Archive | Commentary

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.

“Hundreds of Mohawks marched across the Seaway International Bridge into Canada from the U. S. on Saturday [9 May 2009] to protest a plan to arm border guards.” Akwesasne Mohawk Leaders Issue Joint Statement Against Arming Canada Customs Offices Onerahtokha / April 30, 2009 AKWESASNE — The Mohawk Council of Akwesasne, St. Regis Mohawk Tribal […]

Nancy Fraser‘s analysis of the obstacles to social and political justice represents an advance at a theoretical level for those who face the dilemmas of social practice.  In this sense, her work reinforces the importance of the role of the intellectual, not only when it comes to dealing with moments of crisis, but also with […]

President Barack Obama The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, D.C. 20500 May 12, 2009 Dear President Obama, We write to you again, this time to say we are saddened to see that you now clearly believe in the tired, inhumane and unworkable assumption that violence will somehow work; that might makes right.  But […]

The Citizenship and Entry in Israel Law (Temporary Order), enacted in 2003, is a racist law that bans family unification between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as any citizen from the following states defined by Israel as “enemy” states: Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Adalah […]

  “Forbidden Land” is a short documentary produced by Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel that highlights the confiscation of Palestinian Arab-owned land by Israel. Thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel lost their land in the 1950s and 1960s after the government seized it, claiming that the land was needed […]