For eight years, Ariel Sharon, former Prime Minister of the State of Israel from 2000-2006, has been kept alive, though he has been in a comatose state, unable to talk or communicate naturally. The Times of Israel, the Huffington Post, Haaretz, and Britain’s Guardian have recognized his impending death. Perhaps it is time to bring closure to this man, known as the “butcher of Beirut” for his massacre at the refugee camps in that city, Sabra and Shatila: “The massacre lasted for three days (16, 17, and 18 of September 1982), approximately 3500-8000 persons, including children, infants, women and elderly …
It is easy to forget, with eulogies casting him as the unexpected “peace-maker”, that for most of his long military and political career Ariel Sharon was known simply as The Bulldozer. That is certainly how he will be remembered by Palestinians.
His death was announced on Israeli army radio on Saturday. He was 85 years old and had been comatose since 2006.
Mikhael Warschawski, a founder of the joint Israeli-Palestinian advocacy group the Alternative Information Centre, describes Sharon as one of only two “political visionaries” in Israel’s history, along with the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion.
After having many positive views of New Jersey Governor Christie mainly because he seemed like a better kind of politician, maybe being someone the public could actually trust, I now see him as just another untrustworthy, dishonest politician.
As a political junkie I have followed very closely the whole bridgegate scandal. Today I closely listened to the two-hour press conference Christie held.
Despite all his apologizing, Christie looks absolutely terrible to all those with critical thinking capabilities.
First, though he fired his deputy chief of staff because she lied about her action as shown in an email wherein she …
With more than a foot of snow, sleet, and ice falling over much of the nation, the television news teams went into overdrive. This may be an accurate description of one of those minute-by-minute broadcasts.
“I’m Harry Hansom. Co-anchor Polly Prattle just called. Her car slid into a ditch about eight miles from the studio. Fortunately, she had her roller-blades, and is skating furiously to get here so she doesn’t lose a day’s pay. We begin our Team Weather Coverage with chief meteorologist Hugh Miditty.”
“Based upon detailed computer analysis and extensive satellite monitoring, available only through our exclusive Poplar Eye-Witless Weather …
The thing I like about Steve Forbes (I call him Steve) is that he’s inherited a lot of money and, although he looks funny, he sure can pick winners. Along with the magazine that has borne his family’s name (or vice-versa) since 1917, he’s been a kingmaker as well as a prophet, despite the fact that, as Yogi Berra once put it, “predicting is difficult, especially about the future.” A marginally unsuccessful Presidential candidate himself, Steve knows all about Presidents and their problems. Why, just recently he pointed out in an editorial that Obamacare will have its come-uppance in November …
Scott Sorensen is an artist, activist, and master of alternative accommodations currently living in Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in a tent in a friend’s backyard (he was there first) and has been there for two years and counting. He paints, smokes, paints, sleeps, works with Occupy Jackson, bemoans the oppressive heat (in all senses of that word), sells paintings, works on his tent, works on other assorted projects, climbs trees, and goes to town. He doesn’t have a mortgage, he doesn’t pay rent, doesn’t have 9 to 5. Doesn’t have a car payment. No utilities. It should be …
Saudi Arabia has all the vices and none of the virtues of an oil rich state like Venezuela. The country is governed by a family dictatorship which tolerates no opposition and severely punishes human rights advocates and political dissidents. Hundreds of billions in oil revenues are controlled by the royal despotism and fuel speculative investments the world over. The ruling elite relies on the purchase of Western arms and US military bases for protection. The wealth of productive nations is syphoned to enrich the conspicuous consumption of the Saudi ruling family. The ruling elite finances the most fanatical, retrograde, …
Washington (IPS) — Criticism in the memoirs of former secretary of defence Robert M. Gates of President Barack Obama’s lack of commitment to the Afghan War strategy of his administration has generated a Washington debate about whether Obama was sufficiently supportive of the war. But the Gates account omits two crucial historical facts necessary to understanding the issue. The first is that Obama agreed to the escalation only under strong pressure from his top national security officials and with very explicit reservations. The second is that Gen. David Petraeus reneged on his previous commitment to support Obama’s 2009 decision that troop …
You’ve heard the refrain “we live in the information age.” We have fingertip access to the Internet, providing us with massive amounts of information. There are no longer any excuses for us to say we don’t have the information; it is there, but up to us to act on the information.
The above is all true but very incomplete. Information technology (IT), now the supplier of millions of jobs, does not have its own value-based imperative. The power structure is very selective about what this technology can access so as to keep the power in its concentrating corporate and governmental hands.
The bomb will not start a chain reaction in the water, converting it all to gas and letting all the ships on all the oceans drop down to the bottom. It will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole. It will not destroy gravity. I am not an atomic playboy.
– Vice Admiral William P. Blandy, Bikini bomb test commander, July 25, 1946
When the military scientists of an advanced technological nation deliberately explode their largest nuclear bomb (and 66 others) over Pacific islands and use the opportunities to study the …
On this website, we’ve speculated that one outcome of the flood of NSA-centered revelations has been to desensitize U.S. citizens and diminish outrage at what is actually revealed. We are becoming conditioned to the horror story that is the National Security Administration.
Right before Christmas, we got another dose of breath-taking outrageousness through the reporting of a group of journalists courtesy of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel. The report profiles the work of a powerful unit of technological thugs called the Tailored Access Operations unit or TAO — either an unfortunate coincidence in naming or a reflection of …
Is Facebook flirting with fascism? The question might prove difficult to answer with a resounding “yes or no,” but, to those who have been keeping track of its recent censorship practices, the answer appears to lean heavily toward the affirmative.
Yesterday, on 9 January 2014, after over five years of operation, popular Facebook page Anarchist Memes was permanently taken down by Facebook. With approximately 90,000 likes and hundreds of comments each day, Anarchist Memes established itself as one of the radical left’s most prominent Facebook pages. It posted feminist, anti-racist, pro-LGBT*QA, and anti-capitalist content numerous times a day. For years, the …
President Barack Obama has never been a creature to avoid contradiction. Some would call it hypocrisy, but the more generous might simply consider it the extensive ability to juggle two difficult and even contradictory aims at once. For a person who aggressively campaigned against the existence of the Guantanamo Bay facilities, he firstly staggered then endorsed its retention. For a person keen to chide President George W. Bush for infractions against the liberties of US citizens, Obama has been happy to take the shredder to an assortment of them (surveillance and extra-judicial killings come to mind).
Climate change is not hot weather, and it is not cold weather. Those conditions have been around for eons.
Climate change is extreme anomalous weather conditions, like 100-year floods every few years rather than once every 100 years; e.g., Eastern Europe in 2013, or torrential downpours equivalent to annual rainfall levels but within one week, like Colorado in 2013, or embedded droughts that last for months, like Russia in 2010 when grain exports were halted, or subzero temperatures throughout North America in January 2014 because of anomalous jet streams; i.e., climate change conditions.
All of these extreme weather conditions that in years …
At last the world knows America as the savior of the world!
– President Woodrow Wilson, Paris Peace Conference, 1919
The horrors reported each day from Syria and Iraq are enough to make one cry; in particular, the atrocities carried out by the al-Qaeda types: floggings; beheadings; playing soccer with the heads; cutting open dead bodies to remove organs just for mockery; suicide bombers, car bombs, the ground littered with human body parts; countless young children traumatized for life; the imposition of sharia law, including bans on music … What century are we living in? What millennium? What world?
When will there be justice in Athens? There will be justice in Athens when those who are not injured are as outraged as those who are.
— Thucydides (460 BC – 395 BC)
In December 2007, Major General Graham Binns, Commander of British Forces in Basra, handed illegally occupied Basra Province back to the Iraqis, with Basra city centre “festooned with flags, lights and banners to mark the occasion.”
In fact, the whole nonsense was window dressing. British soldiers had been under siege in their bases between February and September that year and had withdrawn to Basra Airport on the city’s outskirts, leaving …
We had to sound civilized in public, he told us; we had to speak English.
— Adichie, Purple Hibiscus
I was the third seed planted that sprouted one February Sunday evening in a giant hospital at the heart of Ibadan, the largest city in Old Oyo, a restless and unplanned place where life is rushed, growing up is fast and easy, and wounds are unmasked; everything is in the open–from the street-side, open-roof stores that sell your groceries, to the hustlers hawking burnt tapes, CDs and knock-off brands, to the black markets that hide in the day and shine at night, to …
In a small park next to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., signs explain rules about photographs one can take — and illustrate the kind of photo one isn’t allowed to take.
Mass surveillance has an image problem. The visual references commonly used to portray intelligence agencies — screens, servers and sleek glass buildings — don’t suggest an ethics or a rationale to their operations. They don’t suggest that there are even humans involved in collecting information about millions of other humans. In order to understand a world in which mass surveillance is increasingly deemed an unexceptional fact, it …
Crushed for years in the framing/messaging wars, Democrats are finally joining the fray with populist, though cautious, election-year banners. Right, let’s defeat the take-no-prisoners, right wing war cries — dripping with life and death dramas — with safe, feel-good, happy faces. Appealingly, this modest strategy doesn’t depend on the besieged Obama, slow-footed on gay marriage, legal marijuana, upping the minimum wage, or reversing income inequality via serious tax reform.
Excluding a few soaring campaign slogans, this chief executive is a monumental sound-bite flop. What, besides those early come-ons, will go down in history — other than perhaps Obama’s grand gaffe this …
A worst case scenario is unfolding in Syria, and Palestinian refugees, particularly in the Yarmouk refugee camp, are paying a heavy price for Syria’s cruelest war. They are starving, although there can be no justification, nor logistical explanation for why they are dying from hunger.
Spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Chris Gunness, told AFP that “at least five Palestinian refugees in the besieged refugee camp of Yarmouk have died because of malnutrition, bringing the total number of reported cases to 15,” since September 2013. Other estimates, especially those reported by local residents, say the number is significantly …
Obsessed with the “Iran threat,” which leads to its warmongering in Syria, Saudi Arabia is acting like a bull in a china shop, wreaking regional havoc in an already Arab fragile political environment and creating what George Joffe’ of Cambridge University’s Centre of International Studies, on December 30, called the “second Arab cold war,” the first being the Saudi-led cold war with the Pan-Arab Egypt of Gamal Abdul Nasser since the 1960s.
The kingdom stands now almost isolated politically. Its “going it alone” in the Syrian conflict has cornered Saudi Arabia into a self-inflicted foreign policy no-win deadlock, to be at …
We certainly hope that the MLA does not consider a one-sided punitive resolution against Israel like the one adopted by the American Studies Association [ASA]. The “blowback” against the ASA has been significant.
— Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs
It is still too early to assess, but I would nevertheless venture to predict that next year will not be an easy one for Israel’s enemies on campus.
— Judea Pearl, father of Daniel Pearl
Debates about the Israel-Palestine conflict frequently slide into a familiar pattern of assertion and counter-assertion: if one asserts that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the occupied territories deserves formal …
The Conservatives are trying to rally Canadian Jews to their right wing imperialistic world view.
At the start of last month Stephen Harper spoke to the annual Toronto gala of the Jewish National Fund, which has a long history of dispossessing Palestinians and discriminating against non-Jews. Alluding to Arab/Persian/Muslim barbarians at the gate, Harper told the 4,000 attendees that Israel is a “light of freedom and democracy in what is otherwise a region of darkness.”
A few days before this event Minister for Employment and Social Development Jason Kenney spoke at the launch of the Canadian chapter of the Middle East Media …
On December 20, both chambers of the U.S. Congress passed a little-noticed bill to expedite permitting for hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) on public lands in the Bakken Shale basin, located predominantly in North Dakota. And on December 26, President Obama signed the bill into law.
Days later, on December 30, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) freight train owned by Warren Buffett carrying Bakken fracked oil exploded in Casselton, North Dakota. Locals breathed a smoky sigh of relief that the disaster happened outside the town center. In July 2013, a “bomb …
John Kerry spent last week testing the waters with the Israelis and the Palestinians over his so-called framework agreement – designed to close the gaps between the two sides. But the issues he is trying to resolve appear more intractable by the day.
As he headed to the region, Israel’s hawkish cabinet ministers gave their blessing to legislation to annex the Jordan Valley, a large swathe of the West Bank that might otherwise be the Palestinian state’s economic backbone and its sole door to the outside world. On Sunday, as Mr Kerry left, the defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, argued that peace …
The government of Palestine presented Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa with the “Star of Palestine” the highest award of the State of Palestine, on January 6.
“The relations between Sri Lanka and the State of Palestine are exceptional and we remain committed to extending our fullest support to the State of Palestine and the friendly people of Palestine,” President Rajapaksa said during the conferment ceremony.
“President Rajapaksa, on behalf of the people of Sri Lanka, conferred the ‘Sri Lanka Mitra Vibhushana’ awards on former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and current President Mahmoud Abbas,” during his current trip to Palestine, Israel and …
The Palestinians are sleep-walking to disaster, again
by Daud Abdullah / January 7th, 2014
If he succeeds with his current “peace” initiative, John Kerry would have killed three birds, not two, with one stone. With the stroke of a pen his “proposed framework” will not only dissolve the Palestinian refugee issue but also deactivate Israel’s so-called demographic bomb. And for good measure, Israel would be allowed to annex the settlements of the West Bank. That would give them a semblance of the legitimacy they lack.
The Palestine Liberation Organisation and Palestinian Authority position is ambivalent. Not for the first time, they appear to be sleep-walking into a diplomatic trap; an Oslo-type transitional agreement with no …
At the onset of 2014, many people are now anticipating the prospect of a ‘global revolution’. The intense revolutionary fervour of 2011 may have dissipated in North America and much of Western Europe in the past couple of years, but a new geography of protest continues to shift and transmute in different countries and world regions – the million people on the streets of Brazil in June last year; the earlier defence of the commons in Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park; the indigenous uprising and student protests across Canada; the Ukraine demonstrations that are still under way.
