Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours — Noam Chomsky
July 5th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Noam Chomsky: "We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas."
Democracy Now! did a recent feature on MIT Professor Noam Chomsky who gave a lecture in New York at an event sponsored by the Brecht Forum on June 12. According to DN host Amy Goodman, more than 2,000 people were in attendance at Riverside Church in Harlem to hear his address which was entitled Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours. In traditional Chomsky fashion his analysis was as all encompassing as ever as he discussed topics such as the global economic crisis, the environment, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, resistance to American empire and more.
You can watch his 6 part lecture below.
‘Boycott, divestment and sanctions is the obvious place to begin’
July 5th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The West Bank Archipelago
Saree Makdisi expands on the ideas presented earlier in his article ‘The language that absolves Israel‘.
To judge by the next day’s headlines, Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy speech last month was a great success. “Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians,” declared the New York Times. “Israel Endorses Two-State Goal,” said the Washington Post. “Netanyahu Backs Palestinian State,” announced The Guardian.
He did no such thing, of course, unless by “state” one understands an amorphous entity lacking a definite territory, not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty (other than a flag and perhaps a national anthem), not allowed to enter into treaties with other states—and permanently disarmed and hence at the mercy of Israel. It would make about as much sense to call an apple an orange or a piano a speedboat as to call such a construct a state, and yet those are the conditions that Netanyahu imposed on the creation of such an entity for the Palestinians (if they get that far in the first place).
The strange thing is that Netanyahu’s speech marked both the definitive end and a symbolic return to the beginning of the two-state solution as that hapless notion has been peddled since the Oslo Accords of 1993-95. For what he said the Palestinians might—perhaps—be entitled to is pretty much what Oslo had said they might be entitled to fifteen years ago: a “self-government authority” not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty, etc. And on top of that they can also forget about Jerusalem—that is and will forever remain the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people.
If it sounds so drearily familiar, that’s because it is: we have come full circle. First time as tragedy, second time as farce.
Al Jazeera Goes to Washington
July 5th, 2009 § 3 Comments
Congratulations to Al Jazeera, by far the best mainstream news channel, for finally reaching a US audience. Incidentally, in the discussion that follows the stupidest question comes from James Reston Jr., who was portrayed in the film Frost/Nixon as the principled and tenacious researcher who helped Frost secure Nixon’s confession.
Al Jazeera: Just days before Al Jazeera English makes its debut on television airwaves in the US, Al Jazeera’s Josh Rushing hosts a town hall meeting in Washington DC. The show goes behind-the-scenes at Al Jazeera English and allows the audience to engage in a hard-hitting discussion with panelists Sir David Frost, Marwan Bishara and Ghida Fakhry about Al Jazeera, the stories it covers and its coverage of the US.
Memory, Inequality and Power: Palestine and the Universality of Human Rights
July 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Edward Said
A month before the invasion of Iraq and less than a year before he tragically passed away, a frail Edward Said delivered this honorary lecture at UC Berkeley. It is Said’s most foreceful and passionate denouncement of Israel’s systematic destruction of Palestinian nationhood I have come across so far, a testament to a tireless voice of reason and humanism that is sorely missed in the academe and far beyond.
South Africa: Balance shifts left, anger grows
July 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Patrick Bond, South Africa’s leading analyst and author of a number of excellent books on the country’s post-Apartheid neoliberal transformation, reports about rising class polarisation and the prospect of mass social unrest in the wake of the global economic recession.
(Durban, 28 June 2009) — With high-volume class strife heard in the rumbling of wage demands and the friction of township “service delivery protests”, rhetorical and real conflicts are bursting open in every nook and cranny of South Africa.
The big splits in society are clearer now. The 2005-09 dispute within the ruling African National Congress (ANC) between camps allied to former president Thabo Mbeki and President Jacob Zuma has resolved itself largely in Zuma’s favour.
Kouchner and the New Humanitarian Order
July 4th, 2009 § 2 Comments
Communiste et Rastignac. Christopher Caldwell reviews Pierre Péan’s Le Monde selon K., a book about Bernard Kouchner’s particular contributions to the rise of the New Humanitarian Order, a phase of imperialist interventions that has deployed human rights as its preferred justification. (Also see my earlier post on Kouchner’s Zionist activism)
Bush and Kouchner
In mid-May, as the Sri Lankan army completed its rout of the Tamil Tigers, President Mahinda Rajapaksa described the scorched-earth campaign as ‘an unprecedented humanitarian operation’. Others were more inclined to see it as a calamity. Among them was the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had travelled to Sri Lanka with David Miliband to argue, in vain, for a truce.
Rajapaksa’s remark was in one sense a tribute to how Kouchner has changed the world. It is Kouchner, more than anyone, who has eroded the distinction between philanthropy and combat. As a young gastroenterologist and self-described ‘mercenary of emergency medicine’, he helped launch Médecins sans frontières in the early 1970s. He broadcast the plight of the Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, advised Mitterrand in the 1980s, roused public indignation over events in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and served as interim governor of Kosovo after Nato’s attack on Serbia; more recently he has become the most prominent of several socialists in Sarkozy’s cabinet. Kouchner may not have invented the concept of ‘humanitarian intervention’, but he has been its symbol for decades.
I Come and Stand by Every Door
July 4th, 2009 § 6 Comments
Nâzım Hikmet Ran was a Turkish poet, playwright and novelist who was jailed several times by the Turkish government for his Communist beliefs. He produced some of the most beautiful political poetry that has ever been written. I’ve included a scene from Fazil Say’s fabulous Oratorio entitled Nazim. The poem that the girl sings was written by Hikmet in 1956.
I Come and Stand by Every Door
(The Little Girl)
I come and stand at every door
but none can hear my silent tread.
I knock and yet remain unseen
for I am dead, for I am dead.
I’m only seven tho’ I died
in Hiroshima long ago.
I’m seven now as I was then
when children die they do not grow.
Amal means ‘hope’ in Arabic
July 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Palestinian schoolboys sitting beside the empty seats of friends who were killed in Israel's December 08/January09 bombing raid on Gaza. (AP Photo)
Moign Khawaja’s beautifully written piece in Foreign Policy Journal examines the notion of hope in the aftermath of Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza which claimed over 1,000 Palestinian lives (at least one third of which were children) and left thousands more injured and homeless.
Debating Hope for the Forgotten — By Moign Khawaja
It was Amal’s last day at the university where she studies English language teaching. Despite being the last day of her academic career, the aspirant Gazan teacher is in no mood to take it lightly. She dressed modestly but smartly, grabbed her bag and set off for the university that is hardly 15 minutes away from her house in central Gaza. She insisted that the last day of the academic year would be wrapped up by a debate competition where she is leading a team of three women who are also aspiring to become teachers.
“So why study English and become a teacher?” I asked Amal when she was about to leave her home for the university.
“I want to help my country by expressing their suffering at the hands of the occupation,” Amal told in a firm tone. “Would you be able to do this by being a teacher? I interrupted to gauge her intentions. “I will teach my students English language. Despite all the miseries they still have great will power. They want to study, to struggle for their rights and want to return to their occupied lands. I believe in them. They have great powers,” said Amal resolutely.
Pilger on Honduras and Palestine
July 4th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Pilger on Flashpoints: MP3
The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeted
July 3rd, 2009 § 1 Comment
Hugo Chavez, right, President Manuel Zelaya, center, amd President Raul Castro at the end of the Central American Integration System, or SICA, summit in Managua, Monday, June 29, 2009. (AP Photo/Miguel Alvarez)
In his recent article in CounterPunch, George Ciccariello-Maher likens recent events in Honduras to an ”iron fist with a velvet glove” and notes that “while it may feel softer, it’s as ‘interventionist’ as ever…”
The Counter Revolution Will Not be Tweeted
– By George Ciccariello-MaherThe recent street rebellions against the Ahmadinejad regime in Iran were touted by many as the first baptism-by-fire of Twitter as a political tool. Celebratory articles abounded for a brief time, before such foolish dreams came crashing back to earth under the weight of a metric ton of misinformation, unsubstantiated rumor, and idle gossip.
…And the Tweeters Fell Silent
Any Iranian foolish to put her hopes in this most fickle of constituencies that is the Tweeter must have begun to doubt the wisdom of such an approach as short attention spans inevitably set in and, most devastatingly of all, the death of Michael Jackson stole the headlines. Ahmadinejad couldn’t have planned it better if he had offed MJ himself (in cahoots, perhaps, with South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, the other clear beneficiary of Jackson’s untimely demise). Indeed, the Iranian dissidents were the biggest losers of the day, suffering an even worse fate than Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Billy Mays, condemned to historical oblivion by sheer bad timing. But to this list of those suffering from the technophiles’ abandonment of their brief flirtation with the political, we must now add Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, legitimately elected president of Honduras, recently deposed in a barefaced military coup from the far right.
Zelaya, a former centrist who has recently made leftward moves, raised the ire of the entrenched Honduran oligarchy by, among other things, joining the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a radical counterpoint to U.S.-promoted free trade agreements. His overthrow has been followed by a press blackout, military curfew, and repression in the streets, as hundreds of thousands have rallied to the cause of their former leader, only to meet an iron heel reminiscent of Honduran military regimes of the past (dodging bullets in the street, as the magnificent BoRev puts it, “is sort of like Twittering, for poor people”). There have been mass arrests, injuries, and deaths, but some exceptions notwithstanding, these Hondurans are nevertheless, to quote one observer, “Protesters We Don’t Tweet About.”
