Category: USA

US Congressman: Prosecute US Citizens involved with Gaza Flotilla

by Ali Gharib

Israel Lobby stalwart, Rep. Brad Sherman (D. Cal)

On a press call hosted by a pro-Israel organization, Rep. Brad Sherman, Democrat of California, told reporters that he intends to seek the prosecution of any U.S. citizens who were aboard or involved with the Freedom Flotilla.

“The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 [PDF] makes it absolutely illegal for any American to give food, money, school supplies, paper clips, concrete or weapons to Hamas or any of its officials,” Sherman said on the Israel Project call, conflating Hamas and Gaza’s civilian population. “And so I will be asking the Attorney General to prosecute any American involved in what was clearly an effort to give items of value to a terrorist organization.”

Sherman also said that he plans on working with the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that any non-U.S. citizen involved with or aboard the Flotilla are excluded from entering the U.S.

Hamas, considered a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and has held de facto rule over the Gaza Strip since it took the area by force in 2007 in anticipation of an impending U.S.-backed coup d’etat by the rival Fatah faction.

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Rise of the Flexians

By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad


May 26, 2010 (IPS) – In 2005, ahead of the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Irish rock star and philanthropist Bono dedicated a concert to Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs for his services to global poverty alleviation. Time magazine twice named Sachs one of its 100 Most Influential People. His 2005 book “The End of Poverty” was a New York Times bestseller. He has served as a special advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals. In 2007 Vanity Fair was moved to declare him the “savior of Bolivia”.

From the fawning sobriquets it would be hard to tell that Sachs was the architect of the “economic shock therapy” which in Russia during the transition years (1991-1994) contributed to a 42 percent rise in male deaths, and 56 percent in unemployment. His Bolivian “reforms” brought inflation under control but unemployment, inequality and the cost of living soared.Following a decade of unrest, Russia was only saved by an authoritarian nationalist leadership and Bolivia by economic populism. The neoliberal experiment was a failure.

If Sachs has today recanted his extreme free-market views, it is only because of a personal epiphany. At the peak of his power, he was constrained by neither public censure nor official accountability.He is an exemplar of a new breed of influencers who operate in the interstices of official and private power and exploit the ambiguity of their multiple overlapping roles to evade both public oversight and market competition. It is this emerging power that is the subject of social-anthropologist Janine Wedel’s indispensable “Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market”.

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Can Obama make “peace” in the Middle East

Our dear friend Phil Weiss makes the most impressive interventions in this debate. He is also the first we have seen who knows how to handle Tim Sebastien well.

Doha Debates takes on the potential for a US brokered deal in the Middle East.

Atrocities in Afghanistan: A Troubling Timetable

by Kathy Kelly and Dan Pearson

Photo: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Peace activists can hasten an end to the U.S. war in Afghanistan by demanding a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal. [A bill in the U.S. Congress] introduced by Representatives McGovern and Jones, requires such a timetable. In the Senate, a similar bill has been introduced by Senator Feingold. Arguments in favor of a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan should include readiness to examine disturbing patterns of misinformation regarding U.S./NATO attacks against Afghan civilians.

It is worth noting that even General McChrystal acknowledges that U.S. forces have killed civilians who meant them no harm. During a biweekly videoconference with US soldiers in Afghanistan, he was quite candid. “We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force,” said General McChrystal. “To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I’ve been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it.”

Those families and individuals that General McChrystal refers to should be our primary concern. We should try to imagine the sorrow and horror afflicting each individual whose tragic story is told in the “timetable” of atrocities committed against innocent people. How can we compensate people who have endured three decades of warfare, whose land has been so ravaged that, according to noted researcher Alfred McCoy, it would cost $34 billion dollars to restore their agricultural infrastructure. We should notify our elected representatives that the $33 billion dollar supplemental funding bill sought by the Obama administration to pay for U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could be directed toward helping Afghanistan replant its orchards, replenish its flocks, and rebuild its irrigation systems. We should insist on an end to atrocities like those which follow.

Continue reading “Atrocities in Afghanistan: A Troubling Timetable”

Outing the Muslimness, Finally: Some Viewing (and Hearing) Pleasures (The King is Out: Part VI)

The King is out: he is irreversibly a Muslim. His name is Khan: pronounce it correctly please. Long Live the King!

by Huma Dar

[Read Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V]

Rizwan Khan Offering His Namaz

[I]n one scene I wanted to have just a half open door and I wanted to be shown saying namaz once. We couldn’t take that shot. Then we put that bit where I say the prayer: Nasrun minal lahe wah fatahun kareeb (God give me strength to win) [sic] [Victory is Allah’s, and the opening/victory is close] which is my own prayer too. I don’t think we should intellectualise entertainment.  See the fun of it.

This is how Shahrukh Khan describes his experience working in the film Chak De! India (Dir: Shimit Amin, 2007).  With apologies to King Khan for discarding his proposal to not “intellectualize” films, yet taking due “fun” in it, I argue that it is only in My Name is Khan (Dir: Karan Johar, 2010) that the King finally comes “out” as a Muslim.  No “half open door” is needed.  This coming out affords particular visceral pleasures to an audience (or at least a large section of it spread across the globe) long resigned to seeing SRK endlessly and persistently marked by the specifically filmic variety of Hinduness practiced in Bollywood: doing various pujas and aartis at different Hindu temples, or adorning his spouses’ hair-parting with sindhoor and smearing his own forehead with tilaks.  This performative Hinduization of Shahrukh Khan in Urdu-Hindi cinema is unrelenting precisely due to the dogged presumption of SRK’s Muslimness that is not easily obscured.  “In my films I have been going to temples and singing bhajans; no one has questioned that,” (my emphasis) SRK exclaims in the same interview.  No one “questions” the diegetic (filmic) Hinduness of SRK; it is expected and mandatory.  With the increasing and explicit polarization in India since 1990s, the anxiety around Muslimness is such that it requires perpetual masking: an iterative performance of Hinduness, secular or otherwise.  When the mask slips off, the performance is momentarily paused – as when SRK plays a Muslim character in a film and critiqued the anti-Pakistani politics of Indian Premier League (IPL) – Hindutva activists target SRK’s suburban Bombay home, Mannat, with massive demonstrations (See the earlier Part II for more).[1]

Continue reading “Outing the Muslimness, Finally: Some Viewing (and Hearing) Pleasures (The King is Out: Part VI)”

The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners

John J. Mearsheimer

This is the transcript of the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture delivered by John J. Mearsheimer at the The Palestine Center today.

It is a great honor to be here at the Palestine Center to give the Sharabi Memorial Lecture.  I would like to thank Yousef Munnayer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, for inviting me, and all of you for coming out to hear me speak this afternoon.

My topic is the future of Palestine, and by that I mean the future of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, or what was long ago called Mandatory Palestine.  As you all know, that land is now broken into two parts: Israel proper or what is sometime called “Green Line” Israel and the Occupied Territories, which include the West Bank and Gaza.  In essence, my talk is about the future relationship between Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Of course, I am not just talking about the fate of those lands; I am also talking about the future of the people who live there.  I am talking about the future of the Jews and the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, as well as the Palestinians who live in the Occupied Territories.

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Ultra Zionists Take Manhattan, and Demand the Holy Land

Indepedent journalist Max Blumenthal has just released his latest video.  This one deals Jewish extremists at a New York city rally that closely resemble members of the American Tea Party movement.

Blumenthal writes the following.

On April 25, over 1000 New York-area Jewish extremists gathered in midtown Manhattan to rally against the Barack Obama administration’s call for a freeze on construction in occupied East Jerusalem and to demand unlimited rights to colonize the West Bank. With Obama and top White House officials engaged in a charm offensive to repair their relationship with mainstream American Jewish organizations, speakers at the rally lashed out at the Jewish groups and Democratic politicians, warning that cozying up to Obama would endanger Israel and imperil their cherished settlement enterprise.

I’ll let Blumenthal’s video tell the rest.

Last year, Blumenthal, along with Joseph Dana, produced the famous “Feeling the Love in Jerusalem” video that was banned on YouTube and Huffington Post. He also produced “Bomb a Ghetto, Raise a Cheer,” a video documenting pro-Israeli teabaggers rallying in support of Operation Cast Lead. For more of Blumenthal’s works click here.

The Price of Translating a Narrative and its Context (The King is Out: Part V)

Karan Johar falteringly attempts to fashion a cinematic alliance of sorts between African-Americans and South Asians — very unusual in the Bollywood context and more so for Karan Johar, himself — but fails to seize the radical politics embedded. One wishes that the spirit of this song was continuously re-thought, re-energized, re-contextualized, re-translated. A revolution that stops moving, stops “revolving,” is nothing but an aborted one.

by Huma Dar

[read Part I Part II Part III Part IV]



In an interesting twist, Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan displaces or translates (one original meaning of “translate” is to bear or carry across from one place to another) the convoluted and complex, determining context from India, with a specific genealogy, on to the US.  The post-9/11 circumstances provide some unfortunate resonances, yet much of the untranslated/untranslatable context results in the particular aporias of the filmic text.  Even beyond Mandira’s furious and irrational directive to Rizwan Khan, he has to go around saying his name is Khan and “he is not a terrorist” because in that originary terrain of imposed defensiveness there is not much space for a “Muslim name” (besides certain limited spheres), leave alone for “My Name is Khan, and I am an American.”  This latter, more “affirmative” alternative to the “apologetic” cinematic version, is proposed by Suad Abdul-Khabeer in her excellent critique of the film.

Continue reading “The Price of Translating a Narrative and its Context (The King is Out: Part V)”

Heading in the ‘Right’ Direction?

With speculation growing over who President Obama will nominate to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, three top contenders have emerged: Solicitor General Elena Kagan, US Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland and US Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood. In an interview with Democracy Now! legal analyst and contributor for Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald discusses the nominees, focusing in particular on why the nomination of Elena Kagan threatens to shift an already conservative judiciary further to the right. 

Particularly alarming about Kagan’s track record is that when Bush-Cheney were abusing inherent executive power, Kagan was a robust defendant of the admnistration’s claim that the entire world was a battlefield and that executive had the right to indefinitely detain….well…anyone! 

Bomb Power: The Rise of the National Security State

Garry Wills discusses his important new book Bomb Power.

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes historian, critic, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills for a discussion his new book, Bomb Power. Wills recalls his formative influences including his Catholic faith and education; William Buckley and the editors of The National Review; the Vietnam War protests; and the Civil Rights movement. He compares Obama to past presidents and explains why his support turned to criticism. He analyzes the impact of the atomic bomb on the U.S. constitutional system arguing that its development created a national security state characterized by an enlargement of Presidential power at the expense of other branches of government.