Salon releases its Hack Thirty, their least favourite political columnists. Why? “Criteria for inclusion included writing the same column every week for 30 years, warmongering, joyless repetition of conventional wisdom, and making bad puns.” Number three is typical of the rot: [New York Times’] Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around…
Washington still fighting the Soviets in 2010
Happy anniversary suckers: The US has now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union.
We break Iraq and simply ignore it
Where is the Western responsibility for causing such chaos in Iraq? A second exodus has begun here, of Iraqis who returned after fleeing the carnage of the height of the war, but now find that violence and the nation’s severe lack of jobs are pulling them away from home once again. Since the American invasion…
The Western war on a free press, coming to a country near you
Al Jazeera’s Listening Post is a weekly show that dissects the world’s media. This week there’s a focus on Sarkozy in France and his increasingly authoritarian ways against the press. Welcome to democracy:
So much for Fayyad’s dream in the West Bank
This is what Palestinian “state-building” really means: On Sept. 1, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad celebrated with the residents of Qarawat Bani Hassan the inauguration of a mile-long road linking the small West Bank village to a spring its residents consider the lifeline of the community. It was called Freedom Road. While Fayyad was…
Who’s the IDF mole who wants to expose Gaza abuses?
An Israeli insider who dislikes what his colleagues are doing: The IDF magazine, Bamachaneh confirmed today that the list of IDF officers who served in Cast Lead and allegedly committed war crimes, was leaked through an army source. … This contradicts attempts by Israel apologists to rebut the charges and information contained in the list by…
Privatising the lives of children (and Serco is mummy)
Britain’s Yarl’s Wood detention centre is run by multinational Serco. This Channel 4 story documents the effects on children in detention, such as ten-year Iranian Mehrshad.
Melanie Phillips loves to hate and Zionists cheer
When a Jewish bigot – loved by many in the Zionist Diaspora because she loathes Muslims and embraces apartheid Israel – is revealed as she really is: The Spectator and contributor Melanie Phillips today published an online apology to a prominent British Muslim they falsely accused of antisemitism. Today’s apology, published on the Spectator website,…
The old fashioned idea of backing public assets and keeping them
The corporate love affair with privatisation shows no sign of slowing down. But what if the economics are less than convincing? Nicholas Gruen writes in Inside Story that governments should more closely examine what they’re backing and why public ownership of key assets needs to be seriously considered. It’s not socialism, you know: Rather than…
So much for a Jewish majority state
Zionism, we have a credibility and morality problem: Jews no longer constitute a majority in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, according to an expert on Jewish demographics. Prof. Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that Jews – as defined by the government – now…