Attention all US law enforcement agencies! Be on the lookout: a war criminal is coming our way. The Butcher of Gaza is coming to America. One year after the war on Gaza, during which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) murdered 1,400 Palestinians including 400 children, the IDF and war criminal Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi will […]
Geography Archives: Israel
Israeli Apartheid Week: Beirut
Two months ago a few students got together at the American University of Beirut and started planning a week of conferences, workshops, and actions based on the model offered by Israeli Apartheid Week which started six years ago in Toronto. A list of speakers was drawn up, and with nothing much to offer except the […]
Syria’s Strategic Ties to the Islamic Republic: Diplomacy in the Post-Iraq/Post-Peace Process Middle East
Last week, just after we had completed our regional tour to Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his own journey to Damascus, for highly publicized meetings with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, HAMAS Political Bureau chief Khalid Mishal, and a “resistance” summit with Assad and Hizballah Secretary General Shaykh Hassan Nasrallah. Ahmadinejad’s trip […]
Israeli Apartheid Week Sweeps Cities Worldwide
March 1-7, 2010, Worldwide, with U.S. events in: Bard, NY; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; CT; Davis, CA; Iowa City, IA; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Washington, DC. The 6th annual Israeli Apartheid Week is currently taking place in cities across the globe. This week, human rights advocates around the world will host […]
PA Security Forces Arrest PFLP Comrades in Nablus
Palestinian Authority security forces arrested a group of comrades in Nablus, on February 25, 2010, as part of their “security cooperation” with the Israeli occupation. Comrade Khalida Jarrar, member of the Political Bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, strongly denounced the arrests, saying that this action serves only the interests of […]
Germany’s Fear of Finkelstein
Renowned Scholar and Descendent of Holocaust Survivors Prevented by German Israel Lobby from Speaking about Gaza Norman Finkelstein, an internationally renowned scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was due to talk about the state of the decades-old conflict and the situation of Gaza one year after the Israeli assault in Munich and Berlin last week. His […]
The Israeli Agenda
Does Israel want another war in Lebanon and/or Gaza? Certainly, the Israeli posture toward both Lebanon and Gaza has grown increasingly provocative. Violations of Lebanese airspace by Israeli military aircraft are not new, but have increased dramatically in recent weeks. For the past several weeks, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has been warning of escalating […]
The Second Battle of Gaza: Israel’s Undermining of International Law
The Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population, impoverished and the victim of occupation and besiegement these past 42 years. It was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR […]
Thanks to the University of Tehran
We just returned from a trip to the Middle East, which included stops in Lebanon, Syria, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. We will be writing about our meetings, discussions, and observations on this trip in future posts. First, though, we want to express our gratitude to the Faculty of World Studies at the University […]
Rachel Corrie Gets Her Day in Court
On March 10, in the Israeli city of Haifa, American peace activist Rachel Corrie will get her day in court. Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, are bringing suit against the Israeli defence ministry for Rachel’s killing by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003. Four key American and British witnesses who were […]
Why Iran?
Iran continues to be the privileged member of the “Axis of Evil,” a notion formally but not really abandoned by the United States. It is accompanied by Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, in addition to North Korea, among others. Why Iran? The criteria mentioned by Hillary Clinton make no sense. Risk of possessing conditions to manufacture […]
A Socialist View of Sexuality and Liberation?
Sherry Wolf. Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009. 333 pp. $12. The cover photo on Sherry Wolf’s book shows a protest rally with a woman holding a highlighted rainbow flag. Radical gay and lesbian activists, one assumes. Look closely, though, and you’ll see that the woman is […]
No Tutu Is Big Enough to Cover Up War Crimes
Burlington, VT, February 19, 2010 — Human rights activists from Vermont, New York and Israel interrupted a performance of the Israel Ballet at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, VT calling attention to the dance company’s complicity in Israeli war crimes. Using two banners that read “No Tutu Is Big Enough to Cover Up War […]
Letter from Ofer Military Prison: “Missing the Five-year Anniversary of Our Struggle in Bil’in Will Be Like Missing the Birthday of One of My Children”
It has been two months now since I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken from my home. Today news has reached Ofer Military Prison that the apartheid wall on Bil’in’s land will finally be moved and construction has begun on the new route. This will return half of the land that was stolen from our village. […]
Chutzpah, Inc.: “The Brave People of Iran” (versus the Disappeared People of Palestine, Honduras, Afghanistan, Etc.)
It is almost a commonplace, at least for the real — as opposed to the cruise-missile — left, that the flow of information, opinion, and moral indignation in the United States adapts well to the demands of state policy. If the state is hostile to Iran, even openly trying to engage in “regime change,” and […]
How Wars Are Made
In a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia this week, Hillary Clinton said that Iran “is moving toward a military dictatorship” and continued the Administration’s campaign for tougher sanctions against that country. What could America’s top diplomat hope to accomplish with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric? It seems unlikely that the goal was to support […]
Israel’s Region-wide Underground War
Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if Iranian intelligence was almost universally believed to have assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state. Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the operation using forged or […]
A Dangerous Liaison: The Iranian Greens and the West
In the 1979 Revolution in Iran the liberal forces made a fatal mistake: they adopted the old dictum of the enemy of my enemy is my friend and allied themselves with just about every force that opposed the tyrannical rule of the shah. The result was helping to replace one form of despotism for another: […]
Israel Is at an Impasse: It Can Make Neither War Nor Peace
The Main Points of the Speech We reiterate on this occasion our condolences for the loss of our dear martyrs, and our congratulations as well, for they are ultimately the first victors. They are our glory and pride. I will discuss current challenges and our strategy for addressing them. When we remember these leaders and […]
How Credible Is Human Rights Watch on Cuba?
In late 2009 the New York-based group Human Rights Watch published a report titled New Castro, Same Cuba. Based on the testimony of former prisoners, the report systematically condemns the Cuban government as an “abusive” regime that uses its “repressive machinery . . . draconian laws and sham trials to incarcerate scores more who […]
