Today's Stories

April 28, 2008

JoAnne Wypijewski
On Queen's Boulevard, the Night Sean Bell's Killers Got Off

April 26 / 27, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Nothing Will Get Hillary Out of the Race

Ralph Nader
A World of Hunger

Peter Camejo
A Crying Shame: the Wages of Left Capitulation

Harvey Wasserman
Making You Pay for the Next Chernobyl--in Advance!

Franklin Lamb
Will U.S. Policy in Lebanon and the Middle East Ever Change?

Wajahat Ali
Fisk Fighting: an Exclusive Interview with Robert Fisk

Mike Whitney
Food Riots and Speculators

Andrew Wimmer
Obliterate Them!

David Yearsley
Nero, Frederick the Great, Nixon ... They All Did It Better Than Clinton

Greg Moses
Chicago: the Stupid Experiment

Ron Jacobs
Walking the Lonely Road

Robert Fantina
Bush v. Carter: Let History Judge

Missy Comley Beattie
Introducing President McCain

Linn Cohen-Cole
The Criminalization of Raw Milk: a Mennonite Farmer is Hauled Away

Paul Krassner
Remembering Ruben Salazar

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Buknatski, Khaiyat, Lair, and Kowit

Website of the Weekend
Justice for Sean Bell

April 25, 2008

George Ciccariello-Maher
Embedded with the Tupamaros

Dave Lindorff
The Bitter and the Biased: How Clinton Courted Racists in Pennsylvania

Franklin Lamb
The Israeli Project Has Failed in Lebanon

Alan Farago
Hacking the Development Code: the Politics of Zoning in Florida

John W. Farley
Syiran Nukes: the Phantom Menace

Kathleen M. Barry
Some Questions for "Femininists for Clinton:" Is There Really Any Difference Between Hillary and Condi?

Mohammed Alireza
Cowboys and Iranians

Nick Dearden
Haiti and the Black Hole of Debt

Carmelo Ruiz Marrero
Why Biotech is Betting on Biofuels

Bruce Springsteen
Farewell to Danny

Website of the Day
It's Bigger Than Hip Hop

April 24, 2008

Linn Washington, Jr.
Duplicity Demeans Clinton Campaign (or When Bill Praised Farrakhan)

Franklin Lamb
Bush to Nasrallah: an Offer Hezbollah Cannot Refuse?

Jennifer Van Bergen
The High Crimes of John Yoo: the President's Executioner

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Hypocrisy and the Malaysian Guantánamo

Mark Engler
Trade Politics and the Battle for the Soul of the Democratic Party

Dave Lindorff
The Politics of Obliteration: Hillary's Monstrous Threat

John Blair
Obama's Missed Opportunities in Evansville: Did He Even Know It Was Earth Day?

De Clarke / Stan Goff
Politics is Food is Politics

Binoy Kampmark
Bowling for Boris: the Tories, Red Ken and the London Mayoral Race

Philippe Marlière
Sarkozy and the Specter of May 68

Peter Morici
The Bank of England Misses the Point

Website of the Day
Fair Food Nation

April 23, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
Straggling to Denver

Vijay Prashad
McCain's Mask

Paul Craig Roberts
What the Iraq War is About

Stephen Soldz
The Involuntary Drugging of U.S. Detainees

Laura Santina
Hillary: Another Feminist Perspective

John Stauber /
Sheldon Rampton
Pentagon News Networks

Dave Lindorff
What Double Digit Win? Media Round Up in PA

George Ciccariello-Maher
Radical Chavismo Growls a Challenge

Ralph Nader
Andy Stern's Rackets

John Weisheit
Rearranging Deck Chairs at Glen Canyon Dam

Website of the Day
Wal-Mart's "Cost of Admission"

April 22, 2008

David Isenberg
Spinning Saddam's Linkages

Stan Cox
The Political Economics of Greenwashing

David Macaray
Memo to the Clinton Campaign: They Are Still Murdering Labor Unionists in Colombia

Jeff Birkenstein
Playing the Opposite Game: Or Why Can't I Sell Out?

Mike Whitney
Memo to Bernanke: Enough With the Rate Cuts, Already!

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush's Paraguayan Fiasco

Floyd Rudmin
From Lhasa to Bilbao: Journey of a Double Standard

Carlos Villarreal
Why John Yoo Should be Dismissed From Boalt Law School--And Prosecuted

Ray McGovern
What About the War, Pope Benedict?

Michael Gould-Wartofsky
El Barrio Fights Back Against Globalized Gentrification

Robert Ovetz
A Fish Tale

Pat Wolff
Rightwing Power Grab in Cornhusker State

Website of the Day
Defend the Rutgers 3!

April 21, 2008

Bill Quigley
The U.S. Role in Haiti's Food Riots

Uri Avnery
The Lion and the Gazelle

Dave Lindorff
The U.S. Economy and the Costs of War

Wajahat Ali
Finding Osama Bin Laden with Morgan Spurlock

Andy Worthington
Hollow Gestures at Guantánamo

Robert Jensen
The Sorrows of Race and Gender

Ron Jacobs
Clampdown at Evergreen

Dan Bacher
The Great Salmon Closure

Harvey Wasserman
Where's George?

Danny Alexander
Remembering Danny Federici

Website of the Day
Save Our Taco Trucks!

April 19 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
McCain: What Really Happened When He Was a POW?

Patrick Cockburn
A New Struggle is Beginning in Iraq

Wajahat Ali
Zinn Speaks

Andrew Wimmer
Papal Benedictions

Rev. William E. Alberts
Jeremiah Wright and America's Continuing "Separate and Unequal" Societies

David Rosen
Texas Two-Step: The Polygamy Raid and the Regulation of Sexual Life

Robert Fantina
McCain Detests War?

Ramzy Baroud
The Politics of Armageddon: McCain's Pastors and the Middle East

Saul Landau
The No Escape Clause on Iraq

Dr. Susan Block
Raelians, Aliens and Evolution

David Yearsley
Suitcase Arias and Ithacan Jazz

Phyllis Pollack
On the Red Carpet with the Rolling Stones

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Hartz, Newberry and Khaiyat

April 18, 2008

John Ross
The Bush Legacy: Losing Latin America

Dave Lindorff
Courage and Conviction: In Praise of Bill Ayers

Dan Glazebrook
An Interview with Robert Fisk

Carl Finamore
A Look Inside the Hangars

Rannie Amiri
J Street: Do We Really Need Another Pro-Israel Lobby?

Richard Morse
A Creepy Roadblock at Midnight

Ko Young-dae
CONPLAN 8022: Inside Bush's Nuclear War Plan for the Korean Peninsula

Farooq Sulehria
A Himalayan Surprise

April 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Hillary Joins the Vast Rightwing Financial Conspiracy

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Apologists

Kathy Kelly
Weary of War? Don't Collaborate

Madis Senner
The Carrion Feeders' Ball: How Hedge Funds Reap Billions Off Economic Misery

Peter Morici
The G7, the Banks and GE

Ron Jacobs
Washington, al-Maliki and the Militias

William S. Lind
A Confirming Moment in Basra

James Murren
Obama's Disconnect with Small Town America

Ben Terrall
Losing Haiti

Walter Brasch
Political Log Rolling in Clinton County, PA

Website of the Day
Stealth Attack: Homegrown "Terrorism" Bill

April 16, 2008

Bill Kauffman
The Candidates from Nowhere

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Colonization and Massacres

Saul Landau
How to Leave Iraq

Peter Morici
McCain's Economic Plan: GOP Out of Ideas (But So are the Democrats)

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Bankers Saved, Human Rights Sacrificed

Jeff Ballinger
Inside Nike's Asian Sweatshops: Squeezed Vietnamese Workers Strike Back

David Macaray
Union Strikes and Replacement Workers

Gary Leupp
Electoral Revolution in Nepal

Richard Morse
The Food Riots in Haiti

George Ciccariello-Maher
Einstein Turns in His Grave

Dave Lindorff
Letters from the Bitter Belt

Website of the Day
Surviving Prozac

April 15, 2008

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Distraction in an Age of Gotcha Capitalism

Uri Avnery
Manifest Destiny and Israel

Brian Cloughley
Arrogant Lies

David Price
Outrageous Pre-Tour de France Ban

Joe Bageant
Bitter America: Media Shit Storms and Heartland Reality

Steve Early
The Purple Punch-Out in Dearborn

Mats Svensson
To Create Something from Nothing: the Making of a Palestinian State

Michael Donnelly
Dead-Eye Hil and the Elitist

April Howard /
Benjamin Dangl
Dissecting the Politics of Paraguay's Next President

Laray Polk
Let's Not Put the Torch in a Bubble

Charles Modiano
What Does a Woman Have to Do to Get on the Cover of Sports Illustrated?

Website of the Day
The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree

April 14, 2008

Carl Finamore
Airline Deregulation Makes a Hard Landing

Michael Hudson
A Trillion Dollar Rescue for Wall Street Gamblers

M. Shahid Alam
Hizbullah's Big Win: Has Israel Finally Met Its Match?

Patrick Cockburn
A Cleric, a Pol and a Warrior

Paul Craig Roberts
Petraeus Sets Up Iran

Joanne Mariner
Redition to Jordan: What Happens When the Gloves Come Off?

Martha Rosenberg
Suicide and Cymbalta

Dave Lindorff
The Bitterness Thing: Is Obama Channeling Nader

P. Sainath
Hot Messages to Sex Dancer Doom Condi's New Finnish Pal

John V. Whitbeck
On Hypocrisy Over Tibet: a Personal Reflection

Website of the Day
Spying on Environmental Groups

April 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Olympic Torch Toasts US Candidates

Patrick Cockburn
Warlord: the Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Mike Whitney
Want to Save the Economy?

David Yearsley
Film Scores and Westerns: the Stealth Cavalry of Empire

Robert Fantina
Bush's Brand of Morality

Conn Hallinan
Another Defining Moment in Iraq

Bill Hatch
In Praise of Hippies and the Counter-Culture

Ramzy Baroud
The Basra Battles

George S. Hishmeh
Back to Square One

Ron Jacobs
The New New Left in Latin America

Nikolas Kozloff
Olympic Torch in Buenos Aires

Charles Thomson
The British Prime Minister and the Tate's Tin of Shit

Alexander Billet
The Disney-fication of CBGB

Missy Beattie
Huffing and Puffing to Failure

David Michael Green
America's Jones for War

Seth Sandronsky
Education Entrepreneurs

Prairie Miller
Meeting David Wilson

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Ko Un, Ibn Salma and Greaves

Website of the Weekend
Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights

April 11, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Clintons and Their Sordid Colombia Advocacy

Wajahat Ali
Revenge of the Ghetto Nerd: an Exclusive Interview with Junot Diaz

Sharon Smith
Let Them Eat Ethanol!

Yigal Bronner / Neve Gordon
Digging for Trouble: the Politics of Archaeology in East Jerusalem

Alan Farago
Eating South Florida

Dave Lindorff
On Waking Sleeping Giants: Lessons for America from China

George Wuerthner
Money for Nothing? The Problems with the Conservation Reserve Program

Christopher Brauchli
Prostitutes Don't Do Funerals

Website of the Day
Animals Explain the Insurance Industry: a Health Care Video

April 10, 2008

Mathieu Vernerey
Tibet for the Tibetans!

Elizabeth Schulte
Slavery in the Fields

David Macaray
Labor Unions Will Never Get a Fair Shake

Ashley Smith
The Rise of Muqtada al-Sadr

Peter Morici
Driving Up Debt and Dragging Down Growth

Jacob Hornberger
The Military's Distintegrating Family Life

Harold Austin
Snitch or Else: Prison Officials Threaten Gang Drop Outs

Website of the Day
Hillary: the Wal-Mart Videos

April 9, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
The Fading American Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Congressional Theater: the Petraeus / Crocker Hearings

C. Hand
Why Dave Marash Left Al Jazeera

Paul Krassner
Sex and Violins

Paul Wolf
Colombian "Magnicidio" Remains a Mystery After 60 Years

Wajahat Ali
Alien Invasion!

Karyn Strickler
Lost in the Fumes: the Sierra Club Sells Out to Clorox

Dan La Botz
Confronting the Economic Crisis

Eric Walberg
The Shadow of Munich: Another NATO Flop

Robin Millenthal
Enough Already! Growth and the Tar Sands Economy

Website of the Day
Conservative Nanny State

April 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
Should Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be Set Free?

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush Bullies Congress on Colombia Deal

Greg Moses
Migrant Detention in South Texas

Joshua Frank
The Other Military Draft

John Ross
Mexico City's Urban Tribes Go on the Warpath Against EMOS

Michael Donnelly
Hillary's Western Swing

John V. Walsh
Why Obama Lost Massachusetts

Jeff Nygaard
Health, Security and Mandates

Bill Piper
Last Shot for a Bush Legacy?

Sen. Russ Feingold
Legal Representation and the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Catonsville 9, Forty Years Later

April 7, 2008

Ishmael Reed
The Irish Black Thing

Harry Browne
Irish Peace Activist Acquitted; Deported

Uri Avnery
Tibet and Palestine

Lenni Brenner
Obama's Constitution, His Pastor and His Unbelieving Mom in Heaven

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
America Must Respect Pakistan's Democracy

Robert Fisk
Fearful Lives in the Land of the Free

Edwin Krales
Ensuring the Success of Fascism in Spain: the US Corporate Role

Chris Genovali
Vancouver Island's Dwindling Ancient Forests

Website of the Day
LA Artists Against War

April 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Did the Elites Want MLK Dead?

Ramzy Baroud
There are No Checkpoints in Heaven

Ralph Nader
Runaway Bailouts

David Yearsley
How Scott Joplin Had Wall Street Down

Saul Landau
Sex Politics in America

Paul Craig Roberts
The Petraeus and Crocker Show

Lawrence Korb / Ian Moss
Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a True Patriot

Seth Sandronsky
Meet America's Promise Alliance: Colin Powell's New Gig

John Ross
La Cumbia de la Doctrina Bush: Colombia Kills Four Mexican Students in Ecuador Bombing

Robert Fantina
McCain, Republicans and Family Values

David Michael Green
Back to Disaster: Hoover at Home, Tet Abroad

Missy Beattie
McCan't

Patrick Bond
Vultures Circle Zimbabwe

Dr. Susan Block
The New American Pot Dealers

Phyllis Pollack
The Stones Meet the Press

Adam Engel
The Boobus in the Lie

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Diamand and St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
Richard Pryor Goes to the Gun Shop

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Memories of East Jerusalem

The Fruiting Fig Tree

By IRIS KELTZ

In 1967, a caprice of fate found me assimilated and married into an Arab family living in east Jerusalem within two weeks of my arrival.  Forty years later, I am reliving the war with a view of the front line from the safety of my armchair.  I have poured over history books, read personal accounts and spoken with other eye witnesses to try and understand the tectonic forces– political and military, that were shaping the world, while Faisal and I fell in love, married and dreamed of our future while hiding in a basement apartment in Ramallah.

My personal drama happened against a backdrop of catastrophic war.  On the morning of the sixth day of the war, a shrill, angry voice on the radio, announced in Arabic that east Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and the Sinai Peninsula were now under Israeli military control.  In less than one week, Israel grew three times larger than it had been after the 1948 Armistice.  While it was a crushing defeat for the Arabs, the 1.3 million Palestinians living in these territories became Israel’s responsibility and problem.

I was living in east Jerusalem when the old and new cities began to merge after nineteen years of separation.  The fluidity of this situation would harden into a new reality but for a time immediately following the war, a curious flirtation to “meet the other” mixed with high levels of anxiety.  The Palestinian community around me lived in a state of limbo, soaked to the bone with apprehension.  Fear of the Israeli soldiers was embedded in their memories from 1948 when hundreds of thousands of people were expelled from towns and villages upon the creation of the state of Israel.  Almost twenty years later, their world came crashing down– again.  The family who treated me like a daughter and offered me food and shelter held onto their precious Jordanian passports but were not sure what country they belonged to now.  Jordanian dinar was still accepted currency in the market.  None of us had Israeli shekels.  People hoped to remain living in their homes, were anxious to reopen businesses and keep their jobs.  Those working for the Jordanian government definitely lost their jobs, many becoming economic refugees like Faisal’s brother, who ended up moving to Kuwait.  

Faisal’s mother was a nurse-midwife and his father ran a small cafe on an obscure street in the Old City.  The family, originally from Al-Arish in Egypt, south of Gaza, migrated generations ago to the Hebron area where they owned many dunams of land in the Palestinian village of Al-Samu.  I tried to imagine my family being kicked out of Queens by an advancing army who claimed Queens as their ancestral homeland, forcing us to resettle in New Jersey, only to be displaced nineteen years later.  I could not imagine such traumatic displacements.  On the surface, the family seemed to accept their fate with equanimity or maybe they were too shocked to mourn and scream about what was happening to their family and community once again.

* * *

After the war, Faisal and I were among the first people to walk through the western gate that had been sealed for nineteen years, and enter a formerly forbidden area that had separated east and west Jerusalem.  For nineteen years, the Mandelbaum Gate, a UN checkpoint, offered the only safe passage between East Jerusalem, Jordan and West Jerusalem, Israel.  When the British evacuated in 1948, battles between the Palestinians and Jews raged, but the Jews were unable to conquer the Old City.  Moshe Dayan, commander of the Israeli forces and his Jordanian counterpart, drew a two-mile armistice line that held for nineteen years and the forbidden swath of land in between became No-Man’s Land.  

Built by Suleiman the Magnificent, the western gate was known as Bab el-Khalil to the Palestinians and the Jaffa Gate to the Israelis.  During the 1800’s, it was the main egress between the old and new cities of east and west Jerusalem.  Faisal and I walked through the western gate like German Kaiser Wilhelm and British General Allenby once did, but we were not visiting dignitaries.  We were in search of his grandfather’s stone house. 
   
Without the intrusion of people or traffic, vegetation rioted between barbed wire, rocky hillsides, refuse and abandoned homes.  Left untended, olive, fig and almond trees had matured into exotic shapes.  Oleander bushes, with little need for water, proliferated along with wild roses and holy thistles.  Others wandered through the landscape, along side of us, also in search of their past.  Arab farmers set up makeshift stands to sell their freshly grown watermelon.  No Man’s Land had been littered with land mines we were not aware of any such danger.  Perhaps the Israeli soldiers monitoring the activities had already swept the area.

Following childhood memories from the first six years of his life, Faisal found his grandfather’s stone house, intact and untouched.  The flat roofed building had withstood the test of time in the shade of a fruiting fig tree.  Only broken and missing window panes testified to its vacancy.  Surviving hollyhocks and wild iris’s lined the steps leading to an unlocked door.  Reaching out to nearby branches, we gathered ripe figs.  It was as if the house and the tree were waiting for this moment.  Tasting the sweet fruit helped unlock Faisal’s childhood memories of his grandfather, Sheik Mahmoud, a well known visionary, scribe, mystic and scholar in his day.  

Overhead, the desert sun burned hot, but inside, the house was cool.  Strewn over the floors were torn notebooks and yellowed pages filled with Arabic scrawl, streaked with animal excrement in the otherwise empty rooms.  Lying on the floor, in a faded red cloth bag was an old handwritten Koran.  Faisal’s grandfather, had unwittingly abandoned his house, believing he would return the next day or shortly thereafter.  Or, he would have taken his Koran, his personal correspondence and journals like Faisal had done during an unexpected war.  The grandfather had left his home along with hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians during the Jewish War for Independence, known in Palestinian history as al-Nakba, “The Catastrophe”.  Some fled in terror after rumors of massacres like the one on April 9, 1948 in Deir Yassin, a Palestinian village on the outskirts of Jerusalem where hundreds of men, women and children were massacred. 

Faisal sorted through the papers while I leaned against the thick stone walls and dreamed of serving feasts to friends who would rest comfortably on pillows scattered over finely woven rugs.  “Ahalein wesahalein,” I’d say to welcome honored guests into our home.  We’d tell everyone the story of finding his grandfather’s house in ‘No Man's Land’ almost twenty years after it was abandoned.  Faisal’s voice broke my reverie.

“Erees, there are handwritten letters from King Farouk of Egypt, thanking my grandfather for his dream interpretations and personal advise, and a letter from Muhammad Ali Jinnah.”  At the time, I had no idea who these men were.  Since then I discovered that Jinnah, a lawyer by profession, gave voice to the dream of a secular democratic Muslim state carved out of British ruled India and became known as the father of modern Pakistan.  I wish I could have asked Faisal’s grandfather, what advise he had given to Jinnah and what did he now think of a state carved from another state for a particular religious group?

The afternoon passed quickly and before we knew it, the sun was low in the western sky.  Gathering the torn journals, the correspondence and the old Koran like a miraculous harvest, we hurried home through No Man’s Land, through the western gate, into the Old City, excited to  share every detail of our discoveries with Ampty, Ibrahim, Samira and Marwan.  The next day, we went together to see the stone house.  This time we planned a picnic with hummus, cheese, olives, pita bread and freshly picked ripe figs for dessert.  But we were too late!  

An army of bulldozers had leveled the land– for a park– we were told.  No trace of the house.  We searched in vain for the fruiting fig tree.  Gone as well!  We walked in circles, disoriented, not believing what had happened.  The entire neighborhood had been uprooted.  No landmarks were left for the mind to hang onto.  Concrete and stone rubble mixed with mangled trees, shrubs and garbage, creating a mini dust storm.  Dust mingled tears ran down cheeks like rivulets of grief as our sorry processional meandered back through No-Man’s Land, through the western gate and into the Old City, our faces caked with mud.     

This was an unbearable sorrow.  Hope, a rare commodity in this part of the world was quickly crushed.  How many times, had I combed my Queens neighborhood with my two brothers, collecting money to plant trees in Israel, wanting to help make the desert bloom.  It has taken me years to understand why the Israelis could not even spare a fruiting fig tree.  They were erasing an inconvenient history.

Iris Keltz is a writer and teacher, living in New Mexico since the late sixties.  She is the author of Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie (Cinco Puntos Press, 2000).  While traveling through the Middle East, on her way to live on a kibbutz in Israel, Iris met a Palestinian family living in East Jerusalem and lived through the 1967 war with them.  Since then, she has returned four times to bear witness to the changes that occurred from life in the West Bank under Jordanian rule to life under Israeli occcupation.  This story is an excerpt from the book she is working on about her experience during and after that war.   She can be reached at irisk13@earthlink.net .