The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman – he who can’t understand why Muslims aren’t more appreciative of being bombed to freedom – was recently invited to an exclusive audience with Barack Obama at the White House. Another present was the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder (a man who loves getting close to any official source he…
Showing all posts tagged United States
The state of the peace process in 2009
Overland is one of Australia’s finest literary journals. Punchy, provocative, topical, relevant and interesting, the magazine re-launched its website this week and is currently running a Subscriberthon. Do it for yourself and the country. Get into it! I was asked to write an original piece for the festivities: Antony Loewenstein is a prominent blogger, and…
At least the Soviets eventually fell into their own abyss
Robert Fisk feels a disturbing sense of deja vu after Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Nobody said the US President was willing or able to resist his military commanders: Victor Sebestyen, who has researched a book about the fall of the Soviet empire, has written at length of those frozen…
Every whisper or whimper may be heard by Big Brother
What kind of surveillance state future are we accepting? Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law…
Why the Right backs torture, endless war and Jesus
Andrew Sullivan explains why he cannot support the Republican Party, Christianism and extremism: I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law. I cannot support…
Jews should understand Muslim pain
Tariq Ali on the curse of Islamophobia: It sometimes irritates people but I do compare it to the anti-Semitism that existed in the 20s and 30s and 40s of the last century. And I do wonder whether all the education that people are being given, and rightly so, about the killing of the Jews and…
Extremists should not be welcome in Australia
The following statement was released yesterday by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Sector union: Kevin Rudd is set to host an Israeli delegation to Australia led by Israeli Vice Prime Minister Silvan Shalom. Shalom is one of the most senior members of the extreme right wing Israeli political party, Likud, forming part of the…
Millions of Muslims dead and the world wonders why the West is hated?
Stephen Walt asks why the US is so shocked when Muslims want to kill their citizens: Some degree of anti-Americanism may reflect ideology, distorted history, or a foreign government’s attempt to shift blame onto others (a practice that all governments indulge in), but a lot of it is the inevitable result of policies that the…
Anti-war voices are virtually invisible in corporate media
Democracy Now! reports on a new study about the US media: As Obama prepares to unveil his plan, the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has put out a study analyzing how the issue of war escalation has been discussed in the opinion papers of the two leading newspapers in the country, the…
Some handy tips to break the Middle East impasse
Rami G. Khouri writes in Lebanon’s Daily Star with a suggestion to break the Middle East impasse: I have a suggestion. The Netanyahu move does not meet the legitimate demands of the Palestinians, the Obama administration, Security Council resolutions or international law and conventions, yet we should not merely dismiss it and remain diplomatically frozen.…