Much of the study of Islamophobia is directed at the social and political causes and manifestations, including religious and political dimensions and racist characteristics. However, Islamophobia is also used as a strategic tool or weapon; i.e., in pursuit of national agenda.
Many of us are familiar with Islamophobic movements within the Buddhist majority in Myanmar (against the Rohingya minority), and within Hindu nationalist parties in India. It is important to note, however, that it is characteristic of these movements that they direct their Islamophobia against particular groups of Muslims within their own societies, and are less concerned with creating an international …
Washington’s current foreign-policy practice is a bit reminiscent of the golden era of the Ottoman Sublime Porte, in the sense that any visit by a leader of a vassal state is seen as nothing more than an opportunity for a public demonstration of his willingness to serve the great sultan or, in the modern context, to do the bidding of the master of the White House.
The visitor must also wear a big grin and speak passionately about how happy he is to have been given the opportunity to kiss the Sultan’s slippers. Or, to put it in the …
Hot on the heels of the Benjamin Netanyahu “nuclear archive” show supposedly revealing Iranian perfidy, US President Donald Trump added succour to the Israeli cause by promising to withdraw from the Iran Nuclear deal, more lengthily known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The JCPOA originally comprised various undertakings and actions on the part of the Obama administration: the rescinding of various executive orders imposing nuclear sanctions on Tehran (Executive Orders 13574, 13590, 13622 and 13645) and specific sections of Executive Order 13628. To this laundry list were added persons and entities deemed Specially Designated Nationals and Foreign …
by Andre Vltchek and John B. Cobb Jr. / May 8th, 2018
There is no time for long introductions. The world is possibly heading for yet another catastrophe. This one, if we human beings will not manage to prevent it, could become our final. Communist Victory in Beijing, China
The West is flexing its muscle, antagonizing every single country that stands on its way to total domination of the Planet. Some countries, including Syria, are attacked directly and mercilessly. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people are dying.
Political and potentially military disaster is simultaneously ‘complemented’ by the ecological ruin. Mainly …
The media has focused on gay adoption for quite a while, perhaps because it is controversial and controversy – like sex – sells. So, it is little wonder the attention being given to gay rights advocates who are up in arms about laws they see as discriminating against them in the adoption arena based on religious beliefs of adoption agencies such as the law recently passed in Kansas granting legal protections for faith-based adoption agencies that refuse to place children in LGBTQ homes.
LGBTQ activists have now been joined by “tech giants” Google and Apple lobbying against such laws that …
While the media has been full of news about information-gathering by Facebook and other Internet giants, other secretive organizations that are a major threat to our personal privacy and public security are seldom mentioned. And when they are, it has most often been because politicians are praising them and offering up more money for them to spy.
For example, Justin Trudeau recently promoted the “Anglosphere’s” intelligence sharing arrangement. Two weeks ago, in a rare move, the PM revealed a meeting with his “Five Eyes” counterparts. After the meeting in London Trudeau labelled the 2,000 employee Communications Security Establishment, …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / May 6th, 2018
Karl Marx images through his lifetime. Artist unknown.
In 1888, Marx wrote, “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
On this 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx we focus on Marx as a political activist, rather than what he is best known for, an economist and philosopher who wrote some of the most important analyses explaining capitalism and putting forward an alternative economic model.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote, “The history of all previous societies has …
The White House is more and more looking like a house of cards. After 16 months the staff is demoralized, in disarray and divided, some prone to leak embarrassing news to the press. (Trump in January banned personal cell phones in the West Wing, indicating that he mistrusts everyone around him.) While Trump is reported to dislike firing people (in real life as opposed to his reality show The Apprentice), over 12 top officials have left so far, among them the secretary of state, who called him a moron. The high rate of staff turnover suggests that Trump lacks judgment; …
We normal people have two incredibly difficult and very serious problems to overcome. One is a basically mendacious and corrupt system of government, which routinely lies to us when, for example, it tells us it has no money for our essential services such as a well-funded NHS or free universities (like we used to have here in the UK), but has no trouble at all finding money to fund illegal wars and foreign terrorist groups, or finding hundreds of millions to bail out bankrupt zombie banks. Or when it slanders Russia or attacks Syria, for example, without any verifiable evidence …
Beirut, Lebanon: Saturday, May 5, 2018 — On this lovely morning here on the coast of the Mediterranean there is not a cloud in the sky. In less than twenty-four hours voting will begin. However, on this day before the election, a howling wind is blowing from the south making the thousands of posters, banners and building-sized placards that feature the faces of the scores of potential Lebanese parliamentarians dance and sway wildly above the throngs of tomorrows voters.
But this wind, one that just yesterday seemed to bring the promise of a new future for Lebanon, will it be an ill …
On April 9, 2018 at least 14 people were killed during the murderous strike by the Israeli air force on the Syrian T-4 airfield at Homs.
Israeli F-15 fighter jets flew over Lebanese airspace, as they have done on many previous occasions, in total disregard of international law.
Both Israel and Lebanon are still technically at war, and the latest action could easily be considered as yet another shameless provocation. Apparently, whatever terror Western allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel decide to spread throughout the region, their actions will always go unpunished.
To add insult to injury, instead of condemning Israel, the Western …
Over the past half-century, I have been engaged in research, lectured and worked with social movements and leftist governments in Latin America. I interviewed US officials and think tanks in Washington and New York. I have written scores of books, hundreds of professional articles and presented numerous papers at professional meetings.
In the course, of my activity I have discovered that many academics frequently engage in what government officials dub ‘de-briefing’! Academics meet and discuss their field-work, data collection, research finding, observations and personal contacts …
This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy – acting as a watchdog on power – formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. The tell is in one small word in a headline on today’s Guardian’s front page: “Revealed”.
When I trained as a journalist, we reserved a “Revealed” or an “Exposed” for those special occasions when we were able to bring to the reader information those in power did not want known. These were the …
Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians are also being criticized by prominent Israeli politicians. The below comments are from the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, on systemic racism in Israeli society and published in The Times of Israel. ((Ben Sales, “New president seeks to cure ‘epidemic’ of racism” ‘Israeli society is sick, and it is our duty to treat this disease’ and ease tensions between Arabs and Jews, Rivlin tells academics,” Times of Israel, 24 October 2014.))
Israel’s president fills a largely ceremonial role — meeting with foreign dignitaries, representing the government at state funerals and other official gatherings. …
As the capitalist elite continues to pour ever more resources into its crusade to dismantle society, it’s important to keep a tally of the damage done—if only to direct popular attention to where it’s needed most, and to where the Left’s own resources are needed most. High on the list of capitalist priorities, and thus of priorities for left-wing resistance, is the goal to privatize everything from education to nature to policing and soldiering. With that in mind, here’s a list of some recent “negative externalities” of privatization that I’ve culled from news sources.
You’ve no doubt heard of the White Helmets, aka the Syria Civil Defense. They claim to be a neutral entity in Syria. They say they are just helping people caught in the middle of a civil war. But are they? Follow the money and you will find numerous ties to government funding from not only the U.S., but the U.K., Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. We untangle these ties to the White Helmets in a Reality Check you won’t get anywhere else.
Peace in the Koreas is what the world expects; and Peace in the world is what humanity expects, the vast majority. 99.9% of the world population wants peace, but it’s the 0.1% that commands war and destruction, since war and destruction is what runs the western economy. Literally. If peace would break out what we in the west still call economy — though it’s a fraud, every day more visible — would collapse. In the US the war industry with all the associated production and service industries, including the Silicon Valley and banking, contributes more than 50% to GDP. Nobody …
A Review of Dan Kovalik’s The Plot to Attack Iran: How the CIA and the Deep State have Conspired to Vilify Iran
by Stansfield Smith / May 3rd, 2018
The Plot to Attack Iran gives a readable and well-referenced look at Western — especially US — abuse of Iran. The author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik presents a concise overview of US imperial conduct since World War II. The book is a reminder, which we need from time to time, of the outrageous hypocrisy and deceit of the US government and the corporate media. Kovalik also drives home that Washington’s foreign policy operations are not just a threat to other countries, but threaten the basic safety of the US people.
The authoritarian misfits in the Turnbull government have again rumbled and uttered suspicions long held: Australian residents and citizens are not to be trusted, and the intelligence services should start getting busy in expanding their operations against the next Doomsday threat.
This became clear from leaked material on discussions that illustrate in no subtle way the security paranoia afflicting officials in the nation’s various capitals. A merry bunch they are too, featuring the Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and his advisor and department secretary, Mike Pezzullo. These latest discussions disclose not so much a change of approach as a continuation …
He’s gone from shaking hands with the devil to promoting Africa’s most bloodstained ruler.
Last week Roméo Dallaire attended a screening of Rwanda — The Royal Tour in Chicago. The tourism documentary criss-crosses that country with Paul Kagame and the Rwandan dictator was on hand for the premiere. Six months ago Dallaire met Rwanda’s war criminal defence minister, James Kabarebe, in Vancouver and in 2016 the former Canadian general spoke alongside Kagame in Toronto.
All this despite growing attention to Kagame’s brutality and questions regarding the official story of the Rwandan genocide, which underpins his legitimacy. The President of …
Those titular words were sent to me by Fr. Daniel Berrigan shortly before he died.
It is a glorious spring day as I write. The day my father died was also glorious, and I cried like a baby. It was 25 years ago today, May 1, 1993. To the young it must seem like a long time ago. To me it is yesterday. I am his namesake for which I feel blessed. Every day that passes I realize how profound his influence has been on me. Perhaps not obvious to others, it runs like an underground stream that carries me forward …
The hidden battle in Syria – the one that rarely appears on our television screens – has been raging for years between Israel and a coalition comprising the Syrian government, Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah.
Watching over the proceedings without directly intervening has been Russia, although that might be about to change.
The prize is control over Syrian territory but the battlefield is Syria’s skies.
According to United Nations figures, the Israeli military violated Syrian airspace more than 750 times in the four-month period leading up to last October, with its warplanes and drones spending some 3,200 hours over the country. On …
Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.
— Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Boys injured by an airstrike on a wedding in the isolated village of Hajjah, Yemen, at a hospital on Monday. (photo: Reuters)
***** Textbook terrorist tactic and war crime – who cares?
On an impoverished, remote mountain village in northwest Yemen, the wedding celebration was still going strong when the first airstrike hit around 11 p.m. on April 22. The Saudi attacks killed the bride first, death toll to “at least 33 people.” The nearest hospital was miles away in Hajjah. The only two cars in the …
A Review of Donald Worster’s Shrinking The Earth: The Rise & Decline of Natural Abundance
by Robert Hunziker / May 2nd, 2018
Ever wonder how the classical philosophers/economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo would view today’s credo of infinite economic growth, forever more, above and beyond yesteryear. Well, in a word, they would be horrified. Ricardo, similar to the father of capitalism Adam Smith, believed in the concept of a “stationary state” when the land gets fully exploited and material progress comes to an end.
These classical economists did not advocate limitless growth, which today is how neoliberal advocates see their destiny. In fact, Ricardo added the “law of diminishing returns” to Smith’s original thesis, which included bold mention of the “stationary …
The financial industry is but one of many industries in the modern world. Besides whatever their stated purposes may be, every one of their modus operandi can be “unmasked” to reveal some degree and form of wrongdoing and harm done, as I did once in a very cursory way. ((Brumback, GB. “Corporate America Unmasked“, The Greanville Post, January 3; OpEdNews, January 4; Dissident Voice, January 4; Uncommon Thought Journal, January 7, 2018))
One of those industries, the financial industry, is comprised of numerous sectors such as the insurance industry, for instance. I have written about how it along with its …
All smiles and hugs is the current French President, Emmanuel Macron. In the White House, there seemed to be an emotional equation generated by the supposedly warm relationship between President Donald Trump and his guest. In entertainment vision, substance would only consist of wiping the dandruff off the jacket of Macron and handshakes so firm they appear, at stages, to be the weary product of Stockholm syndrome.
A stream of inanities on Macron’s travels developed into a rampaging flood on the idea of what all this back rubbing and hand holding meant. The Bromance theorists became an irritating phenomenon, a cult …
Three more Palestinians were killed and 611 wounded last Friday, when tens of thousands of Gazans continued their largely non-violent protests at the Gaza-Israel border.
Yet as the casualty count keeps climbing – nearly 45 dead and over 5,500 wounded – the deafening silence also continues. Tellingly, many of those who long chastised Palestinians for using armed resistance against the Israeli occupation are nowhere to be found, while children, journalists, women and men are all targeted by hundreds of Israeli snipers who dot the Gaza border.
Israeli officials are adamant. The likes of Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, perceives his war against …
