Archive | Commentary

  Go to <www.democracynow.org/2009/5/21/nigeria> for the transcript of this program. ABUJA, 22 May 2009 (IRIN) — Thousands of civilians have fled their villages in Nigeria’s Delta state after government troops launched an offensive against militant groups in the state on 13 May. Villagers in Delta state’s Gbramatu kingdom reported Oporoza and Okerenkoko villages being attacked […]

  A discussion with Judith Butler on public mourning: Antigone, grieving, victimization, the production of certain populations as “ungrievable”, and the politics of public mourning as the expansion of our ideas of what constitutes a livable life, the expansion of our recognition of those lives that are worth protecting, worth valuing. Nelly Kambouri: In your […]

May 21, 2009, New York — Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner and Managing Attorney for CCR’s Guantanamo project Shayana Kadidal responded with disappointment to President Obama’s speech this morning.  CCR represents the detainees at Guantánamo and is part of the key FOIA lawsuit surrounding the torture photo disclosures. Ratner and Kadidal were disturbed […]

  Enormous resources have been marshaled by conservative and Zionist organizations in an attempt to silence criticism of the Canadian government’s unwavering support for Israel.  The first few months of 2009 have seen a concerted campaign to shut down Palestine advocacy in Canada.  Such examples include: cutting funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) due […]

  Elkalam.com talks with Nadine Rosa-Rosso, former secretary general of the Parti du Travail (Workers’ Party) of Belgium, who has launched a Europe-wide campaign to remove Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations.  She explains the reasons for this initiative today. Why did you decide to launch an appeal for the removal of Hamas from […]

The battle over “intellectual property rights” is likely to be one of the most important of this century.  It has enormous economic, social, and political implications in a wide range of areas, from medicine to the arts and culture — anything where the public interest in the widespread dissemination of knowledge runs up against those […]

The chant “No Justice, No Peace!” rang out once again in Virginia’s rural Powhatan County, as some 250 people marched May 17 on the county courthouse.  The protesters, almost all African-Americans and including a large number of uniformed motorcycle club members, were denouncing what they charged was a racist court decision in the shooting death […]

Havana, 16 May (Prensa Latina) — The International Day against Homophobia was observed here today, with the participation of a diverse, largely youthful public. In the early hours of the morning, the day’s activities began at the headquarters of the Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) and the Pabellón Cuba, in the central district of […]

  “Fetishism: the Key to Sensuality”; “Is Cannibalism a New Religion?”; “Syrian Lingerie”; “I Am Gay, Therefore I Do Not Exist.” . . .  With such a table of contents, Jasad (“body” in Arabic), a Lebanese, Arabic-language, cultural quarterly “specializing in the art, literature, and science of the body,” might be mistaken for an unidentified […]

“We hope for better days; it shall rise from the ashes.” — Motto of the City of Detroit (coined after a citywide fire in 1805) The green dream is coming closer every day.  Green-collar jobs are becoming more and more of a household term and are moving closer to the center of the conversation about […]

  My computer, today, is still at Tel Aviv police headquarters where it stayed after my two-hour interrogation last week.  I am not given, I believe, to conspiracy thinking but the thought crossed my mind, comically rather, whether I’d ever written anything unkind about my neighbor or his family. This morning, when I brought my […]

The United Nation’s watchdog on torture has criticized Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay” and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating. In a report published on Friday, the Committee Against Torture requested that Israel identify the location of the […]

Meeting at the union’s national headquarters in Pittsburgh on May 14-15, the General Executive Board of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) discussed the national debate on healthcare and the reform proposals now being considered by Congress and the Obama administration.  The union’s national leadership board adopted the following statement on […]

“Serbia is one of the few European countries with a protracted refugee population.  More than 90,000 refugees from Croatia and from Bosnia and Herzegovina remain there, victims of wars that erupted after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in 1991.” — UN High Commissioner for Refugees Serbia: Dreams of a Better Life Serbia: Far from […]

Detlev Claussen.   Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius.   Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.  440 pp.  Illustrations.  ISBN 978-0-674-02618-6; $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-674-02618-6. “At bottom, the concept of life as a meaningful unity unfolding from within itself has ceased to possess any reality, much like the individual himself, and the ideological function of biographies […]

A colleague of mine who now works as an editor at a large German daily newspaper told me about an experience he had while enroling in Jewish Studies.  Since the main currents of Judaism and Islam both flow through the same cultural space with a strong Arab influence, he thought it would be wise to […]

Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009). This book is a disgrace. It is difficult to understand why a reputable publisher like Yale University Press would wish to have its name on a book that is so dishonest, ill-informed, and pursues an obvious political agenda.  Perhaps the clue […]

  The East Palestine Archipelago Above: Imagined map by Julien Bousac, graphically illustrating the Palestinians’ difficulty in getting around.  All the zones of the West Bank occupied by Israel are pictured as the sea.  Left: The legend of the map in English. Source: L’Atlas, Un monde à l’envers, Paris: Le Monde diplomatique, 2009. Download the […]

Essayist, thinker and professor in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, Butler is best known for her studies of gender and sexuality, in which she examines the question of what it means to remake, to resignify, the restrictive normative concepts of sexual life and gender. Is it possible to establish any […]

  Behrooz Gharibpour, born in Sanandaj in 1950, is a Kurdish-Iranian playwright and director.  The tombak player in the film is Mohammad Reza Mortazavi.  “Green Hands” was made in 2003.