The talks between the G5 plus 1 and Iran are careening toward a premature breakdown. If they do fall apart, it will be due in large part to a serious diplomatic miscalculation by the Obama administration. Along with its European allies, the Obama administration seized on a plan that cleverly asked Iran to divest […]
Geography Archives: Israel
International Politics & Contemporary Art: A.S. Dhillon’s World Party/Model UN
A.S. Dhillon’s recent decision to paint again has to be seen not as his abandonment of creating public installations but as a step towards extending his social practice by specifically addressing the specialized audience of contemporary art. This transition from the outside to the gallery, the specialized space of art, is a process that began […]
A “Game Changer” in the Middle East:Interview with Toufic Haddad
Toufic Haddad: A prisoner exchange would be a real game changer in the Middle East if it is actually able to take place. I’m less optimistic that it will. The fact is it would be the first time that a political faction would be able to win such concessions out of Israel. We’re talking about […]
Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists? Part 1
The defeat of the Marxist emancipatory project has brought an end to radical secular universalism. The result has been twofold: identity politics and their post-modern ideologies of difference have become the legitimating motifs of Western democracies, whilst radical political Islam has taken the anti-systemic baton of secular Marxism, but subverted it with a brand of […]
In Response to the Bosnia Genocide Lobby
The original title for the article that follows was “Response to ‘Raoul Djukanovic’.” “RD” is the Internet pseudonym of Daniel Simpson, who we mention in our second paragraph (below), and who, as a member of what we refer to as the Bosnia Genocide Lobby, assails us wherever we publish something related to the former Yugoslavia. […]
Memories, Nightmares, and Hopes
Eric Davis. Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 397 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-23546-5. This review has been a long time coming, but during this time, Davis’s book has become the subject of extensive comment, achieving an almost iconic, certainly landmark, status in […]
Barack Obama’s Myopic Iran Policy
By giving Israel veto rights and threatening more sanctions, the U.S. is squandering the best chance we have for a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. Ordinarily, it would have been easy to dismiss the latest resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency censuring Iran as a text, drafted by idiots, full of sound […]
The Progressive Quandary About SEIU: A Tale of Two Letters to Andy Stern
Abstract: The terrain of “progressive labor” in the U.S. has shifted dramatically in recent years. The two-million member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — long associated with the remaking of labor as a force for social justice — has become embroiled in a series of controversies that have alienated past campus, community, and political allies. […]
Native Orientalists at the Daily Times
“The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of the ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.” — Karl Marx A few days back, I received a ‘Dear friends’ email from Mr. Najam Sethi, ex editor-in-chief of Daily Times, Pakistan, announcing that he, together with several of his […]
Washington Can Prevent an Israeli Attack on Iran
Only a few weeks after US-Iran diplomacy began in earnest, it seems to be heading towards a premature ending. Rather than tensions reduction, the world has witnessed the opposite. Iran is refusing to accept a fuel swap deal brokered by the IAEA, the IAEA has passed a resolution rebuking Iran, and Tehran has responded by […]
Israel: Arab Women Workers Need Not Apply
Discrimination, not culture, keeps families in poverty. Israel’s finance minister was accused last week of trying to deflect attention from discriminatory policies keeping many of the country’s Arab families in poverty by blaming their economic troubles on what he described as Arab society’s opposition to women working. A recent report from Israel’s National Insurance Institute […]
Bogus Honduran Elections
November 29, 2009 The true divides in Latin America — between justice and injustice, democracy and dictatorship, human rights and corporate rights, people’s power and imperial domination — have never been more visible than today. People’s movements throughout the region to revolutionize corrupt, unequal systems that have isolated and excluded the vast majority in Latin […]
Another Sign of the Times
26 November 2009 I arrived in Israel at about 15:00 on Wednesday, 25 November afternoon to visit my mother, brother, and sister who are Israeli (and US) citizens resident in Israel since 1973. My mother has been ill, and this visit was prompted primarily for that reason. I have visited Israel dozens of times before […]
On Being Detained by the Israeli Government
The NLG NYC Condemns the Israeli Government for the Detention of African American Political Activists 25 November 2009 The New York City Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild condemns the actions of the Israeli government for its unlawful and racially motivated detention of two African-American political activists. On November 23, 2009, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, […]
Brazil-Iran: New Boost to South-South Diplomacy
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad‘s controversial visit to Brazil further underscored the independence of this country’s diplomacy, and gave Tehran a chance to defend its points of view on the construction of a lasting peace in the Middle East. Ahmadinejad’s one-day trip to Brasilia Monday was the third visit to Brazil by a Middle Eastern […]
Luladinejad
Lula from Brazil and Ahmadinejad from Iran. What is this — the new axis of evil? No — Luladinejad is a new axis of business. In the latest round of the increasingly warm embrace between Latin America and the Middle East, Lula and Ahmadinejad, meeting in Brazil, signed agreements on energy, trade and agricultural […]
Open Letter to Amnesty International’s London and Belfast Offices, on the Occasion of Noam Chomsky’s Belfast Festival Lecture, October 30, 20091
In his wild and slanderous “Open Letter to Amnesty International” (signed, fittingly, “Yours, in disgust and despair”),2 The Guardian-Observer‘s veteran reporter Ed Vulliamy explains that two “main concerns” motivated him to draft his repudiation of AI’s choice of Noam Chomsky to deliver this 2009 Stand Up for Justice lecture: One is that the “pain” individuals […]
Mexican Layoffs, U.S. Immigration: The Missing Link
On the night of October 10, Mexican police and soldiers occupied installations of Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LFC), the publicly owned electric company that provided power to Mexico City and the surrounding states. A few minutes later, center-right Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa decreed the company’s liquidation, merging it with the national power company, […]
Is Judaism Zionism? Religious Sources for the Critique of Violence
Judith Butler’s lecture is preceded by Eduardo Mendieta‘s introduction. A certain problem emerges between religion and public life when public criticism of Israeli state violence is taken to be anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish. For the record, I would like to make clear that some of those criticisms do employ anti-Semitic rhetoric and do engage anti-Semitic […]
The Invention of the Jewish People
Introduction to Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People by Bertell Ollman The Invention of the Jewish People is divided into two parts. The first is a long section on the theory of nationalism, whose main characteristic, according to Sand, is the tendency to invent a past that suits the current needs and […]
