Part Two: Saudi Arabia on the American Chessboard
by B.J. Sabri / April 20th, 2016
Since the Korean War, but particularly since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 until today, the United States has been steadily escalating its military presence in the Persian Gulf. Taking advantage of many colossal events of the past 36 years, the hyper-empire has institutionalized its massive presence on land and sea, and expanded its objectives to include the unambiguous physical control of the area, as well as the …
by William Boardman / April 20th, 2016
The National is an English language publication owned and operated by Abu Dhabi Media, the government-run media organization of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). There is no press freedom in the UAE. Government media report the government point of view, which rarely includes criticism of the government.
On March 26, the first anniversary of the UAE’s unprovoked attack on Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition of mostly Arab states, the UAE’s official media published a document about the carnage in Yemen illustrative of George Orwell’s observation: …
by Greg Palast / April 20th, 2016
Buckle up, America. The voting demolition derby that was the New York primary on Tuesday was merely the crash test for the coming voting wreckage in November: a carefully planned pile up.
First, live from New York….
Francesca Rheannon, whom you may know as the host of Writers’ Voice radio, did the civic thing by volunteering to work the polls in a town east of New York City.
“I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election district, out of 166 Democratic …
by Ramzy Baroud / April 20th, 2016
“We won’t act like them, we will not use violence or force, we are peaceful, we believe in peace, in peaceful popular resistance.” This was part of a message issued by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abba in October, only days after a few incidents took place in which Palestinian youth were accused of attacking Israeli soldiers and settlers with knives.
The message would have carried some weight were it not laden with contradictions. On one hand, Abbas’ supposed ‘peace’ quest has only entrenched the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank, and all but completely isolated illegally occupied and annexed East …
Israeli ambulance crews adopt a policy of denying injured Palestinians treatment, say rights groups
by Jonathan Cook / April 20th, 2016
There is mounting evidence that Israeli ambulance crews are withholding treatment from Palestinians injured during a wave of attacks over the past six months, according to rights groups.
Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, a medical watchdog group, found that wounded Palestinians had been left untreated for as long as two hours.
In some cases, it is believed medical teams failed to tend to the injuries of suspected attackers as revenge, in the expectation that they would die from their wounds.
In parallel, says the group, Israeli soldiers regularly deny Palestinian crews in the occupied territories access to injured Palestinians in violation of …
by Medea Benjamin / April 20th, 2016
One concrete outcome that President Obama could pursue on his visit to Saudi Arabia is saving the lives of three Shia youth sentenced to be executed, most likely by beheading, for participating in nonviolent protests. Sparing their lives could also help ease the Shia/Sunni tensions that have engulfed the region.
Ali al-Nimr, Dawood al-Marhoon, and Abdullah al-Zaher are members of the minority Shia community that has, for decades, been demanding equality and full civil rights. The Shia represent 10-15 percent of the Saudi population and live mainly in the oil-rich Eastern province. Ever since the Saudi state was founded in 1932 …
by Media Lens / April 20th, 2016
While ‘social media’ like Facebook and Twitter are forms of corporate media, it is unarguable that they and other web-based outlets have helped empower a serious challenge to traditional print and broadcast journalism. For the first time in history, uncompromised non-corporate voices are able to instantly challenge the filtered ‘mainstream’ version of events. This certainly helps explain the rise of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, Podemos in Spain, and now Bernie Sanders in the US.
A key lesson learned by many people over the last few years is that supposedly neutral corporate media, in fact, have an unlimited capacity for finding fault with …
by Robert Hunziker / April 19th, 2016
Climate change is on a fast track, a surprisingly fast, very fast track. As such, it’s entirely possible that humanity may be facing the shock of a lifetime, caught off-guard, blindsided by a crumbling ecosystem, spawning tens of thousands of ISIS-like fighters formed into competing gangs struggling for survival.
Furthermore, what if the biosphere is already under stress by “planetary boundary” or the capacity of the planet to support life? Then what?
As for global warming, a non-consensus school of scientific thought, consisting of a small minority of scientists, believes the ecosystem is at risk of collapse within current lifetime. These scientists …
by Jack Balkwill / April 19th, 2016
The Democratic Party, operating from darkness as is its wont, is still blaming Ralph Nader for their defeat in 2000. A piece at Politico begins “The Clinton campaign has a question for Bernie Sanders: Are you to become “a Ralph Nader and try to destroy the party?”
Where does one begin to expose the deceit in this?
Ralph Nader has more integrity than does the entire Democratic Party, from its corrupt, lying bosses to its many ignorant followers. It would have been a good thing had Nader destroyed the Democratic Party, but it is still functioning to sell out the working …
by Nozomi Hayase / April 19th, 2016
As the 2016 US presidential election approaches, the whole country has once again been transformed into a football stadium, with waves of media frenzy and people cheering for their favorite quarterback. The electoral arena in the US is infested with big money by lobbyists like Big Pharma, Monsanto and the Weapons Industry, to name a few. With the unlimited corporate financing of candidates, US politics has degraded into a charade of what amounts to a two-party duopoly, where most candidates from left to right cannot even run a campaign without in some way becoming puppets on a string for these …
by subMedia / April 19th, 2016
The Perils and Promise of Working as an Adjunct
by Bruce Lerro / April 18th, 2016
Throughout 27 years of teaching classes in Cross-cultural Psychology, Critical Thinking, Brainwashing, Propaganda and Rhetoric and Social Psychology at universities and community colleges, I’ve been only dimly aware of how the decline of capitalism and its increasing instability has affected my teaching experience. Contrary to the way college teaching is often presented in liberal la la land – as being a special field in which teachers and students care about each other – these “gigs” are, in most ways, no different than other kinds of alienated work. I write this in the hopes of clarifying my own experience, as well …
by Denis A. Conroy / April 18th, 2016
If “the medium is the message” — a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan — existentialism could be the means of delivering grist to the psychic mill in order to contextualise sovereign identity. To embed or implant acceptance of myths that have the power to embed and implant compliance is where it all starts. The Founding Fathers of the American constitution struggled mightily with the gremlins in the system, but some of their warnings ‘foretold’ might have to be revisited — observe how the Fat Cats of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex have grown ever more obese on a …
by Gilad Atzmon / April 16th, 2016
In 2006, Israel’s largest news site Ynet published a courageous article by nationalist Israeli writer Sever Plocker who admitted that “some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish.”
Like Yuri Slezkine, Plocker admits that the Stalin death machine was operated by Jews such as Genrikh Yagoda and Lazar Kaganovich. In 1934, at the peak of Stalin’s purge: “38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin.”
In recent years we have learned that a quarter of the International Brigade that fought Franco in Spain was Jewish, and the Lingua Franca …
by Paul Craig Roberts / April 16th, 2016
On April 14 Syria held parliamentary elections at 7,000 polling stations, keeping the voting open an extra five hours to accommodate the massive turnout. All were allowed to vote, even displaced Syrians from the two provinces still terrorized by Washington and Israeli backed ISIS.
Washington is angry, because Syria held elections before Washington had time to purchase its slate of politicians and organize Washington-funded NGOs to take to the streets to protest and to claim that Assad had stolen the election.
Despite the massive voter turnout and extended hours for voting, the US State Department set the tone by declaring that the …
The Cheap Talk Extravaganza
by Julian Cola / April 16th, 2016
Believe-you-me. Excess manure needs to be cleared out of the way before we can go any further.
I’m in police custody, detained as a result of investigators uncovering a stash of thirty hot laptops at my residence. I demand that I be allowed to interrogate myself. After all, it wasn’t my hands that pilfered those computers. They’d been jacked over a decade ago by a distant relative who lived with my uncle. All I was doing was typing this article on one of the laptops. It just so happened to be your laptop that was stolen back in the day. Now …
by Rajesh Makwana / April 16th, 2016
Establishing a globally agreed tax body under the auspices of the United Nations and putting an end to dubious tax avoidance activities would bolster government revenues and help finance the provision of essential public services, especially in the Global South.
Buried beneath the sensational revelations making headlines in the wake of the Panama Papers is a simple truth about the importance of fair and effective tax systems: revenues from taxation – whether from company profits, capital gains or wages – are crucial for maintaining nationwide mechanisms of economic sharing that safeguard the basic needs of citizens. Not only does the redistribution …
by Langley Shazor / April 16th, 2016
Have we learned nothing from history? Have the scores of people crippled, nay, murdered by discrimination, bigotry, hatred, etc. been for nothing? History is cyclical, yet some things bear no repeating. But we stand on the cusp of returning to some of the darkest times in our history. The precipice of destruction, we have precariously perched ourselves. Do we dare to climb back down? Or have we danced too close to the edge, falling our only recourse? If to err is human, we have personified our nature to perfection.
It is baffling to witness our inability and/or flat out refusal to …
by Yves Engler / April 15th, 2016
“Anti-Semitism” may be the most abused term in Canada today. Almost entirely divorced from its dictionary definition – “discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews” – it is now primarily invoked to uphold Jewish/white privilege.
In a recent Canadian Jewish News interview long time l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) professor Julien Bauer slurs Arabs and Muslims as he bemoans “anti-Semitism”. “In the corridors of UQAM, there are occasionally pro-Hamas demonstrations and anti-Semitic posters, but this is relatively rare,” Bauer wrote in French. “At Concordia University, it’s an anti-Semitic festival every day of the …
by Bashar Salame / April 15th, 2016
The United Nations is becoming all too familiar with Michigan. First, they learned of rampant water shut-offs affecting 40% of Detroit’s residents last year. They will soon be informed of the plight of Flint, Michigan. For nearly two years, Flint residents were forced to drink, cook and bathe in putrid, toxic water.
The dismissive and unresponsive attitudes at the state level have given way to congressional hearings as well as appeals to the world court, whereby international human rights accords deem access to water a fundamental right. Why would a local issue, in a first world country, potentially find its way …
