April 2011

Weapons sales to the Arab world under scrutiny

by News Sources 04.04.2011

Der Spiegel reports: The revolutions in the Arab world caught British Prime Minister David Cameron off guard. For some time, diplomats had been planning a trip for Cameron that would take him to several countries in the Middle East. In fact, it was meant to be more of a trade mission, with Cameron’s delegation consisting [...]

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Follow the money

by News Sources 04.04.2011

Samir Aita writes: The reasons for the Arab spring go deeper than immediate demands for freedom and democracy. The protesters want to end the political economy and the authoritarian regimes in place since the 1970s. Monarchies in the Arab world have been absolute, and life-long presidents (with hereditary office) ruled the republics, because they created [...]

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Heading toward an Israeli apartheid state

by News Sources 04.04.2011

Daniel Blatman writes: It has been 60 years since the apartheid state was established in South Africa. In March 1951, a few years after the racist National Party came to power, racial segregation was anchored in law. As was common in other countries that adopted racist laws in the 20th century, those in South Africa [...]

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Egypt: Israel must pay us back for cut-price gas

by News Sources 04.04.2011

Ynet reports: Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil al-Arabi stated Sunday that his country would demand that Israel pay the price differences for the reduced gas it purchased during the Hosni Mubarak era. “We will honor everything we signed on and we’ll demand that they uphold it too,” he was quoted as saying in an interview to [...]

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Lewis Lapham: consuming labor

by TomDispatch 04.04.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com Here’s a jarring fact: In January of this year, 21% of Americans ages 16 to 24 had no job. That’s nearly 18 million young people, ranging from high school dropouts to graduates of America’s elite colleges, and there could hardly be a more painful symptom of our ongoing jobs crisis [...]

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Forget Goldstone — remember Gaza

by Paul Woodward 04.04.2011

Here’s a circle that should never have been closed. The Goldstone Report, once credited with having provided a hefty shove as Israel veered towards pariah status, is now being held up by Israelis as having unintentionally demonstrated why, when the need arises, Israel will be able to launch Cast Lead Two and once again chant: [...]

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Why the rebels keep running back and forth in the accordion war

by Paul Woodward 04.03.2011

Ryan Calder is a PhD candidate from Berkeley, California, currently in Libya doing field research on the uprisings of the 2011 Arab Spring. What caused the Libyan revolution of 2011? This is the “big question” that motivates my research. At one level, the answers are simple. The Qaddafi regime has been in power for four [...]

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The fight for Libya

by News Sources 04.02.2011

Al Jazeera reports: US and Egyptian special forces have reportedly been offering covert armed training to rebel fighters in the battle for Libya, Al Jazeera has been told. An unnamed rebel source related how he had undergone training in military techniques at a “secret facility” in eastern Libya. He told our correspondent Laurence Lee, reporting [...]

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Can Israel survive without anti-Semitism?

by News Sources 04.02.2011

Avraham Burg writes: In a very short time we will no longer be able to evade the real questions: Are we capable of apprehending our existence without the hatred of others? Do we really need external anti-Semitism as a means to define our inner identity? Think for a moment about a world in which Jews [...]

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It’s the plutocracy, stupid

by News Sources 04.02.2011

M J Rosenberg writes: I received an email from a Capitol Hill aide who thinks my criticism of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, is overly simplistic. He doesn’t dispute the fact that AIPAC has a disproportionate influence on our Middle East foreign policy. He argues, however, that AIPAC is no different than other powerful special [...]

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Libya offers lessons for both Washington and al Qaeda

by Paul Woodward 04.02.2011

It’s hard to observe Washington without concluding that it fosters a political culture in which stupidity — or at least feigned stupidity — is a prerequisite of success. Pity the politician who might be so naive as to imagine that the appearance of intelligence would boost his or her political fortunes. It has thus been [...]

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Libya’s challenge: democracy under the gun

by News Sources 04.02.2011

At Open Democracy, Mark Taylor writes: The demonstrators at the heart of the Arab spring have redefined the political space in their countries and as a result laid down a new dividing-line in the region. No longer is the political contest between east and west, Muslim against the rest, or pro- or anti-imperialist, humanitarian intervention [...]

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Andy Kroll: union-busting or Republican-busting in Wisconsin?

by TomDispatch 04.02.2011

Reprinted with permission of TomDispatch.com One hundred years ago, 146 people, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in downtown New York City, a building lacking sprinkler systems, fire walls, or adequate fire escapes. Onlookers watched horrified, writes historian Steve Fraser, as many of the trapped workers jumped to [...]

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Why the Libyan revolution deserves support from everyone who believes in democracy

by News Sources 04.01.2011

By Anjali Kamat and Ahmad Shokr, Economic and Political Weekly, March 19, 2011 A month into the Libyan revolution, it is easy to forget that what is now an armed rebellion led by a council seeking international recognition began – much like the protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen – as a peaceful and leaderless [...]

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Getting Libya’s rebels wrong

by Paul Woodward 04.01.2011

When Tunisians rose up calling for the end of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s rule, beyond the fact that the revolution caught the rest of the world by surprise, no one seemed in much doubt about what the Tunisian people wanted. And shortly after that when Egyptians rose up demanding that Hosni Mubarak must go, [...]

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