On May 15th of every year, over the past 68 years, Palestinians have commemorated their collective exile from Palestine. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine to make room for a ‘Jewish homeland’ came at a price of unrelenting violence and perpetual suffering. Palestinians refer to that enduring experience as ‘Nakba’, or ‘Catastrophe’.
By Mathew Maavak
On April 24, Armenians commemorated the 101st anniversary of the 1915 genocide that consigned 1.5 million men, women and children to a torturous end. The Anglo-Saxon world, which was battling the Turks during this period, appeared powerless as another 700,000 Assyrian and Syrian Christians, 350,000 Greeks and an unspecified number of Syrian Muslim intellectuals were killed at the hands of sadistic Young Turks and their Kurdish errand boys.
By Danic Jorden
After January’s raids that tore teens from their families and plucked them off buses on their way to school, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is about to embark on a renewed quest to arrest and deport Central Americans who applied for refugee status in the United States in the summer of 2014. According to sources reported by Reuters on May 12, 2016 and confirmed by DHS a day later, the agency is sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents out on a second wave of raids against immigrants, this time with the specific aim of apprehending and imprisoning Central American women and their children, or “family units”, and unaccompanied minors.
By Henry A. Giroux
Americans live in a historical moment that annihilates thought. Ignorance now provides a sense of community; the brain has migrated to the dark pit of the spectacle; the only discourse that matters is about business; poverty is now viewed as a technical problem; thought chases after an emotion that can obliterate it. The presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee, Donald Trump, declares he likes “the uneducated” — implying that it is better that they stay ignorant than be critically engaged agents — and boasts that he doesn’t read books. Fox News offers no apologies for suggesting that thinking is an act of stupidity.
By Chuck Orloski
The Scranton school bus driver smiled
while N. Main and Parker Street traffic light
turned green and he proceeded uphill –
the toughest left turn on Hoppy’s route!
He turned scorn away from illegally parked cars,
he forgave those who threw him “the finger,”
he regretted how motorists failed to stop
when school bus activated 8-way flashing lights.
By Rowan Wolf
On May 19th, 2016 a documentary by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) will be released – Sonic Sea. Sound is critical for sea life to survive. Their medium is water, and increasingly so much noise is introduced that it is undermining many species ability to survive. This is not even to mention the decade old fight with the Navy to constrain their “Sonar testing” which had the ability to burst the ear drums of marine mammals – particularly whales – and even kill them.
By Jeff Brown
This week, for the Moscow-Beijing Express, I did a web search on the popular internet engines, Google and Bing. I did this, to follow up on my previous Moscow-Beijing Express article, where I pondered if these two giants on the world stage were hopefully transforming the “Putin-Xi marriage”, into a truly long term, bilateral alliance, for the future. See The Xi-Putin honeymoon is over-now it’s time to make the China-Russia marriage succeed long termwww.thesaker.is/21262 or http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/03/02/the-xi-putin-honeymoon-is-over-now-its-time-to-make-the-china-russia-marriage-succeed-long-term/
By Murray Polner
Dov Waxman’s “Trouble in the Tribe” (PRINCETON) is a fair and thorough account of a growing schism between American Jews who refuse to remain silent about Israeli policies they find objectionable and the well-known Israel Lobby. Waxman, who teaches political science, international relations and Israel studies at Northeastern University, offers a reliable definition of the Israel Lobby, which has designated itself as “pro-Israel,” implying that its critics are anti-Israel. Its permanent members include the formidable AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish 0rganizations, the Zionist 0rganization of America, the Anti-Defamation League, and assorted miniscule clusters. It also comprises the hawkish, secular, and mainly Jewish neoconservatives, Christian Zionists, and politicians in both parties eager for Jewish money and votes. “0nly those groups and individuals that endorse Israel as a Jewish and democratic state are allowed within the communal tent–something that senior officers within the organized Jewish community have publicly stated,” writes Waxman. For them, there is an inflexible “red line,” ostracizing and attacking anyone who paints Israel as racist, colonialist or apartheid. Interestingly, a new off-off Broadway play, “The Forbidden Conversation,” explores the growing divide, which the playwright Gili Getz says deals with “the difficulty of having a conversation about Israel in the American Jewish community.”
Greg Palast on Larry King
Greg Palast on Larry King’s PoliticKing with guest host Matthew Cooke on political elites rigging the electoral system. Palast gives Cooke a quick history lesson on vote trickery beginning with 2000–and why you haven’t heard the true story in the US main-stream media.
By Greenpeace
Today Greenpeace Netherlands releases secret documents of the EU-US TTIP negotiations. On www.ttip-leaks.org the documents will be made available for everyone to read, because democracy needs transparency.