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When misanthropy and philanthropy go hand in hand

August 24, 2010

In a society that trumpets its faith in equal opportunity, freedom and the power of the people — government of the people, by the people and for the people, and all that — it’s ironic that again and again, we discover that some of the most powerful people in America are men (invariably men) who [...]

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The new anti-Semitism

August 22, 2010

Joshua Holland lays out some of the evidence that a wave of Islamophobia is sweeping America.
In May, a man walked into the Jacksonville Islamic Center in Northeast Florida during evening prayers and detonated a pipebomb. Fortunately, there were no injuries. (If the man had been Muslim and the House of worship a Christian church, the [...]

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Obama administration carries on the peace talks “tradition”

August 21, 2010

If you’re wondering how seriously to take the latest peace process gambit, this, from the Los Angeles Times, sums up the spirit of the latest move:
One White House official on Friday described peace talks as a “tradition” in which every American president must participate.
“This is something that there has been a long-standing U.S. commitment to [...]

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Pakistan flooding exposes our perverse priorities

August 20, 2010

At Foreign Policy, Colum Lynch writes:
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi presented the U.N.’s members with a stark challenge: Help Pakistan recover from its most devastating natural disaster in modern history or run the risk of surrendering a key front in the war on terror.
“This disaster has hit us hard at a time, and in [...]

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Defending sacred ground

August 18, 2010

At Foreign Policy, Stephen Walt enters the fray on the Cordoba House controversy and notes that America’s founders understood that “trying to impose religious orthodoxy on the new republic was a recipe for endless strife.”
The principle of religious tolerance is not a piece of clothing that one can don or doff at will, or as [...]

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Is Israel’s legitimacy under challenge?

August 17, 2010

Henry Siegman writes:
When a state’s denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent — a permanence that has been the goal of Israel’s settlement project from its very outset (and that many believe has been achieved) — that state ceases to be a democracy. When the reason [...]

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Obama’s defense of religious freedom

August 15, 2010

On Friday, Glenn Greenwald wrote:
This is one of the most impressive and commendable things Obama has done since being inaugurated:
President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, using a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to proclaim that “as a citizen, and [...]

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Obama’s secret war

August 15, 2010

The Bush administration was well known for its lack of accountability and its disregard for international law, yet if the lead proponents of outlaw governance — men such as Dick Cheney and his chief of staff David Addington — preferred to operate in the shadows, there was a political form of accountability in as much [...]

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The Israeli bastion of fear

August 10, 2010

The prefix anti- has become tarnished — no longer the signal of vital dissent. To be anti-war is to be dismissed as belonging to an ineffectual movement that paraded its political impotence until the marching lost all conviction and withered away. To be anti-American or anti-Israel is to be condemned as an enemy of civilization. [...]

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America’s wars of indifference

August 9, 2010

David Bromwich writes:
Something is rotten in our democracy. Like a family where everything goes wrong and nobody says a word, we suffer a load of unasked questions that have under them still more questions. Do Americans always need a war? That is a first question. It did not seem so before 2001. And the attacks [...]

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Looking back at torture

August 4, 2010

President Obama has so far refused to look back at the previous administration’s use of torture, but David Cole says: “on this issue, we cannot move forward without looking back. Unless we acknowledge that what the United States did was not just a bad idea, but illegal, we risk treating torture as simply another policy [...]

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Israeli provocation on Lebanese border could trigger new war

August 3, 2010

Update below
Border clashes between Israeli and Lebanese troops have left three Lebanese soldiers and a journalist dead. Lebanon’s Hezbollah TV, Al Manar, reports one high-ranking Israeli officer has been killed but this has not been confirmed by the Lebanese army or UN troops stationed in southern Lebanon.
As the photo above makes clear, this was a [...]

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Turkey’s diplomatic persistence with Iran may pay off

July 28, 2010

The Wall Street Journal reports:
Iran has pledged to stop enriching uranium to the higher grade needed for a medical research reactor if world powers agree to a fuel-swap deal it outlined earlier this year with Turkey and Brazil, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Wednesday.
The offer marks the latest in an international tug-of-war over the [...]

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