Non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation lives: Today, for a few hours, Palestinians took control over an illegal Israeli settler outpost on the outskirts of Ramallah. Replacing Israeli flags with Palestinian ones, Mohammed Al-Khattib and other members of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall, accompanied by Israeli anti-occupation activists from Anarchists Against the Wall and…
Showing all posts in June 2019
The Iraq war gift
Stephen Kinzer, Guardian Comment is Free, April 23: Trying to figure out who won the Iraq war is a challenging parlour game. Nearly every faction, group and nation has lost. The only evident victors are Iran, the Kurds and a handful of giant American corporations. It is slowly becoming clear, however, that there is another…
The online conundrum
Taking the internet and putting it in the real world: German publishing giant Bertelsmann plans to publish the world’s first reference book based on entries gathered from Wikipedia, the mammoth online encyclopedia written by volunteers. Bertelsmann believes some people who would rather leaf through a hands-on, printed book than surf through the Internet. The company…
Tibet, Zimbabwe and loving China
My following article appears in the Amnesty International Australia’s Uncensor campaign about human rights in China: The nationalistic genie has escaped the Chinese bottle. Citizens across the world have reacted strongly to the perceived anti-Chinese political and media elite in the West. Protests have mushroomed throughout China against what demonstrators view as a slight against…
Solving the world’s problems (thanks to America)
The supposed doyen of the New York Times, Thomas Friedman – a man whose message to the Iraqi people in early 2003 was “suck. on. this” – received a surprise at Brown University: Not everyone agrees with Friedman’s vision that innovation is the path to climate and energy salvation. Just seconds into his speech, he…
What is Google?
The internet is not universal: Some 80 per cent of European Union web surfers now have fast-speed broadband connections, but nearly 40 percent of all EU citizens still do not use the internet at all, an EU study published Friday found. According to the European Commission’s latest Information and Communication Technologies Progress Report, the use…
Two faces of China
Here’s to a celebration of Chinese human rights: Known among schoolmates for his spirited antics and ability to make light of almost any situation, classroom jokester Wei Xiang, 11, was put to death by the Chinese government for drawing a mustache on an image of Education Minister Zhou Ji in one of his textbooks, sources…
What Zionism means to them
Leon Hadar, The American Conservative, April 21: …It seems to me that what [William] Kristol and other leading neoconservatives have been promoting hasn’t been Zionism (whatever that means) but their own very unique Zionist agenda in which Israel assumes the role of a crusader Jewish state in the Middle East that will never make peace…