Year: 2010

Schizophrenia and Race

From C. S. Soong’s excellent Against the Grain.


The diagnosis of mental illness has always been colored by social biases, but a striking shift occurred during the turmoil of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Jonathan Metzl describes how African American men became disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia, which was reclassified as a disease of the violent, and how that skewed diagnosis continues to this day.

Jonathan Metzl is the author of The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Beacon, 2009).

A net loss of freedom

by David Miller

When the anger of a prominent young thinktanker causes one of the world’s largest web-hosting companies to shut down a site that monitors lobbying and transparency, it is time to start asking questions about online free speech and censorship.

Last week, as Hugh Muir reported in the Guardian diary, the website SpinProfiles was taken down by the domain name registrar, 1 & 1 Internet, following a complaint from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, son of journalist Christopher.

SpinProfiles, run by sister organisation Spinwatch, aims to stitch together publicly available information to provide a detailed picture of who’s who in the shadowy world of lobbying. It features close to ten thousand profiles of think tanks, lobbying organisations and those associated with them.

The profile of Meleagrou-Hitchens, a 26-year old thinktanker and blogger, detailed his work for American and British rightwing and neoconservative thinktanks, blogs and magazines, and his particular interest in Islam. He is or has been associated with the UK-based neoconservative Henry Jackson Society Project for Democratic Geopolitics and with the two leading UK-based conservative thinktanks, Policy Exchange and the Centre for Social Cohesion.

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The Only Democracy in the Middle East: 2-4.7.10

The mass demonstrations in Bil’in continue amidst gas and fire and attempted arrests

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The Ghetto in the Ghetto

by Michal Schwartz

The past year has witnessed two cases of discrimination in the religious schools [in Israel]: ultraorthodox Jews of West European descent (Ashkenazis) discriminating against ultraorthodox Jews of darker hues. In August 2009, private religious schools in Petach Tikva refused to admit Ethiopian Jews. In response, the Education Ministry threatened to withdraw financial support for these schools and even to shut them down. In this way it compelled them to admit a hundred pupils.

The second, more recent instance occurred at the ultraorthodox West Bank settlement of Immanuel, where a Hasidic group known as the Slonim is dominant. In September 2008 the Slonim separated their daughters from the Mizrahi girls in the settlement’s school. (Mizrahis, also known as Sephardim, derive from North Africa and Arab lands.) The Slonim built a plaster wall the length of the school and put a fence through its yard, covering it with canvas so that their daughters wouldn’t see the Mizrahis. They changed the hours of the breaks and forbade association between the groups.

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Journey into Memory

Al Jazeera – Witness – Three writers journey across Syria to an infamous jail by the ruins at Palmyra, recalling the spirit that helped them survive torture and abuse.

Israel: A Failing Colonial Project

by M. Shahid Alam

Increasingly, despite its early military and political successes, Israel cannot for long endure as a colonial project. It must choose between wars – and destruction – or transition to a state for all its peoples.

In order to firmly secure its existence – as firmly as that is possible for any state – a settler state has to overcome three challenges. It has to solve the native problem; break away from its mother country; and gain the recognition of neighboring states and peoples. It can be shown that Israel has not met any of these conditions.

Consider Israel’s native problem. In 1948, in the months before and after its creation, Israel appeared to have solved its native problem in one fell swoop. It had expelled 80 percent of the Palestinians from the territories it had conquered. In addition, with the rapid influx of Arab Jews, Palestinians were soon reduced to less than ten percent of Israel’s population.

So, had Israel licked its native problem for good? Not really.

The Palestinians inside Israel pushed back with a high natural rate of growth in their numbers. As a result, despite the continuing influx of Jewish immigrants, the Palestinian share in Israel’s population has grown to above 20 percent. Increasingly, Jews in Israel see Israeli Arabs as a threat to their Jewish state. Some are advocating a fresh round of ethnic cleansing. Others are calling for a new partition to exclude areas with Arab majorities.

The Palestinians expelled from Israel in 1948 did not go away either. Most of them set up camp in areas around Israel – the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and Jordan. In 1967, when Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank, it could expel a much smaller fraction of the Palestinians from these territories. In consequence, with more than a million additional Palestinians under its control, Israeli had recreated its native problem.

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UN: Ditch the Buck!

A new United Nations report released on June 29 calls for abandoning the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency, saying it has been unable to safeguard value. According to some, the demise of dollar is a matter of mere months.

A report by the United Nations says the American dollar should be ditched as the main global reserve currency. It said that the global financial meltdown has exposed systematic weaknesses, one of which is the reliance on the greenback. It also found that developing countries have been hit by the dollar’s loss of value in recent years. A number of states, including Russia and China, have repeatedly called for a new reserve currency system. The UN has now suggested using a basket of currencies for this purpose. London-based markets strategist Nick Parsons believes it’s only a matter of months before the dollar will start to go down.

US Attack on Iran Air Flight 655

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of Iran Air Flight 655 where the US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 passengers and crew aboard. Iran Air Flight 655 was brought down over the Strait of Hormuz by a US Navy guided missile USS Vincennes in 1988. RT Correspondent Jihan Hafiz has joins Alyona with the story.

Also see this Press TV broadcast from July 2009.

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How Gilad Shalit Will Save Netanyahu

Mosaic Intelligence Report: Netanyahu says he will release 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit. 
Why the sudden change of heart? And will Netanyahu survive?

You Can’t Have Your Pineapple and Eat It Too

Manuel Noriega, nicknamed "Pineapple Face"

by Kurt Fernández

As former Panamanian dictator and CIA employee Manuel Noriega faces money laundering charges in France after spending nearly 20 years in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking, my mind wanders back to the mid-1970s, when I met the then-colonel at a New Year’s Eve party in Panama City.

The party was at the home of a wealthy Panamanian family that owned a cement company. My mother and father, the latter a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, had been invited on account of my mother’s charitable work with the Inter-American Women’s Club. My wife and I, visiting from Mexico, tagged along.

There was a live band playing salsa, an endless supply of Ron Cortez and Cerveza Panamá delivered by fast-moving waiters, and an abundance of prettily dressed debutantes and their dates dancing around a pool. In other words, the wealthiest families in Panama were hurting under the government of Noriega’s populist predecessor General Omar Torrijos.

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