Archive | Commentary

I was fortunate enough to attend the Bruce Springsteen “Seeger Sessions” concert in Saratoga Springs, New York, Monday. June 19th. The current Springsteen tour is in support of his new album, We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions, inspired by a request to do a Pete Seeger song for a tribute, which morphed, according to Springsteen, into […]

Capitalism’s demand for cheap labor is the thread that runs throughout the history of immigration in the U.S. and remains the central issue today.  Currently, the crux of the immigration issue is the status of the undocumented Mexican and Central American labor force working in this country.  Just how closely the U.S. economy is linked […]

With several months to go until the election, you may already be tired of the seemingly endless speculation in the media about the Democrats’ chances to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives.  While there is some small discussion among working people about this possibility, for most, the November 7th elections are a long […]

A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEOLIBERALISM by David HarveyBUY THIS BOOK Neoliberalism has left an indelible, smoldering mark on our world for the last thirty years.  Eminent Marxist geographer David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005), spoke earlier this year to Sasha Lilley, of the radical radio program Against the Grain, about […]

After years of tortured searching, I have finally found a use for Western literature.  I merely select pieces from the dead-white-men canon and revise them, in a way that we can better understand contemporary politics!  For instance, the perplexing realpolitik of a certain U.S. Senator, and possible Presidential candidate, suddenly becomes clear, as we reconfigure […]

  My father’s travels ended in 1980. We came back to live the Iran-Iraq war. Zinnah, my sister, was a child of ten when she attended the Dijla (Tigress) Primary School. One day she returned to ask my mother, “Are we Sunni or Shooyouii (Arabic for Communist)?” a word she had most probably picked up […]

Even before Iran was rocked by the mass uprising of 1978-79, I understood that moralists of all stripes shroud certain tragedies with unique reverence as a means of discouraging dissent.  Three decades later, Iran’s opposition movement — and occasionally Human Rights Watch — are grounded in orthodoxies of their own even as they struggles against […]

2,500 US known dead, give or take a corpse or two  Untold tens of thousands of Iraqis. A new and more repressive crackdown in Iraq’s capital city titled, rather lamely, Operation Forward Together.  No Iron Fist this time.  No Desert Storm.  Just Forward Together into the fog or perhaps the abyss.  No one really seems […]

I watched the World Cup match of Iran and Mexico — two peoples with whom Washington is at odds! — on 11 June, with my Iranian friends (mainly men).  So I adopted Iran as my team for the day. Knowing little about Iranian footballers, before the match began, I told my friends to point out […]

  The original Hebrew version of this article was published in Teoria ve-Bikoret [Theory and Criticism] 24 (2004): 203-211. I Two main processes have shaped the character of Israeli society in the past three decades: the privatization revolution and the perpetuation of the occupation.  The underlying interdependence of these two processes has comprised the political […]

  I. The New Israeli Left The new Israeli Left — Zionist and liberal — reinvented itself immediately following the 1967 war.1  During the 1948 war and its aftermath, the Zionist Left had difficulty in working out the contradiction between its socialist obligations to social and political justice and being an inseparable part of the […]

In one of her last essays published in the United Kingdom, the late Susan Sontag compared the pictures of tortured Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq with the photographs “of black victims of lynching taken between the 1880s and 1930s, which show smalltown Americans, no doubt most of them church-going, respectable citizens, […]

On June 2, a combined force of local, provincial, and federal police arrested 15 young Muslim men, including five minors, in the Toronto area.  Those 15, and two others who have been in jail since last August, are accused of plotting terrorist attacks on various targets in Ontario.  If convicted, they could be sentenced to […]

“Whoever battles monsters should take care not to become a monster too, for if you stare long enough into the Abyss, the Abyss stares also into you.”                                     — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche “Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us — and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, […]

  El presidente de Bolivia, Evo Morales, rendirá hoy homenaje al Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara, en el 78 aniversario de su natalicio y en la aldea de La Higuera, donde el guerrillero vivió sus últimas horas. Según confirmó la Presidencia de la República, el mandatario encabezará el tributo, consistente en la apertura de un centro […]

¿Qué mujer en México, sin importar sus ideas, puede honestamente quedarse callada? Los días 3 y 4 de mayo del 2006, quedarán en la memoria de los habitantes de San Salvador Atenco, como unos de los días más tristes y violentos de su historia contemporánea.  Este pueblo, de unos 33 mil habitantes, dependientes aún de […]

Former Senator and 1972 Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern‘s recent commentary on labor “The End of ‘More’” (Los Angeles Times, 22 May 2006), albeit apologetically, confirms that liberal orthodoxy is on the side of telling U.S. workers and working-class communities to quit struggling against the tide of “a new competitive reality.”  But whose reality is […]

Last night, I saw Al Gore’s new movie, An Inconvenient Truth.  There is much to like in this film, not least its clear presentation of stark and convincing evidence about the reality of global warming.  But, as you might guess from knowledge of its star’s balsa-wood political career, this movie is a sheep in wolf’s […]

The emergence of Arab art in New York City has surprised many.  Most importantly, the Made in Palestine exhibit, which opened at the Bridge Gallery in March of 2006, drew large crowds.  The battle of bringing the show to New York, however, was no surprise.  Fearing a strong backlash from the pro-Israel community, galleries and […]

[Since the initial publication of this essay in The Electronic Intifada (6 June 2005), Mahmoud Abbas has set a date for a “referendum”: 26 July 2006; and Hamas has called for its boycott.  After an Israeli attack that killed eight Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Hamas ended the truce mentioned below that had lasted for sixteen […]