Subjects Archives: Race

The current relation between the U.S. and Iran is not pretty; in fact, it is like a roller-coaster ride.  This is bad news for Muslims in America and abroad. Iran is bitter over its billions of dollars in frozen assets still in U.S. banks for the last three decades, following the takeover of our embassy […]

  Remarks delivered at the Thomas Foley Institute, Washington State University,, Pullman, Washington, April 18, 2009 Recently appointed Attorney General Eric Holder, whose parents hail from the Barbados, aroused instant ire when he remarked last February 18 that the U.S. remains a “nation of cowards” for not talking enough about things racial.  But is this […]

  Conor Foley, The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War, Verso, 2008. All is not well within the world of humanitarian aid organisations.  In his new book, The Thin Blue Line, Conor Foley, an experienced aid worker, discusses many of the problems associated with the burgeoning relationship between contemporary aid organisations and recent […]

  The president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attended the conference to condemn the Israeli government’s brutal and repressive policy against the Palestinians.  The European delegates walked out when he called the government of Israel “racist,” but the Latin Americans stayed.  The United States and eight other countries boycotted the event. The Israeli government’s stance against […]

  Within an otherwise bleak reality of capitalist crisis, Mike Lebowitz has provided us with an eloquent restatement of the case for socialism — The Path for Human Development: Capitalism or Socialism?  This short text is now circulating widely in Venezuela, in Spanish, as a pocket-sized pamphlet, has been published in Monthly Review, and is […]

A decision by Israel’s state-owned railway company to sack 150 Arab workers because they have not served in the army has been denounced as “unlawful” and “racist” this week by Arab legal and workers’ rights groups. The new policy, which applies to guards at train crossing points, is being implemented even though the country’s Arab […]

  Sitting in the shadow of an elegant carbet, feeling the trade wind, Roger de Jaham, age 60, lets his Creole accent lilt, talking about the blow that he recently suffered: “For the first time in my life, a man whom I greeted told me: ‘I don’t shake the hand of a béké.”  The man […]

The Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of New York invites you to join us in April for a 10-day trip to Venezuela examining advances in food sovereignty and other initiatives for social change.  Start off in the capital city of Caracas, then travel to four additional states, including visits to newly formed cooperative farms and rural […]

  The Middle East has always been a difficult challenge for Western human rights organizations, particularly those seeking influence or funding in the United States.  The pressure to go soft on US allies is in some respects reminiscent of Washington’s special pleading for Latin American terror regimes in the 1970s and 1980s.  In the case […]

Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel) launched its new election campaign on Monday, January 26, 2009, facing the general elections to be held on February 10.  The campaign’s focus is the fight against fascism and racism. The Arab-Jewish front’s new campaign slogan is “Jews and Arabs Refuse to […]

Human rights, including the right of workers to form trade unions, to strike, and to bargain collectively with employers, are universal and indivisible rights which inhere in all human beings by virtue of their humanity. The Liberal Party government of the Canadian province of Ontario, however, is challenging this notion by calling on the Supreme […]

“Our community is expanding: MRZine viewers have increased in number, as have the readers of our editions published outside the United States and in languages other than English.  We sense a sharp increase in interest in our perspective and its history.   Many in our community have made use of the MR archive we put […]

  miriam cooke.   Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official.   Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.  vii + 208 pp. Illustrations. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8223-4016-4; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-4035-5. To live and do research in Syria is to confront contradictions at almost every turn.  In a repressive state, artists not only create works that are […]

  The recent incidents in Acre appeared to be spontaneous acts of racism and a threat to the “coexistence” between Arabs and Jews in the city.  But that is only if we take seriously the idealist notion of “coexistence” that some said prevailed in Acre.  If not, we are left with a reality where two […]

It is about time that Jews spoke out strongly and decisively against Zionism, and the newly announced International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) is trying to do just that. IJAN is moving towards an “offensive” against Zionism rather than the customary “reactionism,” responding to outrages, which characterizes most solidarity work. This offensive takes two routes: A […]

  On September 18, 2008 Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Venezuela: Rights Suffer Under Chávez.”   The report contains biases and inaccuracies, and wrongly purports that human rights guarantees are lacking or not properly enforced in Venezuela.  In addition, while criticizing Venezuela’s human rights in the political context, it fails to mention the […]

In April 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrant rights protestors marched in cities across the United States.  They countered prolonged debates about the pros and cons of comprehensive immigration reform with a short but sweet affirmation, scrawled on placards: “No Human Being Is Illegal.”  Their direct assertion challenged the deeply entrenched practices of our government […]

  A historic event worthy of the Guinness Book may have occurred in Washington in the last week of June.  The worst “torture” president that the United States has ever had met the most corrupt and brutal president ever inflicted on the Filipino people.  Grotesque or farcical?  Bush is now credited with the horrendous deaths […]

Narrated by Viggo Mortensen.  Art by Mike Konopacki.  Video editing by Eric Wold.  The video is based on Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle, A People’s History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008). | | Print

  In a June 9 New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman tells us that “Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago.  It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.”  He attributes this to Bill Clinton, […]