On the second anniversary of the single worst massacre of Iraqi civilians committed by a private force since the US invasion, President Obama should be forced to explain to the American people and the people of Iraq and Afghanistan why he continues to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to this company and why he permits them to remain on the ground, representing the United States in these countries. At a recent hearing of the bipartisan Wartime Contracting Commission, commissioner Linda Gustitus asserted that in not canceling Blackwater’s contracts after Nisour Square, the State Department “helped to send a message to other contractors that you can do a lot and not have your contract terminated.” (full article…)

Unwavering support for Israeli policy has eroded dramatically both on American college campuses and within the United States as a whole, according to a group of American university professors who on Sunday concluded an academic exchange program here, sponsored by the Yitzhak Rabin Center. (more…)

Few people know how to avoid, evade, beat around the bush, beg the question, bypass, circumvent, fudge, sidestep, prevaricate, equivocate, dodge, duck, avoid and ignore as well as Federal Judge Jay S. Bybee, the author of a torture memorandum given to the Central Intelligence Agency. Few people know how to be as skillfully dishonest while appearing to skirt dishonesty. (more…)

Now, when the irrefutable meets the unchallengeable, American spokespeople tend to own up to it. Yep, we killed them. Yep, they were women and kids. Nope, they had, as far as we know, nothing to do with terrorism. Yep, it was our fault and we’ll pony up for our mistake.

This new tactic is a response to rising Afghan outrage over the repeated killing of civilians in US raids and air strikes. But like the denials and the investigations, this, too, is intended to make everything go away, while our war itself–those missiles loosed, those doors kicked down in the middle of the night–just goes on. (more…)

So let’s hope Obama launches the new era by accepting a fair measure of responsibility on America’s part for the slaughter of some 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza, a large number of them women and children, killed by US weapons furnished to Israel along with moral and political support for its criminal actions. Let him deplore publicly Israel’s savage assault, which came in the run-up to his inaugural. (more…)

Victor Navasky of the Nation magazine apparently considers Obama to be a paragon of the left—and not of the center. As he puts it, “he seems to me a liberal wolf in centrist sheep’s clothing”. This verdict explains a lot about that particular magazine’s reporting: the state of the American left. Pathetic.

If I lived in Europe–to say nothing of an Arab or Islamic nation–where the Palestinians are held to be innocent victims of Israeli aggression, my strong personal identification with, and intellectual belief in, the historic Zionist project would no doubt lead me to spend most of my time defending Israel’s legitimacy, if not its every action. (more…)

No doubt you would Mr. Alterman, because at heart you also espouse the racist beliefs shared by Zionists everywhere.

I write as an Israeli. Some of us, as Israelis, are grieving over what we have become. Blaming the other side with a roster of rehearsed clichés cannot mitigate the grief. (more…)

Just look at this lousy article in the Nation. The author is seriously trying to draw our sympathy for the “Israelis (and Jews) who know the unconventional facts”, who are “marginalized” and “ignored by the mainstream media”.

I can’t stand these introspective articles about the “marginalized” Israeli peace movement. The Israeli peace movement died long ago—it has not been marginalized, it is simply not relevant. When 90% of the Israelis are lining up behind this current massacre, spare me the self-pity.

Human rights groups have criticized Israeli attacks on Gaza as disproportionate and indiscriminate, bordering on war crimes. Yet the Bush administration has encouraged Israel’s offensive, blaming Hamas for the violence. Unconditional American support in the face of Israeli brutality is one of the principal reasons so many people in the Arab world hate the United States, providing fertile ground for radical Islamist groups to grow. What measures would you take to put Israeli leaders on notice that the United States will not unconditionally support Israeli actions? (more…)

It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. (more…)

If you stick to highway traffic through the columns and bulletins of the major media, aside from some passable stuff on the cable news shows, the flow of ignorant drivel seems as toxic as ever, maybe worse, since Israel has tried to empty Gaza of all reporters. The Israelis wipe out whole families, phone apartment blocks to terrify the occupants with boasts that their homes will shortly be blown up, and the Israel claque here stresses the consummate humanity of the attackers. (more…)

The fact that Israel pulled its army out of Gaza and even removed 8,000 settlers in 2005 does not alter the fact that Gaza is still, practically and according to international law, occupied territory. Israel controls the entrances and exits, as well as access to necessities such as power and water. Mexico has not spent the last three or more years under an American aerial and sea blockade. (more…)

Indeed, nothing was said about the severe food crisis in Gaza, which manifests itself in shortages of flour, rice, sugar, dairy products, milk and canned foods, or about the total lack of fuel for heating houses and buildings during these cold winter months, the absence of cooking gas, and the shortage of running water. The viewer has no way of knowing that the Palestinian health system is barely functioning or that some 250,000 people in central and northern Gaza are now living without any electricity at all due to the damage caused by the air strikes.

While the fact that this information was missing from the report did not surprise me, I found myself completely taken aback by the way in which the reporter justified the convoy’s entrance into Gaza. Explaining to those viewers who might be wondering why Israel allows humanitarian assistance to the other side during times of war, he declared that if a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe were to explode among the Palestinian civilian population, the international community would pressure Israel to stop the assault. (more…)

As missiles rain over Gaza, I can only imagine what my grandfather is thinking. Much of the territory’s civilian infrastructure, including police stations, universities, mosques and homes, has been decimated. In the Jabalya refugee camp, five sisters, the eldest aged seventeen and the youngest only four, were killed on Monday as they slept in their beds when an Israeli air strike hit a mosque by their home. Their parents told reporters they assumed they were safe, since houses of worship typically are not military targets. The cemetery where the girls were buried was filled to capacity, so they were placed in three graves. A United Nations spokesperson said the killing is a “tragic illustration that this bombardment is exacting a terrible price on innocent civilians.” The bereaved father expressed the sentiments of so many in Gaza in an interview with the Washington Post. “I don’t have anything to do with any Palestinian faction. I have nothing to do with Hamas or anyone. I am just an ordinary person.” A few days after the attack, I found out that the girls were relatives of our family friends in Florida. (more…)

In many respects, Hamas brought this war on itself… (more…)

Whatever their original intentions, the occupation created its own logic of suppression, first breeding discontent and then rebellion. It doesn’t matter whether that rebellion takes the form of stone-throwing or rocket launching; the Israeli response will always be wildly disproportionate, further damning the prospect for rational solutions. And uncritically underwriting that disproportionate Israeli response to any and all dissent will be the United States, the supplier of those F-16s doing so much damage in Gaza today. (more…)

It began with the death of a child, a 15-year-old schoolboy with a chubby face and long brown curls and a black punk-rock T-shirt–an
ordinary teenager trying to be cool. Though he was privately educated in a wealthy Athens suburb, Alexis Grigoropoulos didn’t hang out at the mall. On Saturday night he was downtown in ungentrified Exarcheia, a neighborhood where the indie crowd collects in cafes–leftists and anarchists and music lovers, potheads and addicts and professors, dissenters and the young–and the object in recent years of an intensive cleanup operation. The police account of the events that led to Alexis’s death had the patrol car set upon by a crowd of stone-throwing youths and the boy himself wielding a petrol bomb. But eyewitness reports and videos shot on mobile phones tell a quite different story. Alexis and his friends were out to celebrate a name-day. Some unknown people passed and threw small objects at the car; the officers stopped, walked back to Alexis’s group and began to curse and threaten them. According to one of the boys, Alexis tossed an empty plastic bottle. The officer aimed and fired three shots, two in the air and one that pierced his chest.

Since then, the country has gone up in flames. There’s scarcely a town or city that hasn’t seen angry protests, many organized spontaneously by the very young. Four days after the killing of Alexis, Athens is still a war zone, with broken glass and upturned cars and flaming buildings everywhere; the New Democracy government, clinging to a one-seat majority, is utterly at a loss. Scandals, indifference and incompetence robbed it long ago of any moral authority; to declare a state of emergency would exacerbate the violence and bring dark echoes of the military dictatorship that fell in 1974, the last time Greece’s cities witnessed scenes like these.
(more…)

Reading Eric Alterman’s recent article in The Nation magazine recently (Israel at 60: The State of the State), I began to consider the significant gulf that exists between ideology and practice among those on the American “left”. I have been an avid reader of Alterman’s for some time, regularly visiting his website (Alternet.org), following his contributions in The Nation magazine, and reading a few of his books (What Liberal Media?; The Book on Bush; etc.). Of course, Eric and I have had our differences in the past – instead of blaming the inadequacies of the American political system for Bush’s “election” in 2000, he chose to blame Ralph Nader for Al Gore’s loss – but I am especially disappointed in his most recent article.

Referring to the 60th anniversary of Israel’s expulsion of the Palestinians and subsequent founding of the Zionist state, Alterman writes of the “successful prosecution of the War of Independence”. When discussing this state that regularly discriminates against 20% of its own population in its lawas and institutions. and which pursues policies of colonization and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories, Alterman waxes romantic about a “democratic society in the midst of countless hardships in a hostile corner of the world that had known only autocracy”.

Does this sound familiar?

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