Archive for October, 2007
Give Fareed Zakaria a Medal!
Fareed Zakaria deserves a medal for breaking with the mainstream media pack to slap down, with the requisite rudeness, the hysteria over Iran being manufactured by the neocons, opportunist Israeli politicians and the Bush Administration. Perhaps stung by having participated in a secret Bush Administration policy discussion to help shape the Iraq war policy before [...]
Jewish Glasnost Update: Zionist Panic!
Is Israel’s top liberal daily a fifth column? Apropos my earlier piece arguing that the ferocious backlash by the Zionist right against Jewish critics of Israel — also targeting as ‘anti-semitic’ those like Archbishop Desomand Tutu who seek to judge Israel by universal moral standards — is a sign of panic over losing their claim [...]
Dual Power in Tehran?
The resignation of Ali Larijani as Iran’s top nuclear negotiator — and his replacement as such by Ahmadinejad acolyate Saeed Jalili, who was 14 years old when the Shah fell in 1979, has limited experience and is reportedly prone to communicate via turgid lectures rather than discussion — has been widely interpreted as a victory [...]
Bob Dylan and Ayatollah Khamenei
In Bob Dylan’s 1963 song “Talking World War III Blues,” he dreams of being the last person alive after a nuclear apocalypse, then discovers that his shrink has been having the same dream, and so has most everyone else. Dylan concludes with a solution: “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be [...]
Rice-Olmert-Abbas: End of the Affair
A few months ago I noted that the Bush Administration’s claims to be pursuing a Middle East peace process was equivalent to The Emperor’s New Clothes fairy tale except for one important detail: “In the fairy tale, the emperor’s courtiers are careful never to let on that they can see their monarch’s nakedness; in the [...]
Can Al Gore’s Vision Avert a Climate-Change Catastrophe?
The Nobel Peace Prize award to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change left me a little uncomfortable. I have no problem with the IPCC, obviously, but singling out Gore seemed a little too Hollywood to me. I may well be naive, but I have a hard time buying the idea of Al [...]
Iran, the Inflatable Bogey
I’m delighted and honored to welcome Dr. Trita Parsi as a guest columnist at Rootless Cosmopolitan. Following the escalating tension between Iran and the West over the past two years, I’ve found Trita to be a singular voice of sanity in the proverbial world gone mad. As both a scholar and as president of the [...]
My Favorite ‘Anti-Semite’
The utterly charming thing about the Zionist Thought Police is their apparent inability to restrain themselves, even from the very excesses that will prove to be their own undoing. Having asked sane and rational people to believe that Jimmy Carter is a Holocaust denier simply for pointing out the obvious about the apartheid regime Israel [...]
Israelis Fighting Israeli Apartheid
I’ve never imagined a simple equation between the non-racial democracy for which we fought (and which we won) in South Africa and achieving a unitary state democratic solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, I’ll admit to being anything but dogmatic on just how that conflict is to be solved. While in principle, I’d certainly [...]
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