The Times reports that a team of US-Nato special forces descended on a village in Kunar and apprehended 10 Afghans, including 8 schoolchildren — grades six, nine and ten — and executed them in cold blood. Seven of the children belonged to a single family, and many were handcuffed before being shot. Following is the lament of an Afghan poet who has endured enough of the freedom brought him by the so-called Operation Enduring Freedom.
(I am unable to translate this right now, maybe later. But the pictures speak for themselves).
One year after Israel’s war on Gaza, Al Jazeera talks to the UN special rapporteur Professor Richard Falk on Palestine and asks him about his views on that war, the impact of the Obama presidency and the future of the peace process.
One year ago, this pro-Israel rally took place in New York City. American independent journalist Max Blumenthal was there to get people’s responses to the attacks on Gaza. Watch for yourself.
As boxing promoter Don King always says: “Only in America!”
Keating misses our point, however, in part because he misreads our argument. It is clear from our post that we are referring specifically to the incongruity of having individuals such as Dick Cheney, General Petraeus, Larry Summers, Thomas Friedman, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salam Fayyad, The Kagans and Ahmed Rashid on a list of thinkers. We surmised that it may have to do with the fact that the main thrust of their work aligns with the US military and economic agenda worldwide. We could not have been referring to FP’s entire list, since, as Keating correctly notes, several of our choices overlap with FP’s, and there are others on the list that we actually respect and admire.
In its headlines for December 14, Democracy Now followed the report on Blair’s confession about his committment to regime change in Iraq regardless of the absence of WMDs, with this:
Iraq Signs Oil Deals with 10 Foreign Companies
Blair’s comments come just as Iraq has signed a series of major oil deals. A two-day auction ended Saturday with ten foreign companies winning access to Iraq’s massive reserves. The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell won the rights to the Manjoon oilfield near Basra, one of the world’s largest. The US-based Exxon Mobil and Occidental Petroleum also submitted winning bids.
The wording is careful: it appears to suggest a connection between what Blair said and the Iraqi oil contracts. The war in other words was for oil. That is a remrkable conclusion to draw from news about an auction in which US companies were the big losers (hence DN’s careful choice of the words ‘foreign companies’). Unless Democracy Now is suggesting that the US waged a war for Russia, Norway and China — biggest winners in the auction — it is not clear why it continues to insist on the discredited “war for oil” argument? Why is it so difficult to admit who actually conceived the war?
Senator William Fulbright had first called the US Congress an Israeli Occupied Territory
Our friend Jeffrey Blankfort on the surprising results of CFR survey — surprising, to the extent that it goes against the lefitst conventional wisdom which has accorded Israel the status of a ‘strategic asset’; much less so, however, when it comes to revealing the level ignorance about the situation in Pakistan. For background, also see Blankfort’s rejoinder to Joseph Massad’s fatuous attack on John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
The Council on Foreign Relations is always near the top of the Left’s list of bogeymen that stand accused of pulling the strings of US foreign policy. It is right up there with the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, right? Wrong. If that was the case, those arguing that US support for Israel is based on it being a “strategic asset” will have a hard time explaining a Pew Research Center survey on America’s Place in the World, taken of 642 CFR members between October 2 and November 16. The Pew poll not only reveals that the overwhelming majority, two-thirds of the members of this elite foreign policy institution, believes that the United States has gone overboard in favoring Israel, it doesn’t consider Israel to have have much importance to the US in the first place.
I am reading Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power at the moment, and I find many of his ideas, and his sociological approach to world history most stimulating. I think his IEMP Model — society as a series of overlapping and intersecting power networks with a focus on the logistics of Ideological, Economic, Military and Political power — is by far the best approach to the study of social power. However, I was underwhelmed by his own (in my view defective) application of the theory in his Incoherent Empire. This interview is old, but his observations on history and society remain relevant nevertheless. (thanks Dave)
UC Berkeley’s Harry Kreisler welcomes UCLA sociologist Michael Mann for a conversation on how comparative historical sociology can help in our understanding of U.S. foreign policy. Series: “Conversations with History”
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announcing on Friday that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed would be prosecuted in federal court in New York.
Saturday, Nov 14th – Today I learn that conversations in delis are political. All I ordered that morning was a cup of coffee. The guy at the register, perhaps dedicated to the idea of service, gives me that and something I’m still having trouble digesting. He had been talking to customers about Eric Holder’s 9/11 trials announcement.
Addressing me although talking to the customer in front of me, he announces with palpable disdain, “Terrorists don’t deserve a fair trial.” Unable to respond, I hand him cash and receive, once again, surplus. Seventy-five cents and a question directed at me, but not to me, “What do you guys think?” Sensing that my response would not be the ‘right’ answer, I leave, saying nothing or perhaps everything.
“Terrorists don’t deserve a fair trial.” Six words, delivered with the kind of alacrity that indicates honesty, compel this question: when we are confronted by such a statement, what kinds of things must we negate or ‘overlook,’ in order to enable their coherence? And, importantly, how and why does this overlooking take place?
I’ve never before visited the USA. Like everybody else in the world, I’ve had it come to me. Its approach has been unstoppable, for good and for ill. For good first: the incredible achievement of American prose, which leaves British writing of the last century far behind. I am astounded by Faulkner, Bellow, Updike and Roth (when they’re good), Cheever, Scott Fitzgerald, and now Joshua Ferris. Formulaic Hollywood switches me off, but I can’t get enough Spike Lee or Martin Scorcese. I love Bob Dylan, Public Enemy and Miles Davis, just for starters. Jazz and particularly hip hop are American art forms which have travelled very well indeed. These two came originally from the black poor, and it’s the heterogeneity of America, and the possibility of marginalised genres and people being heard, which is so appealing. America is a continent-sized country of mixed-up Africans, Jews, Italians, Irish, Latinos, French, Wasps, and everyone else. It should be the most globally-minded and tolerant country in the world.
It isn’t of course. A narrow hyper-nationalism, the shaping of public discourse by corporations and lobbies, and a stupifying media and public education system have seen to that. Which brings us to the ill: America’s homogenising rage, which has ravaged first its own main streets (so Naomi Klein says in No Logo) and then the high streets of the world; its humourless TV gum; its advertising culture of false smiles and sugary platitudes; its racism, wars, military bases, aircraft carriers, support for dictators and apartheid regimes. These are the reasons why the US is known in some parts as the Great Satan, standing behind most of the little satans sitting on Asian and African thrones. In Muscat, Damascus, Shiraz and London I’ve met many people who have been made refugees by the USA.
America is the empire, admittedly in decline. In one sense, therefore, I haven’t needed to visit to know it. But last week I visited nevertheless, for a conference at Notre Dame University which I enjoyed very much.
On November 19, 2009, My Name is Rachel Corrie made its Bay Area premier at Stanford University. Amanda Gelender, senior at Stanford University, produced a staged reading of the play as a part of her senior thesis at Stanford University. Amanda is my friend. She was also my college classmate and we worked together in several campus political organizations, including the student-led Israel divestment campaign.
I attended opening night and along with a sold-out audience was struck by the poignancy of the play and Amanda’s subtle and deeply moving performance. Rachel Corrie was a 23 year-old American woman who traveled to Gaza in 2003 during the Second Intifada. She was killed by a Caterpillar bulldozer driven by Israeli Defense Forces as she attempted to prevent the IDF from demolishing the home of a Palestinian family. My Name is Rachel Corrie consists entirely of words written by Corrie herself, recorded in diary entries and emails from Rachel’s early childhood until a few days before her death. Gelender breathes vivid life into Rachel’s words, which themselves reveal the keen sensitivity and eloquence of a poetic nature.
Amanda Gelender, the lead and visionary behind this production, had been waiting to obtain the rights for the play for nearly two years. But obtaining rights is not always the only hurdle to securing a production of Rachel. Since its London premier in 2005, several professional American and Canadian theaters have seen their efforts to mount a production of this one-woman show quashed by vigorous opposition from powerful forces. The charge is always the same: the play is anti-Semitic. Gelender’s successful production reflects the changing tide that is occurring within the American public’s relationship to Israel and anti-Semitism.
P U L S E 