Why aren’t these bought Orientalist hacks stripped of legitimacy?

Further evidence of the moral and political bankruptcy of the intellectual and commentator class. How many whores were willing to work spruiking Mubarak’s brutal regime? And now this: In February 2007 Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr., who developed the concept of “soft power,” visited Libya and sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months…

Avnery: Israel is on wrong side of history

Uri Avnery in a powerful column about the Zionist state walking off a cliff with its eyes open: Israel is dominated by the settlers, who resemble in spirit the Crusaders of the 12th century. Fundamentalist religious parties, not much different from their Iranian counterparts, play a major role in our state. The political and economic…

Washington; enough of this Arab democracy talk

Evidence one: As more than 100,000 protesters descended into the streets on Friday, women uniformly dressed in black flowing robes carried signs saying, “Revolution: The only solution.” Three weeks of pro-democracy protests in this island nation have followed the pattern of those in Egypt and Tunisia, with cellphones and Facebook posts propelling the movement and…

Westerners who enjoy largesse from our thugs or theirs

The depravity of bought intellectuals, not unlike many journalists who get wined and dined by US forces in Iraq or Afghanistan or in the halls of Washington, Canberra or London. Power can be appealing but it also corrupts: A trip to Libya in 2006 by Anthony Giddens, the former London School of Economics director and…

Drugging at Gitmo clear way to liberate Muslims

Don’t you get the feeling that we’ll be reading these kinds of stories for years as it becomes clear Washington treated terror suspects little better than stray dogs? The Defense Department has claimed it took the unprecedented step of forcing all “war on terror” detainees sent to Guantanamo in 2002 to take a high dosage…

Surely the most complete take-down of Scientology imaginable

During my five hour flight from Sydney to Perth, while thinking about the lack of internet access and ability to focus more on reading, I read this extraordinary recent feature by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker about Scientology, film-maker Paul Haggis and the toxic culture inside cults. It’s truly one of the finest pieces…

We miss Gaddafi’s power already!

How many of these firms have been making money in a repressive state on the backs of poorly paid migrant workers? A group of U.S. companies that do business in Libya is asking the Treasury Department to take measures to protect them despite wide-ranging sanctions announced by President Barack Obama last week. National Foreign Trade…

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