January 2011

How propaganda poisons the mind – and our discourse

by News Sources 01.13.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes: Last week, on January 3, The Guardian published a scathing Op-Ed by James Richardson blaming WikiLeaks for endangering the life of Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the democratic opposition in Zimbabwe. Richardson — a GOP operative, contributor to RedState.com, and a for-hire corporate spokesman — pointed to a cable published by WikiLeaks [...]

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Ashamed to be an Israeli

by News Sources 01.13.2011

Amnon Danker, former editor of Israel’s popular Hebrew newspaper, Maariv, writes: … I have felt lately that it has become shameful to be an Israeli, and a decent person must feel this shame and blush deeply and clear his throat and whisper to himself the question, what should we do, what should we do, for [...]

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Do we have Ahmadinejad all wrong?

by News Sources 01.13.2011

Reza Aslan writes: Is it possible that Iran’s blustering president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, long thought to be a leading force behind some of Iran’s most hard-line and repressive policies, is actually a reformer whose attempts to liberalize, secularize, and even “Persianize” Iran have been repeatedly stymied by the country’s more conservative factions? That is the surprising [...]

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Ann Jones: can women make peace?

by TomDispatch 01.13.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Last week, Pentagon budget “cuts” were in the headlines, often almost luridly so — “Pentagon Faces the Knife,” “Pentagon to Cut Spending by $78 Billion, Reduce Troop Strength,” “U.S. Aims to Cut Defense Budget and Slash Troops.” Responding to the mood of the moment in Washington (“the fiscal pressures the country is facing”), [...]

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The reflexive call for fewer liberties

by News Sources 01.13.2011

Glenn Greenwald writes: William Galston — former Clinton adviser and current Brookings Institution Senior Fellow — has a column in The New Republic about the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that illustrates the mentality endlessly eroding basic American liberty: namely, the belief that every tragedy must lead to new government powers and new restrictions on core liberties. [...]

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Does Israel wish it might become invisible?

by Paul Woodward 01.12.2011

Humiliating journalists might not be a good way of generating positive coverage for ones country, but perhaps the treatment of foreign reporters covering a speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had a different purpose: to try and persuade the world’s media to ignore Israel altogether. Either that, or this and two other stories below represent [...]

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Israel’s public relations policy: never apologise, always confuse

by News Sources 01.12.2011

Jesse Rosenfeld and Joseph Dana write: Never believe the Israeli army killed an unarmed civilian until it’s officially denied. This paraphrasing of Mark Twain’s “never believe anything until it has officially been denied,” should become a mantra for journalists operating in the Middle East. It is a point reinforced recently by the death of a [...]

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Why the demise of the Middle East ‘peace process’ may be a good thing

by News Sources 01.12.2011

Alastair Crooke writes: Establishing a Palestinian state has been a sine qua non of Western foreign policy for the last 20 years. For some, the evident demise of the “peace process” has given rise to a sense of bereavement nearly on par with the end of civilization. A Palestinian state, for many, was a banner [...]

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Israel’s descent into ‘this unfortunate world’

by Paul Woodward 01.12.2011

As Israeli bulldozers demolish the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem to make way for Jews-only apartments funded by the American Zionist, Irving Moskowitz, a retired casino magnate who lives in Miami Beach, Jeffrey Goldberg writes: Peace will not come without the birth of a Palestinian state on the West Bank which has its capital in [...]

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The great food crisis of 2011

by News Sources 01.12.2011

Lester Brown writes: As the new year begins, the price of wheat is setting an all-time high in the United Kingdom. Food riots are spreading across Algeria. Russia is importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins. India is wrestling with an 18-percent annual food inflation rate, sparking protests. China is looking [...]

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Julian Assange’s fight to remain in the free world (outside the US)

by News Sources 01.12.2011

The Guardian reported yesterday: Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, could be at “real risk” of the death penalty or detention in Guantánamo Bay if he is extradited to Sweden on accusations of rape and sexual assault, his lawyers claim. In a skeleton summary of their defence against attempts by the Swedish director of public [...]

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America unhinged

by Paul Woodward 01.11.2011

Will January 8, 2011, be remembered as yet another date that will live in infamy? Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) was having a beer and eating pizza at a New Jersey bar when he heard the news via the television. Soon thereafter, he was contacted by his staff and was on the phone with other House [...]

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The day there is no Iranian bomb

by News Sources 01.11.2011

Didi Remez provides a translation of an op-ed by Sever Plocker that appeared in the Hebrew edition of Yedioth Ahronoth: One of the most historically important statements to have been made in the past ten years in the State of Israel made headlines in the Israeli media on Friday for a single day. It elicited [...]

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Why the destruction of the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem could be a good thing for democracy

by News Sources 01.11.2011

Joseph Dana writes that the destruction of the Shepherd Hotel in East Jerusalem confirms that the two-state solution is finished and that it is time to start fighting for democratic rights for all of the residents of the land under Israeli military rule. Israel and Palestine are under full Israeli military control. Everything going in [...]

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Israel’s drift towards fascism

by News Sources 01.11.2011

“[Benjamin Netanyahu] and each of the 41 MKs [members of Israel's parliament] who voted for the establishment of a political committee to hunt the human rights organizations, will be remembered as being the ones who attempted to smash what is left of democracy in Israel and impose a fascist regime,” a group Israeli intellectuals wrote [...]

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America’s permanent culture of political violence

by News Sources 01.11.2011

Glenn W. LaFantasie, Professor of Civil War History at Western Kentucky University, writes: It’s my belief,… that American political violence is a direct legacy of the American Revolution, for the patriots’ victory in that conflict proved to the American people that violence could achieve a positive end: independence and the creation of a new nation. [...]

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William Hartung: Lockheed Martin’s shadow government

by TomDispatch 01.11.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com As a boy in the 1950s, I can remember my father, a World War II vet, becoming livid while insisting that our family not shop at a local grocery store. Its owners, he swore, had been “war profiteers” and he would never forgive them. He practically spat the phrase out. [...]

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Mental health in the United States of Alienation

by Paul Woodward 01.10.2011

In his New York Times column, “Climate of Hate,” Paul Krugman writes: “It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.” Because? Reality is constituted from a [...]

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The pitfalls of generalizing from the particular — what Jared Lee Loughner does and doesn’t tell us about the state of America

by Paul Woodward 01.10.2011

Was the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords an historic moment in American politics? The media frenzy, a presidential response and now a national moment of silence — all join together to suggest that at 10am on January 8, something happened not just in Tuscon, Arizona, but across the whole of America. I suppose historic moments [...]

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Amateur hour at DHS as anti-Semitism is raised as possible motive in Giffords’ shooting

by Paul Woodward 01.10.2011

“Gabrielle Gifford [sic] is the first Jewish female elected to such a high position in the US government.” This comes from a Department of Homeland Security internal memo obtained by Fox News. Whether no name is attached to the memo or whether Fox wanted to save the author some embarrassment isn’t clear. Memo to the [...]

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In WikiLeaks fight, U.S. journalists take the Fifth

by News Sources 01.10.2011

Nancy A. Youssef, reporting for McClatchy Newspapers, writes: Not so long ago, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange could count on American journalists to support his campaign to publish secret documents that banks and governments didn’t want the world to see. But just three years after a major court confrontation that saw many of America’s most important [...]

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The myth of Talqaeda

by News Sources 01.10.2011

Alex Strick van Linschoten writes: The purported merger of the Taliban and al-Qaeda is the WMD of the Afghan war. This myth is almost as old as the two groups themselves. There’s so much writing on Afghanistan that it’s always going to be easy to find wild theories and dodgy “scholarship”, but this supposed morphing [...]

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Nick Turse: the Pentagon’s planet of bases

by TomDispatch 01.10.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com [TomDispatch recommendations: If you have a chance, check out "The Tyranny of Defense Inc.," the latest piece by Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestselling Washington Rules, at the Atlantic. It was written to commemorate the 50th anniversary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (in which he coined the phrase “the military-industrial complex”), but you also [...]

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