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Shoppers Without Borders: Cure for Media-Inflicted War Wounds
Paige Turner, a 29-year-old graduate of Grinnell College’s creative writing program, came to New York to start her life as a novelist. She got some gigs chronicling upscale Manhattan lifestyles for glossy magazines: “good background for my first socially conscious bestseller!” Things were going great — she was online most of the day, researching fashion […]
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Sour Pickles and Sour Grapes
When politicians vacation and little action is expected, the words German journalists use for such summer doldrums is “Saure-Gurken-Zeit” — “sour pickle time.” Since German often squeezes things together into what Mark Twain called “not words but panoramas,” it’s usually written with no break, “Sauregurkenzeit,” and may be derived from the time before the harvest […]
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US Intervention Is Not Humanitarian and Will Not Protect the People of Iraq
Here we go again, the US is using a humanitarian catastrophe to implement imperialist objectives and pour petrol on fire. It is sickening to see Obama and the Western media shedding crocodile tears for the Iraqi people, after the US-led occupation pulverised Iraq as a society and killed a million of its people. It […]
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I See Palestine
In response to Roger Cohen, “Why Americans See Israel the Way They Do,” New York Times, August 3, 2014. . . . The bias of the cowboy-and-Indians movies I grew up on in the 1950s has long been exposed: swallowing up Native American land was the aim, and the myth of the dangerous savages who […]
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Targeting Elbit Systems in the Month Against the Apartheid Wall
Surveillance. It’s in the headlines and on the tips of tongues. As technology offers new possibilities for connection, it also offers new means to keep tabs on people. Surveillance has become seemingly ubiquitous, from the NSA reading emails to drones in the skies. A nation that has for 66 years been ruling over an indigenous […]
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Germany’s Left Party on the EU and NATO
Running up a down escalator is itself mighty difficult. Trying to keep your footing both on an up and a down escalator at the same time is simply hard to imagine. Yet it gives an idea of Germany’s present Ukrainian policy. Soon after Soviet soldiers left East Germany between 1989 and 1994, the newly-unified country […]
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Marking Nakba, Marching to Return
For 66 years Israel’s founding generation has lived with a guilty secret, one it successfully concealed from the generations that followed. Forests were planted to hide war crimes. School textbooks mythologized the events surrounding Israel’s creation. The army was blindly venerated as the most moral in the world. Once, “Nakba” — Arabic for “Catastrophe”, referring […]
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Venezuela: Making Peace . . . With Capitalism?
It was shortly after Moses’s encounter with the Burning Bush that God promised to take the people of Israel to the land of milk and honey. God, who could be extremely cryptic in his explanations (“I am that I am”), did not beat around the bush when it came to capturing his audience. For that […]
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Regarding Barnard Administration’s SJP Banner Removal
On March 10th, Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine hung a banner on Barnard Hall. The banner was placed after members of C-SJP went through the required bureaucratic channels and processes in order to give voice and presence to our week-long events as part of Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), a global period of action and awareness-raising that has been occurring throughout the world for the past ten years.
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The “Brown International” of the European Far Right
In the lead-up to the international day of action against fascism on 22 March, Thanasis Kampagiannis, writing in the latest issue of Σοσιαλισμός από Κάτω (Socialism From Below), the theoretical journal of the Greek Socialist Workers Party (SEK), looks at the danger of a major far Right breakthrough in May’s European Parliament elections and […]
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Guerrilla Girls of the FARC-EP: Making War, Peace, and History
If regular armies are generally a man’s world, guerrillas and insurgent forces are just the contrary. There women have always had a central role. Think of Agustina of Aragon, Olga Benário, Tania Bunke, Maria Grajales, and Celia Sánchez, or even (stretching a bit) the legendary Amazons. It is not for nothing that Liberté — the […]
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Germany: Fast Food, Slow Decisions
Let me begin with food — fast food. Let me invite you in. Looking around, there’s no denying it: this is Burger King. It could be in Augusta, ME, or Anaheim, CA, and the fatty Whoppers taste the same. But it’s not — most customers here speak German, some maybe Turkish (the biggest minority). For […]
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Challenging Harper’s Imperialist Agenda
It has become commonplace to observe that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has been re-making the symbols and practices of the Canadian state. Canada, in this view, was once the social democratic heartland of North America. But under Harper, Canada has been transformed into a hyper-regime of neoliberal market fundamentalism. Nowhere, it is argued, […]
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A New Phase of Neoliberalism in Iran: The Untold Story of Iran’s “Moderate” Government
An Iranian economic delegation, headed by Economic Affairs and Finance Minister Ali Tayyebnia, held intensive talks with their counterparts from other countries on the sidelines of the joint annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on October 11-13. The talks followed the little noticed meeting between Iran’s new president Hassan […]
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ILWU’s Northwest Grain Conflict: Business Unionism or Fighting Class-Struggle Unionism
When Wisconsin state workers were courageously occupying the state capitol to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on their unions’ right to bargain, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka trumpeted a call for solidarity actions throughout the labor movement on April 4, 2011, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, killed during the Memphis sanitation […]
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From Al-Araqib to Susiya: Forced Displacement of Palestinians on Both Sides of the Green Line
On Nakba Day, 15 May 2013, Palestinians will mark the passing of 65 years since the massive forced expulsion of Palestinians from their national homeland. The Nakba commemorations demand reflection not only on the “catastrophe” of the loss of life, land, and property in 1948, but also on Israeli policies that are still dispossessing Palestinians […]
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Celebrating Ethnic Cleansing
We went on “Israeli Independence Day” to Rabin Square, Tel Aviv, to celebrate the “ethnic cleansing” along with the people of Israel. We distributed maps prepared by Zochrot documenting the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the beginning of Zionism to 67. Reactions? The “best” you can find on the Zionist streets. Here […]
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Drones, Sanctions, and the Prison Industrial Complex
In the final weeks of a six-month prison sentence for protesting remote-control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, I can only reflect on my time of captivity in light of the crimes that brought me here. In these ominous times, it is America’s officials and judges and not the anarchists […]
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Just Another Shin Bet Interrogation
I was fortunate this week. I had a quick and easy crossing from Jordan back into Israel. No delays, no questions, no invasive body searches and no lengthy rummaging through my luggage. The border guard sitting next to the computer took my passport, opened it and looked at the screen, presumably to check for […]
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I, Samer al-Issawi, Son of Jerusalem, Send You My Last Will: Carry My Soul as a Cry for All the Prisoners
Message from Samer al-Issawi, day 209 of his hunger strike, via Rona Merrill and Neta Golan I turn with admiration to the masses of our heroic Palestinian people, to our Palestinian leadership, to all forces, parties, and national institutions. I salute them for standing by our fight to defend our right to freedom and […]