now are, by their actions, no better than barbarians and the leaders in the West who back them have Palestinian blood on their hands. When it comes to behaviors like ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide the claim of self-defense is ludicrous.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 17, 2012 Billboard Wars -- An Analysis
here are fewer civilized men and women than we like to believe. The ones in power, regardless of the nation-state, only rarely behave in civilized ways. The bulk of the citizens either give support to or are indifferent toward their leader's actions. The small remainder are left to struggle against a strong and consistent counter-current.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 9, 2019 Donald Trump the Christian Warrior
It takes a special type of God-connected trickster to pull off the transposing of Donald Trump into a "Christian warrior." So, who is it that is making such claims for the president? He is Robert Jeffress, 64-year-old American Southern Baptist pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas.
(26 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 27, 2014 Deconstructing the Zionist View of Gaza's Horror
outside Israel, Washington, D.C. and various other Zionist strongholds, David Harris's worldview is crumbling. And, as the numbers of those who share his viewpoint shrinks, other counter-groups, such as the Boycott Israel movement, grow in number. Sooner or later a tipping point will be reached and then things will change and probably do so rapidly.
(14 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 15, 2014 A Sober Look at U.S. Democracy
The average voter is an important constituent of his congressperson, senator, governor, or even mayor only for that short period of time when he or she must be convinced to cast a ballot. The voter then recedes into the background and the real constituents are now powerful interest groups with the money to buy political access and influence.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 17, 2017 Donald Trump's Evolving Mass Movement
In his campaign Trump told the most outrageous lies (Mexico is sending rapists to the U.S.), insult war heroes (John McCain) and "gold star" families, insult entire religions (Islam) and esteemed religious leaders (the Pope), make racist remarks about a federal judge, and even insult the entire female half of the human species by bragging about grabbing women by their genitals. He could do all of this and still get elected.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, October 30, 2015 Culture and Conflict Resolution
How is it that the 150 artists and authors who signed the Culture for Coexistence open letter do not know the relevant facts? Setting aside the confirmed Zionists, whose ulterior motive is pretty clear, do these people take this stand because it "feels right" -- that is, because they believe cultural interaction ought to, or even must, promote conflict resolution?
SHARE Monday, August 24, 2015 The Iran Agreement and Israel's Claim to Speak for the Jews
opposition forces in Congress probably will be unable to destroy the nuclear agreement with Iran. Will this achievement encourage the Jewish donors who favored the deal to come together and form a single Jewish organization outspokenly independent of Israel and its followers in the U.S.? This is what is needed if we are to liberate the U.S. Congress and political parties from the myth of a unified Jewry in support of Israel.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 18, 2015 Israel Divides the Jews
Zionism has always divided Jews. On one side have been those sensitive to humanitarian issues and the religion's traditional championship of egalitarianism and justice. And on the other side have been those who have committed themselves to a Jewish future defined in Zionist ideological terms.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, December 23, 2019 Trump's Executive Order on Anti-Semitism: A Category Mistake
On 12 December, President Trump issued an executive order directing the federal government to deny funds to universities and colleges that allow alleged anti-Semitic speech on campus.
(20 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 1, 2020 COVID Madness
Both politicians and the populace appeared to have given up and, as one of those sloganeering signs put it, silently agreed to "sacrifice the weak and reopen." And almost everywhere they did reopen, the COVID-19 virus returned with a vengeance.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 31, 2019 Hillary Clinton's Hunt for "Russian Assets"
Hillary Clinton claimed that both Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) and Jill Stein, head of the U.S. Green Party, are being "groomed" to run a third-party race during the 2020 presidential election. Groomed? Groomed by whom? By the Russians, of course.
(26 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 4, 2019 Making Progressives The Enemy
Zionists are hell-bent on moving the world backwards: back to the days when racist conquest was mistaken for the spread of civilization, when efforts to institutionalize standards of human and civil rights were seen as impingements on sovereignty, back to the days when no one gave a second thought to oppressed peoples (including oppressed Jews).
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 9, 2020 A Culture of Cheating?
Cheating, along with its partner habitual lying, undermines both communities and institutions: everything from marriage to commerce, to science, to government. Nothing can stand firm before them once these vices become normative. That is what makes Donald Trump so unacceptable -- he represents a social climate wherein honesty can never be assumed.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 28, 2017 Reality and its Enemies - An Analysis
There is an ongoing reality that is destroying hundreds of thousands of lives in the Middle East. And though most Americans are ignorant of the fact, and many of those who should be in the know would deny it, the suffering flows directly from decisions taken by Washington over the last 27 years.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 18, 2014 The Forgotten Futility of Torture
Despite the revelations of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, the chances are pretty good that Bush and his operatives will get away with their crimes. And that means that chances are just as good that it will all happen again. Ignorance and false assumptions seem secure in their positions of influence.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 20, 2019 Democratic Party Dilemmas
For all the horrors our foreign adventures have wrought, the real present danger is that we will turn on ourselves and destroy our precarious democracy. Under these circumstances, the Democrats, for all their shortcomings, represent not only the party of choice, but the potential salvation of the United States.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 7, 2015 The U.S. and Israel: Diverging Interests
The real "concerns and interests" of the United States in the Middle East have noticeably diverged from those of Israel. As a consequence Israel is now loudly complaining that Washington has abandoned it. Well, Washington might do well to play the same game -- to loudly complain about Israel's traitorous behavior.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, May 8, 2015 On the Perennial Nature of U.S. Urban Riots
Military grade riot-control equipment is now de rigueur for most large police departments. So great is the demand for these deadly toys that the Defense Department now has a committee appointed by the president to look into what constitutes appropriate equipment to hand out to the cop on the beat.
SHARE Friday, October 23, 2015 The Ideologue's Tunnel Vision
Many Palestinians can understand Western Jewish history, including the Holocaust, and recognize how it shapes, though ultimately cannot excuse, Zionist behavior. Unfortunately, the Zionists can't reciprocate by understanding the history that drives Palestinian behavior. They cannot do so because their ideology precludes the possibility that they are in fact responsible for Palestinian suffering.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 22, 2020 How the Israel-UAE Pact Undermines International Law
Much of the diplomatic world has gone gaga over the 13 August 2020 "normalization" of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), facilitated by years of encouragement coming out of Washington.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 30, 2015 Changing Alliances and the National Interest in the Middle East
There has been a major shift of alliances that has stunned and paralyzed the Obama administration. The enemy has certainly remained the same: the fanatics whose lineage can be traced back to Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks of 2001. However, who is now allied with these "bad guys" and who is allied against them has radically altered.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, November 22, 2013 More on Global Warming
What will we ultimately do about global warming? It might well be that the answer is not nearly enough. We are a species influenced by natural localism, and therefore the majority of Americans, and others in the West as well, are not going to abandon a present full of profit and relative comfort as long as the sky is clear in their own local place and time.
(6 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 12, 2013 Does Torture Work? Does It Matter? -- An Analysis
The torturers are all past or present powerful government officials and their henchmen. Most of them will die in bed and maybe, someday, have their face put on a postage stamp. Their horrid deeds, already excused, will soon be forgotten. As the old Latin saying goes, "in times of war the laws go silent."
SHARE Wednesday, January 29, 2020 Fallen Republicans and the Fate of Liberal Democracy
Despite their sworn oaths of impartiality and the damning evidence presented by the Democrats, Republicans will let President Trump get away with his criminal behavior.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 21, 2018 Fraying Principles
The fraying of principles related to human rights that now pervades U.S. politics and particularly the liberals' readiness to acquiesce in the denial of other people's rights, speaks to a significant devaluing of conscience and an unconscionable shallowness when it comes to ethical judgement. These newly elected Democrats are stepping into a struggle for the political soul of their party.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 4, 2019 Trump's Female Supporters
In his rather simple-minded way, Trump is assuming that his rhetorical messages of 2016, now made real in terms of policy, should be all the stronger in 2020. After all, it is an indicator that this president delivers on his often repugnant promises. But the promises have been tainted by president's crudeness, his inability to handle criticism in a civil fashion, and his habitual acting out the role of a bully.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 22, 2013 Snow Job About Israel-Palestine
It is probable that the Israelis would have no need to implement their ghetto strategy if they were ready to reach a just and fair solution with all of the Palestinians. As long as Israel persists in stealing Palestinian land in a process of relentless expansion, they must convince themselves of the irreconcilable nature of the conflict and persecute not only those who would resist, but the entire Palestinian population.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 11, 2015 Getting Past The Issue Of Being Jewish
The struggle is against racism, discrimination, oppression, occupation and illegal colonization because they are evils no matter who perpetrates them. The Israeli case has to be prioritized because Israel and its Zionist allies have bought and bullied our own government and political parties in a corrupting manner.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 29, 2015 Global Warming Redux: Another Ticking Bomb Out of Paris
Local interests will promote denial long enough to make the necessary sacrifices politically unachievable. They certainly have done so so far. That means our grandchildren will almost certainly live in a very different atmospheric and geographic world than we do. And, of course, going forward, no one should invest in seashore real estate.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, January 29, 2018 Special Israel
Zionist influence spreads far beyond Israel's area of dominion and now influences (one might say corrupts) many of the policy makers and bureaucrats of Western governments, and particularly those of the United States. This often turns their governments into accomplices in Israel's abusive policies.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 19, 2019 On the Alleged "Preciousness of Life"
The assertion that life is precious is one of those idealized maxims that everyone is expected to agree with. However, in practice, it is just as obvious that the notion is largely ignored. In truth, life, including human life, is very often treated with callous disregard.
SHARE Friday, June 9, 2017 Jeremy Corbyn Tries the Truth
It is depressing that conservatives throughout the Western world have learned so little -- if anything at all -- since 2001. That is the year George W. Bush delivered the grotesquely misleading line that Ben Wallace now echoes. Right after 9/11 Bush proclaimed the terrorists do what they do (at least in the West) because "they hate our freedoms."
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 15, 2017 Tolerance as a Prerequisite for Civilization
this is not just an American problem. The deplorables are to be found in all populations -- more in some and less in others -- but never absent. In the U.S. Donald Trump is their leader. No doubt he also serves as a symbol of leadership for deplorables worldwide. As such President Trump and his following subvert our future -- luring us in the direction of barbarism.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, October 21, 2016 How Original Is Donald Trump?
Sensing defeat, Trump has already declared his belief in a grand conspiracy involving the Clintons, bankers, feminists and the media, who have conspired to cheat him out of the presidency. That he could be the source of his own troubles seems not an allowable possibility to him, given the extreme narcissistic nature of his character.
(10 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 6, 2016 Moral Idiocy in the Halls of Power
The Geneva Accords set the range of acceptable behavior toward prisoners of war, established protections for the wounded and the sick, and the necessary protections to be afforded civilian populations within and approximate to any war-zone. Some 193 countries, including the US, have ratified these agreements. Now, as of August 2016, they are 67 years old. Have they worked? The answer is, in all too many cases, no.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 11, 2019 Deteriorating Climates
Thanks to President Trump's conspicuous habit of acting out both his narrow-minded, often bigoted, conceits (legal and otherwise) and his adolescent frustrations. In behaving this way, Trump has, by his own example, liberated the seedy, sleazy and sordid among the American population.
SHARE Thursday, March 5, 2015 Benjamin Netanyahu's Ideologically Dictated Worldview
the actions and motives Netanyahu assigns to Iran are factually wrong. Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons, has not carried on weapons research of this nature in over a decade, and is willing to commit itself to an inspections regime that will keep track of its good intentions in this regard. This stance is attested to by nearly every Western intelligence agency, and the Israeli intelligence organizations as well.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 16, 2014 Who Set-Up Medea Benjamin?
Medea Benjamin's horrid treatment was not a mistake. It was not the action of a few rogue border officials. It was a premeditated act on the part of the military dictatorship that now passes for a government in Egypt. Who gave the orders? No doubt this plot started in Washington when someone, probably a security officer attached to the visa department at the Egyptian embassy, recognized Benjamin's name.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 24, 2015 The Decline of the Western Ethnic State
If the leaders of Europe are smart about it they will go beyond merely symbolic numbers. If they are not, then there will be concentration camps on their borders and eventual violence that will mark a dark period in their supposed civilized histories. Controlled or not, in the end, many of the refugees will probably find a way in.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 13, 2020 Death by Illogic, Lies and Stupidity
On 3 January 2020, Trump personally ordered the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani -- which, by the way, may well have been unconstitutional because it was done without prior consultation with Congress.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 18, 2019 Exploiting the Ignorant
In the 4 October 2019 issue of Rolling Stone magazine it was reported that the 27-year-old "pop, pop-rock, and R&B" singer-actress Demi Lovato had made a trip to Israel in order to, among other things, be baptized in the Jordan River.
SHARE Friday, March 22, 2019 Israel's Tragic But Predictable "Migration" to the Right
Unless a majority of Israeli Jews are willing to go the route of South Africa and renounce their program of discriminatory dominion over millions of non-Jews, they have nowhere else to go but head-first into the hell that is the racist right.
SHARE Tuesday, July 19, 2016 From Charity to Mayhem
The apparent inevitability aside, what lesson can be learned from the large and growing role played by charitable solicitations in the United States? An answer can be found in the proposition that, to the extent that a society is dependent on charity to satisfy community needs, the proper role of government is not being realized.
SHARE Tuesday, November 12, 2019 The Problem of Localized Ethics
There still continues a struggle between those who would apply ethical standards universally and those who would hold to the traditional in-group exceptionalism. Meir Shamgard and the Zionists followed this latter approach.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 11, 2012 On The Re-Election Of The President -- An Analysis
Obama wants to do exactly as he says. For in his heart of hearts he is a compromiser. He will compromise with just about anyone on just about anything. Given the political structure within which he lives, that means he will compromise with rabid Republicans, Zionists and neoconservatives -- if they will only "see reason" and compromise with him.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 19, 2016 There Is Nothing Unusual About Ignorance
Those running for president are assumed to know everything about what is going on in the world as well as in their own country. This is of course impossible, though there is always a short list of issues that are center-stage. So, what happens is that leaders have "briefing books" prepared on these priority issues.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 23, 2015 International Law and Crimes against Humanity
Crimes against humanity include government-initiated or -assisted policies or practices resulting in massacre, dehumanization, unjust imprisonment, extrajudicial punishments, torture, racial/ethnic persecution, and other such acts. In 1976 the United Nations General Assembly declared the systematic persecution of one racial group by another (for instance, the practice of apartheid) to be a crime against humanity.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 15, 2017 A Future For The Democratic Party?
The Democratic Party survives intact, having marginalized Bernie Sanders's liberal effort to restructure it. Ironically, its structural survival is its greatest weakness. As a consequence it will just plod along, stuck in its rut. All things being equal this might condemn the Democrats to minority status for a long time.
(17 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 28, 2014 Why It Is Hard to Feel for the Israelis
What about the children? After all, children "have no agency" and therefore should not be held responsible for the conditions created by their elders. But again, the Zionists cannot demand such an exception while agents of the Israeli state regularly arrest and incarcerate Palestinian children. This is a sad truth of the world as it actually is: double standards make ideals impossible.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 16, 2016 The West's Favored Autocrats
U.S. foreign affairs have been designed to spread capitalist economic practices that facilitate the prosperity of its own "ruling" class. Washington doesn't care if its cooperating allies are murderers, corrupt thieves, racists and the like. They might be bastards of the first order, but it is OK as long as they are "our bastards." Such is the company we keep.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 14, 2019 Amos Oz and the Real Israel
Amos Oz's ambition was to define, or more accurately, redefine, the Israeli character. The effort was an expression of his idealism which, despite all evidence to the contrary, told him that the present state of Zionist Israel could be reversed and humanized -- made more benign through an underpinning of what he called "humanistic Jewish culture."
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, May 14, 2021 Israeli Apartheid Confirmed
Western governments are so committed to Israel -- and steeped in the hypocrisy this requires -- that they will simply ignore the HRW revelations, as they did the earlier reports.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 21, 2020 A Pandemic Comes to the U.S.
No one really knows where Covid-19 originated. We do know that there was an initial outbreak in Wuhan, China, among people who worked in a market that sold wild animals, but some of these animals were imported into China, so the Covid-19 strain that is causing all this trouble could well have originated further afield.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, May 11, 2020 From Wuhan to Baghdad with Trump and Bush
Donald Trump and George W. Bush are both know-nothing Republican leaders. They are know-nothing in the sense that neither of them know the difference between their own desires and objective reality.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 15, 2017 Dysfunction In The White House
Even though we are still early in his administration, there is no sign that anyone can control the President's addiction to gaffes. He is an immature, thin-skinned egotist, and in the end, this may well cost the Republicans dearly. He has a really exceptional ability to stir up the American political scene. For progressives such agitation creates opportunities and risks.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 31, 2017 "Seven Forbidden Words"
Forbidding specific terminology from the budget language of HHS departments constitutes one avenue of attack against those who refuse to believe Trump's innumerable lies. You might not believe his fantasies, but you are not to use "evidence-based" counter-arguments if you operate within the executive branch bureaucracies he ultimately controls.
SHARE Monday, June 3, 2019 Cover-Ups and Truth Tellers
Can you accuse a person of lying who actually seems not to know the difference between truth and untruth? Trump's inability in this regard is demonstrated daily, and the Washington Post fact checker puts the running count of presidential lies at 10,111, with no end in sight.
(8 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 17, 2015 Terror in Paris
Is there a way out of this vicious cycle -- one that might also uphold a broad and truly universal standard for freedom of speech? Ideally, there is -- it is called international law. This is not just any set of laws, but ones that reflect human and civil rights.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, April 24, 2017 A Dilemma For the Intelligence Agencies - An Analysis
Can Western intelligence agencies still retain an ability to speak-out to power." Can they still, effectively, convince their governments not to assume that mainstream media information is accurate, but "rather to await careful investigation" before "rushing to judgment" on important issues?
SHARE Wednesday, August 23, 2017 Trump's Defining Moments
Most Americans, if pressed to take a side, would probably stand against the real Donald Trump revealed by these recent defining moments. So, the U.S. is in both political and cultural limbo. Its citizens are left asking if Donald Trump's defining moments will also define their own future.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, June 8, 2020 Israel Loses Its Best
Zionism, the ideology underlying the Jewish state, originated in the 19th century as a response to the persecution of Jews, particularly in eastern Europe and Russia.
SHARE Wednesday, February 25, 2015 Palestine at the International Criminal Court: Potential and Problems
Palestine's request that the ICC take up Israeli behavior during its summer 2014 invasion of Gaza is a seminal cry for justice. It is also a seminal challenge to the Court and all its member states to see that international law applies to the strong and influential. As goes the judgment on Israel, so goes international law in our time.
(13 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 4, 2017 Walls For The Dead
All those patriotic dead soldiers become victims -- victims of a powerful ideological conviction. But it is not the ideology coming out of Hanoi that killed them. It was the ideology coming out of Washington that transformed patriotic sacrifice into victimization. And, as victims, the American dead stand on the same plane with the roughly three million Vietnamese who perished in the same conflict.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, July 27, 2020 An Attack on Edward Said's Legacy
Glick's attack on Said, and her attempt to tie his work into the protests that followed George Floyd's murder, shows how frightened the defenders of one racist state, Zionist Israel, become when their principle ally, the United States, comes under attack for racist practices.
SHARE Sunday, August 19, 2012 On the Road to Ryan and Ruin -- An Analysis
A Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan presidency would most likely increase the pace of deregulation and destroy what is left of the country's safety nets. It would ultimately devastate the middle class, greatly increase the ranks of the poor and unemployed, do away with union rights, and reserve prosperity for the upper class alone.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, March 6, 2017 Trump and the Anti-Semites
It is unlikely that Donald Trump realizes what he is doing. He probably stereotypes his own behavior as necessary and correct just as he stereotypes the behavior of those who disagree or oppose him as wrongheaded and personal (rather than principled). Most likely, he behaves as he does in an almost instinctual way. He is a born-and-bred bully.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 4, 2012 Israel Says: Rachel Made Me Do It -- An Analysis
All witnesses said basically the same thing: we did not see Rachel Corrie and even if we had we would not have seen a civilian. Why? Because Israel is at war with the Palestinians and, as one testifying IDF officer (aka Yossi) put it, "during a war there are no civilians." There are only terrorists and their allies (Corrie) and Israel does not prosecute its soldiers for waging "war" against them.
SHARE Monday, August 6, 2018 Food Theft as a Form of Cultural Genocide
Despite the decades of ongoing conflict that has been grist for the mill of mass media, there are still millions of Americans, and others too, who know little about the cultural genocide of the Palestinians.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 15, 2017 A Culture War Against Tolerance
The success of right-wing news and other media is a good example of viewers practicing, perhaps unconsciously, confirmation bias. The criterion for the information you seek out is not accuracy or truth, but rather its ability to confirm an outlook you already hold.
SHARE Monday, August 10, 2020 Seth Rogen Turns The Truth Into A Joke
Rogen's experience demonstrates that "the establishment" has no intention of negotiating, much less compromising with "young Jews who reject Zionism."
SHARE Friday, May 20, 2016 Zionism Begins to Unravel
This disconnect is not a sudden or new situation. The numbers of questioning American Jews have continued to grow, and things have only gotten worse for the Zionist leadership. Indeed, just as many young American Jews may be joining pro-peace activist groups as are cheering on AIPAC at its conventions.
SHARE Thursday, April 16, 2015 Islamophobia on Wheels
Outside of the Washington Beltway, those who support Palestinian rights are on the offensive, and the Zionists on the defensive. However, the Zionists certainly have not given up, and the most egregious of them, such as those at the AFDI, still lash out with hate-filled messages. So, the fight goes on.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 17, 2012 Free Speech or Inciting to Riot? -- An Analysis
This incident has exposed the deep vein of anger against the United States that runs through the Muslim world. This anger is nothing new and we continue to ignore it at our peril. The Muslim world continues to be a tinder box that someone resident in the West, someone like Nakoula Bassely Nakoula, can throw a match into and spark something akin to another 9/11.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 12, 2020 Woodrow Wilson's Racism And His Support For Zionism
Wilson became the 28th president of the United States (1913-1921). He led the United States into World War I, was instrumental in the founding of the League of Nations, appointed the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court and, notably, facilitated the eventual establishment of a "Jewish national home" in Palestine.
SHARE Wednesday, May 3, 2017 Politicizing Anti-Semitism
The assertion that criticism of Israel is an act of anti-Semitism relies on the assumption that, because Israel describes itself as "a Jewish state," it represents all Jews. This exaggeration, in turn, seems reasonable due to a broader tendency, most prevalent in the democratic West, to confuse governments and the people they claim authority over.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 2, 2021 A Problem of Clerical Hypocrisy
On 12 September 2021, Rabbi Wolpe had an opinion piece, written at the time of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, in the New York Times. It is entitled "A Rabbi's Guide to Making Amends." It turns out that his recommendations are as easily applied to offenses committed by the Zionist national collective as to any Jewish individual.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 29, 2017 A System Problem for Democracy
This problem of centralization of power within organizations, particularly those that demand loyalty from their members, is commonplace - whether they are political organizations or not. There should be no surprise that many Western democracies are suffering from this system problem.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 22, 2017 Our Hidden Cultural Corrupters
There is a lot of violence in the United States, and if you look at the news it appears that things are getting worse. The nation is armed to the teeth, which means that any out-of-control angry person can vent in lethal fashion. Or, maybe they can choose to vent in the European style by using their car as a battering ram.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 31, 2019 God and U.S. Foreign Policy
God is back at work in support of the foreign policy of the United States. In fact, this time around, God has apparently gone so far as to rig the 2016 U.S. presidential election (and you thought it was the Russians!) in order to assure Donald Trump's election. And why did the deity do so? To protect Israel from the bad guys in Teheran.
SHARE Monday, May 25, 2020 National Values: Reality or Propaganda
Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate, thinks he knows what American values are. Here are some of them: "inclusivity, tolerance, diversity, respect for the rule of law." Biden defines these as among the "democratic values that define us."
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, August 11, 2017 Education and Ideology
In the case of Israel, education has been subordinated to ideology to such an extent that it cannot promote diversity, shared values and a common identity with non-Jews. Thus, given the Zionist ethic as practiced by Israelis and their diaspora supporters, the Palestinian identity and values are anathema and represent threats.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 4, 2018 The U.S. at War with Itself
Roseanne Barr's racist opinions are nothing new. Nor, since the advent of Donald Trump, is their public display. A culture of racism shaped the American way of life since before the founding of the United States. Listening to the tweets of Roseanne and Donald Trump, one can understand why it's a war -- a cultural civil war.
SHARE Saturday, November 19, 2016 Local Fear And Ignorance In The Rise of Donald Trump
It would appear that the political pendulum, both in the U.S and elsewhere, has swung from a fragile "progressive" point on its arc to a potentially savage regressive location. A lot of damage can be done in the next four to eight years unless humane and truly progressive counter-strategies to what is coming down the line are devised -- and devised fast.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 21, 2018 Ethics and the Arts
Having tied themselves to the Zionists, the orchestra leadership will not be able to react rationally to the charge that they are aiding and abetting apartheid. In a certain sense the orchestra, as an institution, has sold its cultural soul for donor silver. Perhaps some of the musicians will preserve their own cultural integrity by deciding to stay home.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 6, 2016 Hillary Clinton's Platform Follies
Why all this to-do over a non-binding platform document? Perhaps because, for a short but critical time, you have 12 million voters taking it seriously -- seriously in a way that may cause damage to Clinton's presidential ambitions. Yet her blinding self-confidence won't let her consider this possibility, and that myopia is why she refuses to make substantive compromises to Sanders.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 27, 2014 Predictions Based on the 2015 Federal Budget
There is no sense of national interest, and damn little sense of community, in the American political system. Both concepts have been superseded by the particular parochial goals and sense of solidarity of groups and subgroups with the deep pockets necessary to buy legislators and legislation. This is what happens when democracy allows itself to be captured by an increasingly unregulated capitalist ethic.
SHARE Tuesday, February 25, 2020 Tales of Student Torment
As a Palestinian student at Haifa University observed, "you can't escape the feeling of alienation when you are an Arab student in the Israeli universities. On the one hand, you are in an academic environment, but on the other hand you are surrounded with guns. It has reached a point where it's difficult to see the contradiction.
(17 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 28, 2018 America's Moral Angst
What enough of the American people did in 2016 was to allow the bigoted, barbaric part of the nation, assisted by the inattentive, to gain power in the person of Donald Trump. There are congressional elections in November 2018. We will see how many of those who closed their eyes, held their noses and took a leap into the unknown by voting for Donald Trump now come to the polling stations hoping to atone for their sins.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 25, 2016 The New Anti-Semitism and its Background
Israel, created in 1948 in response to anti-Semitism in general and the Holocaust in particular, became the "Jewish state." Its Zionist leaders were dedicated to the "ingathering" of all Jews into one national entity. And, before you knew it, they were attempting to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and other non-Jews from the land under Israel's control so as to make room for this "ingathering."
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 22, 2015 Israel Goes to the Polls
Undermining peace, promoting oppression, assuring poverty, fostering racism, playing on people's fears and interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries -- none of this can be good for the rest of us. Clearly, Netanyahu is bad news for the world at large. He is the political world's analogue to global warming -- the more active he is, the more toxic the environment becomes.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 16, 2019 The Sorry State of the Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize was established by Alfred Nobel in his will of 1895. Nobel was a Swedish chemist (he invented dynamite) and wealthy arms manufacture. He died in 1896, and the first Peace Prize was awarded in 1901. It has been awarded annually ever sinceexcept, reasonably enough, during periods plagued by worldwide war.
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, March 5, 2018 Freedom's Perversities
LaPierre's answer to the bloodbaths caused by guns is to have more guns. "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun." In the case of the Parkland high school shooting, where, in fact, there was an armed guard present at the school, as well as with previous school shootings, LaPierre's formula translates into arming teachers as a way of "hardening the schools."
SHARE Saturday, April 25, 2015 Censorship at Southampton University
Israel has evolved into a "rogue" state that is being protected by Western powers, particularly the United States. It has achieved this "exceptional" status by two means: first, the Zionist corruption of Western governments through a lobby process involving the bribing of politicians, and second, through the exploitation of the Western fear of the Arab and Islamic world.
SHARE Monday, January 2, 2017 Running from the Law
What is missing from these responses to Netanyahu's tantrum is any public recognition of the main point of Resolution 2234. That is the fact that Israel stands in violation of the rule of law. And by doing so for decades, the Zionist state has eroded the force of international law generally. No state leader, including those who directly voted for the resolution at the U.N., has deigned to follow up on this point publicly.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 23, 2012 America's Twisted Notion of Freedom
In America, "freedom" now means the right to inflict harm on the community, whether it's the freedom of Wall Street bankers to gamble recklessly, the freedom of the rich to shut factories and off-shore jobs or the freedom to swagger around with deadly weapons. That freedom has struck again in Colorado.
(6 comments) SHARE Monday, April 22, 2013 Freedom and High Anxiety in the USA -- An Analysis
Unfortunately, freedom as practiced in the U.S. has its drawbacks. It has encouraged an often heartless individuality that disregards serious levels of poverty. It has allowed the evolution of interest group politics that often works against national interests in both domestic and foreign policies.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 27, 2012 Genocidal Yearnings -- An Analysis
Today all but a handful of Israeli Jews dislike and fear the people they conquered and displaced. They wish they would go away. And, when their resistance gets just a bit too much to bear, they are now quite willing to see them put out of the way.
SHARE Sunday, August 8, 2021 Abortion and the Culture War
It is anyone's guess if, devoid of able and forceful Democratic leadership clearly articulating what is at stake, enough voting American citizens will understand the risk or have the motivation to stop a reactionary takeover.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 11, 2012 The Know-Nothing Candidate -- An Analysis
The Know-Nothing candidate wants to be president. And he may well succeed depending on just how many other Americans know nothing in ways that make them comfortable with Mr. Romney's ignorance. "Ignorance is as ignorance does," particularly on election day.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 30, 2013 Endless War -- An Analysis
With the government's wholehearted embrace of targeted assassination, as well as modern surveillance technology and the precedent of offshore prisons for "enemy combatants," one wonders if, from now on, the recovery of rights will ever be fully equal to their loss.
(9 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 30, 2016 On the Down Side of Institutionalized Religion
Some fundamentalists would have us believe the lesson is to remain humble and obedient in the face of an unfathomable deity whose mysterious purposes are simply beyond human comprehension. Yet there is nothing incomprehensible about the repetitive death, destruction and intolerance bred by institutionalized ideologies.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, May 21, 2018 In Our Age of State Crimes
Whole nations are created using mythology and self-deception as pillars of identity. The reality of history somehow creeps in and the effort to sustain these self-deceptions eventually poisons the societies that rely upon them. Today that poison can be seen in the way Donald Trump is received as a savior by many Americans just because he represents a racist militarism they confuse with honor and "greatness."
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 27, 2019 Trump's "Deal of the Century"
President Trump's peace plan for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or at least the economic side of it, was discussed at a meeting in Bahrain on June 25 and 26. The plan, euphemistically entitled "Peace to Prosperity" and the "Deal of the Century" is also, inaccurately, likened to a "Marshall Plan for Palestinians."
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 2, 2022 The Jewish Schism Deepens-An Analysis
"This year, American Jews have been part of a racial reckoning in our community. " How are we complicit with racial violence? Jewish communities " have had teach-ins and workshops, held vigils, and commissioned studies.
And yet " so many of us ignore the day-to-day indignity that the Israeli military and police forces enact on Palestinians, and sit idly by as Israel upholds two separate legal systems for the same region.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 22, 2019 Senator Schumer's Divine Mission
since both American and Israeli leaders seek to meld nationalist passions with religion, we must recognize that religion too can be a refuge for scoundrels. Of course, that does not mean that all religious folks are such. Rather, it means that scoundrels can find it quite useful to use religion, just like patriotism, as a cover for immoral and criminal behavior.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 31, 2020 U.S. Urban Rebellions Revisited
The protests are no longer just about the murder of one African American. They are now about the inability of the justice system to deliver justice within an interminably unjust America. When the state loses legitimacy in the eyes of citizens, all that is left is the violence of mass suppression. And that is a one way road to hell for all us no matter what our race.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 15, 2013 A National Debate about Government Spying?
Having concluded that the NSA's real and potential secret access to the communications of almost every American, and a growing number of non-citizens, was criminal in nature (perhaps totalitarianism in the making), Snowden leaked the classified information that would bring the NSA's activities into public view. It was the right thing to do and he says he has no regrets.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 4, 2018 A Tale Of Two Massacres
Today the U.S. is in the midst of a cultural civil war waged by those who would destroy that progress. In other words, here things are in flux and a culture infused with human and civil rights is still an option. Indeed, taking that option is the real way of "making America great again."
SHARE Wednesday, December 20, 2017 Trump, Jerusalem and International Law
Now we have the Zionists and Christian fundamentalists standing behind Trump, patting him on the back. The rest of the world stands in front of him, aghast. Typical of the self-serving type he is, Trump only cares about the blandishments pushing him in the direction he wants to go.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, April 5, 2013 Critical Thinking Gone Missing -- An Analysis
The majority of any population will pay little or no attention to news stories or government actions that do not appear to impact their lives or the lives of close associates. If something non-local happens that is brought to their attention by the media, they will passively accept government explanations and simplistic solutions.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 27, 2016 Paul Ryan's Economic Plan
Ryan's vision is a utopia has already been historically proven to be its opposite -- a dystopia. The haunting refrain that history is bound to repeat itself is true only if we let it be so. And when our leaders' plans and schemes spell predictable disaster -- well, only the self-deluded and the truly ignorant would go there.
SHARE Tuesday, October 17, 2017 A State For The Kurds?
The Kurds are now closer to independent status than at any time since the near-miss days of World War I. Their best strategy is to make the best (if not the most) of that status within a confederated Iraq and end their interaction with Israel. This has to be better than a near-genocidal war in which they would be the victims.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 25, 2014 Saudi Arabia Flexes Its Fanaticism
Washington can sanction the Russians for protecting their security interests and the Russian-speaking population in the Crimea. They can sanction the Iranians for developing nuclear energy. And, they can acquiesce in the utter destitution of 1.76 million Gazans. But you will hear no talk of sanctions due to Saudi aggression or its sponsorship of terrorism.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, October 2, 2020 Regression as a National Theme
The United States has taken another step backward in terms of social progress. This comes with Donald Trump's nomination of a religiously motivated conservative, Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 15, 2015 Why We Need the International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court operates only when national courts will not or cannot prosecute an individual suspected of heinous crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, or other war crimes. Also, in order for the Court to have jurisdiction, crimes must have taken place within the territory of one or more of the 123 states that have ratified the Statute.
SHARE Saturday, April 18, 2020 Intimations of Barbarism
Thus, no one should have been overly shocked at the display of barbaric callousness offered up by the Republican legislators in Wisconsin in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.
SHARE Monday, November 28, 2016 Trump and the Jews
As problematic as it is, the ascendency of Donald Trump gives the American Jews a second chance to make the right choice, to join with their natural allies and fight for the equal rights of all groups. U.S. Jews should think long and hard about this, for it may well be that their second chance will also be their last chance.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 2, 2021 The Democracy vs. Freedom Dispute
In the United States, there is a dispute over whether democracy and freedom are compatible. Some, such as Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, have questioned their compatibility, and even asserted that freedom, rather than democracy, is what the U.S. really stands for.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 7, 2016 Charles Krauthammer: America's Conservative Voice
There is something truly inhumane in the Krauthammer perspective. However, that does not mean that those politicians such as Marco Rubio and Chris Christie who espouse such bankrupt ideas are incapable of winning local, state and national elections. Never underestimate the ignorance and gullibility of conservative-minded voters.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 9, 2021 The Bell Tolls for Israel
On 19 October 2021, the Israeli Defense Ministry officially labeled six well known Palestinian human rights associations as "terrorist organizations."
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 26, 2017 Trump vs. Truth
As things get more contentious, Trump will retreat from the business of governing. He will turn it over (if he hasn't already) to his accomplices: Stephen Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Vice President Pence. Having done so, he will devote more and more time to his so-called reelection campaign where he can vent his spleen among the adoring crowds of supporters who serve, collectively, as a stimulant for the man's immense ego.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 10, 2016 What the Trump Phenomenon Means for Israel
If Trump becomes president and, like most of his predecessors, tries to settle the Israel-Palestine problem, he will no doubt be met with not only the usual Israeli stonewalling, but outright hostility. After all, Trump as president will have to deal with Netanyahu as prime minister and they are alike in that both tend to "shoot from the lip."
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 30, 2016 What motivates US policy toward Israel?
Clinton extols the U.S.-Israel alliance as one of "shared values." She describes Israel as "a bastion of liberty." This is de rigueur propaganda and, for the Palestinians, has no convincing connection to reality. By describing BDS as a movement that must be suppressed, Clinton is endangering U.S. constitutional rights.
SHARE Saturday, December 9, 2017 College Sports and the Corruption of Education
When it comes to the enthusiasm around college sports, the notion of education gets lost. Thus, it seems not to have occurred to most college sports fans that whatever satisfaction they might derive from supporting their teams, they are simultaneously helping to undermine the education of the players.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, October 28, 2016 Customizing Truth
Our elites play out our destines as if they have no free will -- no capacity to break with structured ways of seeing. Yet the middle-echelon specialists keep sending their relatively accurate assessments up the ladder of power. Hope springs eternal.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, April 14, 2014 Free Speech Or Bribery?
We are dealing with those funneling millions of dollars to politicians in exchange for political and legislative favors. That is the exercise of free speech only if you equate it with the suborning of elected officials. It's hard to believe that the five Supreme Court Justices who voted in the majority do not know this. And if they do, they are guilty of using the Constitution to rationalize criminal behavior.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 4, 2017 Netanyahu -- Running from the Law
UNSC Resolution 2234 told the Israeli government that it is obliged to follow the rule of law -- in this case international law. Mr. Netanyahu's response was to repudiate that law. Thus, the Israeli prime minister ran from the law -- something outlaws do.
SHARE Tuesday, April 7, 2020 An Attack On Free Speech
Zionists are making every effort to encourage laws that make criticism of Israel illegal because, they claim, it is ipso facto anti-Semitic. The weaponization of anti-Semitism maliciously defames individuals, corrupts legal systems and also threatens any reasonable notion of free speech.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 9, 2016 Natural Born Killers?
the notion that our willingness to slaughter each other is innate -- an adaptive habit of a long evolutionary history. This conclusion is offered as an explanation rather than an excuse. For, as the Nature study authors recognize, culture can impact such behavior -- tamping it down at least within a designated in-group. Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that our addiction to lethal violence is our evolutionary fate.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 13, 2013 A Culture of Walls -- An Analysis
Zionists came to Palestine with a wall already fixed in their minds. That wall existed as a conviction that anti-Semitism was inevitable and eternal. Only possessing their own state could protect the Jews from this incessant danger. Subsequent Palestinian resistance was almost instinctively seen by the Zionists as anti-Semitism.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 21, 2013 Two-State Solution or Illusion?
The U.S. government maintains the hope of a two-state solution to "show that it is working toward a diplomatic solution, to keep the pro-Israel lobby from turning against them and to disguise their humiliating inability to allow any daylight between Washington and the Israeli government."
SHARE Thursday, October 16, 2014 On The Purpose of U.S. Education
Producing loyal and uncritical citizens is something our schools, at all levels, do pretty well. The uncritical thinking aspect of this goal is quite important and puts in doubt the place of critical thinking in the national curriculum. For a nation of critical thinkers would, from the perspective of citizen loyalty, be a dangerous thing.
SHARE Sunday, October 28, 2018 The Climate Crisis Is Back In The News
The prospect of drastic climate change is back in the news. But, for all too many people it is just that, a news item. It is like other eye-grabbing stories: a bit scary, but also happening somewhere else and at some other time. If you happen to be at that other place or approximate to that time, things get more immediate, more real. But otherwise it is theory.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 5, 2015 Communal Upheaval
Israel's self-righteous position has always been that it has an unquestionable right to tell American Jewry when to support or not support their own (US) national interests. And if you don't follow their lead, you will be accused of betraying "your people." This persistent incivility has just been below the US's public radar till now. We can thank Netanyahu and his Likudniks for the fact that that is no longer the case.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 2, 2021 Armed and Ignorant in the Land of the Free
Gun violrnce is happening in a country in which there are more guns than people and where laws are enacted that make it easier to buy a gun than to vote.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, April 30, 2018 The White House-Mercenary Connection
The notion that the good society is the one that looks after the basic needs of its citizens so as to create a platform for the realization of their creative potentials is, if not dead, then in serious abeyance. Donald Trump, who thinks the world's most notorious mercenary -- Erik Prince -- can help achieve the misguided goals of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East.
SHARE Wednesday, January 17, 2018 Contextualizing Sexual Harassment
Now that the sexual harassment genie seems to have escaped the bottle, we can see the problem more clearly. It's time to pursue serious culture renovation -- to take on those primitive instincts and thoughtfully develop better, non-doctrinaire cultural ways to manage them. One thing is for sure, they are not going to go away on their own.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 18, 2018 Israel's "Psychological Obstacles to Peace"
Israeli leaders have produced an artificial political and psychological environment that identifies national security with the avoidance of peace. All Israeli governments have played this propaganda game because all of them have been and still are more interested in land than peace.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 18, 2018 Missiles over Damascus Courtesy of Monsters in Washington
Our proclivity to violence has been institutionalized and our fundamental societal need to maintain group cohesion has been perverted by the those who claim to be our leaders. It is something of a vicious circle -- or maybe just an eternal Catch 22.
SHARE Friday, June 11, 2021 Zionist Academics Take The Side Of State Power
The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a very successful learned society. Its scholars cover all of the Middle East and North Africa.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 23, 2017 Moral Failure at the United Nations
The moral failure at the U.N., represented by the withdrawal of the ESCWA report, is the result of Secretary General Guterres's decision to acquiesce in a denial of reality -- the reality of Israel's practice of Apartheid. Reality in Palestine is what the Americans and Israelis say it is because politicians and international leaders literally can't afford to challenge their corrupted views.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 3, 2015 The Boehner-Netanyahu Cabal
Boehner knows that pro-Israeli lobbies are key political donors, so his aim is to increase their contributions to Republicans and decrease them to Democrats. If this requires selling out an American president, Boehner is ready to do so. If it means embroiling the American people in yet another Middle East war, he appears ready to do that as well.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, September 13, 2021 A Forever Foreign Policy Debate
It is important to look at this debate just because it is going on among those to whom policy makers pay attention. And, through such an examination, to realize that any exchange at this level of insiders is unlikely to get at the core problems of U.S. foreign policy.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 16, 2014 Why the Israelis Are Repetitively Violent
One reason for Israel's repetitive violence is that if they admit it is a tactical failure and desist, they might have to negotiate a genuine peace treaty with the Palestinians. Many will immediately say that they have, repeatedly, tried to negotiate while always coming up against Palestinian intransigence.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 10, 2016 Donald Trump's Moment: Will It Last?
Many of those who did vote for Donald Trump voted for him because he appeared to stand against the political system they hate. They want the country ethnically cleansed of Mexicans, the government downsized and, culturally, the clock turned back to the 1950s. If he does not do this he will appear to have become part of that hateful system, and his fans may well end up hating him too.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 24, 2021 New Symbolic Role for the Israeli Flag
During the January 6 insurrection, hardly any of the U.S. media took note of the following fact: among the signs and banners of rightwing organizations stood a very large Israeli flag.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 3, 2021 On The Spectrum
Those who pay attention to mental and emotional states, and their multitude of disquieting effects, recognize the notion of a spectrum.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 3, 2012 In Defense of Richard Falk -- An Analysis
Professor Richard Falk was appointed in 2008 to a six-year term in his present position. That means he has been telling the unsettling truth about Israeli behavior for four years now, with another two to go. Repeatedly he has documented Israeli violations of international law and its relentless disregard for Palestinian human rights.
SHARE Saturday, October 5, 2013 Zionism versus Diplomacy and Peace
As politician and president, Obama has been caught between a desire to avoid war with Iran, a war that would almost certainly harm the Western world's economy, and the political pressure of the powerful American Zionist lobby. The Zionists ultimately seek to ensure that U.S. policy falls in line with Israel's desires to see Iran destroyed.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, July 9, 2018 Reality Remake
Historical facts such as the Zionist "Plan Dalet" and the ethnic cleansing it promoted in 1948 are essentially deleted from history.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 28, 2013 The Boycott of Israel Eight Years In
BDS is only at the beginning of its trek. Its fast start and ongoing achievements should bring hope and pride to those involved in the movement. They should also raise some serious second thoughts in the minds of those Israelis who think Netanyahu and his government of ideologues can prevent their country's increasing isolation.
SHARE Saturday, January 10, 2015 Israel's March 2015 Elections
Regardless of the outcome of the March elections, Israel's habitual violence and its ongoing violation of international laws and the standards of human rights will not change. However, sooner or later the boycott, allied to ongoing episodes of Palestinian resistance, will bring Israel to a real crossroads, and then difficult choices will have to be made.
(18 comments) SHARE Monday, September 1, 2014 "But is it Good for the Jews?"
can we assume that Zionism and Israel are good for the Jews? The answer is no, we cannot. Zionism failed the Jews by insisting on an Israel for one group alone. That insistence has inevitably led to racism, discrimination and ethnic cleansing. These are not practices that have characterized modern Jewry and so it is simply wrong to equate Zionism with Judaism and insist that Israel stands in for the world's Jews.
SHARE Tuesday, December 25, 2012 On The Killing of Children and Others, Domestic and Foreign -- An Analysis
Whether Americans are paying attention or not, their government, their elected officials, continue to make sure that the U.S. remains out and about across the globe, projecting the nation's power via guns and sanctions, and thereby helping to lower the world's burgeoning population in the most negative of all possible ways.
SHARE Monday, December 31, 2018 Doing International Business With Criminals
Given our economic culture, no one should be surprised that the language the consultants, and the rest of us, presently speak is "a late-capitalist language." This language "narrows our conceptual horizons" and thereby "makes it more difficult to conceive alternative ways of organizing our economy and society."
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, December 23, 2016 How to Destroy a Planet
One of the subjects on which Trump's ignorance stands out is environmental protection -- the rubric under which comes the effort to save the planet from global warming. This warming process is a scientific fact and the subject of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. those who voted for Trump never considered the criminal nature of promoting global warming.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 15, 2013 Bad Precedent and Bad Faith
Anyone who accepts at face value the assurance of government lawyers that laws such as the Patriot Act and NDAA will conform to the Constitution and not walk all over one's civil rights should, as the old saying goes, have their head examined. There is not much "daylight" between Obama's practice and the past behavior of neoconservative vulgarians such as George W. Bush. "If it swims like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 20, 2016 The Zionists Censor a Textbook
The sad truth is that the suborning of textbooks addressing culturally sensitive subjects has become a standard practice. Thus, the process of education is indeed threatened by incessant propaganda. This includes the culture war that swirls around American biology textbooks. It also includes the powerful Zionist drive to literally wipe the Palestinians off the map.
SHARE Monday, January 13, 2014 Whose Academic Freedom Are We Talking About?
Israel's future is one of increasing isolation. The Zionists recognize this possibility and that is why they are kicking and screaming. They even want to outlaw aspects of the boycott effort. It might be easier if they joined the 21st century by giving up their racist ambitions. However, ideologues rarely give up their ideologies willingly, so we will all have to do this the hard way.
SHARE Tuesday, September 5, 2017 Labor Day 2017
Daily work will stay a stultifying trap for most, and dissatisfaction will continue to be taken for granted as a consequence of the need to labor. It is no wonder that here in the 21st century, one is driven back to the 18th-century Enlightenment writer Voltaire for solace -- for the message that we can as yet do little better than "tending our own gardens well."
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 29, 2013 The Crime of Indifference
The suffering of the Palestinians is never more than "minutes" from most Israeli backyards, and it now and then violently boomerangs back on Israeli Jews. Nonetheless, a kind of contrived, willful ignorance does come into play. One can be raised in ignorance and educated to a view of history that eliminates others' suffering as well as one's role in causing it. The Israelis have made an art of this process.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 14, 2015 Who Is Fighting the War on Terror?
The Obama administration's ability to secure the Iran nuclear agreement is an isolated example of realism. Current U.S. policy toward Syria shows that Washington has not made the turnaround leading to a permanent clear-sighted ability to assess national interests in the Middle East.
SHARE Tuesday, March 23, 2021 Joe Biden's Heartfelt Illogic about Israel
Joe Biden will sustain Israeli dominance in the region even as that country confirms itself as a rightist, racist threat to human rights and international law. Biden may lose his moment in history.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 16, 2013 War and Institutionalizing Abuse -- An Analysis
With the exception of a handful of civil liberties organizations, there has been no popular resistance to the long term drift into official criminality. Today's public, reconciled to all of this by propaganda and the fear it creates, will not protest in any politically significant way, even though polls indicate that, when asked, they are uneasy with all of it.
SHARE Thursday, February 2, 2017 Immigrant Irony
Let's hope that the grandchildren of those who today do manage to reach the "land of the free" remember the tribulations of their grandparents, and be willing to hit the streets with the next generation of protesters. Because these are struggles that never really go away.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, July 23, 2018 The Faulty Logic Behind the Zionist Attack on BDS
To date, some 25 U.S. states have tried to outlaw BDS, even though, as an infringement of free speech, their efforts are clearly unconstitutional. In this case lobby power proves more compelling than either the U.S. constitution or logic.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, January 23, 2017 American Zionists and the Issue of Immigrants
American Jews act in solidarity with other discriminated groups only if they, the Jews, resist Zionist leadership. If they follow the Zionist lead, they usually do one of two things: passively support the discriminatory majority or stay silent. This behavior is particularly true when it comes to the issue of immigrants.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 3, 2021 How to Undermine a Diplomatic Triumph
The true status of current negotiations to reinstate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran is unknown to the American public -- most of whom are tragically indifferent to the outcome. This is so even though the successful negotiation of this deal with Iran back in 2015 represents one of the greatest triumphs of diplomacy in the last hundred years.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 12, 2013 Crises Today, Catastrophe Tomorrow
Eventual concern might turn out to be so great that global warming could replace the proverbial invasion from outer space. That is, it could be the threat that unites all parties against a common enemy. So, if the UN Security Council can't agree on Syria or Israel, maybe its members can rally together to persuade Brazil and Indonesia to stop deforestation and save the planet.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 8, 2014 Censorship Is The Norm
Perhaps the grossest ongoing censorship of all is the culturally conditioned, narrow range of opinion fed to the vast majority of Americans by their own media. The narrow range of views offered creates a uniform background noise hiding most of what is at variance with the standard message. In other words, media practices constitute de facto censorship.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, February 22, 2019 To Fight Ignorance, Tell the Right Story
Technologically advanced storytelling has now been with us for a century and thus the genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle. Unless we want to follow Plato's suggestion and ban such presentations altogether, we can't prevent their occasional misuse. That being the case, we might as well put this ability to good purposes as well. Saving the planet and keeping our kids healthy seem to qualify.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 13, 2013 In Defense of Amira Hass -- An Analysis
A good argument can be made that Israel, a recognized member of the modern array of nations, has a right to exist. However, it can be asserted that its present racist state apparatuses that practice ethnic cleansing and institutionalized discrimination, as well as the Zionist ideology that justifies such practices, are increasingly unacceptable in the modern world and therefore can claim no inherent right to exist.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 1, 2016 Getting Rid of Bad Examples
We are in need of newer, more culturally and historically relevant heroes. Men and women such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Albert Einstein, Susan B. Anthony, Rachel Carson, Angela Davis, Cesar Chavez, Daniel Berrigan, Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg, to name but a few.
SHARE Sunday, May 31, 2015 Does Egypt have a Government?
There are many names you can give the present nature of rule in Egypt. You can call it a dictatorship, a despotism, a tyranny, a garrison state, unlimited rule, or even a reign of terror carried on by thugs in suits. All of these would be relatively accurate. What you can't call it is a government.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 29, 2020 The Costs of Limited Awareness
Most Americans do not pay attention to foreign policy issues except when they appear to impinge on their
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 11, 2018 What the Marc Lamont Hill Affair Really Tells us About Zionist Goals
Destruction is the Zionists' strategic goal and the attack on Marc Lamont Hill and others like him is dictated by the tactics they have chosen to use toward that end. That is really what is going on, and it is important that as many people as possible become aware of just what is at stake here. In terms of human rights we all should start thinking of ourselves as potential Palestinians.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, December 17, 2012 Education and National Security -- An Analysis
There are parts of the country where poverty and "racial isolation" result in such poor educational (and vocational) opportunities that the majority of the population has no hope of sharing in the general prosperity and promise of the country. These people will not acquire the necessary skill set, nor will they be indoctrinated with the patriotism, that education is meant to deliver.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, October 5, 2015 On the Age-Old Tradition of Not Caring
The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other Western country, are still influenced by the primitive outlook of 18th and 19th century capitalism. Care for the poor was the responsibility of the churches. This entire setup was designed to maximize individual freedom by keeping government small in both power and scope.
SHARE Sunday, January 31, 2021 The 1776 Commission Report
One of Donald Trump's efforts to restructure, or maybe de-structure, the U.S. was the establishment of a 1776 Commission. Its job was to recast American history in an extravagantly patriotic fashion so as to assert U.S. exceptionalism.
SHARE Thursday, November 6, 2014 The Peace Process Hustle -- An Analysis
On the Zionist side there now exists at least two realities. One is certainly that of Prime Minister Netanyahu -- the reality of the Zionist ideologue with Israeli power backing it up. But then there is the other Zionist reality -- that of Israel's increasing isolation, not only diplomatic and cultural, but also, over time, economic.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 23, 2014 Planning for the Future of the BDS Movement
The 67-year-old effort to harass most non-Jewish citizens and residents out of the country will greatly intensify. The BDS campaign conducted against South Africa was a reaction against that society's racist culture and policies. There is no reason why a powerful BDS movement cannot be sustained against Israel on the same basis.
SHARE Saturday, December 22, 2018 Argument and Counter-Argument
The arguments used by the Zionists to defend their policies and practices have been quite consistent. This can't be because they are convincing, since they are clearly losing the battle for public opinion. It may be that being a dogmatist simply robs you of any originality and flexibility.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, April 22, 2019 The Struggle For Our Future
We are in a decisive struggle that will determine the shape of our future. Will it be reactionary or progressive in nature? Organized conservatism has evolved into a reactionary force throughout much of the West, and the hard-fought-for, progressive aspects of our world are in serious danger. The fate of Donald Trump, the U.S.'s ersatz Mussolini, in the 2020 election might be a pivotal moment in this struggle.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, September 26, 2016 True Believers and the U.S. Election
One thing Donald Trump has done is brought the US version of "true believer" to the political forefront. If Trump loses, the true believers will retreat back into the fringes of society to await the next charismatic leader who can rally them. And, given both traditional parties' historical inability to reform the country's capitalist, imperialist and racist ways of doing things, that next time is bound to come.
(11 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 15, 2015 Gun Cultures -- An Analysis
The NRA is in total denial of the fact that, ipso facto, to be armed is to be dangerous. They illogically deny that there is any connection between the publicly held 300 million firearms in the country and the fact that the U.S. has the highest gun-related homicide rate in the "developed" world. You can find greater rates of gun-related murder, but you have to go to places like Honduras and El Salvador to see them.
SHARE Tuesday, March 14, 2017 One Hundred Years of the Balfour Declaration
The whole process has proved remarkably self-corrupting for Zionist Jews. It is ironic that now most Zionists are themselves anti-Semites. In this case the Semite targets are the Palestinians and the growing number of western Jews who have come to support their cause.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 27, 2013 A Concise Answer to Ido Aharoni's Query "Why Boycott Israel?"
Unlike other oppressive and brutal governments, the Israelis and their supporters directly influence (one might say corrupt) the policy makers of many Western nations and this often makes their governments (most specifically the U.S.) accomplices in Israel's abusive policies. This being so, prioritizing Israel for boycott is not hypocrisy but rather necessity.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 12, 2014 Repugnant Republicans
With Republicans, one gets the sense that they are really true believers. They see their positions and actions as absolutely right and good, and if you disagree with them you are absolutely wrong and bad. In other words, while both parties are often dangerously wrong, the Republicans are wrong in a demented ideological fashion. As such they really are more repugnant than the Democrats.
SHARE Monday, June 20, 2016 Getting It Wrong about the Orlando Massacre
Fear and distortion generated by neoconservative, Zionist and Islamophobe interest groups are influencing the storyline, the "spin," on the sort of violence we have seen in Orlando. The National Rifle Association - that is, the gun lobby - is successfully pushing to minimize the issue of inadequate gun control.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, September 12, 2014 International Law vs U.S. Democratic Practice
Special interests have become the main center of political power in America. Short of catastrophic political breakdown, this arrangement is not going to change. The only thing that those who value international law and human rights can do is to continue to build their own special interest lobbies and compete for influence in government against the dehumanizers and other assorted international law breakers.
SHARE Monday, October 27, 2014 The Special Interest Problem
If there is a way out of this dilemma it must come from the general public. The long-standing dissatisfaction with politicians, especially on the national level, must be channeled into a popular campaign to free the legislators and policy makers from the influence of narrow interests.
SHARE Monday, December 5, 2016 U.S. Reactions to the Death of Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro was the man who led the successful effort to overthrow the brutal and reactionary dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista -- a dictatorship that had the backing of the U.S. government.
The Castro-led victory of 1959 began a long period of transformation for Cuba, raising the country from a starkly poor Third World condition to a modernizing socialist state.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 9, 2012 To Hell With The Intelligence -- An Analysis
The CIA and its like are fairly good at collecting information, analyzing it, and rendering reasoned judgments as to its meaning. Usually, the advice rendered by the middle level folks who do the analyzing and reporting errs on the side of caution. The problem is political leaders all too often ignore intelligence reports when they don't fit with their political goals.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 24, 2013 On Great Photographs and Their Impact -- An Analysis
The old cliche that tells us a picture is worth a thousand words, says nothing about what those words might be. In respect to Israel and Palestine, the West's informational environment was once dominated by the Zionist narrative. That is no longer the case. The Palestinian narrative is now present. Israelis and their supporters should look long and hard at those images that depict the consequences of their own actions.
(7 comments) SHARE Friday, October 5, 2012 On the Status of Women -- An Analysis
There is widespread social anxiety among American men caused by the confusion of gender roles that has allegedly come with growing gender equality in the U.S. This has brought about a backlash.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 16, 2020 International Law Vs. Eternal Recurrence
The 21st century may prove decisive for both the human race and the planet. The environment needs the enforcement of regulations reducing greenhouse gases and other pollutants. The human race needs the reenergizing and enforcement of international law.
SHARE Thursday, December 11, 2014 Free Choice vs. Media Determinism
Free choice is significantly limited by media determinism. How many of us understand this to be the case? It has to be very few, for if very many realized the situation, they would surely demand that the media break its alliance with the powerful. Without objective information, there can be no meaningful free choices.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 3, 2013 Haneen Zoabi: Another Persecuted Truth-Teller -- An Analysis
Politicians with dictatorial leanings instinctively avoid their own reflection. They cannot admit the consequences of their own actions and policies and they cannot tolerate others who publicly expose those consequences. Like Dorian Gray, they restrict the ugly truth to some hidden closet. Yet, eventually, someone like Ms. Zoabi comes along and takes up the role of truth-teller.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, March 4, 2013 Civil Rights Takes a Hit -- An Analysis
It is clear from the history of general voter participation in elections that the majority of Americans do not pay close attention to politics, and even those who do are often all too easily swayed by everything from personal appearance to silly propaganda. The Supreme Court may be about to prove that this is so.
SHARE Thursday, March 14, 2013 The Wrath of the Bureaucracy -- An Analysis
The US military has shown no serious concern about what its soldiers have done-continue to do-to civilians in the Middle East. This is because soldiers act in ways compatible with the bureaucratic rules of the organization they serve. Under these conditions, killing of civilians, no matter at what frequency or number, is deemed accidental as long as the soldier follows the military's self-prescribed "rules of engagement."
(9 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 10, 2016 The Civil War Returns to New Orleans
The public display of their heroes and symbols constitutes their eroding toe-hold in the public sphere. Another way of assessing this process is to note that these white supremacists are being pushed, irrevocably, back into their tribal private space where resentment and anger have long been the emotional glue that holds them together. Violence on their part is probable.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, September 22, 2014 Zionism and the Educational Elites
It is because of the continuing vulnerability of higher education's administrative elites to donor blackmail that we continue to witness the tragic and unjust treatment of scholars and teachers who have taken a public stand against Israel. Donor blackmail is the last front line for the Zionists as they continue to suffer defeats in the battle for public opinion.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, May 9, 2016 On the Misuse Of Anti-Semitism
While the suggestion of the wholesale transference of Israel to the U.S. is but a fantasy, associating the U.S. and Israel certainly has an underlying logic. The United States is Israel's major protector and financier. The U.S. Congress treats Israel as a privileged 51st state. And, most of those who emigrate from Israel go to the U.S.
SHARE Tuesday, December 13, 2016 Racist Nationalism Returns to the Western Political Scene
White supporters of Donald Trump saw immigration and terrorism as the country's major problems. Moreover, they connected these two issues to their fear of the country's growing diversity. Of course, economic woes were also a concern, but they too were exacerbated by fear of the fact that the country was then under the leadership of a black man, Barack Obama.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, May 11, 2018 It Is Time For A Palestinian-Jewish Alliance
The Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories cannot win this war on their own. Worldwide civil society has become engaged in promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Christians of conscience also do vital work. Yet, it is the Jews who, most importantly, must be seen to offer a democratic alternative to Zionist racism. And, they must do this publicly, shoulder to shoulder, with the Palestinians.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 8, 2013 A Window On The Right Wing -- An Analysis
Ours is an age of "infotainment," and the more entertaining media personalities, politicians, and even government officials are, the more their "info" is received favorably. Conservative America is out there in many forms. Some are organized around religion, some around various forms of xenophobia, and some around the fear of government, its taxes and regulations.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 27, 2014 The New York Times Declares the Peace Process Futile
The NYT editorial board has the same problem as the Obama administration: they both know the truth but are unwilling to do something about it. They both know the problem is that the Israeli government is not interested in genuine peace (actually, has never been interested in it). Israel is only interested in continuing its conquest of Palestinian land.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 6, 2014 Disturbing Democracy
Liberal democracy (with a strong, tempering dose of social democracy) may be the best, or perhaps the least worst form of government there is. However, to create it and keep it requires tolerance and willingness to make reasonable compromises. It also precludes making deals with authoritarian forces whose ambitions are dangerous to democracy itself.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 21, 2014 The Role of the Intellectual
Most people of high intellect have sought to serve power and not critique or question it. Most non-intellectuals accept the word of those in power as authoritative and true. That, no doubt, is why the independent-minded, outspoken intellectuals demanding moral integrity and responsibility from those in power are so rare.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, January 18, 2021 A Brief but Portentous Insurrection
The U.S. had a problem -- one that could encourage insurrection -- came when some 74 million Americans chose to vote for a racist neofascist in the 2020 national election.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 10, 2021 Joe Biden Adopts a Trump Approach to Iran
Our new president is leading us in the direction of domestic sanity, and there are even hints of progressive potential in his evolving agenda. Under his leadership.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 17, 2013 Perspectives On The Surveillance Scandal -- An Analysis
We are losing the foundation of innocence until proven guilty. The assumption of innocence no longer exists in a surveillance state. Neither does a Constitution with a Fourth Amendment. Neither does habeas corpus or due process. All of those are things of value in the world of democratic men and women.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 14, 2020 An Encore for Charlie Hebdo
French enthusiasm for Charlie Hebdo has fueled Islamophobia and led others to use the situation to argue for the restriction of civil rights.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 24, 2013 Taking Sides In Egypt
The people naively believed the assurances of the military leader, Abdel Fattah el Sisi, that after Morsi was done away with, the military would bring them "real" democracy (an idealistic 33-point liberal constitution was produced but never implemented). In this way the secular democratic groups who helped bring down one dictatorship provided cover for the return of the same sort of dictatorship with different faces.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 21, 2013 On the Death of Helen Thomas
The way the Israelis behave they have no need of Helen Thomas to "delegitimize" their country. They are doing a fine job of that on their own. Thomas's remarks came in the aftermath of a piratical attack on the Gaza Aid Flotilla, during which Israeli commandos murdered nine aid activists on the Mavi Marmara.
(10 comments) SHARE Monday, March 4, 2019 Anti-Semitism vs. Anti-Zionism in France
Anti-Semitism is nothing new in France. It is embedded in a certain French self-image that is, in the end, reluctant to allow entry to anyone not deemed truly French, be they Muslims or Jews. Unless French leaders are willing to challenge this cultural puritanism, they will find anti-Semitism, and other forms of xenophobic passions, poisoning their national life for the indefinite future.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 6, 2012 The Picking-a-President Dilemma
Many Americans struggle with the moral and practical issue of whether to vote for someone who may be the better choice to be President but who is still far from perfect. With the upcoming election, that choice is even more critical.
SHARE Thursday, April 21, 2016 Netanyahu's Mind
In cases where the behavior of the offending state is criminal and often barbaric, change, be it easy or hard, must ultimately come. And, in fact, the Israelis and their supporters are in the process of learning the price of following the dictates of "Netanyahu's mind."
SHARE Sunday, January 10, 2021 Defending Apartheid
The predictable Palestinian struggle seeking equality and the end of apartheid is seen as a subversive movement by both Israel's Jewish majority and its increasingly rightwing governments.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, August 18, 2014 Liberal Zionist Dilemma
You simply cannot adhere to the principle of universal civil and political rights and, at the same time, support a Zionist state. To do so is to involve oneself in a contradiction. The liberals are being forced to face this fact. And, as this happens, they will have to make a real choice: cease being Zionist or cease adhering to the liberal ideal.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 12, 2018 The Saudi-Israeli Liaison
Both Saudi Arabia and Israel should be anachronisms. Two nations making outrageous, unprovable claims of divine right that in turn excuses undemocratic, racist-like behavior and policies. And the United States, which also sees itself as God-blessed, readily backs them both.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 13, 2014 Stereotyping In Congress, Then and Now
The ignorant, the ideologues, and the stereotypers call out to each other decade after decade. As they echo their menacing ideas, the rest of us, mostly ignorant of all that is not local, bend our ears and listen intently. Indeed, presently it may only be the weariness of 70 years of off-and-on war that has led us to a momentary reluctance to buy into Representative Duncan's warmongering nonsense.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 19, 2013 Ideological Disaster
In the long run, things do not look good for the Republican Party. Many radical conservatives have come to see their moderate compatriots as worse than any liberal Democrat. They see them as traitors to principle--as politicians who ran scared in the face of the Obama's "socialist" agenda. Under these circumstances most of the party's energies might well be taken up with self-destructive infighting.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, February 4, 2013 The Gatekeepers -- An Analysis
To date, Israel's leaders and Zionist supporters have shown an amazing capacity to ignore all criticism. The newly re-elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has let it be known that he has no intention of watching The Gatekeepers. It is also questionable how many of those who voted for him, or other right-wing politicians, will bother to seek the documentary out.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 9, 2021 The Saturday Night Live Joke versus Israeli Behavior
Zionists are deceitful because they purposely conflate Zionism which is an ethnocentric political ideology adhered to by a subset of Jews, with Judaism, a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural religion. Then they insist that Israel's allies -- particularly the United States -- adhere to this same propagandistic conflation.
SHARE Tuesday, February 4, 2014 Is Iran the Real Problem?
In the capital of Tehran, along with the traffic congestion and air pollution, there are a myriad building projects. These are not signs of a society shriveling on the vine. To go beyond the present level of sanctions and impose the ever more draconian measures proposed by the U.S. Senate comes close to an act of war.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 11, 2012 Democracy Takes A Hit -- An Analysis
The assumption the Democratic electoral gurus act on is that American progressives really have nowhere else to go other than the Democratic Party. Staying home on election night or voting for the Green Party would be "throwing your vote away" and, in essence, helping the Republicans. Such behavior would not reflect rational decision making. Alas, this turns out to be a naive assumption even if its corollaries are true.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 10, 2013 Israel: Legitimacy and Behavior
Increasingly in the contemporary world legitimacy does not simply rest on the mere fact of occupying or asserting sovereignty over territory. Today legitimacy has to do with national behavior that satisfies international norms and laws. Now that might not be the consistent opinion of governments which are prone to hypocrisy, but it is increasingly the position taken by civil society
SHARE Saturday, August 1, 2015 On the Dangerous Aspects of Noise
The noise in the "news" is not diffused chatter but a loud and sustained message. It is, more often then not, a form of propaganda -- the same story-line repeated over and over again until it fills the public airwaves and from there comes to dominate the thought waves of the ignorant.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 2, 2012 History on a Billboard -- Fanatacism on the Ground -- An Analysis
It might very well be that Israel is here to stay. But that does not mean that it will always be the racist, oppressive society it is now. Consistently applied outside pressure, growing in scope and strength, can wear down support for ideologues, create a better society that is tolerant and mindful of the need for justice, first and foremost for Israel's victims, the Palestinian people.
SHARE Sunday, December 1, 2013 A Victory for Diplomacy
The interim deal with Iran is an act of sanity, and the present American administration, whatever other foreign policy shortcomings it has displayed (and there have been plenty) deserves praise for defying the radical right and pushing it through. As to the deal's detractors in and out of Congress, they are the warmongers among us and deserve to be exposed as such.
SHARE Friday, June 10, 2016 Two "Presumptive" Presidential Candidates: Bigots All Around
If she plays her cards right, Clinton may win over enough of the Sanders supporters to defeat Trump. However, if you are inclined to vote for Hillary, don't kid yourself that what your are going to get is an upright, ethical president unwilling to adopt openly bigoted policies against vulnerable and long suffering peoples. Clinton has clearly abandoned such standards of behavior.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, March 25, 2013 The Holy Land Gets Skunked -- An Analysis
It's one thing to punish someone for calling attention to Israel's rank behavior. It is something else to insist that foul is actually fair -- to say the sewage smells like roses. Who would be reckless enough to imply such a nauseating thing and do so with a straight face before cameras with the whole world watching? How about the President of the United States?
SHARE Thursday, June 19, 2014 The Mess in Iraq
If you want to look for those Americans who have real responsibility for this mess you have to go to those who put American troops in Iraq in the first place. You have to turn to George W. Bush and his neoconservative allies. Those are the less than brilliant minds who concocted the destruction of Iraq and left it in shambles.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 2, 2015 On Flags and Cultural Cures
If laws are consistently enforced over a long period of time, most citizens will internalize these messages and they will become part of their moral code. Except for the 12 years of Reconstruction, the South had known nothing but legally sanctioned racist rules of behavior right up to the middle of the 20th century. And so it was racist rules that were thoroughly internalized.
SHARE Tuesday, September 25, 2012 Red Lines And Presidential Politics -- An Analysis
The standard retribution practiced by the Israel lobby against a recalcitrant American politician is to try to get him or her kicked out of office. Usually this is done in a low-key way and most Americans don't even know it is happening. But this time the act of revenge, driven by an egocentric and bellicose Israeli Prime Minister, is being carried out in full public view.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 5, 2013 In Praise Of Richard Falk -- An Analysis
Richard Falk's crime is to be a person of note, an esteemed academic and a respected servant of the United Nations, who is trying to break through with the truth. At least at the level of leadership and media, the United States is not capable of such self-reflection and so its citizens are likely to be the last to know that much of the terrorism they fear is a product of their own government's continuing barbarism.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 9, 2014 Justice Corrupted
Times of high tension often result in the lowering of important standards in the application of law. They do so by heightening the fears of the general public, which in turn gives license to bigots embedded in the justice system such as judges and prosecutors who have Islamophobic prejudices, Zionist biases, or neoconservative delusions. When dogmatists are in control none of us are really free.
SHARE Friday, April 12, 2019 Are Democracy and Despotic Racism Compatible?
what is the legacy of Zionism? The establishment of genuine democracy in the Middle East? Is it even the realization of a haven for the world's Jews against the next Holocaust? No, it is neither of these. It is rather the melding of an elitist pseudo-democracy with racist despotism -- the realization of an elitist fortress from which Israel maintains distinctly undemocratic control of a hinterland full of conquered people.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, August 20, 2012 Forgetting the Why of the New Deal
Until the Great Crash of 1929, the federal government did little to regulate the power of Wall Street as it precipitated cycles of boom and bust that ruined the lives of many Americans. That history is now being forgotten as Republicans move to dismantle what's left of the New Deal.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 6, 2014 The Question of State Legitimacy
There has been a tendency for the lessons learned about the importance of human rights to fade with time, particularly from the institutional memories of state bureaucracies. The proclivity of all state apparatuses to behave in a Machiavellian way has reasserted itself, particularly in the foreign policies of Western democratic states.
SHARE Monday, December 1, 2014 Attack on Academic Freedom Redux
The Salaita case is not the only recent attempt to intimidate academics critical of Israel. An organization calling itself AMCHA ("your people" in Hebrew) and purporting to work for the "protection of Jewish students" has posted a list of over 200 professors who support the boycott of Israel. They too have been judged anti-Semitic and Jewish students are urged by the organization to avoid their classes.
SHARE Monday, August 5, 2013 What National Interest?
Special interests such as the Zionist lobby can and do buy themselves control over vital aspects of Middle East foreign policy. It is a failed system which has already dragged the nation halfway to hell. Another "10 or 20 years" will take us the rest of the way in.
SHARE Tuesday, May 31, 2016 The Opportunist and the Fanatics
How long will the marriage of convenience between the opportunist Donald Trump and the fanatics of the NRA last? Well, that is really up to Trump, the self-styled unpredictable one. What do opportunists and fanatics have in common? Fanatics rarely change, but opportunists are always playing the odds.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, February 29, 2016 Cruelty as a Campaign Come-On
Some have described Trump as a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder. Whether or not that is how you want to label him, he certainly has no problem publicly promoting cruelty. And, a subset of the American population responds positively to his abusive behavior.
SHARE Friday, January 8, 2016 BDS in the Crosshairs
our greatest enemy is our indifference to the quiet erosion of important aspects of the democratic process. Allowing the attack on BDS only contributes to this disintegration of rights. However, in the end, there can be no excuse for not paying attention. One morning we will wake up to find that valued rights and traditions are no longer there for us.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 6, 2013 Egypt's All-Or-Nothing Politics
Morsi was in office for about a year and never had effective control of an economy that has been derelict for decades. He was even accused of increasing the influence of the United States in Egypt. These accusations made little sense and were probably propaganda moves made in an effort to destroy the new government altogether.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 8, 2015 Terrorism and Some Hard Truths
Politicians will take up the cry of Islamic terrorism because it frees them from any immediate need to take on the real -- and politically dangerous -- problem of gun control. Most of them are cowards when it comes to hard truths and the difficult need to lay them convincingly before the public. It is always more expedient to rile the masses than educate them.
SHARE Sunday, November 29, 2020 A Near Miss with Despotic Selfishness
Donald Trump spent four years glorifying and modeling his selfishness. His worst performance came with the COVID-19 pandemic. At that point, Trump played the role of the despotic Nero fiddling while the United States went down in the flames of a worldwide plague.
SHARE Thursday, April 3, 2014 Mr. Rosenberg's Conundrum
Can justice be achieved for the long-suffering Palestinians while preserving Israel as an exclusive Jewish state? Rosenberg wants to answer this question in the affirmative and he thinks a two-state solution will allow him to do so. Unfortunately, that is "not how the real world works" (his phrase again) in Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, December 18, 2015 Converging Fears
In a world of competing powers and ideologies, insecurity seems forever just around the corner. This too comes in historical cycles. And, if such insecurity becomes deep enough and widespread enough it can threaten finely balanced democratic political systems as citizens forget about constitutional rights, which support peace and stability at home, and go looking for "strong leaders."
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 26, 2013 Rights Erosion -- An Analysis
As long as the law is denied to some, we are all at risk. The majority does not understand this. They do not understand that for democracy to be worth its salt, it must defend the rights of everyone, and particularly those who disagree with, live differently from, and think differently than the majority. As goes due process rights, so goes our democracy.
SHARE Tuesday, September 3, 2013 Congress and the Imperial Presidency Debate Syria
The notion that the President of the United States, with or without Congressional approval, has the authority to act as the world's "policeman" and punish violators of international laws, that it itself flaunts, is offensive and dangerous. Let's hope that Congress listens to the people this time around and tells the President to keep his cruise missiles to himself.
SHARE Monday, June 2, 2014 Class Segregation and the Housing Market
The tactic now being employed by the landlords and developers is to add amenities to existing buildings -- things like roof gardens, gyms, playrooms for children, added storage areas and the like -- and then prevent those tenants in rent-regulated apartments from using them. Landlords and developers argue that these new amenities are "market tools" to attract high-end tenants who will pay market rates for apartments.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 28, 2013 In Syria, Weapons of Mass Destruction Redux
the voting population is the main "constituency" of politicians only at election time. Right now it is reported that approximately 60% of that constituency does not want the U.S. to attack Syria. However, it is not election time. In the post-election period, the politician's real constituency becomes special interests most of whom are anxious for an attack on Syria.
SHARE Friday, May 17, 2013 Alan Hart and What It Takes to Struggle On -- An Analysis
Thirty years ago you could not critically raise the subject of Israel in public, and thus the Zionists had a monopoly on the entire history of this issue. That is emphatically not the case today. Despite Alan Hart's unfortunate experience, the fact is that, at a popular level, the Zionists have lost control of the Palestine narrative.
SHARE Wednesday, February 17, 2016 Combating BDS Act of 2016
Congressmen and senators tied to Zionist special interests will eventually have to rethink these alliances. Their connection with a state that has no compunction about violating international law has led them to become accomplices in the undermining of U.S. law.
SHARE Monday, October 14, 2013 Still Staying Sober
It is one thing to get to the negotiating table and another to have the political wherewithal and courage to make the reasonable compromises necessary for a successful settlement. The Iranians want their rights recognized and sanctions lifted. Getting Congress to go along with that will take visible public demand. Progressives will have to find a way to help realize that demand.