Latest articles
by Michael Keefer / October 14th, 2015
Stephen Harper has been talking recently about “old stock” Canadians — and at the same time stirring up fear and loathing against more recent arrivals in this country, notably those of Muslim faith, in order to mobilize electoral support for his Conservative Party.
I think it’s time “old stock” Canadians shared their opinion of these antics. Perhaps I qualify for the job, since my ancestors arrived here two and a quarter centuries ago. (That’s a blink of the eye by native standards, but we may have preceded the Harpers.)
The first thing to say is that my family — the widow and …
Iran Has Been Transparent and Accountable Over its Nuclear Program: Andre Vltchek
by Kourosh Ziabari / October 14th, 2015
An acclaimed philosopher and journalist who has recently visited Iran tells Fars News Agency that the reality of Iran is absolutely different from the way it’s being illustrated in the mainstream media.
Andre Vltchek says: “Iran that you see when visiting the country has nothing in common with that imaginary, terrible and cruel Iran that the West’s mass media has created.”
Commenting on Iran’s nuclear program and the international responses to it, Andre Vltchek says the majority of the Middle East nations and the global public don’t have any objections to Iran developing nuclear technology, considering Iran’s peaceful nature and its long …
by James Hoover / October 13th, 2015
America is pretty much a corporate state (a whimsical view): take your pick — a plutocracy, an oligarchy, or a corporatocracy. By just stating this, our job is not ended. In fact, we have stood by so long and let it happen, almost to the extent that its entrenchment is so complete that a social democracy is perhaps, not recoverable.
This culture has seeped into our pores like an infection you have difficulty getting rid of. All institutions have been drawn into the cultural mix but one element, a branch of government we forget, drastically affects our lives — the …
by Ramzy Baroud / October 13th, 2015
When my book Searching Jenin was published soon after the Israeli massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, I was quizzed repeatedly by the media and many readers for conferring the word ‘massacre’ on what Israel has depicted as a legitimate battle against camp-based ‘terrorists’.
The interrogative questions were aimed at relocating the narrative from a discussion regarding possible war crimes into a technical dispute over the application of language. For them, the evidence of Israel’s violations of human rights mattered little.
This kind of reductionism has often served as the prelude to any discussion concerning the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict: events …
by Ludwig Watzal / October 13th, 2015
BONN, GERMANY — Not many people have the guts to question the official narrative of the attacks committed on 9/11 in the United States of America, in London, Madrid, Mumbai or elsewhere, which governments attribute to Islamic terrorists. Elias Davidsson is one of those, who in 2002 became skeptical of the official account on 9/11 and later more generally of the widely held belief that Islamic terrorism exists as a real and distinct threat.
Elias Davidsson was born in Palestine in 1941. His parents left Germany due to the persecution of Jews. He lived in Jerusalem in his childhood and …
The deliberate torturous death of a once proud nation
by Andre Vltchek / October 13th, 2015
Last year, I stopped travelling to Indonesia. I simply did… I just could not bear being there anymore. It was making me unwell. I felt psychologically and physically sick.
Indonesia has matured into perhaps the most corrupt country on Earth, and possibly into the most indoctrinated and compassionless place anywhere under the sun. Here, even the victims were not aware of their own conditions anymore. The victims felt shame, while the mass murderers were proudly bragging about all those horrendous killings and rapes they had committed. Genocidal cadres are all over the government.
Don’t get me wrong: there is really nothing wrong …
Unrest grows among Palestinian citizens of Israel, outraged by restrictions on access to al-Aqsa and causalities in the occupied territories
by Jonathan Cook / October 13th, 2015
The violence rocking the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and now Gaza is on the verge of spilling into Israel, Palestinian leaders in Israel warned.
A wave of unrest has swept Palestinian towns in Israel over recent days, with repeated clashes with Israeli police in Nazareth, Jaffa, Lod, Ramle, Taibeh, Sakhnin, Rahat, Kfar Qassem and elsewhere. Dozens of protesters have been arrested.
On Thursday, as Palestinians declared a day of rage, police fired tear gas and stun grenades and led baton charges against several hundred protesters in Nazareth, the largest Palestinian city in Israel. Sixteen demonstrators, five of them minors, were arrested.
“We want …
by Stanley Cohen / October 13th, 2015
In its first full week of a “new” get tough policy, almost 500 young Palestinian demonstrators were injured, shot and maimed, and at least three teens murdered in response to what Israel sees as a rising tide of “militant” resistance against the illegally occupied and, by now, almost completely annexed West Bank. At the same time, the IOF has not only increased its already frequent bombing runs in the embattled, largely defenseless Gaza Strip, but tightened it’s concentration-camp like grip on 1.8 million civilians, reducing even further the trickle of essential goods, food shipments and medicines permitted into the beleaguered …
Is the revolution any closer?
by Denis Rancourt / October 12th, 2015
Author and social scientist Stuart Tannock has recently published a historical and critical overview of the practice of grading in education, in which he concludes:
This article uses the example of assessment to argue that if the public university is to perform the role of fostering critical, reflexive, independent and democratically minded thinkers – a role that has been universally embraced by its promoters – then the use of grading in higher education assessment needs to be strongly contested. ((Tannock, Stuart, “No grades in higher education now! Revisiting the place of graded assessment in the reimagination of the public …
I will take the punishment, the torture, the injustice with a fat happy consumer smile on my face
by Paul Haeder / October 12th, 2015
Here I go again – the at-will piece of human detritus that I am, according to Oregon’s great employers, twice now, non-profits, sacking me because I pushed the state’s vocational rehabilitation careerists outside their pathetic Little Eichmann lives by pushing for my clients – adults with developmental-intellectual-psychological disabilities – to get as much out of the state’s bureaucracies that are filled with middling folk who do not give a shit about people.
At-fucking-will means No Rights in the Workplace. That’s what these doublethink folk call it – right to work states. Making 18 bucks an hour, driving my ass off daily …
by Jack Balkwill / October 11th, 2015
The boy lived in New York City,
They chased the boy right through the park
In a case of mistaken identity
They put a bullet through his heart
Heartbreakers, with your forty four,
I wanna tear your world apart,
Heartbreakers, with your forty four,
I’m gonna tear that world apart”
– Mick Jagger, “Heartbreaker“, released August 1973
Last year, on the anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, Tamir Rice, a 12 year old African American boy, was shot down in cold blooded murder by police in Cleveland, Ohio.
The boy had been reported by an onlooker as carrying a pistol, but the caller reporting it said it might be a …
by Ali Kazak / October 11th, 2015
For years Israel and its lobby around the world have been trying to normalise their relations with Arabs and Muslims without solving the Palestine Question.
One of the methods they resorted to in the last few years is using human rights and community organizations such as interfaith dialogue and Multiculturalism to achieve this objective and to: isolate the Palestinians, marginalise the Palestine question, end Israel’s isolation, and prevent criticism of Israel, knowing that these organisations will be the first to stand against Israel’s violations, racial and religious discrimination.
The group responsible for this task in Australia is The Australia/Israel & …
Save Children from War!
by Dr. Hakim / October 11th, 2015
I felt empty when I heard that to the north of where I work in Kabul, bombs were dropped on a ‘Doctors Without Borders’ Hospital in #Kunduz, for a full hour.
12 hospital staff and 10 patients were killed, three of them Afghan children. 33 persons are still missing.
Borderfree Afghan Street Kids say that the three Afghan children shouldn’t have been killed by a U.S. airstrike on a Doctor Without Borders Hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
I wondered if it was mainly medical personnel like myself who felt sad.
So, together with Ali, an Afghan Peace Volunteer, I asked the Borderfree Afghan Street Kids, …
by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers / October 11th, 2015
The confluence of Columbus Day Weekend and the Kunduz hospital bombing has us thinking about the deep levels of cultural violence in the United States and what can be done to change it. How does the US move from a country dominated by war culture to one dominated by a humanitarian culture? And, how do we do it in time to avoid war with China and Russia, which both advanced closer this week.
What does Celebrating Columbus say About the Character of the United States?
Popular Resistance has reported on the legacy of Columbus. Howard Zinn describes the true history of Columbus and …
Putin and the Press
by James Petras / October 11th, 2015
The major influential western print media are engaged in a prolonged, large-scale effort to demonize Russian President Putin, his politics and persona. There is an article (or several articles) every day in which he is personally stigmatized as a dictator, authoritarian, czar, ‘former KGB operative’ and Soviet-style ruler; anything but the repeatedly elected President of Russia.
He is accused of hijacking Russia from the ‘road to democracy’, as pursued by his grotesquely corrupt predecessor Boris Yeltsin; of directing the bloody repression of the ‘freedom loving Chechens’; of jailing …
by William T. Hathaway / October 11th, 2015
This year marks the 20th anniversary of wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park. From 66 released originally they’ve increased to over 300 and are no longer endangered. That they thrive here is not surprising, for they are creatures of this raw land in a way that we aren’t. Wolves are fitted to this environment, and so to understand them, we have to know the country that nurtures them.
The area from Yellowstone to central Idaho has one of the lowest densities of human population in the United States. Those who do live here are held in thrall by land and weather, …
by Eva Bartlett / October 10th, 2015
Over the past five years, the increasingly ridiculous propaganda against President al-Assad and the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has ranged from the scripted (OTPOR fomented -“revolution“) “peaceful protesters under fire” rhetoric, to other deceitful lexicon like “civil war,” and “moderate rebels.”
As the intervention campaigns continue with new terrorist and “humanitarian” actors (literally) constantly emerging in the NATO-alliance’s theatre of death squads, it is worth reviewing some of the important points regarding the war on Syria.
Million Person Marches
On March 29, 2011 (less than two weeks into the fantasy “revolution”) over 6 million people across Syria took to the …
by Jonathan Cook / October 9th, 2015
In the age of phone cameras, we have become increasingly used to photos and videos of Palestinians in the West Bank being shot by soldiers in unjustifiable circumstances.
Think of 18-year-old Hadeel Hashlamon, who was killed late last month at a checkpoint in Hebron. A series of photos of her suggest, in the words of Amnesty International, that she was “executed” by the soldiers there. She was shot multiple times and left to bleed to death.
The army claimed she had a knife, which they photographed on the ground nearby. But whether she was carrying the knife or it was planted there, still an issue that …
by Andre Vltchek / October 9th, 2015
Tens of millions of European and North American immigrants, legal and illegal, have been flooding both the cities and countryside in Asia, Latin America, and even Africa.
Western migrants are charging like bulls and the ground is shaking under their feet; they are fleeing Europe and North America in hordes. Deep down they cannot stand their own lifestyle, their own societies, but you would hardly hear them pronounce it. They are too proud and too arrogant! But, after recognizing innumerable areas of the world as suitable for their personal needs – as safe, attractive and cheap – they simply pack and …
As Long as They are not Ruling Class Children
by Jack Balkwill / October 9th, 2015
Teach your parents well,
Their children’s hell
Will slowly go by
And freed them on your dreams
— Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, “Teach Your Children,” from their 1970 album “Deja Vu”
As U.S. bombs and gunfire continue to fall on the Middle East, Southwest Asia, many nations in Africa and across much of the third world, corporate media remind us that Halloween is just ahead, and after that, the “holiday season,” so we should ignore anything but our primary purpose as consumers, to buy stuff, throw it away and replace it with new stuff.
This consumer job makes the rich richer, which is what …
by John V. Walsh / October 9th, 2015
One half of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine went to Tu Youyou for her discovery of the antimalarial drug artemisinin. Many of us who do research in the biological sciences have felt that this award was long overdue.
The discovery of artemisinin has saved the lives of millions. And so the Nobel is proper recognition for Dr. Tu, for China and for the advancing role of women in science here and around the world.
There is an interesting and illuminating back story to Dr. Tu’s discovery. In the 1960s North Vietnam and the Vietcong were at war with the …
by John R. Hall / October 9th, 2015
God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
This is the first verse of a hymn entitled “Conflict: Light Shining out of Darkness,” written by William Cowper in 1773. The author failed at a suicide attempt after penning his creation. More than likely he was simply overcome with the mystery of God’s ways. Since that time, some version of the first six words have been repeated by devout Christians more than seven hundred trillion times (estimate). I’ve personally heard a form of the phrase at least three hundred thousand times …
Waiting in Vain for Moderation
by Binoy Kampmark / October 8th, 2015
The most unedifying spectacle since Russia’s full-blooded attempt to change the tide of conflict in Bashar al-Assad’s favour has been the lexical scrounging on the part of Western governments. They are on the hunt for excuses what, exactly, they are defending, let alone protecting.
There is little doubt that no intervention would be the best sort of intervention in Syria. That tends to be the rule for most countries where sectarian, brutal conflict takes place. Secular religions such as humanitarian intervention, or regime change in the name of human security, are no less dangerous than fanatics who have also …
by Jonathan Cook / October 7th, 2015
Here is the US changing its story for the FOURTH time of why it launched an air strike on the Doctors without Borders hospital in the Afghan town of Kunduz at the weekend, massacring at least 22 patients and hospital staff.
As Glenn Greenwald has doggedly pointed out, the western media have been faithfully changing their account repeatedly and largely uncritically of what happened to keep in line with US claims. CNN and the New York Times have been particularly egregious offenders. The media monitoring group FAIR has also produced a revealing overview of the NYT’s coverage …
And what is really happening in Syria?
by T.P. Wilkinson / October 7th, 2015
Seventy years after the UN Charter was supposed to prohibit wars of aggression, we can see that the only countries that have complied with the spirit of the charter have been the so-called communist block, now non-communist Russia and nominally communist China.
Unlike the Soviet government on 7 July 1950, inexplicably absent from the Security Council and hence unable to veto Resolution 84, used by the US as its pretext to invade Korea, the Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government have rejected any Security Council resolution rubber-stamping of the US war in Syria. That is probably the most remarkable historical …
by Eric Walberg / October 7th, 2015
The number of pilgrims visiting Mecca for the Hajj has increased exponentially—from 57,000 in 1921 to more than two million this year. As more Muslims want to come each year, the demand to accommodate them will continue to increase. But the death toll in this year’s Hajj continues to climb (1,112 and still counting) as a result of the incident where two waves of pilgrims in Mina converging on a narrow road (which had been partly closed to allow a VIP Saudi prince to jump the cue), causing people to suffocate or be trampled to death.
The Hajj was never intended …
Lynton Crosby in Canada
by Binoy Kampmark / October 6th, 2015
Lynton Crosby has a full schedule. He is the modern electoral PR hitman for parties in dire straits. He is hired to stir the pot of resentment and undermine hopes for change. His very existence suggests that democracies are shadows of their actual function, operating on traditional platforms of populism when required.
Those familiar with the Crosby portfolio should be aware about various hobgoblin practices he has been engaging in over the years. When he has the brief of desperation from governments in trouble, racial and immigration tensions will be fanned. The security state imperative will be …
#GlobalGoals?
by Rajesh Makwana / October 6th, 2015
It’s high time UN agencies and the mainstream media acknowledge the true scale of global poverty and engage in a long overdue public debate on how ambitious and transformative the international development agenda really is.
As the star-studded endorsements and media hype surrounding the all-pervasive Global Goals campaign begins to subside, a very different truth is beginning to emerge about this latest attempt by the international community to end poverty and create an ecologically viable future. Despite the UN’s ambitious claims, all the indications are that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do not have the potential to “free the human …
by Matt Peppe / October 6th, 2015
A week and a half ago news emerged from Havana that the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the Colombian government had reached a framework for a final peace agreement to be signed within six months. This was hailed as a breakthrough in the half-century-old conflict and an opportunity to bring peace to the people of Colombia. But by adopting the government’s narrative, mainstream media have failed to recognize the primary cause of the violence and the inevitability that it will continue in the future.
The decades-long policy of the Colombian government has been a national security strategy …
by Paul Craig Roberts / October 6th, 2015
In his comment on the mass shootings at the Oregon community college, President Obama said: “This has become routine.”
So have police shootings of unarmed and unresisting Americans.
So have numerous other undesirable and deplorable happenings, such as the foreclosure on the homes of millions of Americans, while the “banks too big to fail” are bailed out with trillions of dollars, and such as foreign policy lies that have destroyed seven countries, bringing the US and Europe millions of refugees.
In addition there are the foreign policy lies that have brought the US and Europe into conflict with Russia, and the economic lies …
