Geography Archives: Israel

Maryla Husyt Finkelstein, the author’s mother, after the war in Austria.  She was in a Displaced People camp. Every night as we watched the news on television my mother would avert her eyes and raise her hand to block the screen when scenes from Vietnam flashed across it.  After a few moments the question would […]

Some people knew exactly what to think about the letter Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent to U.S. President George W. Bush.  Since they had already pegged Ahmadinejad as a Holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening, nuke-hungry lunatic, it was no stretch to see the letter as exactly the sort of thing a Holocaust-denying, Israel-threatening, nuke-hungry lunatic would write, even […]

You and your friends are invited to attend the San Francisco debut of HOPE UNDER SIEGE, a collaborative photo exhibition depicting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and people.

[John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s essay “The Israel Lobby” (London Review of Books 28.6, 23 March 2006) rekindled the smoldering controversy over the relations among US foreign policy, Israel, and the Israel lobby in the United States.  Norman G. Finkelstein‘s comment on the controversy below provides a very useful analytical perspective on the subject. — […]

The opening of the 39th Parliament of Canada on 3 April 2006 quickly revealed what should now be plain to all.  Under the Conservative Party leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canadians are faced with a government with an unambiguous right-wing agenda.  The outlines of the “Harperism” project can readily be discerned: there is a […]

A few years back, I was talking with a young socialist organizer about books.  He had just asked me why I wasted my time reading fiction when there was so much non-fiction that needed to be read.  Culture, I replied, reflects and illuminates a society just as much as, if not more than, history or […]

Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Dearly beloved leftists and friends.  It’s 2006 and we’re gathered here together uncomfortably discussing why so few of us are […]

Peter McLaren David Gabbard and Karen Anijar Appleton, “Fearless Speech in Fearful Times: An Essay Review of Capitalists and Conquerors, Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, and Teaching Peter McLaren,” MRZine, 30 October 2005 Peter McLaren is Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of […]

Since my essay on the Danish cartoons was published on 21 February 2006, I have received dozens of emails supportive of my argument that racism has no place on the left.  Additionally, comments on the article posted on MRZine show that there are people willing to stand up against anti-Muslim bigotry.  However, what is deeply […]

How stupid do they think we are?  The administration has been on the road these past few days trying to package the war in Iraq as a success.  Bush insists that the war is going well and that the US will stay on until final victory and eternal democracy.  Dick Cheney told the world that […]

Ramallah: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine condemns all those who directly or indirectly caused the criminal arrest of its General Secretary, his comrades, Brother Fu’ad ash-Shawbaki, and numerous other militants of various patriotic and Islamic forces who were subject to arbitrary political imprisonment based on American-Zionist dictates.  The PFLP declares that the […]

Although the strategy is older than the mean sheriff and his less sadistic deputy in the Old West, we need to only go back a few years here.  If one recalls, prior to the US/UK invasion on Iraq in 2003, there were several initiatives to “promote democracy” in that country.  Usually it was the State […]

Dear Ms. Ebadi: Rostam Pourzal, “Open Letter to Iran’s Nobel Laureate: Part 1 “ (27 February 2006) Poet Khosro Naaqed, a prominent promoter of your reformist coalition, demonstrated in a published commentary last summer why a majority in Iran is now disillusioned with your “democracy” project.  As you know, he speaks for almost all Iranian […]

“I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering.  I don’t know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world.  All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. . . . This I know and it is very little. […]

The more things change, the more they remain the same.  This commonplace contains more than a little truth of what liberal democracy has become in Canada today.  The daily political discourse might adopt a “compassionate conservatism,” a “social liberalism,” or even a social democratic “third way,” but all the parties agree that the benefits of […]

Jyllands-Posten stood Clausewitz on his head.  Its now infamous cartoons of Mohammed are not so much speech as acts.  Acts of provocation and belligerence.  They are the latest round of politics as war by other means. Make no mistake.  Jyllands-Posten is not in the business of promoting the freedom of speech.  Nor are the European […]

Dear Ms. Shirin Ebadi: The appeal you and Mohammad Sahimi addressed to “Western democracies” in the International Herald Tribune on January 19 disappointed this former admirer of yours.  Your invitation to the current and previous imperial powers to intervene for human rights in Iran fails precisely on grounds of the noble principles you invoked to […]

  Oslo is dead.  This is not much of a scoop, as analysts and pundits have been saying and writing these words for many years, at least since the Intifada of September 2000 began.  But now that the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections of January 25th, 2006, are over, we can officially turn off the […]

  “Predictions are suspect.  But something new is happening. . . .” — Paul Buhle1 A people’s movement against the “class war from above” is beginning to crystallize across Thailand.  Students and unionized workers have suddenly emerged as a new force in the streets in helping to organize a broad-based people’s alliance to oust the […]

  The US Green Party called for divestment from Israel on 21 November 2005: The Green Party of the United States (GPUS) publicly calls for divestment from and boycott of the State of Israel until such time as the full individual and collective rights of the Palestinian people are realized. . . .  The party […]