I’m currently at the Auckland Writer’s Festival. Wonderful event. Speaking to hundreds of people every day – mainly about the Middle East but also on the importance of alternative voices online – and the one message that keeps on coming up is how rarely dissenting Jewish perspectives or those critical of Israel appear in the…
Showing all posts tagged Iraq
The one-minute explanation for the “war on terror”
Lessons on terrorism that every American should know:
Americans murdering Afghans, says Seymour Hersh
The journalist who helped break the story that detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were being tortured by their US jailers told an audience at a journalism conference last month that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan. New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh also revealed that the Bush Administration had developed advanced…
What the West has brought the children of Fallujah (ie. not joy)
An important CNN report (simply being in the mainstream media is key) that highlights growing birth defects in Iraq: A large and growing number of Iraqi children are suffering from severe birth defects, as shown in the heartbreaking CNN segment embedded below, and their parents blame alleged U.S. chemical-weapons attacks. Lawyers representing the families have…
Can Australia please not hate refugees for five minutes?
Here’s Australia’s Liberal Party, the main Opposition, with its election-style ad. Note the brief section on refugees, red lines indicating an invasion of “illegals” from countries such as Iran, Sri Lanka, Iraq etc. Not racist at all. No chance:
How Blackwater would like to police the world
The ongoing saga over private military contractor Blackwater continues (mostly exposed by journalist Jeremy Scahill) in this exclusive report: Erik Prince, the reclusive owner of the Blackwater empire, rarely gives public speeches and when he does he attempts to ban journalists from attending and forbids recording or videotaping of his remarks. On May 5, that…
Debating Zionism’s boundaries
My following essay appears in the current edition of Jewish, American magazine Tikkun: IMPOSSIBLE PEACE: ISRAEL/PALESTINE SINCE 1989 by Mark LeVine Zed Books, 2009 THE MAKING OF MODERN ISRAEL, 1948–1967 by Leslie Stein Polity, 2009 POLITICS AND VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE: DEMOCRACY VERSUS MILITARY RULE by Lev Luis Grinberg Routledge, 2009 ISRAEL AND PALESTINE: REAPPRAISALS, REVISIONS,…
Isolating Iran is part of the “great energy game”
Here’s my interview with Foreign Policy Journal by Kourosh Ziabari: The Middle East is witness to continuous developments these days, such as Iran’s active diplomacy to attract the indispensable 118-member bloc of non-aligned countries to support its nuclear program, the growing isolation of Israel in European countries and within academic circles in the U.S., Arabs’…
Hizbollah rearms and accused of terrorism and Israel just continually rearms
Remind me who is the neighbourhood bully in the Middle East? It certainly isn’t Hizbollah or Lebanon: Hezbollah on Wednesday shot back at US charges it was stockpiling sophisticated weapons, accusing Washington of destabilising the Middle East and vowing to continue to build its artillery. “The resistance has the right to use all legitimate means…
Abu Ghraib was only the beginning
This is what the Western allies have given the Iraqi people; a land destroyed by war that still tortures citizens on a daily basis. NPR reports on a Human Rights Watch investigation that details shocking tales of abuse at a secret Iraqi prison: