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Today's Stories August 2, 2006 John Ross August 1, 2006 Michael
Neumann Robert
Fisk Omar Barghouti Marc Levy Diana Barahona / Jeb Sprague Claud
Cockburn Ross Eisenbrey Dave Lindorff John Chuckman Francis
Boyle Phil Doe Stephen
Soldz Website of the Day
July 31, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Uri Avnery Robert
Fisk Amina Mire Marjorie
Cohn Sibel Edmonds / William
Weaver John Ross Stanley Rogouski Gideon
Levy Ron Jacobs James
Ridgeway / Alicia Ng Brian Tokar Alexander
Cockburn
July 29
/ 30, 2006 Michael
Neuman Vijay
Prashad Ramzi Kysia Werther Robert Fisk Patrick
Cockburn Ralph Nader Rachard
Itani Eduardo Galeano Gary Leupp Eve Poretsky John Chuckman Fred Gardner Juan Santos Punyapriya Dasgupta Liaquat
Ali Khan Israel Shamir William
A. Cook Stanley Heller Dave Lindorff Moshe Adler Susie
Day Pat Williams Anthony
Papa John V. Whitbeck Jackie
Corr Myles Palmer Tom D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website
of the Weekend
July 28, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Uri Avnery Renee Bowyer Robert
Fisk Patrick Cockburn Ramzy
Baroud Don Fitz Elaine
Cassel David Price Mike Whitney Mickey Z. Niranjan
Ramakrishnan Charles
Glass Website
of the Day
July 27, 2006 Tanya
Reinhart Saul Landau Ramzi
Kysia Tom Barry Joseph
Grosso Sharon Smith Gale Courey
Toensing Christopher Reed Werther Yusuf Mansur Richard
Harth Website of the Day
Norman
Solomon Barbara
Olshanksy David
Nally Jonathan
Cook Patrick
Cockburn William
Blum Joshua
Frank Gabriel
Kolko Daniel
Cassidy Michael
Dickinson Robert
Fisk Uri
Avnery Website
of the Day
July 25, 2006 Harry
Browne Marjorie
Cohn Robert
Bryce Sharat
G. Lin George
Bisharat CounterPunch
News Desk Zena
El-Khalil Larry
Lack Mike
Mejia Ashraf
Isma'il Website
of the Day
July 24, 2006 Mark
Levy Robert
Fisk Maher
Osseiran Paul
Craig Roberts Patrick
Cockburn Website
of the Day
July 22-23, 2006 Jonathan
Cook Paul
Craig Roberts Gilad
Atzmon Robert
Fisk Ralph
Nader Fred
Gardner Christopher
Reed Dr.
Susan Block Najla
Said Uri
Avnery July 21, 2006 George
Galloway P.
Sainath Aseem
Shrivastava Alexander
Cockburn Website
of the Day July 20, 2006 William
S. Lind Robert
Jensen John
Ross Tom
Hayden Paul
Craig Roberts July 19, 2006 Patrick
Cockburn Trish
Schuh Jonathan
Cook Vicente
Navarro July 17 / 18 2006 Mike
Whitney Kathleen Christison Atrocities in the Promised Land
July 14 / 15,
2006 Alexander Cockburn Tanya Reinhart Robert Fisk Daniel Cassidy Winslow Wheeler Hugh O'Shaughnessy M. Shahid Alam William S. Lind Ramzy Baroud Gilad Atzmon Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg Samar Assad Ron Jacobs Lee Ballinger Walter Brasch Dave Lindorff Clifton Ross Tom Crumpacker Ricardo Alarcon William Hughes Susie Day Farrah Hassen Poets' Basement
July 13, 2006 Rev. William
Alberts Ramzi Kysia Rep. John P. Murtha Radford / Santos Stan Cox Saul Landau José
Pertierra Website of
the Day
July 12, 2006 John Ross John Stauber Robert Boston Wayne S. Smith John Graham Kevin Prosen Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
July 11, 2006 Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin Mokhiber / Weissman Amira Hass Clare Hanrahan Brian Cloughey Felice Pace Raed Jarrar Website of the Day
July 10, 2006 Paul Craig
Roberts Uri Avnery Roger Burbach Ron Jacobs Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Alexander Cockburn
Stephen Green Paul Craig
Roberts Greg Moses Ralph Nader Laura Carlsen Conn Hallinan John Chuckman Fred Gardner Dr. Tod Mikuriya Pierre Tristam Lucinda Marshall David Swanson Heather Gray Dave Zirin
/ John Cox Mark Engler Michael Lettieri Ron Jacobs Jamal Juma' Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement
July 7, 2006 John Ross July 6, 2006 Nick Dearden John Stanton Ralph Nader Laray Polk Saul Landau Joshua Frank William S. Lind Adelman / Lindorff Jonathan Cook Website of
the Day
Mike Whitney Saul Landau Ramzy Baroud Missy Comley Beattie Arthur Neslen Vincent Maruffi Paul Cantor Paul D. Johnson David Price
Col. Dan Smith Chris Floyd Marjorie Cohn James Brooks Medea Benjamin Matt Reichel Elisa Salasin Rick Wilhelm Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
July 3, 2006 Robert Bryce Dr. Bouthaina Shaban Julia Olmstead Dave Lindorff Andres Gomez Alan Singer Alexander Cockburn
Paul Craig
Roberts Stephen T.
Banko Daniel Cassidy Fawzia Afzal-Khan Jeff Taylor John Ross Greg Moses Laura Carlsen Justin E.H.
Smith Brian Cloughley Anthony Papa Mike Ferner Jerry Tucker Jane Goodall / Rick Asselta Phyllis Pollack Poets' Basement
June 30, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Heather Williams Burbach / Cantor Nick Dearden Michael J.
Smith Brian Concannon Virginia Tilley
Bill Quigley Ron Jacobs Paul Craig
Roberts June 28, 2006 Jorge Mariscal Greg Moses Mark Weisbrot Ramzy Baroud Dave Lindorff William S.
Lind Mike Ferner Zoltan Grossman
Marjorie Cohn Benjamin /
Jarrar William Hughes Doug Giebel Uri Avnery Alexander Cockburn
June 26, 2006 Don Santina Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Rafael Rodriguez-Cruz Evelyn Pringle Jonathan Cook
June 23, 2006 Youmans / Erakat Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Col. Dan Smith
June 22, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Winslow T.
Wheeler Tanya Reinhart Mike Marqusee William Blum
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August 2, 2006 Kibitzing at the Corner of Sylvania and TalmadgeA View of Gaza and Lebanon from the InteriorBy MANUEL YANG Toledo, Ohio.
July 29, Saturday, 4-5 p.m., a day before the Herod-like massacre of Israeli airstrike on a Qana village in south Lebanon that murdered 56 people, almost all of them women and children, we mill at the corner of Sylvania and Talmadge, a frequent antiwar demo site in Toledo, OH. Behind us is Franklin Park Mall, whose newly minted Border's Bookstore had driven our only independent bookstore Thackery's out of business last year (the municipal developers have recently bulldozed Westgate, the very shopping plaza where Thackery's used to in order to make way for Costco whose demand for a living wage waiver the city council unhesitatingly sanctioned by overriding the mayor's veto in April). Across the street is a BP station. The heat fumes from the pavement with a heat index of about 100 degrees. Approximately a hundred people, mostly from the city's Arab-American community, are lined up on the streets holding signs, circulating free bottles of water and soft drinks, and amiably conversing among each other. Almost nobody from the local peace group Northwest Ohio Coalition of Peace is present. NWOCP, a mixed group that includes liberal Zionist sympathizers, have not even issued a statement condemning US-backed Israeli acts of blatant state terrorism in Gaza and Lebanon. Last Friday (July 21), after
a downtown demo with an even bigger show of force, apparently
the local TV media felt it necessary to kowtow to the pressure
of local Jewish organization to offer them equal time to rebut
the views of the demonstrators. As Israel called up 3000 reservists
and its warning forced thousands of villagers in south Lebanon
to become refugees, United Jewish Council of Greater Toledo chief
executive officer Joel Beren raved like an impetuous advisor
to the pre-Exodus Pharaoh facing the revolt of Mosaic slaves:
"If they (the protesters) think that the world is fooled
by their misrepresentation of facts, then they are the ones who
are fooled." I stand with a sign that says "stop the killing of children in Lebanon" (I didn't write the sign; I just picked one that was readily available from those scattered on the ground), smoking and watching the overwhelmingly supportive thumbs-up and peace signs from passing cars, their friendly honking reciprocated with lighthearted hand-waves and cheering from our ranks. Brian and Steve, two local anarchists, show up. Brian, his neck wrapped with keffiyeh, gives me a lowdown on the Friday demo, which I didn't make it to. "Some older, conservative members of the Middle Eastern community wanted Kelly to take down a ripped upside-down American flag with an anarchist circle-A scrawled on top of it, but she said, no, she had as much right to hold that up as those with more reformist signs at the demo. Yeah, and, actually, the younger, more militant Arab-American kids defended her and told the older objectioners to mind their business. It reminded me of what happened four years ago at a Palestine peace rally at Promenade Park when a Republican Clerk of Courts Maggie Thurber was on stage and doing her pre-Lucas-County-Commissioner election spiel to the demonstrators when some people made a man take down a detourned Israeli flag that had a swastika in place of a Star of David. And I remember how I found that a little disturbing, that they'd allow a Republican political hack to talk to us while curbing this man's dissenting voice..." Amjad, lifelong peace and justice
activist, Media Decompression Collective member, and local impresario
of independent music (his online Bebop Records is a treasure-trove
of hard-to-find killer materials for the diehard popular music
connoisseur), is listening. I chime in, "But shouldn't such discussions and arguments be there from the outset as we find ourselves in places like this? I mean, all of us know that these demos are going to have virtually no effect on ruling-class policy, including in Toledo. It always seemed to me that the whole point of these demos is instead to talk, discuss, and even argue, if needs be, with people you wouldn't otherwise talk to. Last Thursday, I went to a small Ann Arbor demo near the corner of Fourth and Liberty, near the downtown post office -- apparently they've been doing this every day for several months now -- and Peter told me that going to these things is analogous to going to a generator and getting your political energy recharged, sparking heat and energy of shared ideas, thoughts, and ... " A driver in a pickup truck waiting for the light to change turns to us, shouting inaudible epithets and giving us the finger with both of his hands. I smile back, tempted to jump into the street and, doing my best Cassius Clay footwork and shadow-boxing, half-jokingly shout, "Hey, motherfucka!, I'll take you down any time, any day! You might kick my goddamn ass but I'll still give you the beating of a lifetime!" But, wanting to neither dump my lit cig nor look like a testosterone-frenzied schmuck, I think the better of it and keep my mouth shut, just smiling and exhaling smoke. Carrying a homemade sign that declaims "Stop US Imperialist Aid to Israeli Terrorism", Al, the non-AFL-CIO-affiliated leftwing UE organizer, has arrived and is telling us about his upcoming trip to Greece, mostly in its northern parts. I ask him about the ethnic composition of northern Greece and he tells me about the nationalist insecurity among some of the non-Greek minorities, the perilous lies of Greek nationalism that some of the latter feel pressured to accommodate. "I mean, the origins of the city-state, for example, is not unique to ancient Greece and, even as some Greeks may vehemently deny it. Greek culture generally contains many hybrid elements not unique to itself, such as Turkish, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Egyptian" "Yeah, black Athena!" I interject. Brian: "Well, I'm against the whole of urban civilization. I think civilization, including industrialism, is the root of the problem and we should get rid of it." "What do you mean?" "I mean, look at these SUVs and cars guzzling up oil for blood and destroying the environment in the process. I don't think they should even be making automobiles. We have to destroy the very industries that produce them.." Steve: "Or what about MacDonald's? What's the point of running MacDonald's on the basis of worker's control? Mass-manufactured processed fast food that fucks up health and the environment I don't think should be even allowed to exist." Al leans in, "Well, I agree with you that MacDonald's food is awful and shouldn't exist after the revolution but, if there are workers there who're struggling to organize a union, you can bet your ass I'd unhesitatingly support them. That's the basic ethic of class solidarity. Besides, what about the Paris Commune, which is a product of urban civilization, and Kronstadt Uprising, a product of seafaring civilization?" Steve: "Sure, sure, I support workers' rights too but all I'm saying is, that's not enough. You have to bust the machine at its foundation, you have to blow up the factory. And I'm sure the Parisian Communards would've preferred getting rid of the city and the Kronstadt sailors the ship if they had the choice." Brian: "See, I think class is important but there are other issues like gender and the environment that are equally as important. I mean, so what if workers organize into a union if that union turns into a bureaucratic appendage of corporations and only greases the wheel of business as usual? There are other ways of organizing life, like among the hunter-gatherer society and indigenous people. The problem is civilization." I start to pontificate, "Well, the discourse of 'civilization' is a fairly recent one, dating from the eighteenth century. It comes from the Lowland Scottish intellectuals like Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, who established this modern association of civilization with commercial development and capitalist private property. Why? To enclose the lands of indigenous, including those of the clan-based communal land system of the Highlanders. Of course, expropriation and exploitation existed before that but their rationalization was not premised on the ideology of 'civilization' in the modern sense, they were justified on religious or tribal or ethnic or proto-nationalist grounds" "But that's just semantics, though, and I don't care about that. I don't care if you call indigenous culture 'civilization' alongside of industrialism. I'm not interested in such language-game" "Dude, that's not what I said! I didn't say that we should simply redefine the term 'civilization' in a more multiculturally egalitarian fashion. That's not my point at all. My point is that the idea of 'civilization' as the highest good, as better than the barbarism of the Highlanders or the savagery of the American Indians or African commoners or Palestinian peasants tending their olive gardens, is an idea that comes straight out of historical capitalism, its systemic need to expropriate the land and force the expropriated population into a new class of workers for capital or, if this isn't possible, exterminate them. This is the logic of capitalism and that's why the environment, gender, city life, everything that we do under this 'civilization' have everything to do with the class struggle, everything." "But what about the indigenous? How are they part of the class struggle when they're living outside of capitalism?" "Because they face the capitalist enclosers and developers, because, in order to preserve their traditional way of life, they have to struggle against capital. That's nothing if not the class struggle. You can't wish away consumerist, urban and industrial civilization any more than you can wish away the indigenous commons. Just as the indigenous commoners have their struggles to wage, we have our own struggles to wage in this goddamn civilization and non-hierarchically linking such struggles is what" Amjad looks at his watch and announces to us that he is going to record James Longley's 2002 documentary on Gaza off of Link TV and we're welcome to come over and check it out. Amjad's wife Afaf, visiting her family in Gaza, is now trapped in the besieged city and can't come back because of the Israeli border shutdown. One of Afaf's family members has an olive garden with fig trees and the IDF bulldozed it last week. "There's nothing to do
but wait, it's just a waiting game," Amjad's unvarnished
tone is sobering. "Yeah and they'll say today that there were only the six of us!" As I'm about to leave, a minor fracas is about to develop: an older gentleman points to a man on the other end of the demo and angrily says he's holding a pro-Zionist sign. We, the self-appointed mediators, go to confront him. The sign under contention actually says: "Wake up! Get out of bed with Israel!" O.K., none of us thinks this means a clarion call for the U.S. to jump out of bed and go on a romantic rendezvous with Israel but, rather, to leave the collusive bed in which it sleeps with, indeed supplies virtually all of the arms and political legitimacy to, its Middle Eastern watchdog concubine. Al goes to tell the irate man but he's not persuaded. Bad grammar is already causing dissension among us. Beware of language-games! I turn and, next to the guy with this controversially misinterpreted sexual-innuendo sign, I see another dude with a sign that declares: "God doesn't bomb people!" "Is that true?" "What's that?" "That God doesn't bomb
people," thinking of the jealously avenging Yahweh of the
ancient Israelites who had a bizarrely ethnocentric taste for
genocide. "Does God even exist?" "So far" I walk away, not sure of either. Manuel Yang can be reached at: badmarxist@yahoo.com
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                    |
