Killing Children, the Burdens of Conscience, and the Israel-Hamas War

For the children killed in both Israel and Gaza, history did not begin on October 7th. History makes clear that the creation of graveyards for children has a long legacy and is deeply rooted in the language of war, militarism, forced detentions, occupation, blockades, and violence.[4] It is a language that pushes aside the rhetoric and value of human dignity, social responsibility, compassion for the other, and democracy itself. The killing of children in war is overlooked when human dignity succumbs to nationalistic passions and militarized machineries of violence. More

Classic Intelligence Failure: The Impact Of Arrogance and Hubris

Over the past 80 years, there have been costly intelligence failures in the United States and Israel despite sufficient intelligence collection and the presence of classic warning signals.  For the United States, the attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 could have been prevented or ameliorated because we had deciphered Japanese diplomatic codes that revealed the Japanese instructions to their embassy in Washington to destroy coded materials and to break relations with the United States.  These are classic warning signals.  More

Vermin

When somebody – a Nazi or Donald Trump – calls Jews, Muslims, immigrants, Democrats, queers, Marxists or others, “vermin”, “parasites” or “vampires”, it means they consider them sub-human, diseased, and undeserving of life. In an October interview with The National Pulse, a far-right website, Trump might have been quoting Hitler verbatim: “Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now, it is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country, it’s so bad and people are coming in with disease, people are coming in with every possible thing that you can have.” No Nazi ever spoke the blood libel more clearly. More

Roaming Charges: Leave It to the Men in Charge

+ Americans are experiencing a rare chance to relive in real-time echoes of the darkest episodes of our own history–from the howitzering of the exhausted Nez Perce in the Bear Paws to the slaughter of nearly frozen Lakota women and children at Wounded Knee; from the interment of Japanese-Americans to the grotesqueries of Abu Ghraib–and seem to have decided it was all for the greater good. More