The next time a politician or pundit says anything about Iraq, anything at all, ask yourself if you have ever heard him say that Iranians have historically regarded Shi’ism as a deterrent to Arabization?
If you haven’t heard anybody who sounds knowledgeable talking about this, then you have no reason to think him knowledgeable.
We may [...]
The squalls of hypocrisy accompanying disclosure that Barack Obama’s pastor of some twenty years has been inveighing against our cultural doubleness, one society for people of color and another for whites, is something like a national case of reflux.
Is it big news we live in two societies—black and white, rich and poor, powerful and [...]
The less Americans read the more BS they’re likely to believe. So when I hear of someone referring to the Qu’ran as an evil book, a fascist book, a license to murder, I take him to be someone who takes his reading in small doses prescribed by quacks.
I’ve read the Qu’ran in translation many [...]
“There should be an end to the occupation that began in 1967. The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. These negotiations must ensure that Israel has secure, recognized, and defensible borders. And they must ensure that the state of [...]
Read More... After seven years of making matters worse by a bizarre combination
of indifference and misdirected meddling the Bush Administration has finally convened Arabs and Jews at Annapolis, Maryland, and guess what’s missing? What, not who.
The media are yakking about extremist Hamas and Iran not being there. Forget them, what’s conspicuously absent is any acknowledgment that [...]
The profiteers, the apocalyptos, the chicken hawks, they all wanted to go into Iraq without a thought to the most obvious fact of all—we would be magnifying Iran’s influence in the region tenfold while our policy was to contain it.
It was obvious to the majority of Arabs, most of whom are Sunnis. It was obvious [...]
The United States of America was born out of conflict with imperialism, but it finds itself unsuccessfully trying to clean up imperialist messes from Indo-China to Iraq.
How has this happened?
I think the answer lies in the tension between Jeffersonian ideal and piratical capitalism. We have failed to reconcile these two driving impulses. Indeed, we [...]
(This is a transcript of a recent podcast for journalism students around the world.)
Lost Story Disease is ravaging the planet. Its toll will be much greater than the Spanish Flu’s. While there are no cures for such diseases as cancer, there is a cure for Lost Story Disease. It’s called better reporting.
Here are some of [...]
The worse things get in Iraq, the more our dominionist White House sticks to its rancid story, the more I wonder not what the United States is doing there—I’m convinced we don’t belong there—but what the Muslim countries are doing there.
What do they want? Blood? Their own and everyone else’s? Conflict to distract [...]