Palestine: to exist is to resist
March 23rd, 2009 § 5 Comments
Therapy Today, the monthly journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) had a 4 page piece in its March edition together with a front page picture, “Palestine: to exist is to resist” which gave quite a detailed account of the psychological trauma inflicted on Palestinian people, particularly children.
Under pressure from supporters of the Zionist state of Israel the editor, Sarah Browne pulled the article from their web page yesterday. Seemingly this pressure was a phone call telling them “that they’d find out they’d been very unwise to publish such a one-sided piece etc” and a couple of emails.
It might be worth email her saying that caving in to such pressure and withdrawing such an accurate piece does not serve the best interests of BACP members. (Thanks to Ian for this).
Her email address is: sarah.browne@bacp.co.uk
Here is the article retrieved from google cache.
Palestine: to exist is to resist
Notes on the psychological impact of military occupation in Palestine
by Martin Kemp and Eliana Pinto
« Read the rest of this entry »
Capitalism from the standpoint of its victims
March 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
In his classic study of propaganda, the late Australian scholar Alex Carey writes that the 20th century was marked by three major developments: the rise of democracy, the rise of corporations, and the rise of propaganda to protect corporations from democracy. One of the aims of early 20th century propaganda was to exploit significant symbols: to associate capitalism and big business with liberty and freedom, and unions, state ownership with totalitarian collectivism. In his latest piece M. Shahid Alam’s looks at the final collapse of these connotations along with the general crisis of capitalism.
It has never been easy offering a critique of capitalism or markets to my undergraduate students. Most have never heard an unkind word about these bedrock institutions, which they know to be the foundations of American power and prosperity.
These are hallowed institutions. The power of private capital to produce jobs, wealth and freedom is one of the central dogmas that many Americans absorb with their mother’s milk. To hear this dogma challenged – in any context – is unsettling. I sometimes suspect that this bitter pill is harder to swallow because it emanates from someone who, so transparently, is not a native-born American.
As the weeks pass, however, my students appear to settle down. In the past, they have been reassured to learn that markets have done a good job at delivering prosperity to a few centers of global capitalism. They do work for us, even if they have not worked for most Asians, Africans and Latin Americans.
The Big Takeover
March 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
‘The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power’. Matt Tabibi of Rolling Stone on ‘How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution’.
It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).
Miles to go before I sleep
March 23rd, 2009 § 8 Comments
Robert Frost
For the past 6 months, I have had to stay up late most nights to work on my thesis, usually until 4 am but sometimes longer. That is because I find it harder to focus before midnight. There is always the temptation of cinema, literature, music or the company of friends, so I always have to remind myself of Frost’s famous response to a similar situation: ‘But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep’.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert FrostWhose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
US seeks to expand covert war in Pakistan
March 23rd, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The United States has been heavily criticised for the high number of civilians being killed by drone missile strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
That controversy was high on the agenda during a visit by the head of the CIA to Pakistan.
The US, meanwhile, is considering expanding the fighting to Balochistan province, as Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr reports.
The renewed assault on Mearsheimer and Walt
March 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
In an apparent acknowledgment that the Freeman controversy has once again confirmed John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s thesis, apologists for the Israel lobby have renewed their assault on the two professors who first drew attention to its power. The effort I believe is meant to preempt people turning to their book for answers by tainting their reputation. Since the right has little credibility on this, the charge has been led this time by ‘liberal’ Zionists such as David Rothkopf and Jonathan Freedland. My friend Phil Weiss recently posted a brilliant defence of Rothkopf’s scurrilous attack on M&W by Middle East scholar Jerome Slater. I am hoping to find some time so I can respond to Freedland’s equally specious arguments.
Phil Weiss writes: ‘What I have urged more than anything else in the Israel lobby discussion is: discussion! Because only with open discussion can the true extent of the Israel lobby be understood. Chas Freeman’s ouster has had a huge effect, of course. A week or so back David Rothkopf published a vicious attack on Walt and Mearsheimer at Foreign Policy suggesting the lobby is a figment of their gentile imaginations. Below, Jerry Slater, a friend of this site who has published his own critique of Walt and Mearsheimer and is distinguished for practicing the new history of Israel/Palestine in our country, leaps to the scholars’ defense re Rothkopf. An ardent, sincere, and moving argument.’
In the year and a half since the publication of John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s Israel Lobby, the attacks on the book’s main arguments as well as personal attacks on its authors have intensified–even as Israeli policies and behavior towards the Palestinians have become more disastrous than ever, and even as the lobby demonstrated its muscle in its successful effort to induce Obama to abandon support for the appointment of Charles Freeman as Director of the National Intelligence Council.
Meta-Free-Phor-All: Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer’s Day?
March 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
‘Stephen has a metaphor for Sean Penn: Sean Penn is a big mean jerk, and Stephen hates him.’ A Colbert Report classic, with metaphors drawn from Shakespeare, Eliot, Frost to Star Trek.
Focus on Gaza – Faction Fighting
March 23rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
In this week’s Focus On Gaza we look at two blows suffered by the Israeli army. Firstly a UN report which brands the recent Israeli war on Gaza as illegal.
Secondly the chilling accounts of a disregard for civilian safety from its own soldiers involved in the operation, published this week in a leading Israeli newspaper.
Galloway faces the ‘Jewish Defence League’
March 21st, 2009 § 1 Comment
George Galloway on Channel 4 News (UK) facing the national director of the ‘Jewish Defence League’ (JDL) of Canada, Meir Weinstein, on Galloway’s banning from Canada.
Looking at the JDL Canada website we find the group was established “in the late 1960s to confront and fight anti-Semitism.” One might wonder why they are interested in blocking Galloway from entering Canada; the story was originally that he was banned for his views on Canada’s military presence in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is their first principle, ‘Ahavat Yisroel’, Love of Israel, and Galloway’s recent aid convoy to Gaza that is the real problem. I was surprised to see Weinstein on Channel Four, as he considers helping the starving people of Gaza a crime, you’d expect to see him on the BBC.
Also worth noting is that the JDL was described as a violent extremist Jewish organization in an FBI 2000/2001 Terrorism report.
Philip Weiss on the Freeman Affair
March 21st, 2009 § 2 Comments
Investigative journalist Philip Weiss discusses the aftermath of Chas Freeman’s withdrawal from NIC chairman consideration, the alienation of liberal American Jews from the Israeli government, the opportunity to break up the monolithic AIPAC lobby and the conflict between Zionism and democracy.
MP3 here. (21:19)
Philip Weiss is an investigative journalist who has written for The Nation, New York Times Magazine, The American Conservative, Jewish World Review and other publications. He is the author of American Taboo : A Murder in the Peace Corps and writes the blog Mondoweiss.
