Foreign Policy In Focus

The current right-wing government of Israel wants to negotiate with the Palestinians for their independent state as much as China wants to negotiate with Taiwan for its independent state. I have very little faith that this Israeli government will negotiate in earnest with the Palestinians. Netanyahu wants to negotiate for the sake of negotiation.

In the following short film, directed by filmmaker Iara Lee, Cultures of Resistance takes a brief look at the current state of what President Eisenhower famously called the “military industrial complex.”

What were NBC executives thinking? The unemployment rate remains near double digits, and many Americans have simply stopped looking for work. And what does the network premier this fall but a sitcom called Outsourced about an American manager sent to run a call center in India. The jokes revolve around funny names, unappetizing food, Sikh turbans, arranged marriages. "It's hard to know what a normal smell is here and what isn't," says Todd Dempsy, the culturally insensitive manager played by Ben Rappaport, in last week's "Touched by an Anglo" episode. And there's indeed something fishy about a show that capitalizes on U.S. jobs going overseas during an economic downturn.

Canada’s defeat in elections for a temporary seat in the UN Security Council has implications that reach beyond being an upset for Stephen Harper’s conservative government in Ottawa. It reinforces how far most UN members are from supporting other nations that unconditionally accept Israeli behavior in the Middle East. It also, ironically, lends some support to Ottawa’s longstanding opposition to increasing the number of permanent Security Council members.