Today's Stories

October 14, 2009

Michael Neumann
Fearsome Words? a Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict

October 13, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Putting the Spine Back in the Commonwealth

Shamus Cooke
What Obama Isn't Telling American Workers

John Ross
War on Mexican Women

Brendan Cooney
Ask Awal Khan About Obama's Prize

Frida Berrigan
Operation Enduring Detentions: Losing the Moral High Ground

Yves Engler
Is Canada More Pro-Israel Than the US?

David Macaray
Why the Government Fears Unions

Dave Lindorff
Democrats: Selling Out, But Still Getting Screwed

Mark Weisbrot
Occupying Afghanistan is Making Things Worse

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
History Repeats Itself

Binoy Kampmark
That Dirty Colonial War

Website of the Day
The Health Insurance Industry's Latest Doublecross

October 12, 2009

Pam Martens
Secret Deal Between Wall Street and Washington Shines a Harsh Light on Federal Housing Agency

Mike Whitney
A Dollar Rout or More Bernanke Trickery?

Martha Rosenberg
Yale Lab Tech Causes Two Problems for Animal Researchers

Jessica Arents
The Price of Peace: Our Arrest at the White House

Eamonn McCann
Massacre in Ireland, Massacre in Iraq

Bill Hatch
Dairy Industry Goes Down the Tubes

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time for a Timetable in Afghanistan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Siren Song of World Praise

Gideon Levy
Obama's Betrayed Mission in the Middle East

Iyad Burnat
Why Does Obama Get a Prize and Bush Got Shoes?

Alan Cabal
Why Obama Deserves the Nobel

Dan Bacher
The Astroturf Method

Website of the Day
The Palestine Chronicle Needs Your Help

October 9-11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
War and Peace

James Bovard
Eight Years of Big Lies on Afghanistan

Kathleen and Bill Christison
New Crisis Developing in Palestine

Andy Worthington
Congressional Depravity on Gitmo

Marc Levy
Talking Dirty to the Kids

Tariq Ali
Ahmed Rashid's War

Mike Whitney
The Securitization Boondoggle

Paul Craig Roberts
Warmonger Wins Peace Prize

Alan Nasser
Cockeyed Economics

Jack Z. Bratich
The Twitterest Pill: Policing Dissent in the Information Age

Steve Breyman
Time for a War Tax

David Michael Green
A Hapless Presidency

Dave Lindorff
The WTF Prize

Paul Buchheit
Fear of the Rich

Jim Goodman
Feedlots and E. Coli

Missy Beattie
Theater of the Absurd

Michael Leonardi
Ships of Poison

Nadia Hijab
The Plight of the Right of Return

Mel Packer
The Crackdown on Pittsburgh

David Macaray
The Raiding Game

James T. Phillips
Getting Burned

Charles R. Larson
One Man's Walk Through Hell

Michael Donnelly
Behind the Capitalist Curtain

David Yearsley
The Biggest Blot on Mel Gibson's Rap Sheet

Lorenzo Wolff
Rap That Threatens ... and Endures

Poets' Basement
Heyen, Ames and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Jobs Conference

October 8, 2009

Saul Landau
A Late September Morning With Fidel

Paul Fitzgerald /
Elizabeth Gould
Dark Omens for the US in Afghanistan

Linn Washington, Jr.
Pot and Perversion: Judicial Antics Expose Drug War Insanity

Marshall Auerback
Neo-Classical Economics Misses What Matters

Dave Lindorff
A Nation of Snoops

David Rosen
Bankrupt Morality: the Staying Power of Republican Sinners

Chris Darimont / Misty MacDuffee
The Bear Essentials: New Thinking Needed to Save BC's Salmon and Grizzlies

John V. Walsh
Remembering Hinton's Fanshen

Stewart Lawrence
The Edwards / Hunter Affair Reconsidered

Charles R. Larson
Conservatives in the Sandbox

Website of the Day
Et Tu, Code Pink?

October 7, 2009

Brendan Cooney
Are Republicans Breaking US Law in Honduras?

Paul Craig Roberts
Dead Labor: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Recovery: Unemployment Up, Wages Down (But the Banks Have Been Saved ... Sort Of)

Jonathan Cook
A Third Intifada?

John Stanton
HTS: Congress Rewards Failure, Puts Personnel in Harms Way

Joanne Mariner
Tortured Language

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cherry Blossoms

Stephen Lendman
The Gaza War's Effect on Women

Sen. Russell Feingold
Time to Draw Down in Afghanistan

Mary Lynn Cramer
Doublespeak on Health Care

Website of the Day
How to Bag a Wolf by Aerial Assault

October 6, 2009

Mike Whitney
Dollar Hysteria: Is the Sky Really Falling?

Gareth Porter
The Iranian Rift in the IAEA: Leaked Paper Based on Disputed Intel

Jonathan Cook
How Israel Buried the UN's War Crime Probe

Boris Kagarlitsky
My Hour as Talking Head in Moscow

Iain Boal
The New Crisis at Pacifica

Ron Jacobs
Why Are We in Afghanistan?

John Ross
Wave of Anarchist Bombings Strikes Mexico

Michael Dickinson
Panic in Istanbul: Smoke, Mayhem and the World Bank

Stephen Fleischman
Beware the Predator

Ira Glunts
The Audacity of Nope

Missy Beattie
Outside Looking In

Website of the Day
Round Up the Usual Suspects

October 5, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Titans Use Aliases to Foreclose on Families While Partnering with a Federal Agency

Mike Whitney
Dead Man Walking: Welcome to the US Economy

Paul Craig Roberts
How the Feds Imprison the Innocent

Harry Browne
Ireland Says, "Yes, Please"

Sara Mann
My Little Town: Nothin' But the Dead and Dyin'

Omar Barghouti
Dissolve the Palestinian Authority

Shamus Cooke
A Jobless Recovery?

Brenda Norrell
A Dirty New Low for Peabody Coal

Fred Gardner
Situation NORML: Reconciling Medical Pot Use and Legalization

Binoy Kampmark Copenhagen Blues: McChrystal and the Afghan Trap

Website of the Day
In Goldman Sachs We Trust?

October 2-4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Geezer Renditions

Saul Landau
News From Raul Castro

Diana Johnstone
After the German Elections: Is Socialism Really Dead in Europe?

Greg Moses
Cramming for the Downside

William Blum
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Another Cold War Myth

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Nuclear Program: Where's the Proof?

Russell Mokhiber
Welcome Back, Michael Moore

John Ross
Chomsky in Mexico

Ellen Brown
IMF Catapults From Shunned Agency to Global Central Bank

David Ker Thomson
Cop Shocks

David Macaray
The Audacity of Toyota

Gary Engler
Unions in a Rut

Robert Fantina
Meet the New Boss (Same as the Old Boss)

Lisa Stolarski / Naomi Archer
Pittsburgh: Still a (Coal) Company Town

Anthony Papa
Here is Your Chance to Help End the Failed War on Drugs

Joe Allen
The Good Wife: Bad View of a Corrupt System

Harry Browne
Tarantino Scalps His Audience

Ron Jacobs
Collective Fiction

Charles R. Larson
Cultural Warriors: Austrialian Aboriginal Art Triennial

David Yearsley
Hanns Eisler's Great National Anthem for East Germany is Available: Make It America's

Poets' Basement
Taylor, Gardner and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Wrongful Convictions of Youth

October 1, 2009

Andy Worthington
A Truly Shocking Gitmo Story

Carl Ginsburg
The Great Marginalization

Mary Lynn Cramer
Seniors on the Chopping Block

Col. Douglas Macgregor
The Bog of History in Afghanistan

Brian M. Downing
The Paradox of Financial Disorder

John V. Walsh
Mao's China at 60

Ramzy Baroud
The Big Diversion

Norman Solomon
Starting Another Year of War in Afghanistan

Dan Bacher
Undamming the Klamath

Brenda Norrell
Lazy Journalists are the Darlings of the Corporations

Website of the Day
Neoliberalism as Water Balloon

September 30, 2009

Vijay Prashad
McChrystal's Afghan Desolation

Gareth Porter
U.S. Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn't Add Up

Andy Thayer
The Fiasco Behind Chicago's Olympics Bid

Paul Craig Roberts
Another War in the Works

Dean Baker
Medicare Buy-In: What's Wrong With Giving People a Choice?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Mission Impossible

Laura Flanders
Punch in the Streets, But Not in the Suites

Dave Lindorff
The Baucus Excuse

Seumas Milne
Why British Workers Are Angry

Martha Rosenberg
What Integrity Means to Pfizer

Website of the Day
Why You Should Boycott Hyatt Hotels

September 29, 2009

Marshall Auerback
A Neoliberal Hijacking

Alan Farago
Recovery Without Feeling

Jeff Sher
Shopping for Health Care

Bruce Jackson
60 Minutes and the General

Gareth Porter
Fears of Defeat in Afghanistan

Jonathan Cook
Palestinians in the Israeli Army

Bouthaina Shaaban
Arabs in the International Balance

Dave Lindorff
Looking Under the TARP

Stephen Soldz
Spreading Hysteria About Swine Flu "Hysteria"

Sara Mann
The Party of No Meets the Island of No

Website of the Day
Cosmos, Autotuned

September 28, 2009

Laura Carlsen
The Sound and Fury of the Honduran Coup

Anthony DiMaggio
The U.S., Iran and Nuclear Terror

Paul Craig Roberts
More Lies, More Deceptions

Neve Gordon
On Palestinian Civil Disobedience

Bill Quigley
Street Report From the G20

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's LBJ Moment

Nicola Nasser
Stuck Between Two Failures

Ben Rosenfeld Murder in New Orleans: Remembering Kirsten Brydum

Website of the Day
The Short March

September 25-7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ruin of His Presidency

Daniel Wolff
Speculating on Education

Rev. William E. Alberts
How "White Magic" Makes the Ism of Race Disappear

Mike Roselle
Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

Saul Landau
Covert Memories From Miami

Eshan Azari
Why Afghan Intellectuals Live in National Despair

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Pentagon Feedlot

Robert Jensen
Is Obama a Socialist?

Jonathan Cook
Sleeping with the Enemy

Nelson P Valdés
Cuba, Hurricanes and the Internet

David Michael Green
Dumping Dubya

Ramzy Baroud
The Goldstone Report and Israeli Impunity

John V. Whitbeck
The Partition Straightjacket

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trial Delayed ... Again

David Ker Thomson
The Lady Vanishes

Seth Sandronsky
Obama and Race Management

Jim Goodman
Why are Farmers Afraid of Michael Pollen?

Charles R. Larson
From Oppression to Opportunity

David Yearsley
Froberger's Travels

Kim Nicolini
Hardcore Capitalism

Lorenzo Wolff
Transparent Pink

Website of the Weekend
An Emergency Appeal in the Fight Against Big Coal

September 24, 2009

Steven Higgs
Even in Indiana, Doctors Support National Health Insurance

Christopher Brauchli
Death Pays

Marshall Auerback
The Shortfall at the FDIC

Stephanie Westbrook
Italy's Fallen Soldiers

Nadia Hijab
Know Your Dictator

Sen. Russell Feingold
Fixing the Patriot Act, Restoring the Constitution

David Macaray
Goodbye "Norma Rae"

Binoy Kampmark
Curry Bashings in Oz

Joe Allen
Dancing With the Hammer

Website of the Day
The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

September 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Economy is a Lie, Too

Gabriel Kolko
The United States in Afghanistan: Eight Years Later

Uri Avnery
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit

Shamus Cooke
The First Shots of the Trade War

Missy Beattie
The Sound of Money

Gareth Porter
Taliban Rising

Mark Weisbrot
How Much Repression Will Hillary Clinton Support in Honduras?

Dr. Susan Block
The Murder of Annie Le

Norm Kent
Pot and the Right to Pursue Happiness

Richard Neville
Apocalypse Porno

Website of the Day
In Carver Country

September 22, 2009

Franklin C. Spinney The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Russell Mokhiber
Who's the Pimp?

Greg Grandin
Zelaya's Brazilian Gambit

Nikolas Kozloff
Salvaging Democracy in Honduras Will Be Tricky

John Ross
Mexico Convulsed by Paranoia

Ron Jacobs
Gen. McChrystal's Salespitch

Tariq Ali
The Afghan Folly

Dave Lindorff
NYT Trashes Single-Payer

Harvey Wasserman
Tom Friedman's Idiocy Atomique

Vijay Prashad
Is Anything Better Than Nothing?

Kareem Shora
After the CIA Torture Report

Website of the Day
Did a State Dept Official Sell Nuclear Secrets?

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

Carl Finamore
Backstage at the AFL-CIO Convention

Uri Avnery
Sliming Goldstone and His Report

Nikolas Kozloff
Joe Wilson's Immigration Hypocrisy

Paul Simpson, M.D.
Why Your Doctor May Have PTSD

Alan Nasser
New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

Ray McGovern
CIA Torturers Running Scared

Dave Lindorff
Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

Lina Thorne
Women, War and Afghanistan

Jeb Sprague
Confronting the G20

Website of the Day
Petition: Save the Yellowstone Grizzly

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

October 14, 2009

A Suppressed Talk on the Israel/Palestine Conflict

Fearsome Words?

By MICHAEL NEUMANN

In April of this year I was invited by the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association to speak at one of their meetings.  The meeting was to have taken place in the Parliament building in Ottawa, where I have spoken previously without incident.  John Ivison, in the National Post newspaper, published a not particularly vicious or unbalanced attack on me, deploring the invitation.   After this, without any contact with me and without seeing the content of my talk, the meeting was 'postponed'.    It is now clear that the postponement was permanent.

This might seem spineless, but it involved more than the National Post article.

Ivison reports that Alykhan Velshi, director of communications for Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, had the following to say:

"In a free country like Canada, Mr. Neumann has the right to air his noxious views. The corollary, of course, is that we can and must criticize them. Neumann's farrago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate are completely repugnant to our government, and we make no apology for saying so."

Bob Rae (former Ontario premier, former head of the New Democratic Party, now a high-ranking Liberal Party leader) is reported to have been '"surprised and disappointed" that the parliamentary group thought Mr. Neumann had something positive to contribute'.

Here is the alleged farago of cant, conspiracy theory and hate - unaltered since before the attacks.  Readers may judge for themselves whether the allegations have merit.

* * *

Nationalism and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

For a brief period in the 1970s I worked in the Vancouver used book trade.   I got to know a legend among booksellers -  Bill Hoffer.   Bill was a skilled purveyor of Canadian first editions and a great bluffer.  Once I found him in earnest and extended conversation with one of 'his' authors; later I asked Bill whether the guy's stuff was any good.   "I don't read it," said Bill, "I just sell it.".

Bill told me that the secret of the used book business was 'gaining moral ascendency' over the customers (whom he called 'civilians').   This meant making them feel like you were more knowledgeable about and more committed to whatever they were interested in.    Intimidate the customer a bit, and your business flourishes.

The Israelis gained moral ascendancy long ago; some reputed people called 'the Arabs' never had it.  This involved more than PR skills.   It also involved terrible confusions about nationalism.   They're the secret weapon of the Zionists and the secret weakness of 'the Arabs'.

Zionist ideology has always departed from a question:  every people has its state; why not the Jews?   A 'no' answer would tie you to that evil of evils, antisemitism.  The rights of 'the Jewish people' meant Israel had a morally titanic 'right to exist'.   It meant that the relentless expansion of Jewish settlement was, far from a mortal threat to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area, the mere completion of the long Jewish Odyssey.  It was just part of the long journey home.

As for the Palestinians, they described themselves as Arabs.   This sounded like they *had* a home; it was the whole Arab world.  If their 'Arab brothers' would not take them in, well, that was no fault of the Zionists.   So if the Palestinians were squeezed ever further into unlivable enclaves, it was the Arabs who were to blame.   The Arabs would rather dispute a tiny strip of their vast possessions than grant the Jews their little homeland.

These claims - we're just a people like any other, we just want to go home - are the last bastion of lsrael's crumbling moral stature.   It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy.  Israel's rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era.   The confusions that sustain them not only raise racial crusading to a moral imperative; in other ways they bring unjust disrepute and demoralization on the entire so-called Arab world.

If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology.   Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe.   There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine.   As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe.   Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it?   And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can't possibly explain - the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as 'subhumans' in inhuman prison camps?

There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities.  It fairly stares us in the face.   It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics - poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans.   It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics.  This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.

Before proceeding let me forestall a predictable objection.  I intend to trace the ravages of ethnic nationalism, not by any means to make Zionists into Nazis.  It is entirely unnecessary to take this false step, which would obscure rather than clarify the repellent aspects of Zionism.  The offspring of ethnic nationalism are a nasty brood, but of course the Nazis were in a league of their own.

Wilson legitimized this atrocious doctrine during the peace negotiations that ended the First World War.   Wilson's own secretary of state, Robert Lansing, anticipated its consequences all too accurately:

"The more I think about the President's declaration as to the right
of 'self-determination,' the more convinced I am of the danger of
putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands.

"What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians,
and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent,
disorder, and rebellion? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and
Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it? How can it
be harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed?

"The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle in force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause!"

For his prescience Lansing incurred Wilson's disfavour and was forced to resign.  He seemed a fussy old spoilsport, unwilling to grant peoples their rights  - peoples, or, as he puts it in the language of his era, races.   Could he not see the progressive implications of Wilson's doctrine?   Did he not understand that the self-determination of peoples - races, ethnic groups - was a sacred human right?

Well, one person did, the person who wrote:

"If the race is in danger of being oppressed or even exterminated the question of legality is only of secondary importance. The established power may in such a case employ only those means which are recognized as 'legal'. yet the instinct of self-preservation on the part of the oppressed will always justify, to the highest degree, the employment of all possible resources.

"Only on the recognition of this principle was it possible for those
struggles to be carried through, of which history furnishes magnificent examples in abundance, against foreign bondage or oppression at home.

"Human rights are above the rights of the State."

Ah, human rights, which belong not only to individuals but to 'peoples'.   This champion of human rights was Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf.  (Murphy translation, line 4084, Volume I, chapter iii)

Hitler 'understood' that peoples had a right to their homeland.   The 'national' part of National Socialism was not civic nationalism, the nationalism that calls on French, German, American, Italian or Spanish *citizens* to cherish and defend their countries.   It was ethnic nationalism, the nationalism of 'peoples', races, who did not have a homeland, or who had suffered a diaspora or historic wrongs.  Hitler held that the German people had suffered both and was threatened with extinction.  The Germans wanted their homeland back, all of it.  Every other people had its homeland; why not the Germans?

Of course this was nonsense.   The 'German people' was a bit of a fiction, and the borders of their 'homeland' were founded largely on historical myths irrelevant to contemporary rights and wrongs.   But despite the most awful and obvious fulfilment of Lansing's worst nightmare, we have never abandoned Wilson's and Hitler's endorsement of ethnic nationalism.   It infects even our condemnations of 'the Germans' for the Nazi era.

To condemn 'the Germans' means this:  even if you'd spent the war in an orphanage because your parents had died in street battles with the Nazi black shirts, you would share in the Germany's collective guilt.  You share in it not because of anything you have done, but because you were, by birth, a German.  We might call this 'collective responsibility', but that's just a respectable name for racial guilt, the guilt of a 'people'.   From the rubble of the Nazi empire, the rubbish of ethnic nationalism rises up and takes an honoured place among our orthodoxies.  From this rubbish comes the right of a fictitiously collective 'Jewish people' to a 'homeland'.

That link is explicit.  The Nazi conception of a Jewish people lies at the heart of Israel's famous right of return.   Don't take my word for it.   Listen instead to the AMERICAN-ISRAELI COOPERATIVE ENTERPRISE (AICE), which describes itself as "a nonpartisan organization to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship by emphasizing the fundamentals of the alliance - the values our nations share".   To explain in what sense 'Jews' have a right to return to their homeland, the AICE states that "At present, the definition is based on Hitler's Nuremberg Laws: the right of Return is granted to any individual with one Jewish grandparent, or who is married to someone with one Jewish grandparent. As a result, thousands of people with no meaningful connection to the Jewish people theoretically have the right to immigrate."  AICE neglects to mention that such persons also have the actual right to immigrate, and to obtain citizenship.  On the other hand,  a stateless Palestinian refugee, perhaps living a precarious existence in France, has no such right of return, even if his ancestors inhabited Palestine itself for a thousand years.  Palestine, it seems, is not is the 'homeland' of Palestinians, but only of the Jews.

'Jew', in other words, does not refer to those who espouse Judaism or embrace Jewish culture. 'Jew' means 'of Jewish ancestry'.   In virtually every Canadian jurisdiction, ancestry is explicitly cited as a prohibited ground of discrimination.   Ancestry is just a contemporary stand-in for the older notion of race and is generally used in references to racial discrimination.(**)   Like skin colour, it's something you cannot change, and therefore a particularly repugnant basis for determining civic status.

For the homeland to *belong* to the Jews is for them to have *sovereignty* there.   Thus Article 7(a) of Israel's Basic Law stipulates that "A candidates' list shall not participate in the elections to the Knesset if its objects or actions, expressly or by implication, include...  negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people."  The Jewish people, in other words, are sovereign, and hold the power of life and death over all non-Jewish inhabitants under state control.  Lest this seem overdramatic, note how the Israeli ministry of justice commented on a court case in March 2009:  "The State of Israel is at war with the Palestinian people, people against people, collective against collective."(***)

So a miracle appears among us.   The very ideology of homelands and peoples under whose auspices the Jews were all but exterminated has become the sustaining ideology of Israel, a state devoted to Jewish ethnic sovereignty.   This is why we always hear that Israel - not Israelis - has a right to exist.   What matters are not the citizens of a state, but the state itself, the totemic icon of 'the Jewish people'.   The fatal confusion that legitimized ethnic nationalism at the Paris Peace Conference now legitimizes Israel itself.   When Zionists suggest that the French and Germans have a right to their states, they conveniently forget that this means the *inhabitants* of France and Germany, not those of some French or German *ancestry*, not a 'people' in the sense of an ethnic group.  (The world was outraged when it suspected that Britain's 'patrial' immigration laws were designed to favor those of ethnically British ancestry.)   But 'the Jewish people' have a right to their state, and this is supposed to be some lofty ideal.   Why?  Because ethnic nationalism has taken on the cloak of civic nationalism, and we are too stupid to notice.  Had ethnic nationalism not shed a single drop of blood, we should still be ashamed for crediting its mystique of peoples, historical wrongs, collective vices and virtues, ineluctable destinies.   Abstractions and myths that could not even gain entrance to a university's ivory towers flow daily from the lips of supposedly practical people.

Zionists bought into ethnic nationalism because it served them well.  'Arabs' bought into it too, partly as a reaction to Zionist colonization.   It has not been enough to say:  the Zionists wish to impose racial sovereignty on these Palestinian individuals; this in unacceptable.  One must also ask:  are not the Palestinians a people?  is Palestine not their homeland?   do they not also have a right of self-determination?  But if ethnic nationalism has given the Palestinians some chance at meeting the Zionists on their own terms, it has on the whole served 'the Arabs', and therefore the Palestinians, badly.

In the Middle East, ethnic nationalism has always been greeted with polite acceptance and a certain embarrassment.  The idea that all Arabic speakers shared in being Arabs began life, like most ethnic nationalisms, as an almost literary adventure.  It originates in Syria, where progressive Christians developed it to counter Ottoman rule.  The British, through T.E. Lawrence 'of Arabia' quickly seized on it enrol some inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula in the same cause.  After 1919, the Syrian and Arabian strains of this doctrine met in uneasy coexistence.  The British installed Arabian rulers in Syria/Lebanon and Jordan, not without complaints that their new subjects were 'not Arabs'!  It was again the British, in the 1940s, who presided over the foundation of an 'Arab League', partly as a move to keep the French from re-establishing their position in Lebanon.

One of  the League's founding members was Egypt.  This might bring a smile to some of you who know the Middle East, because you have heard Egyptians make disparaging remarks about 'the Arabs' who frequent the nightclubs along the Nile, or listened to an elderly Egyptian tell you the story of just when he first discovered he was an 'Arab'.   But the myth of an Arab people is more than a successful British ploy.  It took deep roots when Gamel Abdel Nasser fashioned it into a ideology of resistance to Western colonialism, not to mention a convenient tool for extending Egyptian power.  As an oppositional creed, everyone from Berbers who hate 'the Arabs' to Egyptians who despise them to Palestinians who feel abandoned by them will proudly claim their Arab identity against the insults and depradations of the West.

Yet all know better.  There are inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula who may plausibly be called Arabs.   Most other Arabic speakers have little in common with these 'Arabians', and little sympathy for their culture or traditions.  As for 'Arab nationalism', no longer is there a Nasser to fashion it into a progressive force; it has withered on the vine.  Yet if Arab ethnic nationalism never gained enough force to harm others, it gained enough prominence to put the so-called Arab world at the losing end of moral ascendency.

The Arabs, understood as the ensemble of Arabic speakers, are by no stretch of the imagination 'a people'.  They pay a heavy price for this dubious self-description.  On the one hand, it associates every Arabic speaker with every crime of every other Arabic speaker - this holds even for some whose native tongue isn't Arabic but who live in officially 'Arab' countries.  It is as if the Sudanese 'Arab' militias were the armies of a 'people' encompassing the Syrians of Tyre and the Berbers of Marrakesh.

Perhaps this bad press is a mere annoyance.   But there is worse.   Not only the rest of the world but 'the Arabs' themselves have come think they are somehow a hopeless case:  why on earth can't they unite?   Why don't they do more for the Palestinians?   Why the endless bickering and mistrust?  'The Arabs' in these respects seem like perennial losers incapable of self-government, markedly inferior to 'the Jews'.   This impression is only partly countered by savvy remarks about an 'Arab street', always on the verge of rising up against their rotten rulers, yet never, it seems, more genuinely committed to the Palestinians than a fan club to their favorite football team.   To the extent that unsustainable attempts at constructing an Arab identity have contributed to the decline of Middle East secularism, they have also contributed to the rise of fanatical religious extremists.   This too has hurt the Arabic-speaking world.

Not only does Arab nationalism make 'the Arabs' look bad; it also obscures what is good.   When Arab states support and sustain the Palestinians, it is much more from genuine altruism than from bogus racial solidarity.  But to the extent that Arabs do not do all that is expected of them - do not take in the Palestinians, do not invite them in as fellow-Arabs, the reason is simple.   The Palestinians are not fellow-Arabs.   They have no home, no 'homeland' if you like, but Palestine.   Wondering why their 'brother Arabs' do not to take them in makes as much sense as wondering why Northern Irish Protestants would not welcome as brothers their 'fellow Anglophones' from Dublin or Watts or the slums of Kingston, Jamaica.

The ethnic nationalism of the Zionists is a big success; that of 'the Arabs', to their credit, a big failure.  Perhaps we overestimate the extent to which the West can contribute to resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict, not least because we are so dead set in regarding the 'Arab world' - which has given Israel a bloody nose on more than one occasion - as a bunch of losers.   But certainly Western peacekeeping initiatives, especially from Canada and the US, are undermined by the painfully obvious efforts of our leaders not to adore the Israelis too passionately, and not to despise 'the Arabs' too thoroughly.  Unfortunately 'the Arabs', now fond of their fictitious identity, are complicit in creating this bias.

This has to change, but it cannot change without abandoning the revolting principles we have so blindly espoused.  That will not be easy.  We are so bemused by the lovely vision of peoples determining themselves, we cannot see that ethnic self-determination is, in the real world, a quest for racial sovereignty, not a bid to enter some international folk dancing festival.   We take the Zionist adoration of Israel, its commitment to racially Jewish rule of Palestine, as a paean to freedom and human rights.  We look up to Israel for precisely what should make us abhor it.   The 'self-determination of peoples' is a poison set in the very heart of our humanitarian ideologies.    Neutralize it and Israel will lose its moral ascendency.

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at a Canadian university.  He is the author of What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche and The Case Against Israel.  He also contributed the essay, "What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.  He can be reached at mneumann@live.com

Notes.

(*) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/return.html

I am not the first Jew to find the founding concept of Zionism unacceptable, and long ago a much more committed Jew went further than I.   Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, expressed himself as follows - in 1944:  "The concept of a racial state - the Hitlerian concept- is repugnant to the civilized world, as witness the fearful  global war in which we are involved. . . , I urge that we do  nothing to set us back on the road to the past. To project at this time the creation of a Jewish state or commonwealth is to launch a singular innovation in world affairs which  might well have incalculable consequences."

(**)Even countries that appear to discriminate on the basis of ancestry do not in fact do so.  For example, the UK's ancestry visas do not: "The visa enables people aged 17 or over whose grandparents were born in the UK to come for four years and eventually apply to stay"  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1579415/Britain-may-abolish-ancestry-visa.html)    So the ultimate criterion is residence, not ancestry.  Not so Israel.

(***)The Ministry of Justice, March 2009, commenting on whether Israeli citizens can bring spouses to Israel if they come from a 'hostile country' or from the occupied territories:  http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

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