Reuters reports that heavy fighting raged in Deraa, Aleppo and elsewhere all weekend in Syria: Amateur video captured the burning of the historic 17th century Aleppo covered market or souq: The loss of the market is not as important as the loss of even one human life, much less some 30,000 killed, but it is […]
Archives for September 2012
Settler Violence and Ethnic Cleansing: Mahmoud Abbas at the UN on What Israel is doing to the Palestinians
Mahmoud Abbas complains of Israeli settler colonialism in the Palestinian West Bank and warns of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The speech, at the UN General Assembly, did not get the same coverage on US television news, let us say, as that of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu. All the time Netanyahu […]
Obama set precedent with Drone Killings for Romney to become Terminator-in-Chief (Ross)
Alice K. Ross writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism: President Obama’s personal involvement in selecting the targets of covert drone strikes means he risks effectively handing a ‘loaded gun’ to Mitt Romney come November, says the co-author of a new report aimed at US policymakers. ‘If Obama leaves, he’s leaving a loaded gun: he’s […]
Annals of Settler Colonialism (4) German Namiba #savagesunite
German officers arrive in Southwest Africa from Berlin to deal with the Herero, whose rebellion has died down. Ordinarily a colonial state would now move to negotiations. But Gen. von Trotter had no intention of negotiating or compromising. The Herero were now doomed. Refusing to negotiate in good faith is common among settler colonialists. Being […]
Alice Walker: Palestinians face Oppression Much worse than Jim Crow of Old South
On Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!”, celebrated novelist and Pulitzer-Prize winner Alice Walker points out that Palestinians in the Occupied Territories under Israeli control face conditions much worse than those suffered by African-Americans in the Old South under Jim Crow. For more on Israeli checkpoints on the West Bank and the circumscribed lives of Occupied Palestinians, […]
Netanyahu 2002: Iraq has Centrifuges ‘the size of Washing Machines’ to Produce A-Bomb
Israeli PM Binyamin “Chicken Little” Netanyahu tried to scaremonger about Iraq in 2002, as his contribution to the Anglo-American war of aggression on that country. “there is no question whatsoever,” Netanyahu said, “that Saddam” was seeking nuclear weapons. He said that Israeli intelligence reported to him that Russian scientists and North Korea were on site […]
Annals of Settler Colonialism (3) German Namibia #savagesunite
The rebellion of some among the much-abused Herero people is transformed by the German authorities and settlers into a race war and a pretext for seizing their lands. The logic of settler colonialism involves a ratcheting up of tensions that is always exploited to the advantage of the colonizer. The indigenous population is “savages,” whereas […]
It’s Psychological Warfare, Stupid: Why Netanyahu Really wants to Destroy Iran
The Israeli Likud Party’s cover story for why it wants to draw the United States into a war with Iran makes no real sense. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has been predicting an Iranian nuclear bomb since 1992 (a time when Iran had no nuclear program at all), and he has been wrong for 15 years […]